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