Take Gmail as an example. They provided nice way of allowing applications to access your mailbox. Then we got data mining apps which started using this for malicious purposes (with user consent). Now the API is only available for developers willing to go through security audit ($15k-75k).
10 years ago Facebook provided a pretty nice set of APIs and way to grant access to your data (for example photos, messages, friend lists) for 3rd party apps. What we got was 1000 quiz apps using these for data mining - with user consent.
Android is another example. Initially Google put little restrictions for data applications could access - with permission from user. We all know what happened.
I’m not saying we should stop trying to tear down the walled gardens, but this is not trivial problem to solve. Some users might be even better off with their data locked in the garden managed by Apple, Google or Facebook.
10 years ago Facebook provided a pretty nice set of APIs and way to grant access to your data (for example photos, messages, friend lists) for 3rd party apps. What we got was 1000 quiz apps using these for data mining - with user consent.
Android is another example. Initially Google put little restrictions for data applications could access - with permission from user. We all know what happened.
I’m not saying we should stop trying to tear down the walled gardens, but this is not trivial problem to solve. Some users might be even better off with their data locked in the garden managed by Apple, Google or Facebook.