Browser Firm That Required Users To Confirm Their Real Life Identity Shut Down After Its Employees Were Threatened (xconomy.com)

New submitter nleskovic shares a report: When Authenticated Reality launched last year, it seemed that the company had struck gold in terms of market demand and fit. The Austin-based startup had developed a Web browser that would require users to prove they are who they say they are. Users would have to sign up for an account -- scanning their driver's license and taking a photo -- in order to download the browser, which would sit "on top" of the Internet, said Chris Ciabarra, Authenticated Reality's co-founder, in an interview last year. "Everybody knows who everybody is," he said. So, when Facebook announced this week that its site was, once again, home to inauthentic pages and accounts designed to influence the outcome of the upcoming midterm Congressional elections, I contacted Ciabarra to find out how the company was doing. But, he said Wednesday that he had shut down the startup just a month after its debut. He said people who had heard about Authenticated Reality from media reports were visiting the firm's offices in California and threatening employees. (The addresses were listed on the website.) "It was getting kind of scary," he told me. "They were thinking we were taking their freedom away because they had to sign up using a driver's license. They thought we were trying to follow them."

Comments

Yeah, no, fuck them and that shit

[Rick Schumann]

The day that I have to use my real, legal name on the Internet no matter what it is I'm doing, and no anonymity allowed, will be the LAST day I ever use the Internet, and I know I'm FAR from being alone in this.

Re:Yeah, no, fuck them and that shit

[Rick Schumann]

See, this isn't about 'stalling development', it's about freedom of speech and freedom of expression and anonymity on the Internet serves to facilitate that, not just here in the United States, but everywhere around the world where there is the Internet. Do you really want to live in a world where someone has to be afraid to speak the truth about, say, their government on the Internet, because they have to use their real name to do it and they know they'll get arrested and incarcerated or maybe killed outright for it? Why do you think things like TOR exist? I know damned well that the anonymity the Internet provides us all with can and is abused but I'd rather put up with trolls and other abuses of of it rather than have that ability taken away. It's already been leveraged quite enough as a surveillance and data-collection platform by ISPs, we don't need people being required to use their real name on it, too, making every gods-be-damned thing you say and do there a matter of public record.

Re:Yeah, no, fuck them and that shit

[markdavis]

>"In most of the life you live you don't have to expose your identity, it's only if you are doing specific things - like purchasing liquor - and even then your identity data is rarely used except to prove your age."

And that is dead wrong too. You should NOT be required to expose your identity when purchasing liquor or such. You should only be required to PROVE YOUR AGE. And that does NOT mean a retailer should capture/store ANY information about you (name, address, license number, hair color, race, anything), just that they look at your date of birth. And, yet, retailers are, more and more, thinking it is acceptable to "scan" your license or whatnot. Unacceptable.

I had a Target try to do that when I was buying freaking canned air (yes, AIR, you know, dusters for computers) and insisted on scanning my license. I was paying cash. I flatly refused and escalated all the way up to the store manager, who finally admitted there is no law requiring such tracking and let me purchase it anonymously, like it always should be.

People, please stand up for your rights, before you lose them all...

Re:Why?

[Kielistic]

It was only a couple of years ago that the internet was praised for its ability to allow people to communicate outside of their authoritarian countries. Now people are demanding "America-net" because an election didn't go to plan.