Re:Quora User Data Compromised
by canadaduane on Tuesday December 04, 2018 @10:13AM
(#18600067)
I'm very excited about Sovrin and other Self-Sovereign Identity solutions. As one of the engineers at Mainframe (we're building decentralized, unstoppable apps that keep data and relationships in control of the user) I think what you're talking about is one of the top two value-adds for decentralization for western societies.
Brave and BAT are attempting the same thing from a slightly different direction than we are--they are attempting to bring privacy to partially-decentralized apps; however, I don't think this will ultimately succeed--privacy is broken by the weakest link. As soon as you allow some connection to some server somewhere that's exfiltrating your interests, you now have advertisers lining up to buy that data and exfiltrate more. As far as I understand the "hybrid decentralized app" model, where DNS and web2.0 are allowed, you permit these weak links to exist.
A better solution to this is incorporating https://universallogin.io/ imo.
1. enable donations / tips / subscriptions to sites using a browser-native crypto wallet
2. use ZKP anonymity
This enables a publisher / subscriber business model of 'dollars without data'. Which should really be the Minimum Viable Product for a publisher.
PII data for marketing is the icing on the cake for publishers, but the bar is high (and getting higher) around sharing that, and many of us want to support sites, but don't want to go through N+1 payment gateways and digital identity forms just to read some content.
From this perspective I see Brave and BAT as enabling a very old model: I give you a quarter, you give me your newspaper. End of story.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18595792