Regarding the whales, they can alreayd upvote any of their own crap (ie. Bernie Sanders does this). I think self-voting can be an issue, but this doesn't change that dynamic.
Also, I envision a service that generates a private/public key pair for you (similar to how crypto web wallets work) that will then encrypt your data and submit it to the Steem blockchain as a service.
Can someone grab and hide that shiny object for me? I'm going blind...