Monday: nothing to protect. Wednesday: a deadline. Friday: Oma.

Monday: nothing to protect. Wednesday: a deadline. Friday: Oma.

My mother is 79. She reads the paper every morning, and lately she keeps finding the same story in it with a different company name on top.

"They lost the data again."
"Yes."
"Why did they have all of it?"

I started explaining customer databases and stopped halfway through, because her question was better than my answer.

Then she said the thing I have been trying to fit onto a slide for two years.

"In my day the shop knew my face. When the shop closed, nobody else lost anything."

She isn't being nostalgic about the shop. She is pointing at the one thing the shop had that no server has: it only ever knew what it needed, for exactly as long as it needed it. Nothing was kept for later, because there was no later to keep it for.

What you don't have, nobody can take.

If Oma understands it, everyone does.

hashID is how you get to be yourself, without having to explain yourself.
Prevention by Design, not Surveillance by Default.