Re:Cutting the Gordian Knot of Web Identity
by dredmorbius on Tuesday September 06, 2011 @01:24PM
(#2966353)
I'll take this one further level meta: why the hell does any site need to know "who" I am, period?
I know the obvious answer: for the advertising and marketing leverage. I'll do my own hand-wave here and say that this is specious, that there's a sufficiently rich predictive dataset based on other extant characteristics (browser type, IP location, on-site behavior) to do an adequate job of targeting ads to my instance of AdBlock+.
A large part of the reason I don't subscribe to sites such as The New York Times is ... I feel really uncomfortable having my list of reading preferences on the news site available. That's discoverable in all sorts of ways (legal or otherwise), and I have to trust in the Times, its staff, temps, contractors, third-party business relationships, vendors, ISPs, systems disposal methods, etc., etc.... Multiplied by every site on which "I" have an account. Um. Thanks but no.
There's the issue of payment. Bitcoin is only the latest iteration of a digital cash. Many banks now offer one-time payment tokens. There's no technical reason (though arguable usability reasons) for me to have to provide a shared secret (my account number and verification code) with every online (or offline) financial transaction. This system is proving increasingly fragile, and both online and offline systems have and will be compromised. Cash risks only the current value held. Credit/debit risks a future stream of compromised payments.
I'm moderately fine with the old-school world of pseudonymous passwords, especially with fallbacks of cypherpunks/cypherpunks, or cowbodyneil/cowboyneil (or BugMeNot) on sites. If nothing else, I'm sending a very clear signal that I don't want my data mined and I don't trust YOUR systems for guarding against this so I'm invoking my own.
There's still the closing problem of delivery. This can be managed by various means, including selective disclosure to the shipper only.
In the real world, we engage in complex transactions based on very limited identity and information disclosure. The person who makes my pencil (or ThinkPad) has no idea who I am or where I live, let alone much information about the other entities responsible for the production of the product.
The technologists here know that building a modular system with limited information disclosure based on what's needed to accomplish a given transaction, presented at the interface between operations, leads to a simpler, more robust, and ultimately better system. Why are we trying to design an online commerce system that's at such odds to these principles (see "ads/marketing comments above)?
I know the obvious answer: for the advertising and marketing leverage. I'll do my own hand-wave here and say that this is specious, that there's a sufficiently rich predictive dataset based on other extant characteristics (browser type, IP location, on-site behavior) to do an adequate job of targeting ads to my instance of AdBlock+.
A large part of the reason I don't subscribe to sites such as The New York Times is ... I feel really uncomfortable having my list of reading preferences on the news site available. That's discoverable in all sorts of ways (legal or otherwise), and I have to trust in the Times, its staff, temps, contractors, third-party business relationships, vendors, ISPs, systems disposal methods, etc., etc.... Multiplied by every site on which "I" have an account. Um. Thanks but no.
There's the issue of payment. Bitcoin is only the latest iteration of a digital cash. Many banks now offer one-time payment tokens. There's no technical reason (though arguable usability reasons) for me to have to provide a shared secret (my account number and verification code) with every online (or offline) financial transaction. This system is proving increasingly fragile, and both online and offline systems have and will be compromised. Cash risks only the current value held. Credit/debit risks a future stream of compromised payments.
I'm moderately fine with the old-school world of pseudonymous passwords, especially with fallbacks of cypherpunks/cypherpunks, or cowbodyneil/cowboyneil (or BugMeNot) on sites. If nothing else, I'm sending a very clear signal that I don't want my data mined and I don't trust YOUR systems for guarding against this so I'm invoking my own.
There's still the closing problem of delivery. This can be managed by various means, including selective disclosure to the shipper only.
In the real world, we engage in complex transactions based on very limited identity and information disclosure. The person who makes my pencil (or ThinkPad) has no idea who I am or where I live, let alone much information about the other entities responsible for the production of the product.
The technologists here know that building a modular system with limited information disclosure based on what's needed to accomplish a given transaction, presented at the interface between operations, leads to a simpler, more robust, and ultimately better system. Why are we trying to design an online commerce system that's at such odds to these principles (see "ads/marketing comments above)?