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Comment by pmarreck | Hacker News Reader

I had a product idea for an AR app that would do this for everyone who's opted into it. So for real-world networking events, you might choose to disclose some things about yourself but only for that venue and only for some window of time for example.

I never built it, but it's perfectly possible to do.

The genius idea IMHO was the business model- If you were into certain things you wanted to keep private from most but only wanted to disclose to other people who were into those same things, you could pay a fee, and it would then show you others who were in that "market" (of ideas, drugs, sex, whatever). (It might only ask you to pay it if it found someone nearby who matched. And then it would automatically notify the other person unless you paid an ADDITIONAL fee... Not sure about the latter idea, but it was an idea.)

The only issue is everyone holding their phone up in front of their faces.

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> The genius idea IMHO was the business model- If you were into certain things you wanted to keep private from most but only wanted to disclose to other people who were into those same things, you could pay a fee

> The only issue is everyone holding their phone up in front of their faces.

No, the genius idea is its major issue, just by paying you gain access to private data (people's preferences) without any kind of chain of trust to make sure that someone is actually part of the group ("market" in your terms) for which they want access to.

By paying you could know that someone around you is looking for cocaine, or is willing to sell sexual services, or is looking to match other people from the same gender, or holds a certain political view against an authoritarian government, etc.

I answered this in a sibling comment. You could acquire credibility in a particular preference from the network over time.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39482786

Sounds great, I'm going to make a "credibility as a service" startup and we'll find ways to farm whatever score in whatever fields you want.

And you can be sure government agencies will do the same.

Odd that you think this would happen for my little idea when this hasn't happened for credit cards which is possibly the largest financial incentive possible. To my knowledge, I can't buy a credit score

Finance is a heavily regulated industry, so people trust credit providers with things like social insurance numbers, which are not transferrable between people

Your service would probably not be able to tie so uniquely to an individual, so there would be ways for people to transfer it.

Or just hire a company to pretend to be you for a while.

How would you stop spies or undercover cops trying to infiltrate the "market"?

Or people who want to "out" gay people. I know.

That would be a good argument over not permitting a unilateral notification of a match (which, at the very least, I wanted to make very expensive and thus profitable, if it's allowed at all). If it notified both people 100% of the time, and one of you was a possible impostor, you could report them. And from a legal standpoint, showing interest in a market doesn't make you guilty. And, you could possibly also build "cred" in one of these tagged "markets" by getting cred from others who say you're legit, and that information would be revealed at the same time (possibly at your discretion).

Makes sense. You still might get honeypots though; could you make cred work more generally with trust between friends, friends of friends etc. without compromising the markets?

Well, are there other markets where the same cred has worked? AFAIK, when Silk Road was a thing, one's cred on there was protected and valuable.

True. I didn't mean to imply that it doesn't work.

So your genius idea is to get people to pay to put themselves on a future blackmail list when your data is leaked/stolen/sold? I have to say, it is a kind of evil genius.

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