The First reason is because it gathers everything that concerns you in one place.
You can have your browsing history, your geolocation history, your purchase receipt, your account statements... anything that concerns you and that you could automatically receive from third party. There is also data you produce your like your holiday pictures, your running itinerary and performance...
This is very convenient simply to access it, but the real value lies in letting users total control and freedom in the way they decide to use it.
There is no restriction for the user to access its data, no restrictive API, it's there and ready to be used. Programmers can develop their own tools to do quantified-self for instande and mashup any data they want. Also applications can develop like for instance, a "travel" app. Everything related to your travel, from pictures, to receipts to persons you met are in your private cloud, and this hypothetical app would be a way to remind a journey differently. Because everything run in your personal place you control, there is no need to communicate your data in many case hence the bonus for privacy.
That doesn't mean you isolate yourself from companies, data disclosure project aims to give users a way to correct information companies hold on the user, to update their information in one place, and to let them remove information they don't want. More trust is good for business. Users could decide to share more data with companies and receive discounts, or directly give feedback on the product.
Ultimately it is all about giving users the same tools that companies have to deal with the relationship. It brings more transparency and control over privacy.
If I sparked your curiosity, I highly recommend you reading about project VRM by Doc Searls, and visiting the Personal Data Ecosystem Consortum. All this could seem crazy right know but this is really happening pushed by government's Data disclosure projects. The U.K. already made compulsory for some industry(energy, telecommunication..) to disclose personal data to empower users.
It is an attempt to outline the current shift in attitude towards privacy from different perspectives.
Governments want more transparency on usage of personal data and give users access to their personal data. Have you heard of Smart Diclosure and Midata?
It happens that giving users back their data and enable them to do whatever they want with it, is not a threat to innovation. Quite the opposite. It seems to me that there is very pertinent approach such as VRM that would benefit customers and companies.
Or simply people who didn't have the skills to be a peer?!
And what about closed gardens like social networks and services that wall our data behind proprietary walls? Google data liberation front is a step forward but its still not enough.
People with such great skills and knowledge of the stakes of IT like the HN audience shouldn't put the blame on common people right?!
I genuinely believe that technology and the open source community have reached a maturity that makes the development of simple and solid alternatives are possible, even for the least knowledgeable of us.
Take a look at what this startup is trying to achieve: https://www.cozycloud.cc/
It gives everyone an easy to administrate server, you can assign your own domain name, self host it or have it hosted elsewhere. The server is a plat-form on which you have total control and ownership of your data and can install and develop apps that serves YOUR needs. It still young but with the support of talented people that could become BIG!
While playing around with gmail, I found out that you can send from any smtp server emails to gmail pretending you are someone else's gmail account. There is no way of seeing from gmail that it isn't the trusted sender. The fake email is associated with social details from the real account.
Weird right?
Way to go! At Cozy cloud(https://www.cozycloud.cc/) we are developing an open source personal cloud platform that you can self-host and assign your own domain.
Right now we already offer backup of your email address but we would like to offer a good web-mail alternative.
Have you got suggestion for a Node.js mail client we could cook in?
That's absolutely true!
The one thing is today, it's not anymore big secure mainframes operated by corporate for corporate data; it's everyone's computing that is outsourced to third party companies.
This is a totally new situation where the balance of power is very different.
That's a good feedback thank you! And good food for thought for a future article. This one was more intended as an informative endeavor in some cloud giant's nasty practices.
Hello, this article is meant to highlight what makes cloud giants so powerful and why these are not so open ecosystems. The startup that publish this develop an open source personal cloud in Node.js. You can develop and install your own apps on it. Very early stage but quite promising!
you might be interested in visiting this link: cozy.io
Disclaimer, I am from Cozy and wrote the article and the FAQ.
You can self host Cozy on your own hardware or any hosting provider you trust. You are in no way tied to us.
Keep in mind we are relatively young project, in the future we will make possible to move easily your instance from one provider to another.