^^THIS.^^

Why doesn't the digital world follow the same model as the analog world, where you are the center of your life, in the sense that you hold the panoptic view of everything that happens to you, and everyone else has theirs? Because we've been hijacked by these massive context-based honeypots that effectively (and often legally, through the terms of service nobody reads), seize ownership of big chunks of your digital identity, and locks them in silos away from every other chunk. You get split up into pieces for the profit of a few people and their VCs.

There is a technology fix to this problem -- and almost all the others, large and small. If I could code I'd already be writing it. https://medium.com/@arthurfont...

Neither of which requires you to grant access to the actual content, unlike Gmail which accesses it to sell you stuff, as do virtually all social networks. And, relevant to the OP, snail mail and phone content never could be intercepted without a warrant.

I'll give you the benefit of the doubt that you're not ok with the way things are going privacy-wise. Would you do anything to change it?

But I think we're really talking about controlled (and in this example, authenticated) access. That's not so revolutionary. You can see everything as data owner, but you only share with me what you want me to see. Just like every service out there now, except there's no middleman with uber-access to everything.

I'd really be interested in a technical argument why this is un-doable. Or your alternative to the mess we've got now.

This is the problem the world seems to be overlooking. The absurd assumption is that we'll willingly give our most personal data away; we've evolved to a bizarro state where we must hand over our content to strangers in order for it to be useful to us. Email is just one example but it's the same across all vectors of your personal data corpus, including social, messaging, video, files, etc., etc., etc.... not to mention the "data exhaust" from your browsing, GPS, and commercial interactions.

The only solution is to organize every person's data according to the PERSON WHO OWNS IT, not sprayed across myriad services, each with its own repository. Those are subject to all sorts of abuse, from corporations, governments, and criminals.

It's time to change the data model to one that empowers human beings, not the institutions that have turned the digital screws on us since the beginning of the Internet. Here's my take on the opportunity:
https://medium.com/@arthurfont...

Does anybody here agree this could work? Or, more appropriately, could it be made to work based on the transformative value it delivers?

Exactly but it's not just Twitter.... All of these social platforms should be open protocols, not for-profit corporations, since they'll always be throttled from their true potential by the need to monetize.

A completely opposite approach is here.

Maybe the meta-problem is that all our different applications/services have different data repositories and thus need separate security solutions. What if we flipped it so that each of us had a private, individually encrypted cloud repository, with identity and communication APIs layered on top? Then simple apps could be written to conform to the new "cloudspace" certificate-based authentication and security model.

In this way you would no longer need separate services for email, IM, social, file sharing, etc. We'd communicate directly and privately in every mode (with public still an option if appropriate), and cut out the middleman. Starting from that approach you'd basically rewire the Internet while leaving everything else the same. You'd obviate the need for Facebook, Gmail, Twitter, Dropbox, Snapchat, Instagram, Youtube, etc., etc., etc.... Basically, any service that collects user data and orchestrates sharing between people would be an evolutionary dead end. That would be cool right?

Plus, the only way it could work is to base everything on open source software and devops, so nobody could ever seize control or extract a tariff. It would be what Bruce Schneier refers to when he laments the lack of "public commons" on today's commercially-controlled Internet. Going a step further, once everyone has his/her own private personal cloudspace, we'd each have a place to put all the data from our Fitbits and Nests and Internet of Things, and the other exploding sources of personal data. Wouldn't this be a better way altogether?

If you had to dream up the worst possible place to keep your personal data, you'd pick, "Scattered across the Internet in places controlled by strangers." Pull that thread and you arrive somewhere near this solution. http://www.arthurfontaine.com/...