by roromainmain ·
Hello HN, As a European citizen, I'd love a tool allowing me to easily collect and centralize data I've already shared with FAANG and other large US platforms, for the purpose of sharing (selling?) it to relevant European companies.
I know data portability is challenging, as most platforms are reluctant to make it easy to transfer data to competitors. But I don't expect full portability here: to my knowledge, most major platforms already provide basic export mechanisms, notably to comply with European regulation.
A typical use case: I'd like to collect the two years of conversations I already have in ChatGPT and make them available to Mistral. Other sources could be relevant as well: emails, chats, social media history, search history, etc.
The potential value for a company like Mistral seems significant (?). AI companies need large amounts of high-quality data, and collectively, European users are sitting on an enormous corpus of personal data currently concentrated within US platforms.
I would expect such a tool to have a viral component. Some users might contribute their data to European companies simply because they want to help level the playing field.
In a nutshell: could data existing data portability mechanism become a way for individuals to actively redistribute the data they generated for LLM training purpose?
Does this sound relevant? Technically and legally doable? Could there be a marketplace for this, or another viable business model?
Happy to get involved if anyone wants to build it ;)
When each of my kids got to the age that they started using email and having an online presence, I got them their own vanity domain by going to a "fake word generator" and then taking the best-looking fake words and doing a registrar search for it.
With my youngest son starting the process, I thought "I'll save time going back and forth and integrate the process. Surely it can't be that hard." Making it happen was easy. Making it something I would share was harder.
It's implemented as a single-page app at https://vanitydomain.net, with all of the logic on the client side. It takes the top 10k words in your language's Wikipedia, and builds a Markov trigram model to make a plausable-ish word. I tried more clever things, but they were all worse.
For each plausible word, it hits Cloudflare's DNS (super cheap, fast, and scalable) as a low-pass filter, then checks the definitive RDAP server if it's available. It displays the words that passed both and gives you a link to register it (not monetized; it's all good).
If you know someone who might benefit from having a vanity domain with a hosting site, infinite email addresses, and control of their own online presence, this might be a fun starting point.
Let me know if there are things that could make it better, or if you know of a better model for word generation. It's my fun-time project that might be a blessing to other people, so feel free to push it in a good direction.