This was never about "protecting children." It never is. It's always about censorship and control.
The only time politicians ever see children is when they can use them as a soapbox to push an agenda.
The only time politicians ever see children is when they can use them as a soapbox to push an agenda.
I feel like this narrative is counterproductive. Sure, it is true that some people advocating for this are doing it out of ulterior motives, but it certainly isn't true for all of them. Telling the people with legitimate concerns that they don't actually care about children is going to push them into the camp of the people who want to take advantage of their concern. In order to actually prevent the kind of damage that these censorship systems can inflict, there probably needs to be an actual discussion about the problem these systems are ostensibly designed to address.
People have to remember this is a political issue and politics is about coalition building. Insulting large swaths of the general population as being nefarious liars isn't a great way to build coalitions.
On the contrary! Look at Qanon. They've essentially taken over the Republican party. They not only insulted the bulk of the population, Qanons want them dead. It worked fine.
And large swaths of the general population are nefarious liars who don't actually care about children. If building coalitions requires ignoring that fact, then we're not going to build coalitions. The real world isn't HN, where you're expected to assume good faith at all times, regardless of evidence to the contrary.
This seems to be working okay for the current administration? Among the issues Trump ran on was demonizing a large swath of the population and vowing some nebulous form of revenge.
We will never get our privacy once this is widespread. Laws are too easy.
The agency that issues your documents can give you a digital copy that is cryptographically bound to the secure elements in your device.
When you want to prove your age to a web site it uses a zero knowledge proof (ZKP) based protocol to prove to the site that the documents bound to your secure element show that age. Nothing but the fact that they show that age and that they are bound to your element is disclosed to the site.
The ZKP proof protocol communication is just between your device the site. The government that issued your ID is not involved, so they don't know where you have used the ID or even if you have used the ID.
BTW, this is not limited to age. It can be used with any data on your ID. For example if German political forum wanted to verify you were German before allowing you to post you could use this system to disclose to them that your ID has "Germany" in the country field and that would be all that is disclosed.
For those outside the EU, Google has released an open source library for implementing things like this [1].
You are correct.
That said, please tell me which online age verification mechanism doesn't store such PII and/or is immune to hacks/breaches/data thefts.
Please only reference those mechanisms that are actually in use, not hypothetical or experimental mechanisms that are not used for such a purpose.
No rush. I'll wait. Although the actuaries say I'll likely only live another twenty years or so.
And is limited to just a subset (albeit one of significant size) of the folks subjected to such "age verification."
Today the internet in Russia is utterly broken. A VPN or a DPI bypass tool isn't something nice to have — it's an absolute necessity, especially if you communicate with people in other countries.
That’s not true. Sometimes they see kids for sex. I mean, isn’t this what Epstein is all about?
The ironic thing is many people who decry forcing these companies to verify age, would be fine with such age verification restrictions on Insta or TikTok.
From your own source:
> A government spokesperson said VPNs are legal tools for adults and there are no plans to ban them.
As someone with kids I care deeply about the harmful stuff my children will get exposure to. And I'm worried about this as a negative influence, especially to boys, much more than I'm worried about smoking, vaping, drugs, guns, and most other things. This can absolutely wreck your relationships, and it's just not practical to control on a family level. Over 25% of teenagers have ED and it's going up. That can't be good. And for girls it can lead to risky or overall degenerate behavior due to changing expectations and influence.
So many people here pretend like there's no problem.
Or maybe they think that the proposed solutions are worse than the problem.
Because children are the only ones who use VPNs?