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The 'papers, please' era of the internet will decimate your privacy

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Re: The 'papers, please' era of the internet will decimate your privacy

#601

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was thinking that some kind of permanent physical attachment with passive electronics could be given to children, like an ankle bracelet used for home curfew, monkey's headband, a dogs shock collar, or just a nice bracelet, call it MoB, which couldn't be removed until they are of age. Devices they are given could be associated with those devices and not usable without them, if they disappear from passive scanning t…

My God, what a horrific and evil idea

go on, spell it out - its just a thought experiment - how is it worse than the death march we're already on? and the inexorable march to control adults, this is the opposite of that, and it reflects the control we're supposed to exert over our children, in a pretty neutral way (it seems - waiting for your arguments to burst my balloon!). Society and parents control you while you need a parental guardian, then once of age you're free to do whatever we like.

Re: The 'papers, please' era of the internet will decimate your privacy

#602

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Kudos for resisting alcohol as an eight year old. How does that apply to all the kiddos whose lives are impacted by social media? Kind of a "them problem"?

Yes, it is. Kids get screwed up in all kinds of ways that we do nothing about. We could eliminate a lot of harm by prohibiting religious indoctrination, for instance, but that's unlikely to happen.

There is no hard data showing that religion (which one? all of them? from learning the Tao to following the dude who said "Love thy Neighbor"?) is somehow harmful, but we have direct evidence showing this is harming children. What is with people ignoring data and facts because they're scared of something largely innocuous? We get it - you were bored when your parents made you sit in a pew for an hour a week.

Re: The 'papers, please' era of the internet will decimate your privacy

#603

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Giving children access to social media should have the same parental neglect charges as giving them heroin. The current strategy of yelling "parent's should parent" does nothing to influence any sort of result. It's simply ineffective and makes people who say it look like slogan slingers rather than cooperating in any meaningful change.

> Giving children access to social media should have the same parental neglect charges as giving them heroin. This is probably the most interesting angle of discussion I’ve seen in the past few days on this topic.

An insane overreaction?

Re: The 'papers, please' era of the internet will decimate your privacy

#604
post #437

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Real life is not anonymous and consequence free either, why should online life be? In real life you are largely anonymous if you go to any place that is not in your social circle. If I go to any physical store under the sun and pay in cash I remain completely anonymous. The only exception is staff checking your ID for alcohol etc. if you look underage, but that datum is only stored in one persons brain for as long…

> Unless you have absolute faith that your government will never do something you have a moral objection to, you can never be sure that anything you are, believe or do will not be censored or land you in jail in the future. Any solution that can convince the Germans, the most privacy obsessed sticklers on the whole planet, has my support by proxy. If they think it's safe enough, it most likely is. Almost no other cou…

> Any solution that can convince the Germans, the most privacy obsessed sticklers on the whole planet, has my support by proxy. If they think it's safe enough, it most likely is. Almost no other country has seen the dark side of what you're saying here as much as Germany, first with the Nazis and then in East Germany.

As a German citizen myself I argue that the more correct view of this is that the Germans are going back to their fascistic roots.

> Both Brexit and the Trump election have been significantly impacted by this, and it's not even controversial to observe that.

Yeah and most of that online chatter that made that happen originated from adult citizens that would not be blocked by online identification laws.

> Perhaps, but that doesn't mean that we should not address the elephant in the room - the seriously degrading impact that social media has on our society.

Well if you agree with my point then that would imply that foreign social media influence operations are not actually the elephant in the room. I think a convincing case that these measures would meaningfully improve the political climate has a much higher burden of proof.

> There was no debate because almost no one in (for example) tech circles is even acknowledging the problem, let alone coming up with a solution. Give me a better solution and I would argue for that instead. The status quo is unacceptable.

This "well we must do something" attitude where people are willing to accept anything that promises to solve some problem is how the worst laws are created. It's easy to forget that things can always be made worse too.

Re: The 'papers, please' era of the internet will decimate your privacy

#605
post #525

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, you can reliably attest public source builds of critical software for the ultimate in transparency. That even includes models running on GPUs. Combine that with blind tokens and you get trusted, anonymous identity verification.

What you also get is mobile devices that can't run unblessed code, make it impossible to remove legally-mandated spyware or backdoors, as well as websites that you can't use anonymously, even when you have very valid reasons to do so.

You also can’t build a house which violates building or electrical codes, or drive without a license. These are safety and security protocols and the digital realm now has them.

Mobile devices are secure and that’s why they’re not infected with malware, like any Windows machine. This is why Android is the host of 98% of all mobile malware and iPhone is not.

You have the freedom to make your own insecure devices which don’t have any trusted or secure elements. Go for it! Take your GNU and go wild.

Re: The 'papers, please' era of the internet will decimate your privacy

#606

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm saying a system like this is preferable to attaching our real identities to everything we do online, as countries are attempting right now. We can verify age without losing privacy or anonymous speech. It's still my preference to have no verification at all. On the internet, nobody should know you're a dog.

> I'm saying a system like this is preferable to attaching our real identities to everything we do online, as countries are attempting right now. We can verify age without losing privacy or anonymous speech. The problem with your hypothetical was that you casually introduced the police as an enforcement mechanism for cases of a minor accessing an over-18 website. The implication is that the physical police are now in…

I don't know how many times I can repeat that I agree with that.

"Here is a plan that is bad in an obvious way, but not near as bad as what the government actually plans to do."

"Omg you proposed something bad."

Aside from that, I was mainly interested in the narrow point that pervasive surveillance is not the only way to do age verification. If you don't insist on near perfection, then you don't need to bother sending police around. If you do insist on near perfection, then my plan is better than the universal surveillance plan.

Re: The 'papers, please' era of the internet will decimate your privacy

#607

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is a way to prevent this (or at least slow it down), but that way requires device integrity protection. With integrity protection, tokens can only be minted with a government app, driven by both biometrics and physical human hands touching the physical screen. There's no way to do it in the background. Without it, you can indeed have a single activist mint 10 billion tokens and give them out for free, defeating…

What you conveniently forgot to mention is this means the death of open general purpose computing. No more rooted devices, no more self built PCs. You go buy a government approved device and run the government approved OS preinstalled and the moment you deviate from the government approved happy path you are booted off the internet.

Well technically, you could still have open PCs, and just plug in a device like a USB hardware wallet.

Re: The 'papers, please' era of the internet will decimate your privacy

#609
post #366

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What stops children from paying someone to buy beer and cigs for them? I preempted this line of questioning. I'll quote the section for you: What you propose doesn't make stores any money, so either you have to spend a bunch of money to induce them to carry the tokens [1], or you have to have harsh penalties for "losing" shipments of tokens. If you risk harsh penalties for choosing to sell the tokens, why even both…

In a world where ubiquitous ID verification is required, you can just, like, mandate that stores with liquor licenses sell them. If they want to keep their licenses, that is. A simple law against linking those two pieces of information would be sufficient. Sure, someone like the NSA wouldn't give two shits about what's legal, but they also wouldn't have the means to clandestinely get the necessary hardware installed…

> ...you can just, like, mandate that stores with liquor licenses sell them. If they want to keep their licenses, that is.

Given that the store makes zero money on the sales and faces Liquor Board-imposed penalties if they sell to an under-eighteen, I guarantee that the token-dispensing machines are going to be functional roughly as often as the frozen dessert machines at chain fast-food places.

Anyway. It looks like in order for your scheme to function, everyone (including lawmakers) has to play nice and both abide by the current rules and agree to never add any privacy-eroding ones for the rest of forever. Given that that's a precondition, here's a much simpler system that has been widely field-tested and has zero privacy concerns above what you get from simply using The Modern Web:

  ---------------  ---------------
  | I'm over 18 |  |   I'm not   |
  |    ENTER    |  |    LEAVE    |
  ---------------  ---------------

Re: The 'papers, please' era of the internet will decimate your privacy

#610

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What you conveniently forgot to mention is this means the death of open general purpose computing. No more rooted devices, no more self built PCs. You go buy a government approved device and run the government approved OS preinstalled and the moment you deviate from the government approved happy path you are booted off the internet.

Well technically, you could still have open PCs, and just plug in a device like a USB hardware wallet.

Could you have a Trusted Platform Module tied to fingerprint reader, while the phone is rooted?

Nobody here complains that you can't install apps onto your TPM.

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