As if renewing your real passport wasn’t a big enough pain, you may soon need an internet passport to get into your favourite Reddit thread.
Driving the news: Per TechCrunch, Worldcoin — a crypto project co-founded by Sam Altman — has created integrations for World ID, its iris-scanning identity verification tool, for some major digital platforms, including Shopify, Reddit, Telegram, and Minecraft.
- World ID is part of a broader push by the company to create a passport for the internet that verifies whether every user on a platform is, in fact, a real human.
- Reddit moderators, for example, could give special permissions to users with World IDs to avoid spam or allow Shopify merchants to use the ID as a verification tool.
How it works: There are three authentication levels: ‘Casual’ doesn’t require an eyeball scan to prove your identity — or your real name, since you just need to prove you’re not a bot. ‘Standard’ level does, and ‘high’ level requires both an iris scan and facial recognition.
Why it matters: It’s not getting any easier to tell humans and bots apart online. With more platforms looking to rid themselves of the spam and fraud risks that a growing number of fake accounts present, many could turn to World ID to create a more human digital space.
- Canadians experienced a 52% increase in bot-initiated attacks last year. In the last three months of 2022, Facebook removed 1.3 billion fake accounts from the platform.
Bottom line: Five million people already have a World ID, 100,000 of which signed up in the last week. Couple the company's growth with the fact that major platforms can now use it, it’s not crazy to think the ‘human passport’ could become a new norm on the internet.—LA