Privacy is an interesting topic not many people have addressed yet. If nostr adds a social graph to everything (product reviews, maps, employment, whatever), anyone can mine our data instead of just the companies that host it. See my blog post below for more hallucinations.
Discussion
maybe the account creation process for nostr can help here, not everyone is going to want to go back to being anonymous online, but not every post will have to be associated with one account, you can have multiple accounts for various groups that don’t allow, or will at least slow down, the profile merchants
Threw this out there a while back - 'Toastr - Burner ID - Easy UX'
ephemeral is so much more elegant than burner, lol
Toastr is a great name
This is a great comment, thanks
I think the idea of one physical person one identity is doomed, only the tyrannical still want this. Have a dozen nyms at any time all for different interests or facets of your identity. Kill them and create new ones regularly. Use AI to run a couple that intentionally poison the well for data scrapers. Never use your government ID anywhere but with the government.
Dating scraping won't go away unless we make it useless. Data wants to be free and someone will always try to use free data against you.
This is one of the issues that makes web of trust such a challenging problem to solve.
Here’s a crazy idea: instead of a signature that proves Alice made some statement (could be a rating or whatever), have some system that utilizes a signature that proves [some user on this list of users] made the statement. Alice would be on the list but her privacy would be protected to some extent.
I presume there’s a way to do this cryptographically although I’ve not investigated how exactly to do it. ZKPs perhaps.
Example: the list could be a list of people who are part of the Nixon Administration. The statement could be one made by Deep Throat (Mark Felt) regarding Watergate. The digital signature would prove that someone in the administration made the statement, thereby removing the need for the world to trust the reporter (Carl Bernstein).
Or the list could be users who fit some demographic, and the statement could be a rating of some particular product marketed to that demographic, so Alice could provide useful info (possibly in exchange for some sats) while protecting her privacy (not perfectly, but pretty well).
There are ways a bad actor might try to abuse this which would be worthy of consideration. Not sure how significant that would be.
This is actually one of my motivations for working on decentralized list curation. Using the example above with the list of people from the Nixon administration, imagine that the list has these two characteristics:
- the items on the list are not necessarily made public, adding greater privacy protection to the people on the list
- the list is curated by your web of trust, so you trust the list to be accurate despite the fact that you don’t know who’s on the list.
That would be a powerful thing, would it not?