TruAnon — Writing

Why Does LinkedIn Pay to Verify You for Free?

2026-09-03T12:00:00.000Z

Social media, marketplaces, dating, and gig-economy platforms are all priced on the Lifetime Value of Accounts (LTV or CLV). They should be priced on the credible ones.

Here's why LinkedIn does it: a "Credible" member monetizes at a multiple versus "Unknown." And Unknown is not just unknown to other users — it is unknown to advertisers, influencers, and supporters. Venture portfolios specializing in these platforms are worth a fraction of what they could be.

We believe the fix is asking people to surrender privacy. It isn't.

The Authority-Driven Model

An authority-based, document model produces a private fact. A scanned license sits in a vault. The platform knows nothing, the members know nothing — but everyone knows that surrendering private documents is a risk.

AI can generate an entirely convincing profile, complete with facts and photos. But the deeper problem is simpler: private ID is cheap to forge and easy to steal. It provides little authenticity or accountability online — it does nothing to help you recognize the fake or dangerous profiles of others. Value is low; adoption is even lower.

The Community-Driven Model

The first App Store wasn't merely a place to get software. It established a relationship: protecting the rights of artists online, and protecting the platform and its owner. That structure dictated what could be exchanged, what could be revoked, transferred, updated — everything. It worked, because it persists some 30 years later.

That is Digital Rights

Identity assurance is the same. A long-lived history of independently anchored interactions is substantially harder to manufacture and nearly impossible to maintain in public over time. This creates a cost to fraudsters, so they simply take their schemes to less-trusted platforms — iTunes made music piracy obsolete; it did not make it impossible. Fraud has an underlying financial incentive, and that is its Achilles heel. We can undermine that incentive and attack the economics of profile fraud, while protecting the people who use it.

Instead of putting identity under the control of an authority, we can separate it — and let the individual control how their identity is viewed and shared by others. This is a benefit, not a loss of privacy. Owners grant visibility. Owners can revoke it. Members can leave a platform without leaving the identity portion of that account behind.

That Protection is Value

Identity just might be the final frontier of our movement to go online. This protection of rights began with that first App Store. Today, we risk ourselves, and the platforms we use risk their reputation. A picture of a government-issued ID will never assure the rights that protect us, or the platforms we use.

More importantly: when members bring their own proof, there is no limit to how many can access credibility — and there is a benefit that drives adoption.

Credibility means members can do more of whatever they came to do, more safely. The right to protection is something we all want to see in this world.

Credibility means your formerly "Unknown" membership is now worth 3x, 5x, even 10x more. Members prefer other trusted, badge-wearing members, and this safety effect is immediate.

It works because members make it work — naturally. There is no coercion involved.

Join the circle of trusted platforms and adopt TruAnon's inherently safe digital identity today.

A.I. “Vibe” Coding; Adopting Trust APIs

2026-08-28T12:00:00.000Z

Today, most of your membership remains ‘Unknown’ to others. This means they are ‘Unknown’ to your advertisers, supporters, champions and influencers.

This is potential revenue left on the table; ‘Credible’ membership is worth 3x, 5x and even 10x more than ‘Unknown’. Consider Twitter’s takeover — $20B in play without any change in membership, features, or availability.

Traditionally, we fight “fakes” — banning fraudsters and counting bots. The real question isn’t fakes. It’s knowing who’s real. This solution is available to anyone but it does not interfere with other offerings or change how people use your service.

Members Adopt What They Value

Offer as many options to verify as you want or need, but adoption is decidedly low. People do not want to surrender privacy and are reluctant to use ID online.

Here, we see a natural benefit to anyone. A profile amplifier that lets you do more of whatever you came to do, more safely. In fact, the benefit is so universal that opting out stands out as much as opting in.

AI Implements Your Keys

Today, this API is as simple as this; it can be implemented by AI in one-sweep. Adoption is immediate; the value of trust and identity is now an ever-evolving part of your platform.

Give this simple URL to your AI agent and ask whatever you want: https://github.com/jtayler/trusted/blob/main/README.md

Visit developer.truanon.com and get keys to get started building the next generation of dating, peer-marketplace, gig-economy and social sites where securing our future world is part of your brand and offering.

Your Badge Is Waiting

The result is far more than a badge of trust. Here we see members control how others view and share their identity. This benefit is universal, since every profile can be amplified with continuous, and verified data points people can explore and learn from and they display whatever they choose.

This is quite literally the links and profiles others already know you by.

When a member verifies, you keep that database-flag forever, even if you pause or suspend this service, the value is yours to keep. The purpose of this solution is to eliminate risk, it is designed to NEVER create risk.

Your membership sees this as a benefit; value is unlocked before any cost. This ensures the value returned, is always greater than the investment. This is a revenue unlock, not a cost center.

This is what makes some platforms most trusted.

Join the circle of platforms that are helping secure our future world and jump over the competition whose membership remains ‘Unknown’.

The Value of Credibility — Twitter by Numbers

2026-08-21T12:00:00.000Z

The Value of Credibility — Twitter by Numbers

In 2022, Twitter had roughly 250M daily active users and agreed to be acquired for $44B.

Twitter publicly claimed ~95% Credible membership. The buyer disputed this, asserting closer to ~60%. During the dispute, Twitter’s implied valuation fell to ~$20–25B, putting ~$20B of value in question, without any change in product, revenue, or growth.

THAT— is the value of Credible membership.

The Credibility Gap

A Credible member is worth ~$300; an Unknown one ~$80 — a ~$220 gap per user.

Put simply, Unknown members retained only ~27% of their value meaning ~73% of per-user value was suppressed by uncertainty alone.

The Takeaway

In 2022, Twitter demonstrated that credibility — not bots, not features — can swing tens of billions in valuation, and that an Unknown user is priced at roughly one quarter the value of a Credible one.

Markets price confidence. Advertisers price confidence. Buyers price confidence. Supporters, developers, employees, champions and influencers all price confidence. Platforms must reflect it, not guess it.

Credibility Value

Per-user value rises without changing product
Trust & Safety cost drops
Legal and privacy risk collapse
Adoption scales globally
Fraud becomes uneconomic
Valuation reflects reality instead of estimates

Authority-Driven

Traditional verification cannot scale because it requires review, custody, and judgment over people’s identity — all of which introduce cost, delay, exclusion, and legal risk.

Only a fraction of users will ever submit to centralized checks. Platforms that try anyway inherit the liabilities everyone wants to avoid: storing data, handling breaches, bias claims, appeals, and regulatory risk.

Worse, authority creates a single point of failure and caps adoption at the lowest common denominator.

Community-Driven

Your job is to transition membership from Unknown to Credible and unlock the full potential of your whole platform and company valuation as quickly and safely as possible.

A community-driven approach scales because it removes authority entirely — members bring their own proof, maintain it continuously, and let confidence emerge from visible consistency.

Trust becomes a property of the network, not a decision made behind closed doors, allowing platforms to serve everyone, globally, without owning identity or risk.

Join the circle of trusted platforms and adopt TruAnon inherently safe digital identity today.

The Child Who Has No ID Still Has an Identity

2026-08-19T20:12:53.000Z

As the inventor of the first App Store, I have spent a lifetime working on digital rights and identity. As a parent, there is one principle I will not compromise: a child should never have to surrender their privacy simply to participate online.

Yet we have created a strange problem.

From educational services to games and online communities, children increasingly need to prove who they are and how old they are. In Australia, that problem has become especially important. The country now requires covered social media platforms to take reasonable steps to prevent children under 16 from holding accounts.

But how do you prove that a child is 13, 14 or 15?

And what happens when the child does not have a conventional government-issued identity document?

The answer is not to force every child into an identity system designed for adults. The answer is to recognize the identity they already have.

Your child already has a digital life

My children have had school accounts, educational services, gaming accounts, healthcare relationships and other digital records. Their school account is particularly interesting. It is not simply an email address.

This is an account created and maintained by the school. Parents can see it. Teachers can see it. The school controls it. It identifies the student within the school community and establishes facts that matter: this is the student, this is their school, this is their year level.

At the end of the school year, the account can be retired and a new relationship established. That is a very different kind of identity from an email address. It is a curated identity.

What is an anchor?

An anchor is an existing, trusted relationship that can establish something about a person without requiring the person to disclose everything about themselves.

A school account can be an anchor of a student’s identity. It can establish that the student belongs to that school. It can establish their year level. It can establish that the account is maintained by an institution with an independent reason to know who that student is.

Most importantly, the student does not create the evidence themselves.

A fraudster can create an email address. A fraudster can create a website. A fraudster can create a social-media profile. But a fraudster cannot simply create the school’s continuously maintained record of a student.

That distinction changes everything.

Proving age without exposing identity

Suppose a student needs to demonstrate that they are between 13 and 16. The useful question is not:

“Show me your identity document.”

The useful question is:

“Is there a trusted relationship that can establish the fact I need to know?”

Through TruAnon, an authorized service can establish visibility between trusted properties. The school does not have to hand over the child’s entire record. It can simply provide the necessary proof.

The service requesting access does not necessarily need to know the child’s address, medical history, photograph or government identifier. It needs to know the fact required for the transaction.

That might be:

This is a real student.

This student attends this school.

This student is in Year 8.

This student is within the permitted age range.

The proof remains anchored to the institution that maintains the underlying relationship. And because that relationship continues to exist, the proof can continue to be valid.

Identity assurance must be continuous

This is where conventional identity verification falls short. A document is checked once. A selfie is checked once. A date of birth is typed into a form.

Then everyone hopes the assertion remains true.

Anchored identity works differently.

The underlying relationship can be continuously maintained. If the school account is active, the relationship exists. If the student leaves the school, the relationship can end. If permission is granted, it can be revoked. If access is no longer appropriate, the connection can be turned off. The result is not simply identity verification. It is continuous identity proofing.

Children already have trusted digital relationships

This is the important thing we have missed. Children do have digital identities. They have them in schools. They have them in healthcare. They have them in education. They have them in games.

They have them in the services their parents use to manage their lives.

Australia’s healthcare system is another example of a large-scale trusted relationship involving children. The opportunity is to allow trusted properties to establish limited visibility between one another without turning every interaction into a disclosure of the child’s entire identity.

That is the purpose of anchoring.

From proving identity to proving relationships

Imagine a student accessing an educational resource. The resource does not need a copy of the child’s identity documents. It needs to know that the student is entitled to access it. Imagine connecting students across Australia. The system does not need to publish their identities to the world.

It needs to establish that they are genuine students and, where appropriate, that they fall within the relevant age group.

Imagine connecting students internationally. Again, the important thing is not exposing the child’s identity. It is establishing the trusted relationship behind it. That is what an anchored identity makes possible.

Dawn of the Trusted Internet

Australia’s age-assurance requirements have forced an important question into the open: how do we protect children online without making privacy the price of participation?

The answer cannot be another giant database of children’s identities. It cannot be asking children to repeatedly upload identity documents. And it cannot depend entirely upon algorithms guessing a child’s age from their face, voice or behaviour.

The better answer is to use the trusted relationships that already exist.

Schools already know their students. Parents already have visibility. Teachers already have oversight. Healthcare systems already maintain relationships with patients.

These are anchors.

TruAnon binds to those anchors while allowing the owner of the relationship to control what becomes visible, to whom, and for how long.

That means identity can be assigned, anchored, verified and revoked without becoming exposed. Children should not have to surrender their privacy to enter the digital world. They should be able to enter it with something better: an identity that is trusted because it already exists.

That is the dawn of the trusted Internet.

Most of Your Users Can’t Upload ID — Now What?

2026-08-14T12:00:00.000Z

Most of Your Users Can’t Upload ID — Now What?

This fascinating presentation on trust will change how you see the future. Learn how to shift risk off your platform — today and permanently.

RISK Incarnate

In today’s world, social platforms depend on profile verification — and members value it just as much. But when verification means uploading ID, privacy becomes the price we pay.

Most Users Will Never Verify

People do not want to surrender privacy to use a website. According to the World Bank, in 2025 roughly 800 million people don’t have ID at all. Most ID cards are not usable online. New Yorkers don’t drive, and only ~17.5% of citizens of Japan have a valid passport.

ID‑based verify — whether passport, license, or similar — will always exclude more than 90% of your membership.

Not because they’re untrustworthy, but because they don’t have the credentials to give.

Verify Without ID Cards?

It turns out you already own your digital self, it’s the links and profiles others already know you by.

Instead of gating access on private documents, here we let people “bring their own proof” — digital consistency, reputation history, a variety of alternate credentials. Confidence comes from transparency and audience — your history of connections, friends, and followers over time. This depth of confidence can be tabulated and reflected as a rank/score others trust.

This approach works alongside CLEAR (or any ID‑based verification) — it doesn’t compete. This does not interfere, people who have traditional solutions can offer this as a privacy conscious option members prefer.

Those who don’t have ID (the 90%+) still get access to credibility. No gate‑keeping. No unnecessary exclusion.

Authority-driven solutions always add risk of privacy violations, reviews and disputes.

Community-driven means members make it work. It’s automatic.

Verify Is A Benefit

For members, this is a benefit so natural that opting out is conspicuous. For platforms adopting this approach there are THREE major benefits.

No loss of privacy, no risk of violation
Available to anyone anywhere
Members make it work, it’s completely automatic

Critically, verify unlocks value. Often 5x-10x “Unknown.” in lifetime value of accounts. When verify is a benefit, limitless numbers of members can access the value of Credibility without loss of privacy and that means the valuation of your brand and company are elevated to potential.

Your platform can create privacy features that were not even possible before. Critically, this is equally available to anyone in the world regardless of location or language.

Trust should never be conditional on credentials you happen to hold — especially when those credentials are scarce globally.

Join the circle of trusted platforms and adopt TruAnon (truanon.com) today—

Bluesky Doesn’t Need Another Identity Authority: A Window into Trust and Transparency

2026-08-01T19:57:23.000Z

BlueSky’s AT Protocol is a brilliant step toward a more accountable web. It was designed with authentic identity in mind.

A public internet does not need a universal identity authority. It needs a common language for expressing confidence without exposing the underlying evidence.

The Internet already contains the evidence needed to establish confidence in identity. We don’t need another authority to manufacture trust — we need a common way to expose and summarize the evidence that already exists.

Proposal: a shared, "informal protocol" for identity confidence

AT Protocol introduces an important primitive: verifiable publishing origin. A signed record can prove that content came from a particular publisher and has not been altered. But origin is not the same as confidence of author identity.

The next layer is understanding what confidence exists around that author. Not by exposing private evidence, and not by creating another authority, but by allowing the result of verification to travel with the identity and remain distributed in place where it already resides.

Bluesky proves continuity and origin; TruAnon adds a privacy-preserving way to express confidence about that validated author without exposing any personally identifying information.

The opportunity is not to create a new identity system. It is to make the evidence already present on the web easier to understand, while preserving user control and privacy.

Confidence should remain earned, observable, and continuously updated — not assigned by an authority.

Mastodon -The Cutting Edge of Trust?

2026-08-01T19:10:27.000Z

I am Jesse Tayler founder of TruAnon inherently safe digital identity . My software background is Digital Rights (I invented the first App Store in 1993). I focus on human safety, harm reduction, and data sovereignty. I have four children, and I am here to help secure our future world.

Mastodon is a social platform like Twitter. It relies on the popular rel=”me” identity protocol. It’s not always easy to use, but it verifies websites and profiles others already know you by, and it works without reviews and disputes. When you want to showcase your expertise? Tell others who you are? These validated links and profiles are, by definition, a benefit for anyone legit.

We can make it easier to confirm what is yours, and make it possible for social or blog sites that don’t support HTML editing. We distill the trust and accountability these sites represent and reflect the rank and score those properties represent. A badge of trust.

Mostly? We want to choose how we’re known: reveal verified properties or just a badge with the rank of confidence those properties represent. Sometimes, online privacy is directly connected to personal safety and we want to grant, or revoke visibility as we wish.

By securely anchoring identity to the platform, control is returned to the owner. Choose to be fully public, or completely pseudonymous -always backed by the same level of underlying trust.

This approach protects a community from those seeking to identify, harm or even subpoena PII from the platform while honoring the tradition of open standards and digital rights.

Here we see a return of pronouns. Sites do not want to ask for more information, this has proven to be a privacy risk and profiles have been reduced to just name and bio.

In the Trusted internet, we can assign confidence to our claims of identity because this transparency means oversight that would reveal a fraudster far more quickly.

Join the circle of trusted platforms and adopt TruAnon APIs today.

Originally published at https://www.linkedin.com.