We all know that the EU wants age verification for the web. I dont trust my country, the EU and definitely not Instagram, Twitter etc. to implement this in way where my personal data won’t be shared with anyone. But the idea that everyone on social media is a verified human beeing could also have a lot of positive effects.
Imo it would be awesome if every person could have only one single account. Bans and restrictions have much more impact which forces users to behave more like irl. You could reduce a massive amount of bots which would reduce fake news and be a time saver for mods.
As a solution for the privacy issue, I searched for open source passport verification tools and found ZKPassport which makes the proof on you own device without sending you data anywhere. It generates a deterministic Id which is salted and hashed, so you can’t find a real person from a user account or otherwise. Only this Id is sent to the server as a proof, nothing else. The code is open source and its possible to self host the backend for this system.
I try to implement ZKPassport into a lemmy fork to make a small proof of concept for this idea. Of course this needs a lot more security features for a real production scenario, because mods and server owners have much more power and the federation is more complicated with only a few servers that have passport auth enabled and some even have their own implementation of the auth.
So if the proof of concept works out well the question is, would people be rather use passport authenticated Fediverse instances when all of you data stays on your phone?
EDIT: I don’t suggest that the whole fediverse switches to passport authentication, every instance can decide on their own. Therefore you could also have multiple accounts across multiple instances but not multiple accounts on the same instance.
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No. Nobody needs my ID for me to shitpost on a forum.
Imo it would be awesome if every person could have only one single account. Bans and restrictions have much more impact which forces users to behave more like irl.
What about people who want to criticize their oppressive government without risk of being identified from their post history? People questioning their gender or sexuality who don’t want to come out to everyone yet? People who view or post NSFW things and don’t want it associated with their primary account?
There are plenty of valid reasons to have multiple accounts besides ban evasion.
Like I already wrote, its not possible to identify a real person based on the user data on the platform, even if you gain access to the database and server. No passport data is sent to the server only the id which can’t be reversed to get you’re personal data. So you can still be anonymous
Despite that: I don’t want to keep all of the internet behind a passport verification wall. This would be terrible. I imagine it more like we have some platforms or servers where people need to verify
Wtf is even the point of this then? Who is checking the IDs? If you can’t link it to a person why he’ll do they want your id?
The point is to verfiy someone does not already have an account and is not a bot. Your smartphone is checking the ID locally. Governments provide public lists of keys that match keys on the passports of their citizens, so you can download the public lists locally and check them on your device outside of any social media platform etc. Your smartphone just sends something like “this user is verified” to the server
Nope, still 100% NO!!! I don’t care what the scheme is. I don’t trust any of the people or companies involved. I don’t trust the company that makes my cell phone, the operating system, the gov, none of it.
There is literally nothing you could say to me that would ever have me scanning my ID to access social media. I already hate this shit, Lemmy is barely acceptable. Lemmy goes ID medication and I just delete my account and the app, period. I’d be completely done.
Ok got it, thanks for your input!
your smartphone is checking
No, no and no. I’m using lemmy on a desktop computer because typing on a phone is a PITA. Requiring a phone, or any other physical second factor authentication, is additionally antithetical to the “let’s use less resources” point of the fediverse.
governments provide the lists
No, no and no. We already don’t trust corporations, why would we trust governments? Who among here is free of sin to cast the first stone? The US? (And woe betide having to authenticate with your own government that is already repressing you)
your smartphone only sends
No no and no. No need for smartphone.
What the hell is all this crap? Who are you really working for? Make your disclosures.
You only need the phone for the inital registration, but yes I get your point.
Governments already have the data. In a certain way you already trusted them by getting your passport and the platform just checks if its correct. The important part is to verify without sending the data into the internet.
I am not working for anyone why wood I? Everything is for free and open source, I don’t even have a lemmy instance so I can’t even publish it. I will just share my code and people can do with it whatever they want.
Governments already have the data. In a certain way you already trusted them by getting your passport
Bold way of saying I “trust”. I never chose to be born in a given country, they have not obtained an informed, actionable consent on my end for that association, nor have I agreeded to have my activities bound by specifically their imagined permits regarding where this or that land ends. And once again: this does not solve for those who have their own State as one of their primary aggressors.
I applaud your critical thinking, but you are asking inside a bubble that knows answers before it asks questions. I doubt such an idea can at this time in history be implemented in a grassroots way.
Thank you, I guess you are right. Still, there were some good points here and there that were worth learning. I’m going to give it a try anyway (on my local machinet) and see how it goes…
What the fuck is your agenda?
What do you mean? I am just coding an open source project in my spare time to learn, maybe improve the web with it and ask people about their opinions. If you don’t like that you don’t need to use it, probably no one will in end.
We all know that the EU wants age verification for the web.
Yes, and it needs to be fought politically.
But the idea that everyone on social media is a verified human beeing could also have a lot of positive effects.
No. No, it could not. I grew up with the idea of the Internet being a mostly separate space from real life, one where our identities do not matter as much, and want that to be the case as much as possible. “On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog.”
I grew up in the same mindset as you describe.
But this reality never manifested. Instead the perceived anonymity of the social media sites, combined with the algorithm, tears our societies apart.
I don’t think that the fediverse has enough reach for such a system to make sense, but Met, Google and Tiktok certainly should use it.
The opposite of “tearing our societies apart” would be “uniting our societies”.
I come from a country (Austria) that once tried a political system where all of society was forced to unite behind a strong leader. That didn’t go very well.
So I refuse to think of “tearing our societies apart”, without further qualification, as an inherently bad thing. Better that than enforced unity of all of society where no dissent outside the Overton window is ever allowed.
combined with the algorithm
Agreed that that’s a major problem with today’s Internet. When I started to use it, the main way to publicly communicate online was web forums where threads were sorted by topic and then chronologically by when they were last posted in, i.e. with no recommendation algorithms. At the time, I was a preteen and dreamed of a world where that was a mainstream thing and way more people would be posting on forums like that.
Way more people use the Internet now, but it’s not structured that way at all anymore, and I do not understand what was so wrong with it that it needed to be replaced with algorithmic recommendations. Did that concept just not have a functioning business model, or what?
Yes it would have a lot of positive effects. The end of bot farms for a start, social media and society at large is hugely affected by the whims of bot activity.
It would cripple the large social media platforms, that’s a win.
*reads headline*
FUCK NO!
*reads wall of text*
HELL FUCKING NO!
Nope. We have seen time and time again that websites can not keep things like passwords safe and secured. What makes you think any of them can keep actual proper identifiable information safe and secure?
The data doesn’t even get into the platform, so they can’t store it and they can’t loose it. If an attacker gets access or leaks data it will be just hashes, no actual data
No.
Lol, no.
Fuck no, I won’t use anything online that requires me to submit any kind of ID, ever. This will inevitability be compromised no matter what assurances are offered.
Imo it would be awesome if every person could have only one single account. Bans and restrictions have much more impact which forces users to behave more like irl.
People who would enjoy that are already at Something Awful. People flocked to Reddit because there they weren’t living in constant fear of running afoul a mod and getting permabanned. Today they’re fleeing Reddit for the exact same reasons.
There are definitely many benefits to living in a police state like that. But conversations also become stagnant and redundant to avoid rocking the boat too much.
ABSO-FUCKING-LUTELY NOT¡!!! I WILL NEVER EVER EVER EVER GIVE MY FUCKING ID TO A SOCIAL MEDIA SITE
NOT FUCKING EVER!!!
You didn’t read the piat before getting on your rage.
I read it. My opinion is the same. I would absolutely NEVER in a million years use my passport or any ID to log into a social media platform. Regardless of the way the data is managed. People are too clever to not devise a way to pull some kind of shenanigans with it. And it’s a slippery slope too. I don’t want to get comfortable with the idea of this. I don’t want any of us getting comfortable with this.
This is vibe-coded nonsense.
