4 ms·

The offline version proposed doesn’t even work. If the government issues untraceable “I’m an adult” cards there’s nothing stopping someone from acquiring one an

by dpark 3mo ago

The offline version proposed doesn’t even work. If the government issues untraceable “I’m an adult” cards there’s nothing stopping someone from acquiring one and immediately selling it to a minor. There’s also realistically nothing stopping someone from acquiring multiple and selling them to minors. “Oops, I lost my adult card again. I need a new one.” The solution is of course to make them revocable which means traceable. The same applies online/digitally except that you can very likely distribute the same ID to many minors without getting a new one allocated. I’m in the “we should protect kids online” camp, but I am not sure there’s a real way to do it without compromising privacy for everyone.

rootlocus 3mo ago
Protecting kids online requires attention from their parents, not from the government.
- dpark 3mo ago
  Protecting kids is well within the scope of the government. This “it’s the parents job” is also reductionist. It is, but somehow we still have made it illegal for minors to buy hard liquor and pornography from physical stores in the United States and few argue that restriction is wrong.
  - rootlocus 3mo ago
    And they still find ways to drink themselves to alcohol induced comas. There's no real substitute for education and parental nurturing only best effort band-aid solutions. Children with problems at home are more likely to be targeted by bullies or child predators. I'm not saying the government shouldn't do anything, they should and it should probably involve legislature around social media that positively affects adults as well. But raising a child, teaching it what's dangerous and what's safe and developing a relationship of trust so you're aware when there's danger lurking, that's a parent's job. No amount of legislation will help neglected children. They're tiny, curious, ingenious humans who will find ways to get what they want.
    - jonhohle 3mo ago
      No one is saying it’s one or the other. It’s both. There are certain children who need protection from bad parenting and certain parents that need protection for their neurodivergent children.
    - dpark 3mo ago
      Children drinking themselves into alcohol induced comas is fairly rare. Teenagers consuming large amounts of explicit pornography is not at all rare. I agree nothing will replace parenting. The children who do drink themselves into comas are largely enabled by adults (who are also generally committing a crime). But there is harm reduction the government can and probably should do. I have to say, as much as I think the article author here is naive, I also have to wonder if the net positives outweigh the net negatives. Uploading an id and face scan to a pornography site seems like the worst of all possible scenarios. Getting a government issue credential is better than that at least.
- rpdillon 3mo ago
  This is my take, but I am a bit frustrated by OS manufacturers. The obvious move is have a screen after factory reset the puts the device in kid mode permanently. It then will send a "I'm underage" flag to sites, and sites return no content (or safe content) when they see that header. This is a system that makes it easier for parents to do their parenting job. All the pieces of this system already exist, but the UX for managing a device during setup to be a "kids device" isn't there. This system is good for a bunch of reasons: * It gives parents control such that they can tailor the experience to their kids. This is a problem with current proposals. * It doesn't bring identity into the mix at all, completely defusing the risk of mass surveillance. * It's easy to verify if adult sites are complying: hit them with a curl request containing the header, check the response. This is much easier that verifying that Discord is checking user ages properly using their face-scanning technology.
  - psd1 3mo ago
    That's how i was leaning, because i cynically assumed a maximally-fuckwitted decree. However. The world is as it is, not as we wish it was. My mother can't click "update and restart"; pathological technophobia. Should it be parental responsibility? Sure, why not. Will it that be effective? No. At scale, people are incompetent.
- Jtarii 3mo ago
  This approach has clearly failed and something different should therefore be attempted.
- jerome-jh 3mo ago
  Protecting kids and other vulnerable people matters to everyone, so why not the government? What would think of a country where, let say your mother cannot go out without fearing getting robbed or raped? Same for kids. Maybe you do not have kids and you do not care. Anyway being a parent does not mean being behind your kids at every single moment. I hope you have not spent your childhood under constant supervision of your parents. So at some point everyone is concerned about protecting kid, and not only there own ones
grey-area 3mo ago
Untraceable is your invention and obviously absurd and unworkable. No scheme is going to issue cards/tokens that can be traded between people, that's obviously unworkable. Untraceable is for the consumers of the cards obviously, but in order to have trust they need to be traceable for somebody to verify them. The government can already determine who you are and already requires you to prove that at certain points, this is not a new invention of government it is required for governments to function.
- dpark 3mo ago
  It’s not my invention. It’s in the article. The physical card proposed contains nothing traceable. “They issue a card that says only one thing: "over 18". The card carries official seals, signatures, and anti-forgery features.” If you put an id on the card, then it’s a layer of indirection, but you’ve still handed them a unique personal identifier. Traceable credentials are fundamentally not privacy preserving, because that’s what traceable means.
  - grey-area 3mo ago
    You're now arguing about something which isn't even in the proposal from the EU, it's a hypothetical from the article which attempts to draw a parallel with existing physical id (I guess to demonstrate to people that this already happens regularly with passports, ID cards, driving licenses etc). That existing physical ID is government issued, has an issue no, usually has a photo on it, often other biometrics nowadays, and is definitely traceable! Absolutely such a proposal cannot be fully privacy preserving, because at the very least it gives away your age, but also probably other identifiers.Just like your browser that you're using right now gives away a lot of information which advertisers use to fingerprint you like fonts etc. This sort of solution requires a central issuer/authority to know about the tokens, there's no way round that as there is no way round governments issuing passports if you want border control. The goal is that it'll preserve much better privacy than uploading passports etc to random websites, which I think it will.
    - dpark 3mo ago
jerome-jh 3mo ago
If the kid knows how to buy a certificate from a shady website, then probably he his old enough to watch porn and other disturbing content. That does not mesn the system should be thrown away as a whole.
- dpark 3mo ago
  I did not say it should be thrown away. I said that it can’t be done while preserving privacy the way advocates claim. It’s totally plausible that the trade-off is reasonable, but I also don’t think we should pretend that the trade-off isn’t there.
xoa 3mo ago
>I’m in the “we should protect kids online” camp, but I am not sure there’s a real way to do it without compromising privacy for everyone. Of course there is, it's easy! You take a white list approach instead of an auth one. The default is that the general Internet is exclusively for adults. Anonymous = adult. Then use the DNS system to make a set of .kids ccTLDs, with government controlled registries. Then legal standards can be set for who gets a .kids.cc domain and what content is allowed, what meta-data is required, what services can be provided (which could be blanket stops, like no ads or social media under age 7, or granular, like "age 7-11 can only talk to registered educators or other children within given domains"), and so on. Then everything is in place to have router manufacturers give parents a super easy interface (and technical ones can do their own easily) to add their kids, have a password for each kid, and either automatically filter by general age, or let parents drill in and select specific categories or the like. And it'll all Just Work. Yeah it'll be a lot less stuff then on the main internet, but with government money to fund things and parent-based payment all abstracted from what kids see there will be as much as there was on PBS or the like back in the day. So specific ID/passwords/parental control is exclusive to those who haven't reached majority. Once they do they an just dispense with it and access everything like we do right now. The entire approach being taken everywhere is 100% backwards, because it's not about the kids at all it's about control over adults.
potsandpans 3mo ago
I agree that we should protect kids online against authoritarian surveillance state policy.
raxxorraxor 3mo ago
Compromising privacy for everyone also means compromising privacy of kids as well. And their identity will be known to services that can target them with adds. These policy approaches are simply for surveillance.

by dpark 3mo ago

rootlocus 3mo ago

Protecting kids online requires attention from their parents, not from the government.

dpark 3mo ago
Protecting kids is well within the scope of the government. This “it’s the parents job” is also reductionist. It is, but somehow we still have made it illegal for minors to buy hard liquor and pornography from physical stores in the United States and few argue that restriction is wrong.
- rootlocus 3mo ago
  And they still find ways to drink themselves to alcohol induced comas. There's no real substitute for education and parental nurturing only best effort band-aid solutions. Children with problems at home are more likely to be targeted by bullies or child predators. I'm not saying the government shouldn't do anything, they should and it should probably involve legislature around social media that positively affects adults as well. But raising a child, teaching it what's dangerous and what's safe and developing a relationship of trust so you're aware when there's danger lurking, that's a parent's job. No amount of legislation will help neglected children. They're tiny, curious, ingenious humans who will find ways to get what they want.
  - jonhohle 3mo ago
    No one is saying it’s one or the other. It’s both. There are certain children who need protection from bad parenting and certain parents that need protection for their neurodivergent children.
  - dpark 3mo ago
    Children drinking themselves into alcohol induced comas is fairly rare. Teenagers consuming large amounts of explicit pornography is not at all rare. I agree nothing will replace parenting. The children who do drink themselves into comas are largely enabled by adults (who are also generally committing a crime). But there is harm reduction the government can and probably should do. I have to say, as much as I think the article author here is naive, I also have to wonder if the net positives outweigh the net negatives. Uploading an id and face scan to a pornography site seems like the worst of all possible scenarios. Getting a government issue credential is better than that at least.
rpdillon 3mo ago
This is my take, but I am a bit frustrated by OS manufacturers. The obvious move is have a screen after factory reset the puts the device in kid mode permanently. It then will send a "I'm underage" flag to sites, and sites return no content (or safe content) when they see that header. This is a system that makes it easier for parents to do their parenting job. All the pieces of this system already exist, but the UX for managing a device during setup to be a "kids device" isn't there. This system is good for a bunch of reasons: * It gives parents control such that they can tailor the experience to their kids. This is a problem with current proposals. * It doesn't bring identity into the mix at all, completely defusing the risk of mass surveillance. * It's easy to verify if adult sites are complying: hit them with a curl request containing the header, check the response. This is much easier that verifying that Discord is checking user ages properly using their face-scanning technology.
- psd1 3mo ago
  That's how i was leaning, because i cynically assumed a maximally-fuckwitted decree. However. The world is as it is, not as we wish it was. My mother can't click "update and restart"; pathological technophobia. Should it be parental responsibility? Sure, why not. Will it that be effective? No. At scale, people are incompetent.
Jtarii 3mo ago
This approach has clearly failed and something different should therefore be attempted.
jerome-jh 3mo ago
Protecting kids and other vulnerable people matters to everyone, so why not the government? What would think of a country where, let say your mother cannot go out without fearing getting robbed or raped? Same for kids. Maybe you do not have kids and you do not care. Anyway being a parent does not mean being behind your kids at every single moment. I hope you have not spent your childhood under constant supervision of your parents. So at some point everyone is concerned about protecting kid, and not only there own ones

grey-area 3mo ago

Untraceable is your invention and obviously absurd and unworkable. No scheme is going to issue cards/tokens that can be traded between people, that's obviously unworkable. Untraceable is for the consumers of the cards obviously, but in order to have trust they need to be traceable for somebody to verify them. The government can already determine who you are and already requires you to prove that at certain points, this is not a new invention of government it is required for governments to function.

dpark 3mo ago
It’s not my invention. It’s in the article. The physical card proposed contains nothing traceable. “They issue a card that says only one thing: "over 18". The card carries official seals, signatures, and anti-forgery features.” If you put an id on the card, then it’s a layer of indirection, but you’ve still handed them a unique personal identifier. Traceable credentials are fundamentally not privacy preserving, because that’s what traceable means.
- grey-area 3mo ago
  You're now arguing about something which isn't even in the proposal from the EU, it's a hypothetical from the article which attempts to draw a parallel with existing physical id (I guess to demonstrate to people that this already happens regularly with passports, ID cards, driving licenses etc). That existing physical ID is government issued, has an issue no, usually has a photo on it, often other biometrics nowadays, and is definitely traceable! Absolutely such a proposal cannot be fully privacy preserving, because at the very least it gives away your age, but also probably other identifiers.Just like your browser that you're using right now gives away a lot of information which advertisers use to fingerprint you like fonts etc. This sort of solution requires a central issuer/authority to know about the tokens, there's no way round that as there is no way round governments issuing passports if you want border control. The goal is that it'll preserve much better privacy than uploading passports etc to random websites, which I think it will.
  - dpark 3mo ago

jerome-jh 3mo ago

If the kid knows how to buy a certificate from a shady website, then probably he his old enough to watch porn and other disturbing content. That does not mesn the system should be thrown away as a whole.

dpark 3mo ago
I did not say it should be thrown away. I said that it can’t be done while preserving privacy the way advocates claim. It’s totally plausible that the trade-off is reasonable, but I also don’t think we should pretend that the trade-off isn’t there.

xoa 3mo ago

>I’m in the “we should protect kids online” camp, but I am not sure there’s a real way to do it without compromising privacy for everyone. Of course there is, it's easy! You take a white list approach instead of an auth one. The default is that the general Internet is exclusively for adults. Anonymous = adult. Then use the DNS system to make a set of .kids ccTLDs, with government controlled registries. Then legal standards can be set for who gets a .kids.cc domain and what content is allowed, what meta-data is required, what services can be provided (which could be blanket stops, like no ads or social media under age 7, or granular, like "age 7-11 can only talk to registered educators or other children within given domains"), and so on. Then everything is in place to have router manufacturers give parents a super easy interface (and technical ones can do their own easily) to add their kids, have a password for each kid, and either automatically filter by general age, or let parents drill in and select specific categories or the like. And it'll all Just Work. Yeah it'll be a lot less stuff then on the main internet, but with government money to fund things and parent-based payment all abstracted from what kids see there will be as much as there was on PBS or the like back in the day. So specific ID/passwords/parental control is exclusive to those who haven't reached majority. Once they do they an just dispense with it and access everything like we do right now. The entire approach being taken everywhere is 100% backwards, because it's not about the kids at all it's about control over adults.

potsandpans 3mo ago

I agree that we should protect kids online against authoritarian surveillance state policy.

raxxorraxor 3mo ago

Compromising privacy for everyone also means compromising privacy of kids as well. And their identity will be known to services that can target them with adds. These policy approaches are simply for surveillance.