To eat at a restaurant you give a phone number and suddenly have an account with Resy. Renting an apartment means signing up for a service to access the move-in documents and then another to unlock the door.
These services rarely benefit the consumer. I’m not sure why it bothers me so much. Maybe it’s the erosion of agency. Maybe it’s the over-complicating of what should be a simple activity. But it’s becoming more frequent.
You don't need to look far to find a reason to abhor this. If you have a need to verify your identity on Twitter, you're handing your personal information to an Israeli firm (AU10TIX) beyond all accountability and reach of western justice systems.
The move is to review those polices, and decline.
It's actively hostile.
It should be treated as such.
The pain of declining on the privacy or personal rights grounds is intentional on their part. They do not respond to inquiries. And in my experience, companies that just use those tools decline to answer inquiries about it.
For instance, something like https://self.xyz. It's strictly better than the alternatives:
- already works with existing government-issued ids
- doesn't require submitting scans of your ID to third parties that can then be stored and leak
- allows privacy-preserving verification like "is this person older than 18" without requiring sharing of the person's exact age
And, honestly, our industry has provided, and continues to provide, ample evidence for why companies can't be trusted with any personal data at all, and particularly identity data.
And then the government outsources it when the latest wave of privatization hype comes through.
"World has already been working with Tinder and ran a pilot of the verification process in Japan. It was apparently enough of a success that Tinder will roll out the authentication method globally."
Kind of depressing. As much as I'd like to think something like this would die, let's be honest: it won't.
Yeah, it will be an uphill battle. How many of us have the wherewithal to resist a demand like this? Refuse and interview because they demand you submit to Altman's biometric scan, when you're unemployed and it's the only one you've gotten this month? A lot of people will take the path of least resistance, and there could be a lot or resistance to avoiding this on a lot of paths.
Probably the only way to get this to die is regulation or fearmongering. And the fearmongering would be tricky: portray is as the "mark of the beast" you might get a lot of conservative Christians to reject it, but then progressives might embrace it because rejection has an "icky" association with a group they reject (sort of like how antiglobalization used to be a liberal position, but now liberals reject tariffs like they're libertarians, because tariffs have the stench of Trump).
It does seem to me that this should be solvable at the device level by having a biometric scan produce a signed key on your device that can be used to issue a token of authenticity, similar to the way payment systems or certificate authorities work.
Then again, this only intensifies a different, growing problem where access to a smartphone or computer becomes a basic requirement for participation in society. No easy answers.
Seems like a smaller evil than a lot of the other stuff being floated TBH
We already trust the government to give proof of identity (through ID cards) and there is already a vast infrastructure network dedicated to that.
But who am I kidding, politicians would never let this happen (at least, not in a privacy preserving way). One can dream though.
I'm not sure this is possible in EU and US. And I'm sure it is not possible worldwide.
Some governments already have government SSO services, and some (sometimes the same, e.g. France) already have or are working on apps that locally, on device, scan your ID, take a selfie, compare the two, and confirm you are who you say you are.
Unless you're doing constant live verification which takes the privacy problem up several more notches, how do you know the user is still the ID'd person?
Because the problem World claims to try to solve is real.
Imagine A system where there's a vending machine outside City Hall, you spend $X on a charity for choice, and you get a one-time, anonymous token. You can "spend" it with a forum to indicate "this is probably a person or close enough to it."
Misuse of the system could be curbed by making it so that the status of a token cannot be tested non-destructively.
In the specific case of Tinder you might as well just make Tinder paid and skip all of this.
All you need to do is send me your biometrics, and if you don’t feel like doing that willingly I’ll use the billions of dollars of capital that my friends and I have to coerce you into doing so because I’ll leave you with no other choice.
The problem we at Globe are trying to solve is real and necessary to solve.
People who oppose it are obviously the problem, not me and the existence of a problem is sufficient reason for me to coerce people into accepting my solution without government oversight because my friends have been diligently working hard to reduce the ability of governments around the world to do so.
And can't you just visit 100 notaries and create 100 accounts?
Any alternative seems better at this point... For most tech savvy https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46875837 is probably the best alternative
There may be other clauses that aren't described, so I may be missing a real restriction.
> Hey decentralization nerds! I have an idea for a cryptocurrency which creates a centralized repository of biometric data for all of humanity.
- Sam Altman, probably.
An effective solution to the how-to-distribute-UBI problem could itself be the thing that backs the new currency in a similar circular fashion. I mean, it's not like the bar is very high. Currently our money is backed by games of chicken over whether the Strait of Hormuz is open.
But biometrics are just the wrong way. They require too much trust to be placed in a sensor, and an authoritative source of truth about the data. Any time such a source of truth exceeds a certain importance threshold, it becomes corrupt.
I believe the solution is out there, but it's in a different part of the landscape dictated by the CAP theorem: CRDTs not blockchains.
- M. Zuckerberg, ~2000.
Also: Blade Runner, anyone?
Looks like jitsi, whereby, and signal are all viable alternatives – anyone have something better, or feedback on the above?
See, it feels like there's an extraneous step here. Seems like by arriving at this physical location, I've proven I'm human already, and you can just note down the name on my ID and mark me as verified.
1. https://web.archive.org/web/20220305174531/https://twitter.c...