Texas app store age verification law blocked by federal judge
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The Act is akin to a law that would require every bookstore to verify
the age of every customer at the door and, for minors, require parental
consent before the child or teen could enter and again when they try to
purchase a book.
Previously the Fifth Circuit had relied heavily on Ginsberg v. New York (1968) to justify rational basis review. But Ginsberg was a narrow scope - it held that minors don't have the same First Amendment rights as adults to access "obscene as to minors" material. It wasn't about burdens on adults at all. Later precedent (Ashcroft, Sable, Reno, Playboy) consistently applied strict scrutiny when laws burdened adults' access to protected speech, even when aimed at protecting minors.
In Paxton the majority split the difference and applied intermediate scrutiny - a lower bar than strict - claiming the burden on adults is merely "incidental." Kagan had a dissent worth reading, arguing this departs from precedent even if the majority won't frame it that way. You could call it "overturning" or "distinguishing" depending on how charitable you're feeling.
The oral arguments are worth watching if you want to understand how to grapple with these questions: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ckoCJthJEqQ
On 1A: The core concern isn't that age-gating exists - it's that mandatory identification to access legal speech creates chilling effects and surveillance risks that don't exist when you flash an ID at a liquor store.
Note: IANAL but do enjoy reading many SC transcripts
But there is whole industry of education, profession, journals, blogs, podcasts and videos trying to teach, interpret and explain the same laws. In the end it is decided by experts who have been practicing law for decades and even almost half of those experts may disagree on the right interpretation but a citizen is expected to always get it right from the start.
I want to share a thought experiment with you - atop an ancient Roman legal case I recall from Gregory Aldrete - The Barbershop Murder.
Suppose a man sends his slave to a barbershop to get a shave. The barbershop is adjacent to an athletic field where two men are throwing a ball back and forth. One throws the ball badly, the other fails to catch it, and the ball flies into the barbershop, hits the barber's hand mid-shave, and cuts the slave's throat-killing him.
The legal question is posed: Who is liable under Roman law?
- Athlete 1 who threw the ball badly
- Athlete 2 who failed to catch it
- The barber who actually cut the throat
- The slave's owner for sending his slave to a barbershop next to a playing field
- The Roman state for zoning a barbershop adjacent to an athletic field
Q: What legal abstractions are required to apply consistent remedies to this case amongst others?
Opinion: You'd need a theory of negligence. A definition of proximate cause. Standards for foreseeability. Rules about contributory fault. A framework for when the state bears regulatory responsibility. Each of those needs edge cases handled, and those edge cases need to be consistent with rulings in other domains.
Now watch these edge cases compound, before long you've got something that looks absurdly complex. But it's actually just a hacky minimum viable solution to the problem space. That doesn't make it fair that citizens bear the burden of navigating it - but the alternative is inequal application of the law
My question is why does anybody have to be liable at all? Most normal people would consider this just to be a freak accident.
Sure, there's learning points that can be taken from it to prevent similar incidents - e.g. erecting a fetch around the field (why didn't you suggest that the field owner be liable) as it can be reasonably foreseen the situation of a ball escaping and being a nuisance to someone else (maybe it just startles someone on the road, maybe it causes a car crash, whatever), or legislating bars or plastic film on the barber's window, etc.
But here nobody seemed to act in any way negligently, nor was there any law or guidance that they failed to follow. It was just the result of lots of normal things happening that normally have no negative consequences and it's so unlikely to happen again that there's nothing useful to be gained by trying to put the blame on someone. It was just an accident.
This question mistakes what civil law is doing. A more accurate framing would be, “why does anybody have to bear the loss?”. But of course, somebody must. So the task of civil law here is to determine who. Certain policy choices will align better or worse with a sense of fairness, better or worse with incentives that could reduce future losses, etc.
If there are too many instances of people dying in such situations, then the fundamental way to solve that is to prevent such situations from existing. A specter of civil financial liability is but one way of trying to do this, and having judges create common law theories is but one way of assigning that liability. Relying on those methods to the exclusion of others is not a neutral policy choice.
The whole point is that there's a legal system that allows a plaintiff to make an argument that there was negligence at play, and OP outlined a logical list of examples of how it could be argued up to the government itself being negligent for zoning. It's the job of the legal system to remove the ambiguity of "seemed", particularly in the context of tort and compensation.
This example just happens to be less obvious than a construction company building a house or bridge that collapses and kills people, and most cases in front of a court are equally ambiguous.
If the Yankees hit a practice ball out of their stadium and into my house, causing bodily harm to a loved one, I wouldn't be satisfied with any of the reasoning in your comment.
More generally, people are allowed to take on risk as per their own appetite, but legal liability allows risk-hungry individuals to be incentive-aligned with everyone else.
Here's another lens:
I install cabinets in your kitchen. Your loved one trips, hits the cabinets, breaks their neck and dies.
Should I be liable in this case as well? I did a thing that was involved in harming your loved one... if the cabinet hadn't been there, they might not have died.
---
In both cases, it's pretty clear that there's no intent to harm your loved one. At best you're arguing that it was "foreseeable" that hitting a baseball might harm someone, and that it wasn't "foreseeable" that installing cabinets would harm someone.
But clearly that's ALSO wrong, because we know people have been hurt hitting cabinets before.
So clarify how you'd assign blame in this case, and why it's different from the baseball case?
Basically - your stance is that risk is always a decision someone has made, but I find disagrees with my intuition. Risk is an inherent part of life.
If you cannot understand the law as it applies to you, you cannot possibly be free under that law, because your actions will always be constrained by your uncertainty.
Perfect understanding of every law and its consequence is not possible anyway, because laws are meant to be contextual and interpreted by humans, to allow for exceptions in unusual cases (contrast that with the monumentally stupid idea of "law as code", which, if implemented, would grind us all under the gears).
In vast majority of cases, people don't need more certainty than they have or can trivially get, because variance of outcome is low. E.g. you don't need to know the exact amount of dollars where shoplifting turns from misdemeanor into a felony - it's usually enough to know that you shouldn't do it, and that stealing some bread once to feed your kids will probably not land you in jail for long, but stealing a TV just might. And by "low variance" in outcomes I mean, there's obvious proportionality and continuity; it's not the case that if you steal bread brand A, you get a fine, but if you steal bread brand B, you go straight to supermax, right away.
This is not to deny the ideal, but rather to point out that practical reality is much more mundane than picking apart unique court cases makes one think.
Do you actually think it's ok for freedom to only exist for people who can afford lawyers?
There are other means to gaining power, of course.
I think this is why the thing judges hate the most is people admitting when the law gives them an unfair advantage.
A rule that unjustly benefits someone is fine as long as they don't break kayfabe. Big Brother loves you, that's why you can't install apps on your phone, it's to protect you from harm. The incidental monopolization, censorship and surveillance are all totally unintentional and not really even happening. Oceania has always been at war with Eurasia.
Whereas, declare that you're shamelessly exploiting a loophole? Orange jumpsuit.
There is an action you can take that does two things. One, it makes it marginally more expensive to commit fraud. Two, it makes it significantly more expensive for your existing customers to patronize a competitor. If you do it, which of these things was it your intent to do?
The answer doesn't change based on whether you announce it. You can fully intend to thwart competition without admitting it. And, of course, if the only way you get punished is if you admit it, what you really have is not a law against intending to do it but a law against saying it out loud. Which is poison, because then people knowingly do it without admitting it and you develop a culture where cheating is widespread and rewarded as long as the cheaters combine it with lying.
Whereas if the law is concerned with knowledge but not "intent" then you'd have a law against thwarting competition and it only matters what anyone would expect to be the result rather than your self-proclaimed unverifiable purpose.
But then it's harder to let powerful people get away with things by pretending they didn't intend the thing that everybody knew would be the result. Which is kind of the point.
Having laws that tilt the playing field and then punishing anyone who admits the emperor has no clothes is just censorship. People still figure it out. Only then they get rewarded for knowing about it and not saying anything, which causes the corruption to spread instead of being opposed, until the rot reaches the foundation. And that's what causes "everyone starves, or worse."
I disagree. What you've described is certainly bad for much of society, but it represents a change from full participatory democracy to narrower and ultimately aristocratic governance. Many nations moved away from aristocracy and embraced democracy, but the difference in failure mode between "good for the people" and "good for the nation" does nevertheless exist (even when you can avoid the other problem democracy has, that "good for the people" and "popular" are also sometimes different).
When nobody can even "get rewarded for knowing about it and not saying anything", then you get all the examples of groupthink failure. Usually even this is limited to lots of people, rather than everyone, starving, but given the human response to mass starvation is to leave the area, I think this should count as "everyone starves" even if it's not literally everyone.
When everyone knows the rules are optional, or when they think facts and opinions are indistinguishable, then things like speed limits, red lights, which side of the road you're supposed to be on, purchasing goods and services rather than stealing them, all these things become mere suggestions. This is found in anarchies, or a prelude to/consequence of a civil war. There can be colossal losses, large scale displacement of the population to avoid starvation, though I think it would be fair to categorise this as "everyone starves" even if not literally for the same reason as the previous case.
I don't think that's the relevant distinction. "Benevolent dictatorship" is still one of the most efficient forms of governance, if you actually have a benevolent dictator.
The real problem is perverse incentives. If you have a situation where 0.1% of people can get 100 times as many resources as the median person through some minimal-overhead transfer mechanism, that's maybe not ideal, but it's a lot better than the thing where 0.1% of people can get 100 times as many resources as the median person by imposing a 90% efficiency cost. In the first case you lost ~10% of your resources so someone else could have 100 times as much, but in the second case you lost >90% of your resources only so that someone else could have 10 times as much as they'd have had to begin with, because now the pie is only 1/10th as big.
But the latter is what happens when corruption is tolerated but not acknowledged, because then someone can't just come out and say "I'm taking this because I can get away with it and if you don't like it then change the law" and instead has to make fanciful excuses for inefficiently blocking off alternative paths in order to herd everyone through their toll booth, at which point they not only get away with it but destroy massive amounts of value in the process.
Not quite that simple.
If enough people stop believing in the law, the society breaks apart, and you have people shooting each other in the streets trying to loot supermarkets and extend their lives for a week or two, before inevitably dying of starvation.
This is serious stuff. Society and civilization are purely abstract, intersubjective constructs. They exist only as long as enough people believe in them -- but then, it's still not that simple. Actually, they exist if enough people believe that enough other people believe in them.
Money, laws, employment, contracts, corporations, even marriages - are mutually recursive beliefs achieving stability as independent abstractions. But they're not independent - they're vulnerable to breaking if large group of people suddenly start to doubt in them.
Adams and Jefferson wrestled with another question. J said generations shouldn’t be tied to the decisions of their ancestors. Adams said but surely laws are necessary to maintain stability and order and preserve their fragile democracy for future generations.
Idealism is long term thinking.
If you disregard reality, you will never understand the world around you to make change.
If you disregard idealism, you will only ever be able to react. You will end up dragged around by the nose, and pulled towards someone elses ideal that might not be so good for you.
Thinking that power is inviolable is an idealism that benefits existing power. They don’t want you to think of the countless times power has been overthrown, and a more just society has been built on the ruins of one with benefits for only those with power.
Ginsberg was about burdens on adults. In that case, New York law prohibited the sale of content containing nude images to minors. The Supreme Court upheld the conviction of a store owner under that law, who had sold magazines containing nude pictures to underage buyers: https://www.oyez.org/cases/1967/47.
Ginsberg acknowledged that the magazines did not qualify as obscenity as to adults--selling the magazines in question to adults was protected First Amendment conduct. So the age checking necessarily required by the law was a burden on those First Amendment protected sales. Ginsberg necessarily found that burden to be a permissible one.
They aren’t judges making decisions, they’re talking about the law on a podcast.
"The insistence on perfect age verification requires ending anonymity. Age verification to the level of buying cigarettes or booze does not. Flash a driver's license at a liquor store to buy a single-use token, good for one year, and access your favorite social media trash. Anonymity is maintained, and most kids are locked out. In the same way that kids occasionally obtain cigs or beer despite safeguards, sometimes they may get their hands on a code. Prosecute anyone who knowingly sells or gives one to a minor."
Also after I had a certain number of birthdays, clerks have stopped demanding my ID. So my purchases are pretty much anonymous.
The card should be issued by a private company, or ideally, multiple companies. And it should be a scratch-off card with a unique code, so that codes can't be tied to transactions.
EDIT: Because age verification tokens will likely be a commodity, low-margin business with little differentiation. So I assume companies will do stuff to make their token more attractive than the competition.
Grocery stores already sell age restricted items as well as gift cards that require activation. The state could issue "age check cards" that you could purchase for some nominal fee. That would require approximately zero additional infrastructure in most of the industrialized world. The efficacy would presumably be equivalent to that for alcohol and tobacco.
Consider a somewhat extreme example. A preprinted paper ticket with nothing more than a serial number on it. The clerk only visually inspects the ID document then enters the serial number into a web portal and hands it to you. When you go to "redeem" it the service relays the number back to the government server rather than your local device doing so directly. That would be far more privacy preserving than the vast majority of present day clearnet activity.
No absolutely not. There's no need for it. We don't require Internet connected beer cans to phone home to a government server and recheck your driver's license when you're cracking them open.
> When you go to "redeem" it the service relays the number back to the government server rather than your local device doing so directly
Your possession of the token when you enter it into your social media account is proof enough that you're of age. The social media website only needs to call the token issuer's API to verify its validity. And all the token issuer should know is it's a valid token sold to a buyer of legal age. Anything more is needlessly complicated and risks anonymity. No recording of IDs in any way, shape or form whatsoever.
And there's no need to involve the government or government servers in any of the implementation or technology. It can be an open, published standard. Any company that can get their cards in stores, and sold with age verification, should be able to participate. All participants can be periodically inspected by the government to ensure compliance with standards.
As to the rest of what you wrote, isn't that exactly what I already described? The only notable difference is that your scheme permits non-government token providers.
> The clerk only visually inspects the ID document then enters the serial number
I thought "the serial number" was the number on the ID document. You actually meant the number on the token scratch card. Makes sense.
> The only notable difference is that your scheme permits non-government token providers.
Right. More accurately it only permits non-government token providers.
Also usually once you turn a certain age they stop asking you for ID. Again, I'm not aware of how things work in place where they customarily scan and store your ID for alcohol purchases. I would lobby my legislators and fight this odious practice tooth and nail. The store is almost certainly selling that information.
Yeah, it runs into the same socioeconomic problems. Not just voter ID but also tobacco, alcohol, most weapons, and in many places other than the US medical care just to name a few. So it's already a well established problem that people keep and eye out for and at least try to address.
Consider that the alternatives are the continued normalized unfettered access of brainrot by young children or else requiring an ID check in a manner that blatantly compromises privacy. On the whole the liquor store approach seems like a good solution to me.
To be fair there is another alternative that for some reason seems widely unpopular. Make headers indicating age restricted content a requirement and legally require the OEM configuration of devices to support parental controls based on such headers. That would be a slightly less efficacious solution but would involve noticeably less ID checking.
And I don't know how things work in other places, but I've never had my ID scanned when buying alcohol. These days clerks don't even ask me for ID because I obviously appear to be legal age.
In my proposal the token would be a scratch off card with a unique code. It can't be associated with the transaction.
If a bot that sends a fixed set of headers and is behind a single static IP is behaving poorly and slowing down your server you can block it and move on. Whereas when an abhorrently selfish operator with a client that actively hinders fingerprinting rapidly rotates through hundreds of thousands of IPs you end up with mass adoption of solutions like Anubis.
> It comes from so many sources you can't block them,
Nonsense. If it were really countless fixed sources then a centralized domain blacklist would be sufficient. The issue is that the sources - both domain and IP - are aggressively rotated and even spoofed whenever possible.
It's a dumb law, but, devil's advocate - isn't that how porn shops work? And porn shops also sell some non-porn items, too.
The court is generally pretty adept at navigating the difference between "a bookstore that has some spicy books" and "a sex shop that has some non-spicy books".
You might arrive at an old saying, about what the internet is for.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_free_speech_exce...
What is the consistent principle of law? I am having difficulty finding one that would support this ruling.
Age restrictions narrowly tailored to specific content thought to be harmful to minors have often been tolerated by the courts, but something broad like all book stores, all movie theaters, or all app stores violates all three strict scrutiny tests.
As to the first amendment: Although not equal to that of adults, the U.S. Supreme Court has said that "minors are entitled to a significant measure of First Amendment protection." Only in relatively narrow and limited circumstances can the government restrict kids' rights when it comes to protected speech. (Erznoznik v. City of Jacksonville, 422 U.S. 205 (1975).)
And don't say "because it's insane for kids to buy deadly weapons" because that doesn't seem to figure into any other part of second amendment interpretation.
Nothing more complicated than that. The courts are empowered by the Constitution to interpret the Constitution, and their interpretation says kids can have their rights limited.
If they could interpret the constitution and that was that, then the judicial branch would basically have ultimate power and be exempted from the checks the other branches have on them.
Yes, the court’s job is to interpret the law. But the Constitution is not code and the judges are not the CPU. Ultimately, the rule of law will always be dependent on people.
I'm assured by lawyers of both parties that this is not the case. And since I am not a lawyer their understanding is worth a lot more than mine. But as someone who does have significant credentials in philosophical and scientific reasoning, I can say that legal reasoning is not at all what I am familiar with.
Christ, are you in high school? This shit is covered in like sophomore year social studies.
Wasn’t it the other way around? E.g. the fir amendment was pretty much ignored (barely a guideline) by everyone almost until the 1900s.
Even the founders themselves discarded it almost entirely just a few years after the constitution was ratified..
My memory is failing me for the relevant case name but I’m also fairly sure students don’t have full 4th amendment rights, again because they are compelled to attend school and the government employees are allowed to search them at any time
Some of this depends on whether the state has an interest in preventing known, broad harms - say in the case limiting minors ability to consume alcohol.
Conversely, there are no clearly proven, known targeted harms with respect of youth access to app stores (or even social media). What there are, are poorly represented / interpreted studies and a lot of media that is amplifying confused voices concerning these things.
> In U.S. constitutional law, when a law infringes upon a fundamental constitutional right, the court may apply the strict scrutiny standard. Strict scrutiny holds the challenged law as presumptively invalid unless the government can demonstrate that the law or regulation is necessary to achieve a "compelling state interest". The government must also demonstrate that the law is "narrowly tailored" to achieve that compelling purpose, and that it uses the "least restrictive means" to achieve that purpose. Failure to meet this standard will result in striking the law as unconstitutional.
> What is the consistent principle of law? I am having difficulty finding one that would support this ruling.
The Constitution of the US mentions age in a few very specific places, namely the minimum age to run for The House, The Senate, The Presidential seat, and I believe voting age.
I don't understand your point.
Those age limits are arbitrary and the justification can sometimes be nebulous but they clearly exist in the US.
This is explicitly the case with voting rights, but other than that? While there a contextual limits where age may be a factor as to whether the context applies (e.g., some of the linitations that are permitted in public schools), I can't think of any explicit Constitutional right where the courts have allowed application of a direct age limit to the right itself. Can you explain specifically what you are referring to here?
Right to keep and bear arms -- federally 21 to buy a handgun and 18 to buy a rifle/shotgun from an FFL. Although sometimes you can touch federal law (NFA) and not have such limit -- a 12 year old could buy a machine gun or grenade for instance privately and still be able to buy a federal tax stamp.
Speech - a little looser but the 1A rights of minors in schools are a little bit less than that of staff. It's been awhile since I looked over the cases but IIRC staff had slightly stronger free speech regarding political speech than students (I'll try to dig up the case later if someone asks for it).
For example: meth is very illegal under federal law, and not mentioned in the constitution.
You should stop citing the constitution.
The Wartime Prohibition Act says you are wrong. The 18th Amendment was certainly necessary to both make the policy irrevocable without another amendment, and to give states independent power notwithstanding usual Constitutional limits on state power to enforce prohibition on top of federal power, it is much more dubious that it was necessary for federal prohibition.
The last Congressionally declared war was World War II, so if that was supposed to be the constitutional basis for the Controlled Substances Act, there would seem to be the obvious problems that the war was generations ago and nobody is diverting scanty wheat from the food markets to make MDMA.
The wartime prohibition act, to the extent it regulated intrastate trade -- was also beyond the powers restrained by the 10th amendment. The fact a wartime era court lol'ed their way into regulating intrastate commerce is just another example of the federal government happily steamrolling rights (something they are especially good at around wartimes), but they needed the amendment to keep it up in non-wartime.
----- Re: irishman due to throttling ------
>Ignore meth. Do it again with wire fraud.
The question was about age limits on things that there is an explicit constitutional right of. You don't have a right to meth nor wire fraud. Your argument here doesn't make sense, nor is there an age where meth or wire fraud are legal which again was the question.
You’re missing the forest for the trees. It’s ok to be wrong.
Daww, edit:
The seed for this thread was:
> It is difficult to square the notional unconstitutionality of this with the fact that the exercise of other Constitutional rights have long been conditional on age. This just looks like another example. > What is the consistent principle of law? I am having difficulty finding one that would support this ruling.
I pointed out that "unconstitutionality" wasn't accurate, because it isn't. You went on about jurisprudence whathaveyou. You moved the goalposts. I suppose I moved with them to try and make my point.
As is, you are being politely called out as incorrect because you are asserting someone people don't believe and not providing any argument, evidence or justification.
> Those age limits are arbitrary and the justification can sometimes be nebulous but they clearly exist in the US.
I mean, kind of, I guess?
States make their own age-related rules. The states are part of the US. So technically sure, you're right. In practice, you're very wrong.
This is wrong. It's particularly wrong in the way that you draw a distinction between theory and practice. It's so wrong that it's backwards.
In theory, the states set age related rules. In practice, they must set them to what the federal government tells them to. This was established in the specific case in 1984 [0] when Congress realised that it could withhold funding to states based on how quickly they agreed with it, and in the general case in 1861 [1] when the United States initiated a war that would go on to kill 1.6 million people after some states asked it only to exercise the powers derogated to it in its constitution.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Minimum_Drinking_Age_...
States have age-related laws at an insane level. I don't know what you're on about.
Which of those are in regard to the 1st Amendment?
> This just looks like another example.
No, it doesn't.
> What is the consistent principle of law?
The 1st Amendment.
> I am having difficulty finding one that would support this ruling.
The judge stated it clearly. And if there's an inconsistency then it's other rulings that violate the 1st Amendment that aren't supported, not this one.
Is the act of shouting "fire!" in a crowded theater protected speech?
Surely there should be some limits on what constitutes protected speech.
The source of that quote was a war-time judge who used that analogy in his ruling in 1919 against people handing out anti-war flyers. A ruling that was overturned in 1969.
It was precedent for 50 years.
That precedent died 56 years ago. It's been dead for longer than it even existed.
Strawman. That is not speech in the same way that yelling or crying is not free speech.
The first one is the same strawman. Making the word milk a trigger mustn't milk illegal.
Anti-war protests were what was meant by "shouting fire in a theater". That's what our government was trying to ban.
P.S. I won't engage further with people clearly not arguing in good faith.
Speech communicates ideas. It is mostly opinions. If you state something as fact, when it isn't, it is libel. As such, saying "there is a fire" in the theater is not speech, it is an exclamation.
If you aren't for free speech, then yes, yawning is speech.
As for that "shall not be infringed" wording that is in the Constitution, there's a whole lot of sophistic, intellectually dishonest ideological rhetoric around it. The historical record shows clearly the Founders did not mean by their language what many people today insist that it means--for instance, they passed a number of gun laws restricting their use, and the original draft of the 2A contained a conscientious objector clause because, as the opening phrase indicates, "keep and bear arms" at that time referred to military use (and "arms" included armor and other tools of war; it was not a synonym for "firearms"). And some of the modern claims are absurd lies, such as that the 2A was intended to give citizens the means to overthrow the government, or that "well-regulated" doesn't mean what it does and did mean. George Washington was dismayed by the Articles of Confederation not giving him the power to put down Shay's Rebellion ("Let us have a government by which our lives, liberties, and properties will be secured"), and one of his first acts after the Constitution was ratified was to use the militia to put down the Whiskeytown rebellion.
https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2022/06/26/conservati...
We love to regulate here in the EU and now that love of regulation is being weaponized against its own people.
General != majority, but SCOTUS is not a gauge of American opinion. Perhaps a better example is Brown v. Board of Education, at a time when a very large portion of the public was not in favor of integrating the races in public schools.
TL;DR: Protection is absolutely provided by the courts, which is the highest authority on what the Constitution (and Amendments) and other laws mean.
Neither do apps, so it seems apps over an ISP are more equivalent to adult content on cable tv, which do not require age verification to watch.
Movie theatres require a chaperon for minors for R rated films? (And theatres often block some ages entirely.)
That's a fundamental difference than the heavy handed approach of using the state to mandate KYC laws to post on the internet.
We need to amend the constitution to guarantee our privacy. It should be a fundamental right.
As far as government intrusion into our privacy, it's addressed by the 4th Amendment's guarantee - that the right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects and that our rights against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated.
The challenge is that courts repeatedly and routinely support and protect the government in it's continual, blatant violation of our 4A protections.
This has allowed governments at every level to build out the most pervasive surveillance system in human history - which has just been waiting for a cruelty-centric autocrat to take control of it.
And for the most part, we have both parties + news orgs to thank for this. They've largely been united in supporting all the steps toward this outcome.
The Pennsylvania High Court recently ruled that the Pennsylvania local police don't need a warrant to access your search history.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46329186
Clearly, those protections have already been violated.
Absolutely. And to keep court-sanctioned violations from getting challenged, a state can utilize a number of tactics to shroud the methods in secrecy. This makes it very difficult for the violated to show standing in a challenge.
The state has nearly every possible advantage in leveraging gov power against the public.
How does this work? Does that mean if Pennsylvania police ask google nicely for it, then google isn't breaking the law in complying? Or that Google has to hand over the information even without a warrant?
But yes, I'm aware of the Third Party doctrine ruled on by judges whose conception of people making phone calls involved an individual talking to another human being (a.k.a. an operator) to connect you to who you wanted to talk to.
A practice antiquated when the ruling was made and a bygone relic by this point.
My complaint is that Google should not have been permitted that choice in the first place. The entire sequence of events - from requesting the data without a warrant through to handing the data over without a warrant and any following data mining that was done with it should have been forbidden on constitutional grounds. Both parties ought to have been in violation of the law here. We need to fix the gaping hole in our constitutional rights that the third party doctrine represents.
Do you mean those who rent their homes?
I rented for a long time. I bought a house. None of my house, papers, or effects are owned by anyone but myself. I guess a credit union owns the mortgage, but they haven't and won't sell it.
To those who will jump to disagree with me about the credit union selling my mortgage: they won't. They don't engage in that market, never have.
Do you self host your own email? No? Those are "papers" that your email hosting provider can consent to providing law enforcement access to without a warrant.
Do you use search engines? Your search history is in the same boat with the search engine company.
Don't use a VPN? All of your internet traffic is in the same boat with your ISP
You use a VPN? All your internet traffic is in the same boat with the VPN.
The list goes on and on. It is almost certainly true that some company has private information about you that they can turn over without a warrant.
It's obvious what GP and others are saying - that the concept of things like "papers" and "effects" are no longer as concrete as they used to be. What used to be physical letters stored in one's home are now emails stored on any number of servers.
> Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize.
You’re conflating ideas to make a point. I admire the effort, you’re just not correct.
I am talking specifically about the ideas you are disputing:
>> partially signed off to corporate entities who are more than happy to consent away their access into our effects.
I haven't conflated anything. You may be confused and think we're talking about ownership or physical access though.
I was more referring to the average US resident or American who agrees to broad terms and conditions with, their ISP, Microsoft 1 drive, Roomba of the year, microphoned smart TV, email provider, cell service provider, etc. Many of which are essential for navigating modern society.
You can write them down on paper.
If we all acknowledge that the internet is a beautiful disaster that shan’t be trusted, which it always has been and always will be, we can all collectively get over ourselves about privacy on the internet. “Hey world I went overseas for vacation/holiday! I cooked this amazing dinner! I’m cheating on my SO using an online chat app!”
Maybe stop doing all 3 of those things. I can’t tell you how liberating it’s been since I got off all social media in ~2008. It’s super easy to be very private if you so choose. Having any kind of internet presence is a voluntary sacrifice of privacy.
There are two issues here, each harms us on it's own and both are intertwined toward our detriment.
The first is the deeply problematic 3rd Party Doctrine with established that we lose our rights when a 3rd party has control over our private content/information. What few stipulations there are in the precedent are routinely ignored or twisted by the courts (ex:voluntarily given). This allows governments to wholly ignore the 4th amendment altogether.
The second is the utter lack of meaningful, well written privacy laws that should exist to protect individuals from corporate misuse and exploitation of our personal and private data.
And even worse than Governments willfully violating our privacy rights (thanks to countless courts) and worse than corporations ceaseless leveraging our personal data against us - is that both (of every size) now openly collaborate to violate our privacy in every possible way they can.
(I saw a Telly recently. This device should be terrifying, but "free" makes people make weird choices.)
Does requiring by law an age of 21 to enter a bar violate freedom of assembly? Lots of important political events and discussion historically in the US have occurred at taverns.
The major part of this case is that without a jury trial he'd probably have had zero chance of being cleared. Countless others were persuaded to plead guilty to avoid a long time in prison and then were given long sentences. h he was strong enough not to give in.
You are right, freedom of expression in the US doesn't cover inciting violence, but it has an high bar, imminent lawless action:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brandenburg_v._Ohio
Yes in Lucy Connolly's case she admitted to inciting violence, though I'm not certain what she did justifies a 31 month sentence.
A bookstore with a single employee can no more verify the content of every new book or periodical put up for sale than Apple can verify all new content on the internet.
Books and periodicals come out far, far too quickly for an independently owned bookstore to read first. Never mind new books which have set release dates where bookstores might not get advanced copies for books sold on consignment.
If the owner stopped caring and just decided to let any book that passed through the automated "does this book immediately and actively harm the customer?" screening machine then you'd have something that approximates the app stores.
[Image with a bookstore filled with AI slop]
Enforcing anything other than that is a huge 1A violation IMO.
Phrasing this as "you" versus "a second party to the child" involves me, where I originally did not present a statement that would give the impression that I'd be involved. Keep me - "you" - out of it. I'm simply making fun of this analogy.
Correct analogies should be used to present the most fool proof argument.
Avoiding the collection of user data in the first place (if it's possible) is exactly the correct approach to user privacy.
I think most laws should look reasonable from the common-sense viewpoint. And when they don't, there should be a serious explanation.
Corollary: a secure notification should consist of a link with a random number token which opens the real message via an authenticated API on an encrypted channel. Would look a bit weird though. iOS at least has silent notifications for that.
That's why the surveillance capitalism business model is so dangerous. If you horde user data to make ad sales more profitable, you put your users at risk.
If app developers want to pass customer data in notifications, the data they are passing should be encrypted so that Apple (or Google) doesn't have access.
You can't hand over what you can't access.
As they say in Apples developer docs:
> Important
Don’t include customer information or any sensitive data, like a credit card number, in a notification’s payload. If you must include customer information or sensitive data, encrypt it before adding it to the payload.
You can use a notification service app extension to decrypt the data on the user’s device.
https://developer.apple.com/documentation/usernotifications/...
- Former NSA General Michael Hayden
I very much saw the irony that Texas of all regions tried to restrict the Wild West that is the digital App Store landscape. I think something needs to be done but the implementation proposed is not just problematic but also downright technically impossible. Our first implementation simply failed open for all kinds of errors. Reading the AppStore Age Verification APIs (except Apple) they tried to make this an app problem ala: Playstore is not up to date. Show a message to the user yadayadayada… There so many reasons why this call can go wrong. And the apps won’t start blocking all users just because this call failed. Not to speak about the issue that just for Texas we had to implement said call globally. Because the law states that a an account created after 1.1.26 of a Texas “resident” needs these additional checks. Well let’s see what happens next.
I also wonder why smut literature (the best selling category of books on Amazon) seems to get a free pass.
> I also wonder why smut literature (the best selling category of books on Amazon) seems to get a free pass.
It's popular with women and basically invisible to men.
> It's popular with women and basically invisible to men.
Mostly true, and this might be a reflection of reality, but certainly not a justification.
They know that re-litigating that is a road to ruin because 'artistic merit' is so well tread a ground in literature.
Write the most sexually disturbing sentence you can come up with and it's going to be rather meh and possibly quite comical. And any of the gravity that it does have comes from the reader's ability to generate the visuals themself which is mostly out of reach for children who don't have the experience to necessarily know what's even being described.
On the age verification thing the only reasonable proposition i've heard would be a feature that allows parents to set some setting that gives a device users age or age range for mobiles and tablets. I think this covers a reasonable percentage of use cases if your goal is actually protecting kids and not just using that as deceptive cover to sneak in widespread surveillance laws. A simple setting that says for example this ipad user is 10-13yrs is privacy preserving enough and would not negatively impact adults and because it would be coming from the device itself would actually be harder to get around vs VPN's or spoofing IDs, etc.
The idea of trying to address all devices in all scenarios is absolutely preposterous in my opinion.
1. easy wins for politicians in conservative areas of "won't somebody think of the children?!?!" so they can look like they're doing stuff to stick it to big tech while appealing to their voters' sensibilities
2. wanting to de-anonymize the internet as much as possible in the name of CSAM and anti-terrorism but is actually about wanting unchecked surveillance. the same reason we have to bang the drum against anti-encryption laws that they try to pass every several years
It seems to be more about harmonizing Texas law (SB2420) under the constraints of federal law (1A), so we will likely to see this question all the way to the USSC.
Like age laws for vape pens vs age laws for shopping.
You cannot narrowly target a medium.
Presumably for the same reason why libraries can not be targeted narrowly
Google just sent me a email today that Google would push forward
Reminds me of HTTP error code 451, Unavailable For Legal Reasons.
I can imagine some future programming language with a LegalRestrictionException.
Thanks, Obama
Apparently, these are not quite equivalent. Like books and weapons, like books and alcohol, etc.
Porn may provide a suitable model: not all movies need age verification, so those can be viewed at any age. Some movies, however, do require age verification. Similar age ratings could be applied to apps. For example, Facebook only after 18 regardless of parent's approval.
Good thing that isn't what happened. It is called an "analogy" and is not a factual statement of equivalence.
The MPAA rating system and adhering to it is completely voluntary.
Good in theory, but practically impossible. Peer pressure is too high for parents to be a significant barrier. If you were successful, please share how you did that.
That is obvious harm.