[nikhildahake]

Would people be interested in a social network that allows them to own their data? I built a prototype. Check it out here: https://www.timelines.co

=Timelines -- A social network that allows you to own your data.

=Share beautiful moments of your life with friends, family or the world.

=Easily customize who sees which post.

=Maintain ownership of your data at all times. Timelines stores your data in a specific folder on your Google Drive which is sandboxed from all your other data on Google drive.

=You'll need a Google account to use Timelines!

What do you guys think?

[rambojazz]

This looks like a bad joke. If I want to own my data I would not use your website, especially given that it requires a Google Drive account.

[nikhildahake]

How else do you propose to own your data? What if I encrypt the data before storing on Google drive and decrypt it after fetching from google drive?

Your data is pretty much all over the internet anyway. On HN news servers, your mail servers, etc etc. So, how do you decide who to trust and who not to?

[zzo38computer]

Private data I will store on my own computer. Public data I will store both on my own computer and elsewhere, and I don't care where they copy it; it is public so you can put it wherever you want to put.

[nikhildahake]

Let's say you are sharing pictures with your friends and you want them to access those pictures even when your computer is offline. That would mean that those pictures need to be stored on a server from where they can be served. So, we can rule out your computer.

How do you propose that we store the data in this case? I can only think of storing it on some server in an encrypted form. Your thoughts?

[zzo38computer]

Depending on the intended distribution, I might use DVDs or printouts or other kind of physical media like that. But, for some uses that won't do, so then you would encrypt them and store them on a server.

[Nextgrid]

Google is a cancer/advertising company. Why would you use them for storage for a supposedly privacy-friendly social network?

[nikhildahake]

How else do you propose to own your data? What if I encrypt the data before storing on Google drive and decrypt it after fetching from google drive?

To answer your question: Right now, the storage is provided by them. So, I don't need to worry about paying for a user's storage. It is on google. And as stated above, data can always be encrypted before storing.