> I'm concerned that it will inevitably require loss of anonymity and be abused by companies for user tracking.
Are you sure you read my comment fully?
Are you sure you read my comment fully?
the governments powerful enough to roll something like this out are not trusted authorities which will protect the privacy of their citizens. remember before the Snowden revelations when the NSA's director of national intelligence swore under oath that they did not collect "any type of data at all on millions of Americans"?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Clapper#Testimony_to_Con...
The trust I mentioned was the ability for third-parties to trust that the authority will not hand out IDs in an uncontrolled manner. I was not saying that the ID holders need to trust the authority:
> Users can identify themselves to third-parties without disclosing their real-world identity to the third-party and without disclosing their interaction with the third-party to the issuing body.
If the authority doesn’t know how your ID is used, you don’t have to trust the authority to keep that information private.
Online identity verification is probably best handled by an organization with that as a single priority.
Under the government ID scheme, we have to trust [bad corrupt government] to verify all citizens of [bad corrupt government]. Since that government frequently lies and acts maliciously using every means at their disposal, platforms will treat IDs verified by that government similar to bot traffic and the country will be cut off from the public internet. You'll be banning scientists and journalists from working with others around the world, just because they live in a country with an obnoxious government.
Isn't it also best if people can have multiple identities? Or should someone's contributions to X field be discounted because of their dabbling in fringe Y field?
This doesn’t make sense. The whole point of using IDs in this way is in an authenticated context.
Did you think I was suggesting that this ID would be accessible to any website without asking? This is something you would send as part of a registration step. So, for instance, if you spam Hacker News, you get banned, you try to register again, it receives the same ID as before and knows not to let you register.
As you note, websites can already force people to register, so this isn’t adding anything new there.
If the only way to associate a user with their ID is by fingerprinting them, you can do the same thing without an ID with having shadow profiles. If the proof system is designed for privacy, the ID doesn't make you more trackable.
In other words, if the ID never directly leaks companies can just make up a static ID for you and get the same results.
There is a permanent ID, but it doesn't have to be told to the site.
In which case it doesn't make tracking any easier than the site making up a "fake" ID for you.