Their sudden interest in our passports

Some of the curious lot just want to use my passport to take out a loan in my name or steal my identity. Others are looking for signs that I might be of non-human origin.

Today marks another important milestone in Europe’s journey towards digital independence. Amid rising tensions with the United States, European organizations are launching their own social media. It’s called W, and, at the moment, it closely resembles X.

There’s one issue that worries security researchers, though. People who want to post content on W will have to verify their identity using a passport or ID card. W has a separate app for this – W Identity – that somewhat reduces the risk of using a passport to sign up for social media. However, security experts are still very cautious about it.

“The outsourced verification layer is usually the part that breaks,” Arnoldas Radišauskas, a Cybernews security researcher, says.

“We have watched this exact model fail again and again. Tea promised it had deleted IDs after verification, yet years of passports and selfies turned up in an open database. The same happened with Discord, which lost around 70,000 ID images through a third-party provider, and AU10TIX, the firm verifying users for the likes of X and TikTok, left its systems exposed for 18 months.”

Some Americans are surely having fun watching our attempts to create alternatives to apps created in Silicon Valley. Euro-Office, a European version of the Microsoft Office, is one of the more curious examples, as its code, apparently, can be altered from Moscow.

The US, in turn, is ramping up protections of American tech. Anthropic had to abruptly disable Fable 5 and Mythos 5 after the US government ordered the suspension of all foreign access to the models. The cause was an apparent Jailbreak, which, blown out of proportion or not, doesn’t really matter as the US wants to be the leading nation when it comes to AI.

And just before the furor over the decision to disable the Fable 5 and Mythos 5 models, Anthropic updated its privacy policy, stating it may check users’ identities to help keep services “safe and secure.”

I feel like, at some point, they will ask me to audition just to be able to use their services.

The same goes for social media. With politicians around the world extremely concerned about children online, we will soon need to prove our eligibility to use services we don’t even like in the first place. The UK has just banned social media for under-16s, but they still don’t know how they will verify users’ age, and are looking into it.

At the same time, they are not restricting access to platforms like WhatsApp. While kids are safe from mindless scrolling there, anyone can drop your kid a message on WhatsApp. Given that WhatsApp numbers have been circulating on the dark web for years, it is highly likely that a child predator already has your kid’s number.

It is surely dangerous out there online, but do we make it safer by verifying who we are?

Today, we posted an investigation into a humongous database – containing 24 billion records – that included sensitive data such as usernames and passwords.

Malicious hackers already sit on a treasure trove of data. What they lack, they can hack.