With online fingerprinting, big companies seem to have the problem of "identity", bots and spam prevention decently solved, but at the cost of users privacy. T

With online fingerprinting, big companies seem to have the problem of "identity", bots and spam prevention decently solved, but at the cost of users privacy. There are many opportunities that could really use a good mechanism to uniquely identify users, know for sure they are real people. This is pretty hard to do (or outright impossible) without the collaboration of governments. But governments will f*ck it up in a number of ways if we leave it to them. We have to think bigger than what some countries have already solved. First, we need something like credit cards. A physical object (identity cards could work on many countries, but they tend to suffer from beyond horrible usability when it comes to their digital chips / functionality) with a password that can be changed. We would also need a place to see all the "transactions" or actions done with your identity, as we have with credit cards. India and their Aadhaar project has shown that biometric identification is not good. But it sounds very nice and sci-fi, so it sadly sticks. Nothing new yet. But what we really would need are manageable permissions, so you can always prove that you are an actual human, but not necessarily revealing anything else and being a completely anonymous user, or choosing to reveal some data (country, real name, etc). If something like this was global and effective, not only we would have many more opportunities through the internet, we could also come much closer to things like direct democracy. Password management and online identity management would also become much easier. Obviously there also are many problems. Starting with the access to the internet itself. And all this identification system does sound very dangerous from a privacy-minded perspective (but the alternatives will end up being much worse, and worse systems will be imposed on us). And I'm still completely ignoring the political will to do something like this.