Data ownership and layer fungibility

Recently got into the topic of data ownership on a conversation with Carey Lening which helped catalyze a few ideas I’ve been kicking around for a while.

In short, data ownership requires layer fungibility.

I’ll elaborate below.

How distributed[C] handles identity

As we had mentioned on Designing for Personas, we want people to feel comfortable creating multiple pseudonymous identities on distributed[C].

How do we manage identity, then?

Small world

We do not intend to enforce any sort of identity verification or unique identities in distributed[C]. We do not think encouraging people to doxx themselves is a good idea.

This goes beyond concerns about privacy, though. We believe that having multiple personas, which you can use depending on the context you are in, is healthy.

This raises concerns regarding disinformation. If the platform is uncensorable, and we do not plan to enforce identity, how will this not become a cesspool of fake news?

Identity, Privacy, and the Edge

Introduction

My goals for this talk are to:

• Give a small taxonomy going into categories and labels that I think are useful when talking about identity;
• Walk you through what a layered conceptual model for identity could be like;
• Talk about the privacy implications for how we go about implementing things;
• Hopefully convince you that the closer to the edge we process things, the better it is for the user, but that the edge does not guarantee privacy (no matter what the Blue Behemoth whose name starts with an F would like people to believe).

Slides at Speakerdeck.