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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

#371

Post by KaiserPro »

kaashif wrote: post #110
johnc1 wrote: 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…

That's not the problem governments are solving. They're solving the problem of convincing the public it's a good idea to end the anonymity of internet use.

> That's not the problem governments are solving. They're solving the problem of convincing the public it's a good idea to end the anonymity of internet use.

I'm really sorry, but that's giving politicians far to much credit for being able to plan ahead.

Look at both the UK and the USA. The UK's just yeeted its PM because he had the personality of a block of cheese. The USA is currently inches away from shooting people if they mention the word green and water in DC. None of that screams "I am a master at planning ahead and manipulating public opinion in to doing x"

The politicians have no idea about how this all works, they see that "social media" is causing harm (its not the only source, we might get to that) The public, especially in the UK really do not like americanised media being forced in their faces and want "something to be done"

Again for the UK specifically the OSA specifically didn't layout a government mechanism for age verification. they left it to the end company to avoid the suggestion of tracking. Despite it being ripe for uberfraud and blackmail.

it would be much more private if ofcom had published an opensource gateway to anonymously authenticate against. (assuming the thing was built properly and verified)

But to the point you are hinting at

Google, meta, apple and $OS makers already track you. This is not an issue of privacy persay, its about who can track you and why. I'd much rather a list of times I access a site that required age verification being stored by the government, than every single fucking page I looked at tracked by google/meta.

The latter is already here.

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

#372

Post by lordfrito »

pibaker wrote: post #359
miki123211 wrote: post #336

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is a way to prevent this (or at least slow it down), but that way requires device integrity protection. With integrity protection, tokens can only be minted with a government app, driven by both biometrics and physical human hands touching the physical screen. There's no way to do it in the background. Without it, you can indeed have a single activist mint 10 billion tokens and give them out for free, defeating…

What you conveniently forgot to mention is this means the death of open general purpose computing. No more rooted devices, no more self built PCs. You go buy a government approved device and run the government approved OS preinstalled and the moment you deviate from the government approved happy path you are booted off the internet.

I'm a fan of separating the trusted compute levels for commercial and non-commercial uses/sides of the internet. I think we have to move in this direction.

As it stands today, doing business on ebay/craigslist/etc isn't that much different than doing it in a back alley in the bad part of town. Generally a bad idea but YMMV if you keep your wits about you. Of course it's your right to do business that way, but no one in their right mind thinks it's acceptable to do global commerce that way.

Commerce relies on legally enforceable contracts (both paper and EULAs), which ultimately rely on identity to be enforced. It's a bug, not a feature, that someone on the internet can steal my identity to purchase a product in my name and have it shipped wherever they want. It's a feature, not a bug, that my bank asks me for photo ID before I empty my account in person.

I'm not allowed to access banking computers, except occasionally and from within in a sandbox with proper credentials (ATM card for example). If, in the future my bank needs to do their compute inside my house on my phone, then it seems fair that there should be walls that keep me outside of their trusted compute.

That said, I am 100% behind keeping open purpose general computing free and available. Rooted devices, self built PCs etc all of it. I love it, saying this as a person who grew up building their own PCs and programming from a young age. I think that we all should be able to access the non-commercial side of the internet in any way we want, a true public square, warts, gutters and all. Hobbyists can do whatever they like as long as it doesn't touch commercial systems.

As I see it, the problem for most of us is that the social/fun side of the internet has largely been captured by commercial interests. Anything with a EULA should be considered a commercial site, since you're legally bound by a contract using it. As it stands today all the fun things on the internet would require enforced identity.

Maybe having a separate walled off "commercial internet with identity enforcement" will finally open the public's eyes as to the ramifications of the digital world we've built. And also allow us to individually take a stand and push back against the commercial interests through our daily choices of what sites we visit. Basically voting with your ID chip instead of your pocketbook. You can still do business in the gutter if you want to, but for the normies it will be easier for them to spot when they're in a back alley. And it gives parents options for keeping kids off of the anonymous side as as well.

I do think a Reddit with identity would be a much less toxic place. As long as the brave adventurers among us can still access the digital gutters like 4chan and other message boards.

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

#373

Post by sharperguy »

tqi wrote: post #58

> You’re not happy about it, but you hand over a photo of your passport and hope it doesn’t come back to haunt you. I think for this argument to carry weight with voters, privacy advocates need to be much more specific about what "coming back to haunt you" looks like. They do a little bit of it later on[1], but I think most people do a rough cost benefit in their head and decide that the small benefit outweighs the s…

The biggest angle for me is censorship. You associate your online identity with your legal identity, there is no longer any recourse if you are banned from a platform. You could easily be arrested if your posts are determined to be 'offensive' in some manner considered to be in breach of the law, or simply have no ability to rejoin a platform under a new identity, or have identities across multiple platforms banned in parallel.

I've found that many people are actually in favor of these when they believe that it will only be enforced against people they disagree with. I'm hoping that people will be more likely to listen when they realize that their enemies may in future be able to get into power and change the definition of what is 'offensive', 'misinformation' or 'disinformation' to their own personal opinions.

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

#374

Post by ligne »

ruszki wrote: post #278
pastel8739 wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the smart cards required some human input to perform a signature maybe this could work. Otherwise there is nothing stopping someone from selling use of their card via some proxy software

Is this type of problem even solvable?

I mean Netflix haven't managed to solve password sharing so,

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

#375

Post by KaiserPro »

pessimizer wrote: post #177
johnc1 wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know! What puzzles me is responses every such article gets even on HN - let's build some cool tech that 95% of the general population and 100% of politicians won't even understand not to mention agree to. Yes, government want to end anonymity and that's clear to some. But governments enjoy on a pretty broad support for this and many people supporting this believe it's a real problem. Suggesting to leave it unsolved…

> But governments enjoy on a pretty broad support for this No they do not. They do an enormous amount of PR trying to convince people that they have it, though. In the real world when there is a ton of support behind a position, you see representatives of it all over the place and they are pushing the agenda and the coverage. In the world of online age verification, you just see a bunch of lame duck politicians using…

> No they do not. They do an enormous amount of PR trying to convince people that they have it, though.

Ok who is paying for that PR though? its not free.

its not like all the UK kids charities are for it.

> Most of the anti-social media people are hippy-dippy upper-middle class

My kids school is very much not in the posh area of london (although they are trying to make it posh) they hate what social media feeds their kids _indirectly_ As in clips and trends sent to their kids via chat or DMs.

It appears that what they want for their kids is basically a walled garden where the advert-content can't bombard their kids, along with the racist/violent stuff.

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

#376

Post by AJRF »

ajb wrote: post #370
AJRF wrote: post #322

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 resonat…

And this is why we are where we are

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

#377

Post by [deleted] »

rockskon wrote: post #84
teravor wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

worthless is too strong. the truth is that the two extremes you listed can be titrated. if you use nullifiers you can trade some privacy for some security. basically you convert your true identity into a private token which you can use to authenticate aspects of yourself, the price being that the token can be tracked with some effort across services. better than just using your identity at least. if a token/nullifier…

Okay - so you verify age and what else? What combination of details can you validate on that is meaningfully privacy-preserving and couldn't result in wide-spread re-use of tokens? Additionally - what would prevent some kids from getting a homeless man in the city to hand them his ID, get a facial scan, and everything else you can think of to generate a token and then pass that token around? ZKP are a cryptography-ne…

[deleted]

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

#378

Post by defmacr0 »

KaiserPro wrote: post #371
kaashif wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not the problem governments are solving. They're solving the problem of convincing the public it's a good idea to end the anonymity of internet use.

> That's not the problem governments are solving. They're solving the problem of convincing the public it's a good idea to end the anonymity of internet use. I'm really sorry, but that's giving politicians far to much credit for being able to plan ahead. Look at both the UK and the USA. The UK's just yeeted its PM because he had the personality of a block of cheese. The USA is currently inches away from shooting peop…

Formally politicians may be in charge, but at this point most political power derives from within the administrative state.

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

#379

Post by bigjimmyjohnson »

akie wrote: post #362
AJRF wrote: post #322

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 who…

Just off the top of my head, what if I want to use reddit mostly to talk about mundane things like local events in my city or technology and don't really care if that ties back to me, but I also want to ask about embarrassing health problems or just weird shit and I would rather not have that tied back to me? I should have no options without everyone in the world being able to easily find out about it?

If some sites like Facebook want to be real-name only, that's fine. People can use Facebook for that if they choose. But don't ban alternatives for people who want alternatives.

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

#380

Post by stingraycharles »

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…

Governments are serious about knowing who’s doing what online, and all this age verification is just an excuse. It will also raise the barrier to entry for newcomers in the market, so it’s convenient for platform owners as well.
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