On 25 February 2011 10:37, stephen white <[email protected]> wrote: > I commented on the comic via the buddycloud developer area, and Jonas > suggested that I repost here. I apologise for my first post being a criticism:
> That comic makes it a lot harder than it needs to be. If I was explaining > this to my grandma, I would say "everyone's been using email for decades. It > works and it's proven... Now Google and Facebook want your information so > they want you to use their website, and now we have all of these privacy > problems you keep reading about in the news. Buddycloud does the same as > Facebook but like email, so there are no privacy problems because it's being > done the way email worked for decades" I think the comic is an excellent piece of work. It is lucid and explains the concepts well without being preachy. 'Everyone' hasn't been using email for decades and the the email model has problems which centralised systems can solve: spam, data retention and search, validation that messages come from the same source. With more personal information they could even go as far as to address the authentication entirely. > That version of the explanation points out the established solid history, > then says it's continuing that history. The problem with the comic is that it > argues the merits of both cases, making people need to consider one or the > other as though they're on an equal basis. They're not. The centralised > Facebook approach is the design that doesn't have the history, hasn't proven > itself, and has the privacy issues. This is a substantial advantage that > shouldn't be wasted by "fair and balanced" arguments. You mean it allows the reader to draw their own conclusions by presenting an unbiased view? Heaven forbid! The centralised Facebook history is a similar model to the server+terminal. That's very well proven. The idea of distributed nodes is not at all well proven and has only really existed in any volume since the mid 1990s. How do you think people accessed email before desktop PCs? Via a dumb terminal to a central server. Okay, this was own by an organisation but the data was not under a users control and arguably they had less privacy protection than they do now. The degree to which an individual values their privacy varies from one person to the next. Let's not preach at any one. It just creates friction. I don't like the current models and would like more control over my personal information but that's my personal view. A mesh model is an entirely new bread of model which is proving rather difficult to implement on any sort of scale. Let us not view history with rose tinted glasses. _______________________________________________ Freedombox-discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.alioth.debian.org/mailman/listinfo/freedombox-discuss
