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Stop Killing the Internet: No Digital ID and No Age Verification
- TryingToBeNice 3mo agoEven for a "Citizens' Initiative", this stuff is remarkably tone-deaf. "No Digital ID" ignores the very-real need for people to prove their identity to government(-ish) entities online, and to do so in a reliable, cheap and convenient way. Sure, you do not want that ID to become mandatory for publishing or existing on the Internet in general, but that's a separate discussion: demand sufficient protection for anonymous/pseudonymous posts instead, which is absolutely something that needs to be codified as part of basic human rights. "No age verification" is even deader-on-arrival. Parents are literally screaming at politicians to protect "the children" (as always), but pretty much everything that has been tried so far to silence those screams has failed (remember PICS, the Platform for Internet Content Selection: that was the last serious contender, and it has been dead for, like, 20 years). Again: demand a way to implement this securely and anonymously, don't take an untenable abolitionist stance or resort to hand-waving in the vague general direction of "parental responsibility": that has been tried, and it's not working anymore. And, please, stop vilifying the EU in these matters. The UK left the EU, ostensibly so they could make "more sensible laws" in, specifically, respects like these, and they're now leading the assault on basic freedoms with even more fervor. And no, that's not just big-bad-Starmer's fault: it's a preview of what you have to argue against and propose a compromise for instead.
- dgellow 3mo agoThey don’t seem to oppose any of that if you read the intro > We call on the European Commission to propose legislation ensuring that digital identity and age-assurance systems used to access online services in the Union remain voluntary, privacy-preserving and non-discriminatory. Citizens must not be forced to identify themselves to access lawful online content or services unless strictly necessary, proportionate and provided by law. The legislation should require anonymous or pseudonymous proof-of-age, data minimisation, selective disclosure, open-source implementation, independent security audits, prohibition of cross-service tracking by relying parties, and equivalent alternatives for citizens who do not use a digital wallet.
- iLoveOncall 3mo ago[flagged]
- perching_aix 3mo agoWhile that's fair, would be kinda nice if the title was consistent with the content, instead of being, say, "reach optimized" (populist), wouldn't it?
- TryingToBeNice 3mo agoMy apologies for joining this community. Do you have any more valuable tips, other than "get lost newbie"?
- dgellow 3mo agoWelcome! I would recommend to read the guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html And don’t pay attention to downvotes, that’s part of the game, it’s nothing against you, just accept that sometimes you lose karma :) in some way it’s a good exercise for the ego
- dang 3mo agoIt is not ok to post like this here. Please see this longer reply: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49114611 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49114611.
- jvuygbbkuurx 3mo agoIt has been quite a slippery slope. Services that used to allow password auth have retired them in favour of bank detail login. I can kind of get it, since it's offloading support to the banks, but it's also annoying since the bank logins themselves are a pain to setup, maintain and use (mobile app only). It would be nice to have some good standard that is less invasive.
- victorbjorklund 3mo ago
- superxpro12 3mo agonot all parents are screaming this. Only the parents who refuse to parent their children, and conveniently scapegoat society for their parental failings
- cromka 3mo agoWe cannot possibly expect all parents to take proper care of their kids. This has never been the case and never will. That's why we have schools and other institutions that oversee our growth within society. You could make same exact argument regarding kids health, alcohol abuse, nicotine abuse, all types of addictions, age of consent, and so on. You can't just have all the safeguards dropped because you think you're doing a good job. Or, even worse, you have no kids and it's your virtues merely projecting.
- ndr 3mo agoIt is a parenting issue. Don't let kids have an internet-connected phone, the same way they can't have a bottle of wine. If they really need such device make sure that device is locked to a small list of app/contacts possible. There's no need to lock down the rest of the internet because the responsible person of such kid can't tolerate their complaints. It is a parenting issue.
- hobom 3mo agoYou totally ignored the point OP was making! Even if it is a parenting issue, simply declaring that will not make parents parent better. It's the same reason why we ban children from drinking wine, because parents cannot be relied upon here. Unless your point was that we should legally ban kids from handling phones, which I think is too extreme.
- ndr 3mo agoBut that is my point. Chase the responsible adult if you see a kid with an overpowered phone, much like you would if you found the same kid with a bottle of wine. And granted, we don't have locked-enough phone in market yet, but that's a solvable problem if we were to create that market.
- seany 3mo agoI'm a parent and would rather ban age verification. So it's certainly not everyone...
- kbelder 3mo agoRight. Care for your children includes the responsibility to keep the society they're eventually going to participate in, free and open. Loving your children means fighting censorship, not promoting it.
- OkayPhysicist 3mo agoThere are also fascists screaming at the government to do other wildly illegal stuff. The lousy parents begging the government to "tread on me" would get wildly better results by spending less time trying to create an authoritarian state and more time with their kids they claim to care so much about. They're children. They have the internet access you give them. This isn't some unsolveable problem that needs government intervention, my parents were setting up filters so long ago that they're grandparents now.
- TryingToBeNice 3mo ago[flagged]
- OkayPhysicist 3mo agoAnd the solution already exists, one that doesn't empower the government to do some truly heinous shit. Every power you grant the government is another knife they'll eventually stab you in the back with. Maybe you like your current government, but what about the next one, and the one after that? Instead, just use the tools you already have access to. I was not opposed when California mandated that applications add parental controls, that's fine. If parents want to restrict their children's internet access, there's a continium there ranging from "prudent parenting" to "child abuse", but that can be worked out on a case-by-case basis. I am, however, rabidly against the state requiring you to dox yourself every time you log into a website, because inconceivably lazy parents can't figure out how to use the parental tools that they already have.
- Muromec 3mo agoParenting controls are shit on the end device side. It's not working, it's not even trying to. Nobody would need this blanket approach if parenting controls actually worked.
- naravara 3mo agoBack when smoking was more normal we basically did leave it up to Big Tobacco to determine how best to tackle underage smoking and they would literally say insane things like “Oh course we’re not targeting elementary school kids! We’re not monsters! Our advertising doesn’t hit them until they’re in 8th grade at least!” Expecting platform monopolists and dopamine dealers to design for this is folly. They are wired to try to normalize an unhealthy level of dependence on them. Their business model is addiction.
- deleted 3mo ago[deleted]
- trallnag 3mo ago>securely and anonymously Not possible. Why do advocates of age verification bring this argument up again and again? It is not possible.
- perching_aix 3mo agoI haven't considered this before with SKG, but if this progresses, it means the EU parliament may choose to take action based on an initiative that potentially only a vocal minority supports [0], while coming across as if they were simply following the will of the people. Not sure how I feel about that, sounds kind of problematic in retrospect. Especially since there's no mechanism for triggering EU-wide referendums to help this AFAIK. [0] population of the EU: 452 million, unique signatures required for this: 1 million
- Muromec 3mo agoIt would be nice to have a digital referendum on this topic. I could think of some tech that makes it happen, something like a digital ID maybe?
- paseante 3mo ago[flagged]
- account42 3mo ago> I haven't considered this before with SKG, but if this progresses, it means the EU parliament may choose to take action based on an initiative that potentially only a vocal minority supports [0], while coming across as if they were simply following the will of the people. What, you don't think that's how things work already except "the people" whose will is being followed is an even smaller group. Is political activist having a bigger influence over politics than people who slouch on their couch supposed to be surprising or even bad?
- perching_aix 3mo agoSo I'm correct, but this works out in your favor so it's all good? I can ask demagogue questions too you know.
- account42 3mo agoNo, you're not correct that this is kind of problematic.
- iLoveOncall 3mo agoI think it's a missed opportunity to not have called it "Stop spying on every EU citizen online". It would make for great headlines and might finally wake people up when they see that the EU has rejected a proposal called that. "Stop killing the internet" unfortunately means nothing at all to the layman, they will still be using it pretty much exactly as they were before, and governments will just claim "See, internet is still working".
- edoceo 3mo ago[dead]
- ben_w 3mo agoAgreed. I think it's time that "please let 1800 analytics firms monitor your every browsing habit in exchange for this content" was seen in the same light as "please let 1800 private foreign espionage and propaganda agencies spy on you".
- hunterpayne 3mo agoYes, absolutely...people drastically underestimate how much political propaganda on social media is from targeted foreign operations. Getting children and those propaganda operations off "adult"/anonymous social media would be so beneficial to all of society. The EU is actively doing something else though...I doubt the propaganda operations would even be slowed down by the EU's efforts.
- jck86 3mo agoYou may be overthinking this. It is privacy that means little to the regular joe. The internet they use every day and it being changed beyond recognition is much more tangible than privacy being curtailed just a little bit more. And these authoritarian politicians will destroy the internet with these actions. Maybe they will even change society as we know it, and not for the better. The problem is thinking such initiatives will achieve anything in a bureaucratic system devoid of honest debate and actual democracy. These citizen's initiatives must at least be tried but simultaneously we must create a new internet forever out of politician reach.
- trolleski 3mo agoUA spies on Europeans, and vice versa. Then they share, it's not spying on your citizens, it's called 'intelligence sharing'.
- prosopts 3mo agoWhat is UA?
- artisinal 3mo agoUnited America?
- metalliqaz 3mo agothat ended in the 80s
- MisterTea 3mo agoPerhaps they meant United Artists, an evil syndicate hell bent on world domination and film distribution.
- trolleski 2mo agoYes, that was it! :D
- account42 3mo agoIt's the TLD and ISO 3166 country code for Ukraine but that doesn't really make sense in context. Probably gp just mistyped US which is one key off on most keyboards.
- Cider9986 3mo agoThis is bad but it's no reason to adapt a defeatist attitude.
- Bender 3mo agoAs far as I know the only thing that influences change is money. What methods could be implemented to take money away from governments that implement with such things? All of my ideas would be very low traction but there are clever people here on HN that I am sure could come up with a few better ideas. One of my (probably dumb) ideas is: - Create a legal presence in a country that does not require being dystopian, relaxed business laws, less regulation, lower taxes, move most of the corporate side of the business there. Take the tax revenue with you. It does not have to be all at once. Make the move a slow boil so they don't see it until it's too late. Which countries, provinces, regions, states have the least regulation, least dystopian behavior and the least taxes? There has to be a incentive for business leaders and board members to move things around. Bonus if the saved money pays for a Gulfstream G650 ER or two.
- hnav 3mo agoThey control the last mile of the Internet so it would require satellite networking run by another country to cut them out like this.
- kbelder 3mo ago"I Remember Babylon" by Arthur C. Clarke. Written in 1960, but very prescient.
- hunterpayne 3mo agoIf only there was some free speech absolutist who had their very own satellite Internet company. I must be forgetting someone... PS The dishes are hard (but not impossible) to hide.
- hnav 3mo agoif it comes down to trying to find illegal internet terminals (a la illegal radio receivers in the past), they will just put up planes/drones at high altitudes and loiter until they hit a ground based signal
- Muromec 3mo ago
- 220hertz 3mo agoHopefully this fares better than Stop Killing Games.
- righthand 3mo agoSKG has fared pretty well, what do you mean?
- datakan 3mo agoThey just had a pretty major setback in court.
- righthand 3mo agoThey’re still around so I don’t see why having a legal setback is the same thing as going poorly. They are attempting their mission again with new bills in US and EU.
- TheRealPomax 3mo agoThey... didn't? They got a petition response from the EU that was more positive than they had expected, and a response from the commission is not court: the response phrasing literally leaves the door open. Heck, the parallel movement in the US even had a major legislative victory in California, so... what are we talking about?
- buzer 3mo agoCan you be more specific? The only related court cases I'm aware of are U.S. The Crew lawsuit which seems to have reached settlement recently and the French case regarding which I haven't seen any updates since it's filing.
- datakan 3mo agohttps://www.dexerto.com/gaming/stop-killing-games-fails-to-secure-eu-law-despite-1-3m-signatures-3376431/ https://www.dexerto.com/gaming/stop-killing-games-fails-to-s...
- mothballed 3mo agoA few things you can legally do online without ID or age verification in the US 1) buy cigars and pipe tobacco (but not cigarettes!) 2) Buy "CBD" by the pound 3) Buy ammunition, a barrel and the rest of gun parts for a glock, except a frame/receiver that can be 3d printed in a few hours to complete it. 4) Order and have delivered wine But there are people arguing to skip all that and go to straight to ID for social media. It isn't about the children. It's about keeping tabs on who says what.
- mr_mitm 3mo agoIs teens ordering wine a big issue in the US? Bigger than social media?
- forgetfreeman 3mo agoOf course not. But literally any excuse that comes to hand will be deployed if it helps the tech industry continue to avoid meaningful consequences. The same handful of companies that have engineered a global surveillance suite that rivals the most tyrannical sovereign governments wildest dreams (and can trivially detect the approximate age of a user) will without a shred of irony deploy legions of paid influencers and other astroturf to decry age verification as an assault on privacy.
- hnav 3mo agoBut it is an assault on privacy. If "protecting kids" was the goal here they'd push for regulation that forces websites to return standardized metadata that then gets interpreted by the user agent which can be configured by the parent.
- tosti 3mo agoNah, that's a perfectly fine technical solution. Powers that be don't think like that. They understand pulling someone over to check their license, so something like that will do.
- 3mo ago
- metalliqaz 3mo agoThe Internet is already dead. I'm reasonably confident that in the relatively near future, the Internet will be so overrun with bots and other worthless "content" that people will flock to platforms that confirm IRL identity.
- kristerv 3mo agoYeah I've been wanting ID for years. Because i neighbor Russia and their propaganda game is top notch. One person one account.
- hunterpayne 3mo agoThink what that would mean for your average person in a country that didn't like their government...for instance in Russia. You clearly haven't thought through the consequences of your suggestion.
- AuthAuth 3mo agoThis isnt legislation for Russia
- hunterpayne 3mo agoYou assume you will always like and agree with your current government. And there are European countries who already jail people for political speech the government doesn't like.
- naravara 3mo agoYou don’t need IRL identity, you just need persistent reputation. That reputation can be attached to a pseudonymous identity or an IRL one. But the design of most modern social media is to detach the “content” from the context of the author. The feeds you subscribe to are funnels that channel atomized bits of content to you. Some of it may be authored by them, but it’s the platform that intermediates your relationship to that content more than the creator. The creator is subordinated to it. A different design logic, and the logic of the blogosphere that preceded it, much more tightly prioritized following a blogger or poster and interpreting everything you see in light of who was posting it. The trust is placed in the account you follow.
- mixxit 3mo agoStop letting regular people know they are engaging with bots Only massive data gatherers should be able to track and know everything about people
- hunterpayne 3mo agoWanna be rich? Make a social media company that somehow only allows real people to post. You crack that one, fame and fortune await you...
- inigyou 3mo agoW Social, the WEF honeypot?
- b0rtb0rt 3mo agoam i alone in wanting the internet to be killed? we’d all be better off if everyone wasn’t terminally online
- Eddy_Viscosity2 3mo agoI think the scenario posited here is the worse possible one where we are still chronically online but on a dead internet while being fully and relentless surveilled.
- everdrive 3mo agoThe internet of the future is an IQ test. Are you smart enough to get in, do your work in a focused manner, and get out so that you live your life? Many, many people will fail this test.
- KPGv2 3mo agoCounterpoint: meatspace is awful unless you're a normie. Christ, the day I got out of my small town and into a major city university dorm room with fast Internet was the day my life opened up. I found people with my interests. Etc. "The Internet sucks. Get offline," is the battle cry of someone who likes Marvel movies and the book that Target has at the checkout line, or lives in one of about five cities in the USA.
- aqfamnzc 3mo agoOof. You're missing out if you think meatspace is limited to target and big American cities. I agree that the web makes it easy(er) to connect with others in niche interests, but in-person experiences can be so diverse, vibrant, stimulating that I understand the simmering tug some have toward wanting the internet to become unusable. I agree with sibling that a "healed" internet, while very optimistic, is the ideal case. Sincerely, your fellow terminally online HN commenter.
- 3mo ago
- cineticdaffodil 3mo agoSo if i can not circumvent the surveilance- can i pack my wanted unsurveiled stuff into harmless data and send them- basically use the surveiled Internet as a UDP layer - over which my hidden unsurveiled internet goes via TCP?
- gchamonlive 3mo agoYou mean a VPN?
- damienmeur 3mo agoThings are far more enjoyable as a teen when it s forbidden, remember the golden age of p2p! Teens who want to see porn will be able to see porns, but they will learn somethings along the way to do so This is caricatural of course, but it s just so dumb as law as enforcing age verification "anonymously" is just like a don quichotte battle at AI era
- GuB-42 3mo agoI often joke that every technical measure that prevents teens from watching porn is a way to make teens more tech-savvy. Kids these days have it too easy, we need stronger protections or the next generation will make pathetic hackers.
- giancarlostoro 3mo ago> the next generation will make pathetic hackers. "Hey ChatGPT Hacker Core Rizz Edition, can you hack this website for me?"
- fsflover 3mo ago> Teens who want to see porn will be able to see porns, but they will learn somethings along the way to do so How will teens overcome the Android SafetyNet?
- t1234s 3mo agoThis is funny coming from the EU who brought us cookie banners.
- bluefirebrand 3mo agoThe EU didn't bring us cookie banners, tech companies performing malicious compliance with the EU mandates did
- AAAAaccountAAAA 3mo agoEven EU institutions use cookie banners. Also, if it was just malicious compliance, there would have been years of time to fix the regulations so that such shenaigans would not fly. I think the problem is that GDPR focuses on consent more than would be prudent. Regulation is usually introduced when some actions are not appropriate even when there was consent. For example, one is not allowed to sell spoiled food, no matter how clear warnings they gave to the customers.
- deleted 3mo ago[deleted]
- fsflover 3mo agohttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49059408 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49059408
- svobodamartin 3mo agoThe name could also be: "Stop overcontrolling and overregulating every aspect of our lives!"
- EGreg 3mo agoWe can talk, talk, and governments will still move forward. Or we can build an alternative that shows it's possible to get age verification while maintaining privacy. There is a real way out of it -- the governments can have their cake and eat it too. I published several academic papers to prove it, and I'm open to building and deploying it. Would anyone want to work on this together: https://magarshak.com/papers.html https://magarshak.com/papers.html
- raxxorraxor 3mo agoPersonally I think we should build something that makes verification unfeasible instead of building something slightly less worse.
- EGreg 3mo agoHow would it be unfeasible to check someone’s age if it’s feasible now with a driver’s license? The technogy exists — it is called deepfakes LMAO
- DavideNL 3mo agoSo if i understand correctly, there's no webpage to sign this initiative yet?
- skeptic_ai 3mo agoYou need to first provide a passport image + 5 angled selfies + bank statement + proof of employment to the Peoples Democratic European Union before you can sign.
- advisedwang 3mo agoApparently it can take 2 months (or sometimes 4) before the initative is registered
- fooqux 3mo agoThe internet's (at least as we knew it) days were numbered as soon as the dot com bubble happened. It changed from a thing to share info to a thing to make money. It's irrecoverably corrupted and this blatant overreach for everyone's PII is just a symptom.
- vid 3mo agoI'm glad they mention privacy preserving and being voluntary. It's possible to make digital ID that allows selectively revealing attributes without identity, and that could solve problems like bots, socketpuppets, etc along with reasonable age-gating. It could be an ideal internet if it's properly applied. The problem is it's difficult to verify all the promises are being kept, and if they're not it instantly becomes a true dystopia. And sites could use it in inappropriate ways resulting in discrimination.
- account42 3mo ago> I'm glad they mention privacy preserving and being voluntary. It's possible to make digital ID that allows selectively revealing attributes without identity Not without either being able to trivially let others use your proofs OR ending open computing. There is no zero knowledge proof about the slab of meat sitting in front of the screen.
- vid 3mo agoThat's what "The problem is it's difficult to verify all the promises are being kept, and if they're not it instantly becomes a true dystopia" is about.
- BrenBarn 3mo agoI think if it we want to stop killing the internet, the lack of regulation of AI/bot companies is the biggest problem right now.
- atmosx 3mo agoThere is a surprising amount of engineers who don’t understand what’s happening. So they deal with it as if it’s a funny thing… yeah if two police officers come knocking your door with hard data, you will just explain… and yeah, I mean kids, can bypass it… right? Wrong. This is not 1995. They can make very harsh laws and they can make it borderline impossible to bypass should some authority choose to do so. The danger here is control: total and absolute control of who will be able to see what, at any given time. Once upon a time this was a hard problem, not anymore.
- nemomarx 3mo agowhat's the current solution that's impossible for kids to bypass with a borrowed or stolen id, say? I don't see any proposals yet that will actually work for what they say they'll do.
- hunterpayne 3mo agoYou want a proposal? Make a kids-only set of sites. And then make hardware/software that can access only those sites. Make sure existing and future "non-kid" hardware can't access those kids-only sites. You can allow companies to register that they are one of these kid friendly sites with the additional regulation that would entail. Then make a kid having hardware that can access the normal Internet like having a beer in the US. Now perhaps you can find a hole in this, but it can be patched with technology and the right regulation. That we aren't doing something like this gives the game away. How the EU is going about this means the point of all of this has nothing to do with children and everything to do with controlling political speech. PS Yea, I know its a very vague suggestion, it can still be implemented
- Root_Denied 3mo agoOne issue that I see with this type of system is that it doesn't allow for parental/guardian oversight of what kids are doing or discussing. Ever gone down the auto-suggestion rabbit hole on YouTube Kids? You start getting into weird and potentially disturbing territory much more quickly than you'd expect.
- Razengan 3mo agoHow are we on the tech and protocols side of having a truly distributed worldwide mesh-net? i.e. drone swarms replacing ISPs?
- KPGv2 3mo agoIt's been working for decades. But nobody uses it except child pornographers. Freenet.
- inigyou 3mo agoFreenet has been renamed to Hyphanet and then Locutus has been renamed to Freenet.
- account42 3mo agoDo you really think a technological solution will hep you if governments go down this path? At the very least you would something that isn't trivially detected and localized by an RF scanner.
- inigyou 3mo agoIt's called packet radio, they will track down your transmitter and arrest you.
- josalhor 3mo agoI want the right to not be identified. I also want the right to SELF identify. I think the toxic culture of the internet has happened in part because anonymity leads to lack of accountability. I want to self identify and interact with other people who also self identify. The cost of running LLM botnets is going down. I cannot imagine how the next cycle of elections is going to be like on all countries. I understand the right to remain anonymous, that should remain, but that state should not be the default on these massively big platforms. Our brains and political systems are not designed for this. And no, "get people to get rid of their smartphone voluntarily" like I see on the comments is not going to happen.
- Dig1t 3mo ago>I want to self identify and interact with other people who also self identify. You can do that already, Facebook is pretty close to exactly what you're talking about. They do a lot of work to identify real people and de-prioritize spam/bots. You can configure your account to only be able to interact with real people if you want. Many people like anonymity though, it's important for speaking truth to power and discussing topics which are outside the Overton window. There's a good reason that many of the United States' founding fathers used pseudonyms when writing. Anonymity and real freedom of speech are foundational to democracy. If you can put someone in jail for saying something that the government doesn't like, then the government will be able to steer discourse towards outcomes it deems acceptable, even if those outcomes subvert the will of the people. There's no real need to have the government force all websites to always authenticate all humans. The only real argument for such a system is to move us toward dystopian authoritarianism.
- fc417fc802 3mo ago> I think the toxic culture of the internet has happened in part because anonymity leads to lack of accountability. It is trivial to demonstrate that this is incorrect (despite sounding plausible). There's plenty of incredibly toxic behavior to be found all over facebook. Among other considerations it's worth noting that most of the usual social feedback mechanisms are missing from typical online interactions. > The cost of running LLM botnets is going down. Agreed that this is an existential threat to anonymous discourse as it is typically implemented.
- panny 3mo ago>The legislation should require anonymous or pseudonymous proof-of-age NO. It really shouldn't. I will not comply. Porn sites can require this shit, but not the rest of the internet. Social media, dating websites, that's up to the users. If kids are on there, that's on the parents. Do your job, be the parent. I'm not going to let lazy good for nothing parents ruin the internet for everyone else.
- preisschild 3mo agoYeah I agree, forcing large websites to respect client side parental control settings is better (let the OS/browser set a request header with the age bracket that the website uses)
- elric 3mo agoThis initiative has the ID "ECI(2026)000011". If I understand this correctly, that means there have only been eleven citizen initiatives this year? Is that system working as designed, because that's a shockingly low number. Edit: the initiatives themselves also have shockingly low numbers of signatures. A few thousand. A million are required for the EC to take notice. This system seems a bit shitty. But maybe I'm misunderstanding it.
- garaetjjte 3mo agoI don't think that's too surprising, as even if you get 1 million of signatures the only thing you will get is "response from Commission". So they can reply with legalese for "get bent" and there goes your million signatures.
- urbandw311er 3mo agoThe physical world has age checks when kids attempt to enter a premises with dangerous or unsuitable content - eg bars, casinos, strip joints. These seem largely accepted as a good thing. Why do so many seem to feel that the same protections are so outrageous when applied in the virtual world? Honest question, I can see both sides.
- tavavex 3mo agoWhen you are age-checked in real life, the bouncer glances at your ID, checks the date of birth, checks the photo and lets you through, having not remembered a shred of that information. You are just one in a crowd of a thousand. If you're old enough, they may even wave you through without looking at any real data. When you're age-checked on the internet, a scan of your ID goes on the website, then is likely forwarded to a helpful third party business. It extracts every bit of data, analyzes your picture, then carefully saves and catalogues everything, and returns True to the website, which may have also stored their own copy of this data, depending on how the process is implemented. This data is now in their hands forever. If, at any point in the future, you access another age-gated website that uses the same third party business, now there's nothing stopping them from correlating that private browsing data. How juicy. Adtech will love that. As you keep handing out your ID left and right, every single bit you divulge is recorded somewhere, forever. And at the end of the day, this is just moving data around, so there's nothing preventing your government, or the host's government, or all governments from passing a law that asks for that data to be shared with them - just in case, you know. Now there's many copies of your exact identity floating around, just one data leak or legal request away from revealing everything you've ever done tied in a neat little package. Real life ID is limited by constraints of practicality and our physical world, digital ID is limited by nothing. And this is the best-case scenario I'm describing here. Imagine if they ask us to show our identities publicly, not just to the corporate all-seeing-eyes. Everyone would become doxxable by default, their whole life exposed and searchable, the mere idea of having secrets would be wiped away, communities made for marginalized or at-risk people would all fall silent. Yes, there are ideas about zero-knowledge proofs and legislation about data privacy and whatever else. But these don't benefit either corporations or governments, and the average Joe doesn't care about putting his real name on everything, so we can pretty safely assume that this won't happen.
- LeBit 3mo agoI have a hard time figuring out whether most of the comments are genuine or not. Are you guys really in favor of giving governments and police corps more control and more power so that you are observed, monitored, restricted because "the internet is dead", "think of the children" and "you need to know who to sue"? You guys are joking, right? Right?
- zoobab 3mo agoThe title is misleading "No Age Verification" and then later on call for using ZKP to do Age Verification. Is the Pirate Party supporting Age Verification now?
- ShinyLeftPad 3mo agointernet is just infra. you probably mean the web. and yeah, LLMs kill it faster.
- xtiansimon 3mo agoIt’s interesting to *imagine* the future development of “The System” of segregation. Government driving changes to laws, imposing fines on platforms which create EULAs resulting in technological controls (or alarm flags)—whether you can bypass it or not—leading to irreversible bans and prosecutions. Growing disenfranchised. Those who do not materially support the system are left out, and the laws prevent new players. /imagined dystopian future.