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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

#371

Post by gzread »

gruez wrote: post #135
choo-t wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even with ZKP this is still highly problematic, it create difficulty for undocumented people to access the web, create ton of phishing opportunity, reinforce censorship on most site (as they will now all need to be minor compliant or need age verification), reinforce the chilling effect and make the web even less crawlable/archivable (or you need to give a valid citizen ID to your crawler/archiver). With no proof it…

>it create difficulty for undocumented people to access the web Why is this such a sticking point in US politics? If the "undocumented" people aren't supposed to be in the country in the first place, why should rest of society cater to them? Even if you're against age verification for other reasons, dragging in the immigration angle is just going to alienate the other half of the population who don't share your view…

What if they are supposed to be in the country, but they are undocumented?

This means "not having documents". It's not a synonym for "illegal immigrant".

Re: Meta Platforms: Lobbying, dark money, and the App Store Accountability Act

#372

Post by pear01 »

bee_rider wrote: post #353
pear01 wrote: post #348

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This assumes enough of the small dollar population agrees on anything to meaningfully compete on the cost of buying. They may on paper, but of course a lot of money goes to dividing us up come election time. What you are suggesting is no shortcut - it would rather be almost like inventing an alternative political party.

The joke is that we’re already paying for representatives, they just don’t seem to be very loyal to their employers.

Exactly, that is the proof. We are already losing this game. Trying to outspend lobbyists using some kind of crowdfunding sounds interesting at first, but is just restating the same terms on which the game is already rigged, which means you will just lose again.

I think there might be a way to make it work, however you would have to be very aware and plan for a way to not reinvent the same losing dynamics. It might not be possible.

Re: Meta Platforms: Lobbying, dark money, and the App Store Accountability Act

#373

Post by gzread »

whimsicalism wrote: post #199
tinfoilhatter wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You fail to mention big Israel money, when 98% of US congress members are taking donations from AIPAC. Strange omission on your part.

100% of AIPAC money is from Americans.

What does that mean, though? In a sense, 100% of USD transactions take place in the US. But sometimes it's on behalf of someone else.

Re: Meta Platforms: Lobbying, dark money, and the App Store Accountability Act

#374

Post by 0xbadcafebee »

SkyeCA wrote: post #114
0xbadcafebee wrote: post #81

I don't understand why nobody in the comments is freaked out about this. This isn't just "oh Google knows my age", or "oh politicians being corrupt again!" This is "the government made a law that every computer in the world must track every person's identity and send it to the cloud". No offline devices. Commercial vendors get your biometric data (and the equivalent of your driver's license / SSN). Every application…

> I don't understand why nobody in the comments is freaked out about this. Because it's hopeless? It's been proven time and time again there's nothing the average person can do to fight this sort of thing. It's just better to sit back and watch as everything gets ruined.

Actually it's the opposite. Average people speaking out is how the world gets better. It's when they don't speak out that things are allowed to get worse.

You literally live in a Democracy. There's 5.8 billion people on this planet who wish they had the kind of power you have. If you give up your rights without a fight, you don't deserve them.

Re: Meta Platforms: Lobbying, dark money, and the App Store Accountability Act

#376

Post by [deleted] »

gzread wrote: post #371
gruez wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>it create difficulty for undocumented people to access the web Why is this such a sticking point in US politics? If the "undocumented" people aren't supposed to be in the country in the first place, why should rest of society cater to them? Even if you're against age verification for other reasons, dragging in the immigration angle is just going to alienate the other half of the population who don't share your view…

What if they are supposed to be in the country, but they are undocumented? This means "not having documents". It's not a synonym for "illegal immigrant".

[deleted]

Re: Meta Platforms: Lobbying, dark money, and the App Store Accountability Act

#377

Post by rectang »

heavyset_go wrote: post #44
cosmos0072 wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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 To be honest, I worry that the framing of this legislation and ZKP generally presents a false dichotomy, where second-option bias[1] prevails because of the draconian first option. There's always another option: don't implement age verification laws a…

Practically, instead of requiring that sites verify age, require that they serve adult content with standardized headers. Devices can then be marketed as "child-safe" which refuse to display content with such headers.

Re: Meta Platforms: Lobbying, dark money, and the App Store Accountability Act

#378

Post by QuantumFunnel »

Muromec wrote: post #226
inetknght wrote: post #163

Age verification is merely the background task to set up infrastructure for OS to provide many many other signals about who's using the device. Age signals from the OS? Need to provide a channel of information available to applications. Applications already talk to servers with unchecked commonality. Biometric data? Today it unlocks your private key. Tomorrow it's used to verify you are the same person that was used…

Nobody stops the government from sending goons to your door right now for a snarky comment. Some govts in fact do it today. It is also cheaper than ai rocket and more precise too

Who needs rockets when you have autonomous mini drones

Re: Meta Platforms: Lobbying, dark money, and the App Store Accountability Act

#379

Post by EmbarrassedHelp »

jwr wrote: post #2

I 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.

Zero-knowledge proofs are only anonymous in theory if you ignore the issue of requiring a third party, and the issue of implementations.

And according to the EU Identity Wallet's documentation, the EU's planned system requires highly invasive age verification to obtain 30 single use, easily trackable tokens that expire after 3 months. It also bans jailbreaking/rooting your device, and requires GooglePlay Services/IOS equivalent be installed to "prevent tampering". You have to blindly trust that the tokens will not be tracked, which is a total no-go for privacy.

These massive privacy issues have all been raised on their Github, and the team behind the wallet have been ignoring them.

Re: Meta Platforms: Lobbying, dark money, and the App Store Accountability Act

#380

Post by classified »

bigyabai wrote: post #335
john_strinlai wrote: post #313

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Gotta give it to Zuck. if "it" is the middle finger, for sure. "terrifying" is a great choice of word for it.

I was equally impressed/terrified by Apple's marketing blitz around client-side-scanning. So many people got paid to advocate for that, and the community barely convinced them it was a bad idea. There's not much hope left for any of FAANG deliberately resisting surveillance.

Why would they resist surveillance? They're making massive profits from it.
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