The powers that be are 'correcting' the mistake of the anonymous internet where anyone can call a politician fat and the police can't arrest them for it.
The Age Verification Trap: Verifying age undermines everyone's data protection
781–790 of 1001 posts
Re: The Age Verification Trap: Verifying age undermines everyone's data protection
#782Earlier quoted context omitted.
So we should trust the governments of the world? The same governments that don't seem to be doing anything about a large group of people that visited a specific island to abuse minors?
Where did I say that? Exactly, nowhere. If I‘m contra B, it doesn’t mean I pro A
What other realistic option is there if parents aren't going to be empowered to raise their own children?
Re: The Age Verification Trap: Verifying age undermines everyone's data protection
#783We'll try everything, it seems, other than holding parents accountable for what their children consume. In the United States, you can get in trouble if you recklessly leave around or provide alcohol/guns/cigarettes for a minor to start using, yet somehow, the same social responsibility seems thrown out the window for parents and the web. Yes, children are clever - I was one once. If you want to actually protect child…
> give parents strong monitoring and restriction tools The problem is that it's bloody hard to actually do this. I'm in a war with my 7yo about youtube; the terms of engagement are, I can block it however I want from the network side, and if he can get around it, he can watch. Well, after many successful months of DNS block, he discovered proxies. After blocking enough of those to dissuade him, he discovered Firefox…
Whats so hard about taking the iPad out of they're hands? or laptop or whatever, once you catch them on sites they shouldnt be on?
Re: The Age Verification Trap: Verifying age undermines everyone's data protection
#784We'll try everything, it seems, other than holding parents accountable for what their children consume. In the United States, you can get in trouble if you recklessly leave around or provide alcohol/guns/cigarettes for a minor to start using, yet somehow, the same social responsibility seems thrown out the window for parents and the web. Yes, children are clever - I was one once. If you want to actually protect child…
If we expect Parents to treat Social Media like other unhealthy, dangerous, and highly addictive products, then that can never start with "just expect ignorant parents to all magically start doing something difficult, for no real reason".
It starts by banning kids from the internet, entirely. It starts with putting age restrictions on who can buy internet connected devices. It starts by arresting parents and teachers who hand pre-literacy kids an always-online iPad. It starts with an overwhelming propaganda campaign: Posters, Commercials, After-School Specials, D.A.R.E. officers, red ribbon week.
Then, ultimately, it still finishes with an age-gated internet where every adult is required to upload their extremely valuable personal information to for-profit companies, for free (With the added weight of being forced to agree to extreme ToS, like arbitration agreements).
So what do we do? I agree that the age of entry to the internet should match other vices (currently 21+ in the US, although really that should probably be 18+)...
It will never be acceptable for a single country's police state to extend across international borders, so... we just ban all of the UK and Australia from every web service until they get withdrawals and promise to stay nice? That could be a start.
But this whole situation in like 'freedom of speech' once you start picking and choosing what counts as "acceptable" speech, then suddenly you lose everything. You literally can't make everyone happy, because everything subjective is open to contradiction - and because there are freaks in the world who will never be satisfied by anything less than a complete global ban of everything.
Who gets a say? Do the Amish get to tell us what we are allowed to do? Where do you draw the line? You can't. Completely open is the only acceptable choice. But I still vote we start publicly mocking the parents who give their kids an ipad, and treat them like they just gave that kid a cigarette. Because seriously, they're ruining that kid.
Re: The Age Verification Trap: Verifying age undermines everyone's data protection
#785Earlier quoted context omitted.
The problem is not that we aren’t doing age verification, it’s that a group of authoritarians are trying to force mandatory implementation of age verification (and concomitant removal of anonymity). That’s the problem.
It seems like the solution is to provide an age verification mechanism with robust privacy protections. That way when we offer a solution that works for all of their states concerns, if they disagree with the privacy preserving approach we force them to say outright "I want to keep a record of every website you visit."
I don't understand how such a thing could be possible. Privacy is inherently gone, even if the third party doesn't learn your real name.
Re: The Age Verification Trap: Verifying age undermines everyone's data protection
#786Why is no one talking about using zero knowledge proofs for solving this? Instead of every platform verifying all its users itself (and storing PII on its own servers), a small number of providers could expose an API which provides proof of verification. I'm not sure if some kind of machine vision algorithm could be used in combination with zero-knowledge technology to prevent even that party from storing original do…
Technologists engage in an understandable, but ultimately harmful behavior: when they don't want outcome X, they deny that the technology T(X) works. Consider key escrow, DRM, and durable watermarking alongside age verification. They've all been called cryptographically impossible, but they're not. It's just socially obligatory to pretend they can't be done. And what happens when you create an environment in which th…
It's worse than that. Money will continue to flow in to companies like Persona, becauae there is no alternative. Persona will use that money to continue to build profiles on people.
Society would be better off paying cryptography researchers and engineers at NIST.
Re: The Age Verification Trap: Verifying age undermines everyone's data protection
#787We'll try everything, it seems, other than holding parents accountable for what their children consume. In the United States, you can get in trouble if you recklessly leave around or provide alcohol/guns/cigarettes for a minor to start using, yet somehow, the same social responsibility seems thrown out the window for parents and the web. Yes, children are clever - I was one once. If you want to actually protect child…
If we expect Parents to treat Social Media like other unhealthy, dangerous, and highly addictive products, then that can never start with "just expect ignorant parents to all magically start doing something difficult, for no real reason". It starts by banning kids from the internet, entirely. It starts with putting age restrictions on who can buy internet connected devices. It starts by arresting parents and teachers…
I've already thought about it from the US's perspective and here's my path forward.
If government does not want kids to have access to the naughty bits of the internet but thinks there's something worth sharing with children then the government should provide a public internet for kids and THATS the site that will ask for a login known to belong to a kid. We already do public schooling with public funding and we do not let rando adults sit in classrooms with kids and they get a school id. Boot Think of a phone or tablet that can only access the network through either a proxy or vpn but otherwise locked down. It certainly seems like it doesn't require much programming, heck have trump vibe code it for all I care.
I mean yeah, parents could just teach their kids the tough stuff because thats how it used to work anyways, well that and the libraries and schools but those can be pruned of bad books and bad teachers at the request of government anyways right? The kids could also be interviewed periodically by government to inventory what topics they have discussed with their parents to weed out the 't' or 'g' words.
I mean yeah I don't see a place for facebook in that intranet but isn't that sort of the point, we all know big social media will be incentivised to promote engagement with less regard for safety, so why do kids need facebook anyways? The instagrams and ticktalks are worse although maybe government should make a child friendly ticktalk type school social network, call it trumps school for kids for all I care, folks in power right now and a significant part of the US believe that trump knows whats good for kids right?
I mean obviously the libraries have to be REALLY REALLY cleaned up but thats just a detail. But why are parents forcing internet wierdos onto their kids with these smartphones / porno studios in their pockets? What do they think chester the molester on ticktalk is gonna have the kid upload their id? even if he does, do we really want that? c'mon man
Re: The Age Verification Trap: Verifying age undermines everyone's data protection
#788Imagine if regular TV with age warnings in the beginning of programs made you fax your ID to the channel headquarters before you could watch PG13+ or whatever movie. This is obviously a privacy nightmare and a suboptimal solution.
A good solution that respects privacy and helps reduce the exposure to harmful content at a young age is not very obvious though (but common sense and parental guidance seems to be the first step)
Re: The Age Verification Trap: Verifying age undermines everyone's data protection
#789In my experience the people who want "privacy preserving age verification" are the same people who want "encryption backdoors but only for the good guys." Shockingly the technically minded among them do seem to recognize the impossibility of the latter, without applying the same chain of thought to the former.
They are fundementally different problems. It is already the governments job to maintain a record of their citizens and basic demographic information like age.
Private actors are already offering verification as a paid service. They are accumulating vast troves of private date to offer the service.
Re: The Age Verification Trap: Verifying age undermines everyone's data protection
#790Earlier quoted context omitted.
Companies are legally prohibited from marketing and selling certain products like tobacco and alcohol because they historically tried to . Parents are legally and socially expected to keep their kids away from tobacco and alcohol. You're breaking legal and social convention if you allow your kids to access dangerous drugs. Capitalist social media is exactly as dangerous as alcohol and tobacco. Somebody should be held…
So we should ban social media is what you're saying but not what OC is saying.
Banning access to social media for kids under 18 similar to how tobacco and alcohol is banned to underage people would be the more direct line.
This argument is quite close to what gov'ts are "trying" to do here! And I tihnk you'll find very few people ammenable to the idea that we should allow cigarettes to be sold to underaged people (even if in practice they still get access).
The argument on the "don't do the social media ban" side is quite an uphill battle if you dig into this metaphor too much