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EU Parliamentary Research Service calls VPNs "a loophole that needs closing"

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Re: EU Parliamentary Research Service calls VPNs "a loophole that needs closing"

#91

Post by pveierland »

rufasterisco wrote: post #81
pveierland wrote: post #38

Age restrictions + VPN bans + encryption restrictions + client-side monitoring + restricting general purpose computing.. It's just rapid descent into digital fascism set up by people who have no ability to see how the dots will end up connecting.

I am sorry you see it this way, when the very subject at hand is a practical example of how the EU has planned and built a wallet around the very same ideas you seem to cherish. Unfortunately, now that it comes to the news cycle, it’s easy to get outraged around misleading headlines. I encourage you to invest time in researching what the EU has done in the past decade around digital identities and their framing aroun…

I don't care for a limited and selective best-possible interpretation of a subset of measures viewed in isolation. The point is that a broader set of vectors are being used continuously to gradually ensnare and limit digital freedom.

This is not a misleading headline, this is a document from the European Parliamentary Research Service that calls out VPNs as a technology that may need to be moderated in order to enforce restrictions such as age verification.

https://www.europarl.europa.eu/RegData/etudes/ATAG/2026/7826...

As you are calling me out - specifically answer how restricting access to VPNs would benefit the freedom of thought, communication, and information within Europe, and not be something that - together with other measures - can help facilitate digital fascism.

Re: EU Parliamentary Research Service calls VPNs "a loophole that needs closing"

#92

Post by palata »

cess11 wrote: post #84
oytis wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These dimwits (and I don't just mean those in EU) seriously want to stop adolescents from watching porn, and are ready to mess with internet infrastructure for that. That's a depressing manifestation of aging society

It's not really about kids looking at porn, it's about tracking everyone else and making it easier for state surveillance and corporations to identify people. Kids don't have money and hardly ever manage to do crime without getting caught so they're profoundly uninteresting to surveil in this way, but adults are and here the interests of the state and corporations converge so they'll make a push for tyranny. But how…

If you think that there is a need for new technology to identify people, I suggest you wake up and start getting informed about surveillance capitalism.

There is absolutely no need for new technology to track people, it's there already.

Also I feel like a big reason for age verification is social media. Many countries are trying to prevent kids from accessing social media (because we know it's bad for them), and age verification is the way to do that.

Badly implemented, age verification is bad. But there are ways to implement it in a privacy-preserving manner, which wouldn't make the current state of surveillance capitalism worse.

Re: EU Parliamentary Research Service calls VPNs "a loophole that needs closing"

#93

Post by esseph »

otabdeveloper4 wrote: post #53
reddalo wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree, age verification on the web should 100% banned. Parents should learn how to be parents; the government shouldn't force companies to do parenting instead.

So you're implying alcohol and cigarettes should be sold to children? (Not to mention all the other consent age laws.) That said, VPN is a national security issue, children are only a pretext.

> VPN is a national security issue

:/

Re: EU Parliamentary Research Service calls VPNs "a loophole that needs closing"

#94

Post by Aerroon »

walrus01 wrote: post #33
nickff wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone who lives in a jurisdiction which does require such disclosure: it is a significant inconvenience for small businesses, and no benefit to the general public.

Do small businesses in your area have complicated ownership structures that it's significantly inconvenient to disclose the one family that owns, for an example small business , a plumbing repair company with 4 vans and 6 employees?

You get extra spam. Any data that ends up on those public lists will be used to spam you. Some websites will also correlate all the data they have on you too, so you can get that spam at home too.

Basically, you have no privacy if you start a small business under these kinds of rules.

Re: EU Parliamentary Research Service calls VPNs "a loophole that needs closing"

#95

Post by rounce »

shevy-java wrote: post #77
qnpnpmqppnp wrote: post #19

This title seems misleading. The EP paper appears to be highlighting the existence of a debate regarding VPN. Relevant quote: "Some argue that this is a loophole in the legislation that needs closing and call for age verification to be required for VPNs as well. In response, some VPN providers argue that they do not share information with third parties and state that their services are not intended for use by childre…

But you single out just one paper. If you include all paper and discussions the picture is super-clear, and the title is not misleading at all. This has to be said. > Of course I'm not saying the EU won't regulate VPNs The word choice is quite revealing. You write "regulate VPNs". To me this is not "regulation" at all - it is restriction or factually forbidding it. It is newspeak language here if we dampen it via nic…

> why the sudden attack by EU lobbyists against VPNs?

Live sports, they’re already assaulting internet infrastructure in various EU member states (eg. La Liga forcing Spanish ISPs to block cloudflare IPs during matches). With this in mind it seems less a case of surveillance state and more a case of corporate state capture.

Re: EU Parliamentary Research Service calls VPNs "a loophole that needs closing"

#96

Post by ionwake »

palata wrote: post #90
chii wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> seriously want to stop adolescents from watching porn no, they want to pretend this is the issue, so that pervasive monitoring or permission and/or deanonymization is normalized. It is to serve the state apparatus, rather than any actual protection.

If it is possible to "pretend that they want something reasonable", it means that there is something reasonable somewhere. Maybe some want more control, but most certainly not everybody. > so that pervasive monitoring If you haven't gotten the memo, pervasive monitoring already exists. To sell ads. > or permission and/or deanonymization is normalized For age verification, it's possible to do it in a privacy-preservin…

guy on website called hackernews, tries to convince everyone more restrictions are good

Re: EU Parliamentary Research Service calls VPNs "a loophole that needs closing"

#97

Post by palata »

donmcronald wrote: post #10

I think all the identity verification schemes should start with the beneficial owners of companies. Governments have been lobbied to allow complete anonymity for the wealthy that own businesses doing questionable things while regular people are going to have to show id to buy food.

> Governments have been lobbied to

Yep... and to make it worse, nobody is trying to push them towards looking at privacy-preserving age verification: instead technologists try to convince them that they just shouldn't regulate anything. Which... may not work so well.

Re: EU Parliamentary Research Service calls VPNs "a loophole that needs closing"

#99

Post by rswail »

Governments already have everyone's ID, including DOB. They say that the problem is non-adults accessing adult sites and services. So therefore, the sites need to know that users are over 18 (or the selected government age).

There should be a standardized government ID service/API that allows a person to let it disclose their age (or other user selected information) to a requesting site/service. That's all that is needed if the government ID service has appropriate 2FA and security.

Both the request and the response can be appropriately anonymized so that the government doesn't know the site, and the site doesn't know the person's identity.

Why isn't this a thing yet? As far as I know, no one has proposed it.

Re: EU Parliamentary Research Service calls VPNs "a loophole that needs closing"

#100

Post by palata »

hnlmorg wrote: post #68
otabdeveloper4 wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So you're implying alcohol and cigarettes should be sold to children? (Not to mention all the other consent age laws.) That said, VPN is a national security issue, children are only a pretext.

Children have always found ways to access age restricted consumables. Whether that was porno mags, alcohol or cigarettes. They’d just get an older sibling, or stranger to buy it. Or they’d have a fake ID. Or they’d just steal it from a family member. But you know which kids did this the least? It was the ones where their parents / guardians took their responsibilities as a guardian properly.

> Children have always found ways to access age restricted consumables

Doesn't mean that it's equivalent to giving them free access to those consumables.

> But you know which kids did this the least?

Source?

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