I had a thought awhile back. In the vast majority of uses, identity is exactly the issue. Yet in the vast majority of compromises or problems, the problem is

I had a thought awhile back. In the vast majority of uses, identity is exactly the issue. Yet in the vast majority of compromises or problems, the problem is correlation and combination of data. By this I mean it seems to me that, say, the Social Security Administration needs to be able to identify a citizen in order to know whether and how much they need to pay a person of a certain identity to avoid paying the wrong amount, the wrong person, double-paying, etc. There does not need to exist an identity which spreads beyond that. Your credit card company does not need to use the same identity and a unique identity which functions solely within the context of the credit card account is all that is needed. Instead, we have identities that get spread across multiple services even though there is never any actual need to relate or correlate the activity across those services. This seems like the sort of situation that cryptography can solve, although obviously there would be a lot of usability work to be done. But it seems to me that cryptographically unrelatable distinct identities which has only 1 possible point of aggregation (you) is what is needed.