Comment on Age Verification Is A Windfall for Big Tech—And A Death Sentence For Smaller Platforms
jjlinux@lemmy.zip 3 weeks agoWell, as much as I hate it, there’s no privacy when it comes to your government, and this is the case even since the internet was a thing.
Yes, we can keep some stuff obscured from the government, but the fact is that they know everything about us since we are born (probably even before). We need driver’s license, passport, bank accounts, registering homes, cars, even dogs, putting kids in the school system, health services, the list seems infinite.
But that does not mean we have to stop pushing back, because if we do, we’re utterly fucked.
sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works 3 weeks ago
My government doesn’t know everything about me. Look at the news and how long it takes for basic information about a high profile criminal to come out. It takes a lot of investigative effort to put all that info together, even if it’s all largely from various government agencies.
Some stuff is easy to track (e.g. registrations), but a lot isn’t. That means there’s absolutely precedent for privacy from the government on things that don’t matter to it. Why should the welfare department need information about my driving history or whether I have a passport? It doesn’t, so it shouldn’t have access.
jjlinux@lemmy.zip 3 weeks ago
I agree, it shouldn’t, but I but they do. Don’t deceive yourself like that. As I said, some stuff you can (still) keep under wraps, that’s how criminals do it, but connecting the dots they almost invariably get caught, sooner or later.
sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works 3 weeks ago
Right, like Al Capone got caught for tax evasion instead of all the murders and whatnot. If they’re digging, they’ll find it, and they can get almost anything with a warrant.
My point is that governments are generally pretty dysfunctional with information sharing, so even if they have a piece of information, it’s unlikely the appropriate agency has it. They’re getting more and more information the more crap like age verification gets passed, but that doesn’t change the dysfunction between agencies.
jjlinux@lemmy.zip 3 weeks ago
I can never disagree with this premise. Government institutions are dysfunctional and broken as hell, regardless of the country we’re referring to. And that alone supports your point, so I have to say, you are right, not one single institution has all our info. The sum of all of them may, however, have it all. Should they choose to organize all our data and have it centralized (say one database for all institutions to feed from) it’s just a matter of merging the data and giving all of them access, even if they use different systems.
That’s where I’m going with this. We do need to obscure as much as we can, but knowing what we’re not able to keep private anymore is pivotal to focus on those things that we can keep under our control.