Apparently they rolling out this technology that scans our eyeballs online and forcing people to prove their a 'real human'. I thought the constant harassment of captchas was bad. Somehow they've made things even worse.
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@mr_penguin I think the best and most ethical way to deal with bots is to sell physical cards at stores that have a serial number you can enter in and prove you are human that way.
@xianc78
Creating a single human identifier is extremely dangerous for privacy independent of how you do it. With a captcha it's less awful as the tracking can be limited to your session and isn't tied to your actual person whereas a single human identifier, like a physical card bought at a store will be tied to your person. This is even if you record no data about who purchased the card.
The reason is that the state can go back later and force a seller to ID a person via receipts, cameras, and similar. This isn't some imaginary fear mongering concern either. Law enforcement use cameras focused on parking lots to track back folks who purchase goods from brick and mortar retail stores every day. People think that using cash to purchase pre-paid phone cards for instance makes them anonymous, but it's actually only psudo-anonymous. It helps undermine the mass survalance state to a degree, but it does not stop the tracking and violation of ones privacy outright. So what happens is the cops find out where the pre-paid card used to activate a SIM card was purchased from. They go to that store and dig through the receipt data and get a time/date and video of the parking lot at that time. They grab the license plate number and look it up. From there they go to the registered owner of the vehicle or get a warrant to conduct a search (probably after IDing the person from the video.. at least you'd hope, but warrants are a rubber stamping process so very little is ultimately needed... they are the weakest 'protection' ever).