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.
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.
Damn, I think my proton vpn is stopping me from commenting on here
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?
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.
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.
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.
thanks democrats
“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.
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/
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:
Meshtastic does seem very cool
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
Maybe Kaczynski had a point by running off to the woods and living in a cabin.
Let’s just go all the way back to Walden pond.
No that’s too far I like espresso. How about the coffee shop half a block from Walden?
No shit
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”.
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 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
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.
