Company Owned By Humanity

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Wouldn't it be nice if there were companies that are owned by humanity in the sense that they are managed by democratic decisions where every person in the world has one equally weighted vote?

Here, various aspects of this idea can be discussed in detail.

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prichter@lemmy.ml

What mechanism can be used to verify that a participant in an online election is a real person who has only cast their vote once? (lemmy.ml)

submitted 2 months ago by prichter@lemmy.ml to c/humanitycompany@lemmy.ml

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For a “company owned by humanity” in which every person in the world has one vote, a method is needed to verify that the online identity belongs to a real person. It is also necessary to ensure that people do not register multiple times. What solutions could be used to ensure this? Which of these solutions could be implemented on a small scale with little effort, and which could theoretically be scaled to the entire world population?

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[–] jol@discuss.tchncs.de 4 points 2 months ago (1 children)

You can't have perfect secrecy and anonymity while also preventing multiple votes in a digital system.

[–] prichter@lemmy.ml 1 points 2 months ago (1 children)

That's right. It is probably necessary to create a database containing identification details for all participants. If such a database exists, it should either contain only information that cannot be used for identity theft, or it should be managed by a trustworthy authority that ensures this data is not misused.

[–] jol@discuss.tchncs.de 1 points 2 months ago (1 children)

That's not the problem. You can't associate votes to people or that will violate vote secrecy. More identification doesn't solve this. Here's a nice video from Tom Scott explaining this issue: https://youtu.be/LkH2r-sNjQs

[–] prichter@lemmy.ml 1 points 2 months ago

Okay, I understand. You mean that with electronic elections, you can't have both anonymity and trust. I agree. Either you hold elections that are anonymous but could theoretically be manipulated, or you publish who voted for what, making the result verifiable. The decision between anonymity and trust is not an easy one. Here, we can discuss whether elections should be secret: https://lemmy.ml/post/38737498

[–] plyth@feddit.org 2 points 2 months ago (1 children)

The obvious one is DNA, but that won't be accepted by many.

[–] CameronDev@programming.dev 2 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Twins.

Also, DNA doesnt really scale well to remote regions.

[–] plyth@feddit.org 2 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (1 children)

Even twins can be distinguished.

all the identical twins do not have exactly the same DNA , though they nearly share a similar sequence of DNA.

But of course, the entire approach would be a logistical nightmare.

[–] CameronDev@programming.dev 2 points 2 months ago

https://pursuit.unimelb.edu.au/articles/just-how-identical-are-identical-twins#%3A%7E%3Atext=After+the+embryo+splits%2C+tiny+changes+%E2%80%93

Wouldnt there also be continual changes of the same magnitude over the persons life? So any test that can tell apart twins wouldnt be able to ID someone consistently over their lifetime?

Not an expert here, so kinda curious.

[–] prichter@lemmy.ml 1 points 2 months ago

One possibility would be to organize events in different locations around the world where digital identification codes are handed out to all participants, enabling them to vote online during the next time slot (e.g. 6 months). If the codes are handed out at the same time all over the world, it is not possible for one person to collect more than one code for a time slot.