The EU’s eIDAS 2.0 specification for their digital wallet identity explicitly supports the use of pseudonyms for this exact purpose of “Anonymous authentication”.
Re:Why the open social web matters now
by Seattle3503 on Saturday October 18, 2025 @11:03PM
(#45631812)
That's awesome. Hopefully the US can get something similar.
Re:Why the open social web matters now
by DrScientist on Monday October 20, 2025 @07:08AM
(#45642573)
I tend to agree that linking content to real people is a key mechanism that will help fight spam, hidden ads and influencing campaigns.
However, if everything is linked to your ID - those that control that will be able to cancel you all at once. A bit like the consequences of being de-banked in an cash-less society.
So if you bring in laws that require digital ID"s they have to be implemented with a very robust set of safeguards in my view.
Re:Why the open social web matters now
by Gigachad on Saturday October 18, 2025 @09:05PM
(#45631434)
Telegram added a feature where if someone cold dms you, it shows their phone number country and account age. When I see a 2 month old account with a Nigeria phone number I know it's a bot and I can ignore it.
It would let you identify users uniquely, but without revealing too much sensitive information. It would let you verify things like "This user has a Michigan driver's license, and they have an ID 1234, which is unique to my system and not linkable to any other place they use that ID."
If you ban that user, they wouldn't be able to use that ID again with you.
The alternative is that we continue to let unelected private operators like Cloudflare "solve" this problem.