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Why are unalienable IDs an awful idea? Unalienable IDs seem to me to be the "default" of human societies. Before technology, everyone had "unalienable IDs" -- i

Why are unalienable IDs an awful idea? Unalienable IDs seem to me to be the "default" of human societies. Before technology, everyone had "unalienable IDs" -- if you saw Bob, it was Bob.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
jacquesm 3y ago
Or Bob's twin brother. Or someone that really looked like Bob.
afavour 3y ago
I'm always skeptical of "before technology" comparison because they rarely account for the radical differences of the world today, like scale. But in this case the comparison doesn't really work. If Bob went to a new town he could introduce himself as Dave and no-one would be any the wiser. By comparison eyeball scans are owned by a private company, infinitely replicable and reusable. They could follow you absolutely everywhere you go without your permission.
- joe_the_user 3y ago
  Also, biometrics aren't like people recognizing each other. They eventually have to be become data sent over a network so they're basically a password/id designed/assumed to not be alterable or spoofable - but that assumption is generally false. Hacking can happen from anything from someone getting private info to someone walking around with a mask. And here, as mentioned, there's no password resets available.
  - crimsontech 3y ago
    I wonder how we handle stolen biometric data? Do we invalidate it like a stolen certificate? Sorry sir, your eye has been revoked, you can no longer authenticate to this, or any of our partner services.
    - soco 3y ago
      It's difficult to have your eye stolen (let's not get into gore please). But they could simply hack the backend, and say your eye belong to someone else. The app now shows Bob the bank robber being Dave the bank manager, just long enough to empty the vaults. Oh it was on blockchain so you can see afterwards that it was actually Bob?
      - psd1 3y ago
        Or the inept might trade their IDs for instant cash, as is actually happening (reportedly). Since Worldcoin is bribing 3rd-world grannies to sign up. I know that HN is crawling with individual-responsibility people. To those people I say: do you shrug coldly when your aged mothers get scammed? Are villages without electricity fair game?
- salad-tycoon 3y ago
  Worse still, Your eyeballs are scanned now everyone will think you are Bob, even if you actually are Dave, because that’s what the app says. Doesn’t matter what you say or argue because the app says you are Bob and the app is never wrong. I was at Walmart buying some heavily discounted gel blasters. I ordered them for pickup originally but then thought “Walmart employee will misplace it “accidentally” and then buy it when the shift is over” (it happens, a lot). As such, I decide to go myself and pick them up. Turns out Walmart online vs in store clearance price is a big difference so I ask for a price adjustment at the register. I wait for the super user trainer expert person who then calls more super expert backup. They proceed to explain to me that they could do a price adjustment but the app says there are none in stock. Mind you I have the blasters right there at the register and explain to them that these products actually are in stock and say “can we all agree that we are all seeing the same thing right here?” Answer: sorry, no because again the app says it’s not in stock and we no longer have that product. The app says no and what the app says is final. Dammit. You are Bob and these gel blasters in front of us don’t exist. Goodluck Bob.
  - pschuegr 3y ago
    Kafka wept
  - evolve2k 3y ago
    My mistake, I’ve just remembered these must already be mine. Proceeds to walk out with them.
    - spiderfarmer 3y ago
      That’s what I would have done.
    - Obscurity4340 3y ago
      Take as many as you like
majormajor 3y ago
There's two things going on - technology, like you mention, but also scale. Scale brings trust problems. Got a million people in your city? Even without technology, you probably don't know Bob. Bob can rip you off without realistically expecting repercussions, unlike in a small village where everyone depends on each other, and Bob would get kicked out and have to try to find somewhere else. So scale also breaks a lot of the value of permenant IDs, and things like outsourced trust (credit reports, etc) will never be perfect. And in a big society, even a 99% success rate would be A LOT of people getting fucked over. Can this eyeball-thing fix that? Largely, no - any errors in the system that aren't identity theft will still be there. And potentially worse: even fancy technological systems are almost always vulnerable to technological exploits. And then if too much trust is placed in the validation mechanism, a bad actor could potentially go nuts.
callalex 3y ago
If eyeballs were unailienable then safety glasses wouldn’t exist.
riversflow 3y ago
Before technology, Bob could skip 3 towns over and change his name to Rick.
- Tanoc 3y ago
  Which was useful. If Bob was the subject of a targeted attack by Larry that unjustly sullied his reputation or opportunities, moving from Aton to Ceeton and changing his name to Rick means that Larry's erasure of Bob's standing is effectively reversed. Sure, it could be abused. But literally everything has the potential to be abused. Life is about weighing the risks of abuse against the reward of opportunity. And honestly I think we've gotten really bad at assessing that risk in the past half century, with powerful individuals muddying our perception even further to pursue their own goals.
kwhitefoot 3y ago
Not everything old is good.
bloqs 3y ago
Backalley eye replacement surgery
whatshisface 3y ago
The "If you saw Bob" identity was limited to a few hundred people if you were a king, and a few dozen otherwise. Biometrics in digital systems will allow the most disagreeable out of a billion people to positively identify you.
aorist 3y ago
Unalienable IDs might be the default of small-scale face-to-face societies, but not ones which operate at scale. Not even "Bob" can serve as a fixed identifier without intentional state action — (sur)names were very often intentionally assigned to make administration (e.g. taxation) easier: > Campaigns to assign permanent patronyms have typically taken place, as one might expect, in the context of a state’s exertions to put its fiscal system on a sounder and more lucrative footing. Fearing, with good reason, that an effort to enumerate and register them could be a prelude to some new tax burden or conscription, local officials and the population at large often resisted such campaigns. https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/james-c-scott-seeing-like-a-state#toc19 https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/james-c-scott-seeing...
goodbyesf 3y ago
> Unalienable IDs seem to me to be the "default" of human societies. Before technology, everyone had "unalienable IDs" -- if you saw Bob, it was Bob. Interesting. That makes me wonder if cultures around the world feared twins precisely due to the fact that ''unalienable ids' were the default of human societies'. In 'Things Fall Apart', identical twins are automatically 'dispatched' in the evil forest as soon as they are born because they are deemed 'evil'. I never understood why. But since identical twins break the natural default id system of human societies, maybe some societies felt it better to sacrifice the few to preserve the system.

Why are unalienable IDs an awful idea? Unalienable IDs seem to me to be the "default" of human societies. Before technology, everyone had "unalienable IDs" -- if you saw Bob, it was Bob.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

jacquesm 3y ago

Or Bob's twin brother. Or someone that really looked like Bob.

afavour 3y ago

I'm always skeptical of "before technology" comparison because they rarely account for the radical differences of the world today, like scale. But in this case the comparison doesn't really work. If Bob went to a new town he could introduce himself as Dave and no-one would be any the wiser. By comparison eyeball scans are owned by a private company, infinitely replicable and reusable. They could follow you absolutely everywhere you go without your permission.

joe_the_user 3y ago
Also, biometrics aren't like people recognizing each other. They eventually have to be become data sent over a network so they're basically a password/id designed/assumed to not be alterable or spoofable - but that assumption is generally false. Hacking can happen from anything from someone getting private info to someone walking around with a mask. And here, as mentioned, there's no password resets available.
- crimsontech 3y ago
  I wonder how we handle stolen biometric data? Do we invalidate it like a stolen certificate? Sorry sir, your eye has been revoked, you can no longer authenticate to this, or any of our partner services.
  - soco 3y ago
    It's difficult to have your eye stolen (let's not get into gore please). But they could simply hack the backend, and say your eye belong to someone else. The app now shows Bob the bank robber being Dave the bank manager, just long enough to empty the vaults. Oh it was on blockchain so you can see afterwards that it was actually Bob?
    - psd1 3y ago
      Or the inept might trade their IDs for instant cash, as is actually happening (reportedly). Since Worldcoin is bribing 3rd-world grannies to sign up. I know that HN is crawling with individual-responsibility people. To those people I say: do you shrug coldly when your aged mothers get scammed? Are villages without electricity fair game?
salad-tycoon 3y ago
Worse still, Your eyeballs are scanned now everyone will think you are Bob, even if you actually are Dave, because that’s what the app says. Doesn’t matter what you say or argue because the app says you are Bob and the app is never wrong. I was at Walmart buying some heavily discounted gel blasters. I ordered them for pickup originally but then thought “Walmart employee will misplace it “accidentally” and then buy it when the shift is over” (it happens, a lot). As such, I decide to go myself and pick them up. Turns out Walmart online vs in store clearance price is a big difference so I ask for a price adjustment at the register. I wait for the super user trainer expert person who then calls more super expert backup. They proceed to explain to me that they could do a price adjustment but the app says there are none in stock. Mind you I have the blasters right there at the register and explain to them that these products actually are in stock and say “can we all agree that we are all seeing the same thing right here?” Answer: sorry, no because again the app says it’s not in stock and we no longer have that product. The app says no and what the app says is final. Dammit. You are Bob and these gel blasters in front of us don’t exist. Goodluck Bob.
- pschuegr 3y ago
  Kafka wept
- evolve2k 3y ago
  My mistake, I’ve just remembered these must already be mine. Proceeds to walk out with them.
  - spiderfarmer 3y ago
    That’s what I would have done.
  - Obscurity4340 3y ago
    Take as many as you like

majormajor 3y ago

There's two things going on - technology, like you mention, but also scale. Scale brings trust problems. Got a million people in your city? Even without technology, you probably don't know Bob. Bob can rip you off without realistically expecting repercussions, unlike in a small village where everyone depends on each other, and Bob would get kicked out and have to try to find somewhere else. So scale also breaks a lot of the value of permenant IDs, and things like outsourced trust (credit reports, etc) will never be perfect. And in a big society, even a 99% success rate would be A LOT of people getting fucked over. Can this eyeball-thing fix that? Largely, no - any errors in the system that aren't identity theft will still be there. And potentially worse: even fancy technological systems are almost always vulnerable to technological exploits. And then if too much trust is placed in the validation mechanism, a bad actor could potentially go nuts.

callalex 3y ago

If eyeballs were unailienable then safety glasses wouldn’t exist.

riversflow 3y ago

Before technology, Bob could skip 3 towns over and change his name to Rick.

Tanoc 3y ago
Which was useful. If Bob was the subject of a targeted attack by Larry that unjustly sullied his reputation or opportunities, moving from Aton to Ceeton and changing his name to Rick means that Larry's erasure of Bob's standing is effectively reversed. Sure, it could be abused. But literally everything has the potential to be abused. Life is about weighing the risks of abuse against the reward of opportunity. And honestly I think we've gotten really bad at assessing that risk in the past half century, with powerful individuals muddying our perception even further to pursue their own goals.

kwhitefoot 3y ago

Not everything old is good.

bloqs 3y ago

Backalley eye replacement surgery

whatshisface 3y ago

The "If you saw Bob" identity was limited to a few hundred people if you were a king, and a few dozen otherwise. Biometrics in digital systems will allow the most disagreeable out of a billion people to positively identify you.

aorist 3y ago

Unalienable IDs might be the default of small-scale face-to-face societies, but not ones which operate at scale. Not even "Bob" can serve as a fixed identifier without intentional state action — (sur)names were very often intentionally assigned to make administration (e.g. taxation) easier: > Campaigns to assign permanent patronyms have typically taken place, as one might expect, in the context of a state’s exertions to put its fiscal system on a sounder and more lucrative footing. Fearing, with good reason, that an effort to enumerate and register them could be a prelude to some new tax burden or conscription, local officials and the population at large often resisted such campaigns. https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/james-c-scott-seeing-like-a-state#toc19 https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/james-c-scott-seeing...

goodbyesf 3y ago

> Unalienable IDs seem to me to be the "default" of human societies. Before technology, everyone had "unalienable IDs" -- if you saw Bob, it was Bob. Interesting. That makes me wonder if cultures around the world feared twins precisely due to the fact that ''unalienable ids' were the default of human societies'. In 'Things Fall Apart', identical twins are automatically 'dispatched' in the evil forest as soon as they are born because they are deemed 'evil'. I never understood why. But since identical twins break the natural default id system of human societies, maybe some societies felt it better to sacrifice the few to preserve the system.