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by Vinnl 1983 days ago
In my (personal) view, it's the technical part of a solution that definitely also needs to have a social/legislative component. It cannot prevent parties from illegitimate sharing of my data, but it does give them the option to hand over control to me. There are lots of companies that currently hold data on us but for whom that data is not their primary competency, and they only need a small nudge (like GDPR) to make having the customer responsible for that data an attractive proposition.
1 comments

You might be right, but I think it's disingenuous to market it as though this "solves privacy". Worst case, people are lulled into a false sense of security.

Data-storage + authorization doesn't solve any (new) technical privacy-issues; this is "data protection" rather than "data privacy" in my book.

While I recognize the value of W3C LDP and SOLID, I also fail to see anything in SOLID that prevents B from sharing A's now pod-siloed information.

Does it prevent screenshots and OCR?

So it's in standard record structs and that makes it harder for the bad guys?

Who moderates mean memes with my face on them?

It is my hope that future Linked Data spec tutorials model something benign like shapes or cells instead of people: so that we can still see the value.

Laws still exist against things like perjury, even though the existence of the law is not a technical means in itself able to prevent perjury. Note that one of the comments upthread specifically mentioned legislation. The current notion that many people in the tech world have, which roughly states that what determines whether something is kosher is whether it's technically possible to accomplish, is something that needs to change, instead of things just staying a permanent Wild West forever.

There's also an old phrase that putting locks on your doors doesn't actually stop a determined attacker, but that it's okay because they're not meant to—that they're meant to "keep honest people honest". It's a principle that applies here.

No, there are few to no actual privacy improvements over centralized systems.

Perhaps even functional regression: what, are you going to run a hash blocklist across all nodes? Like spamhaus? Is there logging or user accounting? Is anything chain of custody admissable, or are we actually talking about privacy and liberty here?

Is everything just marked, "not for unlimited distribution"? And we dwpend upon there not being bad actors?

Real costs are very different with just friendly early adopters.

Cryptographically signing posts (with LD-Signatures) may help with integrity, but that can be done with centralized systems and does nothing to help with confidentiality.

What about availability? Is it a trivially-DOS'able system?

Who is marketing it as "solving privacy"?