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A lot of facebook's value prop for users is in what you're saying - not as a social media company, but as a centralized identity provider for the social graph.

A lot of facebook's value prop for users is in what you're saying - not as a social media company, but as a centralized identity provider for the social graph. Perhaps a decentralized solution could still use a centralized identity provider to help with things like spam & impersonation/fake profiles and prove who they are, while still allowing users to own the information _about_ themselves. The problem here is incentives; there's not much money in being a dumb identity resolver unless you're harvesting everyones data AFAICT, so I sort of doubt a private consumer solution will emerge in the near future.

corytheboyd 6y ago
It’ll never happen (in the United States at least) but this then sounds like a service that should be run by the local government, or perhaps something more global. People on HN often talk of making the internet an actual public utility, perhaps something like centralized online identify would follow a move like that
- lilactown 6y ago
  yes absolutely. In my scifi utopia, the government provides a digital identity to each citizen as a social service :) One of the downsides of this is that it actually degrades privacy by improving private institutions (and the governments) ability to track you. One way I've thought of to get around this is to allow people to spawn new identities from their own root identity. This could allow a certain amount of anonymity, while allowing institutions to filter identities by requiring a certain amount of social proof (e.g. length of time since identity has been created). Some services might ban non-root identities (e.g. banks), while others (like a bar) just needs to be able to trust that you have a valid ID and can be used to prove you're over a certain bio age. In the event that you need to prove you own a specific ID, there could be a way that given a root ID and a non-root ID, you re-generate the non-root ID from the root - thus proving you own it.

corytheboyd 6y ago

It’ll never happen (in the United States at least) but this then sounds like a service that should be run by the local government, or perhaps something more global. People on HN often talk of making the internet an actual public utility, perhaps something like centralized online identify would follow a move like that

lilactown 6y ago
yes absolutely. In my scifi utopia, the government provides a digital identity to each citizen as a social service :) One of the downsides of this is that it actually degrades privacy by improving private institutions (and the governments) ability to track you. One way I've thought of to get around this is to allow people to spawn new identities from their own root identity. This could allow a certain amount of anonymity, while allowing institutions to filter identities by requiring a certain amount of social proof (e.g. length of time since identity has been created). Some services might ban non-root identities (e.g. banks), while others (like a bar) just needs to be able to trust that you have a valid ID and can be used to prove you're over a certain bio age. In the event that you need to prove you own a specific ID, there could be a way that given a root ID and a non-root ID, you re-generate the non-root ID from the root - thus proving you own it.