Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

expression.fire.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

471–480 of 655 posts

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

#471

Post by wing-_-nuts »

wwweston wrote: post #367
lukan wrote: post #325

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I don't see where I should sacrifice my freedoms to remain anonymous on the internet or MUCH more importantly, have control over my hardware and software just because parents can't do their job

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

#472

Post by Aurornis »

DennisP wrote: post #460
Aurornis wrote: post #442

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. And then what? You think the police are going to make a case out of getting a token blacklisted or start an investigation into the person who the token came from? Also confiscate their devices as part of the investigation? I guarantee that the token source will be someone in another st…

I'm saying a system like this is preferable to attaching our real identities to everything we do online, as countries are attempting right now. We can verify age without losing privacy or anonymous speech. It's still my preference to have no verification at all. On the internet, nobody should know you're a dog.

> I'm saying a system like this is preferable to attaching our real identities to everything we do online, as countries are attempting right now. We can verify age without losing privacy or anonymous speech.

The problem with your hypothetical was that you casually introduced the police as an enforcement mechanism for cases of a minor accessing an over-18 website. The implication is that the physical police are now involved in our access of websites, and you’re saying the tokens involved in us accessing websites will have some evidence that they can use in the investigation of that access.

This is why we keep saying that the anonymous token schemes don’t preserve privacy. It always turns into a slippery slope of adding escape hatches to the anonymity to enforce violations. The very implication that the police are going to be tasked with going out and confiscating devices to investigate suspected age token violations is an indicator of how far the window has shifted on Internet privacy.

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

#473

Post by xandrius »

biophysboy wrote: post #116
mossTechnician wrote: post #74

I 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.

Its a tragedy of the commons situation. The benefits of being offline are dampened by the kid being out of the loop

What internet loop does a kid to be in before the age of 14?

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

#474

Post by RajT88 »

andrewla wrote: post #68
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…

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…

Kids shred these schemes. The designers of them seem to forget that the social dynamics of the adult world are completely different - just one kid needs to figure out how to bypass the system, and the knowledge spreads like wildfire.

Example: schools banned phones, so kids switched to talking over Google docs:

https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2019/03/hotte...

If we give parents better tools to limit and monitor internet access, kids will just buy a used phone which is unregulated. If their parents even bother to use the tools in the first place (it is my impression most parents do not). There is also a lot of loopholes parents do not even think of (like a web browser on a game console).

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

#476

Post by CJefferson »

basilikum wrote: post #418
pif wrote: post #386

I am always surprised that people get shocked when online privacy is put at risk, as if it was a fundamental human right. REMOTE PRIVACY NEVER EXISTED BEFORE A FEW DECADES AGO! And what happened in these decades are enough for the societies to wonder whether this new possibility in human connections (i.e. remote privacy) is globally a good thing. Just stomping your feet because the new toy may be declared illegal is…

> REMOTE PRIVACY NEVER EXISTED BEFORE A FEW DECADES AGO! That is plain wrong. You could absolutely send a letter anonymously without showing your ID. You could use a phone booth without showing your ID. Increasingly more countries demand ID verification for such things like getting a SIM card that used to be remote privacy. But much more importantly you are making a false differentiation between 'remote' and local pr…

While you could send a letter anonymously, it was also trivial for the government to read any letter it wanted.

The problem is we have switched from a world where it was easy to let the government read selected communications (single phones, letters), to one where it's hard not to give them access to everything or nothing.

Personally, if there was some 'magic wand' way I could let the government keep it's previous levels of control in the internet age (they could individually pick users and put work into monitoring their communications, with a clear low limit on the number they can previously watch), I personally would.

But that's hard to do -- it's not obvious it's possible at all, so we need to define a 'new normal', but let's not pretend we aren't taking a huge amount of existing power away from governments with large scale encryption.

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

#477

Post by biophysboy »

xandrius wrote: post #473
biophysboy wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Its a tragedy of the commons situation. The benefits of being offline are dampened by the kid being out of the loop

What internet loop does a kid to be in before the age of 14?

In my opinion, none, but many parents disagree. Also, its more about the secondary effects, where all of their friends at school are talking about internet things they are unfamiliar with.

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

#478

Post by johnc1 »

hdgvhicv wrote: post #305
prmoustache wrote: post #303

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Have decent defaults. “Is this phone for a child” and “scan this wr from parents phone”. 90% of problems solved. That said while Apple does a good job at parental controls, Microsoft is altered. Trying to have controls on Minecraft across a windows laptop and a switch involved a multi hour odyssey, creating tons of accounts for parent and child.

Or, just incentivize or mandate stores to sell "child-certified" phones with parental controls pre-configured (along with a physical plug-and-play usb key for parents disable them when the child is old enough).

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

#479

Post by ajb »

ImPostingOnHN wrote: post #451
ajb wrote: post #370

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I'm not a big fan of the "my way is the right way to oppose things, your way of opposing it is wrong" routine. You can each make a difference in your own way and report back in a year who changed the world more. No need to alienate allies.

I think we can already conclude that the current approach is failing. I'm suggesting reasons why I think that is the case. Of course, my diagnosis may be wrong. But it's implausible that doing what we've done during 20 years of erosion of privacy is going to suddenly turn things around.

As for not alienating allies: if it's this easy to piss off people to agree with you, maybe it's also worth thinking about how to talk to those you want to win over.

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

#480

Post by bigbuppo »

sdfsdfsd3443f wrote: post #342
bigbuppo wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the problem is "social media bad for kids" then any parent that allows their children to access social media is as guilty of abuse or neglect as a parent that lets them play in traffic. Throw the parents in prison and put the kids in foster care. Problem solved.

People make problems where there are none. Parents all around me are giving smartphones to their eight year olds without supervision. I have kids and no amount of bullshit is going to convince me this is necessary for social interaction of any kind. If anything the "phone kids" are the weird ones. People are creating this problem. You can easily, very easily, say "no" to a kid. I pay to keep you bloody alive and I wi…

Well, as I said, we figured out ways to make parents big-r Responsible by applying harsh penalties when they abuse or neglect their children. We spend countless billions on government agenices whose sole purpose is to intervene when parents fail their children. We should use this pre-existing system to deal with the problem of parents allowing their children to use social media.
Post reply on HN