Age verification is just a precursor to automated attribution of speech

firefoxd

It gives a new spin to: > Everything you say CAN and WILL be used against you. Especially when what you said has already been recorded and tied to your identity before you faced the authorities. Edit: from last week https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48632269

jauntywundrkind

Look at W Social. The governments will team up with anyone, no matter how shady, as long as they promise to try to restrict free, unattributed speech. They'll team up with absolute sharks, as long as those sharks are gonna help sack and battle the Declaration of Independence of Cyberspace. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48584497

derektank

Disliking data centers, illegal immigration, or taxes is not a crime in the United States, nor is posting inconvenient messages about politicians, nor is getting a little too rowdy in a group chat. And none of these things are likely to be made illegal any time soon. I always find this form of argument in favor of privacy (which is valuable in its own right to be clear) so roundabout. If you’re concerned about the government impinging on your freedom of speech, then why not write an essay arguing for expansive freedom of speech protections? That seems like a much more direct solution to the problem presented in this essay.

triceratops

"Don't let them win. Don't verify your age. Don't give up your identity. If you absolutely must, find one of the numerous age verification services and pay in Monero." Better yet, how about - "call your representatives"? Some nerds, for lack of a better term, think crypto and cryptography are the answers to every privacy problem. The only way to fix society and the law is by engaging with those things. Not sidestepping them with cryptography, an unscalable approach in any case. I'm deeply pessimistic about the future. The only group competent enough to oppose identity verification has its head in the sand.

wuyuan

You're right. Many countries use the protection of minors as an excuse, but in reality, they just want to strengthen the regulation of speech.

sixsupersoup

Automated fines, like traffic radar control for free speech, will also become a norm as they won't be able to put everyone in jail. But I'm not sure the liberal anarcho-tyranny power will be indefinitely immutable. Speech control might be one their last try to keep control in the west. They will crumble like soviet union.

thomastjeffery

That, and it defines children as perpetrators instead of victims. What right could a citizen ever claim in a world where even children are guilty? There is a huge difference between protecting children and prosecuting/punishing children. Age verification can only be an implementation of the latter.

onion2k

If we taught systems thinking in schools things like internet age verification would never get past being an idea on the back of a napkin. People struggle to consider the second-, third-, and nth-order effects of anything so asking them to consider what else might happen if we bring in laws and technical mechanisms to 'protect the children' is unfortunately too a big leap for a lot of them. Most people are bad at spotting causal links between parts of a system, and people who are good at it exploit that.

bluegatty

The author made an assertive statement without any hint of rhetoric, reasoning, historical parallel, evidence, legislative example etc.

LandenLove

My theory is that age verification is just another way to push human verification. These large tech companies need a way to verify a user is a real person and not an AI bot. Both for displaying ads to real users and cutting down on spam. Nobody would support a "give away my anonymity online so I can be shown an ad for Coca Cola" bill. But it's easier to sell a law to boomers and lawmakers if you use the disguise of "It's for the children ." As if any of these companies care about the well being of children. See Meta confirming their platforms affect the mental health of children and doing nothing about it. Also platforms like TikTok and YouTube optimizing their algorithms for stealing user's attention spans.

initramfs

"The Carnival in Venice was first documented in 1296, with a proclamation by the Venetian Senate announcing a public festival the day before the start of Lent. Unquestionably one of the most well-known Carnival festivities in the world, the Carnival of Venice is rife with mystery, adventure, and conspiracy. The day served to break down barriers between people of different economic standings and religious beliefs. During the Renaissance, masked comic performers performed in Venice's piazzas." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carnival_in_Italy#Venice "The tradition of wearing masks seems to stem from the 13th century. During the ages the Venetians disguised themselves with mask whenever they thought necessary. It allowed them to escape from the rigid rules of the class hierarchy. All classes could mingle, men could be women, women could be men. It also led to unwanted behaviour, from throwing eggs filled with ink to all imaginable kinds of vulgarities. Masks made people unrecognisable, so they could not be prosecuted. Near the end of the Republic, the right to wear masks in daily life was severely restricted. By the 18th century, it was limited to three months starting at December 26 and ending on the last day of Carnival, Shrove Tuesday. Masks were also used in ceremonies, eg. when ambassadors arrived and at the five ritual grand banquets offered each year to Venetian dignitaries by the doge. This resembles the Masquerade Balls during Carnival nowadays. Venetian noblemen and noblewomen wore a costume called a bautta consisting of a white mask (volto), a tricorn hat (tricorno), a hood worn under the hat (zendale) and a tabarro, a loose-fitting cloak. There were subtle differences between noble and non-noble (cittadini or popolani), and the popolani were known to wear more colorful, fun masks to festivities like the bull runs." https://www.carnival-in-venice.eu/venetian-carnival-masks.ht...

BenFranklin100

Calls to mind a quote attributed to Cardinal Richelieu, 16th century Secretary of State for France: ‘If you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men, I will find something in them which will hang him”

zarzavat

I don't like age verification. However I'm not concerned about it. The internet needs new spaces that are more decentralized and less in bed with governments. We already lost our freedom when we agreed to move from IRC to Discord, from phpBB to Reddit, etc. The teenagers who are blocked from mainstream social media will deliver us new free online spaces that are better than what they're blocked from.

OutOfHere

We do need a decentralized scalable permissionless platform for speech. For it to remain sustainable, there should be a slight cost in Monero to making each post on it, preloadable in batches.

btbuildem

This is a reminder to curate and prune all your past social media contribution, because when this goes thru, you KNOW they will apply it retroactively. You'd loathe to lose your cushy job over a moment of lucid honesty back in 2011.

iamflimflam1

This is already happening if you want to visit the US. Customs officers will look at your social media accounts to make sure you are compliant.

RachelF

Age verification is just one part of this crackdown. Device attestation is another - making sure you're using an unmodified government approved operating system and apps linked to your ID.

quotemstr

It doesn't have to be, FWIW. We have all the technology we need to decouple attribution from identity. We can achieve efficient and mathematically perfect unlinkability. Yet the powerful continue to insist on "papers, please" anonymity-rending personal authentication over anonymous authorization. It's not often that the villains of history so clearly identify themselves. My bunch is that the people driving this stuff were unaware that age verification could be privacy-preserving and can't exactly back down now.

stretchwithme

Maybe it should be possible for a parent to set a child age in a device. Everyone else can stay anonymous. I look forward to hearing why that won't work and what problems it will cause.

NoPicklez

I think you can look at all things pessimistically, like this article does but at the end of the day we all agree that there are things online we don't want our kids seeing or engaging with and it takes regulators to push how we protect them from those online places. What other options to regulators have? Age restriction has been around for longer than the internet itself, so its regulators applying that logic to the online world. Whilst I think age verification has its issues, I don't see what other options they actually have. I'll also make the point that in Australia, our regulations explicitly require that Government ID verification CANNOT be the only way and that companies must adopt an additional approach. Almost everything in technology used to protect us can be used against us by those want or choosing to do the wrong thing, does that mean we don't do anything?