Hacker News Reader

Comment by onepointsixC | Hacker News Reader

>The idea that we use our email accounts, attached to huge corporations which siphon every detail about us for their advertising engines is absolutely absurd. I just want to be able to log in to applications and carry some of the simple data like my identity and what assets I have available with me, without having to pay for it by losing my privacy and autonomy.

Okay but instead of it being known to just say one company, anything on the block chain is known to everyone. I fail to see how that's any better or even remotely "powerful".

View on HN

> Okay but instead of it being known to just say one company, anything on the block chain is known to everyone.

Bitcoin != blockchain. Technology exists [1] to store data on the blockchain in a private manner without sacrificing its decentralized nature.

[1]: https://www.getmonero.org/resources/moneropedia/ringCT.html

But if you encrypt it so nobody else can read it then the big bad companies of evil will still need to collect your data individually - which brings us back to the initial point, but now with a blockchain for some reason

Companies are going to collect our data as long as they are able to use that data as an income stream.

I don’t have a Facebook account but I know they have data on me.

Yeah, and even if they can't sell collected data because we all agreed to just put them on a blockchain aggregates and whatnot will still be valuable assets. This isn't an issue that can be solved by technology. It will need regulation/laws and I don't see that happening.

But it’s different! Because blockchain!! /s

How does it feel knowing that you've signed up to 100 applications, which you use for everything from work to pleasure, and that that authenticating account can be taken from you at the whim of a company? Feels bad to me, man.

Couldn't someone just steal your token and you lose access to 100 applications?

No. It's not a token. It's an on-chain account verified by multiple permissions that are controlled by key pairs. It's based on EOSIO technology and is pretty robust.

How do you recover your account when you lose your keys?

You can’t.

Check out Vitaliks post on social recovery wallets https://vitalik.ca/general/2021/01/11/recovery.html

That doesn't address their concern, really. Threat models are personalized to everyone, and for a _lot_ of people, they choose Google/Apple/Microsoft and are fine with that company knowing their 3p logins - but wouldn't be fine with anyone being able to plug in their crypto address and see all the services they've connected with.

Although, i'm sure a blockchain identity service could be properly architected to keep connections secret - i'm eager to see if that ever comes to fruition.

On the other hand, a company providing the service can ban users for spreading harmful information. Imagine a situation where, say, the president of the US was spreading misinformation regarding a pandemic for example. To me it sounds good that there is some control to it.

There is no such thing as harmful information. Only actions can cause harm.

Do you think we should trust unaccountable corporate managers more than elected leaders to determine what is misinformation?

>only actions can cause harm

Disseminating information is an action. Also misinformation does not always contain information: Many times it's just a more polite way of calling something a lie, or simply wrong. Even when there is information, cherry picking which information to share can give the opposite impression of what more robust information would show.

The question of who to trust is a good one. The issue I have with the viewpoint that platforms shouldn't be allowed to make these decisions for their own platforms is that it takes away property rights by having the government mandate what can or cannot be done with privately owned property. Should people have the right to decide what people can do on their privately owned property? Businesses are allowed to make all kinds of rules about this, from dress codes to what they consider disruptive conduct. Limiting that ability seems problematic to me.

I don't have anything that I would consider a solution to finding the right answers or balance here, but I don't think we can ignore these issues.

> There is no such thing as harmful information. Only actions can cause harm.

Perhaps in some idealistic model of society this is true. However, in reality people cannot process and evaluate the factual basis of all information that is pushed on them. Otherwise we would not be seeing so wide-spread misinformation campaigning, fake news and conspiracy theories. Harmful information tends to transform into harmful actions (harmful here being subjective - there's often someone benefiting as well).

I don't have a clear-cut answer who should be determining what is misinformation. Also, I don't believe one bit that a free-for-all model is a good one, quite the opposite. Currently it seems that when someone clearly crosses the line, public opinion or perception forces the company to reconsider allowing the violator to remain on their platform. It might not be the most elegant model, but possibly the best we have.

I think this touches on the heart of such issues. Many people see a big difference between censorship and an obligation to follow certain rules. Others seem to view any rules as a defacto form of censorship. I don't think these positions can be fully reconciled with each other.

That is a valid concern. But in practice most of the sites which allow federated authentication support multiple providers, typically Google, Facebook, and Apple. I expect one of those will eventually ban me for wrongthink, but probably not all of them simultaneously.

To me, it seems the solution here is not to centralize into one identity for everything but the opposite: to distribute each account into its own identity. Software can then manage each disparate identity to ease the burden for the account owner.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com