> the dystopian parts come with the 75-year old widow with dementia or college student aka slacker has to adhere to similar standards to be basically functional.. there needs to be some middle ground, say some
Did I read this wrong? It sounded like you were insinuating that these use cases shouldn't required strong identity assurance. If that is not what you meant, I apologize for reading the statement incorrectly. If identity credentials are provided at low or no cost to prevent marginalization or disenfranchisement, I see no issue. Those credentials are then leveraged for all other systems that require identity proofing. That widow will need to prove who they are for social security benefits, medicare, or to receive an estate from a deceased partner (including removing them from their home's deed if held together, or accepting retirement accounts as a beneficiary). That college student will need to prove who they are for government funding aid, student loans, and to enroll. Disenfranchisement is very real, but so is identity fraud.
People who want strong privacy and governance around identity aren't wrong, they are simply solving at the wrong OSI layer by saying the technical implementation of identity systems shouldn't be good. Fix tech problems with tech, fix people problems with people.
>Fix tech problems with tech, fix people problems with people.
If you've been in the industry for any significant amount of time (over a decade), you'd know that the way things work out is
A) Solve all problems (including people problems) with tech.
B) Create new problems as a result.
C) Goto A
D) As loopcount of A-C increases, the familiarity with how to solve people problems successfully and fully with people starts to wane.
E) Crappy people problem solving systems technically solved require and equip newer generations with survival skills to navigate the flawed technical solution, but not with the flexibility or experience to thrive in an environment without said systems or imagine an alternative process.
F) The world begins to look more and more insane and delocalized over time to new entrants, who now have to cope with the fact that biology equipped us to handle local state management, but increasingly, remote state management is becoming a required survival skill.
G) Human beings do not have network cards integrated into their biology. (Thank god.)
H) Duct taping on the technical solution to G) just makes the original problem we're trying to solve even harder.
I) Somewhere in here is a Paxos joke.
I'll even offer the example of blockchains and cryptocurrencies as an example of this flow.
Our financial system pre-2000's was heavily "Oh, this is a people problem", with heavy employment of "develop a human relationship to get things done." Post 00's, with things like AML/KYC, our institutions are skewing such that the digital metadata (and not the relationship between persons) is the kernel for getting things. This makes identity fraud easier, because now instead of your bank people getting to know everybody, it's "computer says yes/no". Enter cryptocurrencies (the penultimate technical solution, no human involved, just shluffing bits between private keys). Nobody knows anyone anymore. Nobody wants to. The reversal and fatfinger problem still exists and is even worse over those mediums. Now we also have new problems from everyone wanting to take all this financial activity and make it public. Making the original ID/Trust problem even worse.
Now everyone is required to understand network theory and distributed systems to be able to hew out a local truth state, but maximally ill equipped to do the actual hewing, because the skills that got you that truth state in the first place were social, which we've done everything possible to technically engineer away.
this post is such a treasure -- and manages to convey the actual feeling of frustration at seeing things simple made impossible. Another reason this post is a treasure is that it does not have to go way down the dark rabbit hole of .. oh nevermind that! definitely agree with this overview in reality of human efforts
Did I read this wrong? It sounded like you were insinuating that these use cases shouldn't required strong identity assurance. If that is not what you meant, I apologize for reading the statement incorrectly. If identity credentials are provided at low or no cost to prevent marginalization or disenfranchisement, I see no issue. Those credentials are then leveraged for all other systems that require identity proofing. That widow will need to prove who they are for social security benefits, medicare, or to receive an estate from a deceased partner (including removing them from their home's deed if held together, or accepting retirement accounts as a beneficiary). That college student will need to prove who they are for government funding aid, student loans, and to enroll. Disenfranchisement is very real, but so is identity fraud.
People who want strong privacy and governance around identity aren't wrong, they are simply solving at the wrong OSI layer by saying the technical implementation of identity systems shouldn't be good. Fix tech problems with tech, fix people problems with people.