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Comment by imtyler | Hacker News Reader

Is there any service that presents an elegant solution to managing actual identities on the Internet? If not, it seems like a real problem that needs solving.

I understand people value the ability to express themselves anonymously, but I've also been locked out of legitimate accounts--

If everyone is anonymous nobody can be verified. If everyone's identity is tied to their handle there's no anonymous expression.

If somebody could provide a way to both have and eat the proverbial cake, that seems like real winning proposition in my eyes, something worth paying for...

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There is the Notary Public service for physical documents. I did a quick search a while ago out of curiosity, and there appears to be an eNotary service that uses X509 certs to notarize a digital document. I've never seen this used "in the wild", but if it is rooted in the traditional Notarization services, and is based on open standards, why wouldn't tech companies utilize this as a last resort identity service?

Something else I thought about is if someone could come up with a CA service that specializes in personal / client side certs. They could then indicate what fields they have verified (name, address, etc). Also an option to indicate if they have that information on file but not disclosed. And if someone wants a truly anonymous cert, have variable pricing for those. The cert would tell how much someone paid for it. That way services such as message boards could allow anonymous users but set a nominal threshold for certificate cost that they would accept -- high enough that it would limit duplicate spam accounts, but low enough that it would not be much of a burden for a typical user.

Italy has SPID. It’s a federated login system based on your fiscal code (every Italian has one). You can use it to log into any government service and potentially banks and such. If you do lose access to your 2FA (required, it’s your phone), you can:

- re-verify yourself with the provider, with a real ID

- get a new ID with another provider, which still points to the same fiscal code

As a global solution, it would be great to have a “real identity provider” that offers this but also allows me to log into services without giving them too much information.

Apple ID seems relatively good for this given that it lets me hide the address and change my name during registration.

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