Questions and concerns about DFINITY Foundation working "beyond core protocol"

[frederikrothenberger]

Hi @blockpunk

I’m working on the II team and I would like to address the points raised here:

@blockpunk

For example, II is indeed a cool technology, but its overly aggressive design at the application layer results in the same identity not being consistent across multiple conisters, which directly results in data not being interoperable.

While data interoperability is basically the cornerstone of Web3, the foundation of IC builds a large number of usable data layers for Web3, but II makes it impossible to connect the data. If DFINITY had designed II to include more optional privacy models, rather than brutally mandating that all users must be in the highest privacy state (deriving a new ID for each conister visited), developers wouldn’t be as embarrassed as they are now.

We absolutely do understand that interoperability needs to be improved. And yes, right now II does not support any form of interoperability between services. But starting from a strong privacy model and adding opt-in features to relax it is by far the better approach for a sound and sane system than going the other way (which might not even be possible; once you give information away, you cannot get it back).

To address this, we have the following items on our roadmap (see our roadmap update thread):

• Delegation of fine-grained permissions
• 3rd party attributes
• Renewable short lived delegations (which is required to do long-term delegations)

Unfortunately, all of those are a) a lot of work and b) pushed back by other items that are required to just keep Internet Identity accessible and working (i.e. II Domain Migration and Multi-Canister Architecture).

Be assured that we want to improve Internet Identity for both users and developers.

Also, Internet Identity is open to external contributions. If you want to speed things up and help with the development of one of the issues above please reach out. It would be greatly appreciated.