alt Hacker NewsHonestly I just want government backed digital ID for this stuff.
I know the concerns.
I no longer care. The benefits outweight the costs, imho. I want to be able to tell a site "yes I'm Martin here's proof either ban me or let me in but stop making me jump through hoops to prove ID.
And so that social sites I use will no longer have to deal with undesired non-unique accounts for bot swarms and sockpuppets and the like.
The political usefulness of swarms of bots and sockpuppets is why I have conspiracy theories about the conspiracy theories about digital ID.
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You may have already seen it, but OpenPassport allows for partial disclosure of passport data. It's less applicable to the use case of the OP and more applicable for e.g. one time account verification.
https://github.com/openpassport-org/openpassport
I don't have any strong view either way on the government ID verification for online services. At least in theory though, the concept of partial/selective disclosure of passport data seems to be a good middle ground between proving humanity and maintaining privacy.
There is a US government authentication system (login.gov).
Props for sharing what's probably a ubiquitously hated opinion on HN.
Here are two of my own, just to join in:
1. Social credit score system. We should all be able to point our phone at antisocial behavior and damage their score. Until then there's pretty much zero recourse against people who have hostile social behaviors that don't commit a crime (like arguing with the McDonalds employee or causing a scene when someone asks them to turn down their music on the bus). People hate on "Karens" but they're actually our last remaining line of defense against these people.
2. As soon as you get on a public road, the government should have dystopian-level control over your car. You can't speed. You can't run a red light (or it will be video recorded and you'll be insta-billed). When there's a wreck, the camera feed in all nearby vehicles is auto-uploaded to the net so all parties can see what happened, no fuss. Break the rules a few times? That's fine, you get your government issued tiny zip car for a year and we'll see if you can respect the shared roads after that. And, of course, alcohol breath analysis to drive.