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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

#311
post #106
post #21

There 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…

There is a bootlegger and baptist thing going on here. One understandable point of view is that of parents that control their kids' phones, but other parents in the community do not. Then their kids are the only ones in the class without tiktok or Instagram or something.

For those parents life is easier if nobody is allowed on these things.

Re: The 'papers, please' era of the internet will decimate your privacy

#312

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah great idea, having to get out your government ID every time you want to use a website.

A certificate could be anonymous and the website would only need to verify it against the born_before_2008_root_cert in 2026. You could issue has many certs as you want and all would have a validity of 1 year so that websites only have to install at the maximum 2 root certs.

The “2008” part hit me hard

Re: The 'papers, please' era of the internet will decimate your privacy

#313
post #106
post #21

There 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…

Why would you want to lock condoms?

Re: The 'papers, please' era of the internet will decimate your privacy

#314
post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I think their point is to protect kids who have parents so tech illiterate they do not know how to manage parental controls. Having seen some parents I kind of believe it but not to the point of wanting to implement ID tracking on everything.

You've got to be really on the margin of society to not be able to set it up when every grandma and her dog use smartphones. There're about 1000 different ways to improve the lives of such people without making everyone use their government ID when scrolling Instagram.

Re: The 'papers, please' era of the internet will decimate your privacy

#315
Privacy or accountability, pick one. Everyone holds your identity or pointers to it. They - pinky promise - won’t weaponize it until it becomes advantageous or ordered by the government.

In the end someone has to be held accountable. Society does not work without accountability and never has. We were living in temporary illusory world made by nerds. Now the rest joins in.

Re: The 'papers, please' era of the internet will decimate your privacy

#316
post #106
post #21

There 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…

...parents are also responsible to lock their alcohol, drugs or guns...

No they're not - all those things are illegal for children nearly everywhere.

Re: The 'papers, please' era of the internet will decimate your privacy

#317
I hold an unpopular opinion here, but well regulated digital IDs might not be a benefit to us all.

Almost all big tech giants are frankly paper tigers (can I survive without facebook, sure, without next day delivery, harder, without banking or secure ways to talk to my utility providers, waaay harder.

Having a way to get rid of bots that sour our Online discussions, lovely. To reduce billion in bank fraud, sounds great.

I feel as privacy advocates we need to be clear on the difference between secrecy (that’s gone unless you stay offline.) and privacy (your neighbour knows you are having sex in the afternoons but does not say anything.

Re: The 'papers, please' era of the internet will decimate your privacy

#318

It's just the web we're losing. The internet is still free. As for the web, good riddance, let's build something new.

The internet is not free. We've been running out of IP addresses for ages and most people don't have direct internet access these days so are completely dependent on man-in-the-middle servers. All it would take is a broad ban on VPN and end-to-end encryption. Governments have been wanting to ban strong encryption ever since the public got access to it in the 90s (see PGP/Zimmermann).

Re: The 'papers, please' era of the internet will decimate your privacy

#319
post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I was thinking that some kind of permanent physical attachment with passive electronics could be given to children, like an ankle bracelet used for home curfew, monkey's headband, a dogs shock collar, or just a nice bracelet, call it MoB, which couldn't be removed until they are of age. Devices they are given could be associated with those devices and not usable without them, if they disappear from passive scanning t…

My God, what a horrific and evil idea

Re: The 'papers, please' era of the internet will decimate your privacy

#320

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They become a traceable identity token Not if you use a challenge-response protocol where the client returns a zero-knowledge proof of age, where the proof incorporates a random string sent by the website. The traceable stuff is private information that the website never sees. If a minor is caught with it, then law enforcement has local access to the minor's hardware and can probably view the private data. At that…

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

I agree, but this is also clearly a increased barrier. Going back to OPs comment that perfection is impossible, the goal is to raise the bar, I would say that this is more than good enough.
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