[sorryitstrue]

Pretend we didn't have computers and people wanted to store all the facts in their lives - how many people could manage a library / filing system rich enough to catalog the level of information we're expecting to keep here?

[choward]

> Pretend we didn't have computers and people wanted to store all the facts in their lives

This is a pretty moot point since if we didn't have computers we wouldn't have things recording a lot of the data in that article to begin with. For example, with location, you could write down where you are every minute of the day, but that isn't very practical. Luckily, we have computers to automate that. Does that mean you should have to give that data away to a third party?

> how many people could manage a library / filing system rich enough to catalog the level of information we're expecting to keep here

Nobody could do that manually. That's the job of computers. I suppose you could keep a journal and store boxes of pictures and a lot of paper. It would be a pain, take up a lot of space, and take forever to search through. Luckily we do have computers and they happen to be really good at searching. So you should be able to just store this stuff on your computer and have it assist you with owning that data.

Instead what we have is a world where you upload everything to the cloud so someone else owns the data and you have no idea what's happening with it. They also get to choose how the data is presented to you. Since your data is spread among so many companies it hard to get the aggregations mentioned in the article. Usually the only way that happens is companies agreeing to share your data with each other. Most people are okay with this since it's "free".

[sorryitstrue]

My point is, people's minds aren't caught up to the scale of data, and I don't think there is a technology solution for it. We now have more data and more technology but it's not solving the problem.

Hell I don't always know where I'm going to put all the groceries I take home.

EDIT - to add - too much data isn't really useful. When we are talking personal data collection it's basically a librarian's job, which is non-trivial

[jakeywankenobi]

> My point is, people's minds aren't caught up to the scale of data, and I don't think there is a technology solution for it.

I totally agree with the general thrust of this argument. I'd like to hear more about use cases for this kind of personally-owned, aggregated data store. Once this article started talking about searching over, say, notes and highlights from articles and blog posts, I started to see specific use cases that seem totally compelling. However, it's not clear to me how this part of the data ownership conversation matches up with the seemingly more principles-driven data ownership conversation.

Theoretically there's nothing stopping you from building some of these more specific implementations (which the author has done--btw those projects looks really cool).

[choward]

> Hell I don't always know where I'm going to put all the groceries I take home

Just don't buy so many groceries. Jk. Actually, I have started working on a project that would help solve this problem (in combination with solving others). It's just nowhere near ready and won't be for a while.

> too much data isn't really useful

That's not what all the companies building huge data centers are saying.

> When we are talking personal data collection it's basically a librarian's job

I'm not really sure I understand this point. What do librarian's have to do with this?

[perchard]

Not made for storing 'all the facts [of our] lives' - but an interesting example of a robust physical system for knowledge organization is Niklas Luhman's Zettelkasten Method[1].

It translates well to a digital medium. The general idea is a collection of granular information (notes) interconnected in a non-hierarchical way using tags.

[1] https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/NfdHG6oHBJ8Qxc26s/the-zettel...

[chacha2]

TiddlyWiki is the closest digital version of that philosophy.

[vorpalhex]

For those who could, journaling (or even paying someone to chronicle you) was a regular activity that consumed significant time. Especially in a time when sending mail was involved so you wanted to send data dense mail less often to your friend circle.

[lunch]

I believe the data quality of such a library could be improved incrementally through enrichment, labeling, ETL, etc. Treat it like a garden.

[pc86]

What does ETL look like without computers?