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Online age-verification tools for child safety are surveilling adults

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Re: Online age-verification tools for child safety are surveilling adults

#331

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With scoring isn't the logical play to score your favorite the highest and zero out everyone else? Then it just devolves to fptp.

No, to begin with the people who want to play stupid games would give the highest score to every candidate they approve of and the lowest score to everyone else, and then it devolves to approval voting, which is significantly better than FPTP -- and IRV. And even doing that is people being too clever by half. Imagine there are three candidates. The one you prefer is polling at a score of 6/10, another that you like a…

Interesting, and what are your thoughts on the star variant? Also what is so bad about irv?

Re: Online age-verification tools for child safety are surveilling adults

#332

Here's a good interview with the director of the Free Speech Coalition on the consequences of these "protect the kids" moral panic laws, which include widespread surveillance, banning VPNs and raising the cost of running an independent website to unsustainable levels. Remember it's not just about pornography. It's anything deemed "harmful to minors" including platforms like Reddit, Bluesky or stuff conservative lawma…

This is so much bigger than the “religious right” though, UK and Australia have far less of that and parties from both sides of politics here and in the UK seem to be competing to out-do each other with surveillance, censorship and control of adults online under the guise of ‘child safety’.

And all being pushed so, so much harder in just the last couple of years, all at the same time. I don’t know what’s the source…

Re: Online age-verification tools for child safety are surveilling adults

#334
post #7

The fact that these tools are 'active' centric, i.e : You must perform an action to validate you're NOT a child, these will never protect children. A predator simply needs not to verify anything and appear benign and ironically more anonymous than law abiding people. I'm not saying the inverse is the answer either, just that if anyone without an agenda of surveillance looked at this for a second, the penny would have…

Sob stories about children are always weaponized for oppression. It was used to bash interracial marriage, gay rights, suppress dissent, attack the first amendment, and now this. Whenever you hear some dramatic story involving kids about how you have to live a little less free, know the tactic.

[deleted]

Re: Online age-verification tools for child safety are surveilling adults

#336

Here's a good interview with the director of the Free Speech Coalition on the consequences of these "protect the kids" moral panic laws, which include widespread surveillance, banning VPNs and raising the cost of running an independent website to unsustainable levels. Remember it's not just about pornography. It's anything deemed "harmful to minors" including platforms like Reddit, Bluesky or stuff conservative lawma…

the religious right may be one faction in this push for digital surveilance but I don't think they're the ones behind the EU push for chat control and device lockdown or the insane 3d printer proposal in california.

This is a trans-ideological movement.

Re: Online age-verification tools for child safety are surveilling adults

#337

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, to begin with the people who want to play stupid games would give the highest score to every candidate they approve of and the lowest score to everyone else, and then it devolves to approval voting, which is significantly better than FPTP -- and IRV. And even doing that is people being too clever by half. Imagine there are three candidates. The one you prefer is polling at a score of 6/10, another that you like a…

Interesting, and what are your thoughts on the star variant? Also what is so bad about irv?

STAR is basically fine, it's a variant on score.

There are several problems with IRV, but the most obvious one is that it can often knock the moderate candidate out of the final round.

Suppose you have a district that goes 60% for one party. That party runs two candidates and the other party runs one. With IRV, one of the first party's candidates is the most likely to get knocked out, because they'll each average ~30% of the vote (half of 60%) while the other candidate gets the other 40%. But if the majority party then has a preference for their own extremist, it's their moderate that gets knocked out, and then in a district that goes 60% for that party, the extremist has a decent chance of getting in.

The same dynamic can also cause the minority party candidate to win. 51% of the majority party (i.e. 30.5% of the district's voters) prefer an extremist, but enough of the majority party is afraid of them that in combination with the 40% of the vote from the minority party, the minority party wins the run off. Even though the "winner" would have lost to the majority party's moderate using score voting regardless of whether the extremist was on the ballot and even in a two-candidate election using FPTP.

Re: Online age-verification tools for child safety are surveilling adults

#338
post #71
post #55

Age verification inherently requires identity verification. The UK's Online Safety Act originally had a proposal that would allow users to purchase an ID code anonymously in cash from a corner store, presenting only ID to the cashier the same way as buying alcohol. This was never implemented, because it's more useful for the government and corporations to link all online usage to a government ID.

How do you prevent selling those ID codes to kids?

How do you prevent people verifying other people online? Are you going to send cops to some guy's house because he has 3 google accounts? How do you prevent kids sneaking verification from others?

Re: Online age-verification tools for child safety are surveilling adults

#339

Here's a good interview with the director of the Free Speech Coalition on the consequences of these "protect the kids" moral panic laws, which include widespread surveillance, banning VPNs and raising the cost of running an independent website to unsustainable levels. Remember it's not just about pornography. It's anything deemed "harmful to minors" including platforms like Reddit, Bluesky or stuff conservative lawma…

This is so much bigger than the “religious right” though, UK and Australia have far less of that and parties from both sides of politics here and in the UK seem to be competing to out-do each other with surveillance, censorship and control of adults online under the guise of ‘child safety’. And all being pushed so, so much harder in just the last couple of years, all at the same time. I don’t know what’s the source…

Governments around the world have sought to control the internet and strip away anonymity for years, they've now found their foot-in-the-door moment so they're all going for it in their own way.

Some of it is governments watching and copying each other, some of it is dialogue happening at international events, being driven by groups like the Global Coalition for Digital Safety:

https://initiatives.weforum.org/global-coalition-for-digital...

It's probably not being driven by one single group, there are a number of private and government orgs whos interests in controlling information converge.

Re: Online age-verification tools for child safety are surveilling adults

#340
post #45

This is probably fantastic news for the VPN providers. Lots of people who otherwise wouldn't have bothered are now likely incorporating VPN connectivity into their daily routine. This very obviously includes kids. I also wouldn't be surprised if there were plenty of people only dimly aware of the idea of a VPN who are now sitting up and taking note.

I personally don’t use VPN’s except for work but I have multiple clients installed on my devices “just in case”.
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