Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't understand why the act of buying internet access isn't considered a parental control. I doubt very many kids are doing it or can. Ok, but parents buy internet access and then let their kids use it, because the kids need it for school. So? The parents job is to keep their kids out of trouble. Learning how to keep track of what their kids access shouldn't be difficult, and maybe should be part of the obligation…
The problem with this idea is that it assumes responsible parents, which are not a given. I agree with you completely - I don't want any kind of controls on the Internet - but we live in a world where we cannot actually rely on parents to fulfill what you would consider to be basic and reasonable expectations of parental duties.
The 'papers, please' era of the internet will decimate your privacy
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Re: The 'papers, please' era of the internet will decimate your privacy
#262I appreciate the wealth of technical solutions that don't violate privacy, but isn't this overlooking an important point: that children don't need to be connected to the Internet at all times from such an early age? Many internet and cell phone providers seem to take it for granted that children must be online, which is already a net loss for their privacy as they mature.
The children are fine. Many countries no longer allow smartphones at school, which lowers the peer-pressure factor to be online.
Parents are doing their best to steer kids. But these pesky adults, goshdarnit, they access whatever content they want without approval from The State, potentially reading dissident materials, borrowing 1984 from libraries… politicians don’t like that.
Re: The 'papers, please' era of the internet will decimate your privacy
#263There are at least some technological solutions here, such as anonymous credentials. [1] Modern versions of this technique allow one to associate metadata (like a proof of age exceeding a threshold) in such a way that the verifier can't even correlate repeated requests across users. Governments that are serious about age verification and individual privacy (which, doubtful they truly are) should agree on a protocol a…
There is a much easier solution that already exists - parental controls on children's devices. I honestly don't understand why is it not solving the problem? Yes, parents are responsible to set this up. But parents are also responsible to lock their alcohol, drugs or guns, condoms, etc., and many other things. Perhaps parental controls are not good enough? That's where the regulation could genuinely help - require ch…
Re: The 'papers, please' era of the internet will decimate your privacy
#264Re: The 'papers, please' era of the internet will decimate your privacy
#265Earlier quoted context omitted.
This doesn’t stop the scheme the parent proposes, where adults install some proxy on their device and challenges are responded to on the parent device. Then the private key never leaves the parent device and all the child device has is the proxy software, which could be set up to not log any identifier of the key that it used
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Re: The 'papers, please' era of the internet will decimate your privacy
#266Earlier quoted context omitted.
> It's anonymous. The clerk or his POS system knows your name and age, but doesn't know your number. What prevents a commercial "AI" security camera analysis firm from doing a decent job of linking footage of a store's customers to a likely subset of tokens, based on the knowledge of which tokens are sent to which store and how many tokens have been pulled off of the roll so far? Remember that you can design the toke…
You can also just follow people around and look in their windows. Nothing prevents that other than laws and rules and social norms. > In the real world, the system you propose absolutely will not function to the standards required by the people agitating for these systems. You can't "protect the children" if "children" can easily get their hands on anonymous access-granting tokens. What stops children from paying som…
I preempted this line of questioning. I'll quote the section for you:
What you propose doesn't make stores any money, so either you have to spend a bunch of money to induce them to carry the tokens [1], or you have to have harsh penalties for "losing" shipments of tokens. If you risk harsh penalties for choosing to sell the tokens, why even bother? Stores put up with the risk of selling booze because it's *quite* profitable... selling 5c or 0c tokens absolutely is not.
[1] Where does that money come from? From you and me, of course!
No business is going to risk any part of their business by selling seriously-age-restricted goods that they get essentially no profit from. In order to get a business to deal in them, either they will give zero shits about who gets the tokens (because there's no penalty for not caring), or they will get paid a lot of taxpayer money in order to make up for the state-imposed loss when they inevitably give some to under-eighteens. [0]> The only requirement is that the sale and the process of paying for the sale isn't linked to the ticket.
Unless you make it turbo-illegal to link those pieces of information (even weakly), then those two pieces of information will be linked lickety-split. As aspenmaver mentions, lotto tickets are activated at time of sale by phoning home to -I assume- the issuer of the ticket, providing a ready-made mechanism to correlate which tickets are sold to which person. When the people who are crying to protect the under-eighteen from the "evils" of computing notice that under-eighteens are -shock! outrage!- still exposed to that "evil" despite this token-distribution scheme, they will demand any such laws be weakened or eliminated.
[0] ...or fail to strictly follow all of the regs when giving one to a "Token Commission" officer doing an undercover buy, as absolutely happens with alcohol sales...
Re: The 'papers, please' era of the internet will decimate your privacy
#267Re: The 'papers, please' era of the internet will decimate your privacy
#268Re: The 'papers, please' era of the internet will decimate your privacy
#269Earlier quoted context omitted.
How is it more like leaving a liquor cabinet open than not buckling them up with seatbelts? I'm glad we're discussing parental liability. It seems no one else is advocating for "social media access is criminal neglect," so I appreciate the novelty.
I would love to have this be the argument. Parents would typically agree that giving your kids heroin, for instance, should result in prison time. Yet I doubt they would argue the same for social media! Perhaps there should be discussions about what neglect looks like with regards to internet access and whether or not we need societal boundaries around this, enforced via punishing parents, rather than punishing every…
The current strategy of yelling "parent's should parent" does nothing to influence any sort of result. It's simply ineffective and makes people who say it look like slogan slingers rather than cooperating in any meaningful change.
Re: The 'papers, please' era of the internet will decimate your privacy
#270There are at least some technological solutions here, such as anonymous credentials. [1] Modern versions of this technique allow one to associate metadata (like a proof of age exceeding a threshold) in such a way that the verifier can't even correlate repeated requests across users. Governments that are serious about age verification and individual privacy (which, doubtful they truly are) should agree on a protocol a…
The article talks about the possibilities of malicious cloning of these tokens by third parties, but fails to identify the much more common use case, and one that makes this scheme useless for age verification. It's one thing to be concerned about someone stealing my credential, but another to prevent the transfer of these credentials, especially if they are limited use credentials. The entire point of age verificati…