"You cannot complain about Facebook collecting your life’s history, while at the same time complaining that diaspora* cannot find your former classmates. You cannot complain about WhatsApp collecting your address book, while at the same time stating you do not use eMail because exchanging addresses is too cumbersome. You either get a system that knows who you are or a system that does not."
https://overengineer.dev/blog/2020/01/01/2010s-alternative-social-media.html
Well there ARE some clever applications of #cryptography that are underappreciated but that might help break some of those dichotomies.
Just for one trivial example, letting a platform have a hashed* version of an address book would allow lookup against the book without them actually having the contact info.
*and salted, but nevermind
Well, I've always thought far too few tech type people are familiar with some of the applications of cryptography, PKI and all of that.
If more knew about it we'd have widespread use of pgp, web of trust, and many other techniques with very practical benefit.
And of course I'm referring to technical people knowing about the crypto stuff. Much of it is legitimately technical, so I wouldn't fault common users for not knowing about all of this magic inside their applications :)
But yeah, someone who's not familiar with it could be excused for seeing those dichotomies/binaries. Without such solutions, the problems are real.
