[HN Gopher] The death of privacy front ends?
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The death of privacy front ends?
Author : throwoutway
Score : 52 points
Date : 2023-07-30 18:52 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (tux.pizza)
(TXT) w3m dump (tux.pizza)
| hkt wrote:
| The web is slowly being killed. The culprit? Capitalism.
|
| Sorry, not sorry. Use Gemini, search with Marginalia, socialise
| with real people and reach your communities with email.
| OfSanguineFire wrote:
| > socialise with real people
|
| I have some real-life, non-internet-based hobbies for which I
| come together with other people. All the rest of those people
| frequently talk about social media, online influencers, DRM-
| controlled streaming, and WhatsApp groups, and I'm the weirdo
| because I don't follow any of that. In fact, it is socializing
| with real people that convinces me that the world will just go
| along with tech companies' nefarious plans, and ultimately it
| may no longer be very feasible for us nerds to just drop out.
| userbinator wrote:
| The recent WEI (aka user-agent discrimination) proposal might be
| the end-game of all this.
|
| We shouldn't give up, but keep fighting to be able to use
| services with the software and hardware we choose. The whole
| "API" concept has always seemed like a power-grab since it was
| introduced.
| klardotsh wrote:
| Unfortunately this shouldn't be surprising: especially in this
| time of purse strings tightening and every Enshittification-
| powered company trying to grind out the last bits of "value" out
| of their hostage base, companies are bound to take measures to
| enforce their moats.
|
| Migrating to services where the data is free and not captive was
| always the only long-term solution.
|
| Next up: rather than inventing technical solutions to work around
| walled gardens, we need serious legislative efforts to mandate
| data freedom. It should be possible to export 100% of one's data
| stored in a service like Twitter or Reddit in a reasonably-
| parseable format (a tarball of JSON as one possible example, or
| maybe a SQLite database, or whatever is appropriate) and import
| it to a new service. Data moats must end, or we'll be doing this
| same stupid dance every few years when the next MySpaceBookTokDit
| enshittifies and takes everyone's social data with it.
| [deleted]
| rolph wrote:
| data should be stored locally in the first place.
| pavel_lishin wrote:
| Exports only help if new services support imports.
|
| And some of those wouldn't be particularly helpful; @tags would
| lose a lot of meaning as you migrate, _especially_ if others on
| the destination platform already have that handle.
| poisonborz wrote:
| Exports help always. Someone in the future could write a
| tool. Someone can finance writing a tool. AI could be used to
| create a tool.
| veave wrote:
| >Exports only help if new services support imports.
|
| Of course I can understand why a service wouldn't want you to
| be able to post thousands of posts in a matter of minutes, or
| to fake timestamps, or...
|
| The whole idea of massively importing stuff is complete
| nonsense.
| kelnos wrote:
| Fair-ish. Certainly some types of services have an incentive
| to allow you to import, as a way of making it easier to move
| to them. Like an email hosting service would want to make it
| easy for you to move your old emails to them when switching.
|
| I could understand why a Twitter alternative might not want
| you to be able to import a ton of old posts at once. But this
| is why we need open standards and open source. Some random
| large Mastodon instance might not want to allow imports, but
| you should at the very least have the option to spin up your
| own instance, import all your old Twitter posts, and still
| participate in the ecosystem.
|
| As others have pointed out, an @tag can still be useful by
| linking back to the original service. Or the importer can
| support a username mapping so it can rewrite names from the
| old service to names to the new service. Sure, all of this
| requires extra work, but it can be possible if people care
| enough.
|
| Regardless, export functionality at the old service is the
| first necessary step. Even if there's no import on the other
| side now, someone might build one eventually. And even if
| that never happens, being able to archive your old data is
| useful by itself.
| klardotsh wrote:
| @tags are just one of many features, and the lack of a
| matching user on the import side isn't a critical issue: a
| link back to the original post instead suffices.
|
| And regardless, Twitter-alikes aren't the only thing worth
| considering. Exporting all of one's video data from YouTube,
| or all of one's comments from Reddit, or all of one's search
| history (and Google Voice texts, and Docs documents, and
| etc.) from Google are all usecases that fall under these data
| moats that are useful to be able to take with you and move to
| another service. There's probably more usecases I'm not even
| thinking of, but the point is that by exposing all the data
| _by mandate_ , we don't have to be limited by the imagination
| of today, we have the data, we can build whatever future
| frontends and replacement services and etc. we want.
| arielcostas wrote:
| To be fair, Google is one of the few services that best
| support taking your data away by using their "Google
| Takeout" tool. YouTube videos, Photos, whatever, downloaded
| from a single website in ZIPs, TARs or whatever.
|
| Microsoft doesn't have such tool for OneDrive, Outlook or
| their services in general, so downloading 1D docs means
| going to the website, selecting then and pressing
| "download". For Outlook emails... well, good luck
| NoZebra120vClip wrote:
| Yet even Google itself lacks import capabilities, even
| for the very portable export formats they generate. And
| this is understandable, because _en masse_ imports are
| undoubtedly a security issue.
|
| As for OneDrive and Outlook exports, if only there were a
| way to synchronize data to a client. Oh well.
| madeofpalk wrote:
| > It should be possible to export 100% of one's data stored in
| a service like Twitter or Reddit in a reasonably-parseable
| format (a tarball of JSON as one possible example, or maybe a
| SQLite database, or whatever is appropriate)
|
| You _can_ do that. You 've been able to download, directly from
| twitter, an archive of pretty much your entire account. It's
| not quite JSON - it's actually a .js file that declares a
| single variable, but it's close enough.
| voxic11 wrote:
| You can do the same with reddit. They give you a bunch of
| CSVs in a zip file.
| gochi wrote:
| Regulations on data exports doesn't solve this problem at all,
| it just means an endless goose chase of exporting and
| importing. Additionally, we open people up to even larger data
| leaks if the entire export and import path isn't regulated. We
| already have a problem with this in regards to switching
| password managers.
|
| Regulations on what data can even be collected will solve this
| problem, and negate the entire reason for using these front
| ends.
| mindslight wrote:
| Agreed that we desperately need privacy legislation that
| makes Software Augmented with Arbitrary Surveillance much
| less prevalent. In addition, stopping this bundling of
| proprietary javascript clients with service hosting seems
| like straightforward antitrust action that doesn't even need
| any new legislation. Any action that a user can do through a
| web browser should be required to be made available as an API
| for programmatic access.
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| parentheses wrote:
| It's not just a privacy frontend. You're accessing content and
| services without helping the freely provided stuff be monetized.
| I get that you want to protect your identity. Then don't use
| these services or data. It's not public and not free - nor should
| it be.
|
| Privacy is not piracy. This is piracy.
| prmoustache wrote:
| No it is not.
| monkaiju wrote:
| Seeing as how this is hurting usage to the point that
| monetization is hurt, maybe they should actually just let the
| privacy-concious users be...
| 2Gkashmiri wrote:
| RSS by its very nature is designed to not be restricted to the
| "way of presentation and ad earning of the producer".
|
| Producer produces content and RSS syndicates it that can be
| read by clients IN WHATEVER MANNER OR FORM THEY DESIRE.
|
| That's the whole idea of internet. Now, you go ahead and lament
| how this is piracy. Its not. YouTube provides RSS feeds. Same
| do other platforms so as long as they do, we can do whatever
| the hell we want with the feed
| gochi wrote:
| The article highlights several front ends most of which do
| not rely on the official RSS feeds provided by the service.
| charcircuit wrote:
| >That's the whole idea of internet.
|
| No, the idea of the internet is to create a global scale
| network of computers.
|
| >YouTube provides RSS feeds.
|
| Which links you to a webpage that includes ads to monetize
| the video, the RSS feed, and the rest of the site.
| kelnos wrote:
| But that's only if the producer wants to provide an RSS feed.
| While annoying, it's perfectly within their rights not to
| provide one.
|
| > _That 's the whole idea of internet._
|
| I think it's very hard to assert that _anything_ is "the
| whole idea of the internet". If you want to go back to its
| roots, the "whole idea of the internet" was to have a
| reliable military/government communications system in the
| case of nuclear war.
|
| These days the internet means different things for different
| people, and no one person can credibly assert that any
| particular purpose is valid or invalid.
| kelnos wrote:
| "Piracy" is a bit of a strong denouncement. If someone puts
| something on the internet, and their server responds to your
| request for data with... y'know... the data, then the you can
| display that data however you want.
|
| Certainly the server owners can try to do tricky things to make
| it so you can only display the data in ways they want you to
| display it, but there's no natural right that makes it morally
| or ethically wrong for you to display things how you want.
| aquova wrote:
| While I wouldn't be surprised if it died soon, my personal
| Libreddit instance remains running perfectly fine, although it
| has a user count of one.
| Santosh83 wrote:
| Data is the life blood of AI algorithms. Hence the effort by Big
| Tech to silo their mega-platforms & impose WEI upon browsers so
| only their crawlers are able to scrap whatever data remains
| outside the silos. Its a race to the bottom and individual &
| smaller players are going to get crushed even before they can
| start.
| branon wrote:
| Teddit, my preferred Reddit frontend, still manages to have an
| updated frontpage, but clicking on anything gives HTTP 429 for
| several weeks now (I think, only use it intermittently).
|
| If the frontends quit working though, I just won't go to those
| websites anymore.
| Given_47 wrote:
| Ayo I just recently started using the tux.pizza Nitter instance
| as my main
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(page generated 2023-07-30 23:00 UTC)