I handled the “real human” problem by charging access to the platform (and doing something socially responsible with the profits). Saw recently that X is starting to do this for signups, which feels icky (and likely explains why my idea didn’t take off).

X has been doing this and it didn't seem particularly effective. There are still many bots on the platform.

Also, someone with a lot of money can still get around this requirement.

Bribing a government to get fake passports is possible, but many orders of magnitude more difficult.

Bribing hotel clerks to make a new account every time a guest checks in and hands their passport over might be easier since in this case you just need to scan once to register. Maybe that sounds impractical and low volume but imagine you own a chain of hotels across thailand or whatever, you could probably make thousands of accounts a day and just sell that as a service.

Yes, that's just another problem with using ICAO biometric travel documents for something they have decidedly never been designed for: They don't have any PIN code protection, unlike some national digital ID schemes based on similar technology.

How do you verify identity in that prototype? (Not providing my data to a signup form before I know at least the rough idea.)

> I think the only way in which this can be done is by relying on passport (and other government IDs) verification.

Given that most national IDs currently can't anonymously certify personhood to third parties, this seems like it puts unreasonable trust into the "identity broker" preserving both anonymity and not certifying sockpuppets. I don't see a scenario in which any even moderately successful solution would not eventually crumble under these two types of pressure.

> How do you verify identity in that prototype?

By using a third party service to read your passport's NFC chip, we then generate a strong crypto hash of the concatenation of your name, DoB, and last 4 digits of your passport and we also encrypt that hash for good measure.

I agree that it sounds invasive, but there is no better way to verify uniqueness of a passport (and by proxy a human's uniqueness).

And yes, I am aware that a single human can have more than one passport. It's certainly not perfect. But it reduces the possibility of sock puppet accounts significantly.

If you register (just with your email and password), you'll get a little explanation of all the data collected (and don't have to move forward if you don't want to).

> this seems like it puts unreasonable trust into the "identity broker" preserving both anonymity and not certifying sockpuppets

True, but with enough resources onlyhumanhub itself can become the identity broker, no need for a third party.

Newer passports intentionally don't support third-party verifiable signatures anymore (earlier ones did). Non-repudiation was always a bug, not a feature, and that functionality is going away in newer implementations due to privacy concerns [1].

So unfortunately it's back to a centrally trusted verifier even with chip-enabled passwords for this use case.

> True, but with enough resources onlyhumanhub itself can become the identity broker, no need for a third party.

That doesn't address my concern at all: Why should I trust that service with something as sensitive as the mapping of my real identity to any number of pseudonyms? What's the economic incentive to not eventually offer a de-anonymization service to the highest bidder?

[1] https://crypto.stackexchange.com/questions/75058/using-epass...

Hmm, I'm not using verifiable signatures though. Surely there will continue to be a way for a third party to verify that a passport's NFC is authentic and can be trusted. That and the ability to pull some data off it is all I need.

> Why should I trust that service with something as sensitive as the mapping of my real identity to any number of pseudonyms? What's the economic incentive to not eventually offer a de-anonymization service to the highest bidder?

Do you trust banks? Hotels? They all take a copy of your passport and likely store it insecurely.

The information that I store for the passports is irreversible. It's hashed. So even if I wanted to sell it I couldn't. I mean, sure, in the future if this becomes big and there is a company around it, it could become evil at any moment and then start selling this data but then you could easily sue the company for this.

> Hmm, I'm not using verifiable signatures though.

That's even worse then for older passports (and inevitable for newer ones): Everybody will have to trust the service to be honest about not issuing sockpuppet identities. How would you prove that you aren't?

> Do you trust banks? Hotels? They all take a copy of your passport and likely store it insecurely.

That's not a concern I have at all. Every company providing service upon "identity verification" through a scan/copy of somebody's passport deserves everything bad fraudsters can throw at them. It's a non-verification method. And by the same token, the hotel could try to leak the fact that I've stayed there, and everybody taking passport copies seriously as evidence might believe them. I'm fine with that risk too.

Conversely, a private proof-of-humanity service will, by its nature, attract users that want to prove their humanity, well, privately.

> The information that I store for the passports is irreversible. It's hashed.

But that hash is ultimately calculated over somebody's passport data, isn't it? This means that anybody stealing your database will be able to deanonymize any user they have passport data for (which is not exactly secret information, as you've illustrated yourself with the hotel example).

> Everybody will have to trust the service to be honest about not issuing sockpuppet identities. How would you prove that you aren't?

Because that is the whole point of my service? It really feels like you're just trying to come up with ways that this won't work in very special and rare circumstances, where those really don't matter in practice for a social network (which let's face it, isn't a life or death service). It's all about upping the barrier to entry for casual users that would create hundreds of alt accounts to troll/spam people with.

Government intelligence agencies, which can print passports at will, will be able to create millions of fake accounts, while the rest of us will be limited to just one. It's a similar problem to the money-given-to-charity idea: when you trust any actor to enforce identity, you're trusting them to enforce identity.

I don't really think being resistant to evil governments is within scope here. Using passports isn't perfect, but practically speaking it's a hell of a lot better than what we have now which is a free for all.

It only takes a single government losing their signing keys (through whatever means) to break such a scheme.

And if that happens, what do you do? Deny service to that country's citizens?

How often does something like this happen? In that scenario there are a number of options though, one of which is just putting a banner on accounts that are impacted.

More often than you might think. The EU COVID-19 immunology status certificate scheme saw some fraudulent issuances, for example.

And "putting a banner on impacted accounts" both partially deanonymizes and effectively bans legitimate users for no fault of their own.

Travel documents are not a digital identity scheme, and using the ICAO biometric travel document scheme contrary to its explicit design goals is just asking for trouble.

Consider the theory that Russian-government-sponsored bots ran wild with COVID disinformation. It doesn't matter whether you actually believe that theory or not - just consider it. If you allow Russian passports as a valid identification source, then Russia would have no problem running that operation. The same applies to every country of course.

Yeah, and this is why we capture the country that issued the passport we verified. Worst case we can add a feature that allows users to share which passport country they used. And yes, this will mean that Russian users will be screwed unfortunately.

It's really not a convincing pitch to me. It just raises the cost of bots to whatever I have to bribe a poor person to let me scan their documents, and it doesn't do anything to prevent me from putting an LLM in charge of my posts.

Maybe you could require biometric login, something that requires a Google, Apple, or Yubikey issued secure enclave that authenticates on physical touch / face ID, and require that touch for every post.

For me as a person participating in online communities, I'd rather just stay in my private group chats where I have met the people I'm interacting with.

No solution is perfect unfortunately. Even biometric login is easily duped, you can just hire a bunch of workers to pass the biometric check. Certainly much cheaper than bribing poor people to scan passports, eventually you'll run out of passports and we have a chance of identifying those types of accounts based on the passport country and how they behave.

"Proof of <x>hood" is explicitly a non-goal for FIDO authenticators, and implementors go to great lengths to make it impossible (primarily for privacy reasons); that's why they support anonymous attestation only, except in an enterprise context.

That's the thing about reusing existing services and protocols for "proof of x": Quite often, such proofs being possible are often adjacent to or explicitly an anti-goal.

Apple does indeed offer an API that allows uniquely identifying a given device in a privacy-preserving way, though: There's an API that allows apps to store two bits of information about a given device, such as "this device was involved in fraudulent activity on our platform" or "this device has already redeemed a free trial at one point". Not sure if Google has an equivalent.

I strongly also think we're going to have a social network for humans-only (and one for AI-only, and one for humans + AI)

have you looked into world.org? They're scanning eyes and giving robust human identities. Before immediately dismissing, I'd check out the video -- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SXnwoMxKHV8

I think atproto + worldid can one day be very interesting

Yes, I'm aware of this. It's a cool idea, but there are some big problems with this too.