Thread

1. tgsovlerkhgsel · 1789535685 · focus · HN ↗

   This is really clever from Apple. The journalist use case is just the PR story. This will be really useful for identity verification and insurance apps, and has the potential to shift from "you need a smartphone to be able to live normally" to "you need an iPhone to be able to live normally".

   There are already plenty of insurances that require you to submit claims through a smartphone app that tries to essentially do this by capturing sensor metadata etc. - those don't need to be nation-state resilient, just Joe the Crackhead Insurance Scammer resilient, so this works. Likewise, more and more things online require identity verification (either officially or disguised as age verification).

   Edit: And while "a nation state actor can spoof this" is a problem for the journalism use case, the insurance/ID verification use cases are perfectly fine with anything that raises the bar but could be bypassed with enough effort. Also, the journalism use case suffers from the same fundamental issue all of these use cases suffer from: People will "verify" the picture by looking at the repost of a screenshot of the verification UI, not by verifying the original themselves.

   1. dwaite · 1789582065 · focus · HN ↗

      Identity Verification is the realm of digital credentials. The goal isn't to make putting a driving license or passport on a desk and to verify the picture is of authentic pixels, but to move to mDL / EIDAS2 technology to have a digital representation of a driving license/passport.

      This tech would just indicate that they got authentic pixels capturing a potentially fake license.

      Likewise, this doesn't help as much as you'd like with most bespoke remote selfie verification systems, since this doesn't support video, doesn't protect against MITM and adds a remote processing delay that breaks any time-of-flight measurement. It shuffles the risks around.

      1. EmbarrassedHelp · 1789614137 · focus · HN ↗

         Nobody is worry about making the jobs of age verification companies trying to violate user privacy any easier. In fact we should be moving towards new ways of circumventing these attacks on privacy.

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