rbs.io
5 votes c/freepost Posted by scribe — 5 votes, 9 commentsSource

What if you just want to be anonymous? What if you don’t want ANY digital representation of your identity? I do think that owning your identity, rather than a government or business giving you an ID card / Number is better though.

Small problem: counterfeit and identity theft.

Do you think it might help if you could have multiple identities - or multiple facets? Your devices could then present different faces in different contexts and it should be possible (indeed it is possible) to ensure that they cannot be linked together by anyone else except you.

True anonymity is really difficult to achieve. It implies that the server processing your requests cannot make any useful assumption about where the request originated from. Usually there is always a path that can be tracked back to the origin; most efforts seem focused on how to make this backtracking as hard as possible such that it become inconvenient to pursue even if you have the resources of a government. Having said that, I think a simple, handy way for managing multiple identities would definitely help.

Yeah, interesting question - I have this with Facebook at the moment, in terms of their shadow profiles: If I have a named account, then I can stop them using my data. But my data (eg phone number and contacts) exists even without being attached to my name, so it is “not quite pseudonymous”. But lack of data is something else. How can I say “don’t use this phone number at all” if I am unable to prove I own that phone number? And (as per GDPR) they would still need to store it in order to know not to use it.

Bah.

It’s a long article, and I’ve only skimmed it, but it looks like just another article saying that managing information locally is better than bigcorps’ centralized servers.

I especially appreciated the view of our mobile devices as the “fundamental representation of our identity” and about the “decentralized identity projects just growing out of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C)”.

I’ve re-read it, as I thought similar and as I’m trying to run more of my own services on raspberry pi’s at home. But it focuses on something subtly different, which is the idea of our data being portable via handheld devices, rather than decentralised but still “static” servers.

I’ve experimented with such an approach before, where I tried to run status.net on a laptop rather than a server. It highlights the difference between assuming that a service is “always on” vs “available at the request of a user”, and so a portable device paradigm implies that data is tethered to the carrying individual, not the device itself.

Not thought about it much further yet, though :)

This sounds almost exactly like one of the projects that vaeringjar is working on. It’s called “SSID”.