5 ms·

It will be decentralized because if it is not fragmented, it is literally just oppression. I've never understood that way of viewing things. For me identity is

by narag 6y ago

It will be decentralized because if it is not fragmented, it is literally just oppression. I've never understood that way of viewing things. For me identity is a right. The government must provide me with the means to prove who I am and my associated data like birth certificates, academic titles, health (vaccination), real estate and indirectly verifying identity for private contracts that use my national id card number. In an oppressive state identity surely could be oppression, just like everything else, but in a democratic country? Come on. In the USA goverment and even private entities are collecting massive databases of everybody's data. But there's this panic about a centralized service providing identity. It makes no sense.

TehCorwiz 6y ago
I can reasonably change my hardware, software, and habits to avoid being matched with some corporate aglomerated profile of "me". However, I cannot change my government provided identity. Right now I can have multiple identities: one for work, one for my WoW guild, one for security research. With a single centralized identity provider I couldn't do that. They wouldn't just be able, they would by default associate my personal and professional associations. I feel that the risk of a single central (and especially government run) identity provider is that it can chill freedom of association by disallowing you to anonymously, or if not anonymously then disconnectedly associate with people or groups.
pmoriarty 6y ago
"In an oppressive state identity surely could be oppression, just like everything else, but in a democratic country?" What makes you think a democracy can't be oppressive? Even in perfect democracies there is something called the tyranny of the majority, where the majority can oppress the minority. If we're talking about the US in particular, we have to recognize first that it's not even a perfect democracy, and there are many anti-democratic things about it such as the electoral college, and plenty more things that hinder democracy even where it exists (such as poor civic education, money's outsize influence in elections, extremely biased media, branches of government which shirk their balancing and oversight roles, etc). Then, to get specifically to the oppressive aspects of the US, they range from slavery and lack of women's rights from its foundation, to segregation that existed in law up to the middle of the 20th Century (and arguably still exists in fact to some extent and in some places in the US even now), to the imprisonment in concentration camps of Americans of Japanese descent, to discrimination against people who weren't heterosexual, to the War on Drugs and police brutality which primarily impact minorities, to abuse, killing, and imprisonment of people who come to the US from other countries. All this oppression and more has happened in what is ostensibly a democracy, and often likes to style itself as the world's greatest democracy. And all of this oppression has had to do with identity, which required identifying people's race, gender, sexual preferences, or country of origin. Such identification is amplified and made all that much easier in the age of computers, the internet, and gigantic databases on everyone. It's a data trove just begging for abuse.
- chrisco255 6y ago
  It's not meant to be purely democratic. The founders were students of history and recognized the inherent instability of pure democracies. There were no human rights recognized anywhere in the world in 1776. The imperial era was still a thing and Kings and queens still had vast influence over European politics, with various other centralized power structures in virtually all parts of the world. I get that it's easy to point out the hypocrisy of the phrase "all men are created equal" when slavery was still a thing in half the states, but it was a very tenuous situation to go against the crown of England in 1776. It was far from guaranteed. A lot of people see the human rights we have today as some sort of inevitable outcome of progress, but China is case in point that progress and time do not necessarily yield more rights for more people. China is 4000 years old and they still don't even have basic freedom of speech there. All of human history is filled with bloodshed, tyranny, endless wars, conquering, slavery, piracy, vandalism, raiding parties, human sacrifice, religious battles and authoritarianism, with just a few punctuating moments of anything resembling democracy and recognition of human rights. That goes for every race, country, tribe, continent and creed. No heritage is innocent of that. That's the truth. 1776 didn't have to succeed. It very much could of ended with being squelched by the Crown and then where would we be today? Perhaps the Nazis would of won. Perhaps the Soviets would have developed imperial ambition in the absence of a strong US to keep them in check. Maybe the world would be a darker place. I suspect that without the U.S. that it would be, since that's the rule of history and not the exception. Interning the Japanese Americans was of course wrong, but when you're fighting a world war and tens of millions are dying at the hands of Japanese (they slaughtered Chinese by the tens of millions)...it's very touchy isn't it? The lesser of two evils in that particular war was certainly the U.S. Again, prior to world war 2 the world was still filled with imperial forces itching to conquer and enslave other people by the tens of millions. This is just 80 years ago...not that long ago. There was no where else in the world living up to the high ideals we seek to achieve today back then. The U.S. was that place for so many people to escape to. The Jews being one group. The Cubans being another. The Vietnamese being another. The Koreans being another. If you're going to paint the picture, paint it in the context of the world at the time and the subsequent actions in the wake of those problems. I think individuals deserve forgiveness after some time, and the same goes with nations, given that their behavior is corrected. There's nothing wrong with the movement towards more civil rights. But expecting things to go from millenia of imperialism to utopian democracy overnight, especially one saddled with so much legacy from that era, is naive. Again, it didn't have to go so well. It could have very gone south and ended up worse off for everyone.
WealthVsSurvive 6y ago
The problem is not that the data is centralized; the problem is that centralization engenders a position of advantage, which incentivizes perversion. This is why the problem becomes political. The amount of privacy one should have is relative to the ethics of humanity, society, to material necessity and fact, etc. This is an unsolved problem. One would need a series of blind oracles to solve it, unfettered by the influence of living things.
Nextgrid 6y ago
The problem with making government-issued ID easy to verify online is that every website will start requiring it and pseudonymity or anonymity would become a thing of the past, even though it's necessary in some cases.
coldtea 6y ago
>I've never understood that way of viewing things. For me identity is a right. Historically "identity" wasn't a right, but something imposed on people, for better tracking and controlling them by authorities... >In an oppressive state identity surely could be oppression, just like everything else, but in a democratic country? Oppression is not about democratic vs totalitarian state. McCarthy and Hoover, to mention just two examples, reigned over others in the good ole democratic US of A. Not to mention very few (if any) countries have actual direct democracy, or give the people say in how they want to be governed, from the constitution and downwards.
- closeparen 6y ago
  Identity can’t be “imposed,” come on. Personhood is continuous across time and space. All a system can influence is your ability to lie about this. Ability to deceive the state can protect your freedom but inability to trust others also has a cost, there has to be a balance.
  - motohagiography 6y ago
    (Knowing nothing about the author of this reply at all, upon reading the comment as a reference) - as spoken by someone who has yet to have been down the rabbit hole of what "personhood" might mean. Identity is a philosophical problem and a relationship, and so far we've managed to kick the can down the road of what an identity might mean outside the nation state, but the internet may prove to be a bit of a forcing function in deciding some of these questions we had the luck to avoid. I've been doubtful of digital identity startups because most of them are just substituting an opaque problem in crytography for the capital-H hard problem in political philosophy, which originates in prehistorical problems in collecting a census. Maybe OAuth with some OIDC extensions and attributes solves everything, and FIDO has solved it, but if there were a way to bet against that, personally I'd go all in.
    - closeparen 6y ago
      This is a really fascinating conversational pattern. It's like I said "when I let go of a ball it falls down to the ground" and you said "the meaning of 'falling' is a question as old as Genesis, and 'down' depends on your frame of reference." There's a sense in which both of those things are true, just like everything you've said here. And yet.
AnthonyMouse 6y ago
> In the USA goverment and even private entities are collecting massive databases of everybody's data. But there's this panic about a centralized service providing identity. The existence of centralized identity is what enables those databases. They're all indexed by the centralized identity. You give Facebook your "real name" and location and the same thing to your bank and they correlate them in a database. If you were using a different identity for each one they couldn't do that. On the other hand, creating some kind of national ID authentication system would make it much worse, because then things would require that. You couldn't sign up under a pseudonym, so now even the things that are currently separate or that you can keep separate if you want to would be forced into being correlated with everything else about you in those databases. It's an attack.
elric 6y ago
It's interesting how different countries treat "names" in different ways. In the UK, for instance, changing your name is super easy. You tell the government your name is now Foo Bar, and you're done. They'll update their pointers and issue new documents. In Belgium, changing your name is virtually impossible. The king (ostensibly) has to grant permission; you need to provide a "valid reason". This never made sense to me.

by narag 6y ago

TehCorwiz 6y ago

I can reasonably change my hardware, software, and habits to avoid being matched with some corporate aglomerated profile of "me". However, I cannot change my government provided identity. Right now I can have multiple identities: one for work, one for my WoW guild, one for security research. With a single centralized identity provider I couldn't do that. They wouldn't just be able, they would by default associate my personal and professional associations. I feel that the risk of a single central (and especially government run) identity provider is that it can chill freedom of association by disallowing you to anonymously, or if not anonymously then disconnectedly associate with people or groups.

pmoriarty 6y ago

"In an oppressive state identity surely could be oppression, just like everything else, but in a democratic country?" What makes you think a democracy can't be oppressive? Even in perfect democracies there is something called the tyranny of the majority, where the majority can oppress the minority. If we're talking about the US in particular, we have to recognize first that it's not even a perfect democracy, and there are many anti-democratic things about it such as the electoral college, and plenty more things that hinder democracy even where it exists (such as poor civic education, money's outsize influence in elections, extremely biased media, branches of government which shirk their balancing and oversight roles, etc). Then, to get specifically to the oppressive aspects of the US, they range from slavery and lack of women's rights from its foundation, to segregation that existed in law up to the middle of the 20th Century (and arguably still exists in fact to some extent and in some places in the US even now), to the imprisonment in concentration camps of Americans of Japanese descent, to discrimination against people who weren't heterosexual, to the War on Drugs and police brutality which primarily impact minorities, to abuse, killing, and imprisonment of people who come to the US from other countries. All this oppression and more has happened in what is ostensibly a democracy, and often likes to style itself as the world's greatest democracy. And all of this oppression has had to do with identity, which required identifying people's race, gender, sexual preferences, or country of origin. Such identification is amplified and made all that much easier in the age of computers, the internet, and gigantic databases on everyone. It's a data trove just begging for abuse.

chrisco255 6y ago
It's not meant to be purely democratic. The founders were students of history and recognized the inherent instability of pure democracies. There were no human rights recognized anywhere in the world in 1776. The imperial era was still a thing and Kings and queens still had vast influence over European politics, with various other centralized power structures in virtually all parts of the world. I get that it's easy to point out the hypocrisy of the phrase "all men are created equal" when slavery was still a thing in half the states, but it was a very tenuous situation to go against the crown of England in 1776. It was far from guaranteed. A lot of people see the human rights we have today as some sort of inevitable outcome of progress, but China is case in point that progress and time do not necessarily yield more rights for more people. China is 4000 years old and they still don't even have basic freedom of speech there. All of human history is filled with bloodshed, tyranny, endless wars, conquering, slavery, piracy, vandalism, raiding parties, human sacrifice, religious battles and authoritarianism, with just a few punctuating moments of anything resembling democracy and recognition of human rights. That goes for every race, country, tribe, continent and creed. No heritage is innocent of that. That's the truth. 1776 didn't have to succeed. It very much could of ended with being squelched by the Crown and then where would we be today? Perhaps the Nazis would of won. Perhaps the Soviets would have developed imperial ambition in the absence of a strong US to keep them in check. Maybe the world would be a darker place. I suspect that without the U.S. that it would be, since that's the rule of history and not the exception. Interning the Japanese Americans was of course wrong, but when you're fighting a world war and tens of millions are dying at the hands of Japanese (they slaughtered Chinese by the tens of millions)...it's very touchy isn't it? The lesser of two evils in that particular war was certainly the U.S. Again, prior to world war 2 the world was still filled with imperial forces itching to conquer and enslave other people by the tens of millions. This is just 80 years ago...not that long ago. There was no where else in the world living up to the high ideals we seek to achieve today back then. The U.S. was that place for so many people to escape to. The Jews being one group. The Cubans being another. The Vietnamese being another. The Koreans being another. If you're going to paint the picture, paint it in the context of the world at the time and the subsequent actions in the wake of those problems. I think individuals deserve forgiveness after some time, and the same goes with nations, given that their behavior is corrected. There's nothing wrong with the movement towards more civil rights. But expecting things to go from millenia of imperialism to utopian democracy overnight, especially one saddled with so much legacy from that era, is naive. Again, it didn't have to go so well. It could have very gone south and ended up worse off for everyone.

WealthVsSurvive 6y ago

The problem is not that the data is centralized; the problem is that centralization engenders a position of advantage, which incentivizes perversion. This is why the problem becomes political. The amount of privacy one should have is relative to the ethics of humanity, society, to material necessity and fact, etc. This is an unsolved problem. One would need a series of blind oracles to solve it, unfettered by the influence of living things.

Nextgrid 6y ago

The problem with making government-issued ID easy to verify online is that every website will start requiring it and pseudonymity or anonymity would become a thing of the past, even though it's necessary in some cases.

coldtea 6y ago

>I've never understood that way of viewing things. For me identity is a right. Historically "identity" wasn't a right, but something imposed on people, for better tracking and controlling them by authorities... >In an oppressive state identity surely could be oppression, just like everything else, but in a democratic country? Oppression is not about democratic vs totalitarian state. McCarthy and Hoover, to mention just two examples, reigned over others in the good ole democratic US of A. Not to mention very few (if any) countries have actual direct democracy, or give the people say in how they want to be governed, from the constitution and downwards.

closeparen 6y ago
Identity can’t be “imposed,” come on. Personhood is continuous across time and space. All a system can influence is your ability to lie about this. Ability to deceive the state can protect your freedom but inability to trust others also has a cost, there has to be a balance.
- motohagiography 6y ago
  (Knowing nothing about the author of this reply at all, upon reading the comment as a reference) - as spoken by someone who has yet to have been down the rabbit hole of what "personhood" might mean. Identity is a philosophical problem and a relationship, and so far we've managed to kick the can down the road of what an identity might mean outside the nation state, but the internet may prove to be a bit of a forcing function in deciding some of these questions we had the luck to avoid. I've been doubtful of digital identity startups because most of them are just substituting an opaque problem in crytography for the capital-H hard problem in political philosophy, which originates in prehistorical problems in collecting a census. Maybe OAuth with some OIDC extensions and attributes solves everything, and FIDO has solved it, but if there were a way to bet against that, personally I'd go all in.
  - closeparen 6y ago
    This is a really fascinating conversational pattern. It's like I said "when I let go of a ball it falls down to the ground" and you said "the meaning of 'falling' is a question as old as Genesis, and 'down' depends on your frame of reference." There's a sense in which both of those things are true, just like everything you've said here. And yet.

AnthonyMouse 6y ago

> In the USA goverment and even private entities are collecting massive databases of everybody's data. But there's this panic about a centralized service providing identity. The existence of centralized identity is what enables those databases. They're all indexed by the centralized identity. You give Facebook your "real name" and location and the same thing to your bank and they correlate them in a database. If you were using a different identity for each one they couldn't do that. On the other hand, creating some kind of national ID authentication system would make it much worse, because then things would require that. You couldn't sign up under a pseudonym, so now even the things that are currently separate or that you can keep separate if you want to would be forced into being correlated with everything else about you in those databases. It's an attack.

elric 6y ago

It's interesting how different countries treat "names" in different ways. In the UK, for instance, changing your name is super easy. You tell the government your name is now Foo Bar, and you're done. They'll update their pointers and issue new documents. In Belgium, changing your name is virtually impossible. The king (ostensibly) has to grant permission; you need to provide a "valid reason". This never made sense to me.