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Age verification for social media, the beginning of the end for a free internet?

mullvad.net

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Re: Age verification for social media, the beginning of the end for a free internet?

#71
post #33
post #26

hey claude build me a small social media site i can use with my friends... the beginning of the freedom of every person to become a developer

I can't let you do that, Dave

Sometime in the future.

Dave, first we will need to setup age verification for your friends in order to comply with the law. I will not be able to help you otherwise. Remember Dave, I will submit to the local government your request to make a social media website so they will know if are complying with age verification. I have your ID which I will also provide as you need government ID to use AI. Open source AI models were banned.

Re: Age verification for social media, the beginning of the end for a free internet?

#72
post #5

So, to post something in 2027: - You have to have an approved browser. - It has to be installed on an approved platform, Google or Apple, for which you have a valid account. - You have to have an account on the posting platform. - You have to get past moderation on the posting platform. That's without age verification.

don't forget what's been going on for a few decades already: a personal phone number that ties your home address, billing, etc etc.

Re: Age verification for social media, the beginning of the end for a free internet?

#73
"Will the police stop and search people on the street looking for unauthorized phones? Prison sentences for buying a non-state computer on the black market? Charges of organized crime for smuggling in containers of open-source software on USB sticks?"

Come on, do people seriously believe this will happen?

Re: Age verification for social media, the beginning of the end for a free internet?

#74

EU law gives every citizen a right to a bank account. I wonder if EU law could give every citizen a right to a google or Apple account, including a forced recovery option if the account is 'deactivated'? If at some point such an account becomes essential to function in society, access to such an account becomes a legal mandate.

> EU law gives every citizen a right to a bank account.

That directive regulates banks from denying the opening of a basic payment account. But there is no legislation preventing governments from freezing accounts, Canada-style. As far as I know, there's no protection against being de-banked.

Re: Age verification for social media, the beginning of the end for a free internet?

#75
post #26

hey claude build me a small social media site i can use with my friends... the beginning of the freedom of every person to become a developer

“Sure just refill your credits for $200 and resubscribe for 1 year.”

Re: Age verification for social media, the beginning of the end for a free internet?

#76
post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There was some optimism with .xxx that adult content producers would voluntarily switch over. Spoiler: almost none of them did, except for domain name availability reasons.

Plot twist: in a few years all the indie and counterculture web appropriates .xxx domains to evade AI crawling and legislative interference.

And then suspiciously the .xxx registry jacks up the prices to herd everyone back

Re: Age verification for social media, the beginning of the end for a free internet?

#77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And content is increasingly produced for, and by, machines. Human initiative and/or access is increasingly incidental. It's easy to create an alternative. The problem isn't that, it's keeping that alternative clanker-free. (As well as free of all the other enemies / plauges on the useful, generative, Internet.)

> keeping that alternative clanker-free which brings you right back to verification...

Perhaps, but in both cases, I think that the principle problem is attempted control at the wrong portal.

Rather than individuals or devices, residential / mobile / business service providers should be able to vouch for personal traffic and be in a position to validate patterns of use without undue profiling of specific activity. That is, just looking at the encrypted traffic patterns (rather than MITMing SSL/TLS or other secured comms) should show usage that's typical vs. atypical / malicious.

Traditionally, service providers of all stripes (email, ISPs, Web, etc.) seem to have focused far more on ingress security than egress security, or potentially malicious traffic from within their own networks. That's got to change, it's ultimately a hygiene question.

For residential and mobile Internet, accounts are managed at either the household or individual level, and it should be possible to provide attestation and reputation management (as well as, perhaps, broad-based subscription access to compensated content) at those levels.

For commercial access things get more complicated, particularly where a location might provide public Internet access (e.g., public WiFi), or have a mix of human and system-generated traffic at an office, commercial, or industrial site. Still, there should be both well-established patterns of use and indications of anomolous or malicious traffic possible here.

Another option for smaller human-scale networks (e.g., Fediverse / Mastodon / PeerTube / Pixelfed / Lemmy / WriteAs networks and the like) is a mix of harder authentication (Yubikey or NFC-based wearable authenticators, perhaps) as well as a more manageable human-scale moderation (1:1,000 or 1:10,000 scales far better than 1:1 million or 1:1 billion services), allowing for both oversight and keeping the opportunities / benefits of malicious use limited.

The comment I'd originally responded to had me thinking of under-delivering federated systems such as Gemini (the lightweight Web protocol, not Google's AI) or Diaspora* or countless web boards and wikis which ended up overrun by spam and abuse. Simply saying that you're going to re-invent things at small scale in no way means you'll succeed. The ecosystem's changed, the pathogens are far more numerous and capable. Modern systems and networks (social or otherwise) must face those facts head on, and not ignore them or pretend they don't exist.

I think we're going to end up with some form of cost-based (though not necessarily financialised) reputation management systems. I'd very much like to see those not being terribly invasive of privacy, or putting extreme barriers to those with limited means or technical knowledge. It's a tough problem all the same.

Re: Age verification for social media, the beginning of the end for a free internet?

#78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And content is increasingly produced for, and by, machines. Human initiative and/or access is increasingly incidental. It's easy to create an alternative. The problem isn't that, it's keeping that alternative clanker-free. (As well as free of all the other enemies / plauges on the useful, generative, Internet.)

> keeping that alternative clanker-free which brings you right back to verification...

Would be nice to see something referral based. If you don't like X, block them. If X invited Y and Z and their invites behave poorly, you can block the whole tree. Kinda like lobste.rs referrals but for wider internet

I guess the correlary would be like how you can block an entire ASN if you find a lot of abuse from it, but at the human-network level.

Re: Age verification for social media, the beginning of the end for a free internet?

#79
Back to the internet's peer-to-peer roots. Many protocols besides the www

The www became infested with so-called "tech" companies acting as intermediaries (middlemen)

Lots of folks making money from surveillance ad system on the www. Oversized, unmanageable websites calling themselves "platforms"

The www is an ad network. Not a great place for non-commercial activity

Fortunately, the internet is more than the www. The internet was not created to collect behavioral data and deliver advertising as its primary purpose

People pay for an internet subscription, not a www subscription (or now a "social media subscription")

Re: Age verification for social media, the beginning of the end for a free internet?

#80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It gets worse. Banks now require pictures of faces to fucking close the account and pull the money out.

You find it to be a negative that banks require identity verification to drain an account? Personally, I would refuse to keep my money with a bank that doesn’t do this.

The relationship was established decades ago and they accept money and direct deposit still with no KYC.

But to get the money out? Oh no! We need a picture of your face! And there’s no option for going in person.

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