Working on federation now. Depends on what you mean by privacy. If you have federation for a group in society like doctors, you can push policy down to the app

Working on federation now. Depends on what you mean by privacy. If you have federation for a group in society like doctors, you can push policy down to the applications themselves, who can express and enforce it locally, while trusting identity from the Idp (identity provider). If you want more centralization, you can have the applications consume their policy from a UMA2 (or formerly xacml) policy service, but to me that level of central governance is dumb, imo. Provide tools for the edges instead. The users themselves don't have anonymity and their movements are all logged, but this is what facilitates the data subjects (patients) privacy in that scenario. So it's a question of, "privacy, for whom?" On the normal internet, arguably, it's content providers who have all the privacy where viewers/users do not. The criticism in the article is federation doesn't invert this model, but that's not what it's for. The radio/tv model where users can anonymously receive a broadcast signal is the conceptual model for most privacy thinking. This isn't how the internet works, and the only way this is possible is by adding noise to the channel the way Tor does it with onion routing, or some future way of obfuscating the origin of a request using ephemeral paths and end points. Barring new cryptological link/network/transport layer protocols, we're basically stuck with the current privacy model of the internet until quantum computing becomes commercial.