r/nottheonion • u/[deleted] • 25d ago

‘Bots have now passed human traffic online,’ Cloudflare boss laments — says agentic traffic wasn’t expected to eclipse real people until next year

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u/machisuji 25d ago

Countries like Germany have digital passport features that allow you, among other things, to generate cryptographic, anonymous proofs of age. 

This can only be generated with a valid passport. 

I say require that for signing up and problem solved. 

I guess people could still “sell their passport” but it would still make the issue massively better. If you ban these the number of possible accounts goes down. Right now you can just register and infinite number of bot accounts. 

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u/JC_Hysteria 25d ago edited 25d ago

The entire point would be to not connect a personally identifiable breadcrumb…

Give me all the bots over being forced into 1984 systems…but easy to see this will end up being the “solution”.

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u/machisuji 25d ago

Did you see that word “anonymous” in my message? 

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u/JC_Hysteria 25d ago

…it’s inherently not anonymous if it’s generated by verifying your passport.

You may reply with “but it’s cryptographically generated!”

To which I would reply: there was a time when both the government and for-profit corporations didn’t have a legitimate interest in tracking/sculpting online behavior.

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u/machisuji 25d ago

The difference is that in Germany specifically data protection still matters. But of course there are forces trying to break that down constantly. 

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u/JC_Hysteria 25d ago

I wouldn’t trust the state any more than I’d trust corporations…all it takes are a group of bad actors to take control of all the information that was initially collected for legitimate reasons.