Comment by drnick1 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by drnick1 | Hacker News Reader

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> In the EU you don’t need to upload your ID anywhere, the service can use the government’s portal for ID verification. In the case of age verification they can get a yes/no response

The issue is that now the government knows what you are doing online, and that should never be allowed to happen.

I grew up when the Internet was truly free, before Facebook even existed. People shared source code, videos, MP3s, games, regardless of "copyright" or "intellectual property." To some extent, it is still possible to do all of this, but these freedoms are being eroded every day by making the Internet less anonymous. The endgame is obviously to force people to pay for things whose "marginal cost" is zero in the language of economists. "Protecting the children" is just a convenient excuse.

> The issue is that now the government knows what you are doing online

There's zero technical necessity for this. You could do zero knowledge proofs with crypto key pairs issued together with the eID.

The Swiss proposal for eID includes stuff like that. If a service needs proof of age, you use an app on your phone to generate the response, which is anonymized towards the requester and doesn't need to contact a government server at all.

I don’t really get your point. Your government is generally able to compel your ISP to give them logs of all of your traffic, if they don’t already vacuum it up, so it’s honestly a bit naive to think it shouldn’t be allowed to happen, because in practice it absolutely can.

There is a distinction between getting data from an ISP and getting it via your use of their portal, but I’d argue it’s without much of a difference in reality.

There's an enormous difference in the government having channels allowing for the disclosing of private material to them and just giving them all of it from the get go, and it is not unlike the difference of allowing the government to jail people and allowing it to arbitrarily jail people for life.

The difference is legislation, in both cases. Permissible data exchange between government services is legislatively encoded. Permissible sentences are legislatively encoded.

Since we don't see a whole lot of moderately healthy democracies arbitrarily jailing people for life, one might reasonably assume these sorts of controls work.

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