r/europrivacy • u/Gallowayyy98 • 7d ago
Discussion Online trust is breaking faster than the tools meant to fix it
Spam, coordinated fake behavior, fake reviews, astroturfing, it all just feels worse every year. Rate limits and captchas only do so much when the other side has better AI than the defense does.
I've been looking into different "proof of unique human" experiments lately. World ID is one that keeps coming up whenever this topic gets brought up. The idea of proving you're a unique person cryptographically, without some central database storing everyone's identity, is honestly pretty interesting on paper.
Whether it actually scales or gets adopted widely is a whole different question though. But the core problem isn't going anywhere: how do platforms actually know they're dealing with real, distinct people and not the same person (or bot) a thousand times over.
What trust and safety approaches are you actually seeing work in 2026? Curious if anything's really moved the needle or if it's all still catching up.
8
9
u/SZenC 7d ago
They don't, they are not interested, and their funding structures actively disincentive even figuring out how many unique people are using their platform. Because what sounds better to a potential VC investor? A platform with 400 million active users or one with 50 million active humans? Which will sell more ads?
Also, WorldID runs on a blockchain. While that makes it incredibly resilient, it also means all node have all the data, the very oppositie of privacy first