Tell HN: You now need a government id in order to create an Anthropic account
I don't know if this is totally new, but I just can't believe it. I remember that they requested a telephone number 2 years ago, which was already way too much. But now they forward you to a scetchy website called withpersona.com and want you to make a selife with your passport.
I think it's wild what tech companies think they should be entitled to
I have been trying to reactivate an old Facebook account to get access to marketplace, but Facebook wants me to give them a photo id. My username and password is not sufficient, or email 2fa or anything. They want a copy of my government id.
Hell no.
Same with this. Why should anyone give Anthropic this sort of info just to access their service. It's ridiculous
I just made another anthropic account with my backup email and it works fine no government id required. Logged in and using sonnet 5.5.
Does it depent on the country you're located?
Persona is not “sketchy” unless you are actively paranoid. It’s used by quite a few large entities around the web now.
It is sad that the web has become this but that’s a separate discussion.
Firm that verifies mugshots for ChatGPT and Roblox feeds US surveillance apparatus with 269 distinct checks
https://cybernews.com/privacy/persona-leak-exposes-global-su...
> However, the researchers admit that the findings do not prove the direct bidirectional data pipeline between ChatGPT users and screenings performed by the government.
Otherwise none of that particularly surprises me. There are legitimate use cases for wanting to verify this stuff; my point to OP is that it's not some out of the blue company, it's widely used.
I can't even get that far in trying to sign up for Claude. Years ago, I told Constant Contact's (a/k/a Constant Spammer) legal department to block all emails to "animats.com", which was an option hidden away in their terms of service. Back then, they were just a spam service provider. Now, legit companies use them for "deliverability". Anthropic, which has some kind of co-marketing thing with Constant Contact, seems to use them for verification emails. Signup verification emails can't reach me. So I can't even start sign up.
I worked for a facebook ads agency a long time ago and I had to send facebook my id to be able to run ads on the platform and manage different accounts... I really hate that the internet is going this way, but also, what am I gonna do? not do my job cuz I don't want to share my id? not use Claude cuz I don't want to share my id? they're pretty valuable things, so I'm gonna give them my id if I need to. its just a crappy situation. Just gonna assume nothing is gonna come from it and keep going.
I like it. I always wondered what a website would look like that only allowed Americans to register. I'm speaking of Authentication of the person.
I never signed up for Anthropic for the telephone reason.
Instead, I bought Kagi and OpenRouter and use Claude through those.
And you are paying 20x more. Kind of hard to justify that for not giving a telephone number
Yes... God forbid I value my privacy more than my dollars...