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Data is no more the new oil, it's a liability.

You fail to protect users' data, data leaks happen. You are sued! You take that data out of a country, you are sued! You share that data, you are sued. It's only going to get worse with new laws being added every day.

Insights are the real gold. We should work on technologies to store and generate these insights and destroy/give back the original data.

This I think is the best of both worlds.

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    Yes this is truer and truer everyday.

    My website is a website generator that doesn't host anything. I just create files for the user then post it to their Netlify account, I hold nothing of theirs!

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      Exactly, the data should not be persistent on our servers at least unencrypted. THere is this concept of data wallets gaining traction these days. It's like an encrypted wallet (kinda like bitcoin wallets) but stores your data and that could be shared on the consent of the user.

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    Not sure I follow you; for example what kind of insight google could derive from users clicks, that could be more valuable than having access to the raw data about clicks in the first place ?

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      Say you want to use those clicks for targeting ads. So instead of storing all the user data about when he clicked, extract patterns and correlations from the data.

      These days we use Machine Learning to do this. If in the end, all we want is to train these models, we should not need to keep that data, the model is enough!

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        Interesting line of thought. Even if it is still a long way before that vision become reality. Do you have a twitter account to follow ?

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          Yes here is my Twitter account https://twitter.com/varunkhare1234

          Am also actively working towards this goal. Building open-source tools to build privacy-preserving machine learning at openmined.org

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            just followed you https://twitter.com/datapeek ( btw would love to DM you ) !
            What is your opinion on google move toward dismissing cookie altogether and embrassing federated learning of cohorts ?

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              Thanks for joining!

              Actually, it's being rejected by society. FLoC as a concept is nice to prevent third-party cookies however most people do not want cross-website ad targeting at all. Mozilla, safari have all banned third-party cookies and they are not gonna support FLoC either. In fact, I came across websites like duckduckgo and lazyweb who explicitly state that they are going to block FLoC from working on their website.

              But chrome commands 60% market share and hence Google can run with it if they want.

              There are some technical challenges with FLoC as well. Mostly around computation bottlenecks.

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