User owned identity card
I’m going through old product scraps again and found this one from March 27, 2018: “Universal contacts. Connect contacts with Facebook, LinkedIn, etc., user decides what info they want to see on call screen, like Name, Position, Company is calling you.” 📇👇 Back then it felt inevitable. Our identities were already scattered across address books, email, Facebook, LinkedIn, WhatsApp. Of course someone would stitch it all together and show a smart “who is this?” whenever the phone rang. What actually happened was more awkward. Technically, lots of pieces shipped. Socially and economically, it stalled. Caller ID apps scraped address books and felt creepy. CRMs unified contacts, but only for work. Facebook, LinkedIn, Apple, Google all wanted to own identity, not become neutral utilities. By the time privacy norms and regulation caught up, “aggregate everything” started to look more like surveillance than magic. If I wrote this today, I’d call it a “user-owned identity card” that apps subscribe to under strict permissions. Maybe that lives in the OS. Maybe as a protocol. Or maybe it never escapes existing platforms. Here’s the original note from 2018: https://github.com/AnandChowdhary/notes/blob/main/notes/2018/universal-contacts-connect.md