Comment by fvdessen | Hacker News Reader

Comment by fvdessen | Hacker News Reader

"Proof of Personhood" is indeed a critical component of internet infrastructure. In Belgium we have an app for that called "Itsme" and it is becoming more and more the go-to single-sign-on tool. Instead of scanning your iris it asks your bank or government to confirm your identity when you set-up your account. I believe the EU commission is working towards standardising those protocols so apps like Itsme will work EU wide, maybe even worldwide.

As for privacy I don't see a big problem as for most online services I don't want to actually be anonymous towards the service provider, just towards the general web, and the online services should respect that according to the GDPR

Similar system is in place in Italy: https://www.spid.gov.it/en/

Although in classic Italian style now that a solid % of the population has it they’re considering switching to a new, worse, system that relies on the new ID card paired with either an NFC or a card reader.

> In Belgium we have an app for that called "Itsme"

That doesn't sound like proof-of-personhood, it sounds like proof-of-identity.

Itsme identifies you as a person. You can't have multiple accounts. So a Itsme signature is a proof of personhood (in addition to a proof of identity)

Right. All proofs of identity also act as proofs of personhood, but "proof of personhood" isn't the same. You can have a proof of personhood that doesn't identify which exact person you are.

Indeed! I believe Itsme also has the ability to provide anonymised tokens -- to be able to vote online -- but nobody uses it yet

A UBI coin like WorldCoin needs proof-of-identity as well, to prevent duplicate payouts.

It needs to identify an iris, not anything else about the owner of they iris.

That's not really a meaningful difference, though. It's still an identifier unique to you, and as soon as even a single company can correlate that identifier with any of your other identifiers, the game is over. Your iris now directly identifies you.

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