We all know that the EU wants age verification for the web. I dont trust my country, the EU and definitely not Instagram, Twitter etc. to implement this in way where my personal data won’t be shared with anyone. But the idea that everyone on social media is a verified human beeing could also have a lot of positive effects.
Imo it would be awesome if every person could have only one single account. Bans and restrictions have much more impact which forces users to behave more like irl. You could reduce a massive amount of bots which would reduce fake news and be a time saver for mods.
As a solution for the privacy issue, I searched for open source passport verification tools and found ZKPassport which makes the proof on you own device without sending you data anywhere. It generates a deterministic Id which is salted and hashed, so you can’t find a real person from a user account or otherwise. Only this Id is sent to the server as a proof, nothing else. The code is open source and its possible to self host the backend for this system.
I try to implement ZKPassport into a lemmy fork to make a small proof of concept for this idea. Of course this needs a lot more security features for a real production scenario, because mods and server owners have much more power and the federation is more complicated with only a few servers that have passport auth enabled and some even have their own implementation of the auth.
So if the proof of concept works out well the question is, would people be rather use passport authenticated Fediverse instances when all of you data stays on your phone?
EDIT: I don’t suggest that the whole fediverse switches to passport authentication, every instance can decide on their own. Therefore you could also have multiple accounts across multiple instances but not multiple accounts on the same instance.
Sure I have no issue authenticating with government services. I think there are to many bad actors on the internet for a lot of the libertarian principles to hold up. 1 person 1 authenticated or multiple accounts tied to the same authentication is a good system and saves mods and users blocking the same people over and over.
Kinda suprised I see someone in favor of it, after reading all the other comments. Thanks for sharing!
I have high trust in my government not to abuse the knowledge and as much as I’d love to live in a world with a truely anonymous internet there are just to many people taking advantage of that anonymity and it makes platform moderation extremely tedious. I fully believe if you say something unhinged like “im gonna kill my ex wife” cops should de anon the account and be at that persons door to arrest them.
My ideal internet model is a two tiered internet. One where everyone is authenticated and an anonymous one where nobody is. If you want to whistleblow or communicate safely you are free to do so and the main Internet can be cleaned up of bad actors. For actual people who spam and stuff thats annoying but not illegal they be exponentially temp banned from that site. No perm bans if you can only have 1 identity. I’d still want people to have multiple accounts I might have one with my real name one with an alias the site and other users would have no idea but if I said I was going to do a terrorist attack or something both my accounts would get banned and I’d get arrested.