The line that you often hear from Google and its apologists that individual control, variation, programmable devices, user sovereignty over data may be /nice things to play with/ but because of Security Considerations everyone has to be Mature and Grow Up and turn over all their data, every decision about authentication, and permissions to Ole Uncle Monopoly who will take care of things Responsibly, in addition to just being horrible and throwing out half the ponit of having technology,
@Azure This is true, but it’s also true that pushing risk back on to users is as bad an idea in technology as it is in finance.
@ghost_bird True! Though I think this is orthognal. When we have giant oligopolies collecting gigantic piles of data and it gets breached now, the only result seems to be a slap on the wrist or a class action lawsuit with relatively small damages that doesn't actually mitigate the problem.
There are ways we /should/ reduce the risk. That the United States makes the entire key to your life an irrevocable eight digit number parts of which can be easily guessed is disagraceful.
@ghost_bird There's a whole lot of stuff that /could/ be done infrastructurally just to reduce the harm of data breaches and help people affected get back out of victimization, up to an including some possible sort of public insurance to help with the expense of paperwork.
(Which might in itself give an incentive to make recovery easier.)
@Azure Absolutely agreed. We need better accountability in general. What I’m suspicious of is the assumption that sometimes surfaces that we should all be hobbyist programmers administering our own systems and data.
@ghost_bird so long as there's a bunch of them and you can /easily/ move from one to the other and avoid being locked in and they federate in a sane way. Users might do well to be INFORMED CONSUMERS but, things like Consumer Reports and recommendations from someone they know who /is/ informed and other stuff can help with that. Minimum standards, too, THOUGH, I'm a bit worried about those since a lot of times minimum security standards end up written by unskilled bureaucrats and are really bad.
@ghost_bird HOBBYIST programmers, possibly not. I think it would be good /if people knew more/ but that's as much because I have to share a democracy with these folks and I'd prefer they have some idea of how the stuff they vote for would affect them.
I do not, in principle, of anything against simply killing the oligopolies and having a bunch of smaller Infrastructure as a Service providers people can outsource managing storage and data security or whatever to