While it's great there are efforts here, it looks like it's being over-architected, over-engineered, such that people don't own it. This leads to uneasy privacy concerns and dystopian feels. I'm not sure what the solution is, and at least this is an attempt, so at least there is that.
Very interesting, it's always intriguing to see how much of a cat and mouse game this privacy stuff is. I'm always thinking that this needs an overhaul and slightly different approach altogether, sadly I can't produce any viable solutions.
With this huge and complex kind of issues I don't think we have to find one solution but rather point in the right direction, but I'm not even sure we're doing that.
It sounds wonderful, but I have just so many questions. No doubt they don't want to tell us how it actually works, but without knowing that, there's no way I'll trust them.
It's very much a chicken and egg. They say that privacy is what's driving the design, but without knowing how it works I have no way to verify that it really is what they claim.
If anything, the approach has prioritized privacy to such a degree that it probably won't be very helpful. The design seems to require a very high rate of adoption to be useful, and that probably isn't going to happen unless it is opt out, which seems unlikely to be the case.
I'm afraid someone has to tell the author that what is already possible is worse than the concerns raised here.
This technology is actually an effort to not use the available methods that would ignore privacy.
I've started to despair a bit more about both technological and political solutions. I'm trying to adjust to the idea that nothing that happens online is private, and real privacy requires something more like tradecraft than mass adoption of encryption technologies.
I'm beginning to feel as if after I'd put my Android phone though a metal shredder that the individual remaining atoms will somehow still have my ID on them à la QM's conservation of information.
It's been clear to me for quite some while that the whole notion of trying to achieve privacy on the internet is broken - the paradigm we're now using (and have always been using) to achieve privacy is wrong. As no matter what steps we take - such as making browsers more private and less fingerprint prone to, say, sandboxing apps etc., etc. - someone sooner or later will always find ways around our best defenses. As it stands, it's an ongoing incremental battle over privacy that we citizens can never have any long-term certainty about.
Somehow our ID and personal data have to be separated from the hardware, software, means of transmission and IP addresses, etc. in ways that any chance of ever linking them are not just difficult but are also logically impossible. It's only then that we'd be in a situation where no matter the amount of hacking the 'system' would ever reveal or encroach upon users' privacy.
This wallpaper example may still be somewhat of a stretch to implement in practice but chances are it won't be so in the future; its existence only goes to illustrate my point.
If anyone ever manages to solve the problem in an easy implementable way then he/she will either be deemed a hero genius or a pariah. Which of these views one has will depend on which side of the political fence one's sitting.
It might be worth sharing the project with some privacy-oriented forums to get some feedback and ideas on what a good privacy model would look like for it. Good luck! :)
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