In Korea, a lot of online services require you to identify yourself via an identity service that mobile service providers make available. So you sign up for some site, it redirects you to authenticate your real identity with your phone service provider, and then you can finish making an account. It’s quite effective at preventing spam, but then the phone companies now know who you are on the internet. Anonymity is questionable.
Of course, that’s only at registration. There’s nothing stopping someone from creating an account with their identity and letting an AI drive. However, getting banned is much more impacting, so maybe that’s deterrent enough?
Then there’s the question of if such a system could still guarantee anonymity and/or if we’d be willing to give up anonymity to ensure we’re interacting with humans
So… what do we do about it?
In Korea, a lot of online services require you to identify yourself via an identity service that mobile service providers make available. So you sign up for some site, it redirects you to authenticate your real identity with your phone service provider, and then you can finish making an account. It’s quite effective at preventing spam, but then the phone companies now know who you are on the internet. Anonymity is questionable.
Of course, that’s only at registration. There’s nothing stopping someone from creating an account with their identity and letting an AI drive. However, getting banned is much more impacting, so maybe that’s deterrent enough?
Then there’s the question of if such a system could still guarantee anonymity and/or if we’d be willing to give up anonymity to ensure we’re interacting with humans
Curious on others’ thoughts
If the choice is between:
The internet is nothing but hallucinated bot content, or
You have to flash government ID every time you post, and anonymity is impossible,
Then both means the internet is dead.
It’s likely those aren’t the only two choices. We used to use captcha to prevent bots. There may be another way