Meta Platforms: Lobbying, dark money, and the App Store Accountability Act

To put it in Godwin's terms: you're the one saying that the people denying the Jewish Question are the people enabling the Nazis. If we would just agree to the moderate compromise (fill in the blank), then the Nazis wouldn't have an excuse.

Most importantly, it's also an attack on a strawman. Nobody is arguing agains zero-proof age verification. It's probably possible, but in reality is absolute nonsense. There is no material proposal anywhere for a zero-proof age verification system that prevents individuals from being tracked. There is mathematical speculation, and proposals that vaguely and dishonestly simulate what people are pretending exists somewhere.

All of them involve individuals giving up their privacy, and insidiously substitute protecting your identity from the providers of "adult" information where protecting your identity from the government and the providers of verification services are actually the important parts. I do not give half of a shit whether some porn site knows who I am; the only reason I care at all is because they may share this information with governments and private entities that will use it to track me, manipulate me, or blackmail me.

The reason for this? Governments would lose all interest in age verification if it were possible to do it without invading my privacy. If it is possible in the abstract (which it may well be, mathematically), governments would prioritize sabotaging any company or proposal that could make it happen.

The fake proposals of zero-proofs are offering me something I don't care about in order to trick me into giving up something I value, and calling me unreasonable for not falling for it. No, I'm just not a fool.

The real solution: a legal requirement for "adult" information services to only reply to requests that declare they're from someone over the legal age to consume that information. People who give their children computers could root them to make sure that that header is stripped, you could install browser extensions to make sure that header is stripped, you could make sure that header was stripped at the router, you could make sure that everyone could make a phone call to their ISP to tell them never to allow a packet across that carried that header unless it also included a key or a password that the adults of the household could add onto their own requests.

The above methods don't take any technical sophistication at all, and would solve the problem better than computers that attested age, the computers that 14-year olds would be operating for their often computer-illiterate parents anyway.

Why aren't they used? Because this is a totalitarian game, not a serious proposal to solve a serious problem, and it is just meant to fool morons long enough to screw us all in a permanent way.

Technically, yes, but one party (e.g. USGOV) has many more strands that it can weave together into a larger coherent picture than the other (e.g. Meta).

Also one party has guns and an almost blanket immunity to using them on people it deems it does not like via its privacy violations.

That probably tips the scales for some people.

‘Invasion’ is doing a lot of work in your comment, and I don’t think there is a clear and widely agreed upon definition of what constitutes an ‘invasion of privacy’. If you have such a definition, please do share it.