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What we call "age verification" is actually mass surveillance

pluralistic.net

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Re: What we call "age verification" is actually mass surveillance

#511

Post by tremon »

pseudalopex wrote: post #506
tremon wrote: post #488

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The government would know what wallet requested each single use identifier Which only means that the government knows how many tokens each citizen consumes on average. They don't know where each identifier was used nor the exact timestamp unless each website communicates this to the government, and such a backchannel does not exist in the spec.

You did not know governments demanded records? Or infiltrated networks? And governments investigated high electricity users as suspected marijuana growers. Would governments ignore high identifier use?

Can you make an actual argument rather than spouting insinuations? It's rather tiresome to have to construct my own straw man from your drivel.

Re: What we call "age verification" is actually mass surveillance

#512

Post by oliwarner »

Wowfunhappy wrote: post #16
john_strinlai wrote: post #2

> "Age verification" means that everyone who does anything online will have to submit to fine-grained tracking and recording of all their online activities. its been said 1000 times here, but: age verification doesn't have to be a nightmare dystopia of 24/7 fine-grained tracking and recording unless you are somehow hoping to achieve 100% success rate (something we have not done with any other law ever). there are sev…

Could you be more specific as to what you're imagining? I don't personally see a way to verify someone's age which doesn't involve either credit card verification, photo id verification, or some sort of facial recognition. If you know enough about someone to verify their age—even to a relatively low degree of accuracy—you probably know enough to pinpoint who they are in general. Heck—in most cases, we can't even tell…

Attestation from other services is a good option. I have Apple, Meta, Google, PayPal, eBay, Microsoft, Twitter/X and Steam accounts that —through age of account, and their own identity checks and purchase histories— could attest that I'm probably an adult. This obviously isn't a feature they offer currently, but could. Most are available as a federated OAuth IdP.

You already entrust far more than an adult flag to these services so I doubt the news you like to touch yourself is going to be met with an emergency board meeting.

But if that were a problem, would it be that hard to separate identity from end service with an intermediate AV condom service? I'd personally prefer to not add another leaky abstraction layer but that's me.

Re: What we call "age verification" is actually mass surveillance

#513

Post by AnthonyMouse »

palata wrote: post #473
AnthonyMouse wrote: post #395

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Your ID is already controlled by your government, and we don't call that dystopian control. The expression "papers, please", a classic exemplar of dystopian control, is referring to what? > First, it can be open source and have DRM and attestation. Android is open source, for instance. When people say "open source" in this context they mean that the user or third parties can make changes to the system, not that the…

> When people say "open source" in this context Do they? My experience is that often they don't know what "open source" means in the context of software or that they don't know that the system they were criticising is actually open source.

It's not hard to not realize that Android is open source because doing it that way compromises nearly all of the advantages of something open source.

Re: What we call "age verification" is actually mass surveillance

#514

Post by rationalist »

xdennis wrote: post #406
rationalist wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know about this, stores around me are scanning people's IDs to verify their age. I guess I could make an ID (not a counterfeit government ID) that uses the same encoding for the birthday.

After a while you age out of getting carded. The vast majority of alcohol is bought without ever showing any ID.

I aged out of getting carded a long time ago, but I'm seeing stores where their policy is to card everyone. I was behind an old man with white hair and a cane who was bewildered when he was carded.

Re: What we call "age verification" is actually mass surveillance

#516

Post by rustyminnow »

baby_souffle wrote: post #240
rustyminnow wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could probably be implemented by a smartcard or yubikey-like device as well. Shoot, just build it into my state issued ID card.

Do you know how hard it was to get RealID rolled out? And now you're going to tell every state to do it again, but this time it's got a chip in it so "just trust the government, man". This will go well.

They've had some practice now, so next time will go better.

RealID is completely optional anyways. Just like organ donation and using the internet.

Re: What we call "age verification" is actually mass surveillance

#517

Post by fsflover »

bluegatty wrote: post #515
fsflover wrote: post #499

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Shallow dismissal?

Yes, a shallow dismissal to a nonsense metaphor that was not helping to make a kind of argument

I liked the metaphor. What don't you like about it?

Re: What we call "age verification" is actually mass surveillance

#518

Post by fsflover »

bluegatty wrote: post #417
pseudalopex wrote: post #377

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We discuss age requirements in the physical world not much because the physical world allows age checks without mass surveillance.

age checks are not mass surveillance. mass surveillance is mass surveillance

The age check implementation that is pushed on us has the mass surveillance included in it.

Re: What we call "age verification" is actually mass surveillance

#519

Post by palata »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #513
palata wrote: post #473

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> When people say "open source" in this context Do they? My experience is that often they don't know what "open source" means in the context of software or that they don't know that the system they were criticising is actually open source.

It's not hard to not realize that Android is open source because doing it that way compromises nearly all of the advantages of something open source.

Does it, though? There are many, many, many AOSP-based systems. DJI remote controllers run AOSP, and of course there is LineageOS and GrapheneOS.

I can read the sources of AOSP, I can modify it, build it and install it on my device.

I can read the sources of AOSP to find bugs or security issues.

I can read the sources of AOSP to understand how it works and get inspiration for my own projects.

What does it compromise to you?

Maybe you're unhappy about the fact that it is not open development, but that's a completely different question and many, many open source projects are like that. I have offered PRs to multiple projects that never bothered reviewing them because they did not care, and that is exactly how open source works.

There are so many reasons to complain about Google, the fact that Android is open source is not one of them.

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