Kenji Ames

Witness to the debacle

[Kenji Ames @enstrangement]

@lionel_trolling @AdsoOfBelk Competent evil is obviously the worse quadrant of this matrix

[Rick Song @rickcsong]

Who could have guessed that fraud detection data is kind of beautiful? Looks more like a topography map or mitochondria than a bunch of fraud clusters.

[Rick Song @rickcsong]

It’s been a rough few years for identity.

Over 150 million driver's licenses were leaked last week. Tech improvements mean you can now use deepfakes to impersonate anyone or create a whole fake personality to publish content under.

The volume and scale of identity theft is going to break the internet. It’s already starting to, and we’re seeing the signs of it every day here at Persona.

It no longer matters if a person exists anymore. Scammers can borrow a new 'real identity' every minute and never run out. All this raises a big question: what does it actually even mean to be you online today?

Growing up, the internet felt magical. I spent most of my free time playing online games and in chat rooms. I made friends, got flamed, trolled, and cooked plenty. But the magic remained intact, because everyone felt like a real person.

There’s a deep nostalgia for that old internet, when a stranger could become a real friend even if you never met IRL.

Now, that anonymity has faded, and it’s become harder to know who or what to trust. Strangers feel like potential scammers, grudges like engagement bait, and viral videos like marketing hoaxes.

Everything feels fake. Fake stories, fake products, fake people. Even when it’s not fake, the concern that it might be changes how we all interact with the content.

So what changed?

Identity has been flipped on its head. Back then, you were often interacting with fake identities, but real people. Now, we spend our time online looking at real identities, operated by fake people.

At Persona, we think of identity as the front door. Fake accounts, transactions, products, and stories often start with the same problem: a person pretending to be someone they’re not.

And at the same time, being fake has become much more valuable. Stealing an identity used to mean opening a bank account or taking out a loan under someone else’s name. Now, it also means shaping public opinion, influencing policy, moving the stock market, and manipulating prediction market outcomes.

But nothing has really changed about the way we verify people.

Most systems still ask you to show an ID, scan your face, and prove yourself from scratch, over and over again. These methods are exhausting, outdated, and often require sharing more information than necessary.

You shouldn’t have to repeatedly hand over sensitive information to prove you’re real. The internet depends on people being able to connect and participate without fearing that everyone on the other side is trying to take advantage of you.

We believe your verified identity should be something that you build upon and carry with you, not remade from scratch with all your raw data every time you need to interact online. Most importantly, you should have control over what gets shared and what can be carried portably from one interaction to another.

That’s the shift we’re investing in at Persona and where you’ll continue to hear from me, for both our business and the internet as a whole.

[Rick Song @rickcsong]

Given how the situation has evolved, I want to get these statements out there now. I probably should have sooner.

1/ We were not hacked or breached.
2/ We do not send your identity to the government. Our financial services customers *can* file anti-money laundering reports on payments/transactions through our platform to the government.
3/ We do not use your data to train AI.
4/ We do not work with ICE or the DHS.
5/ We do not work with any federal agency. We are competing for government contracts to be able to authenticate remote government employees.
6/ We do not work with Palantir.
7/ We do not interact with Peter Thiel. We *did* take money from Founders Fund which he cofounded.
8/ Our customers are generally the data controller (under GDPR parlance) of the data. We invest a lot to give them the controls to retain and redact it properly.
9/ We schedule for deletion any data we are the data controller of after verification.

Most importantly, we have no interest in your data. We do not profit off it. In fact, it’s the opposite. The liability is too great and the fines are too high.

[Rick Song @rickcsong]

celeste has published the 2nd part of their research. It has been delightful communicating with them, even with all of the stress, noise, and chaos.

We are still committed to responding to the rest of their questions, but I would encourage reading their subsequent findings here

[Rick Song @rickcsong]

We understand Discord is proceeding with age verification without Persona, but some of the implications in this blog post about the capabilities & features of our platform are patently false.

I’m fine if they don’t want to use us. I’m not okay with them publicly saying untrue things about our age assurance technologies to try to shift responsibility away from their own decisions. Doing so further erodes trust.

> We’ve set a new bar for any partner offering facial age estimation, including that it must be performed entirely on-device, meaning your biometric data never leaves your phone. Persona did not meet that bar.

We offer on-device age verification. We even offered credit-card based age verification for free (their new approach). We made this clear to Discord multiple times.

Throughout our partnership, Discord was explicitly looking for a provider who could prevent “fraud/deepfakes/bots/using video game photo mode to pass age check.”

We were transparent about the real technological limitations and capabilities of on-device solutions, which I shared elsewhere on this platform.

We were upfront that on-device solutions can create a “privacy for only the wealthy” problem where only those with higher-end devices would be able to run the necessary models.

We understood that they had experienced recent bypasses that could cause regulatory scrutiny.

Many of us here at Persona are huge fans of Discord and some have been users since 2015. We were eager and willing to partner with them to address all these challenges.

[Alex Tabarrok @ATabarrok]

The U.S. is by far the wealthiest major country—wealthier than Canada, far wealthier than Mexico or China.

Yet Trump claims we are the ones who have been cheated by the global order???

Bonkers. Loser thinking that will make losers of us all.

[Marco Rubio @marcorubio]

Foreign Aid is not charity. We must make sure it is well spent, but it is less than 1% of budget & critical to our national security.

[Kenji Ames @enstrangement]

@ATabarrok @Wiznutz It's only true at low volumes. The USD stablecoin to fiat forex markets lack liquidity in most pairs. At scale, liquidity dries up and off-ramping into fiat converges with fiat-to-fiat prices. Can still be faster, though.

[Nikhil Pal Singh @nikhil_palsingh]

I’ve been struggling for a way to say this. We know that the West’s intellectual, moral and ethical universalism has long been aspirational, observed in the breech, riddled with exclusion clauses and double-standards. But the past year feels like a sharp, qualitative degradation.

[Teamsters Against Trump @TmstrsStopTrump]

Teamsters across America are coming together in a grassroots movement to defeat Trump and elect Kamala Harris.

We know the difference between someone who will fight for us - and someone who just pretends to on TV.

Take the pledge and join us: https://t.co/TKvwNQf3ca

[Kenji Ames @enstrangement]

@scottlincicome The whole issue is the geography of production, not total output or employment. It’s obtuse to imagine that a town devastated by the offshoring of the air conditioner plant is somehow balanced by growth of shitty jobs relying on migrant labor in food processing somewhere else.

[David Weigel @daveweigel]

Good answer here for the swing demo of Orban Moms

[Chris Hayes @chrislhayes]

She's absolutely cleaning his clock.

[François Chollet @fchollet]

This is true -- the rule of law is good for business. Democracy is good for business. Strong institutions are good for business. The collapse of the rule of law would turn into oligarchy, which is bad for business, because the interests of the would-be oligarchs have very little overlap with yours -- even if you are wealthy and well-connected.

[Akilah Hughes @AkilahObviously]

So what’s the truth, is Kamala a DEI hire or is she not Black? It’s almost like the racist conservatives can’t figure out exactly how to tear down a Black woman and are burning down everyone of mixed race who may have been in their camp (for whatever misguided reason)

[Kurt Andersen @KBAndersen]

Why would anyone dare to say this about a person who, at age 19 forty years ago, enrolled in the most prestigious black university in America?

Because he’s astoundingly stupid as well as a pathological liar. My explanatory 2017 Venn diagram:

[David Dayen @ddayen]

VPs are only break-the-glass important but we just broke some glass, so... I'm coming around to the guy who signed the greatest one-year surge of Democratic legislation in a state that I can remember, and with a tiny majority no less.
https://t.co/zfXIUqYHxM

[Gavin Newsom @GavinNewsom]

Reminder of what life was like under Donald Trump:
- Murders rose 30% -- one of the largest increases in recorded history
- Cuts to law enforcement were proposed every year
- $8.4 trillion was added to national debt
- Real GDP declined its largest drop since 1947
- Trade deficit rose over 40% -- the worst ever in U.S. history
- 2.9 million jobs lost
- 154,000 manufacturing jobs lost
- Coal production declined 27%
- Coal-mining jobs dropped by 17%