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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

#351

Post by ibejoeb »

jmacc93 wrote: post #339

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…

In most of the developed world, you need to register with a government to operate a communications device, whether it's radio, land line, mobile phone, whatever. If you're theorizing some kind of peer-to-peer system, where you let someone use your service to bypass mandatory registration, you're going to be liable. There will be very limited takers.

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

#352

Post by fluoridation »

CPLX wrote: post #334
fluoridation wrote: post #318

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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 chil…

>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.

See, you've answered a different question. The question you answered is, "why should children be protected from the Internet?" I'll give you for free that children should be protected from the Internet, for the reasons you've said, and now you get to convince me that I, who don't have or plan to have children, should spend my money to protect other people's children from the Internet.

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

#353

Post by Tangurena2 »

rationalist wrote: post #54
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.

I don't know about this, stores around me are scanning people's IDs to verify their age. I guess I could make an ID (not a counterfeit government ID) that uses the same encoding for the birthday.

They are scanning the PDF 417 barcode on the back.

Here are the specs for what appears on the driving license/ID and how to read the barcode:

https://www.aamva.org/getmedia/99ac7057-0f4d-4461-b0a2-3a553...

They issue a new spec every 4 years.

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

#354

Post by gampleman »

akmiller wrote: post #73
gampleman wrote: post #37

What an exceptionally bad faith way to put this whole thing. A five year old watching hours of the most depraved porn available is harmful to that child. Even if you disagree with that statement, you surely must acknowledge that it is an entirely reasonable opinion to hold and one our societies have generally held to this sort of thing for ages. I also acknowledge that there is a reasonable debate to be had if the di…

Your example is in bad faith as your example assumes that the only thing blocking a child of 5 from porn is age verification of some type. There are lots of blockers today for 5 year olds to get access to porn. > I also acknowledge that there is a reasonable debate to be had if the disadvantages to adults and businesses from imposing these rules are worth the harms prevented Nobody on the "we need age verification" s…

The blockers generally don’t work (I’ve tried). A big part of the problem is that it is in the interest of the providers to subvert them. The main benefit of age verification is changing that responsibility by making it the business of providers to ensure it works, not consumers.

You can make the same argument with alcohol: surely it’s sufficient that parents supervise their children not to drink. But it’s prove to be more effective to distribute that responsibility to the providers as well.

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

#355

Post by Ajedi32 »

pyrale wrote: post #239
Wowfunhappy wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

you generate a random number and send it to website you want to visit. Website you want to visit generates a one-time private/public key for the purpose of this login attempt, hashes your random number, and sends the hash back to you. You connect to the government auth platform, auth yourself to your government, and ask them to sign the hash you received. You pass the signed hash as well as the original random number…

So now I have to get permission from the government to browse the web? And they can revoke that permission at any time? And we need a great firewall to block citizens from communicating with foreign websites that don't comply with this scheme?

This idea is worse than facial scanning, by a lot.

(Better idea is OS level parental controls combined with government-mandated content tags to let the OS know what content is child-safe.)

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

#356

Post by Tangurena2 »

terribleperson wrote: post #287
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…

It doesn't even need 'age verification'. Ostensibly, the goal is to prevent children from accessing content their parents don't want them to see. That means all that's needed is a standard way for parents to make sure that websites know their children are children. They don't need identity, they don't need actual age, we don't even need a complicated cryptographic solution. California had the right idea - establish a…

> the goal is to prevent children from accessing content their parents don't want them to see

This has been mandated in TVs sold in the US. No one sets the thing.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V-chip

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

#357

Post by Tangurena2 »

encom wrote: post #289
sneak wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 the…

My government shouldn't decide what content I'm viewing or providing, and that's the end of it. >muh kids That's the parents problem, not mine. Any system the government comes up with will be insecure, inconvenient, invasive and cost the taxpayers billions, and you all know it's true.

You must have skipped reading Project 2025. Most of the editors/contributors have been appointed/hired/added to the administration/cabinet. More than half of the goals of Project 2025 had already been implemented.

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

#358

Post by palata »

phyzix5761 wrote: post #350
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 government still gets to know what you're doing online. How is that privacy?

Nope they don't. That's the whole point of privacy-preserving age verification.

Technically it is possible. The complaint that people have is that they don't trust that any government will get it right. But it is technically possible with known cryptography.

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

#359

Post by pseudalopex »

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.

Your point was what? No one should be allowed more privacy than you wanted?

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

#360

Post by palata »

mcfedr wrote: post #268
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…

Which part of that is avoiding the distopian control? the very first line, government issued digital id - we have been avoiding that for a very long time how does this work on an open source operating system?

> Which part of that is avoiding the distopian control?

Your ID is already controlled by your government, and we don't call that dystopian control. With privacy-preserving age verification online, the government doesn't learn what you do with the cryptographic token that proves that you are old enough, and the website doesn't learn who you are. So it's exactly the same situation as today, except that now there is age verification.

> how does this work on an open source operating system?

First, it can be open source and have DRM and attestation. Android is open source, for instance.

This said, I hate the idea of remote attestation. And for age verification, I strongly believe that it is not needed. We don't need to make it work everywhere all the time, it just needs to help. I can imagine a privacy-preserving age verification system that helps with some problems (e.g. make social media or porn less accessible to kids) without bringing dystopian control and without making it super hard for adults to access social media and porn.

But I absolutely hate the idea of remote attestation.

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