Submitted 3 weeks ago by General_Effort@lemmy.world to technology@lemmy.world
This is exactly the kind of government overreach people like me have been screaming about since, in my case, the 1990s.
“I told you so” just doesn’t feel so good when what’s happening is nothing less than the entirety of human freedom and liberty is being eroded before our very eyes, and those who disagree with it get labeled as kooks, and accused of hating whatever “oppressed group” of the day is in vogue.
I’m so so very tired of being right.
have you tried being intentionally and absurdly wrong?
Yes. I had always worried about the copyright industry. That was the big money pushing for censorship. Controlling access and exchange of information is part of their business model and even personal ideology. But I don’t know how much this has actually to do with them, and how much is simply the will to power.
What I did not see coming at all was how the left would completely 180 on these issues. That, at least, I blame on the copyright industry.
Right wing people have screeched about “the intolerant left” forever, but I always ignored the obvious hypocrisy. I took it as a debate on what is permissible in polite society. But now Europe is at a point where there is simply a consensus against free speech. Only the most illiberal forces will be able to use these legal weapons to full effect. That will be the extreme right.
It’s just a logical extension of what happens when government becomes the arbitrator of all.
The biggest issue is that so many people see it just as you do, left vs right, instead of liberty vs authoritarianism.
For decades, the libertarian movement, as seen by the left, has been largely associated with the right, simply because of their professed support of the free market, and dislike of gun control
But that same movement has been seen by the right as largely associated with the left, because of their views on things like the drug war, enforced morality, and anti-corporatism.
Has there been a large shift of alt-right into the libertarian movement over the past few years? Yes. Absolutely. And I despise it with a passion.
But there are still quite a lot of us truly anti-authoritarian libertarians out there who despise both left, and right leaning authoritarianism.
But when I bring up issues of authoritarianism, I get “BoTh SiDeS?!” bullshit responses. Because YES, as we can see, BOTH SIDES do their own fair share of this anti-authoritarian bullshit.
They differ in methods, yes. But the bottom line is an encroachment on personal privacy. Property rights are a logical extension of personal privacy rights.
The ideal of free speech is a naive fantasy especially with social media which can amplify the craziest of ideas which can go viral.
I too have been screaming about private online since the 90s. I have an intuitive reaction that sort of mirrors yours.
But can I ask you a question?
And it’s one that I’m asking because I genuinely wish to learn from others.
Because I can’t quite see the difference and maybe there’s something I’m missing.
Why is it not government overreach to ensure pornography isn’t sold to minors in an adult video store, but government overreach to have the same expectation of online pornography providers?
I would love your enlightened view on this so I can learn from it. Because I can’t quite see the difference.
I understand that many adults go into an adult video store and need not prove their age, because they clearly look like adults.
And so the difference here is that everyone have to prove their age online, even people that are clearly adults by how they look.
But entering a pornography website is the equivalent of entering an adult video store where the clerk cannot see you, cannot hear your voice. In that world I would also expect the clerk to check every purchase as they would have no other means of assessing the buyer’s age.
Or maybe you think that adult videos should be sold to everyone and it’s the very concept that pornography is restricted to minors that you disagree with. I don’t personally hold that view but then I can least understand why you would also reject online age verification.
Or maybe you think it is ineffective and won’t make a difference. That argument I most definitely agree with, but how we choose to implement a law, and whether it’s effective, is two different discussions I would posit.
There is no possible way to actually stop teenagers accessing online porn that doesn’t require such a massive invasion of privacy that it leaves no safe way for adults to access it. To go with your adult video store analogy, it’s like if the store staff would have to accompany you home and watch you watching the porn to check there wasn’t anyone standing behind you also looking at the screen, and while they were there, they were supposed to take notes on everything they saw. Even if they had no interest in doing anything nefarious, a criminal could steal their notebook and blackmail all their customers with the details it contained, and there’d be enough proof that there wouldn’t be any way to plausibly claim the blackmailer had just made everything up.
If you want to prove someone on the Internet is a real adult and not a determined teenager, you need lots of layers. E.g. if you just ask for a photo of an ID card, that can be defeated by a photo of someone else’s ID card, and a video of a face can be defeated by a video game character (potentially even one made to resemble the person whose ID has been copied). You need to prove there’s an ID card that belongs to a real person and that it’s that person who is using it, and that’s both easier to fake than going to a store with a fake ID (if you look young, they’ll be suspicious of your ID) or Mission Impossible mask, and unlike in a store, the customer can’t see that you’re not making a copy of the ID card for later blackmail or targeted advertisements. No one would go back to a porn shop that asked for a home address and a bank statement to prove it.
Another big factor is that if there’s a physical shop supplying porn to children, the police will notice and stop it, but online, it’s really easy to make a website and fly under the radar. It’s pretty easy for sites that don’t care about the law to provide an indefinite supply of porn to children, and once that’s happening, there’s no reason to think that it’s only going to be legal porn just being supplied to the wrong people.
Overall, the risk of showing porn to children doesn’t go down very much, but the risk of showing blackmailable data to criminals and showing particularly extreme and illegal porn to children goes up by a lot. Protecting children from extreme material, e.g. videos of real necrophilia and rape, which are widely accepted to be seriously harmful, should be a higher priority than protecting a larger number from less extreme material that the evidence says is less harmful, if at all. Even if it’s taken as fact that any exposure to porn is always harmful to minors, the policies that are possible to implement in the real world can’t prevent it, just add either extra hassle or opportunities for even worse things to happen. There hasn’t been any proposal by any government with a chance of doing more good than harm.
Not OP, but I think the analogy to what is happening to online privacy would be if you were asked to identify yourself at every location: the grocery store, the farmers market, the corner park, the trail along the river; and all of those checkpoints were aggregated and sold, meaning that someone who might not have your best interests at heart could use your travel timeline against you, to advertise to you, to sue you, to charge you with a crime, to destroy your public reputation.
Funny - I assume on one here was actually involved in creating the law that requires identification when buying pornography (or alcohol. Or tobacco) at stores, but we are all considered responsible for it to the point we are hypocrite if we object a similar law?
If someone says they are against that law now, years after it’s already established and spread, it won’t be taken as “I’m generally against the government limiting our freedom to consume what we want” but as “I want to push children to consume porn/alcohol/tobacco”. So no one argues against these laws. But it’s much more feasible to argue against the new laws - a ship that’s still in the port.
30 years from now, when they make the law that neural implants must detect illegal thoughts in the users’ biological brains and block them, you’d make the argument that it’s not fundamentally different than blocking the same topics on the internet - a practice that, by that time, will already be accepted by the general populace.
But entering a pornography website is the equivalent of entering an adult video store where the clerk cannot see you, cannot hear your voice.
There’s the problem. I was tempted to call this Boomer logic, but that would extremely unfair to Boomers. We are only seeing this now, that the Boomers are on the way out.
I think the Boomers understood better how this works. It’s not like entering a store. It’s like making a phone call to the store, and the store may be on the other side of the world. The Boomers understood borders, long distance calls, international mail.
Now the digital natives are taking over. And they understand nothing beyond tapping and swiping.
Spoilered is a post I wrote earlier. Just so you know what’s coming.
The problem is that meat-space logic is applied to the cyberspace (as it might have been said in the 90ies). You go into a store and the clerk sees you and knows your age. If it’s borderline, then they ask for ID. They are applying that thinking to internet services. Where this falls down is that no ordinary Mastodon instance can comply with the regulations of the close to 200 hundred countries in the world. Of course, just like 4chan, many wouldn’t want to out of principle. The only way to make this work is to introduce another meat-space thing: Border posts. You need a Great Firewall of the [Local Nation]. At physical border posts, guards check if goods comply with local regulations. We need virtual border posts to check if data is imported and exported in compliance with local regulations. Such a thing, a virtual Schengen border, was briefly considered in the EU about 15 years ago. It went nowhere at the time. But if you look at EU regulations, you can see that the foundations are already laid, most obviously with the GDPR but also the DSM, DMA, DSA, CRA, … Eventually, the border will be closed to protect our values; to enforce our laws. We will lock out those American and Chinese Big Tech companies that steal our data. We will only allow their European branches and strictly monitor their communications abroad. We will be taking back control, as the Brexiteers sloganized it. Freedom is just another word for having to ask the government for permission when you enter a country. And increasingly, it is another word for having to ask permission for how you use your own computer. It won’t be some shady backroom deal. Look here. People in this community love these regulations. Europeans here are happy to tell US companies to “FO if they don’t want to follow our laws”. Well, the Great Firewall of Europe is how you do that. lemmy.world/comment/19119670
Because I can’t quite see the difference
Parents can (and MUST) monitor what happens in their home. It was expected for the past thousand years, and now it’s the duty of everyone to take care of anyone’s children for some reason. To get to a porn store, you need money to take the bus or you need a car, then the owner of the store can kick your ass or call the cops if you’re underage. Remember that less than 50 years ago, the local priest could smash your face if you didn’t behave properly in the street, With the internet, parents are the sole responsible for what their kids do, but they don’t want to take any responsibility for it. The solution would be a mandatory parental control on every computer, but parents wouldn’t like that.
government overreach to have the same expectation of online pornography providers
Because that overreach happens to remove all my privacy thanks to a few idiot parents who don’t want to do their parenting jobs in another country, and I consider that unacceptable.
Parents have the ultimate say-so of what their kids have access to.
I don’t believe there needs to be a law that says that, no.
If a parent decides their kid is responsible enough to have their own money, then it’s the parents who are to blame if that kid buys “bad” things with that money.
Same thing online. If a parent decides their kid is responsible enough to have unrestricted internet access, then it’s their fault if the kid then goes to a “bad” website.
It’s not the store’s fault. Nor is it the website’s fault.
We have given away far too much of our parental responsibility over to 3rd parties, and now we don’t know how to parent anymore.
People complained about government overreach when seatbelts became a law
Plus no one I have warned from 97 on admits to remembering my warnings. Them all saying nah keep your head down and live, govt has always been bad, nothing will fundamently change.
The same people still support establishment opposition to save us too, following the lead of authorities passing the buck and never admitting a mistake and correcting their behavior.
You’ve been screaming about internet censorship since before the internet?
Fucking time traveller right here
… I was online in 1993, bro. I was dialing into BBSs with worldwide fidonet bulletin boards even earlier than that.
Don’t be such a dipshit.
What are you talking about? The internet existed all through the 90s
Brother, delete this silly comment and be a nicer person. Please, there is still time!
If you know anyone who support age verifications laws remind them that the same governments that care so much about kids is backing and arming israel to murder and starve kids to death.
That’s far too many words for them to properly understand
Then let me summarize:
care 'bout kids? gaza kids?
Yes but that would require them to regard all children as being worthy of protection by the law.
They don’t.
Kids of Families who chose to stay despite efforts to evacuate them 👍
No effort could have evacuated the entire population of Gaza without free movement across land borders. It was never a practical option.
Even if it had been, parents making a dumbass decision doesn’t justify killing their kids.
Hey, UK! When you are being compared to Mississippi, you are fucking up very very badly.
I live in the UK, and this is something I was saying about the Online Safety Act. It puts all the onus on the websites and not only do some websites not have the money or resources to comply, but with something like Mastodon, it doesn’t really work. Like this bill was written and passed by people who don’t know shit about fuck about tech. Several Lemmy and Mastodon instances have shut down/Geoblocked the UK because of this, and other jurisdictions don’t seem to understand that either.
It’s almost like this law was made to preserve the Meta monopoly.
What gets me is how many people in this very community have the same level of ignorance. And on top of that, they don’t understand that these laws also apply to the very service they are using.
but with something like Mastodon, it doesn’t really work. Like this bill was written and passed by people who don’t know shit about fuck about tech. Several Lemmy and Mastodon instances have shut down/Geoblocked the UK because of this
So they knew what they were doing. Age verification is about removing all sources that can’t be controlled.
I think that was the point. Not only decentralized services, but a lot of small and/or individual services too. The way age verification is done is both stupid, and expensive. Only the big names will remain.
Only the big names will remain.
We NEED to Protect The Children which is WHY we’re SO LUCKY to have a President who is SO KEEN to PROTECT Child Rapists like Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell!
Protect Jeffrey Epstein? Last I checked, he doesn’t need anymore “protecting”.
Trump only cares about himself. If he accidentally “protected” anyone but himself, it’s purely a coincidence.
“there is nobody that can decide for the fediverse to block Mississippi.” (…)
“And this is why real decentralization matters,” said Rochko.
If it’s a law, it should be free for both businesses and users.
I don’t see how Mississippi or the UK think they can issue laws on sites hosted outside their jurisdiction. That’s just mind boggling. The onus is on the state to provide age verification, or make their ISPs do it.
Lucky for Mastodon anx other ActivityPub projects, they don’t need to host any servers. People outside of regions where age verification is required can host the servers instead.
If a government wants this in place, they should also facilitate the means.
And of course, even if they did, tech savvy kids can just self-host an instance on their own computer.
Nice.
SeductiveTortoise@piefed.social 3 weeks ago
Government sets up page to verify age. You head to it, no referrer. Age check happens by trusted entity (your government, not some sketchy big tech ass), they create a signed cert with a short lifespan to prevent your kid using the one you created yesterday and without the knowledge which service it is for. It does not contain a reference to your identity. You share that cert with the service you want to use, they verify the signature, your age, save the passing and everyone is happy. Your government doesn't know that you're into ladies with big booties, the big booty service doesn't know your identity and you wank along in private.
But oh no, that wouldn't work because think of the... I have no clue.
bulwark@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
That sounds like a very functional and rational solution to the problem of age verification. But age verification isn’t the ultimate goal, it’s mass surveillance, which your solution doesn’t work for.
floofloof@lemmy.ca 3 weeks ago
The fact that they haven’t gone for this approach that delivers age verification without disclosing ID, when it’s a common and well known pattern in IT services, very strongly suggests that age verification was never the goal. The goal is to associate your real identity with all the information data brokers have on you, and make that available to state security services and law enforcement. And to do this they will make it impossible to use the internet until they have your ID.
MunkysUnkEnz0@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
Don’t forget censorship.
noxypaws@pawb.social 3 weeks ago
what exactly is the problem, though?
infinitesunrise@slrpnk.net 3 weeks ago
Because it’s not actually about age verification, it’s about totalizing surveillance of everyone.
tabular@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
Bold of you to assume a government entity is trusted. In the UK we have a large misrepresentative error due to our voting system.
SeductiveTortoise@piefed.social 3 weeks ago
Depends in what part you trust. I trust them with my ID, I wouldn't trust a random website. They know it anyway as they made it.
TechnoCat@lemmy.ml 3 weeks ago
I think this starts to not work when you start to include other states that want to do this, other countries, cities, counties, etc… How many trusted authorities should there be and how do you prevent them from being compromised and exploited to falsely verify people? How do you prevent valid certs from being sold?
SeductiveTortoise@piefed.social 3 weeks ago
I can only verify with my own government. The rest I don't know. But shut up, that's how it works! /s
To be honest, I have no clue. But dropping my pants to write a mail isn't what I want to do.
homoludens@feddit.org 3 weeks ago
Sold by whom? The created cert can be time limited and single use, so the service couldn’t really sell them. You could rate limit how many certs users can create and obviously make it illegal to share them in order to deter people from using them. That’s not enough to prevent it completetly, but should be an improvement for the use cases I hear the most about: social media (because it reduces the network effect) and porn (because kids will at least know that they’re doing some real shady shit).
General_Effort@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
The problem is that meat-space logic is applied to the cyberspace (as it might have been said in the 90ies).
You go into a store and the clerk sees you and knows your age. If it’s borderline, then they ask for ID. They are applying that thinking to internet services. And so are you. You are just trying to figure out a better way to ask for ID.
The UK doesn’t have a system of mandatory national ID. Brits feel that that is totalitarian. So obviously, they do not use the scheme you propose. It’s not their meat-space logic.
Where this falls down is that no ordinary Mastodon instance can comply with the regulations of the close to 200 hundred countries in the world. Of course, just like 4chan, many wouldn’t want to out of principle.
The only way to make this work is to introduce another meat-space thing: Border posts. You need a Great Firewall of the [Local Nation]. At physical border posts, guards check if goods comply with local regulations. We need virtual border posts to check if data is imported and exported in compliance with local regulations.
Such a thing, a virtual Schengen border, was briefly considered in the EU about 15 years ago. It went nowhere at the time. But if you look at EU regulations, you can see that the foundations are already laid, most obviously with the GDPR but also the DSM, DMA, DSA, CRA, …
Eventually, the border will be closed to protect our values; to enforce our laws. We will lock out those American and Chinese Big Tech companies that steal our data. We will only allow their European branches and strictly monitor their communications abroad. We will be taking back control, as the Brexiteers sloganized it. Freedom is just another word for having to ask the government for permission when you enter a country. And increasingly, it is another word for having to ask permission for how you use your own computer.
It won’t be some shady backroom deal. Look here. People in this community love these regulations. Europeans here are happy to tell US companies to “FO if they don’t want to follow our laws”. Well, the Great Firewall of Europe is how you do that.
commie@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 weeks ago
but they know who they issued it to, and can secretly subpoena your data from your instance.
no thank you.
homoludens@feddit.org 3 weeks ago
They can only subpoena your data if it is stored. Make the code open source (by law) and only store the cert, no connection to the user.
jim3692@discuss.online 3 weeks ago
They (the govt) would know that they issued a certificate to ex. lemmy.dbzer0.com
They can’t know that the certificate is issued to conmie
Unless, of course, the instance logs the age certificate used by each user
And also, unless the govt’s age verification service logs the certificate issued by each citizen
brachiosaurus@mander.xyz 3 weeks ago
It was never about the kids.
en.wikipedia.org/…/2010s_global_surveillance_disc…
just_an_average_joe@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 weeks ago
How about people parent their children?
I believe the issue is that parents themselves are overworked from their job and have no energy to be a parent, because in our society, it is more successful to be a worker than to be a parent.
(Sorry for turning it into a critique of capitalism, I just can’t help it these days)
SeductiveTortoise@piefed.social 3 weeks ago
I'm with you on this one, but that's easy to say for me. I'm in IT anyway. I just have a hard time imagining how my sister for example would set this up for her kids.
Zwuzelmaus@feddit.org 3 weeks ago
Sorry, not sufficient.
Not secure.
" I certify that somebody is >18, but I don’t say who - just somebody "
This is an open invitation to fraud. You are going to create at least a black market for these certificates, since they are anonymous but valid.
And I’m sure some real fraudsters have even stronger ideas than I have.
iopq@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
What stops non-anonymous certificates from being sold?
If John Doe views way too much porn, then you expect the site to shut him down? They have no ability to track other site usage. The authorities have to block him after the 10,000th download.
At that point, why does the site need to know? Either the government blocks someone’s ID or they don’t
homoludens@feddit.org 3 weeks ago
Making the certs short-lived (a few minutes) and single use and having a rate limit for users could make it difficult enough with serious risks (if you make it a crime) for little profit (I doubt many kids will pay serious amounts of money to watch porn; definetly not drug-scale amounts of money).
doughless@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
The service provider could even generate a certificate request that the age verification entity signs (again, with no identifying information, other than “I need an age verification signature, please”). That certificate would only be valid for that specific service provider and can’t be re-used.
LifeInMultipleChoice@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
I give it 2 years till Netflix requires you to have an ID every time you open the app because it has rated R movies.
This is the same principle. The account holder agreement should make the account holder responsible for the use of the service.
The government shouldn’t be parenting our minors, their guardians should be.
Otherswise we should put digital locks on every beer bottle, pack of cigarettes, blunt raps, car door, etc. That requires you to scan your ID before every use.
“Kids shouldn’t be driving cars, it isn’t safe!” Yes, but somehow we have made it 100 years without requiring proof of age/license to start the car.
And the car is far more deadly than them seeing someone naked.
mic_check_one_two@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 weeks ago
Ideally, it would be handled directly on the hardware. Allow people to verify their age once, using a government-run site. Then that user is now verified. Any time an age gate needs to happen, the site initiates a secure handshake with the device, and asks the device if the current user is old enough. The device responds with a simple yes/no using that secure protocol. Parents can verify their accounts/devices, while child accounts/devices are left unverified.
Government doesn’t know what you’re watching, people don’t need to spam an underfunded government site with requests every day, and age gates are able to happen entirely in the background without any additional effort on the user’s side. Adults get to watch porn without needing to verify every time, while kids automatically get a “you’re not age-verified” wall. And kids can’t MITM the age check, due to the secure handshake.
starman2112@sh.itjust.works 3 weeks ago
You sell that cert to a local kid for $50
You generate another cert to sell to a local kid tomorrow
???
Profit
SeductiveTortoise@piefed.social 3 weeks ago
And your solution is...?
GreenShimada@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
It bothers me so much that a ZKP system is entirely possible, and no one will just do the first step of setting that up.
sunbeam60@lemmy.ml 3 weeks ago
Eh, Denmark is. They are building exactly a ZKP system.
Britain has chosen to not make this a legal requirement so it is possible to tie back age verification with who verified. That makes it a lot more suspect.
Humanius@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
Funnily enough that is roughly the implementation the EU seems to be working on.
…ec.europa.eu/…/eu-age-verification
SeductiveTortoise@piefed.social 3 weeks ago
I think I have to specify what I mean by trusted. I do not trust them with my browser history, but I do trust them handling my government-issued identity. I do however not trust a company with that identity because I know they will definitely use it for their own good. What I want is the complete and absolute separation of information. Everyone knows exactly what they need to know, not a byte more. I'm still not convinced we desperately need the possibility to identify us for every fucking service though. Keeping kids from accessing porn should be the task of the parent. Keeping kids out of porn, yes indeed, we all need to tackle that problem.
ItsGhost@sh.itjust.works 3 weeks ago
Because think of the shareholders, I’m waiting to see which politicians spouses own controlling shares in the verification companies…
SeductiveTortoise@piefed.social 3 weeks ago
That's the reason I don't want that for profit. What could it cost in additional taxes? 5 cents?
rozodru@piefed.social 3 weeks ago
meh just do what Amazon does "Hey if you're student you can get Amazon Prime for $5! how old are you?"
me: "I'm 20."
Amazon: "Ok here's your cheap prime!"
/me groans getting out of the chair cause I'm in my 40s
Point being just slap up an unverified age gate and be done with it. Really, truthfully, whose going to actually check? who even cares to check? it's all just a dog and pony show to please the conservative and "think of the children" religious nut jobs who have no idea how any of this shit works anyways. Just spend 2 minutes whipping up a site with a centered div that has a drop down menu asking "how old are you?" less than 18 send it to a "no internet for you page" greater than 18 "go look at porn" page.
Doesn't take a rocket scientist to know what's REALLY happening that they're requiring scanned IDs or faces or what have you. and no company in their right mind is going to fight this as it's free and easy data collection. Bluesky doesn't give a flying fuck as they're just going to end up selling the data they collect.
monk@lemmy.unboiled.info 2 weeks ago
Oh, it will work fine, as soon as it issues it’s first cert without any reference to the identity, it wouldn’t even be needed until it’s expiry. But it’s easier to just not build it.
fodor@lemmy.zip 3 weeks ago
Right, except for the part where you get verified and nobody can do that except you. Oh, and the part where your kids don’t steal a copy. Or a copy of someone else’s verification. And the part where it actually doesn’t contain references to your real identity; easy to fuck that one up, right… Hmm, that actually means the whole thing wouldn’t work.