We already have a society that identifies people when doing business. The burden of proof is on an anonymity advocate to demonstrate why that is harmful and should be changed. I may mot have convinced you that having strong identity enables strong security and reduces spam (that
is my argument). But it’s also not my problem if you aren’t aware of the nuances surrounding how security, privacy and anonymity work. You haven’t made any compelling argument as to why we don't need identity in cyberspace beyond a naive axiomatic assertion that “businesses don’t need them so they shouldn’t collect them” and some FUD level fear that strong identity is an Orwellian technology hell bent on ruining your life. There is so much nuance I don't feel like we’re doing the topic justice. There is a huge spectrum between “ad tech tracking everything you do” and “everyone looks like a spam bot”. The mindshare is heavily skewed toward spam bot because ad tech is abusive. You can have strong identity and privacy without invoking anonymity. You can be anonymous and still fall victim to fishing attempts and scams. Anonymity is not synonymous with security or privacy. Security means you know who you’re communicating with online so you can establish trust. Privacy means you don't need to share invasive personal details in the regular course of existing in society. Anonymity means nobody knows who you are. I want a society where my digital communication with other people is authenticated and a baseline of trust is established. Do you use a secure messenger app that has E2E encryption? Guess what, that depends on strong identity. You are
not anonymous but you are private. I would take a secure and private society every time over an anonymous one that offers weak, if any, guarantees of security and/or privacy.
I work on a product that doesn't collect any PII. We made the decision very early on not to collect any information we don’t need because that’s literally not our business. I am deeply aware of the landscape on these topics. However, as a society we cannot run in a “normal meatspace anonymous cyberspace” mode. We need to bridge civil identity in a secure and private (those are fundamental human rights) way into the online era. That is the core focus of the product I’ve been working on. In reality people have identities whether they use them offline or online. The goal is to protect those identities so they cannot be abused, not remove them altogether.