Every time I read something about digital identity and proof of humanhood, someone points out how we hand over our data or biometrics to some company and something evil will happen.
I’ve been digging into this and found an article about Proof of Human that actually walks through how it’s possible to verify uniqueness without creating a honeypot of sensitive data. They use something called SMPC (secure multi-party computation) where your data gets split into encrypted fragments and distributed across multiple independent nodes. No single party ever sees the full picture.
They also talk about why government IDs won’t work for this (scalability issues, plus you can just report yours lost and get a new credential to sell) and why face recognition isn’t accurate enough for billions of people. I’m not technical enough to fully validate it, but it’s the first time I’ve read an explanation that didn’t immediately set off privacy alarm bells.
Anyone here work in cryptography want to weigh in? Curious if people here think this is inevitable or if there’s another path I’m not seeing.
