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Discord says 70k users may have had their government IDs leaked in breach

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Re: Discord says 70k users may have had their government IDs leaked in breach

#151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ZK proofs for identity can't go mainstream quick enough. I agree with what you're saying completely. It's frustrating that we have the technology now to verify aspects of someone's identity without revealing it, but that it's going to take forever to become robust enough for mainstream use.

It's an interesting litmus test because regulators would not accept ZK age proofs unless the stated purpose of age verification laws (reduce harm to minors) is the _actual_ purpose of those laws. Not some different unstated goal, such as ending online anonymity.

That is exactly what EU is doing with its age verification law. Basically the service provider just has to accept the certificate and check that it is valid and all the cert says is "is over X years old".

https://ageverification.dev/

And the fact that the companies have to implement the system themselves is just crazy. It is very obvious that if the government require such a check it has to provide the proof/way of checking just like in the physical world it provides the id card/passport/etc used for checking this.

Re: Discord says 70k users may have had their government IDs leaked in breach

#152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When the australia sub reddit was discussing the introduction of id on discord, the top comment was something along the lines of "look up openfeint". That was the day I uninstalled discord. It may not be an easy decision, especially if you are part of important social communities, but we cannot accept this level of disregard for our identities.

I just looked up "Openfeint". It took me a while to find the connection to Discord. Not sure if I did because it seems like some mobile app for people who play mobile games with some connection to some Japanese network and hosted in China or something?

OpenFeint was founded by the same guy who founded Discord.

From the Wikipedia page: "In 2011, OpenFeint was party to a class action suit with allegations including computer fraud, invasion of privacy, breach of contract, bad faith and seven other statutory violations. According to a news report "OpenFeint's business plan included accessing and disclosing personal information without authorization to mobile-device application developers, advertising networks and web-analytic vendors that market mobile applications"."

Re: Discord says 70k users may have had their government IDs leaked in breach

#154
post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Models have racial biases, can't support aged faces, or look-alike faces.

You don't have to use ML models for this.

Can you elaborate more? Discord has 656m users. if 10% upload their ID, they'd have 65m ID photos to search through. There are 2 use-cases here:

1/ Safety Bans (lets pretend 0.01% of ID card users have been banned for safety reasons: 650k accounts)

If a user submits their selfie/ID card, Discord needs to compare the new image with one of the 650k banned (but deleted?) images. I can't possible think how a human could remember the 650k photos well enough to declare a match.

Even if such a human existed with this perfect recall, there can't be very many of them on this planet to hire.

2/ Duplicate account bans

If a user registers, how can a support staff search the 65m photos without ML assistance to determine if this is a new user or a fraudster?

Re: Discord says 70k users may have had their government IDs leaked in breach

#155
post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's an interesting litmus test because regulators would not accept ZK age proofs unless the stated purpose of age verification laws (reduce harm to minors) is the _actual_ purpose of those laws. Not some different unstated goal, such as ending online anonymity.

That is exactly what EU is doing with its age verification law. Basically the service provider just has to accept the certificate and check that it is valid and all the cert says is "is over X years old". https://ageverification.dev/ And the fact that the companies have to implement the system themselves is just crazy. It is very obvious that if the government require such a check it has to provide the proof/way of c…

> just like in the physical world it provides the id card/passport/etc used for checking this.

In Sweden it wasn't the government that provided id cards, but the post office and banks. It became the government's job sometime after Sweden joined the EU, after the introduction of the common EUID standard.

And even then online identification is handled by a private company owned by banks: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BankID_(Sweden)

Re: Discord says 70k users may have had their government IDs leaked in breach

#156
post #104
post #9

I don't know if I just became cynical and jaded, but is this really surprising to anyone in any way? Any time I give out my personal information to anyone for any reason, I basically treat it as 'any member of public can now access it'. Even if a service doesn't have it in their TOS that they sell it to 3rd parties, they might do it anyway, or there will, sooner or later, be a breach of their poorly secured system. T…

Developer time is more valuable than user data. The market is being efficient.

I think you're assuming an ideal world where there's no information asymmetry, all the market participants receive and understand all the information and the risks, and clients could realistically move to an alternative platform that provably handles things better.

Re: Discord says 70k users may have had their government IDs leaked in breach

#157
post #9

I don't know if I just became cynical and jaded, but is this really surprising to anyone in any way? Any time I give out my personal information to anyone for any reason, I basically treat it as 'any member of public can now access it'. Even if a service doesn't have it in their TOS that they sell it to 3rd parties, they might do it anyway, or there will, sooner or later, be a breach of their poorly secured system. T…

> I basically treat it as 'any member of public can now access it'.

Still remember the conversation over "mega apps"?

Based on my experience with Alipay, which was a Chinese financial focused mega app but now more like a platform of everything plus money, the idea of treating every bit information you uploaded online as public info is laughable.

Back when Alipay was really just a financial app, it make sense for it to collect private information, facial data, government issued ID etc. But now as a mega app, the "smaller app" running inside it can also request permission to read these private information if they wanted to, and since most users are idiots don't know how to read, they will just click whatever you want them to click (it really work like this, magic!).

Alipay of course pretends to have protection in place, but we all know why it's there: just to make it legally look like it's the user's fault if something went wrong -- it's not even very delicate or complex. Kinda like what the idea "(you should) treat it (things uploaded online) as 'any member of public can now access'" tries to do, blame the user, punch down, easy done.

But fundamentally, the information was provided and used in different context, user provided the information without knowing exactly how the information will be used in the future. It's a Bait-and-switch, just that simple.

Of course, Discord isn't Alipay, but that's just because they're not a mega app, yet. A much healthier mentality is ask those companies to NOT to collect these data, or refuse to use their products. For example, I've not ever uploaded my government ID photos to Discord, if some feature requires it, I just don't use that feature.

Re: Discord says 70k users may have had their government IDs leaked in breach

#160
post #155
post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is exactly what EU is doing with its age verification law. Basically the service provider just has to accept the certificate and check that it is valid and all the cert says is "is over X years old". https://ageverification.dev/ And the fact that the companies have to implement the system themselves is just crazy. It is very obvious that if the government require such a check it has to provide the proof/way of c…

> just like in the physical world it provides the id card/passport/etc used for checking this. In Sweden it wasn't the government that provided id cards, but the post office and banks. It became the government's job sometime after Sweden joined the EU, after the introduction of the common EUID standard. And even then online identification is handled by a private company owned by banks: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B…

Yeah we have something similar here in Finland with banks doing most of the (strong) identification.

This also makes things difficult for immigrants for the first month or two in the country as a lot of services (like making a phone or internet contract) require this identification to use but it is also a bit of a hassle to get a bank account (but getting a new bank account in a different bank once you have a bank account to do the strong verification takes like 2 minutes)

There is a government system but most don't use it but I expect once the eu digital identity wallet thing rolls around a lot of ppl will switch (or be required to?) to that

https://commission.europa.eu/strategy-and-policy/priorities-...

But very importantly this government, bank id, the identification part of the eu id wallet or really any identification system should not be used for age verification as it actually identifies the user not just give a proof that the user is over X years old.

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