Nick Szabo  🔑

Though for the record, I would like to see AT&T lose this case, badly. If you design a system based on personal info you damn well should shoulder the liability when you screw it up.

Baloney. Their system collects personal info for the purposes of phone billing, not for the purpose of trying to secure a relationship of two strangers trying to pretend they know each other because of said phone number.

Agreed. The metaphor in the article seems lacking: all lobbies have signs that say "not responsible for any stolen or lost items". If I leave $25M in jewelry in my room and they get stolen, it seems like a stretch that a judge would hold the hotel liable for the full amount.

See, I think *if* you fail to uphold reasonable care in a blatant way - and I think phone companies have failed this way - then I have no issue with extremely high levels of liability. Failing to verify identity at all in an identity system is blatantly unreasonable.

Sorry Peter but you're in the grip of a severe delusion here. There is no such thing as a singular "identity" that is even remotely the same for the phone company's own relationships with its own customers and somebody trusting a stranger to hold $100Ks of crypto for them.

In these cases providers *aren't even trying*. Yes identity is complex, but that's not the problem here.