Comment by _qjt0 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by _qjt0 | Hacker News Reader

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I wonder if there's an opportunity to reduce the privacy problem by having the phones log data to an intermediate server. The intermediate server will be open-source and run by a trusted entity (EFF, Apache Foundation, whoever). OnePlus will be able to submit whatever code they want to this server after a public privacy-focused code review by the trusted entity.

The proxy server will aggregate and anonymise the data before uploading it to upstream OnePlus servers. For example, it can strip out IP addresses. Eliminate data points which are too few and can therefore dangerous. Maybe if too few people are using an app, records about the usage of that app aren't uploaded to upstream OnePlus servers. If OnePlus wants to know how many photos an average user is taking, the intermediate server could just that information, or percentiles, not data about each individual user. These are all not possible to do on-device.

With this, we don't have to worry about what code is running on the phone, or what OnePlus servers are doing, both of us are closed-source and unavailable to us to inspect. But the intermediate server will be open-source.

Who will pay for that and how are you going to force manufacturers to participate in such scheme? Most people "have nothing to hide" and don't care about privacy, so they won't be happy as manufacturers pass cost of this to them. More realistic way (though not easy too) is to install a firewall on a proxy all traffic is run through and filter suspicious/unknown connections.

Manufacturers or software developers who're especially privacy-conscious, or collecting data that wouldn't be able to get with otherwise, might use this scheme. Maybe the folks who run the upstream server will also pay for the intermediate server. It shouldn't cost much for an entity that's already operating at scale, whether in users or revenue.

"Manufacturers or software developers who're especially privacy-conscious"

Those are few and far between. I still don't see how you are going to get major players into this. Niche -- maybe, but we already have few of these (other comments in this thread mention them). Also, such server would be a very sweet target for hackers and high security requirement raises upkeep by quite a bit.

No more a target for hackers than upstream log servers. In fact, it will be easier to audit, since it's open-source and does less (only aggregate and anonymise data and pass it on).

Yes, it will be niche to begin with, but everything starts that way. If minor players adopt this, over time, it can put pressure on the big players to do so as well. It's a long game.

For example, MS opened an Azure datacenter in Germany where MS doesn't have access to user data. So, people are starting to do things to restrict their own access.

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