Why this exists
IRLProof was built out of frustration with an internet increasingly full of bots pretending to be people. Botnets, astroturfing campaigns, entire conversations with nobody on the other end.
Why the companies who do identity will not build this
It is a fair question, and the answer is not that nobody thought of it.
Almost every identity company sells to the website, not to you. That shapes what they build. They want to hold the identity, keep the data, and own the relationship with the site, because that is what they are paid for. You are the subject of the transaction, not a party to it.
A proof you own is a worse business for them, and that is precisely the point. It belongs to you, you publish it where you like, you revoke it when you like, and it deliberately keeps nothing. There is no data to accumulate, no profile to enrich, and no lock-in to sell. Nobody optimising for the other model would ship it, which is why the space is open.
Why not wait for a big platform to fix it
A large company could build something like this, and some may. The 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 this is 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 this one is different, the design removes the question: there is nothing to misuse, because the information is never held in the first place.
What is the catch? How does this make money?
Right now, it does not. The service is free, and the core of it stays free for individuals. It is meant to become a business eventually, and saying so plainly beats leaving you to 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. Age checks are another, because very few people are 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 the actual plan is set out above rather than left as a 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.
What is committed to, and what is not
A few commitments that can actually be kept, rather than a long list to be quietly walked 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. Anything built later that involves your information differently will be optional, will say plainly what it does, and will be something you choose knowingly. The guarantee is transparency and consent, not a blanket vow about a future nobody can see far enough into.
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.