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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

#361

Post by account42 »

UberFly wrote: post #296
ajsnigrutin wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'm starting to think we need to lean on conspiracy theories in order to get broader population on train with this - and I'm saying this in utmost regret. That's a borrowing game from a right wing/extremist playbook. How about "if you want to buy a dildo on aliexpress, you have to do a full scan of your face and send it to israelis"? I mean.. au10tix does age verification for aliexpress, it is an israeli firm, and…

It always gets back to the evil Jews with some people and ideologies. Sheesh.

What you expect people to just ignore where a lot of this anti-privacy industry is based?

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

#362

Post by akie »

AJRF wrote: post #322
ajb wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Renting and work already require ID in the UK. Every landlord and employer is supposed to take a copy of original documents proving the right to rent/work in the UK. Technically you can do that without handing the docs to the government, but there's less potential liability to do so via the Home Office website.

You miss the point - they are stitching it all together in a way that deanonymize you to your ISP under the guise of save the kids and then convenience

This is a very libertarian and ultimately low-trust forum where most people seem to think the government is out to get you, but I have to say: what's so great about having complete online anonymity anyway? I mean, seriously. Real life is not anonymous and consequence free either, why should online life be?

It's not as if there are no downsides. There are, and some of them are so severe that they are impacting the whole of society.

People can impersonate to be 500 or 5000 or 500000 people from another country and all echo some detrimental or even treasonous sentiment, critically influencing and steering voters, which changes politics and election outcomes and thereby the trajectories of whole countries. I cannot understate how serious that is.

If we can make sure that every real person can only have 1 social media account per platform, and if we can check that someone is an adult, and if (and only if) we can do that in a privacy preserving manner... then honestly, I don't see why I would be against that. I'm ok with being held accountable for what I do online. I want to pay that price to prevent the severe outside interference we've seen in elections and in our politics.

You and many others might not be, but it seems like you've lost the argument.

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

#363

Post by isodev »

j2kun wrote: 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 are at least some technological solutions

I think the main takeaway is that the concept of such verifications is fundamentally incompatible with privacy. Today we have a simple "are you an adult" check but who is to say we wouldn't want further levels of segmentation (legal age to drive, age to allow health insurance etc)?

And this just one signal. Nobody likes the EU cookie/consent prompts but what they've shown us is that most websites are perfectly happy to fingerprint you the moment you step on their pages, and then share/broker your activity with hundreds and thousands of "legitimate interest" partners of theirs.

So the real-world equivalent of this situation is that you walk on the street and whenever you need to wait for a traffic light, board a bus or the tube, go into a shop, etc... you have a security person who needs to faceID(or fingerprint) you and make you wait until they find a match of your profile... and then they ask you to present your ID (which you have to carry at all times) but hey, it's private because you need to enter your PIN for them to read the chip.

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

#364

Post by u8080 »

smallstepforman wrote: post #248
greatgib wrote: post #143

What scary me a lot, is the amount of people here or in real life that are not concerned about that, and that are like "it is to protect the children, so whatever it is, it worth it. And what else we can do?". And often it goes on with things like "anyway, social media are bad, they ruin people even adult, so good thing". Literally they all look like repeating a carefully crafted propaganda without that much more dee…

Mate, you have to revise your stance on Russia, more people are imprisoned annually in the UK for speaking than people in Russia in a decade. The UK banned RT while you can access any western propaganda outpost from within Russia. You’re on Hacker News, this website is known for attracting open minded free thinkers that do not fall under the influence of government financed propaganda. Learn and reassess your thought…

>you can access any western propaganda outpost from within Russia

You cannot without VPN. Anyway, this stupid polarizing "my cow is dead, but neighbor's two cows dead so I am happy" approach is just sad and enables more govt tyranny globally.

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

#365

Post by A_Duck »

There is a real problem here to be solved.

Whenever I speak to someone who's planning to vote Reform (UK hard-right party) their views are primarily shaped by seeing AI slop videos on TikTok/Instagram, showing immigrants doing crimes etc etc

Reform will probably win the next election because of this, unless we find a way to make platforms manage the situation.

Interesting example: https://www.londoncentric.media/p/london-tiktok-fake-news-cr...

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

#366

Post by vkou »

simoncion wrote: post #266
vkou wrote: post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> What stops children from paying someone to buy beer and cigs for them? 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 both…

In a world where ubiquitous ID verification is required, you can just, like, mandate that stores with liquor licenses sell them. If they want to keep their licenses, that is.

A simple law against linking those two pieces of information would be sufficient. Sure, someone like the NSA wouldn't give two shits about what's legal, but they also wouldn't have the means to clandestinely get the necessary hardware installed in every one of the million stores that exist in the country.

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

#367

Post by wwweston »

lukan wrote: post #325
Aurornis wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, this is the part of the issue that is so frequently ignored: Anonymous age verification schemes are easily defeated through proxying because there wouldn't be any consequences for selling your tokens. "Install this app on your phone and we'll pay you $1 per day" and it will mint your anonymous identity tokens and send them off to kids who want to buy them. If there's no way to track the tokens, there is no possi…

We are talking about porn here. And the internet will be always full of it - and that can only be prevented by controlling all of it, or have each state have a golden firewall. All of these solutions seem very complicated, for little benefit. So a anonymous age verification scheme, fine with me. But making it more complicatdd, because dark entities could capture and resell tokens .. seems a step in the direction of m…

Crusades against sexually explicit material are certainly popular in some places.

But these days I see a lot more talk about the developmental effects of parasocial media on kids. There’s a whole segment of buy-in there that didn’t exist before.

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

#368

Post by NVHacker »

ajb wrote: post #139
AJRF wrote: post #56

The path ahead in the next few years (at least for the UK) 1. Age gating + VPN ban under the guise of protecting children from social media 2. Few years pass, Identity Passport gets ushered in under guise of convenience of not having to repeat those pesky age verification checks. 3. Utilities start to require ID Passport. Including signing up with an ISP. 4. Renting starts to require ID Passport. 5. Work requires ID…

Renting and work already require ID in the UK. Every landlord and employer is supposed to take a copy of original documents proving the right to rent/work in the UK. Technically you can do that without handing the docs to the government, but there's less potential liability to do so via the Home Office website.

That did not stop the Government from pushing digital id in order to prevent illegal working, did it ?

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

#369

Post by braza »

That's one of the reasons why I opted for multiple citizenships. I was fortunate to have the option to rehash parts of my name, and I am using my birthplace country's passport as a throwaway for everything, and my other citizenships docs only the governments and legal system know about.

Plus, like others mentioned, I am preparing my future self to be in a total offline/unplugged world and be a semi-ghost digitally, and even now in 2026 I found a bunch opportunities already doing it in a semi-agorist way (e.g. second hand, cash on hand, offline remote physical work, hunting/fishing, farming/a little farm, etc).

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

#370

Post by ajb »

AJRF wrote: post #322
ajb wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Renting and work already require ID in the UK. Every landlord and employer is supposed to take a copy of original documents proving the right to rent/work in the UK. Technically you can do that without handing the docs to the government, but there's less potential liability to do so via the Home Office website.

You miss the point - they are stitching it all together in a way that deanonymize you to your ISP under the guise of save the kids and then convenience

Do you want to help stop that, or do you just want to feel smarter than other people? If you happened to have seen my comments in other threads, you'd know I'm against all this. But telling people they are idiots isn't going to win them over. This is not just a criticism of your comment, it's widespread in these discussions.

Opposing this requires:

* Linking to specific harms, which the public can emotionally resonate with. For example, scanning billions of photos for suspicions of child abuse will result in false positives that cause innocent people's kids to be taken away.

* Not seeming like an overheated conspiracy theorist. Feeling angry about this is legitimate, but it's not necessary to communicate in the same emotional register that you are feeling, even if it feels inauthentic not to. The public are saturated with people being publicly angry, much of which is purely performance. Deep concern may work better.

* Have plausible reasons for why this is happening. Yes, a few individuals like Thiel want to create a digital Stasi, but this would still be happening without them. Mostly this is driven by companies that want to make money, and officials who have a bias towards centralised processes, and are tunnel-visioned with respect to some issue. And people who are genuinely concerned about kids and haven't been given another convincing solution.

* Get facts straight. (Eg, rent/job IDs aren't a future threat. They are here)

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