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What we call "age verification" is actually mass surveillance
- josefritzishere 4mo agoSecurity and Privacy are not the same thing.
- curiousObject 4mo ago‘Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety’ — Benjamin Franklin This isn’t a simple solution to the problem but it reminds me that it is not a new problem. We should remember that
- actionfromafar 4mo agoCould we instead disallow algorithmic skinner-box addiction machines for everyone?
- gampleman 4mo agoI think this is really the only serious alternative.
- jonathanstrange 4mo agoHow about taking some personal responsibility for your life? This shouldn't even be a consideration concerning adults.
- macintux 4mo agoIt's clear by now that the societal impact is significant. I can banish all the social networks from my life and they'll still be corrupting the political process, promoting divisive content, etc.
- actionfromafar 4mo agoI assume you are also for heroin vending machines at every school corner if you watch a 30 second ad slot. You don't have to use them, you know.
- jMyles 4mo agoYour extreme example of a policy regarding distribution of heroin is far from perfect, but also far better than prohibition, which has visited upon the world more death, disease, crime, and cartel enrichment than perhaps any other policy in history. But surely we can do better than either of these extremes.
- jonathanstrange 4mo agoNo, but I'm not against selling alcohol and fast sports cars to adults, for example. I'm not very fond of a nanny state that prohibits almost everything to adults "for their sake" and because the government knows so much better.
- rootusrootus 4mo agoIt is somewhat more challenging for the vendor selling alcohol or sports cars to manipulate your thinking, so the analogy is strained.
- jonathanstrange 4mo ago[citation needed]
- rootusrootus 4mo ago> This shouldn't even be a consideration concerning adults. Ban the boxes for kids
- jonathanstrange 4mo agoI was replying specifically to someone who insinuated that all social media (or, at least, all supposedly addictive social media) should be banned for everyone, including adults. To me, it's a matter of personal freedom that they shouldn't be banned for adults.
- anmalkov 4mo agoExactly. Fix the addiction machine, not just who gets checked at the door.
- inigyou 4mo agoHow can you tell what one is? Reddit in 2010? Facebook in 2005? IRC in 1999?
- actionfromafar 4mo agoI think I would be fine with a positive enumeration. Some ideas for serving content: - purely random - sponsored but without user tracking (like old school TV ads) - sponsored for user selected geographical area feed - sponsored for user current location geographical area feed - follow "friends" or influencers - purely timeline - discussion boards - timeline (IRC like) - threaded - user votes (not magic platform votes) - follow keywords
- inigyou 4mo agoSo Hacker News wouldn't be allowed?
- actionfromafar 4mo agoI think it should be, maybe I'm missing some aspect, I just cooked up a simple list of rules on the spot, sheesh :-D Edit: huh, I'm probably stupid, but can you explain more?
- inigyou 4mo agoHN uses magical platform votes.
- rootusrootus 4mo agoAnd it should be transparent about it. When Dan uses a magic lever, it should be visible.
- inigyou 4mo agoWould Facebook be okay if all the Nazi propaganda posts were tagged "Facebook boosted this post"?
- john_strinlai 4mo ago>"Age verification" means that everyone who does anything online will have to submit to fine-grained tracking and recording of all their online activities. its been said 1000 times here, but: age verification doesn't have to be a nightmare dystopia of 24/7 fine-grained tracking and recording unless you are somehow hoping to achieve 100% success rate (something we have not done with any other law ever). there are several reasonable proposals that would be 90%+ successful without stepping on anyone's toes. i am convinced that enough people in power know it, too, but see this as their chance to get the full-dystopia version rolled out.
- pokstad 4mo agoExactly. The same way that selling alcohol doesn’t require a paper trail of every beer I’ve bought.
- SecretDreams 4mo agoTo be fair, I buy my beers on CC. If someone really wanted to know the best IPAs and session able beers they could get, they could audit my CC records and then cross check to the breweries and pubs to see what I was buying. Just depends how much someone wants to learns bout good beer.
- normie3000 4mo agoAnything under 4% should be sessionable IME.
- pseudalopex 4mo agoYour point was what? No one should be allowed more privacy than you wanted?
- SecretDreams 4mo agoMy point was mostly a joke about drinking beer in response to the OP drinking beer. But the underlying darkness is that if you're paying for things using a CC, you've already given up on your privacy, but it's implicitly lost, rather than explicitly.
- Santosh83 4mo agoYou can't spy on kids without spying on everyone, and in any case they're interested in the everyone part. Ultimately they want 24x7, realtime facial & biometric monitoring of everyone using any "approved" device, and be sure that only approved devices will be able to join networks and do stuff upon them, so for those brave nerds thinking they can survive on GhostBSD from their basement, yes you can, but as Gandalf said, you can only fence yourself in, but not fence the world out. Sooner or later they'll come for everyone.
- simultsop 4mo agoThis is a very strong argument simply put
- Sankozi 4mo agoThis is a manipulation tactic not an argument. Almost nobody wants to prevent spying on kids. Main goal is to prevent harmful content like porn, gore and gambling.
- oceansky 4mo agoThose digital surveillance rules passed in Brazil under the Digital Statute for Children and Adolescents law. Protection of kids is definitely the most common arguments for them.
- Sankozi 4mo agoProtecting kids does not equal protecting kids from spying, which is what the article is arguing against.
- IshKebab 4mo agoSorry but this isn't a strong argument at all. Nobody who thinks age verification laws are a good idea will be remotely persuaded by any of this.
- speak_plainly 4mo agoIn Canada the approach is going to be that social media and AI companies will need to figure out a system where those under 16 can’t access content. The government will be able to grant exemptions if the company can satisfy regulators that they have built and maintained adequate, alternative structural safeguards to protect children on their platform. Further to that, companies are required to do this in a strict data minimization approach, results need to be anonymized and destroyed immediately after the check is complete. The internet has grown into a bit of a letdown to some degree, especially social media. If I have to upload an ID or insert a grey hair into a scanner, that website or app will be dead to me and I will move on to something else or nothing at all.
- rootusrootus 4mo ago> The internet has grown into a bit of a letdown to some degree, especially social media. You have a flair for understatement. > If I have to upload an ID or insert a grey hair into a scanner, that website or app will be dead to me and I will move on to something else or nothing at all. Same. I joke that when I retire I'm throwing out every computer in my house. Turns out the gov't may effectively do that for me, because I will not be handing out my ID to web sites. That is a hard line for me.
- anmalkov 4mo agoThis reminds me of being refused entry to a nightclub in the US because I’d forgotten my passport, even though I had a European ID card and I’m over 40. Offline, age checks already often become rigid “approved identity document” checks. Online, that problem seems even worse, because the check can become a persistent identity layer across the web.
- asdff 4mo agoMaybe it is just a lax west coast thing but they hardly ID here. Bartenders straight up don't ever card at all. Only place you'd get carded is if they put a bouncer out front, which only happens when it is getting really busy, and even then they are mostly there to keep out teenagers and break up fights, only give you a 1 second glance at your card to not chance a liquor license violation. Certain night clubs (haven't seen these antics in CA but have in NYC and Miami) often do stupid stuff to guys though. If you show up with a group of guys they will probably not let you in. You need an even ratio of men and women. They will let in a group of all women with hardly any check.
- nitwit005 4mo agoI always remember when a club opened the door for me without question, because I was holding several pizza boxes. Got to skip the line and everything. Clearly belonged inside.
- seethishat 4mo agoMy main concern is transparency. How do we know that the ruling/governing class is not abusing these monitoring systems and exempting themselves from monitoring? If we are all subject to the same monitoring and there are no exceptions, that would be fair. However, if some people are exempt from monitoring because of their connections, relations, etc. then that would be unfair. And if some people are allowed to harass and stalk others based on some attribute (race, religion, nationality, etc.) because they are in a monitoring position (while others are not) then that would be unfair as well. We need full transparency.
- inetknght 4mo agoTransparency doesn't matter without consequences. Many of the currently ruling governments have demonstrated that already.
- js8 4mo agoYou're wrong, it still matters. It's the first step, and it's an important step in maintaining fairness.
- bluebarbet 4mo ago>You're wrong As a rhetorical trick this is generally ineffective.
- staplers 4mo agoUnfortunately not when convincing a large populace..
- classified 4mo ago> it's an important step in maintaining fairness. When there are no consequences, it by definition isn't.
- js8 4mo ago
- 1970-01-01 4mo agoIf it's stupid but it works it ain't stupid.
- bell-cot 4mo agoAssume that saying "X is stupid" is pejorative shorthand for "I strongly disagree with the other side's criteria judging whether or not X works".
- gampleman 4mo agoWhat an exceptionally bad faith way to put this whole thing. A five year old watching hours of the most depraved porn available is harmful to that child. Even if you disagree with that statement, you surely must acknowledge that it is an entirely reasonable opinion to hold and one our societies have generally held to this sort of thing for ages. I also acknowledge that there is a reasonable debate to be had if the disadvantages to adults and businesses from imposing these rules are worth the harms prevented. There is also a reasonable debate to be had about the merits of various technical and legal schemes being implemented to achieve these goals. But this take is neither of those. For one, surveillance isn't the number one harm being prevented (even though, a number of legal codes attempt to make this the case). As has been pointed out previously, there absolutely can be age verification that is without surveillance. The fact that these solutions aren't always legally mandated and therefore age verification can be used to increase surveillance is a reasonable thing to attempt to amend to the implementations of these laws.
- akmiller 4mo agoYour example is in bad faith as your example assumes that the only thing blocking a child of 5 from porn is age verification of some type. There are lots of blockers today for 5 year olds to get access to porn. > I also acknowledge that there is a reasonable debate to be had if the disadvantages to adults and businesses from imposing these rules are worth the harms prevented Nobody on the "we need age verification" side wants a debate. They want to run face first in to dumb legislation giving governments and companies even more power to track every movement and know exactly who you are.
- gampleman 4mo agoThe blockers generally don’t work (I’ve tried). A big part of the problem is that it is in the interest of the providers to subvert them. The main benefit of age verification is changing that responsibility by making it the business of providers to ensure it works, not consumers. You can make the same argument with alcohol: surely it’s sufficient that parents supervise their children not to drink. But it’s prove to be more effective to distribute that responsibility to the providers as well.
- economistbob 4mo agoThe bigger threat to kids is all the browsers now bypassing domain filtering by default, even if you specify a DNS server. There was a time when multiple vendors sold protection software, but apparently some unsavory elements wanted all the browsers to build in DNS bypassing to go around it. The best protection for children is blocking the bad stuff at the DNS level.
- shevy-java 4mo ago> What we call "age verification" is actually mass surveillance Thank you. It has never been about "protecting the children" either. That was always a lie - the red herring. Many pointed that out from the get go too. The much more fascinating thing is how legislation is still being actively changed to sustain that narrative. This is like a pre-scripted event what we are seeing here. I find it quite fascinating. It shows how real lobbyism actually works. My prediction is that mandatory age sniffing will come, they will continue to claim it is all for children, and the openness of the world wide web will factually be transformed into a two-class apartheid system. The latter has already happened actually - you have walled gardens e. g. discord rather than oldschool phpBB webforums (aka privately controlled access to information), Google already ruined its search engine, AI slop continues to ruin more here. These are all not isolated. This is a deliberate mega-slop attack, combined with payments to key lobbyists. We see a degradation of services here. That they attack VPNs is very logical - after all VPNs allow people to break out of the global ghetto system they are building here. They want to know who is who. Interestingly I see this attack also related to them trying to abolish the right to repair movement. Now, there is no direct connection here, but right to repair also attempts to put people at the center - you purchased something, you should be able to freely change it to your own liking, without some random private company being able to proxy-deny any change to that. With mandatory age sniffing coming, it also means that people will lose the ability to change software. Recently a university here in Europe started to demand that students must own a smartphone AND must install an app from a private company (via google store) in order to be able to read email sent to them via a webmail account. I also found this fascinating, because now people need to submit to Google, in order to study in a small european country, if they study at that university (which is paid for by taxpayers by the way). These interdependencies will keep on increasing here. Even Linux will fall victim - systemd already added data fields to track your age. More to come in the future despite Poettering's claim that it is all very, very harmless. Until it is not. And then it is too late.
- monssooon 4mo agoI dreamt about this. In my dream it was very clear. Like ray dalio says we are in the last inning of the current great debt cycle. The end of the NWO or the great reset or what it is named, brings about great losses to the west. We attemt to save our economies with mass immigration. Along side the downfall of our industries and currencies the middle-class falters and the crime and violent facfions in society becomes stronger. Parallel societies become financed by outer geopolitical entities to escalate the wests downfall. In desperation the western governments try to get in control of their populations before real civil war erupts. One attempt to avoid complete chaos is total surveillance... Just; if ray dalio is right this is not a nightmare but our current trajectory. The leaders know and are preparing...
- tuieriojwpoiejf 4mo agoPerhaps save kids from peter file gangsters first? If local police protects child molesters, and government supports it... Very difficult to take this child internet protection seriously!!!
- Aunche 4mo agoThe new laws in the US don't require any real verification. Parents who care will just select a flag on device/OS setup that gets passed to websites. They can also just lie if they really want to. In the EU, they are trying to verify age with zero knowledge proofs. It would be nice if the author actually spelled out the specific weaknesses of those approaches or even just referenced those laws instead of fear-mongering about "spying on kids", but I suppose that would be to much to ask of someone who made a career out of vibes based rage. Ironic that Doctorow is so eager to capitalize on the enshittification of journalism.
- Aerroon 4mo agoThe specific weakness of these systems is that the governments cannot be trusted with this. They have demonstrated this - Snowden leaks for the US and several EU states, and the general monitoring clause in the Data Retention Directive for the EU as a whole. Even if these governments come up with a zero knowledge system, it's only one click away from being replaced with a full-knowledge system, because the user is already used to it. These governments have already tried spying on everyone (and they almost certainly still do).
- thenewtoolsmith 4mo agoi was thinking of having a mobile/tablet with kiosk mode and full restrictions on the content.
- foo-bar-baz529 4mo agoI don’t think saving them from spying is the main concern. Instead it’s the direct negative effects of the usage upon the kids that’s the concern. Not that age verification isn’t problematic
- rootusrootus 4mo agoThen ban underage smartphones altogether, that would probably make the single biggest improvement in child safety and mental health. Trying to police content is an utter waste of time.
- krupan 4mo agoThe possibly too subtle point of this article is that the spying is what makes the negative effects so powerful. Social media spies on what you are viewing and then sends you more of that, and send the info to other people so they can send you more of that too
- therealdrag0 4mo agoAm I the only one who looked at NSFW websites at 10 years old and played games with voice chat with players of all ages too, and I turned out to be well adjusted productive member of society? People need to chill.
- salawat 4mo agoSeconded. The amount of time and characters spent here trying to coax someone into trying to help these damn layers materialize just tells me the point isn't the kids. It's trying to preserve business model in spite of negative externalities.
- narnarpapadaddy 4mo agoSame, I care little about NSFW. We used to all live in caves together where kids saw adults having sex, in conflict, and cleaning game. But I also grew with a different internet than we have now. There’s a level of targeted manipulation that’s novel. I’m not sure the cat goes back in the bag no matter what we do.
- account42 4mo agoBut the targeted manipulation is also bad for adults.
- llbbdd 4mo agoSame here. Every time a thread like this comes up it brings out that a surprising number of paranoid helicopter parents browse HN, which is a contradiction in perspective that I can't really emphasize with.
- nitwit005 4mo agoThat's the system. You're supposed to freak out about your kids doing the same things you did when you were young.
- account42 4mo agoAs long as freaking out means ranting at the dinner table and not making dystopian laws for everyone, sure.
- tom910 4mo agoThe main problem is providing infrastructure for a government that can over use it in future if move to ultra right/left/authoritarian spectrum Just for example Russia build infrastructure for blocks website for child safety, but it started to used much further
- rootusrootus 4mo ago> The main problem is providing infrastructure for a government that can over use it in future if move to ultra right/left/authoritarian spectrum The US is an instructive example in real time. Roughly everyone worries about what happens when their opponent gains control of the government and then promptly forgets how much they worried when their side has it.
- palata 4mo ago> The main problem is providing infrastructure for a government that can over use it in future if move to ultra right/left/authoritarian spectrum If that was considered the real problem, we would be fighting against surveillance capitalism. Instead we cheer for LLM companies who made it an order of magnitude worse. Let's be honest, the only time we care about being tracked is to access porn, for some reason. And if we're being honest, we are already tracked when doing it.
- pseudalopex 4mo ago> If that was considered the real problem, we would be fighting against surveillance capitalism. You don't? > Instead we cheer for LLM companies who made it an order of magnitude worse. You do? > Let's be honest, the only time we care about being tracked is to access porn, for some reason. You do? > And if we're being honest, we are already tracked when doing it. You are?
- tom910 4mo agoEven some bad aspects/issues doesn't justice that we need to support even worse cases Also want to mark that `surveillance capitalism` companies can not be comparable with totaletar countries which want to control people. This is orders of magnitude worse
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 4mo agoMy solution is simple: Fine companies that allow minors. How you implement that is not my problem! Something that is severely lacking in tech is liability! What's with the "we can't do that" helplessness that pervades this topic?
- atoav 4mo agoI grew up during the 90s/2000s and I used the internet, first social media platforms, messengers, etc. – a lot. My parents had no idea of computers, how to use them, how to use the internet, what is out there etc. Yet I am convinced that the way my parents dealt with it is still the gold standard. Their parenting equipped me well to deal with weird, dangerous or otherwise harmful things I encountered. They were the kind of parents who would let us play in the woods till 9 in the evening, no questions asked if there were scratched knees or dirty cloths. If there was something they thought might be problematic, they talked to us in a way that left the ultimate decision how to deal with a situation with us, displaying a high level of trust into our ability to make good decisions ourselves (and sometimes letting us make bad ones just to talk about it after the fact). Turns out if you want your kid to be able to deal with unexpected situations you need them to deal with situations, period. And the opposite of that is what I even back then saw with many of my friends parents: trying to shield their kid from every encountering (and mastering!) even the tiniest of dangers themselves, alone. You think you tell your kid about the dangers of the world, so they know, but the actual lesson you teach is that only their parent knows what is and isn't dangerous and that they themselves can't be trusted to judge it. That is a bad lesson. Don't get me wrong, we did stupid stuff, like jumping of bridges into rivers and so on. But we were very careful about how we did it, diving beforehand, etc. The real stupid stuff in my youth was all done by other kids that had never learned to judge risks themselves and who in one brazen attempt of rebellion bit off more than they could chew in one go. That landed them in the hospital. My brother and I were the only kids in our friends circle who made it to 18 without having broken a single bone in our bodies, despite being regular skateboarders, snowboarders, climbers, cliff jumpers and all other kinds of borderline insane past-times, some of which don't even have a name. One aspect: Since my parents had no idea what was on the internet and how to protect against specific dangers lurking within it an educational method that didn't have to rely on them knowing and enumerating every danger in the world proved to be a really smart choice in hindsight. Since the landscapes of social media especially for kids and young teenagers is shifting constantly at a high pace, any parenting ideas would need to keep track of all this as well. I can't even imagine how that would work. The alternative is to ban everything. But how do they build a healthy immune system if they are never even exposed to the mild dangers first?
- 4mo ago
- rlt 4mo agoIn general I'm opposed to this kind of regulation, but as a thought exercise, we do have the primitives needed to do age (or any other attribute) verification in a privacy-preserving and decentralized way. You could imagine a hierarchy of organizations (governments, financial institutions, schools, etc) that a website trusts to verify some attribute (minimum age, citizenship, etc). Those organizations can attest that some identifier like an email address has been verified to belong to a real individual with that attribute, and that organization belongs to the hierarchy the website trusts, without revealing anything else about the user, the exact verifying organization, or the requesting website.
- mzajc 4mo agoIf the website sees (and possibly stores) the e-mail address, and the government or another party knows who it belongs to, the scheme is anything but privacy-preserving.
- rlt 4mo agoI’m confident you could devise a way to ensure the verifying party doesn’t know which website requested the verification, and vice versa. I’ll have to think about it a bit more.
- betorabinovich 4mo agohere's alternative legislation that should be at least as effective without the mass surveillance aspect: * as your kid's legal guardian you're legally liable for whatever the fuck your kid does, including but not limited to harming themselves: Parents should care for their kids * platforms will do their best to not be available to minors unless minors are actually their core audience, will inform monthly how they did that, and the bottom 10% of achievers will pay an escalating percentual of their valuation as fine for each instance where they're found lacking: Platforms should care about kids as a category of people * posession of personally identifiable information about an unrelated minor by any unrelated person/company without a clear and preapproved reason is grounds for a child abuse investigation on every person anywhere in the chain of custody of said data: Children's PII should be such a hassle to manage it's not worth taking
- anonreeeeplor 4mo ago[dead]
- rootusrootus 4mo agoCould we step back a little and maybe revisit the premise that we need the gov't to be protecting children to begin with? That's what parents are supposed to be doing.
- CPLX 4mo agoNo let's not. Let's actually create and maintain a society. There are still places in the world where you and your family can literally fend for yourself against nature and rival gangs and so on if you're just super attached to the concept though, it's not like this option has been foreclosed.
- rootusrootus 4mo agoThis discussion is about the Internet. I.e. that we already have police and regulate in-person things like selling alcohol to minors, etc, is not a great argument in support of policing information.
- CPLX 4mo agoIf you call pornograpy and violence delivery to children "providing them with information" then sure but most normal people just consider that a bad thing that we'd like to avoid and definitely would like to stop sociopathic tech CEO's from exploiting for profit. But back to your original point, it's a pretty well-established function of government to protect the children within its borders from being harmed.
- Sankozi 4mo agoYou were arguing against such restrictions (nor selling alcohol to minors) in the top post. So which way it is - parents protect kids on their own or society/state helps somewhat?
- ramblerman 4mo agoWhat a ridiculous strawman. OP wasn't proposing removing the police, and any charitable take would have understood that given the topic of the article.
- nekusar 4mo agoThis whole shitshow thread is a bunch of techies coming up with more inane and erudite ways to implement spying on every web activity, but 'technically better'. And people here are NOT asking why its even needed at all. This is what those ethics classes are for - not asking HOW to make, but whether we should at all. And invasive country identity level online personas is NEVER something we should ever go for. This is basically "FLOCK ONLINE". And we see how devastating Flock is, even when pigs only have access. No ID scans. No eyeball scans. No face scans. Im done with all of it.
- techteach00 4mo agoWe're cooked. The young kids I teach are unfortunately completely accustomed to go guardian spying on them at school. The admin constantly reinforce the need to dissect the internet, treat Chromebooks as media consumption devices, not computers. I hear it will be even worse here next year. Not sure how. These people are obsessed with risk mitigation that it's not even worth having tech class anymore. No risk. 100% control all the time.
- ipaddr 4mo agoThis idea sounds like the death of social media. Remove anyone under 18 ensures they won't signup after. Forcing id verification means 70-80% of adult accounts will be dead. Network effects disappear. Those who remain will be businesses pushing something, hackers/spammers and some die hard group.
- kittikitti 4mo agoI also dislike how confident people are in children's technical skills. It's really not hard at all to block VPN's. It's actually relatively easy to block certain content on your internet devices. I get it, kids are smart, but why do we think everyone is a malicious person who also has the ability to bypass all the restrictions? Perhaps it's the parents who are too dumb to understand how to configure a network?
- abdelhousni 4mo agoArab spring, Gaza genocide and genZ revolutions lately has the attention of the oligarchy... The war for youth attention and minds
- ToucanLoucan 4mo agoI'm just gonna say here that all of this, whatever solution whatever unaccountable political group decides is the one, can only be built by tech workers. All of these require fingers hitting keys to produce code to function. If we unified and refused, it wouldn't happen. It couldn't happen. I am begging my fellow developers in this space to remember that you are WORKERS. The owning class will throw you into the meat grinder with every other worker the second it's convenient to their wealth extraction. Throw down your tools and say no. If you find yourself tasked with implementing age verification shit you think is profoundly unethical, don't build it. If you find yourself building products you know to be harmful, refuse. If you find yourself put against a wall to ship garbage you know doesn't work to check boxes for some fucking CEO, stop. We are the tip of the spear in the global effort to make the world more surveilled, more dangerous, less free, and more expensive. We have a CHOICE and we have to start making it. And yes, it may cost you your job. It'll certainly cost you status. Your boss will hate you. But the last year or so has made it abundantly clear that whatever professional "safety" we feel is not warranted. We are just as replaceable as the delivery drivers who get caught pissing in bottles.
- rootusrootus 4mo ago> If we unified That's cute. About half my coworkers are socialists and the other half fire breathing MAGA. The only thing we have united on was that we don't talk politics at work. But I assure you, there is not universal agreement at all that authoritarian technology is bad. Some people, including many developers, absolutely support it. What you propose requires agreeing on the definition of harmful. And immediately it fails.
- bluegatty 4mo agoThe slippery slope argument is hugely valid, but having kids not have access to alcohol, porn and guns is very normal. We don't even discuss it in the 'physical world' because it's absolutely normative. Even in 'Europe' kids aren't going into the liquor store stocking up obviously - there are always age and responsibility-related conventions. The 'online' nature of this piques our anti-authoritarian triggers and tends to err our judgment a bit. There are valid reasons to do this, and there is 'a right way' - maybe we should have some hope and promote that. I'm not hugely optimistic that they'll get it right, but we should aspire for to build the world we want. There's enough momentum that it's plausible.
- asdff 4mo agoIn europe drinking age is what 16? By the time you want to regularly drink you are already legally allowed to. Meanwhile in the US you get screwed by both the law and your university for drinking in a dorm at 20 years old.
- bluegatty 4mo ago[dead]
- pseudalopex 4mo agoWe discuss age requirements in the physical world not much because the physical world allows age checks without mass surveillance.
- 4mo ago
- krupan 4mo agoParents largely control what their kids have access to, whether it requires a device, a data plan, home Wi-Fi, whatever. Where parents don't/can't control their kids' access, no amount of regulation and technology will fix it. This applies not just to social media, but drugs, alcohol, porn, etc. Yes, laws and IDs add friction and that's good, but if a kid really wants those things they are going to find a way. Social media already had built in friction without needing new regulations and ID requirements. To access social media you need a relatively expensive (for kids) device and some way to connect that device to the Internet, which is also not free. The biggest problem I see is that unlike alcohol, drugs, and porn, there are seemingly benign reasons for kids to use social media. Sports teams, dance classes, youth groups, etc. all want to keep in touch and allow group communication. Too often the adults in charge turn to Instagram or whatever social media app for the group communication. Now, unfortunately, your kid needs an IG account.
- al_borland 4mo agoEven as an adult who doesn't use social media, I find the use of Facebook as a company home page, or using it as a forum for group communication, to be problematic. Especially as Meta makes it more and more difficult to see content without an account.
- ghtbircshotbe 4mo agoOr even worse - as the homepage for local government/department.
- sublinear 4mo ago> Too often the adults in charge turn to Instagram or whatever social media app for the group communication. This was always the problem going way back. Lots of responsible parents pushed back hard and advocated for doing everything in person during the scheduled times. Even before that there were already concerns that kids were stuck indoors and addicted to entertainment. They ultimately lost out to the lazy majority who kept mindlessly repeating "who cares?" and "oh every generation says that when they get old!". Organizers also saw it as a way to do less work. Well here we are now. Even the younger people agree this is dumb.
- 1vuio0pswjnm7 4mo agoActual title, original title: Spying on kids to protect kids from spying is very, very stupid
- soperj 4mo ago>"Age verification" means that everyone who does anything online will have to submit to fine-grained tracking and recording of all their online activities. Hilarious that the author doesn't think that this isn't already happening.
- fsflover 4mo agoYou can always have more of it. Currently, you can use some technical tools like Tor Browser to protect yourself. Age verification makes it easier to block them.
- catoc 4mo agoAge Verification is not about “saving kids from spying/social media”. Same as Regulatory Encryption Backdoors are not about “protecting kids from child predators” This is framing. Abusing kids is bad. But that is not what this about. Let’s keep the discussion on topic: the goal is 1984-level oversight… not just of the kids [Edit: I guess HN agrees: meanwhile the title changed from “saving kids from spying” to “is actually mass-surveillance” - good]
- gaiagraphia 4mo agoI'm against mass surveillance, but gambling sites managed for years.... Can't addictive social media algoshit be thrown in the same bucket?
- codedokode 4mo agoThere are at least two methods to verify age without disclosing identity: 1) Yubikey-like tokens supporting attestation and sold at places not accessible to minors like liquor stores 2) "parent mode" on desktop and mobile devices - the device would refuse to load any inappropriate sites and install inappropriate apps like Telegram, Omegle or Facebook.
- ath3nd 4mo ago[dead]
- johnc1 4mo agoWe're already been protecting children from printed porn, alcohol, drugs (legal or illegal), guns, etc. Children don't even have to buy those items, sometimes they can get them from friends or even find at home. It's always been parents responsibility to protect from that, and the Internet doesn't change that. What the Internet does change is granularity of controls. With physical goods, parents can choose to give children travel magazines but not porn magazines. With Internet, parents don't always have a choice to give children a device to read travel websites but not porn websites. Solving that granularity is all we need! And the good news - it's already largely solved: just give your kids one of the locked down phones/tables with parental controls (i.e., almost any phone/tablet today). The law can and should make a few things better: - introduce minimal requirements for parental controls, certify devices as kids safe (i.e., implementing these requirements) - ideally, require websites to tag content - same way we tag it on TV for ages; this one is harder to enforce in practice (what about offshore websites?) but also not really needed - AI can tag content pretty well as part of parental controls I know all of this was said before many times, but somehow it feels not enough people understand it.
- gampleman 4mo agoAs I pointed out elsewhere, the problem is that these parental controls don't work. It's a matter of incentive: at the moment, it's in the interest of providers to help subvert the filters. Device makers also don't have the strongest incentives to make the filters great, since that would presumably lead to less engagement from large market segments. One of the explicit goals of age verification laws is to throw the legal responsibility of preventing access from minors onto the providers, thereby inverting the incentives.
- metalman 4mo agowe we call "mass surveillance" is actually genocide preperation
- jmacc93 4mo agoEvery time I see stuff about age verification (which I do admit is likely just a justification for control and surveillance over the internet) I can't help but wonder if there's some way to coordinate a large enough number of internet users to adopt a parallel internet that inherently cannot be regulated, or at least one in which no law can be reasonably enforced. For instance a fully encrypted p2p internet. I guess ultimately the problem is banks and other tie-ins to the real world like businesses with public reputations. And so I guess since endless content streams (including porn and other child-unfriendly media) follow the money primarily, any non-monetized / volunteer parallel internet would likely contain mostly unmonetized content like information (eg: wikipedia, Q&A sites, etc) and slow, un-gameable social media In a perfect world, I'd prefer law and regulation minimization, but obviously that's just not reasonable in our actual world. As much as I have libertarian tendencies, I just can't argue that regulation is necessary. The really interesting part is which regulations are the ones you actually need, which do more harm than good, and which should be refactored -- all as measured (probably) by something like counterfactual real world preference (in the best case, at least). My sense (which isn't worth much; only should act on empirical evidence and falsification-resistant modelling) is such a parallel internet, plus an analogous parallel economy (like bitcoin), would be a net positive
- ibejoeb 4mo agoIn most of the developed world, you need to register with a government to operate a communications device, whether it's radio, land line, mobile phone, whatever. If you're theorizing some kind of peer-to-peer system, where you let someone use your service to bypass mandatory registration, you're going to be liable. There will be very limited takers.
- superkuh 4mo agoAs time goes on the opportunities for human persons to interact directly with each other, without some corporation mediating it, become fewer and fewer. Sometimes it's not even possible to buy food without having a third party corporation promise to pay some days in the future; there are places that literally don't take your order unless you have a credit card. This is how they get around the "cash must be accepted for all debts" law. Online it is happening too. No human persons will be allowed to open accounts or even communicat with other human people unless a corporate entity does it for them. This mass surveillence is just a smaller part of the greater attack on human autonomy. Only corporate persons have rights these days.
- forgetfreeman 4mo agoOur lives are being thoroughly surveilled by a combination of phone tech, financial records tracking, pervasive internet user tracking, smart appliances, data brokerages, and our cars. That this is what triggers an avalanche of pushback while the rest of it is ignored wholesale reeks to high hell of either an overt astroturf campaign or industrial grade hypocrisy. I offer no opinion on the concept of age verification beyond noting it's detractors consistently refuse to advance alternatives that address any of problems it's proponents claim it's intended to address.
- g42gregory 4mo agoI keep reading about freedom and democracy on Fox News and New York Times. What is that all about?
- cadamsdotcom 4mo agoNo one in politics is going to listen unless solutions are provided. Government research departments like DoD and CSIRO could commission work to solve this problem, that’s how we used to do this. Relying on private boffins to complain creates too much noise in the room and the bureaucracy can’t tune into the signal. It used to be done via gov sci. What changed?
- niemandhier 4mo agoI see that one point of criticism of the EUId is that people think it will lead to bad things because people will need iOS or android. Ok, we are an international collective of wealthy nerds obsessed with privacy: How much money do we need to collect to get /e/OS to be suitable? A few million? I’d pledge 500€.
- palata 4mo agoIf you're obsessed with privacy, I suggest you look at GrapheneOS instead of /e/OS, though.
- frm88 4mo agoThe post you are replying to refers EUId, which implies European software, so Graphene is not an option.
- microtonal 4mo agoWhy not? GrapheneOS is open source and developed by an international team of developers, why would it not fit for Europe? Besides that, /e/OS is basically LineageOS with weakened security and Murena's own cloud crap added. It's going to be a hell lot better than /e/OS, whose CEO claims security hardening is only for criminals (pedophiles) and spies. He is peddling the same narratives in the media as those who push chat control, etc. And the on-the-ground reality that /e/OS runs Google DroidGuard binary blobs privileged (not so degoogled, eh?), installs F-Droid packages through a proxy that the don't want to reveil the owner or purpose of (which is a disaster combines with Android's trust-on-first-use), along with being ages behind on kernel, driver, firmware, and AOSP security updates. People who care about privacy or security should not use nor push /e/OS.
- palata 4mo ago> /e/OS, whose CEO claims security hardening is only for criminals (pedophiles) and spies That's true, there is a video interview where he says that they are not so knowledgeable about security, and anyway they don't develop an OS for pedophiles, so it doesn't matter.
- trallnag 4mo agoThe total fertility rate in basically all western countries is below replacement level fertility. Without immigration we are shrinking. There are fewer and fewer children around. And now protecting children on the internet got top priority. For real? We point to Russia for controlling the internet more and more. Yet the EU does the same and will probably even overtake Russia on this thanks to more resources / competencies.
- palata 4mo agoNot that I am in favour of age verification, but I find it interesting how many people complain about age verification for being "mass surveillance", but just don't give a shit about AI and TooBigTech and surveillance capitalism. Let's be honest: "they" already know our age.
- monssooon 4mo ago[dead]
- r-woolsey 4mo agoI typed out a whole story and thought better of it.. I never post but this one hits home so hard for things I’ve worked on. I like being alive and would prefer to quietly go work on robots/ai in peace so.. no story. I’ll just say that if the government says any age verification technology is for the kids safety it is most definitely not their idea.. they are being worked like a sock puppet by the real corporate power and the shadowy contractor intelligence gradient. I watched this same sort of narrative play out from behind the curtain with a project in US back in the day. I currently work with some similar systems and data brokers. I’m working on leaving to use my skills to build shit that actually helps the people who need help (SMBs, consumers, etc). I’m tired boss. If you’re hiring a startup tech wizard who has done it all and works hard hit me up.
- quadhome 4mo agoBig Ad Tech is helping push age verification because Big AI Tech took away human eyeballs. It's not that deep.
- 1vuio0pswjnm7 4mo agoWho will be conducting this "mass surveillance" The government? Nope. Guess again This blogger thinks age verification legislation somehow supports these companies or has no negative effect on their bottom line Who knows. Maybe that is correct. We are going to find out But many would argue that unless and until computer users allowing Big Tech to collect data, for any purpose^1, start to be interested that data is being collected (cf. how it is allegedly used), nothing will change Perhaps "age verification" could be what finally causes them to be interested. Trying to argue that this is what Big Tech companies want, or that they don't care, is pure nonsense, but online commenters are certainly trying 1. There's no way to verify how it is used or who is using it
- h4kunamata 4mo agoIn Australia, ordinary posts on X is flagged and requires ID so I solved the problem like any homelab person would. I run OPNSense and have a Mullvad VPN, every time I access X or any service that enforces digital ID, firewall rules forward those requests to the Mullvad VPN gateway. This whole mess started because of the Australian activists Collective Shout. 1. They went after Steam +18 games but Steam didn't give them attention 2. They went after Visa/Master and due to political influence, Visa/Master blackmailed Steam 3. Steam removed thousands of +18 games 4. The following week, UK pushed digital ID 5. Countries worldwide followed but Japan What happened at end?? Million of people having their personal information leaked, it has never been so easy to become a victim of identity theft. The same Collective Shout against +18 games, supported a movie on Netflix exploring kids s**lly.
- XChrispy 4mo agoThe main concern with age/identity verification tools seems to be the concern with storing your personal data for mass surveillance. Yet, their privacy policies say they'll remove it soon after the verification. Is the main pessimistic concern that they will not do that? And that it could be proved they do, age/identity verification wouldn't be an issue?
- account42 4mo agoNo the main concern is building a system where the government gets to decide what you can or cannot view on an individual basis.
- Nevermark 4mo agoI am terrified because the majority of discussions are not treating Problems #3 or #4 seriously. Problem #1: Verify ages for adult-appropriate content. Problem #2: Do not create a new surveillance system for the government. Problem #3: Do not create a --dynamic-- per-user internet-access permissioning/control/denial system for the government. This would be madness. Problem #4: Do not create a --general-- per-user internet-access permissioning/control/denial system for the government. Problems #3 & 4 are very very serious. Any age-verification system, or generalized control-system, will become a pervasive requirement for a large percentage of internet sites, simply by being convenient for risk-adverse sites to adopt. Which means, this will be (not could be: will be) a pervasive government managed system of per-user internet control/denial. We need zero knowledge proofs. Or similar. Minimum. Form of solution: • Any third-party institution meeting publically-defined government requirements, can be an attestor. • Attestors provide persistent age-verification tokens per user-device, on user request/verification: Using actual identification and one-off-anonymized device identifiers. • Sites are given one-off, device and user-identity anonymous, attestation tokens, derived from the device token, on request.* Maximum anonymization is necessary so: • Governments can't identify your devices. • Sites can't identify your devices or you. • Government and sites cannot collude to remove anonymity (via this system), enabling a new surveillance system. Attestation tokens need to be persistent so: • The government is not being given dynamic control of our internet use. Age-attestation tokens, must be provided independent from any other types of attestation, so: • We didn't just invite the government to link multiple permissioning systems together, which will inevitably be used in coordination. And so failure to supply age-attestation tokens is a clear documentatable act. Unrestricted (other than by public standards), third-party attesters: • So users can choose an attester they trust. So there are multiple points of attestation. So there is individual accountability, natural documentation, and reputation risk for any denial of attestation. Anything less anonymized, independent, persistent or available than this is a nightmare situation. Really. I am terrified because the majority of discussions are not treating Problems #3 and #4 seriously.