OpenAI, the US government and Persona built an identity surveillance machine
vmfunc.re
Related ongoing thread: Discord cuts ties with identity verification software, Persona - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47136036 - Feb 2026 (282 comments)
vmfunc.re
Glad to know that my tinfoil hat wasn't too tight when social media came to be and this obvious use was predicted. How quickly will not having social media accounts become a crime?
[0] https://withpersona.com/blog/post-incident-review-source-map...
Ah, it already is. Just being trialed against people with less rights and no voting power.
Since the last several months, your US visa will be rejected if you do not submit public social media profiles.
If you think the government is spending a hundred billions on this category of tech for vetting a few thousand people, you are a prime candidate to buy a bridge that I can sell you for a discount.
I don’t think this is true. You can get a visa just fine if you don’t have social media profiles. Source: me. I don’t have facebook, insta, twitter etc and travel to the US just fine. When I filled in the form I left those empty.
What I think you can’t do is get a visa if you have social media profiles and choose not to disclose them or you post things or have friends/links on your social media that cbp considers elevates your risk etc.
Source: American observing what’s going on right now.
Note also there's a direct response from Persona's security team here[1], and a lot of back and forth from Rick on Twitter[2].
[1]: https://withpersona.com/blog/post-incident-review-source-map...
[2]: https://x.com/Persona_IDV/status/2025048195773198385?s=20
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/may/31/denmark-helped...
Hi there,
Thank you for reaching out to Persona.
Please note that Persona primarily operates as a "service provider" or "processor" for its customers. We act as a "business" or "controller" only for specific services, such as identity verification for LinkedIn, FoxCorp, and Reusable Persona. To learn more about how Persona manages your personal data, please refer to our privacy notices, which can be accessed through the following link: https://withpersona.com/legal/privacy-notices
If you wish to exercise your privacy rights related to services where Persona is a "service provider" or "processor," please contact the entity using our service, as they are the "controller" of the data. We will assist the relevant customer to fulfill your data subject rights, but we do not handle such requests directly on their behalf.
For any privacy rights request related to services where Persona acts as a "business" or "controller," including identity verification for LinkedIn, FoxCorp, Reusable Persona, and personal data related to our sales, marketing activities, or website browsing on withpersona.com, please use our Data Subject Request (DSAR) available at the following link: https://withpersona.com/dsar
For all other inquiries, we will respond as soon as possible.
###
TL;DR we're not responsible, go talk to LinkedIn.
We need far stronger laws for all of it, which will never happen because the rot and corruption has fully metastasized.
Persona's side of the story.
There's a problem here, right? Who else might want to flag you and lock you out of shit? Is this the new normal?
Will they flag Republicans / Democrats / Catholics / Buddhists / People Of Any Particular Skintone / People with Blue Shoes Who Are Exactly 5'9 / ????
The corporations are out of control. We should bring them to heel.
We should also resist and refuse to comply with these totally arbitrary requests we don't have to comply with.
In before I get downvoted and flagged for speaking the truth and noticing patterns.
What am I missing?
This is just furthering the previous history. Currently, the lords have just been able to keep the serfs appeased to a longer extent. Every time in history or in sci-fi, the serfs reach a breaking point and rise up.
this is a completely "WEIRD" outlook.. more than half of humanity has no illusions about "proletarians" they do not even discuss it that way
source: born and raised WEIRD
Who wins at the end?
Having any kind of agency in those things would be a start.
If <FAANG bigcorp of your choice> announces with great fanfare "We're building this totally awesome new technology that will make everything better! And the best thing? You won't have to do anything, we will auto-update all your devices/accounts/etc with it for free! Trust us!", then whether you personally believe their enthusiastic predictions or not doesn't really matter a lot - you will get it anyway, unless you spend a lot of energy to deliberately avoid the new technology.
Dear 1password,
Please stop trying to "innovate". I really like your password manager. That's all I want. I don't want "automatic watchtower AI phishing prevention" I just want a password manager that works across my devices. Make it simple, make it secure, and don't change it. You have a great product. Adding more features will only make it worse. If you keep this bullshit up I will churn.
Also every technological step? Ever? Really? This wouldn't happen to be typed on a computer from a climate-controlled room on a nice global network or anything?
I'm not a fan of persona and have gone out of my way to not provide my details to them even before this, and I really dislike Thiel, but... let's be honest about the stuff we're complaining about.
Communist countries like the Soviet Union and China have even had the explicit goal of outgrowing the US.
> How many more broken social contracts can society endure before it crumbles?
I wouldn't call this much of a society if people's eyes are open.
What's that song name, they don't care about us?
Reprehensible.
Additionally, people are typically only "gifted" on one domain -- if one's gifted enough in the domain of intellect to become a SWE, they're typically lacking elsewhere, whether that be in moral scruples or the ability to discern social things such as when they're working for sociopaths.
We saw it with Bitlocker, we saw it with Client Side Scanning, we see it with Salt Typhoon. Most people that work on weaponized surveillance systems are entirely apathetic, or see themselves as righteous. Even when the system is known to be bugged, obviously flawed, or outright controlled by a foreign adversary.
Because they believe that it's going to be build anyone by someone else?
Because they are not entirely aware of what they are building?
“Hey boss man, why does this database ‘tracked_individuals’ have columns for license plate numbers, home addresses, and political affiliations?”
Give me a break
You can hire sociopaths to work the ~1% of jobs that require a complete understanding of your moral bankruptcy. Mark Zuckerberg, Tim Cook, Larry Ellison, none of these people ever apologized for their ethical flexibility because it's precisely what qualifies them for such a lucrative job. Persona can be a shell org with 20 evil engineers while their partners absentmindedly do the integration work.
Hope this helps.
Immoral boot-licking human engineers are indistinguishable from LLMs.
A common theme in a lot of movies, books, et..
Edit:forgot the most obvious... money
they think what they're doing is actually good for society
not everyone is in the hackerspace libertarian / socialist sphere
i used to work for a place that used persona despite it adding extra friction to signups (literally resulting in less paying customers to the dismay of PMs) because it was worth it to combat fraud. theres a tradeoff in everything
1. Request your data. Email idv-privacy@withpersona.com or privacy@withpersona.com. Under GDPR, they have 30 days to respond.
2. Request deletion. The verification is done. LinkedIn already has the result. There is no reason for Persona to keep your passport scan and facial geometry on their servers. Ask them to delete it.
3. Contact their DPO. dpo@withpersona.com — that’s their Data Protection Officer. If you want to object to them using your documents as AI training data under “legitimate interests,” this is where you do it.
4. Think twice before verifying. That blue badge might not be worth what you’re trading for it. A checkmark is cosmetic. Biometric data is forever.
I verified my LinkedIn identity. Here's what I handed over
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47098245
1.4K+ points, 490+ comments
They just won't respond, then you can wait for 4+ years and nothing will happen to them. [0]
If you aren't actively organizing you aren't going to accomplish anything.
Remember that people power trumps monetary power, but you have to commit for people power to work.
Some sweet irony about this btw.
We know how useful open source software is, there's no reason why this can't be replicated across the planet.
The better alternative in my eyes is to contribute to existing open source, and only if the US becomes hostile against this, fork said code and move on.
Or does Persona provide that by default? Don't know much about their service...
I keep saying this. This is the playbook -- everything is moving to standardize Sam Altman's biometric authentication cryptocurrency company to use internet services. This has been a slow moving strategy for /years/ and every new step over that period only get closer, not further from this goal.
The ASCII flowcharts all contain jagged vertical lines. This is the biggest indicator of LLM output as no human would ever produce that. You can simply see with your eyes that it's wrong if you even glance at it.
> there’s no way for us to prove that they don’t have access to all of that data anyway. we can only assume that they don’t have access to all of that data. but if you want my two cents, they probably do.
This doesn't quite read as LLM output but it makes the whole article look like a conspiracy theory.
> after trying to write a few exploits, vmfunc decided to browse their infra on shodan. it all started with a Shodan search. a single IP. 34.49.93.177 sitting on Google Cloud in Kansas City. one open port. one SSL certificate. two hostnames that tell a story nobody was supposed to read:
> and the company that runs all of this is the same one that takes your passport photo when you sign up for ChatGPT. same codebase. same platform. different deployment. same facial recognition. same screening algorithms. same data model.
> and as always, the information wants to be free. we didn’t break anything. we didn’t bypass anything. we queried URLs, pressed buttons, and read what came back. if that’s enough to expose the architecture of a global surveillance platform… maybe the problem isn’t us.
These all absolutely stink of LLM writing patterns.
Convenience is to humans, what bulb lights at night are to bugs.
Stand in a hospital and say that credibly. I recommend the maternity ward.
Our consumer markets are a wreck. We have no federal watch dog exercising any authority. We have unchecked intelligence agencies actively trying to enslave the world. Our desire for convenience is not the problem, the people taking advantage of it are.
It is what drives the market quite a bit at least. It's why we've produced over 2 billion cars and use them every day to pollute our own air so we don't have to walk two blocks. Most home appliances are convenience personified, the dishwasher, the microwave, the clothes dryer. It's why we have supply chains up the wazoo to bring products from all corners of the globe to everyone's nearby supermarket, a large amount of it getting thrown away when it's expired unsold. We fly across countries for something as pointless as a business meeting. Hell people now even order a taxi for their food, so they don't have to go out to get it.
Modern life is like at least 60% wastefulness in the name of convenience. Of course people with the option to do so will exploit the one thing that's easily exploitable, that's like water flowing downhill.
Maternity is most often not "life and death." Is the maternity ward just a convenience? Or is the cost worth the benefit? You don't seem to be doing any form of honest analysis.
> Most home appliances are convenience personified, the dishwasher, the microwave, the clothes dryer.
Yes, because, those save time. It's worth having a point of view that other people saving their time, and thus freeing it for more worthwhile endeavors is ultimately a net positive for all of society. You pass these off as mere conveniences. It's a rather bleak misanthropic outlook you seem to have acquired.
> Modern life is like at least 60% wastefulness in the name of convenience.
People own cars to drive more than two blocks. You're only making the most ridiculous version of the argument and you don't have very much to back it up.
> people saving their time, and thus freeing it for more worthwhile endeavors
Do we? Use it for more worthwhile endeavours? I doubt scrolling an online feed of endless bullshit would qualify as that, and most people seem to spend their left over time doing that instead. We're dopamine rush optimizers, not some kind of paragon who spends their time working for the good of society.
Now I'm not saying it makes any sense for us to go back to washing things by hand, but I am saying that automating chores and saving time is like heroin to us and that we'll pay every cent we have for it, as OP's original point was.
> People own cars to drive more than two blocks
Yeah but once we have the ability to drive anywhere it's easy to use it for all kinds of things that we really don't need it for, cause it's just so convenient, fuel prices be damned :)
Your biographic data will leak to every hacker and every government world wide.
I understand AI is trained on human output but that doesn't mean we shouldn't be able to distinguish between the two. I've seen blogs where this particular syntax "That's not x - it's actually y" is repeated 10+ times. That's not normal human writing. Admit I picked a bad example here, just read 5 AI articles in a row before this one.
They promised freedom of speech and liberty and this is what we get.
> long before the Charlie Kirk assassination. > or the left wing, for that matter;How so? Leftist censorship became quite popular on college campuses. The ACLU supported that, and got cold feet about promoting free expression more generally when it involves organizations or causes it doesn't like.
I'm a lefty, but I absolutely believe that both the left and right are deep in the "ends justify the means" weeds with respect to censorship and free expression. I blame partisanship. People used to have respect for someone taking a principled stand that didn't necessarily align with their overall political position. Now, that's just seen as a weak maneuver in the all-important "my team vs your team" culture war.
> The whole conservative project is doomed from the start as it has to confront science and progress like the emancipation by women, lgbt people and certain ethnicities.
I have no idea what you're talking about. There is no scientific or natural law that says that every human should have equal rights. You can totally make a stable society that discriminates on color of skin or possession of certain documents or account balance. It's been done many times. Science does not tell you whether votes should be extended all the way to ducks but not chickens, nor whether unauthorized presence in a country should enable arbitrary search and seizure. Plus, "conservative" covers a lot of ground and someone can legitimately be extremely conservative and completely opposed to (eg) white nationalism at the same time.
Sure, conservatism is always going to drag its heels to recognize and accommodate the sorts of progress in science and other understanding that I'm guessing you're thinking of, but progressives can just as easily go too far too fast and be blind to the tradeoffs and principles involved. The "conservative project" can't be doomed; it will always be a different point on a continuum from the "progressive project", and we'll always be able to argue over where the right point is.
Well, at least until we're all dead or so infantilized by our technology that we stop even asking the questions.
> The right wing went full censorship and surveillance after the Charlie Kirk assassination.
the presentation is bad.
verbosity.
it takes many words for the writer to make a point.
that darn cat.
Hey, I got my first downvotes ever for my nasty comment!
This is the most important section, as the above ones any privacy-conscious person would assume most anyway. I did mention before that we need an open-source platform that tracks the people who work and build such systems. Those are the enablers who have no morals or ethics - a greedy corporation is always greedy, but when the average employee is willing to work full time on building such systems, they need to be exposed publicly, just as they are working relentlessly on violating private people's privacy. It isn't about public humiliation; it's about basic human decency and maintaining a minimum ethical code to abide by. These individuals shouldn't be hired or dealt with, not even a simple connection on LinkedIn.
These individuals are dangerous. They are like rats among us and should be exposed, and I bet some of them are reading this as well.