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What we call "age verification" is actually mass surveillance

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

#331

Post by skinfaxi »

Wowfunhappy wrote: post #187
Aaargh20318 wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The way identity wallets work: The government issues an eID to your wallet. The ID is signed by the government and linked to the device to prevent transferring the credential. A public/private key-pair is generated by the secure enclave in your phone, the public key along with proof of possession of the private key is included in the request for the government eID. The government signs individual attributes combined…

> The only real issue is the wallet app and device binding. Because a compromised device could allow credentials to be transferred some form of attestation of device and wallet app is required. In practice this means no rooted/jailbroken phones. Yeah, and no Linux PCs, no custom builds of web browsers (which would effectively become open source in theory only)—basically the end of any kind of open platform. I would m…

Oh you know it would be both not either.

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

#332

Post by ajsnigrutin »

Wowfunhappy wrote: post #16
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…

Easy, when you buy the device, during first setup, you set up the date of birth of the user. If the user is underage, the parent/guardian sets a password to unlock the device if needed before the user is 18. That device then sends "is_below_18" flag to whatever service wants it.

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

#333

Post by johnc1 »

We're already been protecting children from printed porn, alcohol, drugs (legal or illegal), guns, etc. Children don't even have to buy those items, sometimes they can get them from friends or even find at home. It's always been parents responsibility to protect from that, and the Internet doesn't change that.

What the Internet does change is granularity of controls. With physical goods, parents can choose to give children travel magazines but not porn magazines. With Internet, parents don't always have a choice to give children a device to read travel websites but not porn websites.

Solving that granularity is all we need! And the good news - it's already largely solved: just give your kids one of the locked down phones/tables with parental controls (i.e., almost any phone/tablet today).

The law can and should make a few things better: - introduce minimal requirements for parental controls, certify devices as kids safe (i.e., implementing these requirements) - ideally, require websites to tag content - same way we tag it on TV for ages; this one is harder to enforce in practice (what about offshore websites?) but also not really needed - AI can tag content pretty well as part of parental controls

I know all of this was said before many times, but somehow it feels not enough people understand it.

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

#334

Post by CPLX »

fluoridation wrote: post #318
CPLX wrote: post #281

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not disowning it at all. I think paying a recurring cost to prove you're an adult for purposes of accessing the internet is completely fine, trivial, and unimportant. You have to pay a cost to go out in public, since there are nudity laws. You have to pay a cost to use an airport or a train station. You have to pay a fee to prove that you own a car. And so on. It just doesn't matter. It's not important. It's cons…

>I think paying a recurring cost to prove you're an adult for purposes of accessing the internet is completely fine, trivial, and unimportant. Okay, but the person you replied to doesn't, and instead of providing an actual answer to their question, you posed a false equivalence between proving your age and buying a computer. >You have to pay a cost to go out in public, since there are nudity laws. You have to pay a c…

> If you don't have an answer to the question of why someone should have to pay again to use the Internet

Of course I have an answer. To do something about the unlimited firehose of porn, violence, divisive, and addictive content that has been pointed at children for the past generation or so.

There's literally nothing confusing about the "why" in this discussion.

The fact that bad people use the "what about the children" argument regularly for bad reasons doesn't mean that all such arguments are bogus.

In fact, it's an indication of exactly the opposite, it's so regularly used because there is a broad consensus that we need to protect children from harm which is why it's often effective as an arguing tool.

The relevant frame for this discussion is will it actually work, and what are the tradeoffs. A trivially small amount of money for a simple age verification scheme isn't a particularly meaningful tradeoff against a genuine social problem. The bigger, more genuine issues are around privacy and censorship and I do in fact concede those are real.

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

#335

Post by john_strinlai »

pc86 wrote: post #232
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…

> there are several reasonable proposals that would be 90%+ successful without stepping on anyone's toes. I have a feeling my definition of having my toes stepped on differs dramatically from yours. > i am convinced that enough people in power know it, too, but see this as their chance to get the full-dystopia version rolled out. Well there's plenty of idiots in power and I'm sure they have no idea. But there absolut…

>I have a feeling my definition of having my toes stepped on differs dramatically from yours.

based on what?

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

#337

Post by gambiting »

Epa095 wrote: post #323
gambiting wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Government builds a website where you can log in using any government issued ID or using one of the many many many available services that hold your details already(at least in the UK nearly everyone will have a DLVA account, HMRC account, HMPO account, NHS account.....all of these are government services which we can only assume hold our data securely already). On that website, you can click "give me a verification…

Why does the government need to know what pages you visit? It could just encode a string representing the date and 'above 18' and sign it with its private key. PH then just needs to verify it using the public key.

Even better solution then.

>>Why does the government need to know what pages you visit?

In the UK the government already knows, but that's beside the point. It's another bad law that should have been fought against much more than it was.

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

#338

Post by ibejoeb »

baby_souffle wrote: post #240
rustyminnow wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could probably be implemented by a smartcard or yubikey-like device as well. Shoot, just build it into my state issued ID card.

Do you know how hard it was to get RealID rolled out? And now you're going to tell every state to do it again, but this time it's got a chip in it so "just trust the government, man". This will go well.

It will go fine, because everything you want to do will require it. Even if you don't strictly have to, you will be effectively ostracized. Transit, entertainment, productivity tools. Haven't you noticed that things that have previously been easy to do are much harder now, even before this has rolled out? Like providing a government ID to visit a museum, for example. Or getting an email address. Using claude.

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

#339

Post by jmacc93 »

Every time I see stuff about age verification (which I do admit is likely just a justification for control and surveillance over the internet) I can't help but wonder if there's some way to coordinate a large enough number of internet users to adopt a parallel internet that inherently cannot be regulated, or at least one in which no law can be reasonably enforced. For instance a fully encrypted p2p internet. I guess ultimately the problem is banks and other tie-ins to the real world like businesses with public reputations. And so I guess since endless content streams (including porn and other child-unfriendly media) follow the money primarily, any non-monetized / volunteer parallel internet would likely contain mostly unmonetized content like information (eg: wikipedia, Q&A sites, etc) and slow, un-gameable social media

In a perfect world, I'd prefer law and regulation minimization, but obviously that's just not reasonable in our actual world. As much as I have libertarian tendencies, I just can't argue that regulation is necessary. The really interesting part is which regulations are the ones you actually need, which do more harm than good, and which should be refactored -- all as measured (probably) by something like counterfactual real world preference (in the best case, at least). My sense (which isn't worth much; only should act on empirical evidence and falsification-resistant modelling) is such a parallel internet, plus an analogous parallel economy (like bitcoin), would be a net positive

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

#340

Post by choo-t »

utopiah wrote: post #297
choo-t wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, they could trade identifying ones too or even stollen ID cards if you want to go this way. They could also trade porn-filled thumb drive or old-school glossy paper magazine. There no way to prevent kid's exposure to stuff at a 100% success rate. There no way to avoid exposure completely

Indeed but you are the one who claimed it was not a hard problem. I don't think any one of us pushing back here on those claims do so for the heck of NOT finding a "solution", rather genuinely asking because so far it seems nobody did find such a solution without compromises that is in the end not worth it due to the flaw in said solution. The point isn't to be critical of your process, only of the claim that it's a…

> Indeed but you are the one who claimed it was not a hard problem.

Am I ?

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