Why this exists
I got tired of being on the internet and dealing with bots pretending to be people. Botnets, astroturfing campaigns, entire conversations with nobody on the other end.
Why not wait for a big platform to fix it
A large company could build something like this, and some may. My concern is what tends to come with it: needing an account on their platform, handing them more personal information than the task requires, and a result that may only be useful inside their own ecosystem. IRLProof is deliberately platform agnostic. The same proof works on a dating app, GitHub, a forum, a marketplace, or a site that does not exist yet.
What I wanted instead
- Something small and purpose built, where the limits are obvious and stated.
- Something technically understandable and transparent, not a black box.
- Clear control over what is shared and what is kept, decided by you, every time.
- No intrusive face scans. No uploading photos of your license or passport to a stranger's server. Wallets already do this properly: they tell you exactly what is being asked for and make you approve it. People trust that, and they are right to.
Plenty of verification services collect far more than they need and keep it indefinitely. Rather than ask you to believe I am different, the design removes the question: there is nothing to misuse, because the information is never held in the first place.
What's the catch? How do I make money?
Right now, I do not. This is free, and the core of it stays free for individuals. I would like it to make money eventually, and I would rather say so plainly than have you wonder. Proving you are a real person will not be paid for by selling your personal information. That part of the service does not collect anything to sell, which is what makes the promise worth anything.
The honest answer about how it becomes a business is to be decided. The likely directions are charging organisations that want verification they and their users actually trust, and paid extras for people who want more than the basics, such as attaching more information to a proof or password protecting one. Perhaps adult sites, because who genuinely feels comfortable doing a face scan on an adult website?
If you cannot work out how a free service makes money, the usual answer is that you are the product. Here you are not, and I would rather explain the actual plan than leave that gap for you to fill in.
Why not keeping your data is the point
Beyond principle, holding personal data is a liability. It carries legal obligations that differ by state and by country, breach exposure, and audit burden. Since none of it is being sold, that risk buys nothing. Not collecting it is both the honest choice and the cheap one.
What if law enforcement asks for information?
Then there is very little to hand over. Beyond what is already public in a proof itself, the only thing kept is an IP address in ordinary server logs, retained to detect and stop abuse of the service.
That is a deliberate compromise rather than an oversight. A service like this could otherwise be captured for genuinely harmful purposes, and keeping a single thread to pull on makes that far less attractive without handing over anything about who you are. If you would rather not share your IP address with this site at all, there are many well established ways to mask it, and nothing here depends on knowing it.
The commitments I am willing to make
I would rather give you a few promises I can actually keep than a long list I quietly walk back later.
- Proving you are a real person stays free for individuals.
- Nothing is shared without you seeing it and approving it first, in your own wallet, every single time. That is the commitment everything else rests on.
- The personhood proof does not collect personal information to sell.
Deliberately not promised: that every future feature will work exactly this way. If I ever build something that involves your information differently, it will be optional, it will say plainly what it does, and you will choose it knowingly. The guarantee is transparency and consent, not a blanket vow I cannot see far enough ahead to honour.
Limits may also be needed to stop abuse, such as caps on how many proofs one license can make. Those exist to keep it free and workable for everyone, not to upsell you.