Reddit in talks to embrace Sam Altman’s iris-scanning Orb to verify users
https://www.semafor.com/article/06/20/2025/reddit-considers-iris-scanning-orb-developed-by-a-sam-altman-startupOpen linkView original on lemmy.world499
Comments154https://www.semafor.com/article/06/20/2025/reddit-considers-iris-scanning-orb-developed-by-a-sam-altman-startupOpen linkView original on lemmy.world
On the one hand, I understand the inherent limitations of pseudonymous social media and why a corporation and even end users might benefit from authoritative user identification.
On the other hand, oh hell no.
Exactly. Reddit isn’t my fucking bank. They don’t need to know who I am.
Your bank doesn't even need to know who you are.
On a related note, Bank of America, if you're reading this, my name is floop @lemmy.dbzer0.com, and I would like to withdraw all the money from my account. Nonsequential bills please!
The banks are legally required to know who you are. It’s part of AML and anti-terrorist financing laws
It’s called KYC or “know your customer”.
KYC? Isn't that a sex lube?
Who is floop?
I am floop!
I'm on to you Spartacus!
We are floop!
They don’t even require an email when signing up. At the same time they speed run to biometrics.
What a shit show they’ve become.
Whatcha mean, they obviously need to count the wrinkles on your dirty balloon knot.
Wow who's your butthole guy?
Wtf is this sorcery your post says "1." but when I reply its "37."
huh... maybe because of the period and no space? Markdown thinks it's a list item?
Hum
I mean, there's someone here who has (not even exaggerating) 15+ accounts that they just rotate thru.
It's a hassle to block them all because I still see new ones, but I'll take that over "proving myself" as a unique person with something like this.
I haven't seen like any hilariouschaos users in awhile
I don't think psudonyms are an issue, but verifying that a user is an actual person vs an AI chatbot is absolutely something that every popular social media platform will need to tackle at some point.
Hmm funny how Sam Altman is one of the few people responsible for creating that problem and now he's selling the solution to it
It's actually low-key brilliant. Start a gold rush, when you realize the gold isn't actually there, pivot to selling shovels and keep hyping the gold rush. Fools and their money are soon parted, and there seem to be an endless supply of them.
He’s a modern day arms dealer.
The bot problem has been around since before Sam Altman was old enough to legally drink. For example in the early days the founders of Reddit were running bots to make the site look wayyy busier than it actually was in order to attract new users.
He's a convenient bogey-man, and a huge asshole, but he's the not the source of this problem.
Why? Internet rules from the days gone by - everyone is a liar. So it shouldn't matter.
Will they though? Facebook has already created undisclosed bot accounts themselves before. A Platform where real users and such bots are indistinguishable (for the user) sounds like a social media corpos and authoritarian governments wet dream to me. Also reminds me of the attempts to disguise ads as natural content.
Sure but they only want the bots they approve of. That way they can charge for the privilege of allowing someone's preferred bots onto the platform.
As explained, it's not even quite user identification, but rather verification of a unique individual. The ability to identify that an account is held by a unique person (as opposed to possibility being one of many puppet accounts) is pretty useful, particularly if it's not possible to backtrace it to an otherwise identifiable person.
Even so, the problem I see with this system is that a person has to be careful to never, ever, ever associate their unique ID with themselves, though there will be constant pressure to do so.
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This worldcoin? Yeah, it’s looking real good right now…
I'll give you $1 per eyeball
here. have jar. $20 please.
are they really trying to make us ponder an orb to get onto reddit
scan your eyes to use social media? don't mind if I DONT lol
I will happily forego any/all social media (and never look back) rather than submit to such an idiotic, intrusive, perverse, and disgusting system.
🤦♀️ 🙄 🤡 🖕 💩
But think of all the convenience you gain by not having to remember a password! That darn brain of mine
What the actual fuck.
Seriously how on Earth is that supposed to work?
It's just a buzzword volly to get people to want to surrender more data. Actually insane premise lmao
I read about this a few years ago, and even saw them in a mall in Western EU.
The whole thing is just bio-data mining, and they started by preying on some poor regions in Africa
Selling data on people is a lucrative business. Although it is a business and not UBI.
Okay I've scanned my eyeball and I've got some of their worthless cryptocurrency. What about next month, do they want me to scan my eyeball again, because I guarantee it won't have changed.
It could probably be worth it to keep an active eye on your data even if it remains roughly the same. To keep an established base line, to keep an eye out for changes in environment in specific areas, to monitor the effects of aging, to sell you shit when your eye gets damaged. Probably other evil shit too, or just the paranoid urge to surveil people for no damn reason.
So this guy helps create a technology that turns bots up to 11 and then he turns around to sell us a privacy invasive solution to the problem he created? What a fucking asshole.
But would it make you feel better to know that there’s also a crypto currency associated with it?
I can't believe you've done this to me
Isn't he an accelerationist? To them the more fuck ups we have the more solutions we make, which is pretty stupid of an argument in my opinion.
I agree. We obviously need to make huge changes to how we live asap, but it seems so profoundly stupid to let a few unelected people break things without a collectively agreed upon plan in place.
Scan your biounique eyeball to provide ID whilst retaining your anonymity???
Anonymity and the ability for someone else to prove it was me are nearly opposites.
I mean, I don't trust OpenAI or Reddit either but these two things aren't as mutually exclusive as they seem.
With zero-knowledge principles you could maintain anonymity while still verifying identity. Doesn't mean that's what big tech is doing or is gonna do, but also doesn't mean it's physically unreal or anything either. We could build a not shitty system.
Biounique id is an advertiser's wet dream and I don't think it's theoretically possible to prevent it from being exploited for profiling by Google. If the hashed encrypted token retains the uniqueness then it points to you as an individual across time, devices and location changes. There is no escaping this ID. You can't change it, you can't get a new one.
Google and other multinational corporations WILL know where you live and can figure out all your personal characteristics with a little time. Your anonymity is gone forever.
Sam Altman saw the film Minority Report in which iris scanners on holographic billboards trigger the advertisements to address you by name, hampering the escape of the central character who was being set up, and thought "Cool, let's make this. I'm going to be rich! The other dystopian aspects of the film are fiction, but this one I can make real."
Also look at how FB et al can't even keep themselves from tracking you all over the internet using all kinds of clever engineering engineering beyond plain cookies.
If it actually becomes ubiquitous, the ability to tie all the anonymous impressions to one person is too tempting for surveillance ghouls.
In theory the unique id produced by the scan could be salted by you, uniquely for each website or application, and then provided to the site. This would keep aggregators from being able to track all your activity, or at least it would if they didn't already have fingerprinting techniques that do it without the need of another unique identifier.
If the biometric ID is collected and stored by someone else, not only have I lost my anonymity, I've also lost control of my identity and there's no way for me to stop that happening.
This is unequivocally bad for privacy.
Identity does not need to be verified by a private company's scan of someone's eyeballs.
Exactly!
Lol. The bots to humans ratio will get even bigger if that happens.
It works: You can tell the real humans because they'll be the only ones unwilling to do this invasive bullshit. The bots will just come up with something fake to scan and carry on as they always have.
Like a real human eye? Is this how Skynet starts?
Wouldn't it just be reverse engineering what the scanner does? If you have a close enough copy of thesnanning tech couldn't you have a bot rapidly iterate eyeballs in some form till it can pass the real version a couple times and repeat with the iteration process?
don’t kink shame my dude
Drink verification can to continue.
2013, Quasimodo predicted this
Thanks Reddit for giving me yet another reason not to go back
I got banned for more or less saying Elon is a miserable twat who deserves bad things to happen to him on that one thread where people went full board on the gruesome depictions and that was enough for a permaban. Fuck Reddit.
I got banned for saying that poisoning an invasive species like cats isn't any different than poisoning an invasive species like rats, except that cats are cute and fluffy and rats are not.
It was under a post about the Australian government putting up poison traps to combat the local cat population which is threatening local endangered wildlife.
FUCK no.
I thought this was an onion article or something
Sure...as if they get my bio-data. That company will at best get a 1-way salted hash.
Humans with human eyeballs are still using Reddit? I thought it was just bots moderating bots by now.
happy cake day
They can scan these nuts
Scan on deez
This will do it. It will finally kill reddit.
Sicko.yes.gif
Been trying to get people on Reddit to cross over to the light over here but damn it’s hard
Why? I don't want anyone here to whom it's not self evident to that it's better here. For it to stay a better place it needs to keep better people who can make their own decisions using their brains.
Who TF is actually going to want to use these platforms bad enough to do this shit?
Facebook sucks and has for quite some time.
Reddit is mainly just very poorly disguised government surveillance and AI generated advertisement, and none of the content is even enjoyable or enticing. Who TF is their target audience?
Useful idiots
Bots
You severely overestimate how much the average person cares about their own privacy.
Even so, are they going to acquire, set up, and use an iris scanner just to remain anonymous on Reddit?
It’ll be in yer phone
Probably someday, but the article is describing a dedicated orb device that does this.
In Canada we passed a regulation that social media sites have to pay our media companies to link to their articles. Google is paying up, but Facebook said no, and has banned news. It has made Facebook here much less terrible.
You'd have to get me high on PCP + cocaine + some sort of crazy shit like krokodil to just implant the idea that I need to verify my very existence to a private company to post comments online or to enjoy a website.
Lemmy gonna get crowded soon
I wish. I have noticed that I don’t see many Lenny endorsements anymore, I wonder if they remove those (I know my comment has been removed couple of times).
Probably still do quite a lot. I still have my account there in case there are calls to promote the fediverse.
They left Digg posts alone for now though. I know it's another boiling pot, dont have to remind me.
I mean, come on. We shit on redditors, but even redditors won't stand for getting their iris's scanned just to use the site..
I think you dropped this: /s
I would not ponder this orb
lol
lmao, even
Lmao No
...this isn't satire?
Every frickin day... at least once, I read a post's title and start looking around for clues that it's not real... My mind goes: "is it the onion? Is it April's fools again already? This can't be true..."
Reddit knowing who I am isn't okay though. Who tf trusts them?
What?! Think of the shareholder value! /s
Create a problem
Sell the solution
YES, PLEASE! DO IT!!! Give people more reasons to leave!!
Yeah this sounds like final nail in the coffin idea
Nah, since it is only an option (at least it read like this) not much would happen (again) I guess.
Face recognition in smartphones is spread widely even though I know nobody using it.
Facial recognition in smartphones is a very different thing from basically every point of view. Are you sure you don't know a single person using an iPhone? Chances are they'll be using FaceID to unlock their phone.
I don't think I know a single person NOT using biometrics to unlock their smartphone.
Edit: I'm sure there at least 3 people on Lemmy that don't use biometrics but that doesn't change anything I'm pretty sure :D
Edit edit: another one! Maybe there are at least 4 people now.
I don't use biometrics for anything.
nice to meet you. i don't.
Now you know two of us
I really hope this drives a ton of users to Lemmy. I love this platform but it sadly really feels like a 20% Reddit :/
A lot less than 20% when it comes to specific subjects. The great thing about reddit was finding communities around just about every topic or hobby. If 100 people had a passion for something they could meet on Reddit and still have a comfy, somewhat active sub reddit.
On Lemmy you've got generic technology, generic news, generic videogames, generic pics, and almost everything else doesn't get enough traction to keep living. It's a basic population problem, the fraction of people knowing about Lemmy is just not enough to gather around shared stuff. Even those that do use Lemmy are probably not aware of every community attempt that could interest them.
I still see more communities being abandoned than new ones appearing.
Wayyyyyy less than 20%.
Even removing, incredibly liberal, bot percentages from reddit Lemmy is still < 0.001% of the audience
What you describe is the main reason that's stopping me from 100% leaving Reddit. There isn't enough variety and there isn't enough activity in communities that isn't in the few popular ones. At the moment it feels like +80% of current users fit into a specific demographic.
There are like 60 highly-specific cat subreddits but only 2 general ones on Lemmy.
It's a solution to a problem Lemmy will soon have in that case.
Which is bots.
Lemmy isn't flooded with bots and astroturfing because it's essentially too small to matter. The audience is something like < 0.001% that of reddit.
Once it grows the problem comes here as well, and we have no answers for it.
It's a shitty situation for the internet as a whole, and the only solution is verifying humans. And corporations CANNOT be trusted with that kind of access/power
Note: Make the UX on Lemmy even worse to keep the Redditors out!
Well said!! :)
That is perhaps the only orb I care not to ponder.
These companies are really seeing how far they can get away with shit. It's mind blowing.
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So how much are they paying reddit, exactly...?
I hope they do this, it'd make the APIopolypse look like a practice run.
I’m 100% for technological advancement and even AI.
They will have to rip my fucking eyes out before I let them scan them with this thing.
Be well Simon Phoenix
Your iris/fingerprint scanner is only secure until someone is willing to rip out an eyeball/finger.
Or counterfits good enough beat the scanner someone is willing to pay for, a bank might have a super good system but would all the other branches that would use something like this, would even an ATM in a bad neighbourhood has as good of a scanner as one in a higher class area if they can save some money?
Adam ruined reddit.
(Go with me on the joke, reddit was ruined long long time ago. Adam did an endorsement of Orb a few weeks back, got called out and did an apology.)
I'M STILL BLAMING CONOVER THO
It was so weird that he even did that.
I heard this news a couple years ago. No chance in hell it happens
I think the appropriate headline should be:
"Reddit in talks to embrace iris-scanning Orb to verify users created by man alleged by his own sister to have molested her throughout her childhood beginning at age 3."
whatever me and everyone else useful is banned. reddit can do whatever the fuck it wants its just a bunch of white supremacists i think.
there's such a painfully obvious agenda over there with the admins. I got a 7 day ban for knocking russians and saying "slava ukraini" then I got a perm ban a week after that for posing the question "how long until an average citizen with an AR decides to deal with ICE themselves?" because apparently both times I was "inciting violence against a minority" because Russians and ICE agents, according to Reddit, are minorities
The Russia part is still how it works in .ml.
I've blocked the .ml instance so I wouldn't know.
It's not how it works, don't worry. They're just strawmanning.
Yeah I'm not sure why I haven't yet. I guess I just keep thinking that there's some topics like tech that they can't turn into a propaganda opportunity, but they consistently prove me wrong.
i have a novelty account i kept around and i just post luigi pictures whenever it gets unbanned. it has probably only been unbanned a week this year
they already have too much info from their users, same as facebook... years ago things like this were heavily rejected (like PIPA act when the SOPA almost happened)
Glad I left that shithole.
Reddit wants to become bots talking to bots
... and they're gonna need a bone marrow sample to verify
Pondering my deleting my reddit account again
Again? Lol just do it
The one Orb you don't ponder.
I can see why Reddit needs to secure the user base. As not accounts proliferate they need to be able to demonstrate verified real users to their advertisers. Unfortunately for privacy, this will be widespread, in that case. I'm opting out.
Glad i left Reddit a while back
And you need to donate a kidney.
Hey, it's reddit, it'll be worth it to see all those ai bots talk to eachother, Right?
No human needs this, this is the march of the companies against humanity.
Ahh so they'll use this to eliminate bots and multi-account trolls right?
right??????!!?!?
lol. That stupid Orb thing is still around?
So much of what creating privacy busting biometric databases claim to do could be accomplished with speed-of-light geofencing, a.k.a. “distance-bounding protocol”. If a moderator decides messages from country X are problematic, then they can flag/block them for other users. It only requires carefully measuring ping times and basically involves banning traffic from places that can't achieve certain minimum pings to certain trusted servers.
And I was worried that it was the Australian Governments Digital ID shit that would be what gets in my way. You know what reddit, just do it. It would be the kick I need to completely drop reddit.
It reminds me of the eyeballs in linqspace in Beneath a Steel Sky.