The social media ban for younger kids in Australia is not a good thing. By requiring anyone who wants to access social platforms to provide government ID, you’re effectively eliminating online anonymity.
Sure, the justification today might be to “protect the kids”. But you’re slowly building the infrastructure of a surveillance state. All it’ll take is for an authoritarian party to win the next election and your privacy and freedom of expression is over.
The only way to protect children and protect our privacy is if the age verification software is publicly auditable and uses zero-knowledge proofs for age attestation. The website you’re accessing must never see anything about you aside from “This user is 16+.” And the age verification platform must never be able to keep a log of which websites you’ve accessed.
But that’s just a compromise. If I had the option to choose, I’d rather there be absolutely no age verification, ever.
The social media ban for younger kids in Australia is not a good thing. By requiring anyone who wants to access social platforms to provide government ID, you’re effectively eliminating online anonymity.
Sure, the justification today might be to “protect the kids”. But you’re slowly building the infrastructure of a surveillance state. All it’ll take is for an authoritarian party to win the next election and your privacy and freedom of expression is over.
The only way to protect children and protect our privacy is if the age verification software is publicly auditable and uses zero-knowledge proofs for age attestation. The website you’re accessing must never see anything about you aside from “This user is 16+.” And the age verification platform must never be able to keep a log of which websites you’ve accessed.
But that’s just a compromise. If I had the option to choose, I’d rather there be absolutely no age verification, ever.
EDIT: Fixed grammar.
Think of how many kids we could protect if we just locked up the entire adult population. Don’t you care about children?