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The Future of Online Identity Is Decentralized

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Re: The Future of Online Identity Is Decentralized

#121

Post by asciident »

maccard wrote: post #79
kory wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All central authorities are built on trust, fear, or complacency. Americans are complacent with the credit card system and trust it for the most part. The Experian breach has shown that breaches of trust are easily overlooked in favor of complacency, at least to a point. Considering how Americans view other Americans (I hear "stupid" thrown around a lot), I strongly doubt that a decentralized authority would ever gai…

> The Experian breach has shown that breaches of trust are easily overlooked in favor of complacency, at least to a point. I disagree that it matters for trust in CC's. It may have damaged experians reputation, but people still trust amex/MasterCard/visa and their banks, despite Experian being useless. The fact that Experian is required to access those systems is unfortunate, but most people don't deal with Experian…

Considering that the data breach was actually at a completely different company than the one this thread named leads me to believe that the reputation damage is not as significant as you suggest.

Re: The Future of Online Identity Is Decentralized

#122

Post by user5994461 »

Trumpi wrote: post #120

We literally had this with OpenID. If I remember correctly, it pre-dated Facebook and the flurry of "Login with XXX" type authentications. But the corporations like their walled gardens too much and OpenID fell out of favor.

OpenID was replaced by OpenID Connect and SAML.

They mostly operate in federations, which is neither centralized nor decentralized.

Re: The Future of Online Identity Is Decentralized

#123

Post by kory »

ryukafalz wrote: post #106
kory wrote: post #8

If anything, my bet is the future of identity is more centralized. Decentralized solutions, as I've read about them in their current form, require a significant amount of technical knowledge to understand. That is, to understand both what they are and, more importantly, their benefits ("why does this specific solution matter to me?"). Past that, the user experience is extremely poor in comparison to clicking "log in…

I dunno, I think the UX for decentralized identity could be made pretty good. The GNUnet project has one that runs locally but exposes itself with an OIDC interface: https://reclaim.gnunet.org/ It's still pretty early, but imagine a more polished version of that with a user-friendly installer. If you had the software installed and running, it'd behave pretty similarly to e.g. Google's OIDC provider. Linux distros cou…

That's so so many steps and requires knowledge of so many things. It has the big two fundamental problems, and a major third one:

* Its value prop is poorly explained. As an engineer with a CS degree, I still barely understand what it's talking about (what's an "identity attribute"??) without some digging.

* Even if the value prop was well-explained, it's still very high friction compared to "Sign in with ". Why would a user download an installer and deal with managing all of their accounts? There's a secure, anonymous, easy, centralized option that does it all for you (Sign in with Apple). That service does it so well that you only have to click a button to log in or sign up. Nothing else required. That isn't achievable without a central authority managing everything for you.

* (this is the big one) Your local machine is a major point of failure. If you lose your local machine and haven't backed up your accounts, you just lose access, right? The only solution is either set up a server with periodic backup (too much friction for regular users) or a centralized authority that stores them for you, which defeats the purpose of all of this.

This project, to me, falls into the "cool technical stuff category". It's obviously built for "geeks" (lack of a better term) and not for people. That's why centralized tech co's will probably always do this better than open source. They are customer focused just as much as technology focused.

Unmonetized open source projects tend to focus more on technology than user experience. That's why you see regular people using monetized software and developers using open source to build monetized software.

Re: The Future of Online Identity Is Decentralized

#124

Post by closeparen »

coldtea wrote: post #118
narag wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 num…

> 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…

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.

Re: The Future of Online Identity Is Decentralized

#125

Post by Barrin92 »

user5994461 wrote: post #119
Barrin92 wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>All the use cases for digital identity are about enforcement and liability, and there are almost none that anyone would volunteer for. Everything from a LinkedIn or Facebook account to your personal artist homepage with your CV on it establishes identity. People obviously disclose identity voluntarily, because identity is the primary means by which strangers establish trust. If your identity is not transparent to me…

Linkedin/Facebook/Email login establish that it is the same "person" coming back. They don't guarantee the identity of the person as in official name or address or date of birth.

is this a distinction without a difference? Networks like LinkedIn exist for the purpose of building real social capital and that's how they're used by 99% of their users. I don't see the incentive for someone to use a fake persona (other than scamming).

All those private firms are in many ways identity providers just as real and official as governmental ones.

Re: The Future of Online Identity Is Decentralized

#126

Post by pmoriarty »

chrisco255 wrote: post #116
pmoriarty wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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 ther…

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 t…

"It's not meant to be purely democratic. The founders were students of history and recognized the inherent instability of pure democracies."

Many of the founders were also elitists who didn't want anyone but landowning white men to run the country. They were wary of "mob rule" (ie. direct democracy), and preferred to have the elites rule. The jury's still out on whether they were right or whether direct democracy is actually better. Considering how much power and wealth is being concentrated in the hands of a tiny minority in the US, I'm siding with having more direct democracy, not less.

"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."

The existence of slavery in the US wasn't just about 1776.. it lasted until 1865. The US was one of the last countries to end slavery.

"All of human history is filled with bloodshed, tyranny, endless wars, conquering, slavery, piracy, vandalism, raiding parties, human sacrifice, religious battles and authoritarianism..."

"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."

The point of my post wasn't to say there weren't reasons (some might say excuses) for the US to behave the way it did (extreme, widespread racism against minorities is one such reason and excuse), nor to deny that some countries were just as bad or even worse, but to recognize that massive, serious oppression did in fact happen in the US, despite it being some sort of a democracy.

Oppression in the US is still happening, is likely to continue, and will probably be greatly enabled by the easy availability of identifying information on the people within and without its borders.

Re: The Future of Online Identity Is Decentralized

#127

Post by mirimir »

I've been advocating online ~anonymity for many years, and exploring relevant methods. But I also can't ignore the downsides, particularly the role of authentication.

I'll have more to say here. But for now, I'll just invite any who are interested in further discussion to a Podaero group: https://podaero.com/dashboard with invite code "44e5576d".

Re: The Future of Online Identity Is Decentralized

#130

Post by ChrisMarshallNY »

I hardly ever use any OAuth logins. I use my GH login in a couple of places, but I usually create an email/site-specific ID. 1Password is a nice tool.

That said, the last couple of years, I have gone to great lengths to create a "digital personal brand," which is deliberately designed to help people find me, and tie all of my digital artifacts together.

I think that OAuth logins actually work against that. I want to leave "pointers" all over the place, that point to each other in a public manner. OAuth logins "bury" these pointers, so only "gatekeepers" can see the information.

It definitely means that I have to be a lot more careful, these days, than I used to be, in choosing what I write or expose online, but I don't feel it's too difficult. I like to think that I live a lifestyle that has very little to hide.

I was reading about that Fox writer that just committed career seppuku. I think that is a visceral example, showing that we can't trust the old cloak of anonymity to hide our trail, so it might not be a bad idea to, as Twain said, "live that when we come to die, even the undertaker will be sorry."

It's part of a strategy that seems to be working.

Works for me. YMMV

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