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Comment by lamontcg

4 years ago

Yeah I think it is mostly businesses that think this is a huge problem to solve to have identities matched across everything seamlessly.

Mostly what I care about is logins and payments which are addressed by password managers and form filling for credit cards. I just want a friction free experience for setting up an account, logging back into it, and maybe purchasing something.

And ideally I'd like to self-host, maybe with a service that looked like a NAS appliance hanging off a guest network on my router with a forwarded port through the firewall and some method for tracking my IP address (dyndns or similarish).

And ideally payments happen by a handshake between the service I run, the processor and the merchant in a way that my actual credit card details are never used. And for recurring payments I have the ability to just switch them off. Bringing all the control back to me and not leaking out reusable PII everywhere.

Of course corporations would aggressively hate that since it would destroy their business models of recurring payments for services the user is no longer using and the requirement of calling up the business and having to convince some phone operator that you really want to cancel.

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lamontcg

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mattlondon  4 years ago

> Yeah I think it is mostly businesses that think this is a huge problem to solve to have identities matched across everything seamlessly.

Your comment just gave me a thought - just imagine the online advertisers using this for tracking purposes!

At the risk of spreading FUD, it would not surprise me to learn that perhaps this web3 thing is being fuelled/funded by the existing crop of online advertising networks or their close associates? (or at the very least they are watching this situation develop with an incredibly close level of detail)

Who needs cookies if you have a 100% reliable & long-lived (potentially immortal?) ID that the user takes with them everywhere they go online (and is the same on every site they visit) and for every purchase they make (using that wallet) online and offline?

This would be advertising networks' absolute dream situation if it becomes widespread - users voluntarily creating their own unique tracking fingerprint and using it on all the sites they visit, as well as helpfully logging all of their purchases they make with that ID on a public ledger that anyone can mine the data from.

It really does not get much better for the online advertising industry than that.

If you want a cynical take on web3 and are looking for your next billion dollar startup idea, then web3 ad tracking & targeting might be your best bet :)

  • ladyattis  3 years ago

    It's much like the Shadowrun SIN system. Anyone who was SIN-less basically didn't exist in the Shadowrun world. It meant you couldn't get housing, reliable work, food, or medicine. Basically, you were a nobody and everyone made sure you knew it. Similarly, mailing addresses have had similar effects in society and now not having a permanent digital presence will become another barrier to block people who found themselves not able to setup such a presence in the past or can't even afford to get online with a cheap phone. All because the corps demand a means to uniformly know who you are beyond your name.

  • rchaud  4 years ago

    > At the risk of spreading FUD, it would not surprise me to learn that perhaps this web3 thing is being fuelled/funded by the existing crop of online advertising networks or their close associates?

    Hardly FUD, of course these companies are watching. They have more cash than they know what to do with. They will acquire anything that even remotely takes off (even by the low standards of crypto).

    Google acquired their way into all of their major businesses. None of the following were built by them:

    - Google Ads (DoubleClick, acquired 2005)

    - Google Analytics (Urchin, 2004)

    - Youtube (acquired 2005)

    - Android (also 2005)

    The dates are off the top of my head, so I could be off by a year or two.

    • aspenmayer  4 years ago

      I seem to remember Google having native ads prior to the DoubleClick acquisition, but that was many years ago. But I agree with your point that they bought their competition and then bought entire business models.