Meta Platforms: Lobbying, dark money, and the App Store Accountability Act
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Re: Meta Platforms: Lobbying, dark money, and the App Store Accountability Act
#2I am now waiting for Gruber (daringfireball.net) to post another rant about how terrible EU regulation is.
Zero-knowledge proofs are the way to go for this type of thing, I find it mind-boggling that the US lets itself be bamboozled into complete lack of privacy.
Re: Meta Platforms: Lobbying, dark money, and the App Store Accountability Act
#3Not surprisingly, Meta is possibly the worst "offender" behind funding of these campaigns.
Re: Meta Platforms: Lobbying, dark money, and the App Store Accountability Act
#4Oh look, the Heritage Foundation, the ones who wrote up the "Project 2025" agenda for most of the corruption and authoritarianism that has plagued America in the last year.
The very last people you should trust when it comes to "protecting the children."
Re: Meta Platforms: Lobbying, dark money, and the App Store Accountability Act
#5I am now waiting for Gruber (daringfireball.net) to post another rant about how terrible EU regulation is. Zero-knowledge proofs are the way to go for this type of thing, I find it mind-boggling that the US lets itself be bamboozled into complete lack of privacy.
I am from EU, and contrary to age verification laws in general.
My stance is that if somebody is a minor, his/her/their parents/tutors/legal guardian are responsible for what they can/cannot do online, and that the mechanism to enforce that is parental control on devices.
Having said that, open-source zero-knowledge proofs are infinitely less evil (I refuse to say "better") than commercial cloud-based age monitoring baked into every OS
Re: Meta Platforms: Lobbying, dark money, and the App Store Accountability Act
#6 Compare this to what the EU built. The EU Digital Identity Wallet under eIDAS 2.0 is open-source, self-hostable, and uses zero-knowledge proofs. You can prove you're over 18 without revealing your birth date, your name, or anything else. No per-check fees, no proprietary SDKs, no data going to a vendor's cloud. The EU's Digital Services Act puts age verification obligations on Very Large Online Platforms (45M+ monthly users), not on operating systems. FOSS projects that don't act as intermediary services are explicitly outside scope. Micro and small enterprises get additional exemptions.
The US bills assume every operating system is built by a corporation with the infrastructure and revenue to absorb these costs. The EU started from the opposite assumption and built accordingly.
Re: Meta Platforms: Lobbying, dark money, and the App Store Accountability Act
#7TLDR: Meta want to push all the age verification requirements onto the OS makers (Apple, Google, everyone else gets caught in the crossfire) so that they don’t have to do anything AND they want it done in such a way that they can use it to profile people to push them targeted ads.
Its like they want to keep being seen as the bad guys.
Re: Meta Platforms: Lobbying, dark money, and the App Store Accountability Act
#8Not surprisingly, Meta is possibly the worst "offender" behind funding of these campaigns.
I’m curious why Meta would benefit. Meta seems wholly unnecessary, the verification can be done at the OS level, completely in the hands of Apple/Alphabet and maybe Microsoft.
If anything, Meta’s utility would seem to shrink if the OS handles proof of being a real person.
Re: Meta Platforms: Lobbying, dark money, and the App Store Accountability Act
#9I am now waiting for Gruber (daringfireball.net) to post another rant about how terrible EU regulation is. Zero-knowledge proofs are the way to go for this type of thing, I find it mind-boggling that the US lets itself be bamboozled into complete lack of privacy.
Though the EU is at large keeping it's composure with this. My only criticism towards the EU as an EU citizen is how slow and bureaucratic the EU is and that decisions that should be made on the fly are dragged on forever.
That said, government agencies have been doing a terrible job at keeping the private information of citizens safe. But it is nowhere nearly as bad as the US. My best childhood friend died in very questionable circumstances in 2009 in the US in very questionable circumstances. He had a US citizenship and we never really found out what had happened(to the point where we never really got any definitive proof that he had died). But that didn't stop me from trying and I was blown away by the fact that I could log into a US government website, register with a burner mail, pay 2 bucks with an anonymous gift credit/debit card and get a scanned copy of his death certificate in my email. And I didn't even have to provide his passport/id/anything. Just his name.
Point is, the US has been terrible at privacy for as long as I can remember. It is probably worse now with Facebook and Ellison holding TikTok.
Re: Meta Platforms: Lobbying, dark money, and the App Store Accountability Act
#10I am now waiting for Gruber (daringfireball.net) to post another rant about how terrible EU regulation is. Zero-knowledge proofs are the way to go for this type of thing, I find it mind-boggling that the US lets itself be bamboozled into complete lack of privacy.
I am from EU, and contrary to age verification laws in general. My stance is that if somebody is a minor, his/her/their parents/tutors/legal guardian are responsible for what they can/cannot do online, and that the mechanism to enforce that is parental control on devices. Having said that, open-source zero-knowledge proofs are infinitely less evil (I refuse to say "better") than commercial cloud-based age monitoring…
You could make the same case for parental control as evil.
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