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EU Age Control: The trojan horse for digital IDs

juraj.bednar.io

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Re: EU Age Control: The trojan horse for digital IDs

#151

Post by lukeschlather »

pveierland wrote: post #118

It's frustrating to see how shortsighted and tech-illiterate politicians are on these topics. This article from Norway today presents the attitude of the minister of digitization as simply "Social media companies are making billions and we expect them to adequately implement age verification systems with solutions that respect privacy and we will fine those who fail at doing this". The fantastic irony is that in some…

A decentralized government ID system is a contradiction in terms. Government ID is and must be centralized. For me the decentralization is precisely the problem. I shouldn't end up with my government ID registered in a newspaper's database because I bought a newspaper subscription. Decentralization is not good here. In order for identification to work, decentralization requires that everyone who tangentially has access to your identity has persistent verifiable knowledge of your identity. Even in a centralized system it is hard to avoid this.

Re: EU Age Control: The trojan horse for digital IDs

#153

Post by knollimar »

dwedge wrote: post #105
jeroenhd wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And unlike in the real world, there's little to no real benefit to it online. What value is there to industrializing any of this? Kids who will pay someone for their age tokens to watch porn or create social media would probably be smart enough to download a free VPN instead. Even in the very worst case scenario for the designers of this system, where large amounts of people manage to extract their tokens and hand th…

This "they'll just use a vpn" argument is infuriating to me because it's being used to downplay intrusive laws and make them more palatable. The obvious next step (the UK already hinted at it after the online safety act) is forcing VPNs to do ID verification.

if anything, the "they'll just use a vpn" is an argument for the other way.

Law has privacy downsides and is trivially bypassable -> law is bad.

Re: EU Age Control: The trojan horse for digital IDs

#154

Post by strictnein »

sunaookami wrote: post #49
kivle wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it has more to do with digital verification for social media in a hope of killing bot accounts that are interfering in the public debate. Some of the biggest social media influencer accounts turns out to be Chinese/Russian bots trying to fuel hate/division our democracies, and with LLMs it is only getting worse. Some form of digital ID to verify social media account identities is probably the only hope left o…

>Some of the biggest social media influencer accounts turns out to be Chinese/Russian bots trying to fuel hate/division our democracies This is propaganda, none of those supposed networks exists or were successful in anything and when the media do show some supposed accounts they don't have a lot of views. Please stop falling for this, your democracy sucks because the politicians suck and the people want change so th…

> "none of those supposed networks exists"

Countries have been interfering in the internal workings of other countries for centuries, if not millennia. If you want to read up on more recent accounts of this, many of which predate social media, the book Active Measures by Thomas Rid is a good place to start.

Or you can continue to think that this is all just made up "propaganda" and we're all fools, but you alone have seen the light.

Re: EU Age Control: The trojan horse for digital IDs

#155

Post by vrganj »

petre wrote: post #132
silversmith wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In Latvia we've had digital id for close to 20 years. Banks mostly use their own auth, some rely on digital id. No travel service has ever wanted me to use digital id, let alone any other kind of shopping. What we use it for is access to government resources, and signing digital documents. I trust this system WAY more than whatever some company comes up with.

> No travel service has ever wanted me to use digital id, let alone any other kind of shopping Yup, until they are regulated to do so in case you buy booze, porn, metal detectors, crossbows or who knows what else. And until silversmith tries to dodge the draft but he accidentaly bought some booze woth his gov eID to party with friends.

What's stopping anyone from requiring a passport scan right now?

Re: EU Age Control: The trojan horse for digital IDs

#156

Post by chupasaurus »

sunaookami wrote: post #49
kivle wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it has more to do with digital verification for social media in a hope of killing bot accounts that are interfering in the public debate. Some of the biggest social media influencer accounts turns out to be Chinese/Russian bots trying to fuel hate/division our democracies, and with LLMs it is only getting worse. Some form of digital ID to verify social media account identities is probably the only hope left o…

>Some of the biggest social media influencer accounts turns out to be Chinese/Russian bots trying to fuel hate/division our democracies This is propaganda, none of those supposed networks exists or were successful in anything and when the media do show some supposed accounts they don't have a lot of views. Please stop falling for this, your democracy sucks because the politicians suck and the people want change so th…

Russian "bot farms" are investigated quite well. Usually they operate in Russian-speaking sides of platforms but sometimes they go "foreign". I agree that impact of those might be exaggerated but it's hard to measure in the first place.

Re: EU Age Control: The trojan horse for digital IDs

#157

Post by SoftTalker »

jeroenhd wrote: post #107
raverbashing wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Overall, as with every digital ID thread, it would help if some of the fearmon gering commentators would read the actually EUDI specs for once in their lives Yeah I'm getting really really tired of the "crying wolf" crowd

To be fair to some of them, across the Atlantic the Americans are implementing similar laws in absolutely ridiculous ways. Many Americans don't even have ID (and plenty of those are reluctant to the general concept of any kind of government ID), let alone any kind of digital ID. However, their governments are pushing frankly weird and absurd ID verification laws to businesses online. Meta seems to be bankrolling lobb…

> Many Americans don't even have ID

I don't believe this. "Many" perhaps in raw out-of-context numbers but as a percentage of the population, very few functioning, self-supporting and employed adults in America do not have an ID. It's simply not possible to participate in society without one. You need an ID to register a car, to drive, to vote, to bank, to get a job, to buy a house, to rent an apartment, to get water, power, gas, internet....

If you don't have an ID, you are either a child, or you are deliberately trying to exist off the record. I.e. you are here illegally or you have chosen some very fringe antisocial survivalist offgrid way of living.

Re: EU Age Control: The trojan horse for digital IDs

#158

Post by Bender »

I do not know about others here but I will not be participating in anything that requires ID verification. Such domains will be blocked on my DoH servers both private and public though I doubt many here would want to use something other than Cloudflare DoH.

Anyone else here planning on blocking sites that require age / ID verification? Are there any publicly available domain deny-lists that could be added to uBlock yet?

Re: EU Age Control: The trojan horse for digital IDs

#159

Post by SoftTalker »

jdrek1 wrote: post #84
Muromec wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't help but think people mean something else when they hear "digital ids" then what they are. Like I have a digital id from the government of the Netherlands that I use to log into their government systems to declare taxes or what not. I had an X509 certificate issued by Ukrainian government and have their app to do the same. It's bad somehow?

The problem is what follows. They will make it mandatory to use the electronic ID to do anything, resulting in total surveillance. And if you happen to land on their "bad" list (which eventually everyone will), you're locked out of life completely. No banking, no traveling, no communication with anyone, no buying food, nothing.

They already do this. KYC, and similar laws. You can't open a bank account in 2026 (at least in the USA) without ID. You can't get credit, open an investment account, buy a house, vote, or be employed without an ID.

A proper digital ID would eliminate a lot of problems we now have with identity theft, having to obsessively protect names, dates of birth, SSNs in our databases (these things were not considered secrets in the pre-internet era).

Yes, we need to be vigilant about freedoms and privacy. But the idea of a government-issued ID that "proves" who you are is not new and I struggle to think of any way identity can be "proven" without a central issuing authority.

Re: EU Age Control: The trojan horse for digital IDs

#160

Post by subscribed »

petre wrote: post #137
subscribed wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The governments don't mind AI CP even made with real children as long as you're a billionaire openly selling access to the generator. That kind of serves as a proof to your opinion it's a boogeyman.

They possibly do, which is why France invited Musk to attend a hearing. https://www.reuters.com/legal/litigation/musk-summoned-by-fr... But they would gladly use that for more control.

*invited to attend a hearing* after they could no longer ignore the fact the guy is openly selling (and previously posting) CSAM based on the real kids?

That would be a very gentle way to express hurt feelings, not the way to treat a guy who knowingly does that.

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