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The internet would come to a grinding halt as everyone would suddenly become mindful of their browsing. It's not hard to imagine a situation where, say, pornhub

The internet would come to a grinding halt as everyone would suddenly become mindful of their browsing. It's not hard to imagine a situation where, say, pornhub sells its access data and the next day you get sacked at your teaching job.

glandium 1y ago
> sells its access data or has it leaked somehow.
chmod775 1y ago
It doesn't need to. Thanks to asymmetric cryptography governments can in theory provide you with a way to prove you are a human (or of a certain age) without: 1. the government knowing who you are authenticating yourself to 2. or the recipient learning anything but the fact that you are a human 3. or the recipient being able to link you to a previous session if you authenticate yourself again later The EU is trying to build such a scheme for online age verification (I'm not sure if their scheme also extends to point 3 though. Probably?).
- ummonk 1y ago
  How would it prevent you from renting your identity out to a bot farm?
  - overfeed 1y ago
    Besides making yourself party to a criminal conspiracy, I suspect it would be partly the same reason you won't sell/rent your real-world identity to other people today; an illegal immigrant may be willing to rent it from you right now. Mostly, it will because online identifies will be a market for lemons: there will be so many fake/expired/revoked identities being sold that the value of each one will be worth pennies, and that's not commensurate with the risk of someone commiting crimes and linking it to your government-registered identity.
    - coolcoder613 1y ago
      > Mostly, it will because online identifies will be a market for lemons: there will be so many fake/expired/revoked identities being sold that the value of each one will be worth pennies, and that's not commensurate with the risk of someone commiting crimes and linking it to your government-registered identity. That would be trivially solved by using same verification mechanisms they would be used with.
    - palata 1y ago
      > the same reason you won't sell/rent your real-world identity to other people today If you sell your real-world identity to other people today, and they get arrested, then the police will know your identity (obviously). How does that work with a privacy-preserving scheme? If you sell your anonymous token that says that you are a human to a machine and the machine gets arrested, then the police won't be able to know who you are, right? That was the whole point of the privacy-preserving token. I'm genuinely interested, I don't understand how it can work technically and be privacy-preserving.
      - cakealert 1y ago
        It would appear most of the people commenting on the subject don't even understand it. With privacy preserving cryptography the tokens are standalone and have no ties to the identity that spawned them. No enforcement for abuse is possible.
        palata 1y ago
        Right, that's my feeling as well
        overfeed 1y ago
        While it's the privacy advocate's ideal, the politics reality is very few governments will deploy "privacy preserving" cryptography that gets in the way of LE investigations[1]. The best you can hope for is some escrowed service that requires a warrant to unmask the identity for any given token, so privacy is preserved in most cases, and against most parties except law enforcement when there's a valid warrant. 1. They can do it overtly in thr design of the system, or covertly via side-channels, logging, or leaking bits in ways that are hard for an outsider to investigate without access to the complete source code and or/system outputs, such as not-quite-random pseudo-randoms.
- cakealert 1y ago
  Such schemes have the fatal flaw that they can be trivially abused. All you need are a couple of stolen/sold identities and bots start proving their humanness and adultness to everyone.
  - overfeed 1y ago
    > Such schemes have the fatal flaw that they can be trivially abused I wouldn't expect the abuse rate to be higher than what it is for chip-and-pin debit cards. PKI failure modes are well understood and there are mitigations galore.
  - Almondsetat 1y ago
    Blatant automatic behavior can still be detected, and much more definitive actions can be takes in such a system
    - palata 1y ago
      Detecting is a thing, but how do you identify the origin if it was done in a privacy-preserving manner? The whole point was that you couldn't, right?
- xlbuttplug2 1y ago
  I did think asymmetric cryptography but I assumed the validators would be third parties / individual websites and therefore connections could be made using your public key. But I guess having the government itself provide the authentication service makes more sense. I wonder if they'd actually honor 1 instead of forcing recipients to be registered, as presumably they'd be interested in tracking user activity.
- heavyset_go 1y ago
  There isn't a technical solution to this: governments and providers not only want proof of identity matching IDs, they want proof of life, too. This will always end with live video of the person requesting to log in to provide proof of life at the very least, and if they're lazy/want more data, they'll tie in their ID verification process to their video pipeline.
  - debugnik 1y ago
    You already provided proof of a living legal identity when you got the ID, and it already expires to make you provide proof again every few years.
    - heavyset_go 1y ago
      That's not not the kind of proof of life the government and companies want online. They want to make sure their video identification 1) is of a living person right now, and 2) that living person matches their government ID. It's a solution to the "grandma died but we've been collecting her Social Security benefits anyway", or "my son stole my wallet with my ID & credit card", or (god forbid) "We incapacitated/killed this person to access their bank account using facial ID". It's also a solution to the problem advertisers, investors and platforms face of 1) wanting huge piles of video training data for free and 2) determining that a user truly is a monetizable human being and not a freeloader bot using stolen/sold credentials.
      - palata 1y ago
        > That's not not the kind of proof of life the government and companies want online. Well that's your assumption about governments, but it doesn't have to be true. There are governments that don't try to exploit their people. The question is whether such governments can have technical solutions to achieve that or not (I'm genuinely interested in understanding whether or not it's technically feasible).
      - debugnik 1y ago
        It's the kind of proof my government already asks of me to sign documents much, much more important than watching adult content, such as social security benefits.
- palata 1y ago
  But I don't get how is goes for spam or scrapping: if I can pass the test "anonymously", then what prevents me from doing it for illegal purposes? I get it for age verification: it is difficult for a child to get a token that says they are allowed to access porn because adults around them don't want them to access porn (and even though one could sell tokens online, it effectively makes it harder to access porn as a child). But how does it prevent someone from using their ID to get tokens for their scrapper? If it's anonymous, then there is no risk in doing it, is there?
  - terribleperson 1y ago
    One option I can think of is that the attesting authority might block you if you're behaving badly.
    - account42 1y ago
      That doesn't work without the attesting authority knowing what you are doing, which would make this scheme no longer anonymous.
      - A1kmm 1y ago
        It does work as long as the attesting authority doesn't allow issuing a new identity (before it expires) if the old one is lost. You (Y) generate a keypair and send your public key to the the attesting authority A, and keep your private key. You get a certificate. You visit site b.com, and it asks for your identity, so you hash b.com|yourprivatekey. You submit the hash to b.com, along with a ZKP that you possess a private key that makes the hash work out, and that the private key corresponds to the public key in the certificate, and that the certificate has a valid signature from A. If you break the rules of b.com, b.com bans your hash. Also, they set a hard rate limit on how many requests per hash are allowed. You could technically sell your hash and proof, but a scraper would need to buy up lots of them to do scraping. Now the downside is that if you go to A and say your private key was compromised, or you lost control of it - the answer has to be tough luck. In reality, the certificates would expire after a while, so you could get a new hash every 6 months or something (and circumvent the bans), and if you lost the key, you'd need to wait out the expiry. The alternative is a scheme where you and A share a secret key - but then they can calculate your hash and conspire with b.com to unmask you.
wredcoll 1y ago
I live with the naïve and optimistic dream that something like that would just show that everyone was in the list so they can't use it to discriminate against people.
account42 1y ago
You are right about the negative outcomes that this might have but you have way too much faith in the average person caring enough before it happens to them.

glandium 1y ago

> sells its access data or has it leaked somehow.

chmod775 1y ago

It doesn't need to. Thanks to asymmetric cryptography governments can in theory provide you with a way to prove you are a human (or of a certain age) without: 1. the government knowing who you are authenticating yourself to 2. or the recipient learning anything but the fact that you are a human 3. or the recipient being able to link you to a previous session if you authenticate yourself again later The EU is trying to build such a scheme for online age verification (I'm not sure if their scheme also extends to point 3 though. Probably?).

ummonk 1y ago
How would it prevent you from renting your identity out to a bot farm?
- overfeed 1y ago
  Besides making yourself party to a criminal conspiracy, I suspect it would be partly the same reason you won't sell/rent your real-world identity to other people today; an illegal immigrant may be willing to rent it from you right now. Mostly, it will because online identifies will be a market for lemons: there will be so many fake/expired/revoked identities being sold that the value of each one will be worth pennies, and that's not commensurate with the risk of someone commiting crimes and linking it to your government-registered identity.
  - coolcoder613 1y ago
    > Mostly, it will because online identifies will be a market for lemons: there will be so many fake/expired/revoked identities being sold that the value of each one will be worth pennies, and that's not commensurate with the risk of someone commiting crimes and linking it to your government-registered identity. That would be trivially solved by using same verification mechanisms they would be used with.
  - palata 1y ago
    > the same reason you won't sell/rent your real-world identity to other people today If you sell your real-world identity to other people today, and they get arrested, then the police will know your identity (obviously). How does that work with a privacy-preserving scheme? If you sell your anonymous token that says that you are a human to a machine and the machine gets arrested, then the police won't be able to know who you are, right? That was the whole point of the privacy-preserving token. I'm genuinely interested, I don't understand how it can work technically and be privacy-preserving.
    - cakealert 1y ago
      It would appear most of the people commenting on the subject don't even understand it. With privacy preserving cryptography the tokens are standalone and have no ties to the identity that spawned them. No enforcement for abuse is possible.
      - palata 1y ago
        Right, that's my feeling as well
        overfeed 1y ago
        While it's the privacy advocate's ideal, the politics reality is very few governments will deploy "privacy preserving" cryptography that gets in the way of LE investigations[1]. The best you can hope for is some escrowed service that requires a warrant to unmask the identity for any given token, so privacy is preserved in most cases, and against most parties except law enforcement when there's a valid warrant. 1. They can do it overtly in thr design of the system, or covertly via side-channels, logging, or leaking bits in ways that are hard for an outsider to investigate without access to the complete source code and or/system outputs, such as not-quite-random pseudo-randoms.
cakealert 1y ago
Such schemes have the fatal flaw that they can be trivially abused. All you need are a couple of stolen/sold identities and bots start proving their humanness and adultness to everyone.
- overfeed 1y ago
  > Such schemes have the fatal flaw that they can be trivially abused I wouldn't expect the abuse rate to be higher than what it is for chip-and-pin debit cards. PKI failure modes are well understood and there are mitigations galore.
- Almondsetat 1y ago
  Blatant automatic behavior can still be detected, and much more definitive actions can be takes in such a system
  - palata 1y ago
    Detecting is a thing, but how do you identify the origin if it was done in a privacy-preserving manner? The whole point was that you couldn't, right?
xlbuttplug2 1y ago
I did think asymmetric cryptography but I assumed the validators would be third parties / individual websites and therefore connections could be made using your public key. But I guess having the government itself provide the authentication service makes more sense. I wonder if they'd actually honor 1 instead of forcing recipients to be registered, as presumably they'd be interested in tracking user activity.
heavyset_go 1y ago
There isn't a technical solution to this: governments and providers not only want proof of identity matching IDs, they want proof of life, too. This will always end with live video of the person requesting to log in to provide proof of life at the very least, and if they're lazy/want more data, they'll tie in their ID verification process to their video pipeline.
- debugnik 1y ago
  You already provided proof of a living legal identity when you got the ID, and it already expires to make you provide proof again every few years.
  - heavyset_go 1y ago
    That's not not the kind of proof of life the government and companies want online. They want to make sure their video identification 1) is of a living person right now, and 2) that living person matches their government ID. It's a solution to the "grandma died but we've been collecting her Social Security benefits anyway", or "my son stole my wallet with my ID & credit card", or (god forbid) "We incapacitated/killed this person to access their bank account using facial ID". It's also a solution to the problem advertisers, investors and platforms face of 1) wanting huge piles of video training data for free and 2) determining that a user truly is a monetizable human being and not a freeloader bot using stolen/sold credentials.
    - palata 1y ago
      > That's not not the kind of proof of life the government and companies want online. Well that's your assumption about governments, but it doesn't have to be true. There are governments that don't try to exploit their people. The question is whether such governments can have technical solutions to achieve that or not (I'm genuinely interested in understanding whether or not it's technically feasible).
    - debugnik 1y ago
      It's the kind of proof my government already asks of me to sign documents much, much more important than watching adult content, such as social security benefits.
palata 1y ago
But I don't get how is goes for spam or scrapping: if I can pass the test "anonymously", then what prevents me from doing it for illegal purposes? I get it for age verification: it is difficult for a child to get a token that says they are allowed to access porn because adults around them don't want them to access porn (and even though one could sell tokens online, it effectively makes it harder to access porn as a child). But how does it prevent someone from using their ID to get tokens for their scrapper? If it's anonymous, then there is no risk in doing it, is there?
- terribleperson 1y ago
  One option I can think of is that the attesting authority might block you if you're behaving badly.
  - account42 1y ago
    That doesn't work without the attesting authority knowing what you are doing, which would make this scheme no longer anonymous.
    - A1kmm 1y ago
      It does work as long as the attesting authority doesn't allow issuing a new identity (before it expires) if the old one is lost. You (Y) generate a keypair and send your public key to the the attesting authority A, and keep your private key. You get a certificate. You visit site b.com, and it asks for your identity, so you hash b.com|yourprivatekey. You submit the hash to b.com, along with a ZKP that you possess a private key that makes the hash work out, and that the private key corresponds to the public key in the certificate, and that the certificate has a valid signature from A. If you break the rules of b.com, b.com bans your hash. Also, they set a hard rate limit on how many requests per hash are allowed. You could technically sell your hash and proof, but a scraper would need to buy up lots of them to do scraping. Now the downside is that if you go to A and say your private key was compromised, or you lost control of it - the answer has to be tough luck. In reality, the certificates would expire after a while, so you could get a new hash every 6 months or something (and circumvent the bans), and if you lost the key, you'd need to wait out the expiry. The alternative is a scheme where you and A share a secret key - but then they can calculate your hash and conspire with b.com to unmask you.

wredcoll 1y ago

I live with the naïve and optimistic dream that something like that would just show that everyone was in the list so they can't use it to discriminate against people.

account42 1y ago

You are right about the negative outcomes that this might have but you have way too much faith in the average person caring enough before it happens to them.