That being said, any expectation of thoughtfulness at all makes politics frustrating. Even basic things like why people keep making small random changes when most of these problems and solutions haven't changed in more than 2 millennia. And there is a pretty easy consensus to come to about what works. The repeated failures of authoritarianism to get to a good place are so consistent it is wild that people keep trying it.

Little by little, everything I hold dear is getting destroyed. Computers of our own, that we control, that we can freely hack on. Everything the word "hacker" stands for. How I wish I could turn back the clock...

The problem is the lack of thinking about the solution and just handwaving “age verification” as a political posture, which is why we end up with half-baked systems.

Unless you expect the teenagers to run underground mesh radio networks and risk FCC's hammer (real jailtime), it's just wishful thinking.

> the evidence is that people already pretty firmly against things like chat control and the will to push it through tends to come from the political circles more than popular belief it is a good idea.

This is quite the statement. What evidence do you have that of this? Here in the UK, the equivalent bills are pretty widely supported across he board.

> I expect that if the measure itself went to a general vote, the majority would be against it once they have to deal with a specific proposal

This is likely true of pretty much anything, though. Imagine suggesting that people collectively fund a national road network by paying 20% of their income to the government (or whatever number your state/country/municipality chooses). All of a sudden it’s a terrible idea!

So the argument will go to “think of the children” which is a guise for more control and then pretty soon we are living in the dystopian future of 1984 or the UK where the film V for Vendetta took place.

This same kind of thinking gets idiots like Trump elected because people don’t have any sense of the commons and become single issue voters (sic). “Oh just reduce my taxes on my carried interest… reduce my taxes… I’m a xenophobe I hate immigrants let’s not do anything systematic let’s just hard close the border or the world is flat America only exists we don’t need allies or trading partners (JD Vance) … and so on”

Wondering if someone can explain the logic

In this day and age, probably with a relatively tiny investment into public access points, we could very reasonably have a technically functional direct democracy. The legislative cycle is already authenticated so there's no need to solve "authenticated anonymous vote" problem, European countries already have functional eIDAS systems to back the authentication part and the legislative systems are already to some degree digitized.

On one hand, the problem "what if someone sells their vote" is already present and unsolved, in the shape of lobbying. What's interesting, though, that we have built entire systems to shape public opinion and entrenched them into our daily lives, which are used by corporations and politicians alike.

This begs a question: is there such a thing as unbiased public opinion without authenticated internet access?

inb4: direct democracy does not mean parliamentary systems could be abolished altogether, central spaces for debate would still help solve discussion exchange problems

Admittedly it's a long time since I was in school, but when I was there the notion of teaching the benefits of physical activity was limited to being told to run about for some 'sport', and absolutely nothing about why that's a good idea. Everyone was expected to do the same thing with no consideration for ability, disability, or motivation. Kids were punished with detentions for refusing to endure painful exercise that they couldn't do as well as their more capable peers.

The very obvious second order effect of poor physical education is fat unmotivated adults who don't exercise. Maybe educators need some systems thinking training too.

Will be interesting to see if this leads to more Linux systems being deployed. Then again with systemd supporting age sniffing (https://github.com/systemd/systemd/pull/40954), evading this becomes harder and harder.

Because you know their motivations. You've spoken to 'them'.

What makes you suggest otherwise?

This goes way beyond any notion of a "hacker tweaking his electronics".

With ID checks, device attestation and a device required for any transaction, and all this data piped in to a central brain (none of which are far fetched), we're all pretty much buggered.

It is a matter of time until advertising companies claw their way in, insurances calculate individual premiums based on behaviour, and remember, we're all one legislation away from being governed by lunatics.

As has been mentioned elsewhere on the thread - the real issue is often there are complex 2nd and third order effects, often there are devils in the details.

I'm not saying people are not capable of consuming it, I'm saying people don't have the bandwidth.

Direct democracy is best when it's used for very specific proposals with lots of time for debate - not every decision.

If you use it for every decision, time poor citizens will end up at the mercy of professional story tellers.

Direct democracy is cool, but also impractical. I do not want to vote on every counties appropriations for road maintenance. So what's a level of direct democracy that's "good enough"? How do we make sure we're directly voting in things relevant to our lives? What if "relevant to our lives" is unrelated to our geographic location and is very interests based? If anyone can vote for anything, but most folks don't ever vote for most things, how do you prevent brigading of votes via coordination by groups who see that their group alone can swing what would be a small local vote whatever way they want by virtue of sheer numbers? How do you prevent trolls from going through every vote and just voting no on every "community center paper-and-ink budget" across the entire country?

There are so many questions I have about direct democracy systems! Do you have more information?

This is very different to age sniffing here. Age sniffing is not being queried via public votum - lobbyists push it through without any resistance. It's amazing how this works.

My particular favorite thing to rant about is how, on the first day, I was held in detention for the entire day and made to skip the introduction to my classes because I unknowingly wore the wrong shade of blue for the dress code. Like the middle school in the same district, the dress code required a white, red, or blue polo (FUCK YEAH AMERICA!!!!), but the shade of blue from the middle school uniforms was not allowed, something I was never aware of but instead got arbitrarily punished for along with dozens of others, with my parent being made to buy a new set of uniform shirts after school.

It is no wonder that the US is in a state of decline given how horrid the schooling is. I can't imagine a worse environment for stifling intellectual curiosity than the one I was in.

Though I suppose that may have something to do with households in the early days having at most one internet connected device even if they were well off, so society could get away with blaming parents for not monitoring kids' use.

Yet I don't think age verification will work with national IDs for that matter. I generally use social media sites that won't implement it.

But yes, the normal insta/tiktok user will be affected and not think too much about it. Others will have true freedom of speech.

One could present the case in favor of Internet age verification to the nth-order effects, while downplaying the effects in the case against.

So, in addition to presenting the cases with foreseeable effects, we need ways to compare the impact of worst-case scenarios in the two cases, and make a decision or compromise based on that.

Further down the line technical solutions that are private will become illegal and in general not being pro survailance will get you in trouble

People have got into trouble for having retold a controversial joke that they had heard, when the reason they retold had been because they themselves had been upset about it.

I too don't think that holocaust jokes should be accepted, but sometimes people say things because they don't know better at the time. There have been cases of people retelling "dog whistles" without having understood their contextual meaning for certain groups. I've even seen politicians use the phrase "Works sets you free" without understanding why it is inappropriate. People learn and change, but old posts can linger on the Internet for a long time.

I'm not sure about that at all. All my normies friends have no problem immediately submitting their documents to any KYC service that requests it. And talking about chat control they happily parrot the propaganda points, which is something very normal given that they have no insight as we do.

So unfortunately I believe that the laymen are all in favor of chat control.

I don't believe this. I believe us more tech oriented people live in a dangerous bubble that reassures us that obviously people are against it. But that's very likely not true.

The best way to do this is through a combination of subsidiarity and constitutional rights.

You have a central government but its primary purpose is to set out and uphold fundamental rights. It essentially sets out what the local governments can't do, so you can't have ex post facto laws, censor speech, detain people without trial, try to enforce local laws on actions performed in remote jurisdictions, etc.

In particular, the central government should not be in the business of regulating private conduct. Only the local governments do that.

Then you don't have to be worried about appropriations for road maintenance in some other county because you don't live there. Whereas the appropriations in your county are coming out of your pocket, and aren't such a far away thing that your vote is being diluted into irrelevance, so then maybe you want to be paying some attention to that.

Systems thinking is one thing. One sided systems thinking is another.

If you disregard the challenges kids and their parents, or adults as a whole, are facing with just social media, you can easily make a case against age verification.

Yet, the whole reason we are at this juncture, is because there are actual injuries being felt by people. Not because privacy isn’t valued or hasn’t been defended regularly.

Truth be told the worst kind of content is nominally child friendly - just incredibly addictive and overstimulating. We're all so preoccupied with preventing our children from looking at gore or porn or even meeting predators online that we forget that those who stand to make money on addictive content will pull every lever necessary.

The risk is there but it is not a given. The debate is not new, it's been going on for decades. It's a permanent struggle.

Cancer surgery is an extremely important decision, directly affecting many people's lives.

What happened with Brexit was a analogous a bunch of salesmen on TV saying "that mysterious ache you have, don't listen to doctors who say it's fine, call our surgical team today! It's cancer! We can fix this quickly and you'll be back to your old self within a week!" for two decades, then the country agreeing, going to surgery, and waking up to find they'd had half their liver removed, the post-surgical biopsy results said it was fine and not cancerous at all, it took 6 months to recover and they could never drink alcohol again. And the ache was still there.

If it had been an honest "we know it will cost X, we are willing to spend this because otherwise what is the point of money", that would have been totally fair.

Instead, problems that weren't caused by the EU were blamed on it for decades, while the benefits of membership were treated as the natural state of the world to the extent that talk of losing them was equated with "being punished".

Not all referenda that might win a "yes" vote are sensible to propose.

> The referendum was originally conceived by David Cameron as a means to defeat the anti-EU faction within his own party by having it fail.

After that, another issue is that the leave campaign was heavily based on lies and misleading the British voters.

Couple that with a extreme form of policy lock-in / hysteresis: you need just to form a small margin in a majority at a single point of time. After that point of time, the popular opinion doesn't matter anymore because getting back to EU isn't as easy as leaving. So the misinformation campaign need to work just once. By the time voters realize what happened, it's too late.

This situation is a critical failure of democracy. Not just direct democracy, representative democracy can't work in a post-truth world either.

Turns out I just really really hate running.

All they need to do is popularize the idea of "if your website doesn't do X, it'll place lower on google" and people will do anything.

My websites still don't have cookie banners and the police still hasn't come to my house. And the websites uses cookies like every other website always did.

Which actual genocide would you be talking about?

I really don’t think people should water out words like that over what is essentially tiny political differences.

Raise the bar for a data breach. It has value. Much more value if the law did a much better job of restricting what is collected in the first place and its dissemination.

Doesn't really matter except philosophically. There's something close enough to unbiased public opinion when there are no government propaganda campaings, censorship, press owned by conglomerates, and corporate messaging.

But a lot of countries are somewhere on the "direct" vs "representative" spectrum. The US actually abnormally lacking in direct mechanisms, for example. See

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Referendums_by_country

Very few people realize that there is option to not use government cohersion as a solution to everything.

I know this is unpopular opinion. The system is designed for this to be unpopular opinion.

But the problem is not the democracy, but the level of power we give to the government. If the only power of government would be to pick flag colors and national anthem, no one would care about it.

No one cares about UK having a king, because it doesn't change a thing.

Which social media sites won't implement it?

The solution to privacy problem is not to shout while closing your ears but to make it clear that you see their side, how new tech create new problems, and help solve it in least privacy invasive ways.

Otherwise you will always be seen as somebody who has shady agenda. It's just reality. Ordinary people do not care about e2ee. Gotta read the room.

But chat control and age verification are different things.

The government has control over many areas of life, and in most cases I feel that to be on balance a good thing, even though governments can be corrupt or inefficient.

Consider some other domain, like roads. In every country, the government issues licenses that include photographic ID to residents to drive on roads; driving without a license is illegal and can result in fines or even imprisonment. But this level of government control feels normal to people, and most would say the safety benefits outweigh the government interference.

What’s fascinating to me of that there are people who win vehemently oppose age verification yet have no absolutely no problem with anti-BDS laws, Gaza suppression, etc. Or worse, they’ll support those things.

All kinds of tools and software would need to be locked down or criminalized. Otherwise, some smart kid is guaranteed to get around the restriction and give that method to others, and if it's at school on a USB stick.

“Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.”

> Given your idea of a physical card, kids will find a way to use the card of their parents.

Sure there are kids who have access to their parents credit card with the PIN, but how frequent is that? In every system, fraud will exist, but that doesn't mean the system is worthless. “The optimal amount of fraud is non-zero”: https://www.bitsaboutmoney.com/archive/optimal-amount-of-fra...

Seriously, do people not look at history or at least the world around them when they make such claims? Genocides have happened before we had internet, or TV, or radio, or any modern technology people attribute genocides to. Hatred and violence are parts of human nature and trying to blame it on technology is just us trying not to make ourselves look bad.

theres a place for group chats and tight communities but we also need global spaces where you can reach anyone. you cant promote your new album or start organizing a union or share some really good pics with the world if all you have is individual servers.

But instead of inserting controls around email addresses (as with paid services) or devices (as with contraband), the requirement is pushed to the application layer. It really makes no sense from a technical POV.

Much like the GDPR notices that a small industry of 'compliance' product companies sold seemingly to everyone as necessary, they aren't if you're only using cookies for functional reasons and not tracking people. Unfortunately that leads to lower margins for advertisers and we can't have that.

Facebook has said it agrees with a report that found it had failed to prevent its platform being used to "incite offline violence" in Myanmar. The independent report, commissioned by Facebook, said the platform had created an "enabling environment" for the proliferation of human rights abuse. It comes after widespread violence against the Rohingya minority which the UN has said may amount to genocide.

Absolutely hate running!

I really don’t think people should minimize actual historical and current events for political purposes. Knee jerk "bad things are inconvenient, therefore they did not happened" denial is how we got here.

> essentially tiny political differences

The political differences between actual fascism that is on the rise, its actual opposition and those in between are large. Not small. Also, in more recent events there were pogroms in Belfast now. Elon Musk personally contributed to their incitement.

What's next? Your US legal status as determined by your ethnicity? Scan your face to prove you're white? Yeah, that sounds absolutely ridiculous but so did the age verification with KYC just a few years ago.

In person that falls to a human being, and it's an easy and intuitive task that takes seconds.

On the internet this involves some kind of video recording being sent to some agency somewhere being paid a fee, who may later be asked to prove the efficacy of their service. This agency needs a digital copy of the photo from your ID for matching purposes. They'll be tempted to store this for auditing purposes... they'll also be tempted to store correlation IDs etc if the architecture allows.

The issue is trust. You just can't trust these first and third parties not to collaborate for commercial gain or at government demand or request.

And ultimately you're still exchanging verification at registration for a shareable credentials: I could use my ID to sign up to pornhub premium and then sell the username and password to a 16 year old if I wished, just like those buying alcohol can go and give it to the underage. A black market for digital credentials is even easier to establish than material goods

Not everyone knows they exist, and there's a huge install base of older and/or cheaper devices that may not be getting updates that could be strengthened like this.

> Not only does this mechanism require zero involvement of an unrelated third party

But what if we do want to regulate the behaviour of those third parties? We know they've been cognisant of the harms and addictive behaviours their stuff promotes (see internal Meta research), and in fact seem to have designed for that. If the controls are only at the consumer side, are we not likely to see an arms race where they continue to try to addict kids around the controls?

You're also assuming a level of technical sophistication on the part of parents, voters and politicians that would necessarily lead them to come to the same conclusions as yourself about solutions. This may simply not be present.

This is what I mean by "good arguments that won't land". We can talk about how solutions should work, whether solutions can possibly work, and even make strong arguments that regulation in this area is wrong in and of itself. Jumping straight to "they're all liars and only want to spy on me" makes the entire thing look like a group of fringe nutters unable to take onboard how people (particularly non-tech people) feel.

This whole argument is why we do not have more direct democracy. The people in power and people who benefit from the status quo do not want the hoi polloi taking the "wrong" decisions. We might end up nationalising things or taxing big business effectively or all sorts of terrible things. Better to just give people the illusion of choice by letting them choose between two "neo-liberal" parties.

My problem is I don’t think anyone is (seriously) suggesting we get rid of the laws protecting children in the physical world, and having nieces and nephews, they nowadays spend more time in the virtual world than the physical world, often with their friends so it’s hard to track what they do.

What is the next step?

Ok, that sounds snarky, but this is where we are. Parents are asking for age controls, and governments are happy to give them what they want, with them getting an added level over privacy.

And e2ee/cryptography/bitcoin is just the implementation of free speech which supposed to be guaranted?

It is like saying that killing people is OK but storing photo of oneself nudes is a crime - and keep pretending to be not idiot.

In large part that's because, if they'd done so, the kids would've been socially isolated from their peers, at least the most normal ones with the most normal parents, which are the kinds of friends most other normal parents want their kids to have.

It's a collective action problem, except instead of "I can be better off if I ignore what I know is best for society", it's "if I ignore what I know is best for my kids psychologically, they will still have friends, and social media brainrot is a lesser evil than socially isolating my kid from all the normal kids at school."

And also, giving kids social media interaction devices is a convenient form of babysitting. It reduces up-front effort of parenting.

Although they appear to be different different things at first sight, they share the same agenda and objective, mass surveillance and identification of the citizens. Once the door is opened, it can be expected that things will not end there; Politicians and their patrons will exploit this data under "committees" (and of course be excluded from such surveillance as an aggravating factor).

Nowadays it's needed a court order to access legally to the privacy of citizens, and this must be done by the Police or the Interpol, nevertheless someones want to break this.

If they were really worried by the citizens security, they would increase the number of police and judges working in this digital divisions, among other things related to this.

It's a matter of phrasing things. Moxie had this illustrative take: If your chat is not e2ee, it'a a group chat. It's you, your mom, every secret service in the world and some ISP employees as well. If we could clarify to our social circles and broader society that every non-e2ee chat can be browsed by some overpaid freckled 20-something borded out of his mind at a FAANG or an ISP then the viewpoint could change.

I think that most common currency for criminals are still just cold cash... But maybe some use crypto yes. And maybe criminals use e2ee. And Marybe you are rigth that it is a problematic thing for law enforcement. That is not the point though.

The point is criminalizing ordinary people for something completely reasonable like wanting to have the ability to talk in private. And talk in private about what they think of the current leadership...

Discord recently introduced e2ee for voice chat. Apple has iMessage and Facetime. Whatsapp and to a lesser extent Signal are massively popular.

If you asked and ordinary person "Should the government be able to retroactively access your voice and written communications?" most people would probably react negatively.

Sure, in the pre-computer world, the US could possibly intercept letters and phone calls, but the complexity of that was high enough that it meant it could only happen with really strong cause and cost. With the barrier to scraping up unencrypted communications at near-zero (for governments and hyperscalers), the need for everyday citizens to have protected communications is higher.

And none of these things were ever made illegal.

>Ordinary people do not care about e2ee.

I am an ordinary person, and I care about the right to be secure and private in my communications. The founders of the United States put it in our Bill of Rights. Mail in America can't just be read without a warrant; it is protected by the 4th Amendment.

That is nonsense. This type of content appears on my TikTok/Reels feeds nonstop even if I don't interact with it.

This is just an argument against any regulation whatsoever. Yes, some people will find ways to do illegal stuff, but that doesn't mean forbidding stuff is useless. For instance gangs members always find a way to get access to weapons even in countries where firearms is regulated, but there are still pretty much zero mass slaughter in schools in these countries.

> To make age verification useful for protecting kids, you'd need to lock down every software on every operating system and put it under tight government control.

No! This should never be implemented at the software or OS level in the first place. You should be handed a chip card that you can use for that purpose, like how the bank rent you a credit card. Any other implementation is a bad one, and should be fought.

But by fighting the very idea of age verification instead, an idea that pretty much nobody else in the society has issues with when it comes to voting rights, driving rights, or alcohol consumption, you are just favoring these poor implementations by moving the debate on a ground you can't win.

> Otherwise, some smart kid is guaranteed to get around the restriction and give that method to others,

You should really read that “The optimal amount of fraud is non zero” blog post I linked above.

This is not an argument, it's just a stupid quip. And I would sooner suggest that you "never attribute to stupidity that which is adequately explained by malice". Humans are overwhelmingly selfish and more than willing to harm others to serve themselves.

> Genocides have happened before we had internet, or TV, or radio, or any modern technology people attribute genocides to.

Genocides became more frequent every since we have technology. Technology facilitates genocides. Both by creating actual means of killing (industrial killing in WWII) and by creating conditions for distribution of "work". Radio specifically was instrumental in Rwanda.

I'm an optimist, but I don't think any age verification laws will gain traction without first solving the device attestation problem.

Comment 2: “it can’t be that way because of this”

Comment 3: “but it can, because it could maybe be this way”

You: “There was no hypothetical”

Oh my god the comments are getting so stupid. Please, I beg you to stop.

We allow bars and car companies to verify age before conducting business. Does that in itself lead to racial discrimination? I think not.

That's why I'm talking about an “Id card” using Zero-knowledge proofs in a cryptographic chip, not using a paper ID with your picture on top…

"Oddly", the laws that demand you enter your birthday (and will eventually demand you scan your ID) seem to require OS producers to make it so that users will not be ignorant of these new features. [0] I wonder if it's possible to do the same thing for Parental Controls...?

> ...there's a huge install base of older and/or cheaper devices that may not be getting updates that could be strengthened like this.

They're not going to be getting updated to be compliant with any of the new state (or Federal) user-identification regs, so I don't see what good-faith reason you could have for bringing them up.

> But what if we do want to regulate the behaviour of those third parties?

You use law and regulation? You mention nothing in your subsequent paragraphs that a "Papers, Please!" mechanism will prevent that a "Beefed-up and difficult-to-bypass Parent Controls" mechanism will not.

[0] For example, AB1043 says (among other things)

  1798.501. (a) An operating system provider shall do all of the following:
  (1) Provide an accessible interface at account setup that requires an account holder to indicate the birth date, age, or both, of the user of that device for the purpose of providing a signal regarding the user’s age bracket to applications available in a covered application store.

I never had any of the popular social medias when I was growing up, and I wasn’t isolated from anybody aside from the one bloke who insisted on doing all his texting via instagram. I’m in uni now and people kind of laugh when I ask them for a phone number, but if anything it’s improved my social status.

>And also, giving kids social media interaction devices is a convenient form of babysitting. It reduces up-front effort of parenting.

This is the real issue to me. Parents are overworked and exhausted because you can’t support a family on one salary, so there’s no more stay-at-home parents. I was extremely lucky in that my mom’s firm got bought out when I was in 5th grade and she retired on the severance package. Parenting is a full time job and society needs to treat it like one. If stay-at-home parents got a salary from the government, 90% of what’s wrong with kids would be solved (and the falling birthrate issue too).

Maybe one of the most helpful parallels is with mail. I think US and other countries have strict laws about mail communication privacy. Someone can in theory open your mail but it's strictly regulated and not done in a total way.

Also I do think talking about future malicious government prosecuting people based on what was collected previously is actually a good one. But just talking about privacy may be a little too vague.

Many of my friends use Telegram (never with the secret chats feature), Instagram, Line, etc. The only mainstream app with e2ee is WhatsApp. OK maybe Messenger has this feature recently too. But it's definitely not prevalent or something ordinary person just assumes.

It doesn't scale as well. Can't go cross-border easily etc.

I agree that it's wrong but I'm talking about common people (and lawmakers who care about) perception. Until they get burned they won't care and might not take your side like that.

Those things are barriers that make it more difficult to be criminal. We're talking about a factor that removes those barriers and makes it easier.

One of the consequences of the government knowing who wrote or said everything on the Internet would be that it would be much harder for organised crime like drug and human trafficking to operate. Of course, another well known consequence is that the opportunity for government corruption is greatly magnified. My point is that the safety improvement is significant enough that the debate is worth having.

Attitudes to government involvement vary from place to place. In Germany, you need to register your home address with the local government; while most Americans would chafe at this level of government "surveillance", a majority of Germans are comforted by it.

Is your argument that "no one is dying other than those who are dying"?

I became radicalized against social media when I saw the statistics for suicide rates in teenage girls [1]. With Facebook having been found legally guilty of addicting teenagers, I can't in good conscience say "kids will figure it out" when there's clear evidence that the richest men alive are investing millions and armies of behavioral scientist to keep them addicted.

There are most definitely consequences for things that happen on the Internet, including depression and death. I don't like that age verification mechanism are raising so many problematic issues, but I also don't like that so far we've tried nothing and are running out of ideas.

[1] https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2023/05/03/suicide-... or https://archive.is/wY1OH

More evidence: leaked audio from ADL Chief Jonathon Greenblatt saying "we have a Tiktok problem" [5]. Kinda weird that within a few months later Biden signed a hastily passed law to force a sale of Tiktok. Weird.

Need more? Twitch updated it's Hateful Conduct Policy to say "Zionist" is "hate speech" [6]. This is for a political designation not a religious or ethnic one as evidenced by the fact that Christian Zionists outnumber Jewish Zionists in the US by about 30 to 1 [7].

[1]: https://theconversation.com/social-media-platforms-are-compl...

[2]: https://www.aa.com.tr/en/middle-east/metas-israel-policy-chi...

[3]: https://www.hrw.org/news/2023/12/20/meta-systemic-censorship...

[4]: https://www.business-humanrights.org/en/latest-news/hrw-inve...

[5]: https://x.com/snarwani/status/1725138601996853424

[6]: https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/twitch-changes-hateful-content-...

[7]: https://www.trtworld.com/article/15656249?_rt=1

The traditional quip works well on small-scale stuff, but if there's loads of money or power to be gained, malice and greed tends to be fairly prevalent.

Haven’t seen any Amish committing genocides, have you?

(for example: https://www.dw.com/en/eu-weighs-giving-us-data-for-fewer-tra...)

You don't need government ID to talk to people and share info. You don't need government ID to take a dump.

Also the criticism of the article is just ignored while it is a very likely development and lack of imagination isn't an excuse.

Even today government in the EU are already implementing mass surveillance, even by third parties.

Verification wasn't needed in the past, it won't be needed in the future.

Requiring an internet ID is the the opinion of a marginalised minority that has difficulties with technology. Aside from those that are advertisers of course.

Second, if you hand over a chip card, you still need to lock down and tightly control every executable on every machine. How else would you guarantee that kids cannot access content the government deems unsuitable for them?

Third, I still haven't seen a coherent argument why parents shouldn't be in charge of what content their children are allowed to consume. I'm not at all against governments providing free parental control software, for example, or voluntary industry standards similar to the movie ratings.

Finally, "protecting the children" is obviously a pretense. The sole purpose of the push for this is for governments to get the foot in the door of operating systems they currently can't control well. It's the starting point for a surveillance infrastructure: age verification -> digital ID verification -> tracking who said what and handing the data over to intelligence and law enforcement.

You still need to send a digital image from the id, signed by an authority, saying "this person is 18"

You then still need a trusted ID service or algorithm to capture an image of the user _at the time of use_ to compare that to.

Just having access to your digital ID credentials proves nothing

The zero knowledge proof only helps prevent tracking between the ID service and the website you're logging into. This is valuable but requires standardisation and client side support, which doesn't exist.

All the time the client side is implemented by JavaScript served from the server side you're just trusting these parties to behave and not snoop

I mean, 'papers please' mechanisms are a type of law and regulation, we're arguing over what sort of law and regulation should be used, no?

In Australia, platforms are being regulated, the regulation says they must not allow under 16s to have accounts. How they achieve this is up to them to a large extent. "Papers-please" then is their doing. It's certainly not the only way things can be done - see anonymous credentials, verifiable credentials and other such schemes that don't involve showing your identification documents to everyone that asks.

> You mention nothing in your subsequent paragraphs that a "Papers, Please!" mechanism will prevent that a "Beefed-up and difficult-to-bypass Parent Controls" mechanism will not.

An arms race to work around the controls, which seems likely to me unless there is some sort of regulation on the service providers.

But either way, look at this! We're discussing how things might work, rather than dismissing things out of hand and impugning each others' motives. Going to the "Papers please" governments and parents in those populations, saying "Look, we understand there is concern and we think there's a better way", or even "We understand the concern but here's why acting on it in any way is a bad idea" is a lot better than "You're all evil and probably stupid".

So it's likely to work again - not as often as a law-abiding citizen would like, but not never.

Parents are speaking for their kids in a group and against the status quo. The status quo is not working for them.

Businesses are always going to favor the cheapest options, but that's why regulation exist.

> Second, if you hand over a chip card, you still need to lock down and tightly control every executable on every machine. How else would you guarantee that kids cannot access content the government deems unsuitable for them?

You don't need to guarantee that. It's like saying you can't have an alcohol consumption ban on teenagers without spying on them all the time. It's technically true but it doesn't matter: having teenagers consume way less booze due to the rules than they would without it, and that's fine for most people, societies don't need to enforce an absolute 100% ban of things for bans to deliver the expected outcome.

> Third, I still haven't seen a coherent argument why parents shouldn't be in charge of what content their children are allowed to consume.

It's much less about what their children are allowed to consume, but what are businesses allowed to sell to their children. It's exactly like alcohol restrictions: the government don't raid houses to check if parents are letting child drink whine and beer at home, but it aggressively enforces that bars don't sell booze to teenagers.

> Finally, "protecting the children" is obviously a pretense.

Not from the electors. Most people are favorable to these things, and that's why these laws are voted. Obviously intelligence agencies are always trying to get access to more data whenever they can, but that's not the reason why these laws are voted, and the representatives routinely could vote for a version of that which doesn't serve any intelligence purpose.

But saying “we must abandon the idea of age verification in bar” is never going to work in any democratic setting.

Voters genuinely want to protect the children, without second thoughts.

Yes, they are. I still have no idea how laws of the form "You must honor the signals you get from Beefed-Up Parental Controls and we fine or jail you if you do not" fails to constrain the behavior of US-based businesses. You seem to have an understanding of how it won't, so do let me know what I'm missing?

> An arms race to work around the controls,

Whether the arms race is server-side or client-side is irrelevant. If anything, I'd expect a client-side implementation to be far more robust... if for no other reason than because the private company that is contracted to implement and run a server-side implementation will cut every corner to improve their profit margins.

> In Australia...

Speaking from a civil-liberties perspective, Australia has been a shithole for a long time now. They can very safely be ignored by US parents and US lawmakers.

> "You're all evil and probably stupid".

The people who are pushing for these "Papers Please!" regs are evil. The lawmakers (and parents) who aren't asking "Wait, what about the existing Parental Controls mechanisms built into every major OS?" are stupid and -if that stupidity is willful- also evil. Those are plain facts. One is not obligated to be all niceys to people who are invested in tearing yet another chunk out of the vial organs of civic life.

For many people the state is inefficient, illogical, evil and goes after them without any reason (ex: think COVID restrictions). Then why do you care about another way to label you, if you think they already do it, but randomly.

I feel that the privacy discussions do not acknowledge at all there are many other structural society issues. Sure it would make an evil-intelligent government have a harder time, but will not improve at all life with an evil-idiot government, and to me it seems those are a bit more prevalent (note: idiot = implementing solutions that will not solve the problems they claim they do, while them honestly thinking they do solve them)

At the very least, you will need to make sure that no child can install Linux. Otherwise, why wouldn't they? Most kids aren't stupid and want to know what their braindead parents are doing on the internet.

I really believe it's dangerously naive to believe this is about the children. It's quite obvious why suddenly ominous entities are shilling for age verification, digital IDs, digital wallets, and so on (more is to come). Countries in the EU used to get valuable SIGINT from the US that prevented many serious crimes. They still get it but now they've realized that the US might not always remain aligned with them and panic because they have almost no access to modern operating systems except for buying 0-day exploits on shady black markets. They desperately need to get their foot in the door to get the right surveillance infrastructure going. At the same time, politicians are rightly worried about the influence of bots on elections.

These are the principal reason why governments are suddenly pushing for this. If this was about the children, they'd have done it 30 years earlier. Until very recently, this discussion didn't even exist. It's manufactured.

> If anything, I'd expect a client-side implementation to be far more robust...

You're not really describing a client-side solution, you're describing legislation of something like the old Do Not Track header, which is a server-side solution, and fines for services which don't respect it. In such a situation I would expect 'smart' firms like Meta to start finding just-this-side-of-legal ways to get kids hooked on their services. But I suppose the same is likely to happen with server-side-verified blocks on kids using services, Meta can spin up new services that don't quite meet the definition and try to work around it. I guess this is orthoganal to the method of blocking kids.

> from a civil-liberties perspective Australia has been a shithole for a long time now. They can very safely be ignored by US parents and US lawmakers.

Even though what they are doing is less "Papers please" and more "Services must verify, how it's done is up to you", which seems lower down your evil scale than the US states you're up in arms about?

Interesting take.

But again, this is fine, it's an exchange of ideas. You don't seem to be against age verification in principle, you're acknowledging that people want something done. The article and many commenters here are immediately writing off everything in this area as effectively a distraction from full monitoring of everything everyone does on the net.

So while we may disagree entirely on how to go about effecting any sort of solution, and we may not (honestly I'm not entirely averse to the parental controls idea), you're not dismissing the problem out of hand, and in general I have no quarrel with you or your approach.

Or do you want a police state?

I have been beating on this drum to avoid this situation for far longer than it has been the topic of interest on HN for the past few months.

We are here, because difficult conversations were avoided and action which could be taken to stop this from metastizing came in the way of growth.

The “parents” win just by having the laws passed, because it makes it clear what guard rails society expects to have in place for internet use.

If you want, I could give you stories of how KYC rules are not followed in India, enabling fraud. How certain rules in the DSA are toothless, resulting in reduced compliance.

Privacy is going to lose. Correction, it is losing, because the people who think they are defending it don’t understand that the forces at play have changed.

> You then still need a trusted ID service or algorithm to capture an image of the user _at the time of use_ to compare that to.

> Just having access to your digital ID credentials proves nothing

A second order effect of this is that a small number of parents have the ability to manage their kids use of tech.

A side effect of that is kids seeing their peers use tech. I’ve seen 9 month babies getting hypnotized by screens.

This is excluding situations with an antagonist preying on the child, such as grooming or bullying.

Yes, in an ideal world, it would all go down to parenting. Since we live in reality, some of that work is shifting to ensuring defaults are in place.

I thought it was a great question. I wish I remembered more details and had the links ready.

I suppose you missed the part where I said

  Australia has been a shithole for a long time now.

> You're not really describing a client-side solution, you're describing legislation of something like the old Do Not Track header, which is a server-side solution...

Mmm. No, there are three systems being described here.

1) "Beefed up Parental Controls", where all service-restriction information is entered and stored client-side and sent server-side as needed.

2) "Age Please!", where a "guardian account" associates the birthdate/year of one or more users to their respective accounts using the client device. This information is entered and stored client-side and is sent server-side as needed.

3) "Papers Please!" -which is what #2 will become-, where a user uses their client device to photograph their government-issued photo ID to be sent to a third-party and processed server-side.

Because we're talking about accessing an Internet-hosted service, your apparent confusion about the need to send some information to the services servers is -itself- confusing.

> You don't seem to be against age verification in principle...

I'm 100% against it. I'm 100% for guardian-controlled content-restriction policies. I'm also completely fine with a "How old is your cutie? What things do you want them to not see or do?" wizard that populates those policies with some defaults that the guardian can fine-tune if they wish to.

> It's not even about being "all niceys" it's about recognising that the concern people have is genuinely held, and addressing it.

An equally important skill is recognizing when those concerns are not genuinely held. Anyone who should know about "Parental Controls" and chooses "Papers Please!" or "Age Please!" is evil. Lawmakers and regulators pushing for this stuff are in this bucket. Anyone who -once introduced to the concept- claims to see no world in which "Parental Controls" can be beefed up and also claims that "Age Please!" or "Papers Please!" is the only viable option is -at minimum- unrecoverably stupid, and is probably also evil.

If I have access to your digital ID I shouldn't be able to impersonate you anymore than I should be able to fly using your passport.

Your passport is useful not just because it's difficult to forge, but because border control is a thing.

No, they aren't in place at all. It's the parents' job and vast majority of parents do it fine. Nobody wants the Nanny state you propagate.

The part that I quoted? That would be quite a feat. Either way I think it's definitely a choice to entirely ignore what a country is doing in this area due to historical reasons, when the country you're interested in making changes to appears to be doing worse.

> Mmm. No, there are three systems being described here.

There are more than three options here. Here are more possibilities (already in use in some places) -

4. Service providers make an informed guess about who might be a kid, based on usage patterns and scanning the pictures they've uploaded.

5. Anonymous credentials systems, as described in the link in my first post that you responded to.

Neither of these is a 'papers please' solution.

> your apparent confusion about the need to send some information to the services servers is -itself- confusing.

So you're also implicitly ignoring solution 6, which a lot of people elsewhere in this thread are arguing for, which is parents using existing parental control systems built into their devices, which work 100% client side?

> I'm 100% for guardian-controlled content-restriction policies.

That's age verification of a sort by the guardian, enforced server-side. So no, you're not against these systems in principle, you're just proposing a solution that you find palatable.

> Anyone who should know about "Parental Controls" and chooses "Papers Please!" or "Age Please!" is evil.

Why? Parental controls at the moment are patchy, poorly understood and certainly don't operate in the way you're proposing they should in future. It's easy to see why people might declare that such schemes are inadequate.

I am finding it very funny that you are determined to put yourself in the category of "People Nursie disagrees with because they dismiss the entire thing as a conspiracy", even while you're not actually doing that, you're arguing in good faith and I applaud it!

I'm 100% fine with those, but people report that they're "insufficient" for vague reasons. That's why I suggest we beef them up. Also...

> Why? Parental controls at the moment are patchy, poorly understood and certainly don't operate in the way you're proposing they should in future.

you seem to agree with the reports I'm hearing. That's why I suggest beefing them up.

> The part that I quoted? That would be quite a feat.

One that you managed, somehow. Gratz.

> ...they dismiss the entire thing as a conspiracy

Unless you're using the "Two or more people get together to plan something" definition of the word "conspiracy" -which happens to neatly cover planning to go to lunch-, I don't consider this to be a conspiracy. [0]

> There are more than three options here.

I was only discussing three, and I'm sure we can come up with way more than five in total, but sure, let's go.

> 4. Service providers make an informed guess...

That's happening now and has been for a while now. We all see how willing the larger operators are to rely on their guesses rather than relying on the judgment of a third-party. Having said that... when last I checked, 4chan was one of the operators who are doing the noble thing in the face of all this hysteria. [1] It sure is something when 4chan is on the right side of an issue and the big guys aren't.

> 5. Anonymous credentials systems...

They're absolutely not going to be anonymous in practice. As I mentioned earlier:

   ...the private company that is contracted to implement and run a server-side implementation will cut every corner to improve their profit margins.

Absolutely not. Do explain where the restricted account has either its age, documents that contain its user's age, or documents that can be used to look up its user's age entered into it. A helpful hint is to ask yourself how you'd distinguish between the content restrictions set for a precocious eleven-year-old and those set for an adult suffering from both PTSD and advanced dementia who needs to be protected from both scammers and graphic depictions of sex and violence.

[0] Yes, I read ahead to the end of the sentence I quoted. The statement to which this footnote is attached is included for completeness' sake.

[1] <https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c624330lg1ko>

Yes that's the entire point of this whole thread, congrats for getting there in the end.

You don't consider this a conspiracy.

People like the article author do, and in doing so they miss the mark on having any effect on the wider conversation because they aren't willing to even acknowledge the existence of the problem. You are actually engaging with the topic and putting forwards ideas and engaging with solutions. You have thoughts about how something might be made to work. You are not who I1 am complaining about.

(As an aside, why not actually try reading the link about anonymous credentials? It's very informative and it shows you what's possible even if you're too cynical to believe anyone would ever implement it)