I want to post a non-news idea I had about verifying people online, though with Google’s current destructive proposal for a web standard in the headlines, I am admittedly a bit worried it’s going to get conflated.
The idea would be that it serves the same kind of purpose as what a company would ever need - verifying that someone is a unique person, verifying that they are over a certain age - only when the user volunteers that info, and without actually giving said online company actual information about them.
When I read the headlines about such systems being attempted by game companies or web companies, it basically comes with a “Trust us!” caveat that I can’t imagine anyone following. BUT, they at least give some respectable PR language about how such things might be useful to combat harassment, fake accounts, etc, and it does give me some ideas. The internet is kind of a limitless place, but having no limits for everyone is in some ways a limitation in itself.
So, I’m curious if people would actually want threads like that in this Community instance.
I think that this is doable for most of the normal population (and likely not novel (which does not diminish its value)) with public private crypto and some authority (eg government issued ids having keys like Portugal) and then using those to authenticate to a service that allows specifically what you want to share. So normally you’d only ever share say age or something
