Trusting 743 “randos on the internet” to safeguard “my” data, and give me access to use it.
Insanity.
Agent-Centric systems where I retain signing keys to authorize access to (and transactions using my) data are the way forward.
A Key Fob (like you have for your car) is not onerous, and methods for recovery using trusted community members is practical.
Holochain (and the Holo project) are good examples of working implementations.
In other words, agent-device-based identity is a crappy experience for some mixture of end-users and/or devs. Either the user has to manage muiltiple identities, or the devs have to build an ad-hoc identity systems on top of the agent-device-based system.
I think PGP got about halfway there, but falls short in a lot of ways.
In Holochain, a standard service named "DeepKey" (https://github.com/holochain/deepkey, still under development) is tasked with managing groups of "Agent" keys.
On creation of a new Holochain Agent (associated with some Holochain application or piece of hardware), you'll associate it with your Deepkey keyset. Later, you can discard (or recover agency over a lost private key for) an Agent ID.
But at no time should "randos on the internet" be responsible for the agency of your data. That's just crazy -- no matter how "easy" they make it, they simply don't care (evidence would suggest) as much as I do about my data.
This doesn’t work for the internet because anyone can access the target from anywhere.
We already do this to a degree with trusted CA centralization and there are recorded incidents (pretty frequently) of major breaches and state actors posing as various entities.
The stakes are also different, stealing a car is hard to do when it has physical security and has physical consequences. It’s also not worth a whole lot after because it’s hot. Stealing somebody’s identity is worth a whole lot more, hard to if even possible recover from and can be done remotely from anywhere.
I think centralization around brokers is a terrible idea. Look at Equifax, the audit after revealed it was only a matter of time before somebody utilized the multiple gaping completely negligent holes they had. The resulting fine for leaking every man, woman, and child’s ssn, birthdate, address, and drivers license was the equivalent of a few dollars to them.
For some, you might allow "what you know" security (ie. the agent knows your private key).
For other, you might demand "what you know + what you have" security (ie. the agent knows your private key and has provable access to your device). I used various proof of knowledge constructs, such as the ability to read "Private" Holochain entry data (that only exist on-device, and not in the DHT), and demonstrate this by providing the hash or PKI signature of the private data (which is published to the DHT, in an entry provably before the private data being proven was written). There are other ways.
For yet others, you might want that, plus "who you know" security, in which case we do all of the above, and ask some previously defined Agents to also sign the transaction before it is allowed to be written to the Agent's source-chain.
So, the requirement for logical, physical or relational levels of security are available to Holochain / Holo hApps. This is higher security than is available for physical devices like cars, and is even better than provided by devices like Apple iPhone and Watch -- because you retain control over releasing the lock (if you forget your password and lose access to your email address, your Apple device is locked, forever).
- Addresses that are wrong
- Passwords stored (probably insecurely)
- Other personal data that can be stolen
If they "need it", they can be granted access to it (or a personally encrypted copy of it unique to them). Of course they can (and likely will) mis-manage even this data; Zero-Knowledge Proofs and Homomorphic Encryption should be used instead, where possible.
Remember, Public data written by an Agent are written to the DHT and are persistenly available, so "upload and decrypt" isn't really usually a thing in Holochain hApps.
So, if they want to make some non-repudiable claim under the auspices of "my account" (ie. claim agency on my behalf over some change of state, such as a "post" under my name, ...), then they can bloody well get me to sign such a state change with my private key. And, make all such data publicly available so that I (by my sole decision) can cease to use their service and take my data elsewhere.
Remember -- these are "randos on the internet" holding your data. Hundreds, or possibly even thousands of them including all the partners they sell your harvested data to, who are evidently incompetent in managing/securing it, and certainly don't care a whit about you and the sanctity of your data.