Comment on System76 on Age Verification Laws
mindbleach@sh.itjust.works 16 hours ago‘This law is fine because it won’t affect child predators’ is a brave argument.
What is it for? You’ve found so many ways to say it’s toothless, optional, trivially dodged. So why fucking bother? Critics seem to agree, it’s a foot in the door for all of the other privacy-defeating efforts going on, now running in protection ring zero. What does this nonsense do, besides set off those red flags? What impact do you honestly expect, versus telling websites to have an ‘18+ only’ click-through?
PlzGivHugs@sh.itjust.works 16 hours ago
This obviously isn’t the argument I’m making. This law obviously isn’t meant to stop predators. Its meant to provide a parental control option for parents to limit their own children’s access to potentially harmfull or mature materials.
This huge uproar is the point of my confusion. You and others in the field seem certain that this is a direct first step towards ID and AI data collection. Meanwhile, before this, I actually saw this occasionally proposed as a good option in privacy-related blogs/communities specifically because it was optional and entirely handled by the users.
More convenience for adults (not having to click “yes” every time), and having a more effective way of slowing down children accessing content that might be dangerous. For example, if I was a parent who had access to this, I’d likely set up two accounts for my kids: one set to 18+ for when I’m directly supervising them, and one set to under 18 for when I’m supervising them less thoroughly.
mindbleach@sh.itjust.works 15 hours ago
Software freely adding an option to somehow report ‘this user is underage’ is unavoidably distinct from the government mandating any form of requesting, storing, or sharing the user’s age.
Even if you honestly believe there’s no connection to states demanding ID collection before looking at porn - how can you not understand the people recoiling at this? ‘I get it but you’re mistaken’ would see a polite argument. Your apparent bewilderment is inexplicable. ‘Microsoft legally requires your birthdate before you boot up and the internet will work differently based on that’ must be a dark aside in some Cory Doctorow story. How is it our actual reality, which some people think is normal?
PlzGivHugs@sh.itjust.works 15 hours ago
Well, from a privacy/freedom standpoint, how is this different from a website requiring you to enter your age and/or asking you to confirm that you’re 18? They record your age, store it with your data, then let you continue. The fact that baffles me is that this is widely accepted as standard practice, and not a significant privacy concern, while having an account-level flag that does the exact same thing isn’t. Like, is it because its managed by the browser/OS/app store? In that case, why isn’t there the same backlash against the existance of things like system theme flags, user agents, and even usernames.
mindbleach@sh.itjust.works 12 hours ago
As if there’s no backlash for those things! No popular culture reflecting the baby boom on January 1st, 1900. No widespread browser plugins to make e-mail nags and sign-in pop-ups fuck off.
As if legally mandatory age reporting is in any way the same thing as haphazard adoption of a Dark Mode flag. Wikipedia’s not even smart enough to make Automatic the default.
On some level, a website named Porn Hub needing an interstitial that says ‘btw, this is porn’ is the original sin of the internet. It’s borne of the same puritanical horseshit that tried banning pornography entirely. It’s not about children. They’re the excuse. This ongoing moral panic uses them in a widespread and not entirely unsuccessful effort to deny adult-ass adults the things that most of them want. This has been happening my entire life, and yours, and is why I cannot respect the hair-splitting insistence that forcing your OS to report your age is - somehow! - totally unrelated, utterly disconnected, having nothing to do with the many conservative governments who want to track every video you ever jerked off to.
For the children.