Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Stripe Identity

stripe.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

501–510 of 557 posts

Re: Stripe Identity

#501

Post by d110af5ccf »

danShumway wrote: post #481
movedx wrote: post #461

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Discord and Clubhouse need to verify my identity? Discord are doing it for verifying bot ownership, because bots can do a lot of damage if they're just free to sign up to Discord and start "talking" to people. A good way of omitting bad bots from the network is by verifying and tying the bot to the (verified) identity of a real person. I run a server with 1,200 people on it - I've never needed to verify my identity…

> A good way of omitting bad bots from the network is by verifying and tying the bot to the (verified) identity of a real person. Is it? I am much less charitable than you about whether Discord's bot verification is intended purely for user safety or whether it's a combination of laziness and a way of slowly clamping down control over how users access the service, how it can be extended, and what services/clients can…

I agree with your sentiment, but I don't even understand what the rationale for singling out bots is. A user of the service is either causing problems for others or not. Whether that user happens to be a bot doesn't seem relevant to me.

HN does quite well without requiring anything other than an IP address. So does Mastodon. And mailing lists generally have no way of knowing even that!

Re: Stripe Identity

#502

Post by movedx »

danShumway wrote: post #481
movedx wrote: post #461

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Discord and Clubhouse need to verify my identity? Discord are doing it for verifying bot ownership, because bots can do a lot of damage if they're just free to sign up to Discord and start "talking" to people. A good way of omitting bad bots from the network is by verifying and tying the bot to the (verified) identity of a real person. I run a server with 1,200 people on it - I've never needed to verify my identity…

> A good way of omitting bad bots from the network is by verifying and tying the bot to the (verified) identity of a real person. Is it? I am much less charitable than you about whether Discord's bot verification is intended purely for user safety or whether it's a combination of laziness and a way of slowly clamping down control over how users access the service, how it can be extended, and what services/clients can…

> ... slowly clamping down control over how users access the service, how it can be extended, and what services/clients can interop

So what? It's a private network and a private service. They can have it function however they like. That's why free market economies work - people will go find something else, or demand something else, should what's available not fit their needs or they feel too restrictive.

Something like Discord can be replicated easily enough by someone with enough money and a decent engineering team. And it's not like there aren't other options already.

> I disagree that 100 servers is a particularly large number for a popular bot to join

I'm not sure what you mean by "100 servers". I guess that's the maximum amount of servers a bot can join?

There are some pretty big servers out there. If a bot can join 100 servers, and they have an average of 10,000 users, then that's literally 100,000 people that can attached with malware, scams, and more.

Are you saying that's not a problem?

> If the issue is that bots can sign up to Discord and just start talking to people, that's a permissions issue. Why can bots do that?

I don't believe they can. I believe the verification process prevents this? I could be wrong.

> So sure, we can have an extremely invasive form of verification, but we could also just... not let bots join random servers in the first place

I don't believe they can.

> ... we can have an extremely invasive form of verification ...

Is it that invasive? Is requiring people to validate their identity before introducing something that has the potential to directly address millions of people all at once really that invasive?

Should my credentials (and character, intention, etc.) by validated before I'm allowed to talk on a radio station listened to by millions of people, or is the (privately owned) radio station being, "extremely invasive" by asking me to validate who I am before they let me use their network?

> Discord's moderation and user-vetting tools are basically non-existent

There are five levels of verification you can select from, ranging from none to highest. The former requires a validated phone be added to their account.

Their moderation tools are pretty powerful. You can create roles that are flexible enough to allow you to create some pretty interesting setups.

What is it about these tools that you feel could be better?

Re: Stripe Identity

#503

Post by movedx »

d110af5ccf wrote: post #501
danShumway wrote: post #481

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A good way of omitting bad bots from the network is by verifying and tying the bot to the (verified) identity of a real person. Is it? I am much less charitable than you about whether Discord's bot verification is intended purely for user safety or whether it's a combination of laziness and a way of slowly clamping down control over how users access the service, how it can be extended, and what services/clients can…

I agree with your sentiment, but I don't even understand what the rationale for singling out bots is. A user of the service is either causing problems for others or not. Whether that user happens to be a bot doesn't seem relevant to me. HN does quite well without requiring anything other than an IP address. So does Mastodon. And mailing lists generally have no way of knowing even that!

> HN does quite well without requiring anything other than an IP address

Pretty certain HN does way more than this.

Re: Stripe Identity

#504

Post by d110af5ccf »

specialist wrote: post #499
nkohari wrote: post #346

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I suppose it depends on how much you want ~all of your online activity to be attributed to your real identity, in such a way that could be easily examined by the government.

Authenticity and anonymous speech are not mutually exclusive. Stop pretending they are.

You are the only one who mentioned speech, "online activity" is what was referred to. You specifically suggested linking profiles to government identification. "Linking" wouldn't seem to leave much room for anonymity regardless of activity.

Re: Stripe Identity

#505

Post by d110af5ccf »

movedx wrote: post #503
d110af5ccf wrote: post #501

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with your sentiment, but I don't even understand what the rationale for singling out bots is. A user of the service is either causing problems for others or not. Whether that user happens to be a bot doesn't seem relevant to me. HN does quite well without requiring anything other than an IP address. So does Mastodon. And mailing lists generally have no way of knowing even that!

> HN does quite well without requiring anything other than an IP address Pretty certain HN does way more than this.

Do please enlighten me. I've never provided more to HN than a user name and password. There's no third party JS (I just double checked). I suppose the first party JS could be performing aggressive fingerprinting but I doubt it.

(Of course they also have my entire post, view, and vote histories. Those are arguably far more sensitive than any PII I could possibly provide, but I seem to have developed a habit of repeatedly forcing that information on them so I guess that's on me.)

Re: Stripe Identity

#506

Post by AnomalousBean »

echopom wrote: post #306
agwa wrote: post #290

Considering that Stripe was originally known for letting websites accept credit card payments without seeing your credit card number, one might assume that Stripe Identity only allows websites to see the verification result, and not your selfies and scans of your identity documents. That would be an incorrect assumption. Per https://support.stripe.com/questions/managing-your-id-verifi... customers of Stripe Identity…

It's unfortunate , I'm an Enterprise Architect in Banking and honestly I wouldn't have let that feature go in production. Businesses that do not have a legitimate reason to view my sensitive document like Passport , should not be allowed to do so. Only authorized institutions like Licensed Payment Institution / Banks / Insurances etc... should be allowed to do so and AFTER they've been approved. It's sad because you…

Why do you put spaces before commas? Stop it!

Re: Stripe Identity

#507

Post by d110af5ccf »

sascha_sl wrote: post #182
Kiro wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Regular Discord users don't need to send in anything. It's used to verify your bot (only applicable for bots that are in more than 75 servers), which seems like a reasonable use case.

More a requirement at this point. Discord had to crack down on malicious bot developers after some decided to log essentially every bit of information ever sent to them to be put on the internet, including information from private channels. Some scopes require this verification outright now.

> decided to log essentially every bit of information ever sent to them

Kind of like IRC? Which is basically what Discord is. Why would you assume anything you put on the internet isn't part of the permanent public record? (Wait until you find out about mailing lists, Reddit mirrors, the Internet Archive, ...)

(Aside: The only halfway sane solution to this is having separate disconnected identities for each service you use and cycling them semi-regularly so you don't need to worry too much about small identifying details being aggregated.)

Re: Stripe Identity

#508

Post by Aaargh20318 »

makeitdouble wrote: post #486
Aaargh20318 wrote: post #388

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is absolutely impossible to validate the authenticity of an ID document from a photo. Even if you capture a high-res photo and have it inspected by a trained document expert. Fortunately, it is not necessary to do this. Modern passports and many identity cards contain NFC chips that allow you validate the data on an identity document with complete certainty (as in: you know that the data is correct and not tampere…

A bunch of verification systems use a video feed instead of a static photo. This helps a lot to weed out photoshops, and you can also check for reflections (the ones I had to go through ask you to move your camera under different angles) While there is no infallible system, I think we currently have decently efficient solution (with sizable trade-offs of course, as you rely on the user having a smartphone that is sup…

> A bunch of verification systems use a video feed instead of a static photo. This helps a lot to weed out photoshops, and you can also check for reflections (the ones I had to go through ask you to move your camera under different angles)

Doesn’t help. You can photoshop and then print. You can use a card printer if needed to make it look like a real ID card.

To make a proper assessment you need to hold the document, and you need some tools (magnifying glass, UV light).

Re: Stripe Identity

#509

Post by newbie789 »

pc wrote: post #408
agwa wrote: post #392

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for your reply. > Fundamentally, Identity makes it possible to choose how much of this data traverses / is stored on your servers, just as Stripe did with card numbers. There's a stark difference in how Stripe treats exports of card numbers versus exports of raw identity verification data. This makes it way easier, and more likely, for Stripe customers to choose to store raw identity verification information.…

Appreciate your feedback. On the first point, limitations on what the secret key can access are coming very soon. > A concrete suggestion: make it possible for businesses to choose whether they have access the raw data, and expose the choice to the end user in the Stripe Identity flow. Ideally, businesses that want the raw data would be subject to security compliance requirements. This is an opportunity for Stripe to…

It’s great that you think that limiting the firehose-style wild-west dissemination of people’s identity data might be a good idea and I have good feelings about your suspicions, I suspect they might be well founded.

Might as well wait until anybody that can drag and drop Stripe code into their app gets as many photos of people’s IDs and faces and security questions from their users and squirrels it away into their private databases.

Once that’s done it’ll be a good time to fire off a blog post about how not doing that was always in the works and announce groundbreaking features like “basic privacy permissions for identity data “ will become default.

Maybe it’ll be a paid feature for end users?

Re: Stripe Identity

#510

Post by movedx »

d110af5ccf wrote: post #505
movedx wrote: post #503

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> HN does quite well without requiring anything other than an IP address Pretty certain HN does way more than this.

Do please enlighten me. I've never provided more to HN than a user name and password. There's no third party JS (I just double checked). I suppose the first party JS could be performing aggressive fingerprinting but I doubt it. (Of course they also have my entire post, view, and vote histories. Those are arguably far more sensitive than any PII I could possibly provide, but I seem to have developed a habit of repeate…

You've provided them with a username, under which you post, comment and view content. This is enough to identify you as an entity in the system and what it is you're doing. If what you're doing, based on heuristics and what you publish is having a bad effect on "the network", you can be blocked/stopped/warned.

I'm saying HN do anything of this, but I doubt they only look at your IP when you're interacting with the service.

Post reply on HN