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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

#721
post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> How should online services be regulated to mitigate algorithmic harms? That would be a good conversation to have! Instead what is happening is moneyed interests are inputting hundreds of millions of dollars into organizations that otherwise wouldn't have it, which is giving an "unnatural" amount of political influence to those groups, which is changing our country, and not just on this issue. They're literally doin…

They are, but the tech community (ie the group that cares about anonymity privacy on principle) is not making a good counter-argument. To the general public, it comes off as a bunch of trolls and/or conmen arguing in favor of what's convenient for them. Pro-anonymity arguments need to address internet harms and suggest remedies that preserve anonymity. The problem I'm at pains to points out is that many people show u…

There is no room for honest discussion when a bag of money is laying on the scales.

Siding with Meta here is going to look ridiculous in hindsight. (It already does tbh)

- signed, parent with 3 adult children

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

#722

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.

> 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

The huge difference is that these laws make that data flow to the sites, which are then in control of the go/no-go decision. This is another data point of identifying information being leaked to the surveillance industry, and people who opt out and use secure browsers (that don't leak such info) will be denied access, or put in a legally fraught position when programmatically declaring an incorrect age (eg 1970-01-01) to interoperate.

The open society free association version is where information only flows from sites to user agents. Sites declare who they consider themselves suitable for - "appropriate for under 18", "appropriate for under 13", "contains moderated user generated content", "contains unmoderated user generated content", "uses algorithms meant to increase individual engagement (ie addiction)" etc. The browser then makes the choice based on its parental control settings.

(note that unlike GP comment there is no need for a "government list". site self-assertion handles the technical implementation perfectly, browsers with parental controls enabled don't display sites that don't include tags, and legislation requires a good-faith labeling of sites over a certain size so sites don't simply try to push some fiction saying that every user must be over 18)

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

#723

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reading the article, I must clarify my question. You said that there was state level movements prior to the UK. Did you mean that prior to 2023 or 2017 there were US state level efforts? Where was that happening? Sorry for not being clear

I said they passed (just) before. Example, Texas: HB 1181, effective 2023-9-1 United Kingdom: Online Safety Act 2023, effective 2023-10-26 I'm not saying this is all the US' fault (blame lies with big tech who need excuses to mine minors data), but the title blames the UK exporting id verification to the US when the US is very capable of doing it to itself.

Thanks! There's definitely enough blame to share around

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

#724
post #268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the case of food stamps, that was the leverage by which social engineers destroyed the black family via incentives for single mothers — collapsing from 75% married (circa 1950s) to 25% married (modern). The “Welfare State” is nothing but modern share cropping from the party of Jim Crow.

Just so I'm clear here, you think half of Black moms have pushed their child's father away for the lucrative reward of food stamps? And that scenario was preplanned by some unnamed "social engineers"?

The sharecropping nature was intentional, ie, their vision of subservient people generating wealth for the state which it then distributed for their basic needs rather than those people owning property by which they could do for themselves.

That it destroyed black families (among others) is merely happenstance rather than intentional racism — stemming from the overall failure of technocratic managerialism.

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/UPxpKe4N8b8

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

#725

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not difficult at all. It's not good enough for lawmakers. Their requirement is opt-in to adult content, not opt-out (i.e. the goal is parents don't need to interact with their child or set up parental controls themselves). Which is really bad.

It is difficult for parents to do this today! You can either have a limited set of apps with no general internet access (fine for younger kids), or domain-list filtering which takes significant work to set up, has many false positives and negatives, ie it's both a chore to request/allow useful things, and easy to get around. Lawmakers have been convinced the solution is opt-in, so websites can self-categorize and not…

my iPhone has "Limit Adult Websites" as an option - and it blocks some known less-than-mainstream adult content sites. I can basically guarantee it consumes the RTA header/label in addition to maybe a list of sites Apple maintains as adult content (maybe similar data to those DNS providers with an IP that DNS blocks adult sites).

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

#726

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the case of food stamps, that was the leverage by which social engineers destroyed the black family via incentives for single mothers — collapsing from 75% married (circa 1950s) to 25% married (modern). The “Welfare State” is nothing but modern share cropping from the party of Jim Crow.

Your narrative is embellished and does not correlate strongly with the data [1]. Embellished: marriage rates are 33.8% for Black women and 37.8% for Black men, neither of which I would round to 25%. Uncorrelated: marriage rates dropped sharply among people of all single races on the Census except for Asians. It has dropped more sharply for Black respondents, but anything disproportionately affecting the lower and mid…

I’m actually talking about the period from 1950-1980 on the chart labeled: “Percentage of married men by race, 1950–2024”

You can see the collapse of black marriages started earlier and is steeper than other demographics — though eventually white marriages enter a similar decline, along with Hispanic marriages. (Asians hold roughly equal.)

This strongly suggests the effect is correlated with poverty and not race — especially with the white effect starting during the collapse of US manufacturing.

But if we agree the correlation is with poverty you haven't refuted my point — as welfare is a strong incentive structure on those experiencing poverty. That chart is perfectly consistent with what I said.

So your criticism is wrong at two levels:

- you didn’t even discuss the correct time period

- you showed data consistent with my claim

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

#727

It seems to me the intrusiveness of age verification will continue to grow. They want the OS to report the user's age. People will use this to claim whatever age they want. For instance, if companies cannot advertise to children, they might find that almost every computer is reporting that the user is a child--turns out adults want the protections kids receive as well--sometimes. Eventually they will have to enforce…

I will go back to DOS before I hand over this information. I already have my setup for it when this comes down the line. Can also just lie about your age, "I am as old as the fjords, as young as a newborn lamb" - Thor - GTA Vice City radio ;)

You should look into https://collapseos.org/ along those lines.
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