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What we call "age verification" is actually mass surveillance

pluralistic.net

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Re: What we call "age verification" is actually mass surveillance

#11

Post by SecretDreams »

pokstad wrote: post #5
john_strinlai wrote: post #2

> "Age verification" means that everyone who does anything online will have to submit to fine-grained tracking and recording of all their online activities. its been said 1000 times here, but: age verification doesn't have to be a nightmare dystopia of 24/7 fine-grained tracking and recording unless you are somehow hoping to achieve 100% success rate (something we have not done with any other law ever). there are sev…

Exactly. The same way that selling alcohol doesn’t require a paper trail of every beer I’ve bought.

To be fair, I buy my beers on CC. If someone really wanted to know the best IPAs and session able beers they could get, they could audit my CC records and then cross check to the breweries and pubs to see what I was buying. Just depends how much someone wants to learns bout good beer.

Re: What we call "age verification" is actually mass surveillance

#12

Post by normie3000 »

SecretDreams wrote: post #11
pokstad wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly. The same way that selling alcohol doesn’t require a paper trail of every beer I’ve bought.

To be fair, I buy my beers on CC. If someone really wanted to know the best IPAs and session able beers they could get, they could audit my CC records and then cross check to the breweries and pubs to see what I was buying. Just depends how much someone wants to learns bout good beer.

Anything under 4% should be sessionable IME.

Re: What we call "age verification" is actually mass surveillance

#13

Post by sharperguy »

john_strinlai wrote: post #2

> "Age verification" means that everyone who does anything online will have to submit to fine-grained tracking and recording of all their online activities. its been said 1000 times here, but: age verification doesn't have to be a nightmare dystopia of 24/7 fine-grained tracking and recording unless you are somehow hoping to achieve 100% success rate (something we have not done with any other law ever). there are sev…

Doesn't _have_ to be except not enough voters can tell the difference which is exactly the goal.

Re: What we call "age verification" is actually mass surveillance

#15

Post by sneak »

john_strinlai wrote: post #2

> "Age verification" means that everyone who does anything online will have to submit to fine-grained tracking and recording of all their online activities. its been said 1000 times here, but: age verification doesn't have to be a nightmare dystopia of 24/7 fine-grained tracking and recording unless you are somehow hoping to achieve 100% success rate (something we have not done with any other law ever). there are sev…

This isn’t about kids at all. The ID requirement is the WHOLE POINT.

That it is technically possible to do age verification in a privacy-preserving way is thus entirely irrelevant.

They want all online activity tied to ID so they can violently, illegally retaliate in the dark of night against protected expression online that they don’t like.

That’s all this is. Privacy-preserving techniques are irrelevant because they do not accomplish this goal.

Re: What we call "age verification" is actually mass surveillance

#16

Post by Wowfunhappy »

john_strinlai wrote: post #2

> "Age verification" means that everyone who does anything online will have to submit to fine-grained tracking and recording of all their online activities. its been said 1000 times here, but: age verification doesn't have to be a nightmare dystopia of 24/7 fine-grained tracking and recording unless you are somehow hoping to achieve 100% success rate (something we have not done with any other law ever). there are sev…

Could you be more specific as to what you're imagining? I don't personally see a way to verify someone's age which doesn't involve either credit card verification, photo id verification, or some sort of facial recognition. If you know enough about someone to verify their age—even to a relatively low degree of accuracy—you probably know enough to pinpoint who they are in general.

Heck—in most cases, we can't even tell the difference between humans and bots anymore! And it's true that we basically accept that some bots will slip through the cracks—but identifying bots also strikes me as significantly easier than identifying children.

Re: What we call "age verification" is actually mass surveillance

#17

Post by john_strinlai »

mindslight wrote: post #10
john_strinlai wrote: post #2

> "Age verification" means that everyone who does anything online will have to submit to fine-grained tracking and recording of all their online activities. its been said 1000 times here, but: age verification doesn't have to be a nightmare dystopia of 24/7 fine-grained tracking and recording unless you are somehow hoping to achieve 100% success rate (something we have not done with any other law ever). there are sev…

Would you mind elaborating on the specific methods you're referencing? To me, the entire problem is framing the issue as "age verification" in the first place - this implies the web company is responsible for knowing and controlling who uses their service. Whether this is a full-on demand for drivers' license / face scan / verification can, or whether there can be a technical process that obscures some details doesn'…

>Would you mind elaborating on the specific methods you're referencing?

well, i mean, you put a decently reasonable one in your own comment: "client-side parental control software that works based on website/app tags supplied by the server / app creator / etc."

another sibling comment mentions alcohol sales. government could issue a scratch card with UUID that's valid for some time, sold at anywhere alcohol/tobacco is already sold. most people are already comfortable with flashing an id at the beer store.

read any other the other dozen similar threads with hundreds of comments, and there are a handful of other neat ideas usually voted pretty high up.

Re: What we call "age verification" is actually mass surveillance

#18

Post by XorNot »

john_strinlai wrote: post #2

> "Age verification" means that everyone who does anything online will have to submit to fine-grained tracking and recording of all their online activities. its been said 1000 times here, but: age verification doesn't have to be a nightmare dystopia of 24/7 fine-grained tracking and recording unless you are somehow hoping to achieve 100% success rate (something we have not done with any other law ever). there are sev…

I am convinced that no one will make any progress on this issue so long as they refuse to understand that their aren't a group of shadowy figures pushing for this but rather a sizeable chunk of the general population, buoyed on by various moral outrage interest groups including a great many HNers who have been happily stoking the narrative that social media is the cause of every negative statistical ill.

Who wants this? God damn everyone. And in so much as Facebook might do something with the data, what they really want is a legal moat of sufficient depth to drown possible competitors.

Re: What we call "age verification" is actually mass surveillance

#19

Post by speak_plainly »

In Canada the approach is going to be that social media and AI companies will need to figure out a system where those under 16 can’t access content. The government will be able to grant exemptions if the company can satisfy regulators that they have built and maintained adequate, alternative structural safeguards to protect children on their platform.

Further to that, companies are required to do this in a strict data minimization approach, results need to be anonymized and destroyed immediately after the check is complete.

The internet has grown into a bit of a letdown to some degree, especially social media. If I have to upload an ID or insert a grey hair into a scanner, that website or app will be dead to me and I will move on to something else or nothing at all.

Re: What we call "age verification" is actually mass surveillance

#20

Post by anmalkov »

This reminds me of being refused entry to a nightclub in the US because I’d forgotten my passport, even though I had a European ID card and I’m over 40. Offline, age checks already often become rigid “approved identity document” checks. Online, that problem seems even worse, because the check can become a persistent identity layer across the web.
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