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I've been joking about a need for "notary factor" for a long time. There's an existing, deep and distributed network of notaries public that could be reused for

I've been joking about a need for "notary factor" for a long time. There's an existing, deep and distributed network of notaries public that could be reused for stronger authentication in the modern world. In classic banking if you had a recovery problem you could send certain types of notarized letters to get stuff done. It was slow: however long it took to prepare the letter, find a notary public to get it notarized, and then presumably snail mail it to its destination. But sometimes slow is better: if someone is trying to steal my account, if they need to get the right forms notarized and mailed to the right PO Box, there are many steps along the way where I can intercede or a notary public can interject ("I won't notarize this because my ethics do not allow it.") or presumably human recipient at a PO Box can reject the mail for any number of violations or failures of documentation. I think it would be great if the recovery mechanism for "ordinary people" took about the same amount of time as a notarized letter. In that worst case where you are locked out of your account for a week or two it won't feel great, but it also helps you feel better that some jerk trying to steal your stuff can't do it any faster either. There are all kinds of fun technical things that could be used to actually build interesting "notary factor" tools. I think tech companies mostly reject how cool it could be to build because they see "slow" as a "bug" rather than a "feature".

j-bos 4y ago
I agree with this so much. As someone who has had a fair share of notorial interactions, it's low hanging fruit that notaries are not being used to authenticate users. It could even be a means of fighting spam/bots while maintainh anominity.
NoZebra120vClip 4y ago
> "I won't notarize this because my ethics do not allow it." I heard those words uttered at my bank one day, and I became furious. I'd been using, in good faith, a licensed notary at a shipping store, and it turns out he'd been notarizing any damn thing I wanted without regard for proper form. I had been extremely naive about notary publics, and when I ran into one with ethics, it cast the sketchy dude into sharp contrast. Thankfully I've had no legal repercussions due to the invalidity of illegally notarized documents in the past, and I haven't needed to notarize something in a while since then.
sofixa 4y ago
In France there's L'identité Numerique by the Post Office where they provide you a digital identity, verified in person by a post office employee which you can then use to authenticate to various services. EU ID cards also come with biometrics and NFC included, so they can be used to prove your identity digitally (there was a concept in France for an app that reads the NFC, makes you take a video selfie to confirm it's the same person, and then uses that to securely verify your identity)

j-bos 4y ago

I agree with this so much. As someone who has had a fair share of notorial interactions, it's low hanging fruit that notaries are not being used to authenticate users. It could even be a means of fighting spam/bots while maintainh anominity.

NoZebra120vClip 4y ago

> "I won't notarize this because my ethics do not allow it." I heard those words uttered at my bank one day, and I became furious. I'd been using, in good faith, a licensed notary at a shipping store, and it turns out he'd been notarizing any damn thing I wanted without regard for proper form. I had been extremely naive about notary publics, and when I ran into one with ethics, it cast the sketchy dude into sharp contrast. Thankfully I've had no legal repercussions due to the invalidity of illegally notarized documents in the past, and I haven't needed to notarize something in a while since then.

sofixa 4y ago

In France there's L'identité Numerique by the Post Office where they provide you a digital identity, verified in person by a post office employee which you can then use to authenticate to various services. EU ID cards also come with biometrics and NFC included, so they can be used to prove your identity digitally (there was a concept in France for an app that reads the NFC, makes you take a video selfie to confirm it's the same person, and then uses that to securely verify your identity)