This reply seems to have missed the point of its parent and just picked up on the word fingerprint in a different context.

I like the parent's overall point, but I suspect its business model is not viable.

Any service that helps the user against the publisher's interests will need to be funded through charging the consumer. Not easy these days.

Why assume it is against publishers' interests for people to control how they expose their own identity? Advertisers, sure, but publishers? I see privacy as being more orthogonal to their interests than directly against them.

Nevertheless, you're probably right about the business model. I was piggybacking on the idealism of the article we're commenting on. It's fun to just discuss possible futures without worrying about viability once in a while.

Agreed. I ought not to have assumed the status quo must prevail. Indeed, hopefully a viable solution to the Publisher's Dilemma will be found.

> This reply seems to have missed the point of its parent and just picked up on the word fingerprint in a different context.

I am aware that "fingerprint" has different meanings, but the grandparent explicitly talked of biometric authentication (e.g. physical fingerprints) in his last sentence:

> I would prefer this to any of biometric authentication schemes that have been peddled as "passwordless."

This is what I was referring to.

tboyd47 is talking about browser/device fingerprinting, not physical fingerprints. Such fingerprints are usually attached to device rather than the specific account, but if we assume that a user needs a secure password/login to access the device, it might be a workable proxy.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Device_fingerprint [2]: https://panopticlick.eff.org/