AI firms propose ‘personhood credentials’ to combat online deception, offering a cryptographically authenticated way to verify real people without sacrificing privacy—though critics warn it may empower governments to control who speaks online.
AI firms propose ‘personhood credentials’ to combat online deception, offering a cryptographically authenticated way to verify real people without sacrificing privacy—though critics warn it may empower governments to control who speaks online.
I know a lot of people are cranky about digital IDs, but realistically there’s no avoiding it at this point: we need real, government-backed, links-to-a-specific-human-with-a-birth-certificate unique digital IDs. Then service providers can (optionally) demand it in order to register, and can prevent you from creating multiple accounts, and can ban you from their service permanently, and can vouch for you to other services that you are indeed a Real Unique Human Being.
Digital IDs are fine.
For an extremely small handful of scenarios where an actual ID is required, like banking.
It absolutely should be a violation of federal law, with massive, extremely punitive consequences, to use it for age verification for adult content, let alone social media or other websites.
I for one would be fine with a digital ID to be used for even age verification, so long as it is only used for verification and is completely detached from any other form of identification. Honestly I’m getting kinda sick of rumors of Russian and Chinese trolls, true or not, as well as AI commenters influencing genuine discourse.
And harassment and cheating in online games…
Lots of things suffer due to ban evasion. If bans worked, the internet would be a very different place.
Right now I could go create 30 sock puppet accounts to respond to this. Is that really a good thing?
Let government offer the service of “here is a way any human can certifiably identify themselves online” and let people decide what providers they want to give that info to.
If you want to use or run anonymous social media, that’s fine.
I don’t.
If the alternative is corporations violating privacy even more? Absolutely.
The absolute maximum information it’s legal for corporations should be a dozen orders of magnitude less than they do right now, and asking a single user for an ID without a clear, bulletproof cause should be an instant corporate death penalty with every bit of data they’ve ever collected erased.
Privacy is a fundamental right and you shouldn’t be allowed to operate anywhere if you don’t respect it absolutely.