This is doubly so if your book is historic in some sense. Still find it crazy that Marquis de Sade's stuff is legal.
IRC gives you all the features of a normal client but you've got to create them yourself which itself is a dark-art that's been squandered by today's gimmicky services.
Just because it doesn't have a fancy UI to present the media doesn't mean it can't.
Encode to base64 and post in channel. Decode it back to normal format... IRC is excellent for large amounts of stringed text.
You could even stream the movie in base64 and have a client that captures the data stream and decodes.
The only thing that IRC lacks is a feature to recall conversations where if someone isn't present. But if you're someone who needs that host a bouncer or something.
I personally enjoy entering a blank slate.
Public servers sure, may have protections in place but your own server and with IRCd's being easy configurable makes it non-trivial.
You buy Nitro within discord and you still have advertisements.
Also the fact that UK and Australia are kind of backwards on online privacy.
That aside, this is targeted. The fediverse and vbulletin forums of old, even reddit, are all social media but will never require facial recognition. If they do, then far worse things are happening to freedom.
I live in a Japanese city with a US military base and trust me, the only Western thing here are the few bars that cater to them.
They have this in South Korea: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43716932
(mind you, ID/age requirements for access to adult content go way, way back in all countries)
I'd walk to a local library and use their wifi. Or walk to a local McDonalds and use their wifi. Or walk to a friend's/family's house and use their wifi. Or...
Is this sort of flow normal elsewhere? It's certainly normal where I live.
Funnily enough, when the Philippines did this, it was decried as a violation of human rights [1]. But usually, media are so silent on such things I'd call them complicit. One already cannot so much as rent a hotel room anywhere in the EU without showing government ID.
sidebar: i've been trying to raise awareness about "joint communications and sensing" wherever i can lately; many companies involved in 6G standardization (esp. nokia) want the 6G network to use mmWave radio to create realtime 3d environment mappings, aka a "digital twin" of the physical world, aka a surveillance state's wet dream.
https://www.nokia.com/blog/building-a-network-with-a-sixth-s...
I couldn't help but feel extremely creeped out, and my girlfriend still to this day doesn't understand why I felt uneasy about it. "But you got your wallet back!", she says. "Of course the police know your number!". Having 0 privacy has been completely normalized, and I'm afraid we're far too late to do anything about it.
Why is the Internet any different than say, a porn or liquor store? Why are we so fuckin allergic to verification? I'll tell ya why- money. Don't pretend it's privacy.
1. ID checks are not the same as age verification.
2. a social media website is not the same as a porn website.
if you take the stance that social media sites should require ID verification, then i would furthermore point out that this is likely to impact any website that has a space for users to add public feedback, even forums and blogs.
Followed by governments basically shrugging.
If you run a social media site, then you have an API that allows government access to your data.
Let's assign one or ideally two adults to each underage child, who are aware of the childs real age and can intervene and prevent the child from installing discord (and any other social media) in the first place or confiscate the equipment if the child breaks the rules. They could also regulate many other thing in the childs life, not just social network use.
Even you acknowledge this plan is flawed and that the child can break the rules. And it's not that difficult. After all, confiscating the equipment assumes that they know about the equipment and that they can legally seize the equipment. Third parties are involved, and doing what you suggests would land these adults in prison.
I know you thought you were being smart with your suggestion that maybe parents should be parents, but really you just highlighted your ignorance.
The goal of these laws are to prevent children from accessing content. If some adults get caught in the crossfire, they don't care.
Now, I'm not defending these laws or saying anything about them. What I am saying is that your "suggestion" is flawed from the point of view of those proposing these laws.
These are kids younger than 13, they don't have jobs, they live with their parents, no internet/data planes outside of control of their parents, no nothing.
The goal of these laws is to get ID checks on social networks for everyone, so the governments know who the "loud ones" (against whatever political cause) are. Using small kids as a reason to do so is a typical modus operandi to achieve that.
Yes, those "one or two adults" I meantioned should be the parents, and yes, parents can legally confiscate their kids phones if they're doing something stupid online. They can also check what the kid is doing online.
If a 12yo kid (or younger) can somehow obtain money and a phone and keep it hidden from their parents, that kid will also be able to avoid such checks by vpn-ing (or using a proxy) to some non-UK country, where those checks won't be mandatory. This again is solved by the parents actually parenting, again... it's kids younger than 13, at that age, parents can and should have total control of their child.
You undermine your whole point by pretending VPNs are going to make the whole thing moot. Why do you care when you won't be affected because you can just use a VPN? Why does pornhub make such a fuss when their users can just use a VPN? Because in reality, introducing that much friction will stop a lot of people.
Parenting is a good solution, not just giving the kids tablets so they stay quiet. Yes, kids are curious, kids will still find porn, ID laws or not, but parents should teach them and limit their access, not IDs on discord.
And of course porhub is making a fuss, are you, an (assuming an) adult going to go to your telco with your ID and say "hi, i'm John, i want to watch porn and jerk off, but you need to see my ID first"? Or will you find some other alternatives, where pornhub doesn't earn that money?
Yes, to most of society's problems. Yet they persist.
https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w13408/w134...
It only "has to be acknowledged" if it's true. The "evidence" for either of those, but especially social media (as if that were even a single well defined thing to begin with) is pretty damned shakey. Nobody "has to acknowledge" your personal prejudices.
The UK government is nowhere near competent enough to be that stealthy.
Also, it already has this ability already. Identifying a person on social media is pretty simple, All it takes is a request to the media company, and to the ISP/phone provider.
> If a 12yo kid (or younger) can somehow obtain money and a phone and keep it hidden from their parents,
Then you have bigger fucking problems. If a 12yo can do that, in your home and not let on, then you've raised a fucking super spy.
> parents can and should have total control of their child.
Like how? constantly check their phones? that's just invasion of privacy, your kid's never going to trust you. Does the average parent know how to do that, will they enforce non-disappearing messages?
Allowing kids to be social, safe and not utter little shits online is fucking hard. I'm really not sure how we can make sure kids aren't being manipulated by fucking tiktok rage bait. (I mean adults are too, but thats a different problem)
Yes they do. If all that is preventing them from having a job is depending upon their parents to stop that behavior, there are enough parents who aren't going to intervene that I will reasonably be able to staff my coal mine. Sure, the parents should do a better job, but history shows us that many don't (be it choice or be it other factors). So are we willing for the kids of those parents to effectively be treated as adults by everyone else or are we going to keep laws that protect kids even when parents aren't doing so?
What exactly is wrong with the idea that parents should look after their kids?
Having said that, I bet such a mechanism will prove easy to fake (if only by pointing the phone at grandad), and therefore be disallowed by governments in short order in favour of something that doesn't protect the user as much.
Especially if it was tightly integrated into the OS so that parents could issue an AgeKey to each of their children which sites would ask for.
My understanding is that an issuer can issue a Credential that asserts the claims (eg, you are over 18) that you make to another entity/website and that entity can verify those claims you present to them (Verifiable Credentials).
For example, if we can get banks - who already know our full identity - to become Credential Issuers, then we can use bank provided Credentials (that assert we are over 18) to present to websites and services that require age verification WITHOUT having to give them all of our personal information. As long the site or service trust that Issuer.
[0] https://openid.net/specs/openid-4-verifiable-credential-issu...
You choose which one you want you want to have assert your claim. They already know you. It's a better option than giving every random website or service all of your info and biometric data so you can 'like' memes or bother random people with DM's or whatever people do on those types of social media platforms
"If I don't want"? I would get no choice at all about who it would be, because in practice the Web site (or whoever could put pressure on the Web site) would have all of the control over which issuers were or were not acceptable. Don't pretend that actual users would have any meaningful control over anything.
The sites, even as a (almost certainly captured and corrupt) consortium, wouldn't do the work to accept just any potentially trustworthy issuer. In fact they probably wouldn't even do the work to keep track of all the national governments that might issue such credentials. Nor would you get all national governments, all banks, all insurance companies, all cell phone carriers, all neighborhood busibodies, or all of any sufficiently large class of potentially "trustable" issuers to agree to become issuers. At least not without their attaching a whole bunch of unacceptable strings to the deal. What's in it for them, exactly?
Coordinating on certifying authorities is the fatal adoption problem for all systems like that. Even the X.509 CA infrastructure we have only exists because (a) it was set up when there were a lot fewer vested interests, and (b) it's very low effort, because it doesn't actually verify any facts at all about the certificate holder. The idea that you could get around that adoption problem while simultaneously preserving anything like privacy is just silly.
Furthermore, unless you use an attestation protocol that's zero-knowledge in the identity of the certifier, which OpenID is unlikely ever to specify, nor are either issuers or relying parties going to adopt this side of the heat death of the Universe, you as a user are still always giving up some information about your association with something.
Worse, even if you could in fact get such a system adopted, it would be a bad thing. Even if it worked. Even if it were totally zero-knowledge. Infrastructure built for "of adult age" verification will get applied to services that actively should not have such verification. Even more certainly, it will extended and used to discriminate on plenty of other characteristics. That discrimination will be imposed on services by governments and other pressuring entities, regardless of their own views about who they want to exclude.
And some of it will be discrimination you will think is wrong.
It's not a good idea to go around building infrastructure like that even if you can get it adopted and even if it's done "right". Which again no non-zero-knowledge system can claim to be anyway.
Counterproposal: "those types of social media platforms" get zero information about me other than the username I use to log in, which may or may not resemble the username I use anywhere else. Same for every other user. The false "need" to do age verification gets thrown on the trash heap where it belongs.
You do have control, you just don't like the option of control you have which is to forgo those social/porn sites altogether. You want to dictate to businesses and the government how to run their business or country laws that you want to use. And you can sometimes, if you get a large enough group to forgo their services over their policies, or to vote in the right people for your cause. You can also wail about it til the cows come home, or you can try and find working solutions that will BOTH guard privacy and allows a business to keep providing services by complying with laws that allow them to be in business in the first place. It's not black & white and it's not instant, it's incremental steps and it's slow and sometimes requires minor compromise that comes with being an Adult and finding Adult solutions. I'm not interested in dreaming about some fantasy of a libertarian Seasteading world. Been there done that got the t-shirt. I prefer finding solutions in the real world now.
> The false "need" to do age verification gets thrown on the trash heap where it belongs.
This is something you should send to your government that makes those rules. The businesses (that want to stay in compliance) follow the government rules given to them. The ones that ask for more are not forcing you against your will to be a part of it.
I get you don't like it, I don't care for it either; but again, you can throw a fit and pout about it - or try tofind workable solutions. This is what I choose to do even though I made the choice long ago to not use social media (except for this site and GitHub for work if you want to count those) porn sites or gambling or other nonsense. So all these things don't affect me since I don't go around signing up for or caring for all the time wasting brain rot(imo) things. But I am interested in solutions because I care about data privacy
> This is something you should send to your government that makes those rules.
My government hasn't made those rules, at least not yet. Last time they tried, I joined the crowd yelling at them about it. It's easier to do that if people aren't giving them technology they can pretend solves the fundamental problems with what they're doing.
Any more bright ideas?
Yes. ?
Apparently they don't want to leave and are happy staying there and complying. If you don't like a businesses practice, don't use them. . .
> Last time they tried, I joined the crowd yelling at them about it.
Good. I hope more people that feel as strongly about the subject as you will follow your lead.
> It's easier to do that if people aren't giving them technology they can pretend solves the fundamental problems with what they're doing.
No one is "giving" them technology that pretends anything. There is a community effort to come up with privacy focused, secure solutions. If you noticed the OIDC4VC protocols are still in the draft phase. If it's fubar no one will use it. Worse than that is, if nothing comes of any proposed solutions, the state won't just say oh well you tried.
Either we will continue to deal with the current solution of businesses collecting our ids and biometrics and each one having a db of this info to sell/have stolen, or, some consultant that golfs with some gov official will tell them the tech industry can't figure it out but they have a magic solution that's even better and will build a system (using tax dollars) that uses government IDs with the added bonus of tracking and then all of our internet usage can be tracked by the government.
Wantonly dismissing any effort to make things better in an acceptable way is not going to make it magically go away forever. That ship has sailed. You can resist efforts to find a privacy focused solution and get stuck with an even worse one from the state, or, get your crowd yelling hat back on and help make sure data and privacy protections are solidly baked into these solutions the tech community is trying to build.
Or server operators could just implement RTA headers and put the liability on apps/devices to look for the header.
But I don't think anyone has told my.gov.au that needs to happen, so we are either going to get some proprietary solution from social media companies (tricky, since they will need to defend it in court as they are liable, but maybe discord saying 'best we can do sorry' or 'better than our competitors' will let them off). Or just switching off the services for a few days until the politicians panic about the blow back and defer the rollout until some committee can come up with a workable solution (ideally in the next election cycle).
The issue isn't social media is bad, the issue is that social media has no effective moderation. If an adult is hanging out at the park talking to minors, thats easy to spot and correct. there is a strong social pressure to not let that happen.
The problem is when moving to chat, not only is a mobile private to the child, there are no safe mechanisms to allow parents to "spot the nonce". Moreover the kid has no real way of knowing they are adults until it's too late.
Its a difficult problem, doing nothing is going to ruin a generation (or already has), doing it half arsed is going to undermine privacy and not solve the problem.
I haven't researched the topic of social media's effect on young people, but the common sentiment I encounter is that it's generally harmful, or at least capable of harm in a way that is difficult to isolate and manage as a parent.
The people closest to this issue, that is parents, school faculty, and those who study the psychology and health of children/teens, seem to be the most alarmed about the effects of social media.
If that's true, I can understand the need to, as a society, agree we would like to implement some barrier between kids/teens and the social media companies. How that is practically done seems to be the challenge. Clicking a box that say's, in effect, "I totally promise I am old enough." is completely useless for anything other than a thin legal shield.
Instead of destroying the concept of privacy and anonymity on the Internet... how about we just stop these companies from being as harmful as they are, regardless of your age?
You’re acting like it’s not normal for parents to decide which activities a child can do, cannot do, and must do, and to make these decisions with appropriate ages in mind. I tend to lean towards allowing parents a long leash in their own home and other private places but to regulate behavior in schools and public places.
No you don't. The bulk of the comments at this point in time don't mention things being left to parents at all.
All of the things on your list are primarily enforced by parents already.
This law is regulatory capture that's going to strengthen the monopolies of the exact social media sites that you allude to. It makes it harder for smaller, focused sites to exist. Instead the only option will be sites with algorithmic feeds that currently push right-wing nazi propaganda, anti-vaxxers, flat earthers, nihilist school shooting clubs for teenagers, or whatever fresh hell the internet came up with this morning.
If you think age verification is going to fix these problems on the big sites, I suggest watching YouTube Kids. Actually, don't. I wouldn't wish that trauma on anyone. Seriously.
Yes. The state has far, far too much involvement in everybody's lives.
Every time we shrug and say "let the parents decide," we gamble with the most vulnerable: the kids who don’t yet know how to refuse a cigarette, who don’t yet grasp the weight of a loaded weapon, who don’t yet understand that porn isn’t a harmless curiosity. We gamble with the soul of childhood—and when we lose, those children don’t get a second chance. They leave behind empty chairs at dinner tables, empty beds in houses that echo with what might have been. That’s the true cost of unfettered "parental freedom," and it’s a price that's easy to pay with someone else's life. But hey, Fuck those kids, right?
For me it isn't either/or but I have a bias towards fixing abusive parenting. But I don't think even the government will have much luck with that, when so much "not good enough" parenting can be perceived as normal and forgotten about. Every dysfunctional family is broken in their own unique way, and there will never be a catch-all solution. Heck, it's so personal an issue the only way most people will even know it's a problem is if people bring it up themselves. It's too personal and individualized for people to randomly start talking about and unite under as opposed to issues of the state/politics, when it's likely that there is no solution to be found except cutting off the family and moving on.
Avoiding a harm is not equivalent to optimal way in my mind, but it seems like it is in yours? How does that work?
My gut feel here mostly has to do with how I view the activity overall. Smoking I see as a social ill that both adults and children would be better off without, so I don't particularly mind an ID check that inconveniences adults, and that can be opted-out from by simply not smoking. (Social media I see as pretty akin to smoking.)
Inconveniencing adults with ID checks is probably not actually a good way to create incentives though.
(Driving is a special case due to negative externalities and danger you cause to others.)
The big difference for me is, the person looking at my ID at the gas station isn't storing all the data on it in some database, which may or may not be properly secured.
If age verification can be done ephemerally, then I think it's largely a non-issue. But of course it won't, you'll have to submit some combo of personal info + a photo or face scan, and that information will be stored by any number of third parties, probably permanently, only to end up in the next data breach.
There's also an issue of anonymity, which is increasingly under attack on the web. Even in the gas station example, while I'm not truly anonymous when I buy alcohol, the gas station attendant likely isn't going to remember me or my name, and it's certainly not being stored along side an entire customer profile.
For services on the web, we need a similar level of privacy with the age verification, otherwise it's not just age verification it's identity verification as well (and by extension, the tying of all of your activity on that service directly to you) which I do have a big problem with.
If we want age verification online, we have to have a way to do it ephemerally and psuedo-anonymously.
It also povides no useful information to the website operator, which is good. If the info is useful, it will be logged.
If it is logged, well, I've seen what morally derailed hightech state will do with any and all data they can get hold off. They'll put it all in a giant AI lottery machine to generate and "justify" targets for their genocide, to kill and burn entire families at once. It's happening now elsewhere in the world.
What should be scary to everyone is that it's being justified or at best ignored by supposedly morally "normal" western states (like mine) which are not engaged directly in such behavior, yet.
I do not trust "elites", who are able to ignore or justify this being done elsewhere, with making traceable any of my behavioral data directly to me, by forced provision of identity to services that don't need any for their function.
For unrelated reasons, we already have to implement geoblocking, and we're also intentionally VPN friendly. I suspect most services are that way, so the easy way out is to add "UK" to the same list as North Korea and Iran.
Anyway, if enough services implement this that way, I'd expect the UK to start repealing laws like this (or to start seeing China-level adoption of VPN services). That limits the blast radius to services actually based in the UK. Those are already dropping like flies, sadly.
I hope the rest of the international tech community applies this sort of pressure. Strength in numbers is about all we have left these days.
I don't know actual numbers, but I gave up using VPN by default because in my experience they definitely are not.
Yup someone tell the US government, because visitors can't enter the US without giving biometrics
> This is the first book to examine the growth and phenomenon of a securitized and criminalized compliance society which relies increasingly on intelligence-led and predictive technologies to control future risks, crimes, and security threats. It articulates the emergence of a ‘compliance-industrial complex’ that synthesizes regulatory capitalism and surveillance capitalism to impose new regimes of power and control, as well as new forms of subjectivity subservient to the ‘operating system’ of a pre-crime society.
https://www.amazon.com/Compliance-Industrial-Complex-Operati...
I know all too well that when you grow up you're psychologically wired to assume that the way the parents treated you is normal, and if they harmed you then you deserve to be hurt. I've made friends with and assisted many teens and young adults in unsafe living situations (and talked to people who grew up in fundamentalist religions and cults), and they're dependent on online support networks to recognize and cope with abuse, get advice, and seek help in dangerous situations.
In Germany, immigrants struggle to open a bank account because the banks require documents that they don't have (and that they can hardly get with a bank account). Russian, Iranian and Syrian citizens have a particularly hard time finding a bank that works for them. The most common video document verification system does not support some Indian passports, among others.
To banks, leaving these people out is a rational business decision. The same thing will happen to those deemed too risky or too much hassle by the internet's gatekeepers, but at a much bigger scale.
Banks worldwide regularly refuse service to people who have US citizenship, so I don't think you're far off on that point.
US citizens also had issues due to FATCA requirements although it seems to have improved since they were introduced.
parents didn't know I'm gay, but they did control all flow of information (before social media) by controlling all movements outside school.
it took me until my thirties to realise how deeply abusive my childhood was. the only hints I had, in hindsight, was the first Christmas at uni, everybody was excited to go home and I couldn't fathom why on earth anybody would want to. I dismissed it as an oddity at the time.
Now off ya go, little rascals.
Where there is a will, there is mean and teenager looking for porn... That's a big willpower.
In this day and age, of crypto, and certificates, and sso, and all that gubbins, it's surely only a matter of deciding that this is a problem that needs solving.
(Unless the problem really isn't the age of the user at all, but harvesting information...)
Hand out certificates to porn, gambling or whatever sites, that allow requesting the age of a person from the ID card, have the user touch their ID card with their phone to sign a challenge with its key (and certificate signed by the government), that's it.
Government doesn't know what porn site you visited, and porn site only gets the age.
No it's not. Unless...
> Doing so in a safe way is literally impossible since I don't want to share that information in the first place.
...well then it is.
But it's not constructive to claim that proving your age to someone is by definition a privacy violation. If someone wants to prove their age to someone, then that's a private communication that they're entitled to choose to make.
It is true that if technology to achieve this becomes commonplace, then those not wishing to do so may find it impractical to maintain their privacy in this respect. But that doesn't give others the right to obstruct people who wish to communicate in this way.
The hard part is identifying with reasonable accuracy that the person sitting in front of the device is who they say they are, or a certain age.
Offloading everything to crypto primitive moves the problem into a different domain where the check is verifying you have access to some crypto primitive, not that it’s actually you or yours.
Any fully privacy-preserving crypto solution would have the flaw that verifications could be sold online. Someone turns 21 (or other age) and begins selling verifications with their ID because there is no attachment back to them, and therefore no consequences. So people then start imaging extra layers that would protect against this, which start eroding the privacy because you’re returning back to central verification of something.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40298552#40298804
Talking about it or explaining it is like pulling teeth; generally just a thorough misunderstanding of the notion....even though cryptographic certificates make the modern internet possible.
Any number of entities can be certificate issuers, as long as they can be deemed sufficiently trustworthy. Schools, places of worship, police, notary, employers...they can all play the role of trust anchor.
how do you handle revocation when people inevitably start certifying false information?
say if an anchor has issued tens of thousands of legitimate ids, and also ten to career fraudsters who gave them $10000 each
as you've outsourced the trust you have no idea which are legitimate, and if you revoke the lot you're going to have a lot of refunds to issue
(ultimately this is why countries only allow people who can be banned from their profession to certify documents)
So if say a UPS store is issued a cert and they go rogue, we can just revoke the trust anchor cert that was issued to the store, all certs issued further down are also automatically revoked...the revocation check is done either in the app or in the case of a third-party performing the verification they will recognize that there is a cert on the issuing chain that is revoked and reject the cert.
This is how TLS certs are handled too, if a CA goes rogue, all certs issued by that CA are revoked once the CA's root cert is revoked.
As for refund issues, that's a problem for the cert issuer to deal with.
no, it's your problem, as it's your brand slapped over everything, and now you've got tens of thousands of innocent people angry that you've revoked the IDs they paid for in good faith
this would translate into lawsuits, against you
But outside of this if someone is determined they can issue fake documents at this level of provenance.
Drivers licenses for example you can buy the printing machine and blanks (illegally) so you actually need to check the registrar in that location.
All certificates are cryptographically linked to an identity-anchor certificate, meaning buying a certificate would require the seller reveal the private key tied to the identity-anchor certificate, a tall order I would argue.
In the case of stolen identity certificates, they can be revoked thus making their illegitimate utility limited.
Why would your design prevent that?
We have laws against kids buying alcohol, even though kids can (and do) try to get adults to buy them booze, but I don't think that's a good reason to say we shouldn't have laws against kids drinking.
If it can't, it's no better than a button that says "I'm 18"
My boss is a. a jerk. b. a total jerk. c. an absolute total jerk. d. responsible for my paycheck. Correct answer: d.
dated, and very politically incorrect...
https://allowe.com/games/larry/tips-manuals/lsl1-age-quiz.ht...
(scroll down past answers to questions and answers)
e: I get the same feeling as I do reading about key escrow schemes in the Clipper chip vein, where nobody claimed it was theoretically impossible to have a "spare key" only accessible by warrant, but the resulting complexity and new threat classes [1] just was not worth it
[1] https://academiccommons.columbia.edu/doi/10.7916/D8GM8F2W
Over the next five years, you can look forward to a steady trickle of stories in the press about shocked parents finding that somehow their 15 year old passed a one-time over-18 age verification check.
The fact compliance is nigh-impossible to comply with is intentional - the law is designed that way, because the intent is to deliver a porn ban while sidestepping free speech objections.
> 15 year old has a 18 year old friend
Adults can be prosecuted for helping minors circumvent the checks.
> Or the fact that other 15 year old looks older than some 20 year olds
See Australian approach. Site can verify you and both government and site don't know who you are. No need for photo.
> shocked parents finding
No law is a replacement for bad parenting. But good parenting is easier with the right laws.
> a one-time over-18 age verification check
it can happen more than once non intrusively.
Estonia and South Korea I think also have similar features on their IDs, it's already a solved problem.
AFAIU, the German electronic ID card ("elektronischer Personalausweis") can do this, but it is not widely implemented, and of course geographically limited.
Provide easy to use on-device content filtering tools so parents can easily control what their children can access (there are a few ways to do this through law, like requiring it from OS providers or ISPs or just writing these tools directly).
To make it easy, Discord can provide their services under both adults.discord.com and minors.discord.com so parents can more easily block only the 18+ version of Discord.
Require personal responsibility from parents to decide what is appropriate for their child.
I am an adult but refuse to let them scan my face as a matter of principle, so I've considered using https://github.com/hacksider/Deep-Live-Cam to "deepfake" myself and perform the verification while wearing a fake face. If it works, I'll write about it.
Voila, I was verified as an adult, because I could prove I had a credit card.
The whole point of mandating facial recognition or ID checks isn't to make sure you're an adult, but to keep records of who is consuming those services and tie their identities back to specific profiles. Providers can swear up and down they don't retain that information, but they often use third-parties who may or may not abide by those same requests, especially if the Gov comes knocking with a secret warrant or subpoena.
Biometric validation is surveillance, plain and simple.
Eh. It's just easier and cheaper. I'll bet Discord has outsourced this to one of those services that ask you for a face scan when you sign up to [some other service].
Consolidation is the only tricky part that's new.
In 1998 it was easy for a family to have no computer at all, or to put their single computer in the living room where it could be supervised. Internet use was limited because it tied up the phone line. These factors made it easy for parents to supervise their children.
Today, computers are everywhere, fit in your pocket, and its very easy to get online. Even if you don't buy any computer for your children (which is hard, because your children will tell you that they're getting bullied and socially ostracized, which probably won't even be a lie!) they will probably be given a computer by their school and any filters on that computer will inevitability be circumvented. And even if that doesn't happen, they can trade or buy one of their peers old phones and use that on free WiFi to access the internet without you knowing it. Are you going to thoroughly search their belongings every week? If you do, they'll know and find ways to hide it anyway.
And yes, I know kids used to procure and hide porno mags. What they have access to on the internet is a lot more extreme than a tattered playboy.
That ship has sailed. Even the opposition admits that trying to get everyone to filter is not going to work and is functionally insignificant. The only question is whether age verification is still too onerous.
We never needed everyone to filter, just parents busy lobbying the government to impose crap onto every possible service and website across the entire world.
Instead, they should purchase devices for their kids that have a child-lock and client-side filters. All sites have to do is add an HTTP header loosely characterizing it's content.
1. Most of the dollar costs of making it all happen will be paid by the people who actually need/use the feature.
2. No toxic Orwellian panopticon.
3. Key enforcement falls into a realm non-technical parents can actually observe and act upon: What device is little Timmy holding?
4. Every site in the world will not need a monthly update to handle Elbonia's rite of manhood on the 17th lunar year to make it permitted to see bare ankles. Instead, parents of that region/religion can download their own damn plugin.
Preventing your son from playing certain video games that all of his friends enjoy also has a social cost.
This is why I think it's great when schools ban phones in class. When left up to the parents individually it's an absolute disaster.
These are just some specific examples of where I the nanny state can be beneficial. For most things in general though I'd also prefer people govern themselves (and their kids) whenever possible.
Agreed on the classroom angle, there are many reasons (e.g. cheating, concentration) to treat the availability of devices in a uniform way there.
> If you believe that smart phones are disastrous for kids
A focus on the handheld device also makes it easier to handle other related concerns that can't really be solved any other way, like "no social-media after bedtime."
I'm seeing this as a parent in real time. I'm actually changing my kid's friend's parent behaviors by simply being like, "Cool. But my kid isn't/is going to do that" I don't know when parenting happened by social committee, but I don't believe in it.
It's always been the case. We've just become so individualistic, at least in some western cultures, that we rail against it. There's even an old saying "It takes a village to raise a child".
(Yes fingerprinting is a huge issue but the implications of that get fairly complicated.)
State actor and porn site operator are two very different things. Pointing to the former in this context reads like a non sequitur to me.
We already live in an age of relatively little privacy.
The government could fairly easily gain access to the contents of a security deposit box. That doesn't justify a policy requiring proactively declaring their contents to the authorities.
And all of that is before we even get to the essential question - would the proposed measure actually accomplish the officially stated goal?
Or to summarize, the situation is already organically bad so everyone should be okay if we enact laws that artificially make it even worse in new ways.
To be blunt your reasoning seems entirely specious to me.
Yes, in my experience it isn't as severe as "Ostracized", but definitely a bit "left out" occasionally, especially when friends are all doing "snap streaks" and swap BFFs (as they do) etc.
So at least in my area, a girl at 12+ will miss out on some social peer activities if she does not have a phone. End of the world? Probably not, but I guess it depends on your community's local culture. Also, the valley probably isn't a great baseline for comparison.
I'm not recommending anything. I just think we tend to ignore the nuance.
This was the absolute norm in the 00s when cellphones became common and cheap enough for teens to often have one. If you were seen with a phone out it would be confiscated. At some point schools apparently just gave up and only a few are starting to rediscover the policy as though it's a novel idea.
What the fuck happened? When exactly did this transition happen?
In the late 2000s, as a response to a parental demand for communication and safety following high-profile school emergencies, especially school shootings.
Its not parents, primarily.
IMO the pressure comes from a few lobby groups, media scares, companies with age verification products to sell and big tech - the last because it imposes compliance costs that removes competition, and new entrants in particular.
You've skipped right past the "does it work" question. It doesn't. Porn is available on file sharing networks in far greater quantity than it is on reputable websites.
The only realistic methods I'm aware of are whitelist filtering, sufficient supervision, or sufficient interaction and education.
The most specific he gets is "furry porn", which might be a kink you don't approve of but is not obviously more objectionable than "people having sex".
With the net, you get access in one click to the worse and the best. It is a lot of work as a parent to educate the kids about that.
As kids, teenager and even as 20 something, if we wanted to do some experience, we had to physically access the media or be physically present. This was not on-demand over a screen.
So, I filter the access at home while also trying my best to educate. This is not easy and I can understand that non tech savvy people request more laws, even so I am personally against.
The article is pretty well balanced, we have no silver bullet here.
The commercial sex trade, including both porn and prostitution, is a multi-billion dollar industry that seeks to normalize extreme acts and promotes the dehumanisation of women and girls.
Media diet shapes what we are, and kids are more impressionable than most. It is therefore natural and reasonable for parents to want some control over what media gets fed to their kids.
If X predates A by a long time then any attribution of A to X is going to need extensive evidence.
I think the phenomenon you refer to has to do with politics and culture. It's loosely related to the pendulum swinging back against DEI type stuff. Depending on your political persuasion you might replace "bitter misogynists" with something like "angry cynics".
This seems more in line with the increase of mysoginist influencers (Andrew Tate and the like) and less to do with porn. The former of course being the type of content that social media companies are more than happy to proactively promote to children.
I’d rather my kid accidentally run into porn than them accidentally run into this garbage. But guess which one I have to worry about all the algorithms steering my kid to? Hint: it’s not the porn.
As for me, I sought out a large amount of porn "too early". The porn was not violent and I was ashamed to talk about it with anyone. Then again this was before social media became mainstream. I wanted to talk to girls my age but had too much anxiety and depression from my upbringing. ..the real reason for my addiction. So I got called a teenage stalker and got punished so hard I stopped talking to women entirely. The porn was because I was so depressed in the following years. Nobody even realized I had a porn addiction to this day, because I didn't talk about it because... it was cringe.
Still a bachelor but I go to meetings and have worked on it for several years by now. When I worked on my issues enough the urges went away. To the point I wondered why this was such an issue for so long. I no longer feel the need to find a mate to feel complete anymore. Which ironically would make talking to women possible again. But that wasn't because of porn - it was because of depression/anxiety.
I ascribed the causes incorrectly for a long time ("excess porn usage causes the tendency to sexually harass/assault people you're attracted to") which only contributed to my shame and depression for a long time. I think it's because people don't want to admit that they cannot help every person with major depressive disorder ("you need to want help to get help"), so they go after bigger fish that are open to litigation to make it seem like the problem is being addressed. And all this labeling of porn as a problem rubs off onto actual addicts who misjudge the real root of their issues like me.
I have a hypothesis that telling teenagers their minds will be permanently corrupted by too much pornography of any kind and they should be ashamed of themselves for having sexual urges is... not exactly the most productive decision. Especially when gore videos remain unregulated and legal. I think depression/anxiety has a greater chance to cause the behavior they're talking about - "hurt people hurt people" - and those people just so happen to be addicted to something to self-medicate. Shaming people is certainly one way to make them depressed.
But I was sorta glad I avoided talking to people I was attracted to for so long, in my depressed state not much good would have happened. I now have a healthier appreciation of the other sex without completely abstaining and in my view it had nothing do with porn. It was actually about seeing and accepting reality for what it is, not through a depressed filter.
“Protecting women” is the sales pitch, not the objective.
Revoking access to life-critical medical care that is specific to one’s sex is indisputably making the people of a given sex less safe.
Threatening to persecute people who wish to assist women in pursuing life-critical medical care is making women less safe.
If medical care specific to one’s sex cannot be considered protecting the safety of someone on the basis of their sex, what is?
Requiring porn businesses to check IDs would be, legally and politically, much easier.
It kind of isn't anymore. But not just because of porn, obviously.
Early porn exposure goes hand in hand with the problems we see typified in the recent Netflix movie Adolescence. Seen women constantly railed and treated like meat when that young probably does do something.
"Videos of people having sex" is deliberately misleading, modern porn is not dry educational science videos. It's clear you'd rather be snide than correct.
There's really no evidence of this. I find it much more plausible that the boom in misogynistic radicalism is caused by the flourishing of radically far-right niche content online. Our society has become more politically extreme in a number of ways over the past couple decades, and there's no porn equivalent for anti-immigrant or anti-trans sentiment. Andrew Tate, however, is very much of a kind with figures like Nick Fuentes and Alex Jones.
That's not to say porn viewership doesn't have an effect on kids, but I expect it would be much more modest. Unrealistic ideas about sex, anxieties about penis size. I'm in my mid-20s; internet porn was highly accessible to me & my peers when we were young, and while it did have an effect on youth culture, it was quite modest—nothing like the hard pivot to misogyny which I've heard teachers describe when their students become interested in (again) Andrew Tate.
Implying the opposite is deliberately misleading too. "Modern porn" is not entirely 1 thing or another. Much of it's sensible, a lot of it is extreme. Much like any area in life, I think, the real solution is to teach our children what's wrong with the more extreme stuff.
People are scared of porn causing their children to "objectify women"? Then teach them to respect women from a young age and when they see the extreme side of things they'll be like "That's wrong"
It's probably easier to blame the Internet though and to try to neuter it instead - rather than teach your kid the values you want them to have, just make sure they're never faced with values other than those!
it literally isn't. porn is mostly people having normal sex or just nude images of a woman. the existence of fringe fetish stuff doesn't affect that in any practical way. but your confusion seems to be thinking this discussion was about feminism or something when it's really just a decrepit boomer who is against sex being even legal lying through his teeth to justify completely pointless and harmful legislation (see 2 posts up)
Guess what! Both of us are perfectly fine!! (Well the ex is a bit psychotic but that's unrelated...)
This obsession with protecting kids from the realities of life is just fucking stupid. We as a species have the stupidest, most ridiculous views about something that is required to keep us alive!
Not every woman is capable of deep-throating or going straight from vaginal to anal without adding some extra lube. Most women don't want their man to put his hands around her throat during sex. Almost none of them are okay with going from ass to mouth.
Porn also sets an unrealistic standard for penis size. When the average is 5.2 inches with a standard deviation of about an inch, it becomes clear that the 7+ inch penises used in porn are like the top 5%.
I don't think parents are having these conversations with their kids about this.
I would also welcome a discussion about how porn might be disadvantageous to boys (and the very medicated male performers) and how all this contrasts with tolerance towards non-sexual violence depicted on screen.
Like with marginal users?
I don’t like either of them… (And why does YouTube ask me to verify my age when I’m logged into a Google account I created in 2004?)
I take great pains to keep minors out of my adult spaces, and don't have to resort to anything as invasive as biometric surveillance or card charges. This notion that the entire world should be safe for children by default, and that anything and everything adult should be vilified and locked up, is toxic as all get-out and builds shame into the human animal over something required for the perpetuation of the species.
The adult content isn't the problem, it's the relationship some folks have towards it that's the issue. That's best corrected by healthy intervention early on, not arbitrary age checks everywhere online that mainly serve as an exercise of power by the ruling class against "undesirable" elements of society.
What sort of spaces are these (online or in person), and how do you enforce this? I have an online space where such non invasive measures could be useful.
It's inconvenient, sure, and it's not SEO-friendly, but it generally works and doesn't require checking IDs or doing biometric verifications. The thing is, I'm building a community, not a product, and therefore don't have the same concerns as, say, PornHub, for checking IDs. It's also not a scalable solution - I have to build individual rapports with people I can then trust to have the access keys to my space(s), and then monitor that trust at each password change to ensure it's not violated. It's hard work, but it's decently reliable for my needs.
For larger/at-scale providers...I think the better answer is just good-old-fashioned on-device or home-network filtering. The internet was NEVER meant to be child-friendly, and we need to make it abundantly clear to parents that it's never going to be so they take necessary steps to protect their children. I'd personally like to see more sites (in general, not just adult) contribute their domain names and CDNs to independent list maintainers (or published in a help article linked via their main footer) so individuals and organizations can have greater control over their online experience. I think if someone wants to, say, block the entire domain ranges of Amazon for whatever reason, then that information should be readily available without having to watch packet flows and analyzing CDN domain patterns.
It's just good netiquette, I think, but I'm an old-fashioned dinosaur in that regard.
This would be so useful. I once tried to get this information from a company you've all heard of, so that we could reliably whitelist their services on our corporate firewall, and the answer was "they're dynamic, so that's impossible". I said "but you know them, you could dynamically make that information available to your customers", but got nowhere. I'd like this to be a regulatory requirement, but the people who make the rules aren't sufficiently technically competent to identify technical solutions, and don't seem to listen to people who are.
[Edit to add: I really like your old-school approach to building online community for yourself. I don't know your interests, or if I'd like yours, but I wish more spaces with your approach were around. The world in general (not only the internet) is a better place when we interact with each other in ways that aren't commercially determined.]
The world should be safe for kids because kids are the future of our society. When the world isn't safe, families won't have kids and society will start to decline. Maybe that means giving up some of the privileges you have. That's the cost of our future.
My partner and I do not have kids. Our bedroom is not safe for kids. It will not be made safe for kids (as we're not having any).
That doesn't mean every service provider (discord, roblox, pornhub) should have the same.
Yeah those checks are super annoying. The internet has been around long enough, mechanisms for this should exist.
And even in the smaller term, if I had to be 13 to make this account, and it has been more than 5 years, maybe relax?
It's not just about which is worse surveillance, it's also simply that everyone has a face but not everyone has a credit card. I'm not deemed creditworthy in this country I moved to (never had a debt in my life but they don't know that) so the card application got rejected. Do we want to upload biometrics or exclude poor and unknown people from "being 18"? I really don't know which is the lesser poison
> (And why does YouTube ask me to verify my age when I’m logged into a Google account I created in 2004?)
I'd guess they didn't want to bother with that edge case. Probably <0.01% of active Youtube accounts are >18 years old
Does everyone who is 18+ have a face that passes for 18+ (and the inverse as well)?
Overall it seems like a bad idea, but one demanded by what sounds like a good idea with not reasonable way to fully implement it, leading to a tangled network of bad ideas patching other bad ideas patching other bad ideas all the way down.
Whitelisting was never an accepted solution for this worst category, and thus it will not be an accepted solution to any specific cases that society has started to move into that category (accepted to the portion of society moving it into that category, those who don't put it in that category will see such solutions are massive overreach).
I suppose something like the Great Firewall is also kind of sort of workable but that's government coordinated filtering so expansive that it begins to share more in common with whitelists than blacklists.
For every site that complies with age verification laws there will be uncountably many that don't. And that's before getting to file sharing networks. And then there's the dark net. Both of the latter are readily accessible outside of the Great Firewall.
The card providers share your identity in monetary transactions, but I don't think this data does & should include birthdate.
That's useful as one option, but can't be expected of 18 year olds in most countries, and older adults in many.
I know I've read stories of kids taking cards to purchase games or other things online numerous times over the last 20+ years.
Unfortunately it is not enough to prove an identity (you could be using the credit card of your traveling uncle) and regulation requires for it to be combined with another proof.
I see a lot of people associating identity verification with evil intent (advertising, tracking).
I work in this domain and the reality is a lot less interesting: identity verification companies do this and only this, under strict scrutiny both from their customers and from the regulators.
We are not where we want to be from a privacy standpoint but the industry is making progress and the usage of identity data is strictly regulated.
In the US: BIPA started in Illinois and is expanding to other states.
BIPA sets a brutal bar in terms of regulation.
I'm in a different regulated industry (healthcare), so we have a lot of different international standards there, and wondered how that worked in a different space.
2. Parents will help kids bypass checks like that.
3. It can be bypassed by a half-smart 13-year-old who can access an app on a phone that will give them the card details and be able to see transactions.
Any verification that doesn't actually verify you via proper means is easy to fake. Hell, we can fake passport/id photos easy enough so now we have to jump on calls with the passport and move it around.
The days of the wild west of the internet are long gone. It's time to realise that it's so important that it deserves the same level of verification we give to in person activities. Someone seeing you and/or your id. It's the only thing that has the best chances of not being bypassed with ease.
There have been so many dystopian movies about this kind of tech, it's a good insight of what comes next.
This is a good solution, as banks are obliged to provide free bank account for anyone (there is EU regulation on that), this is very save, gives users full information what data third party requested.
[1] https://www.kir.pl/nasza-oferta/klient-indywidualny/identyfi...
The only safe approach is for that information not to exist in the first place.
This was one of the methods that CompuServe used back in the 1980's, though using a checking account.
It's sad that so many aspects of technology have completely failed to improve in half a century.
Personally, I grew up in an era before there was any expectation of validation, and enjoyed the anonymity of message boards and forums. But when people are posting blatantly illegal activity online, I can see the appeal for more validation. Just makes me sad.
I already decline this technology when finance companies want to use it for eg. KYC verification ("Sorry, I don't own a smartphone compatible with your tool. If you want my business you'll have to find another way. Happy to provide a notarized declaration if you'd like" has worked in the past).
Note the list of "messengers that are relevant but did not make it on the list" in case none of the messengers in the comparison meets your requirements. Even that isn't exhaustive, but there are lots of options.
Formats like shorts or news feeds to you algorithmically with zero lag are the problem. It makes for the zombification of decision making. Endless content breaks people down precisely because it's endless. I think if you add age verification but don't root out the endless nature, you will not really help any young person or adult.
When you look at people with unhealthy content addiction, it is always a case of excess and not necessarily type of content. There are pedophiles but honestly, we have had that throughout all time, with and without the internet. But the endless feeding of the next video robs people of the ability to stop by mentally addiciting them to see just one more. And because content is not really infinite, endless feeds invariably will feed people with porn, eating disorders, and other "crap" in quantities that slowly erode people.
Porn addiction is bad but it seems there are even worse things happening.
Sure, companies have no option but to implement funny policies like these, and I'm sure any kid is much smarter than the government, so he will feel good circumventing it.
This story is a tempest in a teacup. The administration found someone to spread this nonsense so every later goes "well that was inevitable, the BBC predicted it would be."
Yeah, and bank robbers can predict that a bank is going to have less cash after a certain day.
This obsession the British have with kids online is so tiresome. You want to stop child sexual assault? Maybe do something about your royalty flying to island getaways organized by a human trafficker and ultra-high-end pimp for underage kids? Or do something about your clergy diddling kids?
Maybe the reason the UK government thinks this is such a big issue is because these legislators and officials are so surrounded by people who do it...because politicians are right there next to clergy in terms of this stuff.
Parents need to be more involved in what their kids do online, just like in real life. Grounding them isn't enough. We wouldn't let them wander into dangerous places, so we shouldn't let them wander online without adult supervision. Also, parents need to prepare for having tough conversations, like what pornography or gambling is.
Online companies need to really work to make their sites safe for everyone. They should act like they own a mall. If they let bad stuff in (like pornography, scams, gambling), it hurts their reputation, and people will leave.
Instead of banning everything, because some people take pleasure in those activities, maybe there should be separate online spaces for adults who want that kind of content, like how cities have specific areas for adult businesses. This way, it would be easier to restrict children's access to some hardcore stuff.
If we all put some effort into figuring out easy and privacy-friendly solutions to safeguard kids, we can rely on simple principles. For example, if you want to sell toys to kids, you shouldn't sell adult toys under the same roof (same domain) or have posters that can affect young minds.
That’s always been the point. “Protecting children online” is the trojan horse against privacy, and apart from a few of us nerds, everyone is very much in favour of these laws. The fight for privacy is pretty much lost against such a weapon.
https://www.wired.com/story/new-jersey-sues-discord/
> Platkin says there were two catalysts for the investigation. One is personal: A few years ago, a family friend came to Platkin, astonished that his 10-year-old son was able to sign up for Discord, despite the platform forbidding children under 13 from registering.
> The second was the mass-shooting in Buffalo, in neighboring New York. The perpetrator used Discord as his personal diary in the lead-up to the attack.
In other words, this is yet another attack on privacy in the name of "protecting the children".
I miss the internet of the early 2000s.
- voting with your feet
- contacting your elected representatives
- contacting media outlets
- becoming a member or donor of civil liberties campaigns
- listening to people who don't yet get it and trying to ensure that they can switch to your view without losing face
Considering everyone currently and without a second thought lets Apple scan their face just for the convenience of unlocking their phone I think this is a lost cause.
This is always about government overreach.
People are less likely to criticize the government, or even participate in political debate, if their online identities are know by the government. Governments like obedient, scared citizens.
The only ethical response to laws like this, is for websites and apps to terminate operations completely in countries that create them. Citizens who elect politicians without respect for human rights and privacy don't really deserve anything nice anyway.
If the government is not working like that, you have an administrative problem, not a societal one. A state is its population.
> That leaves no room for democratic participation
I think there is very limited room for democratic participation and it has become far to difficult to change anything. If I vote and I do not care which of the parties that have a chance of winning wins because their policies are so similar it does not matter, where is my democratic participation? Even if the parties are different and I do not like the policies of either, what is the value of my vote?
I think things will improve in the long term when there is sufficient pushback, but it will take a long time.
In joining a party that represents you better—or founding one if no such party exists—and campaigning for it. Democracy doesn't end with casting a ballot, especially in trying times like these. Nobody is going to come and save us; if we don't stand up, nobody will.
I can wholeheartedly recommend the book "The Germans: They thought they were free" by Milton Mayer[1]. It very thoroughly describes how a society ends up asking how the holocaust could possibly have happened while nobody did anything about it while it did.
> If the government is not working like that, you have an administrative problem, not a societal one. A state is its population.
How do you jive these two statements?
But of course that doesn't apply to autocracies and dictatorships, which Germany pre-WW2 obviously turned into. My point is that the Germans voted for the NSDAP, and dit not resist the transformation into an autocratic state. They let this happen, out of indifference, wrong assumptions, anger, stupidity, and fear. That means one way or another, the German people decided what the state became.
If platforms like discord take a hard-line stance of "no, we're not enabling a surveillance state apparatus" and the government then forces them to cease business in that country, that is a decision with consequences. People don't like when the government takes away their nice things due to motives they don't agree with. It catalyzes a position - "unchecked government surveillance is creating negative outcomes for me".
Over time, if enough actors behave the same way, public sentiments will shift and, assuming a healthy democracy, the government line will as well.
But acquiescing to demands like these only further entrenches the position, as the public is only loosely incentivized to care. The boiling of the privacy frog in a surveillance state like the UK means most people won't care enough to change it until it's too late
You present a choice between pretending everything is fine and giving up. This is no choice at all. Both options entail giving up; one is just honest about it.
We can make things better.
Very dangerous thinking. Unless each and every citizens has approved the elected "representative" and every decision they made (which will never happen), you cannot assimilate the state and the population. The state has to be considered a separate entity, one which operate beyond the common man's thinking.
But they have, by electing the representatives that ought to represent them, and thereby yield the power to make decisions on behalf of their constituents. If they do no not act accordingly, they will not be elected again in subsequent terms; if they act against the law, they will be fairly tried; and if the laws don't sufficiently capture the reality anymore, they will be adapted. That is how a representative democracy should work. If it doesn't, you have an implementation problem, not a systemic one (admittedly, this is almost a true Scotsman, but still.)
> The state has to be considered a separate entity, one which operate beyond the common man's thinking.
This isn't mutually exclusive. Of course the state has to make higher-level considerations and people in power will invariably be corrupted to some degree, but concluding that the state is your enemy and cannot be trusted is the wrong one, in my opinion. With that attitude, you're just waiting for it to become truly evil so you can say "See? I told you all along." Better to try and shape the state you have into something better while you still can.
Yes this is the theory, but what if there is no political party "representing" me, what about people abstaining from voting, what if peoples elect an authoritarian figure I didn't vote for ? This is one of the pitfalls of your system, if only one citizen disagree, or do not feel represented in it, this justification falls apart. You cannot hide this behind an "implementation problem", because there is no such implementation. If "we are the government" so everything the state is doing to me (or any other individual) will be "voluntary". With this reasoning the state is not putting me in prison for my dissident opinion, I went to prison myself.
> concluding that the state is your enemy and cannot be trusted is the wrong one, in my opinion
I didn't conclude such a thing, I only wanted to make clear that the state is a distinct institution that cannot possibly represent everyone, thus not worthy of the title "we". Also yes I do not trust it :)
If it bothers you enough, you’re supposed to create your own party. Democracy doesn’t mean that everyone else is doing the hard work for you.
> what about people abstaining from voting
Silent disagreement—if they were bothered enough, they would go voting.
> what if peoples elect an authoritarian figure I didn't vote for
If a few people do this, the system can (and has, for hundreds of years) handle it just fine. If more and more people do it, something is off, and nobody did anything about it. Part of the problem is people stopped caring and participating, expecting someone else to.
> if only one citizen disagree, or do not feel represented in it, this justification falls apart.
It’s no justification. We live in a shared society, democracy is a compromise to make the most people in it happy.
> the state is not putting me in prison for my dissident opinion, I went to prison myself.
As far as I can see, no democratic state is putting you in prison for a dissenting opinion, as long as you don’t endanger someone else with it.
Otherwise, yes: if you willingly went against the rules you agreed to follow by actively enjoying the benefits of a free, democratic society, then it’s reasonable to go to prison if you’re caught. You expect the same of other criminals, even if they may not realise the error of their ways yet.
People take everything around them for granted, acting like their freedom doesn’t come at a cost. It does. By living in a democracy, you enjoy boundless riches, housing, health care, fair trials, roads, plumbing, electricity, supermarkets, and a myriad of scale effects that are only possible because a lot of people have agreed to work together. The price to thrive in that system is to adhere to our collective rules, and deal with the fact that we constantly need to make compromises with our neighbours so the majority of people can be as happy as possible. And yes, that means even a government that you don’t fully agree with represents you, if not perfectly; it means taking responsibility for the mechanism that feeds you.
Yeah, and that party wouldn't get any seats. I'm sorry, how did we go from "the state IS the population" to "well if your policy preferences fall outside the two agendas on offer, you have to start an electorally-successful third party—something NOBODY has managed to do—and if you don't or if it doesn't work, then it's your fault."
It sounds like you're trying to apportion blame for why the state ISN'T the population, and at that point, you've already conceded that your initial claim was wrong.
It's not your fault how things are, but doing nothing and expecting things to get better on their own isn't going to work either.
The entities that keep pushing for that stuff tends to be quite centralized.
Oh that's not true at all. A state is an institution which is influenced by its population, but if anything, the attitudes of the population are more a product of the state, its constituent political parties, and the associated media apparatuses than of a freestanding "will of the people."
To give a trivial counterexample, if the American state "is" its population, then why does your presidential vote only matter if you live in a swing state, and why can you only vote for one of two candidates? Surely your vote should reflect all of your policy preferences and have equal influence no matter where you live.
This sort of thing can't happen except through the largest tech companies in the world, who are coincidentally already poised to be the world's official providers of digital identity, and private internet enclaves.
Look at what Microsoft has done with Windows - mandatory minimum TPM to install and a Microsoft account registration for a local user. Try using an Apple iPad or iPhone without an iCloud account or adding a payment method. Google wants you to sign in with them, everywhere, aggressively. Cloudflare has been the web's own private gatekeeper for the last decade. Facebook's whole product is identity. IBM has sold surveillance, IAM, and facial recognition services for decades.
Instead of a clunky IP-based Great Firewall, imagine being able to render VPNs ineffective and unnecessary everywhere on the planet by a person's (verified national) identity. Click. Block and deactivate all members of group "Islamic State" on your platform. Click. Allow IDs registered to this ZIP Code to vote in this election. Click. CortanaSupreme, please dashboard viewer metrics by usage patterns that indicate loneliness, filtering for height, last assessed property values, and marriage status, and show their locations.
Currently, laws don't require age verification, just that ineligible parties are excluded. There's no legal requirement to card someone before selling them alcohol, and there's no reason anyone would need a depth map of someone's face when we could safely assume that the holder of a >5 year old email account is likely to be 18 if 13 is the minimum age to register with the provider.
Shifting the onus to parents to control what their kids do on the internet hasn't worked. However, that's a bare sliver of what's at stake here.
Unfortunately things don't always work out that cleanly:
- Sometimes you vote for the pro-freedom candidate, but your candidate loses. - Sometimes there are only two dominant candidates, and both disrespect human rights. - Sometimes one candidate disrespects human rights in some particular way, but the other candidate has different, bigger problems, so you vote for the lesser of two evils. - Sometimes a candidate says one thing while campaigning, and then when elected does something different.
e.g. a site wants to have some proof of identity. it generates a token and sends the user with it to a government service. the service verifies the user's identity, signs the token and sends the user back.
now the site knows that the government service has verified the identity (and relevant characteristics, like age threshold), but doesn't know the identity. the government service obviously knows the user but doesn't know the online account tied to the identity. this can be further separated by using a middleman authentication provider, so that even the site identity itself doesn't reach the government.
am i missing something obvious why that wouldn't work?
i agree that the usual overreach will stand in the way, but i feel (perhaps wrongly) that the idea hasn't been pitched in earnest.
It's not _double_ blinded but it allows end users control over information shared and has proof of ownership built into it.
VPNs are really a requirement for UK residents now.
and for those that think they are actually doing this to protect the children and you are concerned about what your children sees online this might sound a bit harsh but why dont you actually parent. Stop giving your kids unlimited access you tablets/computers etc. back in my day there was the option of having a single computer for the child in a public room that could not be moved. you could create whitelist only sites nowadays very easily even for laymens.
i understand it is a bit harder nowdays because more parents are both working to support the family but i rather not loose what little privacy we have left as a society because its requires more work for you to parent
Basically, you're ignorant.
This isn't to say that the laws that the majority put into place are good. I'm not speaking on that. You are, in this situation, that layman, who cannot solve the problem you are claiming you want to solve.
if a child is determined to see naughty things online theyll just find a website that doesnt care about facial recognition laws while our privacy is still stripped away even more. So we lose more privacy as a society and kids still see what they desire just taking them a few minutes/ at most hours longer.
once again being a parent and paying attention to what your child is doing online or just talking to them about it. you choose to be a parent and that does require work to do a good job at it
What?
Users should be anonymous.
Sites should verify that user is over 18 using a government web service.
Is Discord considered to be different as it's a centralized aggregator platform like Reddit, vs a standalone thing like a message board?
What I did not see in this article was anything about how AI can tell a 13 year old from a 12.9 year old with confidence. This seems unlikely to me.
I agree with the article's implication that websites will now want a scan of everyone's faces forever. Their insistence that they won't store the face scans is like one those cute lies that kids tell, and adults aren't fooled by. Either you're outright lying, or you're using the loophole of not storing the image, but rather storing a set of numbers, drived from the image, which act as a unique fingerprint. Or, you're sending it to a third party for storage. Or something like that. But you're definitely keeping track of everyone's faces, don't try to pull a fast one on me young lady, I've been around the block before.
Where are you gonna get your content if the lolcows can't creep on minors on Discord anymore?
I mean, in theory, they could find ways to circumvent it, but if they were that smart, they wouldn't be the subject of YouTube drama documentaries.
it's primarily a windows program and they can't even make a proper windows gui but embed a website, so clicking on anything is like a link instead of focusing into it. for instance if you middle click someone's name it opens it in a browser. fuck off. pressing alt+f4 closes discord instead of sending it to the tray (despite being a tray program). it's always updating something and then it just says "logging in" instead of saying what it's doing. it gets stuck indefinitely if you log in on a slow connection or you unplug lan while it's logging in or doing whatever it's doing at any given moment. absolutely the most frustrating crap to use. it has a billion options for stupid "hardcore" gamers (i am, too, but i don't need it) with special needs while not being a basic quality application that conforms to any UI standard.
they openly spy on you, not even trying to hide it.
instead of real software, it's a stupid fucking social media "community", so you can't just use it as a MECHANISM NOT POLICY program, instead every time you do something like log into a different account you have to check whether this is morally correct or will somehow harm their "community". like say i want to work on my blockchain, who are dumb enough to use discord as their main communication platform. i obviously then would want one account for that, then another - completely separate (but perhaps with the same phone number to make it logistically easier which SHOULDNT EVEN BE A THING, this is the internet) - account for playing games (often during work), i can't just log into these simultaneously, i have to go check what their policy is on that. literally, my first thought is that like typical incompetent american software devs, they will think i'm trying to scam people or some other kind of "abuse". and of course, they appear to have conceded to partially implement this "feature" (by undoing their nonsense about forensically attempting to forbid this)
jjice•1d ago
If they get it wrong, are you locked out? Do you have to send an image of your ID? So many questions. Not a huge fan of these recent UK changes (looking at the Apple E2E situation as well). I understand what they're going for, but I'm not sure this is the best course of action. What do I know though :shrug:.
roenxi•1d ago
This is over-reach. Both in the UK and Australia.
threeseed•1d ago
2/3 of Australians support minimum age restrictions for social media [1] and it was in-particular popular amongst parents. Putting the responsibility solely on parents shows ignorance of the complexities of how children are growing up these days.
Many parents have tried to ban social media only for those children to experience ostracisation amongst their peer group leading to poorer educational and social developmental outcomes at a critical time in their live.
That's why you need governments and platform owners to be heavily involved.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/article/2024/jun/...
exe34•1d ago
now replace god with parent.
monkeywork•1d ago
jasonfarnon•1d ago
DrillShopper•15h ago
Don't have kids if you're unwilling to parent them. "It's hard! :(" is not an argument.
"We've tried nothing and we're all out of ideas!"
pjc50•1d ago
KaiserPro•1d ago
When a TV channel broadcast porn, who gets fined?
These are accepted laws that protect kids from "harm", which are relatively uncontroversial.
Now, the privacy angle is very much the right question. But as Discord are the one that are going to get fined, they totally need to make sure kids aren't being exposed to shit they shouldn't be seeing until they are old enough. In the same way the corner shop needs to make sure they don't sell booze to 16 year olds.
Now, what is the mechanism that Discord should/could use? that's the bigger question.
Can government provide fool proof, secure, private and scalable proof of age services? How can private industry do it? (Hint: they wont because its a really good source of profile information for advertising.)
EA-3167•1d ago
Broadcasting porn isn't an age ID issue, it's public airwaves and they're regulated.
These aren't primarily "think of the children" arguments, the former is a major public health issue that's taken decades to begin to address, and the latter is about ownership.
I don't think that chat rooms are in the same category as either public airwaves or drugs. Besides what's the realistic outcome here? Under 18's aren't stupid, what would you have done as a kid if Discord was suddenly blocked off? Shrug and not talk to your friends again?
Or would you figure out how to bypass the checks, use a different service, or just use IRC? Telegram chats? Something even less moderated and far more open to abuse, because that's what can slip under the radar.
So no I don't think this is about protecting kids, I think it's about normalizing the loss of anonymity online.
Symbiote•1d ago
The UK also has rules on what can be broadcast on TV depending on the time of day.
KaiserPro•1d ago
Are you kidding me? v-chip, mary whitehouse, Sex on TV are all the result of "think of the children" moral panics. Its fuck all to do with ownership.
> I don't think that chat rooms are in the same category as either public airwaves
Discord are making cash from underage kids, in the same way that meta and google are, in the same way that disney and netflix offering kids channels.
Look I'm not saying that discord should be banned for kids, but I really do think that there is a better option than the binary "Ban it all"/"fuck it, let them eat porn"
Kids need to be able to talk to each other, but they also should be able to do that without being either preyed upon by nonces, extremists, state actors and more likely bored trolls.
Its totally possible to provide anonymous age gating, but its almost certainly going to be provided by an adtech company unless we, the community provide something cheaper and better.
jkaplowitz•1d ago
The corner shop has far fewer false negatives, far lower data privacy risk, and clear rules that if applied precisely won't add any prejudice about things like skin color or country of origin to whatever prejudice already exists in the person doing the verification.
nonchalantsui•1d ago
Additionally, the corner shop does not have far lower data privacy risks - actually it's quite worse. They have you on camera and have a witness who can corroborate you are that person on camera, alongside a paper trail for your order. There is no privacy there, only the illusion of such.
jkaplowitz•1d ago
Also, corner shop cameras don't generally retain data for nearly as long as typical online age verification laws would require. Depending on the country and the technical configuration, physical surveillance cameras retain data for anywhere from 48 hours to 1 year. Are you really saying that most online age verification laws worldwide require or allow comparably short retention periods? (This might actually be the case for the UK law, if I'm correctly reading Ofcom's corresponding guidance, but I doubt that's true for most of the similar US state laws.)
ndriscoll•1d ago
YetAnotherNick•1d ago
I hate sites asking for photo verification, but I think it is more about convenience/reliability for me. My bigger fear is that if AI locks me out with no one to go for support.
eszed•20h ago
KaiserPro•1d ago
The cornershop does not have access to your friend graph. Also, if you pay by card, digital ID only provides corroboration, your payment acts as a much more traceable indicator.
The risk of "digital ID" is that it'll leak grosly disprocotionate amounts of data on the holder.
For Age verification, you only need a binary old enough flag, from a system that verifies the holder's ID.
The problem is, people like google and other adtech want to be the people that provide those checks, so they can tie your every action to a profile with a 1:1 link. Then combine it to card transactions to get an ad impression to purchase signal much clearer.
The risk here is much less from government but private companies.
tempodox•19h ago
SoftTalker•1d ago
Because certainly one's identity might totally change if one's ID card expires...
renewiltord•1d ago
Zambyte•21h ago
leotravis10•1d ago
daveoc64•1d ago
p_ing•1d ago
https://support.discord.com/hc/en-us/articles/30326565624343...
Eavolution•1d ago
mezzie2•1d ago
I think, ironically, the best way to fight this would be to lean on identity politics: There are probably certain races that ping as older or younger. In addition, trans people who were on puberty blockers are in a situation where they might be 'of age' but not necessarily look like an automated system expects them to, and there might be discrepancies between their face as scanned and the face/information that's show on their ID. Discord has a large trans userbase. Nobody cares about privacy, but people make at least some show of caring about transphobia and racism.
> So many questions.
Do they keep a database of facial scans even though they say they don't? If not, what's to stop one older looking friend (or an older sibling/cousin/parent/etc.) from being the 'face' of everyone in a group of minors? Do they have a reliable way to ensure that a face being scanned isn't AI generated (or filtered) itself? What prevents someone from sending in their parent's/sibling's/a stolen ID?
Seems like security theater more than anything else.
nemomarx•1d ago
tbrownaw•1d ago
The government already has this from RealID.
nemomarx•1d ago
it seems to me like I'd be more hesitant to go get a govt photo taken right now at least.
mezzie2•1d ago
A tactical observation more than anything else.
StefanBatory•1d ago
She was 26. She just was that young looking.
:/
candiddevmike•1d ago
Is there a market for leaked facial scans?
doublerabbit•1d ago
Ofcom is a serious contender in ruling their rules especially where Discord is multi-national that even "normies" know and use.
And if they got a slap of "we will let you off this time" they would still have to create some sort of verification service to please the next time.
You might as well piss off your consumers, loose them whatever and still hold the centre stage than fight the case for not. Nothing is stopping Ofcom from launching another lawsuit there after.
> Is there a market for leaked facial scans?
There's a market for everything. Fake driver licenses with fake pictures have been around for decades, that would be no different.
9283409232•1d ago
Edit: This isn't how it played out. See the comment below.
threeseed•1d ago
The actual situation was that the board refused classification where an adult was intentionally pretending to be an underage child not that they looked like one.
9283409232•1d ago
neilv•1d ago
And it was believable, given a history of genuine but inept attempts by some to address real societal problems. (As well as given the history of fake attempts to solve problems for political points for "doing something". And also given the history of "won't someone think of the children" disingenuous pretexts often used by others to advance unrelated goals.) Basically, no one is surprised when many governments do something that seems nonsensical.
So, accusing someone of making up a story of a government doing something odd in this space might be hasty.
I suspect better would be to give a quick check and then "I couldn't find a reference to that; do you have a link?"
jofzar•1d ago
https://tysonadams.com/2013/04/23/did-australia-ban-small-br...
zehaeva•1d ago
MisterTea•1d ago
This facial thing feel like a loaded attempt to both check a box and get more of that sweet, sweet data to mine. Massive privacy invasion and exploitation of children dressed as security theater.
red-iron-pine•1d ago
AStonesThrow•1d ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/21_Jump_Street
Was it Steve Buscemi toting a skateboard?
https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/how-do-you-do-fellow-kids
pezezin•1d ago
I myself have a mighty beard but took a couple more years to develop...
joeyh•1d ago
On contacting their support, I learned that they refused to use any other process. Also it became apparent that they had outsourced it to some other company and had no insight into the process and so no way to help. Apparently closing one's account will cause an escalation to a team who determines where to send the money, which would presumably put some human flexability back into the process.
(In the end I was able to get their web app to work by trying several other devices, one had a camera that for whatever reason satisfied their checks that my face was within the required oval etc.)
rlpb•1d ago
I suspect this won't help you, but I think it's worth noting that the GDPR gives people the right to contest any automated decision-making that was made on a solely algorithmic basis. So this wouldn't be legal in the EU (or the UK).
whitehexagon•16h ago
There seems no way to push back against these technologies. Next it will be an AI interview for 'why do you transfer the money?'
brundolf•1d ago
paulryanrogers•1d ago
pdpi•1d ago
This can be challenging even with humans. My ex got carded when buying alcohol well into her mid thirties, and staff at the schools she taught at mistook her for a student all the time.
smegger001•1d ago
pests•1d ago
dgan•1d ago