291–300 of 1001 posts
Only 26 million is way way lower than I expected, especially given how much these companies make in profit
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Cost kind of stops the government from sending goons right now, sure some governments do it but, it's costly at scale.
Missiles are a lot more expensive and much less reusable than goons though. If the nation state can’t afford the goons, it can’t afford to missile you either
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> App and website developers shouldn't be burdened with extra costly liability Why not? Physical businesses have liability if they provide age restricted items to children. As far as I know, strip clubs are liable for who enters. Selling alcohol to a child carries personal criminal liability for store clerks. Assuming society decides to restrict something from children, why should online businesses be exempt? On who…
> Physical businesses have liability if they provide age restricted items to children. These are often clear cut. They're physical controlled items. Tobacco, alcohol, guns, physical porn, and sometimes things like spray paint. The internet is not. There are people who believe discussions about human sexuality (ie "how do I know if I'm gay?") should be age restricted. There are people who believe any discussion about…
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> App and website developers shouldn't be burdened with extra costly liability Why not? Physical businesses have liability if they provide age restricted items to children. As far as I know, strip clubs are liable for who enters. Selling alcohol to a child carries personal criminal liability for store clerks. Assuming society decides to restrict something from children, why should online businesses be exempt? On who…
For one thing, it's fairly uncommon for children to purchase operating systems. As long as there is one major operating system with age verification, parents (or teachers) who want software restrictions on their children can simply provide that one. The existence of operating systems without age verification does not actually create a problem as long as the parents are at least somewhat aware of what is installed at…
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Zero-knowledge proofs are unworkable for age verification because they can't prevent use of somebody else's credentials.
The same argument could be said for other age verification methods. Nothing stops a kid from getting their older cousin to verify their identity for something and it will never be possible to prevent this.
When we hear about “zero knowledge” ID checks in real proposals they’re not actually zero knowledge altogether. They have built in limits or authorities to prevent these obvious attacks, like requiring them to interact with government servers and then pinky promising that those government servers won’t log your requests.
Jesus. As an American I can do my part, but it’s not much. $70 million is chump change for Meta, yet is far more money than I’ll ever have and does so much to influence state legislation.
Time and time again it amazes me how incredibly cheap lobbied politicians are. They may be earning big sums for an individual, but if you go full corruption[1] to sell out a state or a country - sell it for a fair price. I remember from peak net neutrality discussions during trump 1 maybe around 2017-2018 ant saw an article on theverge.com (that cannot find now) and biggest sum to individual politician was around $20…
she ended up resigning in a scandal caused by her husband accepting a boat (or work on the boat..i don't remember). the scandal was caused by the amount of the bribe. it was too low. the Turkish people could understand some corruption, but to be able to bribe the top leader for $50k. Unacceptable. If it would have been $100 million, it would not have been a scandal.
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Which is strange, because it is widely known a large amount of their advertising revenue comes from fake accounts.
This doesn’t make sense, how do these fake accounts bring revenue ? I thought the end goal is to improve conversion rate by removing the “bots” and this would therefore lead to higher ad spend and more money to Facebook direct
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The same argument could be said for other age verification methods. Nothing stops a kid from getting their older cousin to verify their identity for something and it will never be possible to prevent this.
The people proposing these laws presumably think imperfect enforcement is better than no enforcement at all. In the non-zero-knowledge case, it's possible to revoke falsely shared credentials.
In a true zero-knowledge system sharing falsely shared credentials becomes easy because it’s untraceable. If the proof has no knowledge attached, you can’t conclude who used their credentials on a website that generates proof-of-age tokens on demand for visitors.
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Missiles are a lot more expensive and much less reusable than goons though. If the nation state can’t afford the goons, it can’t afford to missile you either
With the digital panopticon neither goons nor missles are really necessary. Opressive forces can just disable your spending and travel credits. If they need you dead or in custody they can just grab you the next time you pop up on camera near one of their agents.
"Disabled spending" already happened to the people in the ICC that acted contrary to Trump's diktats[0], without the need for a digital panopticon, both the banks and the government know who you are.
[0] https://www.irishtimes.com/world/us/2025/12/12/its-surreal-u...