Comment by dandelo1953 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dandelo1953 | Hacker News Reader

I think this "solution" is the exact inverse of what is actually needed: Strong identity and attribution.

identity need not be just an "individual". It can be a group of individuals that agree to mutually sign data before dissemination.

Individuals, corporations and your toaster can create as many identities as necessary.

Right now we are all living seemingly schizoid lifestyle because we are forced to partition multiple selves into molds that are being provided to us.

The partitioning is necessary for organizing information. But the way it is partitioned should be flexible enough for the end user to have the ultimate say in what and how that information is curated. Currently, all we have are blackbox "algorithms." People are asking for transparency, thinking this will solve the problem. I think it will only lead to obfuscating the problem even more so.

Until the individual has unfettered control, we will always be playing this game.

I really wish conversations would wind back to towards discussing ideas tangential to the web of trust...

I think that problem was hard to solve for a reason. Being impossible not being one of them... but an easy position to sell if you feared the consequences ultimately lead to a loss of control.

You're getting downvoted, but you are at least mostly right.

With video and audio deep fakes we are rapidly approaching a world where anything can be trivially faked by anyone. As a result, anonymous information is becoming worthless. Unless the provenance and chain of custody of a piece of evidence is precisely known, it has a high and growing likelihood of being bullshit.

I do think there are roles for anonymity, but getting "the truth" out is not one of them.

What is far more important is selective privacy and the ability for individuals to define their own envelope of visibility and trust.

In case it wasn't clear, I am not suggesting ALL data must be signed/attributed.

Entertainment, for example, can be safely consumed and have little impact on your day to day regardless of the source. Provided it's clearly meant for entertainment purposes.

However once you introduce some dependency of trust into your process (monetary transactions, health related data exchange, etc), I believe most people in this crowd would agree that they want crypto identity and attribution applied to the data at every stage of transformation.

And then there's everything in the middle... which again, I think should be left to the individual. Norms would eventually develop that would guide best practices.

Pipe dream stuff I know, but I don't see another way out. Open to other suggestions. And especially open to criticism about this approach. I don't want to be the one with the answer.

I just want an answer.

I didn't mean to imply "must," just that anonymous data can't be trusted unless there is some out of band way to verify it.

My comment was really a response to the downvotes more than you. I'm not downplaying that the tech involved with OP. It just doesn't appear to solve the problem it's targeting.

Identity is basically a combination of certain Verified Claims about yourself, signed by some third parties. Given enough of these, you can uniquely identify one or a few people in a given population.

These are all things that we should have a say in how they is used, instead of unilateral usage by third parties such as credit reporting agencies, social networks and banks.

We need to fund tech that gives us the power over our own identity! Like telling friends who you are on some networks and not others, instead of Instagram and Telegram assuming all your FB friends or phone contacts should know.

I like Mozilla’s fund too. I like NIST’s NSTIC grants. We need more!

Identity is important for reputation and so on. But we have to unbundle the claim verification service from the certificate, we should make it so you can’t be tracked between domains. One Government ID or Facebook ID for everything may be one of the least libertarian and least secure ways to do it.

So if you more info and SOLUTIONS just check out:

https://github.com/Qbix/auth

http://magarshak.com/blog/?p=114

https://qbix.com/blog/2018/08/28/vision-for-a-new-truly-dece...

Thanks! Will be checking out this weekend.

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