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Age Verification Laws: A Backdoor to Surveillance

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Re: Age Verification Laws: A Backdoor to Surveillance

#151

Post by lolinder »

mjevans wrote: post #71

The Internet should be Unrated and thus Adults Only by default. Just like public spaces. (Would you allow an 8 year old to wander New York City unattended? Arguments can be made for more controlled spaces but...) Have a website and want the chance for kids to see it? Advertise in the headers that it's moderated and intended to be a given rating. Various indexers can pick that up. Complaints can be forward to relevant…

> The Internet should be Unrated and thus Adults Only by default. Just like public spaces.

This is exactly the opposite of the way public spaces actually work, and the way that public spaces actually work is the very justification for laws like this in the first place! You've just taken their exact rationale and imagined a world that would lead that metaphor to the opposite conclusion.

In most of the real-life US, you can't put porn on a billboard, you can't sell it in a supermarket, and you can't wear it on a shirt. You can't go out naked in public, and you can't engage in public sexual activity.

If you do want to buy porn or go into a strip club, you have to show ID and go into a distinctly-not-public space behind closed doors, often without street-facing windows lest people in the public space be able to see inside.

The fact that this is how public spaces work is why these laws are written the way that they are—by analogy to real public spaces vs real adults-only spaces.

Re: Age Verification Laws: A Backdoor to Surveillance

#152

Post by TZubiri »

This is one of those issues that is almost purely political.

Either you believe the state is out to get you, or you believe that kids shouldn't access porn.

Free software maxis will tell you that age laws are surveillance and that child pornography is an excuse to have subpoena mechanisms.

Re: Age Verification Laws: A Backdoor to Surveillance

#153

Post by AnthonyMouse »

haswell wrote: post #123
kennysoona wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The Internet should be Unrated and thus Adults Only by default. As much as I kind of agree, I want to fight so much for open access to the internet because it was so useful to me as a child, thirsty for information and starving for nourishment. I will say I think these laws are bonkers. Restrict what companies can do with child data, make it clear an account is a minors, that should be more than sufficient.

> I want to fight so much for open access to the internet because it was so useful to me as a child As a child of the 80s who benefited greatly from the Internet as a kid (repressive religious parents, and the Internet was a lifeline), I feel extremely conflicted. On the one hand, I absolutely want to preserve the kind of benefit we received growing up. On the other, the Internet looks nothing like it did when I was…

The dangers of the modern internet aren't boobs though. The 20th century internet had boobs. The modern dangers are state-funded and international they're not going to be thwarted by an age-verification law, are they?

Re: Age Verification Laws: A Backdoor to Surveillance

#154

Post by Aloisius »

JanisErdmanis wrote: post #140

It does sounds like that the author is not aware of existence of zero knowledge range proofs for identity based authetification (anonymous credentials). In essence they work as follows: a third party vouches a commitment for your birth year into a commitment with a signature. This then can be used for to be shown to a service provider along with a range proof to ensure that the age limit gets respected. That way serv…

> a third party vouches

If the only porn requires this, then the third party has a record of every single person who wants to view porn.

Re: Age Verification Laws: A Backdoor to Surveillance

#155

Post by ty6853 »

lolinder wrote: post #151
mjevans wrote: post #71

The Internet should be Unrated and thus Adults Only by default. Just like public spaces. (Would you allow an 8 year old to wander New York City unattended? Arguments can be made for more controlled spaces but...) Have a website and want the chance for kids to see it? Advertise in the headers that it's moderated and intended to be a given rating. Various indexers can pick that up. Complaints can be forward to relevant…

> The Internet should be Unrated and thus Adults Only by default. Just like public spaces. This is exactly the opposite of the way public spaces actually work, and the way that public spaces actually work is the very justification for laws like this in the first place! You've just taken their exact rationale and imagined a world that would lead that metaphor to the opposite conclusion. In most of the real-life US, yo…

[flagged]

Re: Age Verification Laws: A Backdoor to Surveillance

#156

Post by linuxhansl »

mjevans wrote: post #71

The Internet should be Unrated and thus Adults Only by default. Just like public spaces. (Would you allow an 8 year old to wander New York City unattended? Arguments can be made for more controlled spaces but...) Have a website and want the chance for kids to see it? Advertise in the headers that it's moderated and intended to be a given rating. Various indexers can pick that up. Complaints can be forward to relevant…

> Would you allow an 8 year old to wander New York City unattended?

Yes as long as they know to observe traffic and know how to use the subway.

Almost all child adductions are parental kidnappings. This "will nobody think of the children..." neurosis is just that, a neurosis.

Re: Age Verification Laws: A Backdoor to Surveillance

#157

Post by qingcharles »

TZubiri wrote: post #152

This is one of those issues that is almost purely political. Either you believe the state is out to get you, or you believe that kids shouldn't access porn. Free software maxis will tell you that age laws are surveillance and that child pornography is an excuse to have subpoena mechanisms.

But this law doesn't stop kids from accessing porn. It just moves the problem?

Re: Age Verification Laws: A Backdoor to Surveillance

#158

Post by rs186 »

JanisErdmanis wrote: post #140

It does sounds like that the author is not aware of existence of zero knowledge range proofs for identity based authetification (anonymous credentials). In essence they work as follows: a third party vouches a commitment for your birth year into a commitment with a signature. This then can be used for to be shown to a service provider along with a range proof to ensure that the age limit gets respected. That way serv…

How does that third party know my birth year?

And the precision of one year is way too low.

Re: Age Verification Laws: A Backdoor to Surveillance

#159

Post by AnthonyMouse »

lolinder wrote: post #142
mjevans wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nuanced difference: Everyone _has_ to traverse all of public to get anywhere, hence 'decency laws' so parents can take kids around without blindfolds. You're taking the metaphor a bit too literally.

> You're taking the metaphor a bit too literally. Or maybe the metaphor is flawed? GP says that public spaces are adult-only by default, the parent rightly points out this is nonsense: public spaces are Safe for Work (and for kids) by default, and you have to prove you're an adult to access the adult-only spaces. Which is exactly what laws like this are trying to do by analogy to the physical world . It's not OP that…

There is an important difference in the metaphor. Physical spaces don't have a user-agent. Therefore the space itself has to exclude minors because there is nothing else to do it.

The internet does have user agents, and for children the user agents are controlled by adults (and if the child has the cooperation of an adult, you already can't enforce age verification). So now you don't need anyone to prove their age in a way that has privacy implications and chilling effects because you can have the child's user agent notify the site that the user isn't an adult, rather than needing each adult having to prove who is. Which doesn't require any form of identification because it's just a flag the adult sets on the child's device. Therefore anything that does require identification is unnecessary and malicious.

Re: Age Verification Laws: A Backdoor to Surveillance

#160

Post by rs186 »

janci wrote: post #85

Our state-issued eID cards are supposed to have a function that allows anonymous age verification to a trusted party. It should work like this: a requesting party sends a request signed by state-issued certificate to the ID card, the card verifies the request authenticity and responds with a signed confirmation of legal age and that signature then can be verified by the requester. No personal information is shared. W…

So kids just memorize their parents' driving license when they don't pay attention, and this is bypassed, just like in the old days.
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