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by ignoramous 1100 days ago
Cryptographic proof of personhood is going to be a thing, is it not? Outside of BigTech, Signal is as poised as WorldCoin to be just that.
2 comments

I’m just not convinced that anything not tied directly to a government issued ID is going to be strong enough.
Most of the time you want to confirm that you're talking to someone from a given context -- they own a specific Twitter account, or you met them at a party last week, or they sent you an email or were present in a meeting that you want to have a conversation about.

Government ID doesn't help much with those -- it's actually the thing that is not strong enough.

Yes and it's going to be done through digital IDs. Unless something dramatic happens, we're poised to turn to digital IDs linked to your real ID and in turn validating access to apps/communication.
And authoritarians everywhere will rejoice (and they will give out the means to duplicate these IDs to a select few in case they need to generate evidence that 'you' have offended the state).
The only sensible approach to this problem (assuming it is a real problem) is trusted individuals certifying others as human.

There are alternatives to using the state for this, but they are difficult and fraught with UX issues. Perhaps a decentralised web of trust or some sort of blockchain based registrar of trust that can trace trust routes between mutually distrusting individuals.

Unless such a system is in place, international and strong before states start playing in this space, there isn't much chance of beating a state's approach to the problem.

Just look at https certificates. The current system involves browsers shipping configured to trust a whole bunch of entities I don't really trust, and there has been relatively little interest in trying to build a working decentralised approach to site security.

I'll also add that some of the state proposals are in general quite nice in where their priorities are. Such as prioritizing working in the open, both in sharing research, working with standards groups, and open source tooling.

It would be nice if we could come to a thorough solution that actually does cover all bases, rather than all these companies trying to create their own digital ID services that just encourage us to instead do silly things like photograph your ID front and back.

I mean hell it's taken like 20 years for privacy by design to become an ISO standard? That sort of timeline is not something we can really tolerate as more and more people continue relying on online services and in turn wind up trusting horribly outdated techniques/general malaise about data.