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Mozilla to UK regulators: VPNs are essential privacy and security tools

blog.mozilla.org

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Re: Mozilla to UK regulators: VPNs are essential privacy and security tools

#181

Post by aboardRat4 »

globular-toast wrote: post #45
aboardRat4 wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had internet since I was a kid. By attacking the internet you are attacking my homeland.

How old are you? I had the internet too but my homeland is already gone. Forums are empty, IRC channels quiet. It's just garbage run by adtech companies now.

IRC is not dead, and not all forums are dead.

Adtech companies are working tiresly in order to deceive us and drop us into their narrative, but I don't believe that everything is lost. After all, even fbpurity continues being developed. We need to write scrapers to extract our friends, relatives, and everyone else's data from walled gardens, not whine about gardens having walls.

Yes, Google enshittified, OkCupid enshuttified, many things enshittified, and many people who were the founders just passed away. But this only means that we need to be the militant generation, not that the battle is lost.

Re: Mozilla to UK regulators: VPNs are essential privacy and security tools

#182

Post by Ylpertnodi »

phatfish wrote: post #172
pretzel5297 wrote: post #74

[flagged]

I will do everything in my power to keep the tech bros out of my children's life. Yes, that includes being a responsible parent. It also includes societal norms being established. Just as was done for alcohol, nicotine, movies, porn mags ect. I guarantee you are not as dedicated as me trying to protect my kids, so there will be age gates, and that includes VPNs. Everyone knows VPNs are only used for getting shit for…

>Everyone knows VPNs are only used for getting shit for free,

I don't use my vpn for 'shit for free'.

Re: Mozilla to UK regulators: VPNs are essential privacy and security tools

#183

Post by phatfish »

braiamp wrote: post #131

I love how the comments miss that the problem these laws address deserve addressing, but from the producers side: making safe products for the public. This specific solution is fashioned after tobacco and alcohol regulation, which was never primarily about parental supervision, it's about what can be sold and how. And in public health we'd want everyone moving away from both not just kids. The boneheadness of age ver…

The issue is, to regulate the service Meta (or whoever) provides, they have to age gate anyway. Unless the service is child friendly for all users. Which would mean; follow and friend limits, usage limits, blackout periods after 9pm, only seeing posts from friends, no algorithmic "time line". That sort of thing.

That regulation would be orders of magnitude more difficult to implement. Just look at the malicious compliance the cookie regulations created, that was a single modal.

Better to just ban it for under 16s. That might happen before my kids are old enough to be fully exploited.

Re: Mozilla to UK regulators: VPNs are essential privacy and security tools

#184

Post by maccard »

freedomben wrote: post #164
pretzel5297 wrote: post #74

[flagged]

While I agree with your comment at a high level, simply saying it's the parents job k thx bai is not going to cut it. Parents have to have the tools we need to do our jobs. I don't want the government touching it with a 10 foot pole, and no adults should have to give up their freedoms (these kids will be adults some day after all, so even if we're doing it "for the kids" we need to consider the world we're building f…

Parents have the tools already here in the UK.

ISPs come with adult content disabled by default and someone has to opt in to it. Every major OS (Windows, Mac, iOS, android) ships with device level parental controls. Games consoles enforce these based on birth date. ISPs here also provide free network level filtering on top of that. All of this only matters if the parents don’t bypass them when asked.

If a kid is determined enough to get past Apple family controls and the network level filtering on their home network, they’ll have a VPN from a dodgy source in 15 minutes. The solution is to use the tools that are there right now, or accept that age verification is coming for everything.

Re: Mozilla to UK regulators: VPNs are essential privacy and security tools

#185

Post by jonhohle »

philipallstar wrote: post #179
soco wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nevertheless as a society we do have laws protecting the children, also the adults, on the streets. Why not having or applying laws for the online? Why should we expect or ask that the internet be magically better handled by the parents alone?

Because online is global, and you can't have effective local laws against a global system. Parents don't need magic; they just need to watch what their kids use devices for, and keep the devices in public areas of the house. The main thing the state can do is stop requiring kids to have portable internet-connected devices for state schooling.

You are obviously not a parent. I lock down devices, lock down my network, then the public school gives my kid a laptop with access to nearly everything I’ve tried to filter. Even if I can successfully monitor it at home, the device is in their possession and out of my control as a parent for 6-8 hours a day. The government is literally bypassing our family rules and my ability to protect my children in the way I see fit.

For 90% of kids, that’s not going to be an issue and everyone can feel like they’re such a great parent. But for another group of kids, they absolutely cannot handle it and have not developed the executive function to be able to manage access to everything the Internet offers.

In the past we understood this as a society. Broadcasters on public airwaves had standards for what was appropriate. We’ve completely thrown those out in one generation and decided gambling, porn, extremely violence, social and emotional grooming and abuse, and lots more are all OK to give children access to, unchecked and with limited education. It’s really kind of sick.

Re: Mozilla to UK regulators: VPNs are essential privacy and security tools

#186

Post by aboardRat4 »

zkmon wrote: post #171

USA entities tend to think that terms like "privacy", "security" have same meanings and assumptions across the globe, and that the USA laws are universal. Maybe they also think that entire world is just as dumb or dumber than USA. For a start, you should consider this fact: Privacy for a bad actor goes directly against the security for citizens and good actors. So when you talk about privacy you are making an assumpt…

If you don't like privacy, publish your bank card number and cvv in response to this message.

Re: Mozilla to UK regulators: VPNs are essential privacy and security tools

#187

Post by maccard »

phatfish wrote: post #175
notrealyme123 wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not to be to overly reductive, but you could use the same argument for drugs and weapons.

It's not being reductive at all. I'm certain parent commentor doesn't have kids so they don't care. If someone was using the street outside their house to deal drugs and causing problems they would be happy for the police to "regulate" that activity. It's just selfishness. "I want some privacy utopia on the internet (which can no longer exist, the internet isn't the place of the 90s and early 00s), so your kids can b…

How does banning VPNs equate to policing drug dealing? The drug dealing is already illegal.

Re: Mozilla to UK regulators: VPNs are essential privacy and security tools

#188

Post by lurkshark »

freedomben wrote: post #164
pretzel5297 wrote: post #74

[flagged]

While I agree with your comment at a high level, simply saying it's the parents job k thx bai is not going to cut it. Parents have to have the tools we need to do our jobs. I don't want the government touching it with a 10 foot pole, and no adults should have to give up their freedoms (these kids will be adults some day after all, so even if we're doing it "for the kids" we need to consider the world we're building f…

The part I don’t totally understand with the age verification laws is that as I understand it, the websites need to implement the age verification. It seems like the bad actors just won’t do that, and we could’ve made compliance easier for the good actors by just requiring something like the Restricted to Adults label as a meta tag.

https://www.rtalabel.org/

Re: Mozilla to UK regulators: VPNs are essential privacy and security tools

#189

Post by maccard »

phatfish wrote: post #172
pretzel5297 wrote: post #74

[flagged]

I will do everything in my power to keep the tech bros out of my children's life. Yes, that includes being a responsible parent. It also includes societal norms being established. Just as was done for alcohol, nicotine, movies, porn mags ect. I guarantee you are not as dedicated as me trying to protect my kids, so there will be age gates, and that includes VPNs. Everyone knows VPNs are only used for getting shit for…

> Mozilla have picked a battle that will kill off Firefox, I am now not longer interested in recommending or using it

Presumably your support is for a browser developed by Google instead, as they are clearly not interested in surveillance or being in your children’s life?

Re: Mozilla to UK regulators: VPNs are essential privacy and security tools

#190

Post by maccard »

ktallett wrote: post #62
cryo32 wrote: post #57

I have seen some of the inside of this and it's not quite as clear cut. One side of this is driven by a bunch of not too reputable think tanks behind the scenes who persuaded a couple of fringe academics to agree with them and push for it via the civil service. The government is taking bad, paid for advice. I don't know what the agenda is there but there is one and I reckon it's commercial. Probably a consortium of b…

This comment is a little unclear. However no matter what the government or security services want, they won't be able to stop people who want to use VPN or End to end encryption. Nothing would ever change in that regard.

That’s because they don’t want to stop VPNs, they want to criminalise the ones they don’t have visibility into.
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