I feel we are preaching to the choir here. How do we get this message out to the wider population when it's being corralled so much?
I think this Cloudflare business ties into it, although it is masquerading as bot protection.
Age verification is just a precursor to automated attribution of speech
241–250 of 663 posts
Re: Age verification is just a precursor to automated attribution of speech
#242Earlier quoted context omitted.
In fairness, the evidence is that people already pretty firmly against things like chat control and the will to push it through tends to come from the political circles more than popular belief it is a good idea. I expect that if the measure itself went to a general vote, the majority would be against it once they have to deal with a specific proposal. It takes repeated pushes by the authoritarians looking for an opp…
Stupid things like brexit was put to a vote, but really important things such as age verification and mass surveillance are never put to any vote.
In what way was Brexit a stupid thing? It was an extemely important decision, directly affecting everybody's life. If asking people about anything then isn't that what it should be? You might not like the outcome (I don't) but I consider the question of Brexit important.
Re: Age verification is just a precursor to automated attribution of speech
#243Earlier quoted context omitted.
“Age verification” isn't a problem in itself, the problem is how it's done. They could issue a physical id card with a cryptographic chip and do the age verification in a zero-knowledge fashion and it would be perfectly fine. The problem is the lack of thinking about the solution and just handwaving “age verification” as a political posture, which is why we end up with half-baked systems.
But to be effective you need to prove that the person presenting the ID is the person the ID belongs to. In person that falls to a human being, and it's an easy and intuitive task that takes seconds. On the internet this involves some kind of video recording being sent to some agency somewhere being paid a fee, who may later be asked to prove the efficacy of their service. This agency needs a digital copy of the phot…
> On the internet this involves some kind of video recording being sent to some agency somewhere being paid a fee, who may later be asked to prove the efficacy of their service. This agency needs a digital copy of the photo from your ID for matching purposes.
That's why I'm talking about an “Id card” using Zero-knowledge proofs in a cryptographic chip, not using a paper ID with your picture on top…
Re: Age verification is just a precursor to automated attribution of speech
#244Earlier quoted context omitted.
Punishing companies for data breaches will solve more data breaches than any amount of encryption.
I find that particularly unrealistic that we can arrive at a good place solely by fining companies for data breaches.
Seems to mostly work in Europe. Did you know that a European person's advertising tracking data is the most expensive because it's so hard to get?
Re: Age verification is just a precursor to automated attribution of speech
#245In the intel industry, it is known that metadata is more or less enough to identify people. That's state/military intel. Several countries have already implemented bulk acquisition / collection of data that "crosses the borders", which is a ridiculous concept.
If you're located in, say, Norway - and send someone who is also located in Norway a message via Messenger, there's a good likelihood that message will go to some foreign located Meta server, and back to Norway.
When this was being implemented, there was some noise and protests from experts, but that's about it. For the general population it went quietly and without notice.
Re: Age verification is just a precursor to automated attribution of speech
#246Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why are you telling someone else how their hypothetical implementation works?
There's no hypothetical, they tried to equate this to basically buying a gun where you do the certification on purchase. Internet connected devices are not planned to be controlled like that but per session. Under that model what they proposed is obviously not going to work.
The existing California law that passed a few months ago makes it per user account
Re: Age verification is just a precursor to automated attribution of speech
#247Re: Age verification is just a precursor to automated attribution of speech
#248Earlier quoted context omitted.
This assumes good faith, which doesn't match reality. It's about control, not protecting children. Also age verification is still a problem in itself. Given your idea of a physical card, kids will find a way to use the card of their parents. Even if the card couldn't be misused by others - you give platforms the knowledge of whom is a minor, which means they can be targeted better.
Kids will simply find a way to circumvent it without any extra steps. To make age verification useful for protecting kids, you'd need to lock down every software on every operating system and put it under tight government control. We're talking about things like every programming language with a networking library, wget, curl, every web browser that was ever developed, etc. All kinds of tools and software would need…
> Kids will simply find a way to circumvent it without any extra steps.
This is just an argument against any regulation whatsoever. Yes, some people will find ways to do illegal stuff, but that doesn't mean forbidding stuff is useless. For instance gangs members always find a way to get access to weapons even in countries where firearms is regulated, but there are still pretty much zero mass slaughter in schools in these countries.
> To make age verification useful for protecting kids, you'd need to lock down every software on every operating system and put it under tight government control.
No! This should never be implemented at the software or OS level in the first place. You should be handed a chip card that you can use for that purpose, like how the bank rent you a credit card. Any other implementation is a bad one, and should be fought.
But by fighting the very idea of age verification instead, an idea that pretty much nobody else in the society has issues with when it comes to voting rights, driving rights, or alcohol consumption, you are just favoring these poor implementations by moving the debate on a ground you can't win.
> Otherwise, some smart kid is guaranteed to get around the restriction and give that method to others,
You should really read that “The optimal amount of fraud is non zero” blog post I linked above.
Re: Age verification is just a precursor to automated attribution of speech
#249Yup "protecting kids" has a long, long history of being used as an excuse to restrict citizens rights, yet something like Epstein Island was happening with all the proponents of child protection being happy visitors of the said island.
Jevon McSkimming, the second most powerful person in the New Zealand police, under Jacinda Ardern, was arrested not long ago for viewing extreme kiddie porn involving animals and torture. He had been doing so on his work computer!
Complaints had been made against the man for years and been thrown out because of who he was, and the material was only found by accident.
This same individual had been yet another one of those arguing for tighter controls on the internet and free speech for the peasants.
Another one of these "one rule for me, another for thee" types.
Re: Age verification is just a precursor to automated attribution of speech
#250Earlier quoted context omitted.
But to be effective you need to prove that the person presenting the ID is the person the ID belongs to. In person that falls to a human being, and it's an easy and intuitive task that takes seconds. On the internet this involves some kind of video recording being sent to some agency somewhere being paid a fee, who may later be asked to prove the efficacy of their service. This agency needs a digital copy of the phot…
> On the internet this involves some kind of video recording being sent to some agency somewhere being paid a fee, who may later be asked to prove the efficacy of their service. This agency needs a digital copy of the photo from your ID for matching purposes. That's why I'm talking about an “Id card” using Zero-knowledge proofs in a cryptographic chip, not using a paper ID with your picture on top…
Doesn't matter!
You still need to send a digital image from the id, signed by an authority, saying "this person is 18"
You then still need a trusted ID service or algorithm to capture an image of the user _at the time of use_ to compare that to.
Just having access to your digital ID credentials proves nothing
The zero knowledge proof only helps prevent tracking between the ID service and the website you're logging into. This is valuable but requires standardisation and client side support, which doesn't exist.
All the time the client side is implemented by JavaScript served from the server side you're just trusting these parties to behave and not snoop