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The UK's war on anonymity has come to America

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Re: The UK's war on anonymity has come to America

#541

Post by txrx0000 »

ytoawwhra92 wrote: post #284
chr15m wrote: post #254

The right people to protect children are those responsible for them - their parents and guardians. If there is a problem with children not being sufficiently protected, that is the level at which to solve it. Give families tools and information to do so.

No ID checks at clubs, bars, or other adults-only venues. No school zone speed limits, or protected crossings on streets near schools. No requirements for railings on public balconies, fencing around public pools, protective covers over drains or other holes in the ground. Parents/guardians can just supervise. Sounds great!

The things you've listed are obviously reasonable, but the laws being proposed for digital parenting are very much not the same as those benign, locally-implemented guardrails. Take the recent Illinois law as an example: they're mandating all Internet-capable operating systems to broadcast the user's age bracket to all software that requests it. That effectively means you can't communicate online if you don't comply. The physical equivalent of that is making it illegal for you to see, hear, or talk at all, unless you utter the magic words "I am x years old". That is compelled speech, and it's deeply incompatible with the First Amendment.

Re: The UK's war on anonymity has come to America

#542

Post by Flere-Imsaho »

Cthulhu_ wrote: post #407
zmmmmm wrote: post #276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

the weird thing about it all is that age is a bad proxy in the first place for a child's level of safety in interacting with online content. Some kids are super mature at 11 and others still need protection at 16. For some reason the world has fixated on "years alive" as a perfect measure of vulnerability and now are doggedly pursuing it. Even if perfect age verification is implemented, kids will be harmed. Because t…

Arguably, all online content should be moderated - just because I'm 40 doesn't mean I want to come across decapitations and the like.

This is an area I hope AI will help. A locally running AI (of my choosing) will filter the crap online - Ads and beheadings.

Re: The UK's war on anonymity has come to America

#543

Post by like_any_other »

inigyou wrote: post #50
like_any_other wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Note how they always ignore parental controls, and skip straight to deanonymize everyone.

Half the laws we're complaining about (e.g. California, Illinois) are literally just regulating parental controls, and I can no longer give the benefit of the doubt to people who act as if this is the same as forcing internet users to scan their ID. People who conflate these two things are paid lobbyists of Meta to make sure Meta won't have to be safe for children even when the parental controls checkbox is turned on…

> Half the laws

If you forgive the slight exaggeration in my use of "always", then I am half right - in fully half the cases, deanonymization is the first thing they try.

But let's look at those "just regulating parental controls" laws, the California one [1]. What does it do? Does it give parents/the owner the tools needed to limit child access? Does it require vendors to include such tools? No, neither of those. It just establishes how to collect (but not verify) and send age data, so someone else can act on it.

It does nothing to empower parents, but does lay the groundwork to grow an age control ecosystem that can later have verification easily added - all the apps and websites will already support it. Not all "regulation" is the same.

> People who conflate these two things are paid lobbyists of Meta

Meta is the most privacy-hostile company there is, despite fierce competition for that title, and nearly all their services are behind a login-wall, even read-only access, and they don't let you make an account without a phone number [2,3,4]. I avoid them like the plague, and they already go above and beyond what you would want of them.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_Digital_Age_Assuran...

[2] https://www.local3news.com/local-news/what-the-tech/what-the...

[3] Facebook now treats a phone number like a near-requirement - https://quackr.io/blog/facebook-account-without-phone-number

[4] https://www.reddit.com/r/privacy/comments/tyrs6c/so_i_had_to...

Re: The UK's war on anonymity has come to America

#544

Post by inigyou »

dawn3727 wrote: post #460
testfrequency wrote: post #456

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where in the world is your ideal country, that is doing everything right. Genuinely curious as it sounds like you want accessible weapons + unfiltered reach of speech with no side effects.

Come to China; it is recognized worldwide as one of the safest countries.

Also highest quality of life, most technological progress, least corrupt government (executing people caught doing corruption helps with that). Main bad thing is you can't criticise the government or vote.

Re: The UK's war on anonymity has come to America

#545

Post by account42 »

Cthulhu_ wrote: post #410
switchbak wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the issue I have with most of my well meaning but somewhat politically uninformed friends. The idea of “wouldn’t it be good if …” (idealized scenario), is never followed up with a “yes, but …” (realistic evaluation of how politics actually works). Yes it might actually work out ok if a mythical benevolent dictator could manage things with infinite precision and unlimited compassion. I would imagine that has n…

> Yes it might actually work out ok if a mythical benevolent dictator could manage things with infinite precision and unlimited compassion. I would imagine that has never happened at any reasonable scale. That's because people aren't recognizing me as their benevolent god-emperor yet.

I'm sure the cosmic horror reputation isn't helping your PR campaign.

Re: The UK's war on anonymity has come to America

#546

Post by inigyou »

oceansky wrote: post #91
inigyou wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Half the laws we're complaining about (e.g. California, Illinois) are literally just regulating parental controls, and I can no longer give the benefit of the doubt to people who act as if this is the same as forcing internet users to scan their ID. People who conflate these two things are paid lobbyists of Meta to make sure Meta won't have to be safe for children even when the parental controls checkbox is turned on…

But the other half are. UK, Brazil, Texas, Virginia.

I seem to recall the bad part of the UK OSA was the requirement to write a plan about how you'd protect minors and submit it to the government, not anything to do with ID verification directly (although that's one way to design such a plan)?

Re: The UK's war on anonymity has come to America

#547

Post by Arch-TK »

inigyou wrote: post #512
codedokode wrote: post #480

Here's my idea how "safe mode" might be implemented without selfie, passport and without every app or website owner having to spend money on compliance. The mobile and desktop OS should have a checkbox "child mode" in the onboarding stage. Switching device to "child mode" allows only installing white-listed apps from the government list and opening white-listed websites from the government list. Parents may edit the…

Half the laws people are complaining about are literally this although instead of a checkbox, it asks you for the birth date of a hypothetical child whose protection you want the device to match. And they don't use a government whitelist, but expect sites to self-declare and reserve the right to take action against sites that use misleading classification.

I genuinely don't know if the people who keep doing this are just stupid, unreasonably contrarian, or intentionally trying to sound unreasonable (and are in favour of the UK style approach) to weaken the apparent position of being against the UK-style approach.

It's incredibly disappointing to see people constantly complain about the actually _reasonable_ implementations (that don't rely on a loss of privacy for adults _or_ children).

Re: The UK's war on anonymity has come to America

#548

Post by happymellon »

Flere-Imsaho wrote: post #524
watwut wrote: post #505

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No it did not. Online right wing is trying to push narrative that is all.

> No it did not. Online right wing is trying to push narrative that is all. It's sad that people don't see what's so obviously happening in the uk. Censorship is alive and well in the uk, and there are plans afoot to further the control of the online world.

Try reading the whole thing again.

We know there is censorship.

We do not like the censorship.

Americans fund the censorship.

Americans pass laws for censorship.

Americans fund censorship overseas.

UK passes law for censorship.

Americans - See it's the UK fault.

That is the part we are discussing.

Re: The UK's war on anonymity has come to America

#549

Post by [deleted] »

steve_taylor wrote: post #48
anigbrowl wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tech people keep ignoring the fact that many people a) find the parental controls too hard to use and b) have no confidence that their kids won't find a way to circumvent them. If parents felt in control of technology they wouldn't be calling on governments to regulate it in the first place. I know a lot of tech people like to assume that government wants to control everything and these parents are fake front groups…

Parents can stop giving kids smartphones.

[deleted]

Re: The UK's war on anonymity has come to America

#550

Post by inigyou »

iamnothere wrote: post #151
kelseyfrog wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because according to HN there's no way to force social media companies to not serve children without destroying privacy. That leaves parents who aren't changing their behavior because nothing has incited them to change. Legal liabily is an incentive that changes behavior.

Maybe not everyone agrees that social media causes literal cancer. I mean it’s not great, but it’s not the worst thing on earth, either. It’s clearly become a moral panic at this point.

If we define cancer as "that which replicates without regard to its host" then social media has actually caused a huge number of cancers.
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