Expending Solid capabilities to multiple identities and moral persons

Use Solid Solid: The Basics
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Hi,

Disclaimer: I didn’t read the full spec and have quite a limited understanding of what Solid can achieve right now.

From what I read until now Solid is all about giving users control over the data they publish.
I have had a really similar idea for some time now, that I like to play with from time to time.
There are three major differences:

  1. it should manage your identities - plural - not only give access to data relative to your primary identity
    Giving access only to certain parts of your real identity is not enough. Some people have really intense online life and want to keep it separate from their real life. Hobby and work sometime don’t mix well.
    You can think of your identity as faceted, but it might be not enough.
    You have a legal identity, a work identity, a family facet and a friend facet.
    Some people you know may have access to more than one identity, and strangers should only see basic information depending of the context of the encounter.
    It’s quite complicated, but our lives are complicated.
    See what happened to some people that have added indifferently friends, family, coworkers and strangers to their Facebook account: personal information leaked from one circle to another, and some were fired or are not talking to their family anymore.

  2. it should be able to manage moral persons, i.e company, government…
    You are related to friends and family, but you are related to a country, an employer, some service providers too.
    They should be part of Solid too, and not just be treated as data consumer.
    My legal identity should be tied (if i want it) to my government.
    My work identity to my employer.
    And so on…

  3. you should be able to share data produced by other persons on your behalf, for instance a proof of your nationality, an extract of your criminal record or a proof of employment
    Life would be a lot easier if you can grant (temporary) access to data produced for you by other persons.
    When applying to a new job, opening a bank account or looking for a new apartment, you are always asked for some official documents.
    Think of it as an automated form filling on steroid.

I think those 3 points are critical for Solid adoption. It should model all the interactions you might have and ensure different level of identity protection according to your need.

I hope I made myself clear, English is not my mother tongue.
What do you think? Am I totally out of my mind? Is it already doable with Solid current iteration? Where those subjects already discussed somewhere else?

Thanks for reading me.

Xavier

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Regarding (1), that it should be able to manage multiple identities:
First of all, Solid gives you the ability to create multiple pods for different purposes. So one could create a pod for his/her work identity, one for friends, family, hobbies, etc. I think that would be a good approach to this.

Secondly, there’s also the option to limit the access to certain parts of the pod. I am not familiar with this, but I believe it should be possible to handle multiple identities via access restrictions too. But as far as I know, there aren’t easy tools for that yet.

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That’s definitely a possibility. With the proper tool to manage your collection of pods, it can be equivalent.
So I guess (1) is sort of addressed, at least it shouldn’t be too hard to provide this.
Thanks for pointing that out :smile: