Posted by ColinWright 23 hours ago
Is there anything special about a passport photo, or can that be done from any photo of your face?
Anyway, I found that too much of a hassle and switched to other LLM providers.
A few months back I was evaluating one of the GPT-5 models for a side project. Turns out streaming via the API requires org verification, and I decided to look elsewhere.
In hindsight, a good decision given what just came out about Persona.
Do we know how they get that? Because my fingerprints are also in there, so...
And indeed, fingerprints are only accessible using privileged access. Not even you, the passport holder, has access.
And FP is a much worse modality to have registered because, as opposed to Face image, fingerprint is not affected by age. So that will match you 99.999999% for ever. Faces change.
AWS EU region is not doing much, and I suspect most companies run on US providers. EU needs independent platform for this to matter.
I’m so tired of all these covert ops run by these businesses. They aren’t going to stop until there is a heavy price to pay.
I gave in and verified. Persona was the vendor then too. Their web app required me to look straight forward into my camera, then turn my head to the left and right. To me it felt like a blatant data collection scheme rather than something that is providing security. I couldn't find anyone talking about this online at the time.
I ended up finding a job through my Linkedin network that I don't think I could have found any other way. I don't know if it was worth getting "verified".
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Related: something else that I find weird. After the Linkedin verification incident, my family went to Europe. When we returned to the US, the immigration agent had my wife and I look into a web cam, then he greeted my wife and I by name without handling our passports. He had to ask for the passport of our 7 month old son. They clearly have some kind of photo recognition software. Where did they get the data for that? I am not enrolled in Global Entry nor TSA PreCheck. I doubt my passport photo alone is enough data for photo recognition.
It's not. The developers' bubble we're in on the HN is invisibly tiny compared to the real life. And normies are not only perfectly happy uploading all their PII to Persona - they won't even understand what's wrong with that.
There has also been a backlash against verification in other communities like Reddit (also a bubble), mainly stemming from Discord's recent announcement.
The discourse is good, and while I wish every user and potential user understood all the pros, cons, and ramifications, I'm also happy we are finally talking about it in our bubbles.