[justinlloyd]

It looks interesting. I congratulate you for making it. It will be a cold day in Hell before I tell some random corporation the detailed contents of my home which may or may not get data-leaked, sold to another company (yeah! yeah! you pinky promise to "never" do that), partners with external service providers to either sell me something I don't want, data mine what I have or use it to determine if I am a credit risk, or ultimately the entire shebang gets purchased by BigMegaCorp that ties it into a whole bunch of other data points.

Nobody in their right mind would say "my home has an $XX,000 handbag in it" to a private corporation that doesn't have a whole bunch of safeguards in place. There's a reason I keep all of our insurance records in a safety desposit box at the bank. For home insurance you itemize the more expensive items and then have enough general household contents insurance to cover everything else.

[sarchertech]

Databases already exist to provide enough info to target your house. For most people that don’t have million dollar paintings, the likelihood of an attack or a leak of a national database attracting more the thieves than the general property value of your house is extremely low.

Also those “more expensive items” and the more general coverage limits are already in insurance company databases, and I wouldn’t bet on them being any more secure than a random SaaS startup.

[oliwarner]

But no random consumer analytics company is going to buy Visa or Amazon and all their data for six or seven figures, or whatever this would be valued at after a couple of years.

Why is it worth anything? The users of this system are the people with enough to lose. Top-1%ers. With deep metadata stored about their purchasing habits. The direct marketing and informatics value would be immense.

I'm with the GP and many other comments here. This data is valuable, both against you (in targeted marketing and theft) but also to you. You should collect this data, store it yourself, offline, in a safe with those other documents and keepsakes you could never ever replace. It's the same process. It's probably easier on a bit of paper too.

[justinlloyd]

I disagree, in part, with your conjecture, but am not in a position of authority to back up my refutation of your claims. That said, a database that knows we spent $17k on the AMEX last month doesn't know _what_ we spent those dollars on. I could be extremely fat and enjoy expensive takeout food.

[TimTheTinker]

Your comment makes me wonder if something like 1Password would be a better candidate for tracking household goods. You could trust it as much as you're willing to trust it with passwords.

I imagine clicking "New Item > Catalog" (which could create an in-vault Sqlite database). Perhaps they could also build a plugin system for third parties to provide nice-looking, domain-specific front-end UIs for tracking various types of things in 1Password.

Vaults can be up to 1GB in size -- more than enough for personal text data and relatively small images.