Onihikage

We’d absolutely need a level of abstraction. The government knows who you are anyway, but the business entity you’re interfacing with would get a unique token from the government that is not your actual Real ID number but which is a hash generated from the business’s (salted) ID number and your own salted ID number (idk I’m not a cryptographer).

Signing up for an account would resemble using Google or Facebook to create an account; you’d be redirected to some third party Identity Verification System (IVS) which would handle identity verification and redirect you back to the account creation with the extra piece of information provided by the third party. You’d still pick a username, password, etc.; the government database would only be used to generate that unique token.

More specifically, the website or service would only be passed a token from the IVS, uniquely generated based on the company ID and the person’s ID, and the government database would only keep the token, not any of the data used to compute it. (That’s not counting China and other authoritarian states, of course - they’d definitely retain all that information and have a list of all the sites you have accounts with. This wouldn’t solve that problem.) This would make the IVS database virtually useless on its own, as an attacker who compromises the database has no way of knowing which token is associated with which website, and cannot derive it themselves unless they’ve also compromised one or more target websites at the same time. The cryptographic stuff would be rotated once it’s known that a breach has occurred, so such breaches would likely be limited to state actors or black-hat groups that hoard zero-days.

Now, what would all this accomplish? What would it make possible that currently isn’t outside of China?

• Unique website signups - one person, one account, and if it’s banned, that’s it, you don’t get to log in to that site ever again until you’re unbanned. Your only option to get around a ban would be to commit identity fraud, which would be quickly traced back to you if everything really was using this system.
• If you block someone, they can’t just make a new account and keep harassing you; they’d have to start committing crimes, and the pattern of behavior would be easily traced back to their original account, and with it, their original identity.
• No more sock puppets. If you say something on a platform, you only get one account to say it with. Troll farms would have to openly pay thousands of people to support a particular view, which many websites would likely consider a bannable offense. Troll farms are non-viable.
• A website doesn’t need your email address or any personal information from you in order to verify your identity for password resets. If the IVS returns the correct token, that’s good enough.
• If a user has committed a crime, and evidence of this is visible on a website or platform, a government with jurisdiction can, with a warrant, request that user’s token. That gives them a specific identity in the ID database to investigate further.
• If the government is investigating a particular individual over whom they have jurisdiction, they can query websites or businesses over which they also have jurisdiction for information on whether any of the tokens in their database match a user account’s identity token, and request data from the matching account. It would be a much more focused process than queries based on IP addresses which judges keep having to say are not proof of identity.

What would this system not do? What doesn’t change compared to now?

• Companies using this system would still only know for sure who you are if you tell them; at most, they know with certainty what country your identity is associated with, but little more.
• Companies could still coordinate information on data such as which accounts sign in from the same IP addresses, which would tell them more about specific users and potentially let them profile you.
• Companies will still give up any information they have on you to the government if compelled by a warrant, sometimes even without one.
• Websites can be hacked and your data on that website exposed to the world, requiring you to reset your password, etc.
• The government can be hacked and information about your identity exposed
• Accounts can be hacked, and nefarious people can do nefarious things under your name without having to commit identity fraud (though this act could itself be considered a crime under such a system)
• Stalkers can still figure out who you are based on information you post, and go after you in the real world
• The government doesn’t know which websites you visit unless they’re actively spying on you.
• Oppressive governments can and will continue to monitor and log everything they can about you, and attempt to weaponize this against dissenters or those otherwise deemed “undesirable”