Post

Matthew Green
@matthewdgreen.bsky.social

There’s something ominous about the speed with which the entire world has marched to require identification on platforms and, as I expected, begin the process of banning anonymous VPNs.

Richard Barnes
@ipv.sx

Unclear on what you’re asking here. “Privacy enhancing identification” seems like an oxymoron. Identification, in the sense of tying activity to a real world identity, is inherently an information-disclosing / privacy-reducing activity.

0 reposts2 likes

Sam Jaques
@sejaques.bsky.social

I don't expect to win the political battle against age verification (honestly I'm not sure I even want to). I do hope I could push for good cryptography to make the privacy-reliability tradeoff better

Richard Barnes
@ipv.sx

Unfortunately if that’s the thing you mandate in law, you’ve now killed open source software. Can’t have a kid compiling their own Firefox fork that skips the age checks.

Sam Jaques
@sejaques.bsky.social

I'm not convinced there is *no* way to defeat proxies, esp. if our goal is high-but-not-perfect reliability. But these aren't new problems with anonymous credentials. My original question was where the state-of-the-art is, essentially

Natanael, Tech janitor
@natanael.bsky.social

You can build essentially what you want, the problem again is building out the infrastructure and how utterly pointless it can be if you use it wrong (which means enormous expenses and restrictions for no gain)

Sam Jaques
@sejaques.bsky.social

If the government issues my anonymous credentials, they already have my passport. Even in private hands, a few issuers can be held to stringent data handling regulations that would be impractical to enforce on *every* company

Richard Barnes
@ipv.sx

Similar to the E2E encryption debates in that nerding harder will not square the policy circle. Dissimilar to the E2E encryption debates in that the policy world is proceeding nonetheless, as @matthewdgreen.bsky.social said at the top.