TECHNOLOGY

Blue Check Marks and All That

Couldn’t we do better?

Photo by Luke Chesser on Unsplash

This is more of a question than an opinion, so I’d really like those who agree and especially those who disagree to jump into the comments.

I was listening to TWIT talk about Twitter’s now useless blue checks and how contenders for the throne like BlueSky need to verify users, and how expensive that is, not to mention that I and a lot of other people don’t want a site to see our government ID unless they truly need it for legal reasons.

So, I was wondering this: if I sign in with my IOS passkey or Google to every site I use and those sites could say “Yes, this person signed in as pcunix@gmail.com using an IOS (or whatever) Passkey”, doesn’t that verify who I am? You go to Twitter and they say it, Facebook says it, Google agrees, so does Discord and so on and so on. Isn’t that better than a driver’s license or passport for most sites?

Unless someone has stolen my iPhone or iPad or computer, they cannot impersonate my login — at least right now. I’d notice missing tech very quickly and hopefully would wipe it remotely before they could hack in. I might not notice a missing driver’s license for weeks!

Am I missing something here? Right now you could go to pcunix@twitter and have no clue if that’s the same person…