Personas, or profiles of end users, play an important role in the design process and allow developers to better understand community needs and facilitate the creation of user stories and more concrete use-cases for their products. In some of the most challenging security environments in the world, understanding the users capacity, threats, risks, and strengths can be difficult. The USABLE project has harnessed the knowledge of the digital security training community to build personas of high-risk users from around the globe. Learn more about USABLE Personas here.
Exposed Persona Frontend Reveals Extensive Biometric Surveillance Stack Behind Age Verification - ID Tech
Security researchers investigating Discord’s age-verification implementation have discovered a publicly exposed frontend belonging to Persona Identities, Inc., revealing that the identity-verification vendor’s platform performs far more extensive checks than users […]
Persona
A user-memory system for AI agents. 2022–2026. Memory is going beyond schemas, ontologies, Graph RAG, and vector DBs — computers can talk now.
[updated] Age verification vendor Persona left frontend exposed, researchers say
Behind a basic age check, researchers say Persona’s system runs extensive identity, watchlist, and adverse-media screening.
Persona (identity verification service)
Persona Identities, Inc. is an American identity verification company headquartered in San Francisco. The company develops infrastructure for businesses to verify individuals and organizations, manage user onboarding, and comply with know your customer (KYC), anti–money laundering (AML), or age verification regulations.
Threat Modeling with LEGO SERIOUS PLAY: Building your Digital Identity threat
W3C explored how Threat Modeling with LEGO SERIOUS PLAY can help uncover security, privacy, and human-rights threats in digital identity systems. Participants built threats from real-world harms, mapped them into shared landscapes, and discovered they are connected.
High-Tech Anthropology® Process Tour
Come learn about the benefits of observing end users, creating and mapping personas, and assessing iterative designs. Additionally, see the other tools we use and visuals we create to capture and distill information that will help us mitigate the risk of a failed end product. These steps build the foundation for user-friendly designs tailored to target persona(s) – for products that are actually adopted (and even enJOYed!) rather than tossed to the side or treated like paperweights.
The Customer Discovery Handbook
This is a practioner's guide to conducting design research on personas, needfinding, value, and usability.
Guardian Angels: LLM Personalization for Productivity and Security
I propose an approach for highly personalized LLMs, for near-future productivity gains and personal info/cybersecurity against increasingly powerful LLMs: they should, in the spirit of uploading, try to emulate the user’s values and preferences in order to amplify the principal—not replace them. I discuss a package of techniques and proposals to accomplish such ‘guardian angels’; dynamic evaluation of LLMs combined with active learning and elicitation and heavy inner-monologue search/data-augmentation.
Four "Digital Identity" lessons every Web3 builder should know - blog.boscolo.co
This article was originally published on Mirror.xyz May 17, 2022
Security researchers claim Persona, the provider behind Discord's UK age verification 'experiment', performs '269 individual verification checks' on user data, including those for terrorism and espionage
I'm sure this will be well-received.
User & Agents (@userandagents.org)
We are a community focused on shaping the future of user-agent systems. Our goal is to empower people by designing and building software that provides agency, control, and choice in our digital lives. https://userandagents.org
Nicholas Carlini - Black-hat LLMs | [un]prompted 2026
Malleable software: Restoring user agency in a world of locked-down apps
The original promise of personal computing was a new kind of clay. Instead, we got appliances: built far away, sealed, unchangeable. In this essay, we envision malleable software: tools that users can reshape with minimal friction to suit their unique needs.
The Heart of Spritely: Distributed Objects and Capability Security
This paper is the second in a three-part series outlining Spritely's thinking and design. The first paper, Spritely: New Foundations for Networked Communities, explains the problems which face contemporary social network design. This paper details the core technical toolbox provided by Spritely Goblins and how it supplies the necessary features to feasibly build out Spritely's broader vision. The third paper in the series, Spritely for Secure Applications and Communities, ties the first two papers together by showing how the architecture for user-facing software fulfills the vision of the first paper and can be built on top of ideas from this paper.
User & Agents
@userandagents.org
We are a community focused on shaping the future of user-agent systems. Our goal is to empower people by designing and building software that provides agency, control, and choice in our digital lives. userandagents.org