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Age verification is just a precursor to automated attribution of speech

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Re: Age verification is just a precursor to automated attribution of speech

#431

Post by greenleafone7 »

ShinyLeftPad wrote: post #209
monssooon wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is what I fear the most. It is gas lighting and just manipulation. The idea of privacy will become associated with crime. Further down the line technical solutions that are private will become illegal and in general not being pro survailance will get you in trouble

Do you acknowledge that for many people and practically e2ee and crime are connected? e2ee is a very useful tool for crime and combined with crypto useful tool for monetizing crime. Criminals used to speak in code, meet clandestine, use burner phones and websites were easy to shut down. Now they don't need to. The solution to privacy problem is not to shout while closing your ears but to make it clear that you see th…

"Ordinary people do not care about e2ee. Gotta read the room"

Re: Age verification is just a precursor to automated attribution of speech

#432

Post by jklowden »

Count me among those who think publishers should always know who they’re publishing. When law enforcement comes knocking, a warrant should be all they need. Meta can’t shrug and say they don’t know who Batman1964 is.

There’s nothing new in publishing anonymously, just ask George Elliot. What’s new is the notion that publishers have no liability. Social media companies do not claim to speak for themselves. They have no reporters, no sources to protect. They’re one giant “letters to the editor” section. They should know for whom they speak.

Whether or not a writer commits libel is for the courts to decide. Neither the writer nor publisher has the right to avoid responsibility by camouflage.

Re: Age verification is just a precursor to automated attribution of speech

#433

Post by pc86 »

jodrellblank wrote: post #391
pc86 wrote: post #345

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you think the average person - ~98 IQ, at most one year of college but likely none, working some sort of retail, home health, or counter food service job - is truly capable of synthesizing third-order effects of a legal proposal and how it interacts with the current environment? If you do, what about someone 10% below average? 20%? Even at 20% below average intelligence we're still talking about one out of every t…

If I follow your comment, then a politician who is elected based on how they look while eating a bacon sandwich[1] is better at synthesizing third-order effects of a legal proposal because they are a politician? (i.e. Politicians are selected from average people, often on things like appearance, charm, charisma, voice, snappiness, being less-bad than the other candidates, standing for the voter's preferred party, etc…

Why would you think I'm making that completely different argument?

If the current scenario is bad, and someone says "we should do this other thing that would be even worse," pointing out that the other thing is worse isn't an endorsement of the current (bad) scenario.

Re: Age verification is just a precursor to automated attribution of speech

#434

Post by pc86 »

goalieca wrote: post #417
pc86 wrote: post #338

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is that "the authoritarians" (read: almost every politician at every level of government, but a drastically increasing percentage the higher you go) only need to get something passed once then it is there forever. Every law should have an automatic sunset period of 1-10 years that requires it to pass the entire legislative process again, or at least both full chambers + signing.

I remember the patriot act.

In this very comment I started talking about the patriot act two or three times but kept deleting it because I didn't want to ramble. But yeah that's exactly what I was thinking of - for people who care about privacy and freedom it was really one of the worst pieces of legislation in modern US history, and permanently changed the country for the worse.

Re: Age verification is just a precursor to automated attribution of speech

#435

Post by iamnothere »

intended wrote: post #420
iamnothere wrote: post #399

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“Parents” are not a monolith. Your group will lose this war. Any temporary wins will be worked around and kids will probably lead the charge.

My “group” is not what you think it is. I have been beating on this drum to avoid this situation for far longer than it has been the topic of interest on HN for the past few months. We are here, because difficult conversations were avoided and action which could be taken to stop this from metastizing came in the way of growth. The “parents” win just by having the laws passed, because it makes it clear what guard rail…

Privacy as we wanted, anonymity on the clearnet, is losing, I agree. The next generation of privacy, taking your shit offline, is winning. The step beyond, fully private networks, is in its infancy, but we’ll get there.

Re: Age verification is just a precursor to automated attribution of speech

#436

Post by jkestner »

Aurornis wrote: post #411
RachelF wrote: post #41

Age verification is just one part of this crackdown. Device attestation is another - making sure you're using an unmodified government approved operating system and apps linked to your ID.

Every time age verification comes up, it’s shocking how many comments here start proposing schemes where we use government-issued tokens combined with secure device attestation to solve the problem. Some people get so focused on providing a technical solution to the problem of age verification without revealing your full ID to the website that they forget that they’re proposing we start requiring only government-appr…

Not too shocking. Many people’s jobs here require that they pretend that they’re not coding for fascism.

Re: Age verification is just a precursor to automated attribution of speech

#437

Post by mpalmer »

jklowden wrote: post #432

Count me among those who think publishers should always know who they’re publishing. When law enforcement comes knocking, a warrant should be all they need. Meta can’t shrug and say they don’t know who Batman1964 is. There’s nothing new in publishing anonymously, just ask George Elliot. What’s new is the notion that publishers have no liability. Social media companies do not claim to speak for themselves. They have n…

Freedom of expression is inseparable from the right to privacy.

Should journalists be forced to reveal their sources if the subject of a claim sues for defamation?

Re: Age verification is just a precursor to automated attribution of speech

#438

Post by po1nt »

oarsinsync wrote: post #223
po1nt wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The best level of democracy is no democracy. The problem of voting for road repairs is a problem we created by democracy. We voted ourselves into a system we can't escape, just because people back in the days couldn't fully comprehend side effects of their collective decisions. Very few people realize that there is option to not use government cohersion as a solution to everything. I know this is unpopular opinion. T…

> No one cares about UK having a king, because it doesn't change a thing. Which is the position the Monarchy absolutely wants you to have, and they definitely don't want you to know that they have veto power over all laws, and regularly intervene and get laws modified so that they're not included in scope. Meanwhile they just gave themselves a massive pay rise, at a time when government is cutting public spending in…

You can benefit much more as a corrupt politician, as the blame is diluted between the whole government. Single king is responsible for it's actions and we even have a word for throwing them out of the window if they misbehave.

It's much rarer for politicians to even get into jail.

Re: Age verification is just a precursor to automated attribution of speech

#439

Post by friendzis »

DrScientist wrote: post #413
friendzis wrote: post #404

Earlier quoted context omitted.

First, my comment is a knee jerk reaction to the idea of representative democracy falling to authoritarianism, don't take it as seriously in favor of direct democracy. Second, your comment hinges on an interesting hidden assumption. There's implication, that representative democracy selects for a group with inherently higher average bandwidth allocated per proposal and inherently higher average expertise to evaluate…

> There's implication, that representative democracy selects for a group with inherently higher average bandwidth allocated per proposal \ Eh? It's a representatives full time job to consider these things as oppose to the general public doing a full time job and then having to consider legislation. The difference between lobbying for representatives versus people directly is that representatives have to answer to the…

> The difference between lobbying for representatives versus people directly is that representatives have to answer to the people - whereas no-one loses their job as a citizen if they get persuaded by story tellers.

I would not be so sure. What's the fundamental difference between convincing general public to vote certain way in a hypothetical direct-ish democracy and convincing that lobbied-for vote by representatives is the good one in a representative system? Quite a large portion of this full time job is already not spent nitpicking legislative initiatives

Re: Age verification is just a precursor to automated attribution of speech

#440

Post by SoftTalker »

microgpt wrote: post #71
NoPicklez wrote: post #53

I think you can look at all things pessimistically, like this article does but at the end of the day we all agree that there are things online we don't want our kids seeing or engaging with and it takes regulators to push how we protect them from those online places. What other options to regulators have? Age restriction has been around for longer than the internet itself, so its regulators applying that logic to the…

I like the California law where the device owner sets the parental controls and apps have to obey them or get fined.

This is the best solution I've seen, and it's also the simplest. No authority is involved other than the parent. No complicated protocols, or heavy CS theory about privacy preserving algorithms. Just one setting, "this device belongs to a minor" and apps either honor it or they are not allowed in the App store. Will some parents turn it off for their 14 year old? Yes, but some parents buy beer for their 14 year olds. That's a different problem.

Apple, Google, and the social media companies could have done this 10 years ago and we would not even be having this debate today. But they decided they didn't have any social responsibility for what their devices and software did, so here we are.

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