> I'm concerned that it will inevitably require loss of anonymity and be abused by companies for user tracking.

Are you sure you read my comment fully?

> trusted authorities (e.g. governments)

the governments powerful enough to roll something like this out are not trusted authorities which will protect the privacy of their citizens. remember before the Snowden revelations when the NSA's director of national intelligence swore under oath that they did not collect "any type of data at all on millions of Americans"?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Clapper#Testimony_to_Con...

Ultimately trust must be placed in an entity of some type. A democratically elected body isn't perfect but I can't think of a better option. If the electorate don't care about digital privacy or elected lawmakers do not protect their rights, then that needs to be addressed first. Governments have a monopoly on violence. If a citizen can't trust their government to enact (or enact but then not follow) laws that protect human rights, they frankly have much bigger problems to solve.

Part of solving that problem is to make it expensive for governments to violate human rights. If spying on everyone is easier than targeted spying, they'll spy on everyone. Governments have a lot of different priorities and it's not always easy to balance them.

Online identity verification is probably best handled by an organization with that as a single priority.

Under the government ID scheme, we have to trust [bad corrupt government] to verify all citizens of [bad corrupt government]. Since that government frequently lies and acts maliciously using every means at their disposal, platforms will treat IDs verified by that government similar to bot traffic and the country will be cut off from the public internet. You'll be banning scientists and journalists from working with others around the world, just because they live in a country with an obnoxious government.

Isn't it also best if people can have multiple identities? Or should someone's contributions to X field be discounted because of their dabbling in fringe Y field?

> the governments powerful enough to roll something like this out are not trusted authorities which will protect the privacy of their citizens.

The trust I mentioned was the ability for third-parties to trust that the authority will not hand out IDs in an uncontrolled manner. I was not saying that the ID holders need to trust the authority:

> Users can identify themselves to third-parties without disclosing their real-world identity to the third-party and without disclosing their interaction with the third-party to the issuing body.

If the authority doesn’t know how your ID is used, you don’t have to trust the authority to keep that information private.

I did. It doesn't matter that the website might not be able to directly associate a real-world identity with a digital one. It takes a small number of signals to uniquely fingerprint a user, so it's only a matter of associating the fingerprint with the ID, whether that's a real-world or digital one. It can still be used for tracking. By having a static ID that can only be issued by governments or approved agencies we'd only be making things easier for companies to track users.

This sounds like a red herring to me.

If the only way to associate a user with their ID is by fingerprinting them, you can do the same thing without an ID with having shadow profiles. If the proof system is designed for privacy, the ID doesn't make you more trackable.

In other words, if the ID never directly leaks companies can just make up a static ID for you and get the same results.

Kind of. A fingerprint is an implicit ID, whereas the ID suggested by GP would be semi-permanently associated to an individual. So it would make tracking even easier, since most web sites outside of adtech don't bother with sophisticated fingerprinting. It would be similar to a tracking cookie, except the user would have no control over it.

> the ID suggested by GP would be semi-permanently associated to an individual

There is a permanent ID, but it doesn't have to be told to the site.

In which case it doesn't make tracking any easier than the site making up a "fake" ID for you.

> It can still be used for tracking.

This doesn’t make sense. The whole point of using IDs in this way is in an authenticated context.

Did you think I was suggesting that this ID would be accessible to any website without asking? This is something you would send as part of a registration step. So, for instance, if you spam Hacker News, you get banned, you try to register again, it receives the same ID as before and knows not to let you register.

Every website would just move on to force people to register. That's already happening - good luck browsing public posts on Twitter/X.

Again, this is a mechanism for making existing auth more resilient.

As you note, websites can already force people to register, so this isn’t adding anything new there.

The benefit of majorly reducing fraud can create an ecosystem where the trade off is worth it for users to take. For example generous free plans or trials can exist without companies needing to invest so much in antifraud for them.