Balaji Srinivasan: belief

Transcript context

…If I call up, say, Apple customer service and I need to prove I’m Tyler Cowen, one thing they might do is ask me for the last four digits of my Social Security number. This seems absurd. For one thing, that kind of information can be quite readily available. The future of personal identity — proving you are who you claim to be — say, 10, 15 years from now, what will that look like? How will we do it? Is it a retina scan? Is it fingerprint? Is it facial recognition? How will you prove to the world you’re you? Good question. I think it’s going to vary depending on the context. For example, retina scans and biometrics are good in that they’re unique to you. They’re bad in that there’s no password reset, for example. If password reset is a core feature of your security system, you may not be able to use that with biometric authentication. I think we’re going to have a bunch of different options, from email and phone number auth, username auth, biometrics, et cetera, where it’s just going to fit the particular use case. The exit option — this is debated quite a bit now with Facebook, with Google. Some people say, “Well, Facebook, you don’t like it, you don’t have to use it. You can just exit.” How persuasive do you find this argument?…

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