Zuckerberg potentially interested in putting Facebook login on a blockchain

In a video interview with Harvard Law Professor Jonathan Zittrain, Mark Zuckerberg revealed he is considering putting Facebook's login process on a blockchain, although he said he still hasn't determined the way to do it. He claimed blockchain-based identity verification would give users a better opportunity to govern their own data, especially when providing access to third-party apps. Such a“fully distributed” system would likely replace Facebook's single sign-on application, Facebook Connect, if Zuckerberg's plans come to fruition. 

Zuckerberg said about blockchain identity: “You basically take your information, you store it on some decentralized system, and you have the choice of whether to log in in different places, and you’re not going through an intermediary. There’s a lot of things that I think would be quite attractive about that.”

It is likely that blockchain-enabled identity solutions would be warmly welcomed by developers. They are currently required to work with platform intermediaries like Facebook, Apple and Google when they are trying to “serv[e] the people who are using [their] service.”

Zuckerberg noted that decentralized identity would make breaches more difficult to contain, citing last year’s breach in which Cambridge Analytica illegally obtained Facebook users’ data. With the current system, Facebook could just cut off the access for the responsible entity; with a blockchain-enabled solution, it wouldn't have been possible to cut off Cambridge Analytica. In this scenario, a malicious third-party actor could potentially do more damage with the data that they obtain.