The web should remain anonymous by default | Hacker News Reader

The web should remain anonymous by default

blog.mozilla.org

"Careful design of the protocols maintains privacy by preventing sites from learning any additional information beyond personhood." Is personhood verification desirable? Say, HN introduces personhood verification and budgets the number of posts or comments per person. That would limit the amount of AI posts, which seems to be desirable judging by the recent discussion (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47340079). What are the drawbacks though?

I hadn't thought of that.

Check age of persons but not personhood. How old are LLM's?

How do we check? Ask for a cookie recipe? What person can do that from memory?

The idea is to leverage information from site A (say, a bank) who knows a lot about the user to attest to site B (say, HN) that the user is a real person, without revealing any other information known by site A to site B.

That's an interesting trust chain.

> Is personhood verification desirable?

It's hard for me to see how it could be done without unacceptable exposure. So, right now, it's the opposite of desirable to me and I would avoid using any sites that require it.

In my limited understanding, with zero-knowledge proofs. That's also what the blog mentions. Say, a website issues a challenge, you sign the challendge with your private key supplied by either your government (or some other authority). The signature is verified against a big set of public keys using a ZKP without knowing which specific public key matches.

I imagine the problem is more economics and politics than technology. Say, personhood verification becomes available. Then it is also that much easier to mandate age verification, and that becomes a slippery slope.

Yes, I'm aware of zero-knowledge proofs, but they aren't sufficient all by themselves.

> I imagine the problem is more economics and politics than technology.

Exactly so, yes. That doesn't make the problem any less serious. It also makes it very hard to put any real trust in technological solutions. You still have to trust that the solution provider is being honest, has implemented everything correctly, etc. I can't think of any entity that I have that much faith in.

The system is mediated by the browser, so the source code can be inspected by anyone and verified not to leak information.

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