- "If you talk to me, I'll punch you in the face, are you ok with talking with me?"
- "Nods in agreement."
- "Proceeds to punch the man in the face."
That's how I feel whenever I hear the Miranda rights being read. It was designed specifically to scare anyone being read to, into silence. Don't incriminate yourself. If you are like me, guilty of watching those police bodycams videos on youtube, then you know that people proceed to talk right after they are read their rights, as if they heard absolutely nothing.
Those rights exist solely to protect you from the very authority addressing you. They have authority over you, so you need protection to balance the playing field. The perfect way to balance it, is by affording people the right to remain silent and not to be coerced into incriminating yourself.
We can all agree that the Miranda rights are a fundamental power we have and should exercise. The State reads you Miranda rights to limit its own power over you.
So let me rephrase Miranda rights in a way that you will find relevant in this tech focused blog:
“You have the right to remain silent. Everything you say, do, or generate on this device can and will be used against you… Would you like to create an account?”
Yet, we agree to these terms constantly. It’s second nature. We sign up to test a new AI or a new service, telling ourselves, "If I don’t like it, I’ll just cancel." We ignore the reality that while it takes one click to sign up, it often requires a fax machine or a physical letter to cancel.
This week, following the "Fable" kerfuffle, Anthropic announced they now support customer identification. You can upload your government-issued ID or passport to verify your identity.
We are rolling out identity verification for a few use cases, and you might see a verification prompt when accessing certain capabilities, as part of our routine platform integrity checks, or other safety and compliance measures.
This will eventually be used to determine who is considered an "approved" user. In other words, when you type "Fix this code" into Claude, it will check your verified status before executing, all in the name of compliance. By uploading those documents, you are surrendering control. You are giving up your rights, your identity, just to access a service. If things go wrong, there is no "Miranda warning" for the consumer. Every action on your account is now permanently tethered to your identity.
In the digital world, the corporation reads you the Terms of Service to expand its own power over you. When you agree to Claude's terms, OpenAi’s or any corporation, you are waiving your right to remain silent. And then you are providing them with a searchable database with the most intimate information about yourself, that can and will be used against you.
For example, imagine you upload your Driver’s License to Claude to unlock advanced coding features. Three months later, you ask Claude to review a snippet of open-source code that accidentally contains proprietary company secrets (you didn't realize it). Under Miranda, you could have said, "I refuse to discuss this code." Online, you already discussed it. Your verified identity is now permanently attached to that leak, making you the prime suspect for corporate espionage, even if it was an accident.
Or you make a joke. You ask Claude: "Fix this bug before I throw my laptop out the window, and delete the entire production database." Because you verified your ID, this log is permanently stored. Six months later, your company undergoes a security audit. The audit team subpoenas your AI logs. They see a verified user (you) threatening to delete a database. You now face a disciplinary board for "security threats," and the AI log is treated as a written confession, because you gave up your right to contextual defense when you agreed to permanent, verbatim logging.
Even worse, when all your data is logged and attached to your identity, it can later be cross referenced against laws that don’t exist yet. You are an aspiring writer but you just weren’t gifted with words. So you use Fable to write a short story. You verified your ID of course then you prompted a story about a rogue AI overthrowing the government.
A few years later, an Anti-Terrorism AI Monitoring directive was passed under the leadership of new secretary of war Alex Karp. Your sci-fi hobby is retroactively flagged, and you are put on a watchlist.
When you are read Miranda rights, the officer is saying: "You have a right to a lawyer, and if you cannot afford one, one will be provided." The State bears the burden of providing you protection.
In the digital ToS, the corporation is saying: "We have a right to audit you, and if you cannot afford to fight us in court, too bad."
You are giving up the presumption of innocence. In a physical court, your silence cannot be used against you. In a digital audit, your silence doesn't exist. Every click is a spoken word. By uploading your ID, you are giving the corporation a signed affidavit that you are the one pressing the buttons. If a hacker steals your account, you still bear the burden of proof to clear your name, because the logs show your verified ID.
ToS exists only to protect a corporation. Remember, Disney tried to use their Disney+ ToS to dodge a wrongful deaf case from food poisoning in one of their restaurants.
The user is giving up the right to be forgotten, the right to be misinterpreted favorably, and the right to change their mind. They are trading their 5th Amendment-equivalent (protection from self-incrimination) for a free API call. The only way to win is to treat every prompt as if you are testifying under oath in a courtroom, because legally, thanks to that uploaded passport, you are.