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Austrian government seeks to eliminate internet anonymity, with severe penalties

derstandard.at

231–240 of 292 posts

Re: Austrian government seeks to eliminate internet anonymity, with severe penalties

#231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Giffgaff in the UK gives you 20GB for £20 on pay as you go, and it can be used up to that limit anywhere in the EU. And you don't need a passport to get a simcard either.

> giffgaff runs on the O2 network Eh, no thanks

[deleted]

Re: Austrian government seeks to eliminate internet anonymity, with severe penalties

#232
post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the US you have to show your ID much more often compared to other parts of the world. Every bar you enter, or alcohol or drink you buy people ask for identification. This is not the case elsewhere. So, it wouldn't surprise me, if the current administration would at least attempt such ideas.

This is not generally the case in most parts of the US I've lived in either. More importantly, it's purely a private business asking for your ID in this case, and only as an age check. In the vast majority of cases they don't record or really care about anything except your date of birth. No bar I've ever been to kept any kind of record that would have enabled them to tell the government that I had visited the establ…

I’m not a lawyer, but Arizona’s age restriction law explicitly requires recording the details via mag stripe. Whether that applies to something not straightforward in the language I don’t know.

Either way, I routinely get comments about where I live, how my hair looks now, my birthday (coincides with a major date in the US). It’s very low level invasion of privacy, but most of the time I don’t want to small talk at the grocery store, I want to finish what I need to and go. N=1 and all that, but I get the point. At least no one under 21 ever drinks here.

Re: Austrian government seeks to eliminate internet anonymity, with severe penalties

#233
post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the US you have to show your ID much more often compared to other parts of the world. Every bar you enter, or alcohol or drink you buy people ask for identification. This is not the case elsewhere. So, it wouldn't surprise me, if the current administration would at least attempt such ideas.

The ID is for age verification, not Name or any other details.

It doesn’t matter what it’s intended for, it matters what it’s used for.

Re: Austrian government seeks to eliminate internet anonymity, with severe penalties

#234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This will just put foreign platforms, who will ignore the law, into an advantageous position compared to local platforms. Users might switch to foreign platforms that don't require identification. Doesn't really matter, as those things move the Overton window. Tomorrow, when the US, China, and EU adopt similar laws, there wont be any "foreign services" to use.

It’s common, but disingenuous to talk about the Overton window as though it was some immutable, one-way thermodynamic process. The truth of course is that it goes both ways, that discussion and dissent do exist. History, American and otherwise, is full of examples of overreach that doesn’t lead to the desired result, but the opposite.

In theory it works both ways - but once politicians and government agencies gain power, they will not lose them easily.

Re: Austrian government seeks to eliminate internet anonymity, with severe penalties

#235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well and more specifically in places like Colorado that would be enough to take away your guns.

Who's gonna take them? Remember that couple in Houston that put the hurt on a swat team. It doesn't take many events like that to really dampen the enthusiasm for kicking down doors (especially when you're doing it to simply confiscate property). The cops are subject to the same risk calculations as any other home invaders.

Cops have higher ceiling of available tools of coercion. You really want every police visit to start with a flashbang through the window?

Re: Austrian government seeks to eliminate internet anonymity, with severe penalties

#236

Laws like this are long past due. This particular law may not be the best implementation but governments do need to take action to provide their citizens with a real public square online. Excluding fake and paid users (without a declaration of who is paying them) from that space and protecting free speech in that space is essential to having a public policy discussion. Private corporations have not done this, and pro…

It's only a good thing if you're not going to say or be anything which would get you beaten up if everyone were to know about it. It's easy for people who are, in the example of Austria, White, straight, cis, and either Christian or, at the very least, not Muslim, to decry anonymity, but if you're a member of a disfavored minority group, all de-anonymization does is does is open you up to abuse, discrimination, and, perhaps, violence.

You can take as an example the problems Facebook's "Real Names" policy caused for sexual minorities:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook_real-name_policy_cont...

... except multiply it by a thousandfold when the government is in the pocket of a political party which is... disinclined... to acknowledge the existence or legitimacy of such people.

Re: Austrian government seeks to eliminate internet anonymity, with severe penalties

#237
post #201
post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

those governments are failing and voters are moving to the left and the right, depending on the country of course. I think it's pretty universal across Europe that people are moving more to the extremes. But that doesn't make the original parties suddenly "centrist" -- they're just status-quo, "old school". Centrist governments are trying to use "hate speech" laws as a way of curbing their loss of control of the medi…

As if there is no third option other than a) a well fed huge centrist government + civil bland state TV or b) dictatorship. How about Thatcher/Friedman/Chicago school/libertarian politics? Has never been tried anywhere.

Thatcher politics most definitely has been tried, by the UK when Thatcher was PM.

Re: Austrian government seeks to eliminate internet anonymity, with severe penalties

#238
post #8

Could anyone shed some light on which problem this is supposed to solve exactly and what triggered it in the first place in Austria right now? Have there been any issues caused by anonymous posts recently? Maybe I'm just living under a rock, but my feeling was that the main issues we're currently facing stem from political distortion caused by populism misusing platform mechanisms to spread misinformation. I don't se…

“Populists” lol. It’s not like anyone on the political spectrum has any shame. All political entities will abuse every mechanism that is at their disposal that won’t get them in trouble. Maybe the “populists” were the first to take advantage because they are smarter?

Re: Austrian government seeks to eliminate internet anonymity, with severe penalties

#239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, the US will never adopt a law like that. Anonymity is extremely protected by the Supreme Court, because the founders wrote and distributed pamphlets anonymously in support of the Revolution.

> Anonymity is extremely protected by the Supreme Court And yet the US has all kinds of surveillance apparatus to de-anonymize internet users...

Which at least in principle are supposed to be used only in an accountable fashion under strict judicial supervision.

Re: Austrian government seeks to eliminate internet anonymity, with severe penalties

#240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Putting 2 innocent people through systems designed to assume they are guilty is worse ... This is not about being guilty, it's about being accountable for your actions, just like you are everywhere else. In Austria and Germany, people riding bicycles are considered the rudest on the streets. Everybody is anonymous to other participants until an accident happens, but only bicycles have no number plates, so they usua…

It's a lot harder to kill a pedestrian with a bike than with a car, though. Cars are a lot more lethal than bikes, and most countries have road designs that are bike-hostile. You have to be a very assertive and alert cyclist there to not get hurt. That is to say, consideration and respect goes both ways.

> It's a lot harder to kill a pedestrian with a bike than with a car, though.

That's completely irrelevant. It's about the "rules do not apply to me because you can't catch me" attitude, same as with people who harass others online without remorse by using various anonymity tools. Removing this possibility would fix it the accountability problems to a great extent and make them behave more responsibly, in line with others.

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