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> Better the nanny state than Nanny Zuck. why-not-both.jpg Maximizing corporate freedom leads inevitably to corporate capture of government. Opposing either
by rectang 8mo ago
> Better the nanny state than Nanny Zuck.
why-not-both.jpg
Maximizing corporate freedom leads inevitably to corporate capture of government.
Opposing either government concentration of power alone or corporate concentration of power alone is doomed to failure. Only by opposing both is there any hope of achieving either.
Applying that principle to age-verification, which I think is inevitable: Prefer privacy-preserving decoupled age-verification services, where the service validates minimum age and presents a cryptographic token to the entity requiring age validation. Ideally, discourage entities from collecting hard identification by holding them accountable for data breaches; or since that's politically infeasible, model the service on PCI with fines for poor security.
The motivation for this regime is to prevent distribution services from holding identification data, reducing the information held by any single entity.
- AnthonyMouse 8mo ago> Prefer privacy-preserving decoupled age-verification services, where the service validates minimum age and presents a cryptographic token to the entity requiring age validation. This is the wrong implementation. You require sites hosting adult content to send a header indicating what kind of content it is. Then the device can do what it wants with that information. A parent can then configure their child's device not to display it, without needing anybody to have an ID or expecting every government and lowest bidder to be able to implement the associated security correctly. It doesn't matter what kind of cryptography you invent. They either won't use it to begin with or will shamelessly and with no accountability violate the invariants taken as hard requirements in your theoretical proof. If you have to show your ID to the lowest bidder, you're pwned, so use the system that doesn't have that.
- rectang 8mo agoYour proposed architecture also achieves the goal of discouraging content-distributing entities from holding hard identification data, so it sounds good to me.
- tsimionescu 8mo agoThis solves some probelms, such as children accessing porn sites (oh the horror). But it doesn't solve other problems, such as predators accessing children's spaces. YouTube Kids is purportedly a safe, limited place for kids - and yet, there are numerous disturbing videos that get past the automated censors. Pedophiles stalk places like Roblox.
- avereveard 8mo agoThen you do forensic and catch the predator instead of the age verification nonsense
- AnthonyMouse 8mo ago> But it doesn't solve other problems, such as predators accessing children's spaces. Neither do ID requirements. If you're purposely allowing in kids then you're allowing in everyone, because kids generally don't have ID.
- simiones 8mo agoSure, but other forms of age verification requirements can, in principle, solve this (at the massive cost of many other privacy and compliance issues, as the article rightly points out). For example, periodic facial recognition-based age estimation can theoretically allow only kids' accounts to a certain space.
- AnthonyMouse 8mo agoAt which point you're still letting in every pedo who has a kid living with them or can grab one at a local school, and the child trafficking networks that by their nature have access to children or to cybercriminals who know how to fool the check with a fake camera, i.e. the worst of the worst. Meanwhile you exclude the parent who is separated from their spouse and wants to check up on where their kid is hanging out when the kid is living with the other parent, and the investigative journalist who doesn't have a young kid or their kid is 16 but the detection system guesses they're 26. And that's on top of having the lowest bidder building a biometrics database of children.