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OpenAI, the US government and Persona built an identity surveillance machine
Related ongoing thread: Discord cuts ties with identity verification software, Persona - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47136036 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47136036 - Feb 2026 (282 comments)
- tinfoilhatter 8mo ago[flagged]
- akramachamarei 8mo agoI love it when names of things match their characteristics.
- tinfoilhatter 8mo agoExcept everything I said was factual, and nothing was conspiratorial. If you disagree, please point out where I was factually incorrect. Otherwise, you should probably change your username to ignoramus or denierofreality or something similar. Unless you want to be viewed as a hypocrite that is.
- akramachamarei 8mo agoI am earnestly disappointed your comment was flagged because I've forgotten what it was and can't newly reflect on your response!
- RiverCrochet 8mo ago[flagged]
- zoklet-enjoyer 8mo agoNo
- outside1234 8mo agoNo, the mark of the beast is everyone in the Epstein files
- johnnyanmac 8mo agoSo, less a mark and more an abyss to stare into?
- tinfoilhatter 8mo agoWhat do the people in the Epstein files have to do with a mark that people need to receive in order to participate in society? I'm confused.
- billfor 8mo agoYes
- blurbleblurble 8mo agoThey rhyme
- throw4847285 8mo agoWell if you will turn your attention to my Straussian reading of the most popular comic books and anime, you may find that...
- MattDaEskimo 8mo agoWhat can those do from a separate country, who unfortunately had their identity verified through Persona (LinkedIn in my case).
- drac89 8mo agoFrom the blog post I've recently read; https://thelocalstack.eu/posts/linkedin-identity-verification-privacy/ https://thelocalstack.eu/posts/linkedin-identity-verificatio... 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.
- hbcondo714 8mo agoAs heavily discussed here 3 days ago (Persona is the same company LinkedIn uses for their ID verification process): I verified my LinkedIn identity. Here's what I handed over https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47098245 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47098245 1.4K+ points, 490+ comments
- deaux 8mo ago> 1. Request your data. Email idv-privacy@withpersona.com or privacy@withpersona.com. Under GDPR, they have 30 days to respond. They just won't respond, then you can wait for 4+ years and nothing will happen to them. [0] [0] https://noyb.eu/en/project/dpa/dpc-ireland https://noyb.eu/en/project/dpa/dpc-ireland
- tasoeur 8mo agoJust requested deletion through this form: https://withpersona.com/dsar https://withpersona.com/dsar
- ArchieScrivener 8mo agoWhy the myspace music?
- OneDeuxTriSeiGo 8mo agowhimsy
- deleted 8mo ago[deleted]
- ericd 8mo agoIs that… Chrono Trigger?
- deleted 8mo ago[deleted]
- cloverich 8mo agoGoing to copy paste my comment from today's other thread[3] that linked to this: 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-exposure-non-production-subdomain https://withpersona.com/blog/post-incident-review-source-map... [2]: https://x.com/Persona_IDV/status/2025048195773198385?s=20 https://x.com/Persona_IDV/status/2025048195773198385?s=20 [3]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47136036 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47136036
- aeldidi 8mo agoThe withpersona.com URL seems to return 404.
- cloverich 8mo agofixed ty
- deleted 8mo ago[deleted]
- kelvinjps10 8mo agoThey did good damage control with that post
- cloverich 8mo agoThe author has published part 2 of the series... def worth the read: https://vmfunc.re/blog/persona-2 https://vmfunc.re/blog/persona-2
- jtbayly 8mo ago[flagged]
- tomhow 8mo agoPlease don't post LLM output on HN. If an article is unreadable, we accept a link to an archived version of the original content (on a site like Archive.org or Archive.today), not a summary, because then people comment in response to the summary, which may not be an accurate representation of the original content.
- pharos92 8mo agoIt seems like at every technological step, we're sold the dream and delivered the meme. We always end up with the worst possible combination of players, ideas and outcomes; with the promise of what the said technology delivers in terms of additional freedom or free time never realised. How many more broken social contracts can society endure before it crumbles?
- ferguess_k 8mo agoFrom my understanding, we are pretty close to a Dystopian world where all elites of a certain group collaborate to run a Super Leviathan. We still gotta choose our flavors, which may not be feasible in maybe 5-10 years when those leviathans clash into each other.
- measurablefunc 8mo agoGoliath's Curse by Luke Kemp covers it pretty well I think.
- ferguess_k 8mo agoThanks for the recommendation.
- GolfPopper 8mo agoLikewise, thank you for the recommendation. I obviously haven't read Goliath's Curse yet, but it seems like Joseph Tainter's The Collapse of Complex Societies (1988) might also be interesting for the same readers.
- dylan604 8mo agoIt's not like this is surprising, there have been plenty of sci-fi books/movies that have predicted this very thing. How many movies have the haves lived above ground/off planet, while the have nots have lived underground or stuck on a apocalyptic planet. 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.
- ms170888 8mo ago[flagged]
- rd 8mo agoThe amount of green accounts that are obvious LLM spam has increased what seems to be 10x in the past couple of months. What's going on?
- sealeck 8mo agoWhy is this LLM spam?
- rd 8mo agoJust check comment history, each comment follows the exact same structure
- deleted 8mo ago[deleted]
- ssk42 8mo agoClawdBots can now more easily interact with the Internet than regular agents, so you wind up with Moltbook leaking
- SkyeCA 8mo ago> What's going on? People are doing their best to turn Dead Internet Theory into Dead Internet Reality.
- snowhale 8mo ago[flagged]
- deleted 8mo ago[deleted]
- deleted 8mo ago[deleted]
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- FarmerPotato 8mo agoIs this whole unreadable article just the output from an AI prompt describing a techno-thriller?
- random3 8mo agolikely not. Being able to read and understand is a matter of skill though. There are many technical terms there that may make it unreadable for non-technical audience. But you can solve that by having an AI explain it to you.
- FarmerPotato 8mo agoIt's not my skills. I could decipher it if I spent enough time (and had plain text). the presentation is bad. verbosity. it takes many words for the writer to make a point. that darn cat.
- IAmGraydon 8mo agoI didn't find this to be the case at all. It's quite concise and clear. There's just a lot of information presented.
- dizhn 8mo agoAre you going to ignore the whole operating system emulation which plays audio when you enter it? I think the article itself is fine too but if this guy wanted to reach more people this should have been plain text .
- FarmerPotato 8mo agoWhat irked me was the main text was grey on grey, low contrast. While the code boxes were high contrast. And on the phone screen that stupid cat. Hey, I got my first downvotes ever for my nasty comment!
- sebastianconcpt 8mo agoQuite some time ago I said and now repeat: Convenience is to humans, what bulb lights at night are to bugs.
- esafak 8mo agoNo pain, no gain.
- themafia 8mo agoRidiculous. 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.
- moffkalast 8mo agoWhy a hospital? There's very little convenience at play when it's a life and death situation. 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.
- themafia 8mo ago> Why a hospital? 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.
- newzino 8mo ago[flagged]
- Ancalagon 8mo agoWhy do so many engineers willingly build things bad for society?
- bombdailer 8mo agoBecause the highest values of our society are non-values.
- mikestew 8mo agoBecause it generally pays well. I'd wax philosophically, but you can come to your own conclusions from that little nugget.
- popalchemist 8mo agoEnough said. Since the "death of God" (per Nietzsche - the collapse of the metaphysics underpinning our morals and therefore cultural norms and behaviors) the modus operandi has been the utilitarian "get what's yours." 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.
- Ancalagon 8mo agoYou'd think empathy would just be enough, its very sad.
- asdfman123 8mo agoEvery accusation is a confession
- popalchemist 8mo agoNot every. That would be DARVO. Sometimes a spade is a spade, or a pedophile is a pedophile, to make a very clear example.
- 4midori 8mo agoIn response to a data request, Persona says: 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 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 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.
- plagiarist 8mo agoThis is the same complete bullshit trying to remove oneself from political donation emails. "Oh, okay, we will remove you from that one." Days later it's a "different campaign." Sometimes it's the exact same people from weeks ago who have just renamed their campaign and started sending again. We need far stronger laws for all of it, which will never happen because the rot and corruption has fully metastasized.
- jorts 8mo ago100% the political campaigns pinging you is endless and you cannot escape it. I have dozens of campaigns pinging me daily and I mark them all as spam as I never signed up for this nonsense. Give me a way to block them all and remove me from their database.
- mistrial9 8mo ago
- raincole 8mo agohttps://withpersona.com/customers/openai https://withpersona.com/customers/openai Persona's side of the story.
- PostOnce 8mo agoTheir side of the story is that they want to flag people as "too risky to be allowed to use AI"? 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.
- tr_alts 8mo agoThe right wing went full censorship and surveillance after the Charlie Kirk assassination. It is probably not a coincidence that they targeted Discord first, because the suspect was in a Discord group. They promised freedom of speech and liberty and this is what we get.
- hactually 8mo agonothing to do with left or right. the UK is left and has the most Orwellian surveillance state outside of China
- platevoltage 8mo agoThe current Labour Party is NOT Left by any definition.
- jcranmer 8mo agoThe right wing went full censorship and surveillance long before the Charlie Kirk assassination. Anyone who believed that the right wing (or the left wing, for that matter; let's not pretend that censorious dipshittery is not bipartisan) was honestly promising freedom of speech as opposed to merely freedom of speech they like and censorship of speech they don't like was at best willfully blinding themselves to the actual actions of politicians.
- exceptione 8mo ago> long before the Charlie Kirk assassination. True. The free speech narratives are mere tools against opposition by promoting the most childish and stupidly rigid interpretations thereof, not something they really believe in. 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. > or the left wing, for that matter; Both sides is uncalled for. Far left and the horse shoe, sure, but a) far left is very fringe, and b) lets not equate them with a well funded actual insurrection of oligarch and white nationalists with a paramilitary.
- edverma2 8mo agoThis is a hilarious personal website! Love it. Even better that it's paired with quality content.
- spacebacon 8mo agoI felt alive again as I used my physical volume button down to focus on the text.
- mock-possum 8mo agoNot so cute when there’s auto play audio and no controls to stop it on mobile
- jcgrillo 8mo agoI like it. It's like wandering into someone else's house. Their stereo is playing, they're telling you some interesting story. It's their party, I'm just a guest. It reminds me of how the web used to feel.
- 8mo ago
- dang 8mo agoComments moved to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47140632 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47140632.
- int32_64 8mo agoBased on the Anthropic distillation news yesterday I wonder if the AI companies are going to get much tighter with KYC.
- disgruntledphd2 8mo agoI get the KYC concerns for API access, but I'm sortof baffled at why they'd need all of the AML stuff, given that they're not payment processors/financial institutions. Or does Persona provide that by default? Don't know much about their service...
- yoyohello13 8mo agoThis website really is incredible!
- jcgrillo 8mo agowork of art
- dylan604 8mo ago"what is Fivecast ONYX? an AI-powered surveillance platform purchased by ICE for $4.2 million and CBP for additional license costs. according to Fivecast’s own documentation and EFF’s reporting, they do automated collection of multimedia data from social media and dark web, build “digital footprints” from biographical data, tracks shifts in sentiment and emotion, assigns risk scores, searches across 300+ platforms and 28+ billion data points, identifies people with “violent tendencies”" 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?
- varenc 8mo agoAccording to Persona's damage control article[0], the subdomain had "onyx" in its name because that's the internal code name for the project, and it's named after the pokémon Onyx. No connection to Fivecast ONYX. [0] https://withpersona.com/blog/post-incident-review-source-map-exposure-non-production-subdomain https://withpersona.com/blog/post-incident-review-source-map...
- crimsoneer 8mo agoI don't really understand why ICE would have a Persona OPenAI connection...?
- pseudosaid 8mo agoReally? Sounds like they are a customer.
- m4rtink 8mo agoI am not sure summoning Nintendo due to trademark infringement will help with damage control. ;-)
- tremon 8mo agoNaming a fantasy creature after a common gemstone should make it non-trademarkable anyway, but I'd love to see Nintendo tie up the US government in court for years.
- baddash 8mo agothank god there's an annoying fucking cat in the way of what i'm trying to read
- noutella 8mo agoMove your mouse and the cat will follow
- righthand 8mo agoOn mobile the cat sits in the middle of the screen and does not respond to touch input. The author has been told about the distracting elements and refused to acknowledge it.
- trinsic2 8mo agoThank god for noscript. Did see or hear any of that and dumped the text-only version of the article and HN discussion right to my local hard drive for off-line reading.
- cedws 8mo agoGovernments in Europe should be seriously scrutinising this with the background conversation of departing American tech going on. Discord users globally were being coerced into handing over their ID to this American surveillance tech. Are we just going to let this go on?
- frm88 8mo agoUnfortunately Persona already has a lot of contracts in the EU and is about to get more https://fintecbuzz.com/persona-to-launch-a-new-suite-of-solutions-to-meet-compliance-in-eu/ https://fintecbuzz.com/persona-to-launch-a-new-suite-of-solu...
- teyopi 8mo agoNSA spied on European leaders[1] and we did nothing. So yes, nothing happens. [1] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/may/31/denmark-helped-us-spy-on-angela-merkel-and-european-allies-report https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/may/31/denmark-helped...
- thephyber 8mo agoYou act like the governments of Europe weren’t the reason Discord decided they needed to get government issued identity information from European users…
- 5o1ecist 8mo ago[flagged]
- fintech_eng 8mo ago[dead]
- tamimio 8mo ago> 0x18 - betrayal 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.
- gslepak 8mo agoDoes someone have a version that doesn't force you to listen to unwanted music?
- Havoc 8mo agoWonder how many lists I'm on for the unholy sin of saying the glorious american leader is a moron
- oth001 8mo agoOr for saying Israel shouldn't be committing a genocide.
- tinfoilhatter 8mo agoOr for noticing that Discord, Roblox, OpenAI, Anthropic, Persona, and Palantir all have Zionist Israeli founders / co-founders / CEOs / funding. Or that 98% of US congress members received donations from AIPAC or that the US president is a staunch Zionist / supporter of Israel. In before I get downvoted and flagged for speaking the truth and noticing patterns.
- trinsic2 8mo agoYou can see it in each presidential address. The flag is right there along with our own.
- weird_tentacles 8mo ago[dead]
- standardly 8mo agoAuthor was doing such a good write-up, until I saw repeated AI syntax "its not x, but y" and "a is b. b is c. and, c is the final thing in this series of short, punchy sentences". Really tired of this. Why is it so hard to just write naturally? Maybe I'm just easily triggered
- firegodjr 8mo agoThat was writing naturally until AI stole it from us.
- standardly 8mo agoMaybe I overestimated how much was used here. I guess I'm so burned out by seeing it everywhere else, it's becoming hard to tell what's what. 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.
- Kiboneu 8mo ago> OpenAI’s disclosures reference biometric data stored “up to a year.” the source > code shows face list retention capped at 3 years. government IDs retained > “permanently” per Persona’s practices. which is it? 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.
- time2buybitcoin 8mo ago[dead]
- deleted 8mo ago[deleted]
- tiffanyh 8mo agoIsn’t this just normal KYC (for account opening). What am I missing? https://withpersona.com/customers/openai https://withpersona.com/customers/openai
- deaux 8mo agoThere's nothing normal about it.
- deleted 8mo ago[deleted]
- Ms-J 8mo agoAny time you "verify" your identity you are giving it to scum bags such as this. Your biographic data will leak to every hacker and every government world wide.
- fdefitte 8mo ago[dead]
- righthand 8mo agoIn 2022 my friends were telling me how good of an investment this one really smart identity verification company was.
- ProllyInfamous 8mo agoGeneral Alexander (former Director of NSA) admitted, around DEF CON XX (circa 2012), that the intelligence community defines "intercept" as when a human analyst catalogues a piece of information. Reading between these lines, some decade+ later... we swim beyond seas of deception, in these interceptionless databases of humanity. Less than just a number, only weights held in artificial minds.
- LiamPowell 8mo agoAnother downvoted comment asks if this is all LLM output. While I don't think all of it is, chunks of it have LLM smells so I wanted to point those out as the author or other readers may find it useful: 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.
- rambojohnson 8mo ago"We weren’t hacked" is doing PR triage for "we exposed sensitive internal implementation details." Spy company semantics are always incredible. The house didn’t burn down, it just leaked gas.
- 5o1ecist 8mo ago[flagged]
- emsign 8mo agoWebsites with sound are a big no-no.
- _slih 8mo agocalling data sovereignty laws a cybersecurity risk in the same week that Persona had 2500 files exposed on a government endpoint is an interesting choice of timing.