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.
How long before we get a Meshtastic style, decentralized internet?
Maybe Kaczynski had a point by running off to the woods and living in a cabin.
I’m only surprised they’ve taken this long to get anonymity removed from the internet. Using kids as the lever isn’t surprising either.
I other words, a pipe dream for the likes of weird freaks like Yarvin and Thiel and Musk and Zuck and Bezos and Ellison…
Theres a big wide internet beyond apps and social media.
that space is already pretty much dead, at least here in germany. If you create your own website, you need to have a valid legal notice. if you set up a web forum, you’re liable for everything that gets posted there.
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 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
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”.
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 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.
That’s the goal.
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.
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.
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.
Clearly this man is a genius.
Crazy I was screamed at on Reddit for pointing out this guys hypocrisy. Glad I left his miserable platform.
The nightmare trap of the Two Party System is that you can look at one party cozying up to Big Tech (Obama in 2009) and conclude the other party must be reflexively in opposition.
Trump was fully surrounded by Thiel goons before he’d even left office in '21. And the relationship only got tighter with his Elon Musk Bromance. But hey, if you’d just elected Kamala Harris and
Liz CheneyTim Walz to the White House, I’m sure nobody would be talking about how much of their cabinet was stuffed with Silicon Valley cutouts.It’s not like a cartel of trillionaires can buy up both parties at once, right?
Sort of, but my point is he made a specific point of praising a demented rapist and lauding the pedophile party as heroes. Silicon Valley cutouts that support Democrats commit the unforgivable sins of praising diversity or working to solve climate problems. They’re not surveilling hospitals for ICE. This guy loves trump because he believes trump has any opinion or knowledge of tech monopolies.
Tone deaf doesn’t cover it. If he sold shoes, it’d be one thing. But he jumped head first into the cesspit for no reason other than he believed it.
And so, even though our opinions on age verification coincidentally align, he can fuck right off.
he made a specific point of praising a demented rapist and lauding the pedophile party as heroes
He made a point of praising a President’s pick for the Antitrust Division of the DOJ. He didn’t praise Trump and he certainly didn’t praise pedophilia.
Slater’s tenure at DOJ was short-lived and unremarkable. So feel free to mock Yen on those grounds. But this has dick all to do with Epstein. It has nothing to do with the bloated ICE budget (which received bipartisan approval) or the assorts nightmarish cabinet appointments, many of which enjoyed supermajority support in the Senate (Rub’em All Out Rubio was appointed unanimously ffs).
he jumped head first into the cesspit for no reason other than he believed it.
He’s a Tech Goon and Trump had a ton of Tech Goons on his team. These people aren’t partisan, they’re corporate lemmings. By 2028, I’m sure Yen will be lining up to brown nose the incoming Dem administration. By 2032, he’ll be back on Team R, shocked at how the party that did everything Tech wanted has betrayed his customers again. Oh, and incidentally, insisting that the only way to protect yourself from Mean Old Big Government is by upping your Proton License to Double Super Secure.
And so, even though our opinions on age verification coincidentally align, he can fuck right off.
He’s endorsing the poison so he can sell the antidote.
He didn’t praise Trump and he certainly didn’t praise pedophilia.
Disagree. “Great job Mr. president!” is praising trump, and praising trump is praising pedophile protectors. It’s noteven a big leap, or unconfirmed rumors. We have multiple witness accounts to his actions and nothing has been done - legally- following the initial release of many documents.
It has nothing to do with the bloated ICE budget (which received bipartisan approval) or the assorts nightmarish cabinet appointments, many of which enjoyed supermajority support in the Senate
Also disagree. Eighth-graders know what trump is about. Andy Yen knows what trump is about. Corruption, fascism, incompetence. Yeah let’s send a hoo-rah tweet to my (whatever # followers)
(Rub’em All Out Rubio was appointed unanimously ffs).
Yeah that’s disgusting. Although I assumed he was just stupid and corrupt, not flat out evil as has revealed himself to be.
These people aren’t partisan, they’re corporate lemmings.
He’s both. There’s no non-partisan support of trump, he’s made sure of it.
By 2028, I’m sure Yen will be lining up to brown nose the incoming Dem administration. By 2032, he’ll be back on Team R, shocked at how the party that did everything Tech wanted has betrayed his customers again.
Yeah, that’s probably right, but all the reason I’m kicking him to the curb now.
Yeah, this was inexcusable. Trump’s been cozying up to the tech billionaires for years.
Anyone who could not see that Trump was going to extort business for his own personal gain was clueless to Trump and his cabinet of blackmailers.
Anyone of color giving support to White Nationalists is fucking insane and shows a complete lack of understanding of current US politics.
Proton Mail Says It’s “Politically Neutral” While Praising Republican Party
lol
This whole conversation is such a false dichotomy. The laws can absolutely be written such that companies are required to suspend service to any suspected child without requiring ID to use the service.
But just like pollution and everything else we’ve let them push the buck to us.
The problem is that politicians don’t want to legislate enforcement/oversight entities as those would piss off their owners.
Democracies need to replace their lame duck politicians with ones that aren’t bought and owned by the shareholder class who also own the social media corporations.
The laws can absolutely be written such that companies are required to suspend service to any suspected child without requiring ID to use the service.
The laws shouldn’t focus on “harming children” so much, but on “harming humans”.
The big tech companies should be held responsible for the actual damage they are inflicting upon society, and their methods to artificially inflate “engagement” (or whatever the hell they call it) should be held to scrutiny. Whether or not the damage is inflicted upon an underage person or an adult, is merely a distraction.
Those assholes would love it if we all had to identify ourselves and prove our age, if it means they get to keep inflicting their shit upon us.
I agree but like that’s a much bigger discussion.
I think there is an immediate opportunity to mitigate harm in the long term that doesn’t require us finding a perfect solution to corporate-greed(capitalism).
Similar to how prohibiting tobacco sales to minors has drastically reduced the number of smokers. Ask anyone over 70 when they started smoking. Almost all of them started when they were young teenagers.
No.
Wow what petulant response. A brief overview of your comments indicates I was wasting my time responding to you in good faith. I sincerely apologize.
Authoritarian bootlickers get no consideration. “No” is what you get.
lmao wtf kid grow up
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)
Nobody has better solutions to fight against botnets and targeted misinformation. Like, these are big deals that every Nation needs account for some way some how. A non-anonymous internet for the masses, and anonymous internet for those who know how to get around it should be the standard.
Aaaaand they got you
I’d argue that most things that are currently in the crosshairs for exclusion under age verification are also harmful to at least a third of the adult population and to society in general.
Actually maybe that’s just for profit algorithm based social media and / or mass scale surveillance and personal information gathering and advertising.
The point being, if you’re going to make a case for something being harmful to kids, you need to also make a case for it’s being OK for adults or maybe it just needs banning outright for the good of society, see also smoking. Personally I’m in favor of leaving this in the hands of the individual and parents, and perhaps making easy tools for less technically adept parents to use.
TLDR: If Facebook is bad for kids, why isn’t it bad for adults?
That’s quite obviously the end goal here.
