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Comment by zuckluni | Hacker News Reader

I don't think it's an existential threat to FAANG. Because they could request access to your data to perform their AI/analytics on it to then be able to deliver you value-added personalized services.

Most likely these sort of brokered accesses will be the purview of third-party data brokers who will handle your pods for you.

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Why would people accept their data to be harvested? I guess money could be an incentive, which is quite interesting because it would fundamentally revert the power dynamics between the big data abuser and the people.

Lots of food for thought.

>Why would people accept their data to be harvested?

Same as always, to get services free of charge. If I want my photos to be searchable, I'm going to have to let someone run their AI on them.

As an iPhone user, I have my photos in iCloud. I'm paying for it through high device prices and storage fees.

But as Apple's business model is to sell expensive devices, they won't let me securely share my photos with my wife who doesn't own any Apple devices.

So I also upload all my photos to Google Photos where I'm benefitting from a far better AI as well.

If my photos were stored in a Solid pod, I could grant access to various service providers who use various different business models, but it would be far more flexible and easier to switch.

That's what I'm hoping for. Not sure if it will ever come to pass, but it's worth a try.

To add another item to your list, when you're in Apple News and maybe you're reading a free online publication like The Hill, there's no obvious access to Safari, and when you try to share the link it's an Apple News link. There used to be an easy way to get to Safari until recently.

Come on Apple.

The way I do it is to share with Safari from Apple News and then share with Email from Safari. Yes it's ridiculous.

Also, regardless of any privacy settings, Apple News keeps showing me Amazon ads for stuff I bought on Amazon. It drains my battery as well.

So I'm not really keen on using it anyway.

But what if pods are inherently "closed" as you imagine, but a company would actually have to pay a fee to access some of the data and run whatever algo they want.

Would this create a society where low income persons would be perennially targeted by intrusive ads?

That society doesn't need to be created because it already exists. What Solid would do is give all of us a bit more flexibility to set our own priorities than we have now.

People on low incomes will always have fewer options and less flexibility. If we want to change that, we must change income inequality. No technology or business model will ever change that.

> If I want my photos to be searchable, I'm going to have to let someone run their AI on them.

In the next month or so, that won't be true anymore if you use PhotoStructure to host your photos and videos. Disclaimer: I'm the author.

PhotoStructure is software you run, on hardware you own. It runs on desktops, docker, or headless servers, like your NAS. Your library is stored in a cross-platform, open format, so you're free to change how you host your library. I'm still enrolling beta users to try it for free in exchange for their feedback. Later this year, rather than being ad-supported, a subscription will enable advanced features (like automatic tagging based on image content).

(and as the Solid framework becomes more useable, I'll definitely try to support it).

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