For example, when I buy something from a webshop, why does that webshop need my personal information? Why can't I give it a token, which it can then use to send my package, because only the postal system knows the address coupled to the token, etc.
And we should also ban user tracking for advertising purposes, obviously.
> You’ll never punish a North Korean hacker
You don't need to, you can fine the whole country.
How often do we hear "It's the cost of doing business"?
theoretically, yes
You can register to reroute address A to address B, give out the address A to e-shops and then the post will deliver the packages to address B, which stays private. The catch is that address A needs to also be yours, it cannot be something arbitrary.
At least AFAIK.
The simple version: Alibaba/Express and Amazon buys or kills most online competition etc, the remaining behemoths split the different markets and manage all the delivery. Only them know your personal info and every smaller shops need to go through them. Kinda the same way most of the world need to get with Apple/Google for things happening on mobile phone.
That situation could be completed in 5 years I wouldn't be surprised.
The crazy alternative: we all cooperate to have a common protocol to handle personal info, banks and shipment companies all agree to have standardized public APIs that are robust enough to last and be used more than six months. I don't think my grand children would see that happen.
This is the primary economic model of the internet, unfortunately, and thus the reason for all the data collection you described.
Just like how Apple Pay is less friction for online purchases than entering my credit card info is. Take that a step further where Apple can supply personal information JIT for shipping.
Yeah, the workflows need manual overrides for things like different billing vs shipping addresses, etc. But the happy path can be streamlined.
Social Security Numbers could have been replaced, fully or in part, as secure tokens decades ago.
I wouldn't have to worry about it being my time to lose my personal data in a major security breach. I already have lost personal info enough fighting for humane healthcare solutions in old age.
But if we argue intelligently for these solutions that have been tainted by bitcoin and "crypto" we are crypto-bros. We are tech-bros. Even if we grew up dreaming of cypherpunk technology protecting men and women's privacy and body rights, it doesn't matter anymore.
It's a slippery slope, these cruel anti-tech and anti-other jokes, and for me, my IQ on the political outcomes mattered more than my IQ on math problems.
One of the biggest metrics businesses track is repeat purchases. They don't want to give up that info because it tells them if their product is good enough to retain customers.
So the token must have some means of connecting purchases for a user across time (at least per merchant) or businesses will never adopt.
The only difference I could think of is that it also ties your identity with purchase habits. I could be missing something, but it is possible that OP lives in any of the other countries where the address+name+email combo isn't public information.
So everything developed in an ad-hoc manner. E-commerce web sites just asked for the information they need (and the information they didn't need), those who were comfortable using those websites used them, and the paranoid probably held out for much longer (and rejecting the idea of centralized auth loudly).
Most attempts by private companies to establish some de-facto identity/auth/login service mostly failed (well, the couple Big Tech companies got somewhat close, but none of them got close enough to be able to get other sites to use them exclusively)
Besides, even if there was some protocol to handle the payments and shipping without sending the info to the seller, you'd have to trust the payment processors and the postoffice to be secure. It's basically a choice between whether you want to put all your eggs in one big basket or spread them around somewhat.
It would completely destroy the data brokers and targeted ad industry but the world would be a better place as a result. Also not going to happen but I can dream.
We'll probably never convince end-users to "vote with their feet" and use Privacy-focused products. But we can absolutely, through legislation or just precedent, raise the Risk profile until it's better to leave the ad revenue on the table and run a private service.
I’m not so sure. The iPhone is the most popular in the USA despite the cost premium.
Turns out that money never was a good proxy for the public good, or even the ‘good’ of paying users. The goal has never been maximizing UX, the goal always was squeezing profits.
End-users not voting with their feet is misrepresenting the issue, it’s a symptom of end-users being actively lied to during campaigns (I think the euphemism for that is “lobby groups”).
Why? Because politicians care about being re-elected and their approval rates, and finance has proved to be an unnaturally large factor in that equation.
I've worked at plenty of companies that have no interest in tracking their customers but still need to be able to pin IDs to credit cards, etc. to have any hope of stopping mountains of fraud.
This is all new and rapidly evolving technology but giving apps / agents / others just the information they need to know while having a credibly neutral, private, and trustless database mediating is a true cypherpunk vision of how the internet should work and it's being built by people with the right ethos and principles to be as reliable, well engineered, and long lasting as the internet itself.
It is perfectly reasonable for the delivery service to be trusted. After all, they're going to take the physical package, so the business must trust them, and need to know where to deliver it, so the individual must trust them. An individual can request a token for the business and the delivery service can validate it, without the address ever being given to the business.
None of this requires a blockchain to make it slower and inexplicably public.