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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

#391

Post by AnthonyMouse »

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…

The correct way to do this continues to be for sites to tag the content with some kind of rating and let the client device decide whether to show it based on how the user's account is configured.

This requires no ID of any kind because the child's parent or teacher knows their age, and kids buying a device on their own is no more or less of a problem than kids getting some high school senior or homeless adult to lend them their ID.

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

#392

Post by paulsutter »

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…

One approach is for parents to establish certain devices as “under 18” (or 16 or 13), leaving it up to the judgment of parents.

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

#393

Post by akmiller »

XorNot wrote: post #389
akmiller wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's true but has anyone studied the good things that have happened from younger people being able to find community or other positive aspects? Either way the solution again is not age gating, it's real meaningful data privacy laws that if enacted would have a huge effect on many companies today.

How do data privacy laws address the significant number of voters who are being told and believe that social media use is causing issues for children and want something done about it? This is exactly what I mean: you've rocked up and started talking about something else entirely.

I think you misunderstood me, I'm saying strong (very strong) data privacy laws make age gating unnecessary. This solution has far reaching benefits across all age groups.

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

#394

Post by fluoridation »

CPLX wrote: post #381
fluoridation wrote: post #352

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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 convinc…

> I, who don't have or plan to have children, should spend my money to protect other people's children from the Internet. For the same reason your taxes pay for schools even when you don't have kids. Because we live in a society. If you struggle to understand why that matters without reference to more direct personal stakes for yourself, just know that without a society, the children will grow up to rape you, kill yo…

>For the same reason your taxes pay for schools even when you don't have kids.

But I have benefited from public education. Me paying for someone else's education in return is fair.

>Because we live in a society.

"Because we live in a society" is a phrase flexible enough that it can be used to justify anything, including outright theft: "we live in a society; us taking your stuff is the price you have been chosen to pay for your continued belonging". Want to try a little harder?

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

#395

Post by AnthonyMouse »

palata wrote: post #360
mcfedr wrote: post #268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Your ID is already controlled by your government, and we don't call that dystopian control.

The expression "papers, please", a classic exemplar of dystopian control, is referring to what?

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

When people say "open source" in this context they mean that the user or third parties can make changes to the system, not that the source code is thrown over the wall from time to time. The situation with Android is exactly the thing that we don't want.

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

#396

Post by pseudalopex »

palata wrote: post #383
tom910 wrote: post #149

The main problem is providing infrastructure for a government that can over use it in future if move to ultra right/left/authoritarian spectrum Just for example Russia build infrastructure for blocks website for child safety, but it started to used much further

> The main problem is providing infrastructure for a government that can over use it in future if move to ultra right/left/authoritarian spectrum If that was considered the real problem, we would be fighting against surveillance capitalism. Instead we cheer for LLM companies who made it an order of magnitude worse. Let's be honest, the only time we care about being tracked is to access porn, for some reason. And if w…

> If that was considered the real problem, we would be fighting against surveillance capitalism.

You don't?

> Instead we cheer for LLM companies who made it an order of magnitude worse.

You do?

> Let's be honest, the only time we care about being tracked is to access porn, for some reason.

You do?

> And if we're being honest, we are already tracked when doing it.

You are?

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

#398

Post by CPLX »

fluoridation wrote: post #394
CPLX wrote: post #381

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I, who don't have or plan to have children, should spend my money to protect other people's children from the Internet. For the same reason your taxes pay for schools even when you don't have kids. Because we live in a society. If you struggle to understand why that matters without reference to more direct personal stakes for yourself, just know that without a society, the children will grow up to rape you, kill yo…

>For the same reason your taxes pay for schools even when you don't have kids. But I have benefited from public education. Me paying for someone else's education in return is fair. >Because we live in a society. "Because we live in a society" is a phrase flexible enough that it can be used to justify anything, including outright theft: "we live in a society; us taking your stuff is the price you have been chosen to p…

You have convinced me that there are in fact no differences between things, and that protecting children from adult content is indistinguishable from stealing from people, and therefore I was foolish to advocate for it.

I stand humbly corrected.

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

#399

Post by pseudalopex »

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.

Stores collect not required customer information often.

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

#400

Post by john_strinlai »

pc86 wrote: post #386
john_strinlai wrote: post #335

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

My assumption (made admittedly with no evidence whatsoever) that you believe it's possible for someone to verify their age without giving up any anonymity or privacy, even temporarily.

one of the reasonable solutions i allude to is an over/under 18 age attestation at time of account creation on your OS. websites say "18+ content" and the OS either displays or doesn't display the content. there is ~0 privacy or anonymity concerns as 3rd parties don't get any communication about whether the content was shown.
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