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In web3, your wallet ID (used for purchases and proposed for logins too) is an undeletable cookie that tracks you both online and off, and one that anyone can r

In web3, your wallet ID (used for purchases and proposed for logins too) is an undeletable cookie that tracks you both online and off, and one that anyone can retrieve. This article seems to think that having a super cookie like this will make advertising less bad. I think it will be the opposite - instead of only Google/Facebook doing it, you're now going to have every single shady operation under the sun now able to use/mine/combine your data however they please with zero controls (and unlike HTTP cookies they'll need exactly zero investment & zero infrastructure to do so, so there is no barrier to entry to start using this data) Web3 is the advertising world's ultimate dream situation. It allows significantly more invasive tracking by tying online and offline, cannot ever be deleted or changed, and the same cookie ID is shared across all aspects of your life (unless you use multiple wallets with one-per-site, but my understanding is that an anathema to web3 concepts about data ownership)

SubiculumCode 5y ago
But wallets can be swapped all the time, even moment to moment.
- mattlondon 5y ago
  Each time you are adding more immutable data to the Blockchain, which cannot be undone. Each of your identities - to which all of your digital content is tied - is permanently associated with that ID. So if you just have throw-away wallets, how do you use that with your content? You cannot "own" your content if you keep having to abandon wallets to get a fresh advertising ID. And if you keep several different compartmentalized wallets around, as soon as you move something from one to the other or use a different wallet with the same login, you have permanently and irredeemably linked those identities.
  - chrischattin 5y ago
    - xmprt 5y ago
      I've studied blockchains a little bit but I don't understand how you can transfer funds between two wallets that you own without linking them. How would that be possible without either having some kind of zero sum proof (which none of the popular blockchains are using) or allowing an exploit which enables people to mint new tokens from thin air?
      - magicjosh 5y ago
        Tornado.cash is one such project. They are working on making Ethereum behave like cash in terms of privacy/anonymity.
        misnome 5y ago
        My understanding was that using such services basically blacklists the wallet from transacting with anywhere “reputable”?
        magicjosh 5y ago
        Cash isn't traced at every step into an immutable ledger. Why should cryptocurrency? Relevant ZK podcast episode: https://zeroknowledge.fm/111-2/ https://zeroknowledge.fm/111-2/
      - pmontra 5y ago
        You send the coins to your other wallet, exactly as if you were sending them to me. Of course you pay a fee to the miners.
        xmprt 5y ago
        Wouldn't you be able to trace that transaction back to the original wallet?
      - chrischattin 5y ago
        Generating a new public key doesn't add data to the blockchain. Only when you sign a transaction. And if you're talking identities, as in moving around websites, there's no way to link your various public addresses (logins) unless you explicitly do so using the private key you used to generate the public address. Or, you could use the same public address. So, it depends on what you want to do. Do you want privacy? Or, do you want the site to know your activity history? The beautiful thing is, you get to choose.
  - derangedHorse 5y ago
    Yeah but at that point it’s up to the user. There’s a way to stay anonymous but just like anything relating to privacy, users have to be well informed about their risks and mitigations to be able to manage their data effectively.
EGreg 5y ago
The real problem in Web3 (as EVM does it) is that almost all wallets lets you export your private keys. This leads to a lot of scams that trap people. Got rugpulled? Joined Metamask chat on Telegram? Hi, I’m an admin. Just paste your 12 word phrase into this official-looking site and we’ll help you. There’s even a site that will generate vanity addresses for you! (Don’t use it.) Instead, all this could have been avoided if they took the Keybase approach: keys never leave the device. Just have a keychain of devices which you authorize or repudiate, and use THAT to retrieve your actual accounts from the network and sign things. This would work best with BLS signatures without a trusted dealer. I am not sure it can work with ECDSA or Shnorr signatures if you want to collapse all multisigs down to one signature.
- jsemrau 5y ago
  Identity and Authentication are related but separate topics. Identification is uniquely associate a user in a system or application while Authentication is proving that this identity is yours.
- arbol 5y ago
  This can easily be solved with multi Sig wallets
  - EGreg 5y ago
    Yes, those are better at least. But only if “this” is your individual use case, not if “this” is the general state of crypto custody in EVM ecosystem. People think they need fancy airgapped computers and hardware wallets when all they need is to copy their 12 word phrase three times on paper, cut into 9 pieces and bury in 9 different places. Better yet —- wallets normally shouldn’t allow people to export keys.
- Sargos 5y ago
  >Instead, all this could have been avoided if they took the Keybase approach: keys never leave the device. Just have a keychain of devices which you authorize or repudiate, and use THAT to retrieve your actual accounts from the network and sign things. This is what modern smart contract wallets like Argent do. There is no 24 word phrase or long private key to write down, remember or lose. Instead you set up guardians which is a group of people, organizations, and devices you create that allow you to recover your account if you drop your phone in the ocean so there's no practical way you can lose your money or identity. An example guardian setup might be your mom, best friend, lawyer, your hardware wallet and a distributed paper wallet. To recover your wallet you would need 3 out of the 5 to agree. The number of guardians and other details can be as secure and exotic as you desire. The account is also protected by configurable safeguards that mimic your existing bank account. Sending over $500/day? Guardians must approve. Your tokens or NFTs are being sent to a non-white listed address? Guardians must approve. The crypto ecosystem is still in the early phases of being built but these problems and ideas have already been discussed and debated for years and the foundational infrastructure that people will end up using in the real world is being built and deployed today after years of hard work. Using crypto today is a lot like using the internet in the early nineties: it was hard, easy to break, and you generally had to be good at cutting your teeth on new and quickly evolving tech. Nowadays you mostly just forget you're using it.
chrischattin 5y ago
You can generate a new public key at any time.
- shadowgovt 5y ago
  Wouldn't doing so detach past activity I do want aggregated? How is a site I'm interacting with supposed to know it can use my previously-configured settings if I'm showing up with a new public key every time I authenticate?
  - jdavis703 5y ago
    I read this as essentially a single origin supercookie. So each origin (web site) has a unique public key for you, but it’s immutable.
  - k__ 5y ago
    So, you want privacy but without privacy?
    - shadowgovt 5y ago
      Yes. I get that in the current ecosystem via doing business with sites I trust, and ceasing to do so when I cease to trust them. It's not impregnable (sites get hacked, companies get sold), but it's preferable to an alternative where I must either stay one-time-padded continuously or have my activity recorded in a global public ledger.
      - sanderjd 5y ago
        You could use a public blockchain key to log in to a site you trust which stores all of its data somewhere private and have this same functionality. It is only transactions you write to a public blockchain that are public. The act of authenticating using a key stored there does not write anything down.
    - 8note 5y ago
      Privacy as in having control over who gets what information, and being able to change who and what over time
5350-uiop-1130 5y ago
I think the underlying technologies behind web3, i.e blockchain cannot really evolve beyond ponzinomic pump and dump schemes without some kind of legitimate commercial purpose, maybe that's some kind of incentivised advertising. People always say the likes of Google and FB treat us as a product, so perhaps we can at least get some kind of magic bean tokens as a reward :D
- hobs 5y ago
  It's been tried and tried and tried. Generally when they want to increase profits the same outcome - they either flame out of VC money or start selling your data. ~1998 Beenz.com launched https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beenz.com https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beenz.com
  - 5350-uiop-1130 5y ago
    ahh that brings back memories. i had an account.
Tenoke 5y ago
>In web3, your wallet ID (used for purchases and proposed for logins too) is an undeletable cookie that tracks you both online and off, and one that anyone can retrieve. Purchases sure on most chains (though not on e.g. Secret) but the chain isn't recording your logins via your address in most cases. You are just showing to the site that you have the key without making any transactions. So no, advertisers won't have much extra data on your site visiting habits that they don't have now.
- oblio 5y ago
  The thing is, can't they "triangulate" who you are by your transactions? In the same way tracking your location for sure can determine who you are. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/12/10/business/location-data-privacy-apps.html https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/12/10/business/loca... Based on just a few transactions they can figure out that you're a middle aged guy, living in Nowhereville, Iowa, that's into samba, anime and drives a Toyota Corolla, etc. and then from that it's not hard to actually figure out who that person is.
  - Tenoke 5y ago
    I don't see a particular reason to conduct every transaction on-chain, or at least on a public L1. At any rate, I was mostly replying about your login data being public which isn't true.
    - oblio 5y ago
      Then how will we conduct our transactions? Right now I use my country's currency, do you want me to go to a mix of currencies like I'm playing some sort of Android free to play game? That's just adding complexity to my life for no obvious reason.
      - nefitty 5y ago
        Crypto is sort of like the increasing plethora of streaming services, except crypto projects seem to reproduce at a much higher rate and further deprioritize UX. It's not every day, if ever, that I'm dealing with fiat currency conversion. In crypto, it's another one of those seemingly unnecessary hassles that is tolerated as a matter of course.
yoavm 5y ago
I wonder how all this Web3 thing works with GDPR, especially with part 17 - "Right to erasure". Seems like if you go down the blockchain route to store any user data, you're pretty much non-GDPR compliant from day 1. I have a feeling the judge will not like the "it's a feature, not a bug" argument...
- ComradePhil 5y ago
  As long as the blockchain doesn't have "personally identifiable data" you're fine. When a web service is requested to "delete your data", all they need to delete is your name, email, phone etc. and still keep your activity data.
  - chaosite 5y ago
    That's really not how GDPR works. If it's possible to derive PII from some other data (like activity data), then it's also considered PII under GDPR. And it's definitely possible to derive PII from activity data.
    - ComradePhil 5y ago
      You can fight what is PII in European courts. I'm just saying how things actually work. When a company deletes you as a user under GDPR, it does not delete your purchase history for example, because it needs to link the transaction that happened, what was sold, for how much, from which merchant etc. Just because you ask to delete your data does not mean everything associated with you is deleted. The merchant for example will still need to see that the item was sold to someone for a given price etc. That data was not just "yours".
      - hobofromabroad 5y ago
        That's because there are other legal reasons to keep that kind of data. But that isn't a reason to keep all kinds of data related to a user account. Monetary transactions, claim data for insurances, but not support requests for instance.
syntheweave 5y ago
Alternately, Web3 marks the moment that advertising transforms from an industry into a product feature. Consider that our basic premise of advertising is that we must compete for attention to influence consumers. This premise requires a "captive audience", and must insert the ad into some span of time and space where it is viewed. Because these businesses will also operate on Web3, their data is also ripe for the picking. Not all of it, but enough that users will have products available that evaluate the business and make suggestions about the course of action to take, or even select a purchase given a rough specification. If insufficient data is available, independent reviewers will endeavor to create it. And businesses that resist will become dinosaurs. The influencing function of advertising will then begin to collapse as more people delegate decisions to an AI, adding a privacy barrier. Increasingly, businesses will build to the specs generated by analysis of this request data. There will be no market for selling the data, except that of voluntary user disclosure.
derangedHorse 5y ago
“An undeletable cookie” seems seems like a contrived usage of the word “cookie”. That’s like saying an email login is an “undeletable cookie” because people typically use the same email to login to multiple sites. Just like with an email, an address used for different websites can be changed and ether can be transferred to new addresses (in a way that reduces the chance of linking the old and new accounts) using mixers. With regard to data ownership, I wouldn’t say the requirement of that is linking everything you have to one wallet. Many people typically have a private wallet and a public one. One that’s used to publicly attest ownership of things for bragging rights and may be sued to link some sort of personal identity, and one that could be used solely for defi applications or tied to another social identity completely. Another cool thing about using wallets on the web is that it’s always been a design requirement to always obtain user consent when sharing address info and of course when making transactions as well. At the very least when you’re sharing your information it has to be intentionally done unlike with cookies that I can set on any visiting user’s browser (GDPR regulation doesn’t technically stop me from doing it non-transparently, it just has legal consequences if I do)
qualudeheart 5y ago
Most of crypto is very bad for privacy. Somehow people think all of crypto is private because someone used Bitcoin to buy drugs 7 years ago. I’m not looking forward to a world where everything about everyone is carved into the blockchain forever.
jehehdnbmfmf 5y ago
Further, anyone can put anything into your “wallet” without your consent or approval, and removing something horrible added without your consent can then trigger a smart contract that can do even worse things to your unmodifiable “profile”. Dumpster fire of dumb.
- doopy1 5y ago
  There's no such thing as putting something "into" a wallet.

SubiculumCode 5y ago

But wallets can be swapped all the time, even moment to moment.

mattlondon 5y ago
Each time you are adding more immutable data to the Blockchain, which cannot be undone. Each of your identities - to which all of your digital content is tied - is permanently associated with that ID. So if you just have throw-away wallets, how do you use that with your content? You cannot "own" your content if you keep having to abandon wallets to get a fresh advertising ID. And if you keep several different compartmentalized wallets around, as soon as you move something from one to the other or use a different wallet with the same login, you have permanently and irredeemably linked those identities.
- chrischattin 5y ago
  - xmprt 5y ago
    I've studied blockchains a little bit but I don't understand how you can transfer funds between two wallets that you own without linking them. How would that be possible without either having some kind of zero sum proof (which none of the popular blockchains are using) or allowing an exploit which enables people to mint new tokens from thin air?
    - magicjosh 5y ago
      Tornado.cash is one such project. They are working on making Ethereum behave like cash in terms of privacy/anonymity.
      - misnome 5y ago
        My understanding was that using such services basically blacklists the wallet from transacting with anywhere “reputable”?
        magicjosh 5y ago
        Cash isn't traced at every step into an immutable ledger. Why should cryptocurrency? Relevant ZK podcast episode: https://zeroknowledge.fm/111-2/ https://zeroknowledge.fm/111-2/
    - pmontra 5y ago
      You send the coins to your other wallet, exactly as if you were sending them to me. Of course you pay a fee to the miners.
      - xmprt 5y ago
        Wouldn't you be able to trace that transaction back to the original wallet?
    - chrischattin 5y ago
      Generating a new public key doesn't add data to the blockchain. Only when you sign a transaction. And if you're talking identities, as in moving around websites, there's no way to link your various public addresses (logins) unless you explicitly do so using the private key you used to generate the public address. Or, you could use the same public address. So, it depends on what you want to do. Do you want privacy? Or, do you want the site to know your activity history? The beautiful thing is, you get to choose.
- derangedHorse 5y ago
  Yeah but at that point it’s up to the user. There’s a way to stay anonymous but just like anything relating to privacy, users have to be well informed about their risks and mitigations to be able to manage their data effectively.

EGreg 5y ago

The real problem in Web3 (as EVM does it) is that almost all wallets lets you export your private keys. This leads to a lot of scams that trap people. Got rugpulled? Joined Metamask chat on Telegram? Hi, I’m an admin. Just paste your 12 word phrase into this official-looking site and we’ll help you. There’s even a site that will generate vanity addresses for you! (Don’t use it.) Instead, all this could have been avoided if they took the Keybase approach: keys never leave the device. Just have a keychain of devices which you authorize or repudiate, and use THAT to retrieve your actual accounts from the network and sign things. This would work best with BLS signatures without a trusted dealer. I am not sure it can work with ECDSA or Shnorr signatures if you want to collapse all multisigs down to one signature.

jsemrau 5y ago
Identity and Authentication are related but separate topics. Identification is uniquely associate a user in a system or application while Authentication is proving that this identity is yours.
arbol 5y ago
This can easily be solved with multi Sig wallets
- EGreg 5y ago
  Yes, those are better at least. But only if “this” is your individual use case, not if “this” is the general state of crypto custody in EVM ecosystem. People think they need fancy airgapped computers and hardware wallets when all they need is to copy their 12 word phrase three times on paper, cut into 9 pieces and bury in 9 different places. Better yet —- wallets normally shouldn’t allow people to export keys.
Sargos 5y ago
>Instead, all this could have been avoided if they took the Keybase approach: keys never leave the device. Just have a keychain of devices which you authorize or repudiate, and use THAT to retrieve your actual accounts from the network and sign things. This is what modern smart contract wallets like Argent do. There is no 24 word phrase or long private key to write down, remember or lose. Instead you set up guardians which is a group of people, organizations, and devices you create that allow you to recover your account if you drop your phone in the ocean so there's no practical way you can lose your money or identity. An example guardian setup might be your mom, best friend, lawyer, your hardware wallet and a distributed paper wallet. To recover your wallet you would need 3 out of the 5 to agree. The number of guardians and other details can be as secure and exotic as you desire. The account is also protected by configurable safeguards that mimic your existing bank account. Sending over $500/day? Guardians must approve. Your tokens or NFTs are being sent to a non-white listed address? Guardians must approve. The crypto ecosystem is still in the early phases of being built but these problems and ideas have already been discussed and debated for years and the foundational infrastructure that people will end up using in the real world is being built and deployed today after years of hard work. Using crypto today is a lot like using the internet in the early nineties: it was hard, easy to break, and you generally had to be good at cutting your teeth on new and quickly evolving tech. Nowadays you mostly just forget you're using it.

chrischattin 5y ago

You can generate a new public key at any time.

shadowgovt 5y ago
Wouldn't doing so detach past activity I do want aggregated? How is a site I'm interacting with supposed to know it can use my previously-configured settings if I'm showing up with a new public key every time I authenticate?
- jdavis703 5y ago
  I read this as essentially a single origin supercookie. So each origin (web site) has a unique public key for you, but it’s immutable.
- k__ 5y ago
  So, you want privacy but without privacy?
  - shadowgovt 5y ago
    Yes. I get that in the current ecosystem via doing business with sites I trust, and ceasing to do so when I cease to trust them. It's not impregnable (sites get hacked, companies get sold), but it's preferable to an alternative where I must either stay one-time-padded continuously or have my activity recorded in a global public ledger.
    - sanderjd 5y ago
      You could use a public blockchain key to log in to a site you trust which stores all of its data somewhere private and have this same functionality. It is only transactions you write to a public blockchain that are public. The act of authenticating using a key stored there does not write anything down.
  - 8note 5y ago
    Privacy as in having control over who gets what information, and being able to change who and what over time

5350-uiop-1130 5y ago

I think the underlying technologies behind web3, i.e blockchain cannot really evolve beyond ponzinomic pump and dump schemes without some kind of legitimate commercial purpose, maybe that's some kind of incentivised advertising. People always say the likes of Google and FB treat us as a product, so perhaps we can at least get some kind of magic bean tokens as a reward :D

hobs 5y ago
It's been tried and tried and tried. Generally when they want to increase profits the same outcome - they either flame out of VC money or start selling your data. ~1998 Beenz.com launched https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beenz.com https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beenz.com
- 5350-uiop-1130 5y ago
  ahh that brings back memories. i had an account.

Tenoke 5y ago

>In web3, your wallet ID (used for purchases and proposed for logins too) is an undeletable cookie that tracks you both online and off, and one that anyone can retrieve. Purchases sure on most chains (though not on e.g. Secret) but the chain isn't recording your logins via your address in most cases. You are just showing to the site that you have the key without making any transactions. So no, advertisers won't have much extra data on your site visiting habits that they don't have now.

oblio 5y ago
The thing is, can't they "triangulate" who you are by your transactions? In the same way tracking your location for sure can determine who you are. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/12/10/business/location-data-privacy-apps.html https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/12/10/business/loca... Based on just a few transactions they can figure out that you're a middle aged guy, living in Nowhereville, Iowa, that's into samba, anime and drives a Toyota Corolla, etc. and then from that it's not hard to actually figure out who that person is.
- Tenoke 5y ago
  I don't see a particular reason to conduct every transaction on-chain, or at least on a public L1. At any rate, I was mostly replying about your login data being public which isn't true.
  - oblio 5y ago
    Then how will we conduct our transactions? Right now I use my country's currency, do you want me to go to a mix of currencies like I'm playing some sort of Android free to play game? That's just adding complexity to my life for no obvious reason.
    - nefitty 5y ago
      Crypto is sort of like the increasing plethora of streaming services, except crypto projects seem to reproduce at a much higher rate and further deprioritize UX. It's not every day, if ever, that I'm dealing with fiat currency conversion. In crypto, it's another one of those seemingly unnecessary hassles that is tolerated as a matter of course.

yoavm 5y ago

I wonder how all this Web3 thing works with GDPR, especially with part 17 - "Right to erasure". Seems like if you go down the blockchain route to store any user data, you're pretty much non-GDPR compliant from day 1. I have a feeling the judge will not like the "it's a feature, not a bug" argument...

ComradePhil 5y ago
As long as the blockchain doesn't have "personally identifiable data" you're fine. When a web service is requested to "delete your data", all they need to delete is your name, email, phone etc. and still keep your activity data.
- chaosite 5y ago
  That's really not how GDPR works. If it's possible to derive PII from some other data (like activity data), then it's also considered PII under GDPR. And it's definitely possible to derive PII from activity data.
  - ComradePhil 5y ago
    You can fight what is PII in European courts. I'm just saying how things actually work. When a company deletes you as a user under GDPR, it does not delete your purchase history for example, because it needs to link the transaction that happened, what was sold, for how much, from which merchant etc. Just because you ask to delete your data does not mean everything associated with you is deleted. The merchant for example will still need to see that the item was sold to someone for a given price etc. That data was not just "yours".
    - hobofromabroad 5y ago
      That's because there are other legal reasons to keep that kind of data. But that isn't a reason to keep all kinds of data related to a user account. Monetary transactions, claim data for insurances, but not support requests for instance.

syntheweave 5y ago

Alternately, Web3 marks the moment that advertising transforms from an industry into a product feature. Consider that our basic premise of advertising is that we must compete for attention to influence consumers. This premise requires a "captive audience", and must insert the ad into some span of time and space where it is viewed. Because these businesses will also operate on Web3, their data is also ripe for the picking. Not all of it, but enough that users will have products available that evaluate the business and make suggestions about the course of action to take, or even select a purchase given a rough specification. If insufficient data is available, independent reviewers will endeavor to create it. And businesses that resist will become dinosaurs. The influencing function of advertising will then begin to collapse as more people delegate decisions to an AI, adding a privacy barrier. Increasingly, businesses will build to the specs generated by analysis of this request data. There will be no market for selling the data, except that of voluntary user disclosure.

derangedHorse 5y ago

“An undeletable cookie” seems seems like a contrived usage of the word “cookie”. That’s like saying an email login is an “undeletable cookie” because people typically use the same email to login to multiple sites. Just like with an email, an address used for different websites can be changed and ether can be transferred to new addresses (in a way that reduces the chance of linking the old and new accounts) using mixers. With regard to data ownership, I wouldn’t say the requirement of that is linking everything you have to one wallet. Many people typically have a private wallet and a public one. One that’s used to publicly attest ownership of things for bragging rights and may be sued to link some sort of personal identity, and one that could be used solely for defi applications or tied to another social identity completely. Another cool thing about using wallets on the web is that it’s always been a design requirement to always obtain user consent when sharing address info and of course when making transactions as well. At the very least when you’re sharing your information it has to be intentionally done unlike with cookies that I can set on any visiting user’s browser (GDPR regulation doesn’t technically stop me from doing it non-transparently, it just has legal consequences if I do)

qualudeheart 5y ago

Most of crypto is very bad for privacy. Somehow people think all of crypto is private because someone used Bitcoin to buy drugs 7 years ago. I’m not looking forward to a world where everything about everyone is carved into the blockchain forever.

jehehdnbmfmf 5y ago

Further, anyone can put anything into your “wallet” without your consent or approval, and removing something horrible added without your consent can then trigger a smart contract that can do even worse things to your unmodifiable “profile”. Dumpster fire of dumb.

doopy1 5y ago
There's no such thing as putting something "into" a wallet.