Comment by 986aignan
3 days ago
IIRC, you could use asymmetric cryptography to derive a site-specific pseudonymous token from the service and your government ID without the service knowing what your government ID is or the government provider knowing what service you are using.
The service then links the token to your account and uses ordinary detection measures to see if you're spamming, flooding, phishing, whatever. If you do, the token gets blacklisted and you can no longer sign on to that service.
This isn't foolproof - you could still bribe random people on the street to be men/mules in the middle and do your flooding through them - but it's much harder than just spinning up ten thousand bots on a residential proxy.
But that does not really answer my question: if a human can prove that they are human anonymously (by getting an anonymous token), what prevents them from passing that token to an AI?
The whole point is to prevent a robot from accessing the API. If you want to detect the robot based on its activity, you don't need to bother humans with the token in the first place: just monitor the activity.
It does not prevent a bot from using your ID. But a) the repercussions for getting caught are much more tangible when you can't hide behind anonymity - you risk getting blanket banned from the internet and b) the scale is significantly reduced - how many people are willing to rent/sell their IDs, i.e., their right to access the internet?
Edit: ok I see the argument that the feedback mechanism could be difficult when all the website can report is "hey, you don't know me but this dude from request xyz you just authenticated fucked all my shit up". But at the end of the day, privacy preservation is an implementation detail I don't see governments guaranteeing.
> But at the end of the day, privacy preservation is an implementation detail I don't see governments guaranteeing.
Sure, I totally see how you can prevent unwanted activity by identifying the users. My question was about the privacy-preserving way. I just don't see how that would be possible.