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U.S. companies back Sam Altman's World ID even as much of the world pushes back
- wjekkekene 6mo ago[dead]
- rdevilla 6mo agoAs if I needed another reason to despise this continent. Who actually wants to uphold, work for, and build these systems in our society? This is seriously the kind of nation you want to inhabit?
- frogperson 6mo ago[flagged]
- Alive-in-2025 6mo agoanother move is the trump admin trying to "prohibit" wifi points unless they are "approved".
- 2ndorderthought 6mo agoWorld id, meta verifier, how many other military funded establishments are pushing to require mass surveillance of everyone doing anything. Meanwhile their bots run rampant all over the Internet without any concern for anyone else's infrastructure, copyright, or ip. The irony...
- red-iron-pine 6mo agoso take down the internet. or take down their company. or just stop using the internet will posting this on forums that are run by these same people actually be able to drive change?
- jochem9 6mo agoYes. Your message needs to find other people. The how is irrelevant, it just shapes and transmits it.
- pocksuppet 6mo agoYou'd be silly not to, if you think about it. There's demand for ID verification, and don't you want to be the one with copies of everyone's documents, instead of the other guy? Do you want to make the money, or do you want Peter Thiel to make the money?
- Andrex 6mo agoThe prisoner's dilemma of stupidity.
- ArcHound 6mo agoYou mean to tell me that companies that got rich by hoarding data are excited to hoard more data? Never would have guessed. Also, why wouldn't anyone want to have data about everyone? Seems like a valuable asset.
- 2ndorderthought 6mo agoDefense contractors can sell it to the military and related agencies for top dollar. That's probably number 1, number 2 is higher fidelity correlations to other data.
- filoeleven 6mo agoIt's only considered an asset because companies are allowed to externalize the cost of breaches. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CS9ptA3Ya9E https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CS9ptA3Ya9E (Mitchell and Webb on "identity theft")
- josefritzishere 6mo agoNobody wants to live in an open air prison.
- redsocksfan45 6mo ago[dead]
- jmclnx 6mo agoOf course they do, when the age verification morphs into real personal identification (PI) all people's habits will be known to everyone. Time to put a stop to this PI tracking trend. But we all know PI will be tracked by all entities in the future in about 10 - 20 years.
- theplatman 6mo agoso we're trusting the guy who created tech to make it easier for bots to exist on the internet to then sell us the solution to fix the problem he made worse?
- wmf 6mo agoI guess it would be worse if he was doing nothing to address the problem.
- estimator7292 6mo agoIncorrect. Completely and utterly. Trying to make money on selling the solution to the problem you caused (while also probably tracking literally everyone with the solution) is much worse than causing the problem and doing nothing about it.
- Teever 6mo agoI saw someone in another thread put it quite succinctly: Shit in the pool then sell the nets to clean it up.
- HSO 6mo agohe didnt create anything
- stefan_ 6mo agoIronically, of the only thing he did create (ostensibly), a copycat never went anywhere "social network", its claim to fame was the app (preinstalled by paying carriers) spamming your entire contact book with SMS invitations to join their failing network. Splendid privacy record!
- llbbdd 6mo agoI've seen this take a lot and I don't really understand it. IMO if there's anybody to blame here, and I don't think there is, you could go back and assign blame to the authors of the Attention is All You Need paper, or Google as its publisher. Once that was out in the wild it was only a matter of time before someone productized it, but there was no conceivable world in which nobody decided to, and there was no guarantee that it was going to be public in all cases. The basis for LLMs is so simple in hindsight that it's not even impossible that it'd been independently discovered and privately weaponized for many years before 2017.
- AlexandrB 6mo agoI can't believe this idiotic project is running so long after the "blockchain for everything" mania ended. Seems like they can't believe it either since they changed their name from "Worldcoin" to just "World.
- simonw 6mo agoI'd love to see some credible reporting on the graveyard of blockchain projects. So many obviously stupid ideas cropped up on the blockchain in 2021-2022. How many of those are still going concerns? I guess the problem with blockchain stuff is that often there's no servers to shut down or other clear indication that a project has failed - presumably you can look at on-chain data to see if people have stopped trading various backing tokens, but does trade ever clearly stop or are there always bots exchanging tokens back and forth?
- traderj0e 6mo agoTransactions on a blockchain have a cost, so it's kinda hard to sustain faking usage. Unless they count random bogus blockchains.
- jonathanstrange 6mo ago[flagged]
- red-iron-pine 6mo ago[flagged]
- CamperBob2 6mo agoThe difference is, nobody ever expected anything better from countries like China and Russia.
- deleted 6mo ago[deleted]
- jonathanstrange 6mo ago[flagged]
- dzhiurgis 6mo ago[flagged]
- deleted 6mo ago[deleted]
- Dig1t 6mo agoI don’t think what he said is whataboutism, the original claim was that this policy was related to the US becoming “most hated country”. But if it is just doing something that every other country is also doing, then it doesn’t seem like it’d move the needle much on “most hated country” status.
- jonathanstrange 6mo agoWe're discussing this in the context of Altman's project, which is a project by a US company. You're welcome to find examples from other countries but the OP didn't mention any of them. The fact is that currently no other country has the same kind of techno-fascism, it's US-specific and mostly caused by the lack of education of your new tech elite. The new generation consist mostly of dropouts who barely read and talk about things they're not qualified to talk about at all. That wouldn't be a problem if they didn't have so much influence. US companies used to do their business, now they're publishing fascist manifests (e.g. Alex Karp) and directly interfere in politics (e.g. Peter Thiel, Elon Musk). That's not even remotely comparable to what's going on in other countries.
- goolz 6mo agoThe blind leading the blind. These companies and Sam are both devoid of any sort of ethical code aside from C.R.E.A.M.
- red-iron-pine 6mo agoprotect ya neck is also one of their main ethical concerns
- giancarlostoro 6mo agoSam Altman doing his hardest to become more hated than Larry Ellison I see.
- red-iron-pine 6mo agodo not anthropomorphize sam altman
- greenchair 6mo agohis mark of the beast attempt # ?
- gentleman11 6mo agoWeirdly, peter thiel is going on tour right now promoting the idea that the antichrist is coming and may be an organization or social movement rather than a person. Please correct me if I'm wrong, I only skimmed the articles about it
- jacquesm 6mo ago'And how do you know this is the case?' : 'Receipts, mostly.'.
- notahacker 6mo agoyeah, always struck me as odd that Thiel is more obsessed with identifying candidate antichrists than almost anyone else on the planet, including some people who are actually observant Christians, and yet it doesn't seem to have occurred to him that the most messianic secular figures who treat themselves as above mere laws and the guys making millenarian prophesies about the scale of what they're going to deliver are basically the guys in his rolodex...
- jacquesm 6mo agoAnd he's funding them.
- mindslight 6mo agoIt's just the same boring dynamic whereby every accusation is a confession. Come out swinging, and then the obvious parallels between the antichrist and Trump or even Thiel himself fall flat. Basically "no yuo"
- deadbolt 6mo agoPeter Theil's only worry is that someone/something is going to beat him to it.
- booleandilemma 6mo agoI think we need less technology. Can we have a de-tech movement? Life-saving tech is fine but enough is enough with software, AI, surveillance, etc. It's too much. It's been too much for the past twenty years or so.
- xantronix 6mo ago[flagged]
- booleandilemma 6mo ago[flagged]
- jbxntuehineoh 6mo agoseriously, what kind of ignorant rube would be opposed to Technological Progress(TM)? Pol Pot, Lysenko? thank god our society is run by serious people, the kind who understand the importance of ensuring that the Line goes Up at all costs
- gibsonsmog 6mo agoThe Butlerian Jihad looms
- deleted 6mo ago[deleted]
- pesus 6mo agoIt's already becoming a trend amongst the youngsters, though I can't say how widespread it is. I think it's inevitable and long overdue.
- deleted 6mo ago[deleted]
- 2ndorderthought 6mo agoYou shouldn't be down voted for this. It's a valid opinion and it's an acceptable lifestyle. My personal line doesn't go back 20 years. But I think a lot of people can relate.
- Terr_ 6mo agoI'm not even remotely-interested unless there is legislation that creates civil-liability and criminal penalties for abuse or mishandling of the data. Also, companies shouldn't be able to refuse service just because the prospective customer's biometric data was leaked/stolen/duplicated in the past. I mean, when you think about it that's some Twilight Zone or Black Mirror territory.
- thesurlydev 6mo agoSince when has that stopped companies from mishandling of data? :)
- drob518 6mo agoOh, hell no!
- gentleman11 6mo agoI suspect that if we don't want to live in this future, we need some major open source tech leadership around making something like an anonymous version of this I know, not exactly an easy problem to solve, but big tech or government is going to do it if we can't find better solutions first
- wmf 6mo agoGoogle and Apple already developed private age verification.
- john_strinlai 6mo ago>On April 16, it published a blueprint for how companies can grow their revenue with its digital ID. that "blueprint", hilariously enough, starts with the title "How AI is eroding the foundations of the internet". from a sam altman company. im afraid if i rolled my eyes any harder that they would spin out of their sockets.
- jacquesm 6mo agoTo fix the internet, we had to destroy it first. There is no way these guys don't know exactly what they are doing. It's the spam thing all over again, but on a 100x worse scale. Cue PG with an essay 'A plan for AI'. Except this time it is probably going to be game over. I can see a real future for the likes of tailscale here: botfree networks of friends.
- taeric 6mo agoThis is an odd topic. On the one hand, we do seem to have a problem where attention is hijacked by engagement farming. On the other, we also know of problems from draconian management. I would actually like it if we had something that could say, only promote things on my feeds that are "liked" by people within a geographic radius of me. At the least, mute things that are getting pumped from hostile regions. I just don't know that I see how this can get us there, though? Seems far more likely that it would lead to more abuse.
- watwut 6mo agoOr like, have chronological feed of accounts user follows. Simple. Produces less outrage tho, so it is a no go.
- taeric 6mo agoThis assumes that most people would choose that feed? Which, I'm less convinced. That is, this sounds like the idea that telling people if bad things happen when you eat too much candy, then people will eat less candy. Just flat not the case at large. Yes, you also have to document the downsides of candy. Such that I'm also all for having that feed. But I don't see it being enough to move the needle much, on its own.
- chucksmash 6mo ago> That is, this sounds like the idea that telling people if bad things happen when you eat too much candy, then people will eat less candy. Just flat not the case at large. Seems like there's an effect but it just takes time. The younger generations are smoking and drinking less. Maybe the trend will be to abstain from social media feeds and chronological feeds will be their Zima.
- taeric 6mo agoThis feels wrong, too? Younger generations smoke less because we have made it very hard for them to smoke more. Literally where are they going to do it? And the proliferation of zyn and similar isn't exactly problem free. Alcohol is a trend that is talked about a lot. I'm not entirely clear on what we know of that. So many hot takes that largely seem conflicting with each other.
- int32_64 6mo agoIs there any technical solution to these centralized ID authorities doing sybil attacks and minting identities out of nothing to manufacture consensus on supposedly "human verified" sites?
- 2001zhaozhao 6mo agoAn effective naive defense would be requiring ID to be verified with multiple sites
- zingababba 6mo agoSama can ID my balls.
- derriz 6mo agoI’d guess that the pattern of ball wrinkles are quite unique. It could have applications for secure login - you’d could hold your balls above your phone camera or lay them onto a USB attached mini-scanner for authentication.
- jbxntuehineoh 6mo agoiphone 18: now with ball and/or pussy scanner!
- deleted 6mo ago[deleted]
- izzydata 6mo agoPerhaps it is time to return to meatspace for verifiably real interactions.
- red-iron-pine 6mo agobring back PGP in-person signing parties
- dzhiurgis 6mo agoYes it's cute on small scale, but also rhymes with decel movement.
- siva7 6mo agoI would be happy if Tinder used this tech. The Internet is unusable nowadays because of bots.
- yardie 6mo agoThe Blockchain is back, baby! /s
- simonw 6mo agoI tried to track down the original source of the news that World ID is being adopted by Zoom and Tinder and DocuSign and it looks like it's an event they hosted on April 17th. Here's their blog post about it: https://world.org/blog/announcements/the-new-world-id-and-the-partners-bringing-proof-of-human-to-the-internet https://world.org/blog/announcements/the-new-world-id-and-th... There were more logos on that title slide: Tinder, DocuSign, Zoom, Okta, Vercel, Shopify, Browsnerbase, AWS, exa, RAZER, Coinbase, VanEck
- mahmoud420 6mo ago[dead]
- onetokeoverthe 6mo ago[dead]
- bradleysz 6mo agoThe axiom here is that both AI and the human internet are worth keeping. Tech like World ID is scary. Agreed. What is the better alternative? AI isn't going away and a human internet is worth preserving.
- skybrian 6mo agoI imagine that in the future we will have less trust in strangers on the Internet and whether they're human or AI will be a side issue. Knowing that a correspondent is human will be neither necessary nor sufficient.
- karl42 6mo ago> What is the better alternative? One alternative is https://self.xyz https://self.xyz . It generates ZK proofs from the digital signature on your e-passport or national ID card. That allows you to prove "human" or "over 18" or "not on the OFAC list" without revealing your name, date of birth or nationality. Disclosure: I'm an advisor for Self
- kaonwarb 6mo agoPairs well with also-on-the-front-page https://app.oravys.com/blog/mercor-breach-2026 https://app.oravys.com/blog/mercor-breach-2026
- throwaway613746 6mo ago[dead]
- cantalopes 6mo agoNecer hace i tgought i can have a job in age of jobless ai by being a human verified data scraper
- iknowstuff 6mo agoJudging solely by their FAQ, this is not enough. Iris photos can be fabricated client-side, including by AI, and can be shared. So it's invasive AND worthless? Why is this getting support? You need an offline/IRL verification step and measures to prevent sharing/cloning. AND you need to never phone home revealing services you're using. Total garbage Proof of human verification powered by the Orb only involves one type of data: images of your eyes and face. It does not require your name, email, gender or anything else. The iris images are used to verify unique humanness, while the images of your face are used for Face Auth, a security feature that ensures only the person who verified their World ID at an Orb can use it. The Orb takes high-resolution images of your irises and face. The Orb uses these images to confirm your humanness and converts the iris image into a unique code which is then split into randomized multi-party compute (MPC) fragments. The Orb sends the images and MPC fragments to your device (your personal custody package), before permanently deleting them. Your device sends the fragments to the AMPC service to confirm you have never verified before. Your World ID is verified.
- deleted 6mo ago[deleted]
- dylan604 6mo agoCalling it The Orb does not help anything but adding to the creepy factor. Also, Alex Patterson is not involved with this, and I refuse to accept it being called The Orb.
- nickvec 6mo agoAgreed. Gives me Palantir vibes.
- tim333 6mo ago>You need an offline/IRL verification step That's what the orb thing is about. You go visit, meet humans, have a photo of your eyes. You can't just hold up an AI photo or scan your dog or whatever.
- p_stuart82 6mo ago
- At1C 6mo ago[dead]
- ck2 6mo agoSeems like a good point to remind that capitalism doesn't need democracy to function or survive They have no problem helping to strangle democracy to death
- techteach00 6mo agoKYC to breathe.
- ofcrpls 6mo agoKhosla and Nilekani are to blame for this a lot more than anyone else. They got India to steamroll the iris scan in the AADHAR enrollment process and now that is used to justify every other expansion.
- iugtmkbdfil834 6mo agoThe interesting thing is that the issue is real, but that issue is artificially created. If we had the will, we could technically stop it today. Separately, there is too much money to be made ( or ,at least, people with the money think there is, which effectively amounts to the same thing ) and, unless corrected, it is obvious which way corporates will pick. The good news is: this is the one tech that can be relatively easily stopped, if we so choose. Compared to data centers, this is easy. And yet, I am not sure, if it will be easy enough for most to care about.
- dzhiurgis 6mo agoThis reminds me of outrage when facebook tried to create its own crypto.