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Forcing someone to not do something that affects only their personal life is not why I pay taxes. The government has grown to be too intrusive, and it's getting

Forcing someone to not do something that affects only their personal life is not why I pay taxes. The government has grown to be too intrusive, and it's getting worse, now risking the termination of the internet. As it is, the government doesn't do much real work that actually improves people's lives, and now it wants to make their lives worse by taking away their freedoms.

bko 1y ago
[flagged]
- OutOfHere 1y ago
  > You're not forcing someone to not do something. That's so obviously false because you're forcing adults to divulge their ID. They do not want to be tracked in this way. > Things change when you actually have children The issue is that this change extends to result in further blocks that have absolutely nothing to do with access to adult content. Already VPNs have been blocked, and this has a 1000x destructive impact. If you care so much about your children, do the parental thing which is to restrict their devices, rather than expecting the world to restrict theirs.
  - tzs 1y ago
    > That's so obviously false because you're forcing adults to divulge their ID. They do not want to be tracked in this way That depends on how age verification is done. If it is "upload a photo of your ID documents" then yes, ID is divulged. If it is done the way Europe will be doing it with the EU Digital Identity wallet your ID is not divulged. All this is divulged to the site is that you are older than their age threshold.
    - OutOfHere 1y ago
      If there is a central provider, the risk there is worse if the central provider will now have information of your use of the site. I guess it depends on how it's implemented.
      - tzs 1y ago
        Indeed the implementation is important. It is possible to implement it so that the central provider (e.g., whatever state agency issues your driver's license or state ID) can issue you a digital copy of your ID which is cryptographically bound to some secure hardware you own such as a smartphone or a stand-alone security device. When you want to prove your age to a site there are protocols to allow you to prove to the site that you have such a bound ID on your device and that it shows that you are old enough for the site without revealing anything else from your ID to the site. There are such systems currently being tested in the EU as part of their EU Digital Identity Wallet project, which is expected to start becoming available to the public in 2026. Note that the central provider's involvement is just when your ID is issued. They have no idea when, if, or with whom you subsequently use that ID. The sites you use it with only get the age information so even if they are cooperating with the central provider to try to out you they can't provide anything useful. All they can tell the central provider is that someone with an ID that came from that provider and that was over their age threshold visited the site at a particular time. I think the people objecting to age verification really should also as a back up plan try to make it so if age verification is implemented it uses such a scheme.
        OutOfHere 1y ago
        I acknowledge, but overall, it's simpler for an adult to set up filtering for their family. It is disturbing to expect the government to force it not only for oneself, but on everyone. It should be the parents responsibility to set up filtering on the devices used by their children.
owisd 1y ago
The liberal democratic argument is that the websites themselves are the ones imposing these harmful effects on their users, therefore by a JS Mill 'harm principle' argument it's fine for the government to intervene and regulate the websites, same justification for regulating, say, the sale of tobacco or knives.
- OutOfHere 1y ago
  Real harm in this world comes not from these websites, but from government policies that inflict worsening pollution and poverty upon people. The government willingly does nothing about the serious problems, even going in the opposite direction by conspiring with those causing these problems, and instead attacks unsubstantiated pseudo-problems such as what you listed, to appease an uneducated religious minority voter class. Let's for instance count the number of people that these websites have killed versus the number that guns kill. The counts are about 0 and 40,000+ per year respectively. There is no statistical sense in which the government has their priorities straight.

bko 1y ago

[flagged]

OutOfHere 1y ago
> You're not forcing someone to not do something. That's so obviously false because you're forcing adults to divulge their ID. They do not want to be tracked in this way. > Things change when you actually have children The issue is that this change extends to result in further blocks that have absolutely nothing to do with access to adult content. Already VPNs have been blocked, and this has a 1000x destructive impact. If you care so much about your children, do the parental thing which is to restrict their devices, rather than expecting the world to restrict theirs.
- tzs 1y ago
  > That's so obviously false because you're forcing adults to divulge their ID. They do not want to be tracked in this way That depends on how age verification is done. If it is "upload a photo of your ID documents" then yes, ID is divulged. If it is done the way Europe will be doing it with the EU Digital Identity wallet your ID is not divulged. All this is divulged to the site is that you are older than their age threshold.
  - OutOfHere 1y ago
    If there is a central provider, the risk there is worse if the central provider will now have information of your use of the site. I guess it depends on how it's implemented.
    - tzs 1y ago
      Indeed the implementation is important. It is possible to implement it so that the central provider (e.g., whatever state agency issues your driver's license or state ID) can issue you a digital copy of your ID which is cryptographically bound to some secure hardware you own such as a smartphone or a stand-alone security device. When you want to prove your age to a site there are protocols to allow you to prove to the site that you have such a bound ID on your device and that it shows that you are old enough for the site without revealing anything else from your ID to the site. There are such systems currently being tested in the EU as part of their EU Digital Identity Wallet project, which is expected to start becoming available to the public in 2026. Note that the central provider's involvement is just when your ID is issued. They have no idea when, if, or with whom you subsequently use that ID. The sites you use it with only get the age information so even if they are cooperating with the central provider to try to out you they can't provide anything useful. All they can tell the central provider is that someone with an ID that came from that provider and that was over their age threshold visited the site at a particular time. I think the people objecting to age verification really should also as a back up plan try to make it so if age verification is implemented it uses such a scheme.
      - OutOfHere 1y ago
        I acknowledge, but overall, it's simpler for an adult to set up filtering for their family. It is disturbing to expect the government to force it not only for oneself, but on everyone. It should be the parents responsibility to set up filtering on the devices used by their children.

owisd 1y ago

The liberal democratic argument is that the websites themselves are the ones imposing these harmful effects on their users, therefore by a JS Mill 'harm principle' argument it's fine for the government to intervene and regulate the websites, same justification for regulating, say, the sale of tobacco or knives.

OutOfHere 1y ago
Real harm in this world comes not from these websites, but from government policies that inflict worsening pollution and poverty upon people. The government willingly does nothing about the serious problems, even going in the opposite direction by conspiring with those causing these problems, and instead attacks unsubstantiated pseudo-problems such as what you listed, to appease an uneducated religious minority voter class. Let's for instance count the number of people that these websites have killed versus the number that guns kill. The counts are about 0 and 40,000+ per year respectively. There is no statistical sense in which the government has their priorities straight.