Online threats to children are real, but the headlong pursuit of age verification that we’re seeing around the world is unacceptable in its approach and far too broad in scope — and we simply can’t afford to get this wrong.
To be clear, parents’ concerns are valid and sincere. Few people would argue that kids should have unfettered access to adult material, to self-harm how-tos, to social media platforms that manipulate them and expose them to abuse.
But it’s the very depth of those worries that is being cynically exploited. Age verification as is currently being proposed in country after country would mean the death of anonymity online.
And we know exactly who stands to gain: The same tech giants who built the privacy nightmare that the internet is today.
It’s been fun lads. Let’s make agreements for where we will touch grass together when this happens. Follow-up events will be decided on location
I think these laws are not for we’ll just get around it or not use services that require it, for now at least.
It bothers me that we know that this bullshit has nothing to do with the kids and is probably being lobbied by the genocide gang and AI companies, even more that it has become obvious that the only value AI has is mass monitoring, but nobody abords the real issue. We are playing their book.
99.9% navigate the system and grow up perfectly fine, or fine enough. We shouldn’t have to completely surrender our anonymity for the tiny percentage that went wrong.
Before the Internet, some people got weird, and in the Internet era, some people are going to go weird. Age verification isn’t going to change that.
This isn’t about the kids. We all know it.
“It’s for the KIDS, you COMMIE!”
It’s time we stop accepting that rationalization as valid.
Kids don’t have unfettered access if they are supervised, lol. And age gating will fail regardless. So it’s a failure followed by another failure, sigh.
Indeed, unfettered in a literal sense cannot happen even with the most minimum supervision, but regardless of the threshold in parenting (I am not going to pardon parents responsibility on this, but good luck asserting 100% supervision), circumventions will always take place, so with more reason it cannot be used the “kids safety” argument to bring Orwellian levels to everybody’s lifes
just out of curiosity, what do you consider minimum supervision to be?
The theoretical minimum would be sharing any instant of their lives, during which they could not sustain an unfettered access to anything, not like I would consider it a decent minimum in any case (I was revolving around the “unfettered access” concept of the previous comment), but I cannot imagine how it would exists any threshold of supervision above which you can exclude any unfettered access at any given moment of their existence, risk of harmful exposition never drops to zero, so argue an Orwellian measure for the indiscriminate shake of their safety has no sense to me…
He has a vested interest in saying that, but he’s right, and it would be awful
It’s interesting what people expect of Proton Mail. I’ve used it for a long time but for only one reason really: their revenue stream is my subscription and not ads. I’ve never even given a second thought to all their encryption claims. Even with Proton Mail if I ever wanted to send a “secret” email I’d wrap the content in my own personal keys.
With respect to IP addresses of email logins, I’m surprised they ever claimed they don’t have logs. You’ve always been able to review the IP of a login through the web UI as far as I remember. Was the idea that that was also supposed to be encrypted?
Personally I’m OK with them complying with court orders, but I understand that “the definition of criminal is state defined” and that poses serious issues. It kinda seems like if you want to do something that could be considered criminal at some point in your life by your country you should consider something other than a 3rd party email provider for those messages. Signal would be a step up in that regard if you still wanted to use a third party.
It’s interesting what people expect of Proton Mail.
It’s quite mundane actually: people expect what they advertise on their front page.
Their advertising is a stretch at the best of times, and (as seen on my first link) so terrible that it needs to be removed at other times.
Lol, ok, fair.
I guess I see a lot of wiggle room in the marketing speak of their page and I haven’t actually “looked in to” Proton Mail’s claims in a loooong time. So I guess what I really wanted to say is that it’s interesting to me that people take that marketing at face value if they’re actually trying to maintain secrecy. I’ve always just taken it as a given that third party services aren’t particularly good at that, especially as they grow in complexity like Proton has. Signal has been easier for me to believe because of the singular focus and the reputation of the founder in the crypto community; although I guess he’s long gone.
They have to comply with court orders. You can’t run a business and ignore the government and legal system; they will throw the book at you.
Don’t use proton to do anything that could be considered a crime in the EU.
This sounds like something you should take up with Proton’s marketing: “Outside of US and EU jurisdiction”
Which is both correct, but makes them still subject to swiss law, and swiss law enforcement will comply with foreign requests - although it took some serious misrepresenting by the French by citing terrorism laws to get the swiss courts to sign the warrant, forcing proton to log the next IP the user used to log in. Had the user used protons own VPN or TOR to login, the resulting data would have been useless.
If Proton users try to sign up with Tor, they are asked for an email address, which Proton stores and turns over to law enforcement. Your complaint is legitimate, but you are speaking to the choir here, they need to know. At bare minimum, so they don’t get in legal trouble for misrepresentation (although I hope people here presume they have a higher ethical standard than legality)
The positive thing about age checks is the technology that will come out to by pass the system.
I’m working on ways it right now. Aliexpress wants me to do a face check for some items. I’ve been a customer long enough to have been born and become a legal adult as a customer!
They don’t want my face for verification. It’s an excuse to feed their AI, which is already scary good at voice.
How long before we get a Meshtastic style, decentralized internet?
While Meshtastic is great, I believe Reticulum has a more suitable approach for this: https://reticulum.network/
I definitely agree. Meshtastic has its uses but being a wide area network replacement is not one of them. Reticulum seems to be the mesh we all want and the technology is here, we just need to organize to make it happen.
What can I, as a regular guy, do to help make this happen?
I know you mean a Meshtastic style internet in general. But this is too fascinating to not share. Meshtastic is amazing:
Meshcore has worked far better in my exp although there’s been some controversy recently
I have to admit I am a fan from afar, I just enjoy keeping up with new devices and so on.
But I do love drama, so I’ll go check that out now!
Yeah some guy named Andy used the brand to advertise ai made software
Meshtastic does seem very cool
Wifi HaLow is a bit closer to capable of early 00s internet speeds while reaching 1km, meshtastic and mescore reach 100x further and are good enough for text but not really capable of any media.
More people need to adopt both, here’s hoping.
If this becomes widespread, I just won’t use any websites that require it. There will always be ways around it or alternatives for people opposed to losing their privacy. There already are at least 2 Internets. There’s reddit and Facebook and Twitter and all the corporate news sites, and then there’s Lemmy and archive.org and the dark web and dev pages and independent websites and piracy. I find I rarely care about the former anyway. It’ll just mean being blocked off from all the corporate slop, which may be a blessing in disguise.
I am readying myselft for the end of internet since years. I guess we are at the end of the dead internet theory where they have to ID humans to be able to differentiate them from bots and be able yo target them more specifically.
Lol, is that why? Advertising dollars.
It’s tough for millennials, who saw the potential and the promise of the Internet.
It’s important to note the Arab Spring and the One Piece (whatever we’ll name it).
Even now the remnants of the forth estate, are literally vlogging news on tube sites and substack.
But yeah, Internet is ever inching forward to becoming TV or radio. Centralized information is power.
I maintain that we lost the Internet when we accepted asynchronous data connection.
Shocking news! The sky is blue
“Could” is a funny way of saying “are obviously intended to”. Stop playing around, call it out directly. Points where you must have your ID checked are, in fact, ID checkpoints.
Could? Will.
Man, parents not wanting anything to do with their kids’ upbringing will believe anything, huh. They’d rather offload any and all responsibilities to automation than spend one minute teaching kids how to protect themselves.
Then again, they probably don’t know, either.
I think you’re correct in both aspects for sure. Parents are certainly less involved, for the most part, in informing their kids of literally anything. It is much easier to ‘offload any and all responsibilities’ as you put it. iPad kids are a good example of this. Handing a 2yr old a video device and walking away is not parenting. This is an issue with many many topics from internet safety, to general life things, to talks about their bodies. Parents do not want to parent.
I’d also agree, largely, the parents just don’t know, or care. Privacy is, unfortunately, a niche thing to know and care about.
I see this as more like the patriot act- gover ent and big tech are pushing to elevate concerns of “the children’s safety” to violate our privacy and sell data. Same way the patriot act is so you can “keep all the evil bad man terrorists” at bay but really it’s an excuse to violate our rights “legally” in the name of “safety”.
There’s two ways to view what you just said there. Parents aren’t parenting, but you can’t speak for someone elses emotions about it. And it’s more constructive to a problem (rather than adding to it) to ask why, to figure out what’s happening, with compassion, so as to help it be repaired.
Here’s another example, drug addicts, quite often you will hear people judging and shaming their behaviours, without asking why, or looking at their choices with compassion and an eye to repair the problems for them. Most often, very very abused children, grow up to self medicate their internal agony, caused by what they’ve lived through. You wouldn’t then choose locking them up in jail to help repair.
You’re talking about kids, maybe some of them go on to be these same drug addicts.
I would suggest this whole problem with the unsupervised parenting / disconnected parenting is capitalism. And it’s by design.
People have kids (mostly) because they want them, they love them. I would argue very few would want to be parenting poorly. So why are they?
Could it be that there’s no opportunity to stay home and raise kids. Raising kids, is work, and it is hard work, has been so hugely devalued, intentionally, so as to be able to remove it as needing space in people’s lives. Who thinks it’s admirable to stay home and raise kids? That is an opinion that has been societally planted, to serve the bourgeois.
Actual paid work, who can live without working? Multiple jobs, even. That’s also by design.
Capitalism also designed this system we are all currently using, of a family in a singular home. It wasn’t like that, previously. So no village, no desperately needed support for raising kids.
Jobs burn you out, we aren’t designed to live like this, but there’s little to no flexibility, and parenting burns you out, and theres little to no support for that, now. Who has energy left after that, to also find all the ways in which tech is attacking this week.
I would argue, partially, the solve for poor parenting, would be to start rolling out some guillotines.
But also, raising a kid is supposed to be the job of a village, I’m sure you’ve heard that. To be a good parent, you need a full tank, but all the avenues for refilling your tank have been removed.
We should all care about fixing this, it is our next generation. I don’t believe hating on the singular parents trapped in this hellhole, is the answer.
I have siblings like that. Literally never seen them parent. I’ve changed more of their kids’ diapers than I have seen them do, and I have no kids. It’s kind of irritating in an understatement kind of way. My poor niblings
But look at you, being the village, awesome job, stepping in and helping them grow up to be rounded little people. I have 7 niblings, and they’re all a mix of neurodivergence, I’ve been gathering them all and taking them to events and teaching them, playing with them, since day dot. Even though I have kids of my own. It’s so hugely necessary to be in the kids in your life, lives, like that. You can’t parent from an empty cup, and the ability to refill that cup has been removed from us. You taking that time, also gives time for the parents to recharge. You’re amazing, keep it up!
It seems like a pretty common thing for people to expect that the luxuries of modern technology include not having to do anything you don’t want to, including being present for your own life.
People make self-destructive choices every day. (insert “always have been” 🌏🧑🚀🔫🧑🚀)
I mean, I’ve got boxes full of physical books and self hosted movies and Tv. At that point, I’ll just stop using the internet. I need to go outside more anyway.
Finally all my friends that been giving me shit about having a dvd collection can eat shit.
I was finally ready to clean out my closet and get rid of all my old movies and games. But now…
I’ve got a mean collection myself. I have saved every cassette, record , DVD , VHS , book , magazine ( some bit the dust but anything with good info stayed) , zine and CD I’ve ever baught since I was a young teen ( and their many versions of various players for the many formats)
I’ve had more than a few people appear angry that I have kept all these “things” in my life. Blows my mind that they never saw this coming. …I guess I can rent my dad’s and books
I put my 500+ collection of DVDs into several of those old CD storage sleeves cases you used to see back in the 90s. They are safe and sound, ready for when things go too far.
Disc rot is still a thing. Warner Bros DVDs produced between 2005 and 2009 are especially affected.
Yeah. You probably want to rip them asap. But that would be quite a PITA with that many DVDs
Did not know that and will now be ripping as many as I can.
Mine are ready to go at a moment notice 🙌
This was fun to zoom in on and check the titles. Also, good to see an All Elite fan in the wild.
I’ve been watching wrestling since the late 80s and I enjoy all the promotions. I stopped watching regularly around 2002ish. I came back when AEW debuted. I tried watching WWE but it just lost its spark for me. I keep up with news and clips but I don’t watch the weekly programming.
Any standout movies?
Cube 2 is an obscure gem for me. I really like ‘where are we and how did we get here?’ horror movies. Not sure if you saw Cube 3 but it was… not aa good, lmao.
I have only seen the first one, but I did hear Cube Zero was the weakest of the lot.
Your TV is missing
My mother in law got me essentially the bible of DIY gardens for the Flemish region. I learned that there are differences just in tool styles an hour drive away from eachother already.
I could read that for a years and still learn things!
The next step will be to make more essential services online only, so people have to use the internet.
Harder to organize protests though. Like if they implement a new renter’s/homeowner tax, or sales tax, or whatever, that means we’d have to sell our books to make ends meet. And then make “digitally inciting” protests illegal too maybe so you don’t feel comfortable even discussing it on your devices. (Not that our opsec today is sufficient, wager it’s not for like 95+% of us, but this feels yet worse)
Scary stuff
Exactly, well go a step back, communities will thrive.
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Make social media unprofitable instead of this.
Basically don’t allow ads for kids and only show social media posts from their friends in chronological order instead of any fancy algorithm. Also make them liable for showing scams to minors. That kills most profit.
Kill it from the other direction. Make it illegal to algorithmically adjust a users experience to prioritize interaction regardless of whether that’s positive or negative. Ultimately that’s the problem with places like Facebook, they weigh an angry rant the same as a positive one, higher even in a lot of cases. Things that make people angry generate a lot more interaction than positive things so it drowns people in hate and fear. If you treat any interaction as a positive signal things just devolve.
Great, now how do you tell who’s an adult?
They’ll just implement age verification anyway.
Or nobody verifies their age because it’s a hassle, social networks become unprofitable and die.
i barely used commercial social media (bsky excepted), but when australia brought in the the ID thing, I just didn’t bother going back. I used bsky a lot prior to the social media ban, but last time i logged in, it asked me for ID. I thought “fuck giving my ID to some random fucking company. My GOVT ID!”
Yeah right lol
People are already providing ID en masse for registration.
My parents have trouble typing on their password. Try having them do anything more complex and they’ll give up.
Facebook asks for ID nowadays, so does YouTube for adult content I believe. It’s been happening for years. It’s also easier than typing a password if you’re on mobile.
It’ll be normalised whether or not there’s laws requiring it :/
This would be awesome. I would buy myself a fake ID again! This time the other direction.
Anyone think that’s not the point?
“Age Verification” is just them attaching “THINK OF THE CHILDREN” to their push to have every single bit of information about every person on the planet.
All the more ironic when you realise that some of the big businessmen and lobbyists pushing for mandatory age verification checks are in the Epstein Files. Basically the kind of people who you don’t want to be thinking of the children…
Social media functions as a kind of gatekeeper for public interactions, not unlike credit scores, driver’s licenses, and college degrees. The absence of a presence on social media is not only socially debilitating (you’re cut out of the information stream for local events and public amenities) but a red-flag for college recruiters and employers. It’s much like how not using a credit card regularly in your teens/20s impacts your ability to access low-interest lending in your 30s/40s. Or not having a driver’s license interferes with your right to vote.
State officials have been searching for a kind of uniform, iron-clad, easily verifiable public ID for ages. Linking your online presence (a thing that you need for a myriad of daily tasks) to your ID becomes a pathway to this goal. Universal, non-transferable digital ID becomes a wicked two-edged sword as it both exhaustively tracks the “documented” individuals and neatly severs the “undocumented” from society.
Na bro social media is nothing like credit score. You’re totally fine not having facebook, all these municipalities have websites, you don’t need social media for anything.
And even credit scores, you just want it for like two years before buying a home, it’s no problem at all especially in contrast to the challenge of actually saving up enough money to buy a home.
State officials have been searching for a kind of uniform, iron-clad, easily verifiable public ID for ages
What are you talking about? People have been voting, paying taxes, applying for driver’s licenses, for ages online, they all have usernames and passwords with uploaded proof of ID for their online government transactions.
Na bro social media is nothing like credit score.
You might want to talk to folks in recruiting or HR. Everyone checks your social media history when they’re evaluating you.
