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What do I think about biometric proof of personhood?

vitalik.ca

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Re: What do I think about biometric proof of personhood?

#61

Post by kinakomochidayo »

Analemma_ wrote: post #52

Part of me wants to snark at just how far the crypto people have fallen, from “we are going to build a completely private and anonymous economy free from government control” to ”of course you have to be subject to mandatory retinal scans to engage in commerce”, but that wouldn’t really be true. The sad truth is that they don’t really have a choice and neither does anyone else: basically everu web technology will have…

> how far the crypto people have fallen

People are free to build whatever they want on permissionless blockchains like Ethereum, which is way more open to experimentation and new things (like zero-proof knowledge) than Bitcoin ecosystem, which has more cypherpunk roots.

Re: What do I think about biometric proof of personhood?

#62

Post by monero-xmr »

JohnFen wrote: post #48
monero-xmr wrote: post #7

There needs to be decentralized ID using an open protocol with any vendor able to join. The quality of those vendors will be based upon which firms trust them. I do think blockchain makes sense here, because the trust layer is decentralized and the native cryptographic signing primitives means it can’t be spoofed nor manipulated in a proprietary database locked from the public. No idea if world coin is a workable sol…

> Why I have to constantly scan my ID for various vendors is absurd. What are you scanning your ID for? I've never had to do that a single time.

Paypal, ebay, robinhood, vanguard, various crypto exchanges. I guess it's mostly financial stuff. But that's my most sensitive info.

Re: What do I think about biometric proof of personhood?

#63

Post by kstrauser »

xvector wrote: post #56
kstrauser wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Voting on a decentralized platform. That begs the question, presuming that voting on a decentralized platform is good. > Decentralized governance and decentralized UBI in general. I can parse those words, but I don’t see how they’d depend on the widget from the article. > Even when both eyes are missing - the article mentions other ways to verify proof-of-personhood (at the expense of privacy compared to iris scans…

> That begs the question, presuming that voting on a decentralized platform is good. A decentralized platform is verifiable and less prone to being rigged. All that's missing is proof of personhood. > Decentralized governance and decentralized UBI in general. Governance on decentralized platform can typically be approached via a few ways: - weighting votes by compute power - weighting votes by volume of ownership (eg…

> A decentralized platform is verifiable and less prone to being rigged. All that's missing is proof of personhood.

That seems to be an extraordinary claim, and I'm skeptical that 1) it's true, and 2) that's all that's missing.

In short, I've voted for many things in many contexts in the existing world. I don't think I've ever bumped into a problem with voting that any form of a decentralized platform would have improved.

> You are picking a really tiny edge case and saying the entire system can't work because of this.

It's just the first example I thought of. I'm sure that 8 billion people could crowdsource all source of other edge cases.

> You aren't considering the possibility that the edge case can be adequately resolved with enough thought and investment.

I wasn't the one making the proposal. The onus is on the proposer to explain how they're going to deal with the edge cases and convince the rest of us that this is a real, thought-through idea.

Re: What do I think about biometric proof of personhood?

#64

Post by JohnFen »

monero-xmr wrote: post #62
JohnFen wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Why I have to constantly scan my ID for various vendors is absurd. What are you scanning your ID for? I've never had to do that a single time.

Paypal, ebay, robinhood, vanguard, various crypto exchanges. I guess it's mostly financial stuff. But that's my most sensitive info.

Interesting. Of those services, I use Paypal and eBay, but I never had to provide ID. Perhaps because I'm not a vendor?

Re: What do I think about biometric proof of personhood?

#65

Post by JohnFen »

xvector wrote: post #57
JohnFen wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the article goes into detail on why the iris hashes are sufficiently private. The problem is that if it something goes wrong, you can't fix things by changing your biometrics. That means that "sufficiently" private is a much, much higher threshold than it would be in other contexts. It also requires a lot of trust of the entities gathering the biometric information, and it's hard to come up with any entity that see…

How is the hash of an iris scan "sensitive biometric information," any more than a CCTV camera at your coffee shop, or the government minting your ID? It is a hash, for god's sake. It is more privacy preserving than the latter two, or any currently known proof-of-personhood currently in existence - while still accomplishing the goal of proof-of-personhood.

The hash is sensitive because it's a (reasonably) unique identifier that has been assigned to you.

> any more than a CCTV camera at your coffee shop, or the government minting your ID?

It's not, fundamentally, but that's not an argument in favor of things like this. The less of this sort of thing, the better.

But a big difference is that my local coffee shop is, you know, local and not likely to be sharing the images with anyone as a routine matter, and they certainly aren't correlating the images they capture with my identity.

The difference with government ID is twofold: it's the government, which means it's not optional. Second, it's the government rather than private entities. I can have some sort of influence over my government. I have zero influence over private entities. So while I don't like it in either case, I prefer the government-issued ID over something done by companies.

> while still accomplishing the goal of proof-of-personhood.

I'm not sure why this is a goal that is so important that it's worth any reduction in privacy.

Re: What do I think about biometric proof of personhood?

#66

Post by rqtwteye »

Mistletoe wrote: post #33
rqtwteye wrote: post #10

Buterin reminds me a little of string theorists in physics. There is a lot of intellect but they have chosen to chase something that doesn't produce anything really useful despite a ton of effort.

Ethereum may not be useful to you but it is very useful to me and many others. It will become even more useful in the future as people learn what happens when your money is centralized to one particular government, based on nothing at all, and just keeps getting printed more and more of. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/BOGMBASE https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debasement I think crypto solving this issue is definitel…

I bet crypto will have the same problems any other type of money has once it gets widely used. I don’t see anything in crypto that can solve our current problems.

Re: What do I think about biometric proof of personhood?

#67

Post by JohnFen »

xvector wrote: post #58
kstrauser wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For me, the real-world need for such a thing in the first place. It's not often I dismiss something as a solution in search of a problem, but I think that's what this is.

Plenty of use cases require proof of personhood. Voting, for one. Anti-spam as another. And most use cases in which you're required to present an ID.

I don't think voting is a great use case for this. Surely, if you're concerned about fraud in voting, simply being able to prove the voter is a person is insufficient. It wouldn't stop double-voting, etc.

Anti-spam? That seems like shooting mosquitos with missiles. And I doubt it would be that effective at spam prevention. Spammers will just start paying tons of actual people to vet the messages as coming from real people, much like how captchas and the like are circumvented.

> And most use cases in which you're required to present an ID.

We already have ID for that. And surely, in those cases, what is trying to be established isn't just whether or not you're human, but which specific human you are.

I've also heard that it's useful to administer UBI (just to round out your list), but UBI is a thing that -- at least in the US -- is but a vague dream, not anything that's realistically going to happen anytime soon. And even if it is, I don't think a system that just demonstrates proof-of-humanness would be sufficient.

Re: What do I think about biometric proof of personhood?

#68

Post by JohnFen »

xvector wrote: post #59
ackfoobar wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> fortunately it is easy to solve with zero knowledge proof technology I don't have enough intuition around what zkp can/cannot do. It's hard to take his word for it.

> It's hard to take his word for it. He's a known expert re. cryptography and zero-knowledge proof technology. It's about as hard to take his word regarding zkp as it is to take a climate scientist's about climate change.

The thing about science is that it rejects the entire premise of taking anyone's word about anything.

Re: What do I think about biometric proof of personhood?

#69

Post by nathanaldensr »

JohnFen wrote: post #65
xvector wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is the hash of an iris scan "sensitive biometric information," any more than a CCTV camera at your coffee shop, or the government minting your ID? It is a hash, for god's sake. It is more privacy preserving than the latter two, or any currently known proof-of-personhood currently in existence - while still accomplishing the goal of proof-of-personhood.

The hash is sensitive because it's a (reasonably) unique identifier that has been assigned to you. > any more than a CCTV camera at your coffee shop, or the government minting your ID? It's not, fundamentally, but that's not an argument in favor of things like this. The less of this sort of thing, the better. But a big difference is that my local coffee shop is, you know, local and not likely to be sharing the images…

In today's world of technocratic authoritarianism and regulatory capture, the differences between government and corporations is effectively zero.

Re: What do I think about biometric proof of personhood?

#70

Post by eli »

monero-xmr wrote: post #62
JohnFen wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Why I have to constantly scan my ID for various vendors is absurd. What are you scanning your ID for? I've never had to do that a single time.

Paypal, ebay, robinhood, vanguard, various crypto exchanges. I guess it's mostly financial stuff. But that's my most sensitive info.

Do you think that's because those companies need to verify personhood and this is the best solution? Or is there maybe something else at play?
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