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Comment by alias_neo | Hacker News Reader

You have a very "positive/optimistic" outlook on how this would go down;

My immediate thought was that an implementation of this platform would be using legal identification to prove humans, allowing for one a huge depository of highly-accurate personally identifying information; a security and privacy nightmare in my opinion.

This already happens in many places, but those are regulated companies, banks etc, I couldn't imagine a social platform holding the crown jewels like this ever not being a disaster.

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You don't have to have the social networking site handle the privacy information. You could integrate eId as identity providers and for a site like Twitter only provide guarantee that this is a human and this identity is unique for this human on this service.

You wouldn't be anonymous but you could be anonymous towards everyone but the identity providers.

Good point, I had totally forgotten about identity providers. I've only had to use one, which I totally disagree with; I can't remember which one, but some government site here in the UK required an IDP and the options were things like the "Post Office"; Not the sort of organisation I want to be trusting with my identity/login for any government site.

That’s not completely true; you would be anonymous towards everyone but the identity providers and any government or organization powerful enough to wield influence over the identity providers. Which completely defeats the most important reason people choose to remain anonymous.

Ah, yeah I implicitly meant that the identity providers basically have to be government owned so yes.

I don't really see a way around this if the aim is to prove human-ness though.

Right, but the identity providers being government owned exacerbates the problem I'm talking about.

I don't personally care if Joe the random person has access to an anonymous account*, but I do care if Joe the Russian dissident—whose entire ability to safely post points of view which disagree with his government relies upon it—has access to an anonymous account.

* I am not saying there aren't other valid reasons, including entertainment reasons, to have an anonymous account. But those aren't part of my main point

The only thing legal identification proves is that a human created the account. It does not prove that a human is posting or reading/scraping content.

And even then, what does a photo of ID from some foreign country prove? That the person signing up had something that looked like legit ID? Or do we start building a global database of IDs of every human that is "government approved" and somehow not subject to corruption in certain countries?

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