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 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.
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…
“It’s for the KIDS, you COMMIE!”
It’s time we stop accepting that rationalization as valid.
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.
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.
Could? Will.
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.
Shocking news! The sky is blue
That’s exactly what they (billionaires) are trying to achieve. Because they’re getting scared of us getting organised and doing more than burning down warehouses.
its to cut off things like organization, information to keep people ignorant. they only dream of able to turn off internet like iran does to keep people ignorant.
Damn, I think my proton vpn is stopping me from commenting on here
No shit
Surely it’s the death of anonymity for those who want to access stuff which would be age restricted in any other scenario (like a real shop). The rest of the population (most?) don’t care to access that stuff & don’t want it and can carry on being anonymous.
And yes that gives the likes of Facebook et al a problem because they’ll have to categorise their content, but the whole point of this current fad for governments to legislate to restrict stuff is that the big tech companies could have (made efforts to) fix it but chose not to because it’s (waves hands and wails) hard.
kids dont get unrestricted access unless the parent is too lazy and not putting limiations on thier devices. ive seen them give a toddler under 5 a PHONE TO play with.
thanks democrats
“invest in crypto” Also Proton. Fuck Proton.
Fuck the CEO, perhaps. But it feels like letting perfection be the enemy of good to dismiss all of Proton, which at the end of the day is still serving its users well.
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)
