Online age-verification tools for child safety are surveilling adults | Hacker News Reader

Online age-verification tools for child safety are surveilling adults

cnbc.com

660 pointsbilsbie343 comments

>An FTC spokesperson told CNBC that companies must limit how collected information is used. [...] The agency pointed to existing rules requiring firms to retain personal information only as long as reasonably necessary and to safeguard its confidentiality and integrity.

the very same rules that have allowed literally every single piece of my data to be leaked several separate times, and now i have free credit monitoring instead of privacy? and all of those companies still operate normally, as if nothing ever happened? very neat.

>Discord said it is using the additional time this year to add more verification options, including credit cards, more transparency on vendors and technical detail of how age verification will work

and why didnt we start with credit cards? instead of facial recognition with peter thiel? (this is a rhetorical question)

I have gotten several notices of medical data being leaked over the last two years. I thought HIPPA law had very harsh fines for this, but I guess they just look the other way.

Seems like if you just disclose and make assurances that "you take security seriously" then it's fine.

I once worked with both PCI and HIPAA at a consulting firm. Neither had very high bars. PCI compliance was just a yes/no questionnaire that said something like "I do not store unencrypted CC numbers in my DB." No one validates the questionnaire. I just submit it and I got a shiny badge to put on my clients site.

HIPAA compliance was just a half hour webinar.

To be fair, I think HIPAA works in offline contexts (employers can't ask your doctor about your health) but as far as how easy it was for me to get access to customer CCs and medical information... Let's just say the barrier was basically nonexistent.

HIPAA doesn't have a private cause of action so if a violation happens, it's a wealth transfer to the government, it doesn't mean anything to you or any individual.

And most companies can simply price it in as cost of doing business at this point.

> I thought HIPPA law had very harsh fines for this

Not at all. The maximum fine a company has to pay is capped at $2 million per calendar year for a violation, and that's assuming it's even eligible for the highest tier of penalty.

Some companies may have paid fines, some people may have lost their jobs over incidents like these, but the repercussions aren't severe enough to be a deterrent.

unfortunately, even if the fine seems harsh, if it is less than the profits generated the fine is an operating expense and not a deterrent.

I prefer facial recognition. Probably good that there isn't a popular face-spoofer app, since it would put attention to the efficiency of these verifications.

Credit card info is a bad solution. In many countries they still are rare and it would very likely exclude as much adults as children.

The real answer is that while we should expect children to be online, it is the responsibility of the parents to moderate their usage. Add a standard header to every http request to support filter solutions. That is the only viable solution that is of a technical nature.

The whole ZKP idea is futile, no model works if you also have connection information, which states tend to save too.

Anonymous internet usage is pretty awesome. For adults and kids for that matter. And that doesn't change because there are also bad advertisers that practically can identify and track you. If you want to protect kids, have those be imprisoned first. Strong opinion, I know, but also the correct one.

I definitely agree that we need to pass strict laws around “advertising,“ which at this point is a misnomer for the assault we experience every day just by engaging with the Internet or simply walking into a store now. It’s data fracking, not “targeted advertising” anymore.

The semi-anonymous Internet is so important especially for people in repressive households/societies.

> now i have free credit monitoring

Might not even matter ...

"TransUnion and Experian, two of the three major credit bureaus, have started dismissing a larger share of consumer complaints without help since the Trump administration began dismantling the CFPB."

https://www.propublica.org/article/credit-report-mistakes-cf...

It's not like they were really doing a very good job anyway. My data has been leaking for two decades now.

How much money did the CFPB actually give back to wronged consumers?

Pre-trump's attempts to eliminate the department, almost $20 billion.

https://www.consumerfinance.gov/enforcement/enforcement-by-t...

And one would hope that the purpose of the CFPB would be to dissuade lenders from wronging consumers in the first place, meaning the net benefit to consumers was likely much higher.

Thanks for the numbers!

Their mere presence was effective. I know people who had trouble with banks refusing to fix their own screwups and demanding evidence that couldn’t exist.

They changed their tune the second there was an open case on the matter.

Also of note is they were responsible for medical debt cases, which are particularly difficult for people to resolve because of the shared responsibility between the patient and the insurer, which allows the insurer to deflect responsibility until the bill ends up in collections.

Some of the accounts being blocked from certain access are themselves 18! You would think Reddit would consider that, but nope it doesn't.

Age of account was sufficient for Google and third-party services for verification until recently. My gmail account is almost 22 years old, in continuous use. I have a credit card on file with Google Pay. Why would I need to submit a photo to engage with a private service, outside of volunteering to help train a surveillance apparatus?

Is there any forum short of a senate subcommittee that the public can ask companies these questions? The silence is deafening.

Contact your senator and ask them. Call your senator's offices and ask to meet with them or a representative in person, they can schedule an appointment, and most maintain offices in major population centers in their states.

...That would be a cost center, sir. If you don't like our product, you are free to not use us and make your own while foregoing doing any business in anywhere with either of one of the two major political parties.

There is a reason why I don't accept private enterprise as something separate from Government. The nature of the incorporation legal fiction makes them proxies of Government power and influence, hence why I believe private enterprise should in some ways be as heavily restricted by Constitutional guardrails as the Government itself (allegedly) is.

Probably because the transfer of accounts (typically for reasons of better spamming, but in this case for adult access) is possible.

However, that makes me wonder what mechanism might "unverify" an account holder's age upon transfer. I suppose it's simply a need to re-verify (take a new photo) upon every login, but then folks could transfer the session cookie to avoid needing the new owner to perform a login (unless a new device ID/fingerprint makes the old cookie useless).

> … I suppose it's simply a need to re-verify (take a new photo) upon every login …

Clearly the only foolproof solution is a 3rd-party camera pointed at your face at all times whenever you use a computer.

And a *plug to measure the heart rate at all times in the convenient and unobtrusive way, to ensure the face is of the mammal, and not the mannequin.

A sort of "telescreen" if you will.

Since you don't have to verify every time you use the account, transfer of verified accounts will still be a "problem" though. It's just a CYA to be able to say "we verified this account owner."

10 years was enough for Tom Fulp.

https://www.newgrounds.com/bbs/topic/1549829/1

https://www.newgrounds.com/bbs/topic/1555753/1

SOTA is age inference: The platform studies your behavior to estimate your age.

There's even precedent for credit cards! I remember my dad needing to make a small transaction to get me a nintendo online account back in the 3DS and Wii U era

Here's a good interview with the director of the Free Speech Coalition on the consequences of these "protect the kids" moral panic laws, which include widespread surveillance, banning VPNs and raising the cost of running an independent website to unsustainable levels.

Remember it's not just about pornography. It's anything deemed "harmful to minors" including platforms like Reddit, Bluesky or stuff conservative lawmakers think is harmful like discussion forums for LGBTQ people, sexual health information or dissident political opinions.

They also examine how these laws, which are often backed by the religious Right, are getting support more broadly from people who see it as a way to rein in Big Tech who are creating "social media addiction" and so forth.

And even within our industry there is a lot of money to be made by creating and selling compliance products, so even on forums like this you will find people advocating for them.

"Another Internet Law That Punishes Everyone" - Power User Podcast 1/9/26: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8bnp3nmpK9g

This is so much bigger than the “religious right” though, UK and Australia have far less of that and parties from both sides of politics here and in the UK seem to be competing to out-do each other with surveillance, censorship and control of adults online under the guise of ‘child safety’.

And all being pushed so, so much harder in just the last couple of years, all at the same time. I don’t know what’s the source…

Governments around the world have sought to control the internet and strip away anonymity for years, they've now found their foot-in-the-door moment so they're all going for it in their own way.

Some of it is governments watching and copying each other, some of it is dialogue happening at international events, being driven by groups like the Global Coalition for Digital Safety:

https://initiatives.weforum.org/global-coalition-for-digital...

It's probably not being driven by one single group, there are a number of private and government orgs whos interests in controlling information converge.

It's thinly veiled authoritarianism, just the state pushing for more control

the religious right may be one faction in this push for digital surveilance but I don't think they're the ones behind the EU push for chat control and device lockdown or the insane 3d printer proposal in california.

This is a trans-ideological movement.

The fact that these tools are 'active' centric, i.e : You must perform an action to validate you're NOT a child, these will never protect children. A predator simply needs not to verify anything and appear benign and ironically more anonymous than law abiding people.

I'm not saying the inverse is the answer either, just that if anyone without an agenda of surveillance looked at this for a second, the penny would have dropped. So I can only assume that this was the purpose the whole time.

Sob stories about children are always weaponized for oppression.

It was used to bash interracial marriage, gay rights, suppress dissent, attack the first amendment, and now this.

Whenever you hear some dramatic story involving kids about how you have to live a little less free, know the tactic.

The best way to protect children is to educate them to protect themselves, but that argument generally falls on deaf ears, doubly so when there's an opportunity to use "but the children" as a political cudgel.

Don’t forget the second amendment.

I don't understand your point. Can you quote the part of the second amendment that specifically addresses children, or schools for that matter?

> Sob stories about children are always weaponized for oppression.

This is common for opponents of the second amendment as well. "Think of the children!" etc etc.

You're on HN. Expect downvotes.

whats incredible to me are how many useful idiots out there STILL fall for it.

___ said hamas beaheaded 40 babies and that turned out to be a complete fabrication. That fake info was used in part to justify killing thousands of kids in ____

meanwhile the recent strike on Iran resulted in 80 little girls getting killed (with plenty of evidence) and its swept under the rug while we get blasted about the 7 soldiers that died.

More useful idiots are born every day, most of them never are educated and do not see their past blunders as anything wrong happening, they are completely blind to the real implication of their actions.

I know some idiots that read newspapers and technical papers and yet would rather have company like discord providing safety for their new born daughter but would vote for small govt republicans (or democrats, i don't care, it's just a label that is applicable now. they are mostly all the same) and do nothing about calling out the actual child predators and taking proper action against them. It is bonkers

>whats incredible to me are how many useful idiots out there STILL fall for it.

That's about 99% of the population.

But none of us here, right?

Age verification doesn't stop determined bad actors, it just builds a database of everyone who cooperated...........

Know they sheep, the better to keep them penned.

Exactly my point.. And all the industry experts who they must have consulted in to write the laws are coincidently invested in personal data harvesting. Who could have foreseen this happening.

Now do Covid… tracking the non-compliant is surely the smaller task.

A much better approach would be to hold platforms responsible if they allow a stranger that does not have explicit parental consent to communicate with or get information about a minor.

This would block the most common classes of abuse on platforms like Roblox, Fortnight, Lego (kids) Fortnight, YouTube Kids, Minecraft, and "educational" social networks / games.

Note that it doesn't require any centralized surveillance at all. Parents just need to control the kids' ability to create random accounts, by (for example) turning on parental controls as they already exist on most tablets/phones, and blocking app installation / email applications (or other 2FA vectors).

When the parent allows an account to be created, they just tick the "kid mode" box. This even works with shared devices that don't support multiple accounts (so, iPads and iPhones).

> A predator simply needs not to verify anything and appear benign and ironically more anonymous than law abiding people.

Roblox takes the sane approach with this: communication features are completely disabled for "unverified" users.

Minecraft is going this direction as well, at least for UK based users.

Age verification inherently requires identity verification.

The UK's Online Safety Act originally had a proposal that would allow users to purchase an ID code anonymously in cash from a corner store, presenting only ID to the cashier the same way as buying alcohol. This was never implemented, because it's more useful for the government and corporations to link all online usage to a government ID.

I didn't know the Online Safety Act had this proposal. Do you have a source?

I've been proposing the same thing on this site for months. IMO anonymous age verification with no record-keeping is the only form of age verification that should exist. No zero knowledge proofs, no centralized government identity provider, nothing.

Zero knowledge proofs are better than this "bearer token" proposal because all what is needed to unmask an account is for the shop to note down the name on the ID and the code that was given to them.

I already wrote "no record keeping" in my first comment.

Shop at stores that don't do that. If that doesn't work write it into the law that they aren't allowed to record your ID.

For alcohol and tobacco, stores don't even card people that obviously appear to be legal age. So most people won't ever show any ID to a clerk.

I've been buying alcohol since turning legal age, in multiple countries and jurisdictions. Never had my ID scanned or stored.

> Age verification inherently requires identity verification.

Not necessarily. There are facial scan tools which make a guess based on visual appearance of the face. They aren’t perfect, but they might have error rates comparable to systems which require linking to government ID systems.

Facial scan is also identity verification.

How do you prevent selling those ID codes to kids?

The same way you prevented adults buying pornography for kids prior to the web, and the way you prevent adults from buying beer for kids now.

Namely, you don't prevent it (I was 11 when I first saw hardcore pornography, on a VHS tape, at a sleepover party), but it does place a (surmountable) barrier in the way, which will reduce access to some degree. The degree to which that happens depends on a lot of things that are hard to predict. We have culturally normalized access to a lot of things for children, and reversing that will likely take more than just changes to a law.

Sometimes this question comes up with an implied subtext of: "It needs to be bulletproof."

It really doesn't, and especially if the ostensible rationale is blocking the ills of social media. If your friends aren't there, there's less motive to waste a bunch of allowance-money dealing with a sketchy adult to get there.

If it's good enough for beer and cigarettes it's good enough for social media.

> presenting only ID to the cashier the same way as buying alcohol

Selling alcohol to minors is illegal in the UK. Some do circumvent this by various means (e.g. fake ID or having an adult purchase on their behalf, both of which are also illegal), but the same is already true for the current age verification system.

Same way you prevent selling beer to kids. Impose harsh penalties for violators.

How do you prevent people verifying other people online? Are you going to send cops to some guy's house because he has 3 google accounts? How do you prevent kids sneaking verification from others?

How do you prevent kids verifying as adults?

That's the same question.

Meanwhile apparently 70% of Australian under-16's retrained/regained access to social media.

See, even intrusive, surveillance and privacy-busting methods don't work.

I mean I think these laws are stupid and would happily lend my license to anyone in my family to bypass this shit. Especially since for most verifications they literally just need a picture of my driver's license—the very definition of publicly available info.

The entire point is to de-anonymise adults. Especially in countries that are escalating the policing of online speech.

If it was actually about kids, we'd have done it a long time ago. With more focus on things like porn and gambling (including 'loot box' gambling in games) rather than social media.

My default reaction to the introduction of any age-verification for any service is the closing account. Goodbye Discord, account closed out of protest.

The second option is ignoring the verification request. Goodbye online-gaming-with-strangers on Xbox. (I see this as a positive). Same goes for Ubisoft who aggressively wanted my secret papers to verify my identity.

I've yet to come across anything I want or need outside banking or government use where age verification benefits me, or is so useful/important that I would willingly hand over critical secret documents. I've not even needed to use a VPN for anything. It doesn't mean it won't happen, but when it does, option #1 or #2 is going to cover everything.

Which circles back to the main point here - if I ignore it, then effectively I get identified as a non-adult. How does this protect anybody?

(UK-based, might not be the same everywhere)

> I've yet to come across anything I want or need outside banking or government use where age verification benefits me, or is so useful/important that I would willingly hand over critical secret documents

So far. As these laws proliferate (and companies continue complying in advance), at this rate, it won't be long before you can't meaningfully do anything on the Internet otherwise.

What's wrong with being flagged a non-adult? Being a non-adult means you are limited to supervised child-safe spaces. Child-safe doesn't mean "no adults" allowed. It means "monitored and censored"

Aside from the concept of adults masquerading as non-adults, nothing so long as those spaces are moderated fully. I have no problem with skipping the verification, but I do question the moderation of most services.

The problems start when the space become not-for-children and identity validation is mandatory to use them, which will exclude people like me who categorically refuse to hand over personal secrets in order to have access. It does not warrant the inherent risk involved with granting access to personal details unrelated to the service offered. I reckon this will happen when someone decides it's better commercially to make a service adult-only than to moderate non-adult accounts. It's a slippery slope, and a predictable next step once adult have become accustomed to handing over papers for some services to have to do it for many, if not all.

It becomes a problem when platforms are overly cautious in putting an adults only rating on things. The last thing I need as a transgender woman is to attach my personal information to my searches about my health in a country actively progressing towards making a database of us to round up and be sent to camps

Well, ad are supposed to be different for children, right? So in theory we would get less ads by being ID'd as a child. Now, this would probably cause a new law where they would allow child ads...

Less no, different yes. Instead of dodgy meds and dating sites we'd have games and cosmetics and whatever other junk folks are punting at adolescents. If anything, I suspect there would be more ads.

The uncomfortable part is that they try to solve a real problem (protecting minors) by requiring universal identification. In practice this means every adult has to prove who they are just to access any part of the internet. Once that infrastructure exists, it’s hard to imagine it not expanding beyond its original purpose.

Its hard to imagine that it won't launch _already_ expanded beyond it's original purpose. My expectation is that there will be precisely 0 seconds between it and it being abused. The people building it will plan the abuse before it's even launched.

Protecting children means protecting them from people who wish to harm them, that includes the government and platform owners, since these laws don't provide any actual protections to children from those two entities it's reasonable to assume that the law is trying to facilitate child exploitation rather than prevent it.

You have to keep in mind your idea of child protection is likely different from most of Americas'. The law makers' idea is to maximally enable them to perform (largely) uncompensated white collar work. Protected means that by the time they are 22 they have maximally warped their brain into an economically viable specialty and are in massive personal debt. If they make Roblox a $1M in the meantime of course that money won't go to their brainwashing, that would make them lazy.

Discord specifically wanted to solve this by assuming everyone was a minor until they proved their age. Minors still have access to most spaces unless that space (or DMs with adults) was flagged / identified as adult-content.

This is a pretty clear counter example to your snowball fallacy.

It also means any child abuser who wants access to children away from the eyes of other adults just has to avoid providing ID.

The EU is rolling out the EUDI system this year where citizens can verify their age (>16, >18, >21) without revealing any personal information. This is a solved problem over there.

EUDI has had various criticism with its approach for not supporting unlinkability (with the same attestation used across verifiers they can be traced to the same user).

There are some long Github threads in the official repo along with a PDF[1] of cryptographer's feedback about the privacy issues. Also covered in this[2] article.

This is unlike BBS+ which supports unlinkability and which was even recommended by GSMA Europe to such address downsides. In the Github discussions there seems to be pushback by those officially involved that claim BBS+ isn't compatible with EUDI[3] and there seems to be some plateauing of any progress advancing it.

[1] https://github.com/eu-digital-identity-wallet/eudi-doc-archi...

[2] https://news.dyne.org/the-problems-of-european-digital-ident...

[3] https://github.com/eu-digital-identity-wallet/eudi-doc-archi...

According to the EU Identity Wallet's documentation, the EU's planned system requires highly invasive age verification to obtain 30 single use, easily trackable tokens that expire after 3 months. It also bans jailbreaking/rooting your device, and requires GooglePlay Services/IOS equivalent be installed to "prevent tampering". You have to blindly trust that the tokens will not be tracked, which is a total no-go for privacy.

These massive privacy issues have all been raised on their Github, and the team behind the wallet have been ignoring them.

Yikes. I fully expect non-sabotaged computers to become illegal in the coming decades

Doesn't the act of notifying >16 today and >18 tomorrow leak birthdates?

If you want privacy you need to fuzz the transition. Many platforms support that today. Or you can create a separate account when you graduate.

But also, knowing someone's birthday without trying it to other information greatly reduces the risk of harm.

Not unless you actually meant 16<x<18 today and >18 tomorrow.

You can be 30 and verify >16 today and >18 tomorrow, obviously without being 18.

which is nothing in comparison to leaking all of personal information

you can also introduce some jitter like changing age range only once a week/month/year for everyone

Birthday, zip code and gender is enough to uniquely identify most Americans.

Well don't reveal your birthday then. Wait 5 days to confirm >18.

If you run into a liquor store yelling "Im finally 18, here's proof." that's on you?

Will this work without Google/Apple services shown down my throat?

I'm just whipping the dead horse again. Surely the poor thing is beyond micronized dust at this point.

This could have been avoided [1] if the real goal was to protect small children. No need for third parties or sharing sensitive data that will eventually be "ooopsie leaked totally by mistake" or outright sold/shared. No perfect, nothing is.

[1] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46152074

Man... How did yall white Westerners turn out to be the weakest people in the world?

You were supposed to be the bastions of freedom and justice, and the rest of the world begrudgingly admired you for that and were slowly improving to become like you, but ever since 9/11/2001 the rich old people that rule you have been feeding you boogeymen to make you their complacent b*tches and you lay down and crawl along and accept everything without even a whimper.

Now your countries are little different from Russia or China or Dubai etc where the old money cabals run everything, and it's not some third world backhole that was suffering already anyway, but you yourself that are the worst victims of all their laws and wars.

> Now your countries are little different from Russia or China or Dubai

The fact that many independent national newspapers (including this article from CNBC) are openly calling-out the surveillance state and entering the debate into the public conscience should tell everyone that USA (and the West) is very different from Russia or China or Dubai.

USA is not perfect, but at least is has active public discourse. We can openly (and legally) debate these things, and if we convince enough people, then we can change them.

> The fact that many independent national newspapers (including this article from CNBC) are openly calling-out the surveillance state and entering the debate into the public conscience should tell everyone that USA (and the West) is very different from Russia or China or Dubai.

So, the only benefit of the USA is that some media can still complain. And the regime just ignores and does what they want. Regardless dems or reps, they criticize the reduction of freedoms when they are in opposition, but as soon as they grab power, they keep reducing freedoms. It's like they are all just puppets of someone you can't even name without being called names.

> USA is not perfect, but at least is has active public discourse. We can openly (and legally) debate these things, and if we convince enough people, then we can change them.

Yep, they convinced you you are free because you can argue while keeping more and more freedoms and rights from you.

Today, the only difference between Western and Eastern regimes is that one side chooses the "Brave New World" way and the other the "1984" way. But eventually, they'll all converge into Zamyatin's "We" kind of dystopia that inspired both of these.

I think pointing to a single puppet master is reductive. Demography and geography predict essentially all of these changes. Protesting and civil disobedience can obviously tip matters, but the authoritarianism taking the us has been a long time coming just based on the centralization of federal power that started almost as soon as the ink was dry. The tendencies of landlocked resource heavy states are going to be authoritarian. Coastal trade based states will tend to go pluralist. Giant continent spanning states need coordination and continuity, so they go authoritarian. The federated nature of the original US, the EU and countries like Switzerland let those differing tendencies coexist. So once the US began centralizing power it was only a matter of time.

The fix is only barely in the realm of the possible. US states have to be given back their power, and the federal government must be limited to its original remit. This will let coastal states tend to pluralism, and resource heavy and or landlocked states tend to authoritarianism and as long as money and feet are free to cross state borders. It will all work out. Ditching first past the poles and mitigating gerrymandering would also obviously help.

> Ditching first past the poles and mitigating gerrymandering would also obviously help.

Mitigating gerrymandering is a lost cause with first past the post because someone has to draw the lines and whoever is in the majority at the time is going to find a way to benefit themselves. It's especially hard because in a state which is e.g. 60% for one party, drawing the lines in a "normal" way can pretty easily result in a bunch of districts that are each 60% for that party (i.e. they get 100% of the seats with 60% of the votes), and getting it to not do that is the thing that could require a bunch of strange looking lines.

Whereas if you switch from first past the post to score voting, gerrymandering is basically irrelevant.

First past the post de facto disenfranchises the majority of the district including members of both parties whenever the split isn't almost exactly 50:50, because then the outcome is effectively a certainty even if significant numbers of voters change their minds. Everyone who supports the losing major party or any third party fails to benefit them, and everyone who supports the victorious major party in excess of what they needed to secure the district is also not moving the needle even a hair.

Whereas with score voting, you can have more than two viable candidates, and then hyper-partisans can't win in a district where 40% of the voters hate them because they'd lose to a member of their own party, or a now-viable third party candidate, who can appeal to voters on both sides. Changing the composition of the district changes which candidate wins even when the change doesn't put a different party in the majority, and with more than two viable parties there may not even be a "majority" party anymore.

The problem is someone got the Democrats to start promoting IRV, which is barely better than first past the post in many cases and actually worse (i.e. more partisan) in some pretty common ones. Which in turn got a lot of Republicans to start opposing all voting system reforms because they didn't like the results. Meanwhile they would both benefit from using score voting instead of FPTP or IRV. I mean seriously, does either party actually like this partisan hellscape?

> Demography and geography predict essentially all of these changes.

> The tendencies of landlocked resource heavy states are going to be authoritarian.

What are you basing this on? Where can I read more about this?

What are you even talking about?

Like,I don't like what I see in the US (I am not a US citizen), but in Russia or China you get KILLED for talking against the current government.

How can you even compare that

Sure, it's not that bad now, but it seems to be headed in that direction.

> in Russia or China you get KILLED for talking against the current government.

This has started happening in the US. ICE protests.

Active public discourse seems to have not made even a slight dent in the growth of surveillance in the last 25 years.

Wild exaggeration.

Here's an example just recently:

https://www.npr.org/2026/02/17/nx-s1-5612825/flock-contracts...

It's a constant and ongoing public concern.

Public discourse is a speed bump not an immovable barrier. The proof is in the state of things advancing in the same direction for the past few decades at least. Speed bumps are still valuable but not if you want to block the road. So public discourse alone isn’t the silver bullet you make them out to be.

Over some Democratic party campaign wedge issue like illegal immigrants (who I guess are the only people who should be protected from constant surveillance, so special.) They will immediately not care about this at all when they are in charge of ICE, or whatever they rename it. Democrats love Flock (i.e. get paid by Flock.)

So you can imagine how much surveillance has expanded in countries without such discourse.

In the US. There is no discourse and active criminalization of the people protesting pipelines, neutral markets and internet, right to own, etc. Even right to protest is under attack. What discourse? Private equity and monopolies is what everybody is willing to give away their comfort to. The effort of raising your own kids? Nah. I want govt to nanny me and everybody else. Better policing? Nah. We need the quick solution and surveill the neighborhoods. Better get back on your feet programs and social safety net for people needing it? Nah get off my backyard and take those homeless with you.

It is constantly people wanting convenience and vertical integration in favor of homegrown human solutions and then complaining that their rights are not met because of course they aren't. Corporations never cared for people.

Idk I feel like I writing a documentary. And not a response now

Somehow we have more public “discourse” than ever with less public “debate” than ever. People just yelling rude names at each other and repeating nonsense talking points, while the trajectory of what’s actually happening continues to worsen. I include Congress and the executive branch in this characterization.

I regret that I have but one vote to give to this comment.

It seems like at least half of what everyone consumes in all of 'social media' is 'politicized' but no one is interested in debating. Debating would have to mean we're talking to those gross people from the opposite 'team,' asking them to justify the policy they are advocating for, listening to them, and trying to convince them of our own positions.

When was the last time we witnessed any politicians or activists trying to change minds? Right-wingers scream dumb slogans like "They're sending the rapists over here!" and left-wingers scream back their own dumb lines like "Racist! America was built by immigrants!" And both sides dismiss the other side's arguments as the nonsensical ravings of the evil and/or stupid.

It's pointless. Very few people will be convinced by arguments. Refuting someone's entire belief system will not lead them to reevaluate their lives and follow us as though we were Jesus. This just doesn't happen.

The reason for this is people believe things without actually thinking about them. People manage to believe in things that are mutually exclusive. Debating them will just make them hate you for your air of superiority.

Discourse is useful for validating one's own beliefs. Throw ideas out there and if others can't refute them then they are probably good ideas. I don't think there is any other use.

And half or more depending on the platform are foreign agents and/or bots to continue stirring shit up. It’s sadly too easy and the platforms themselves promote that engagement.

Imagine how far we are from allowing our own stances to change for the purpose of finding out the truth that would benefit us all

Turns out open debate doesn't matter in a post truth society. They don't stop CNBC because they know it doesn't matter how they report anymore. The propaganda is so ingrained that facts won't deter the masses anymore.

>The fact that many independent national newspapers (including this article from CNBC) are openly calling-out the surveillance state and entering the debate into the public conscience should tell everyone that USA (and the West) is very different from Russia or China or Dubai.

For how much longer will they stay independent? Media empires love to consolidate; most of the largest video services will soon be owned by a fan of govt surveillance.

A circus performer kept a troupe of monkeys and fed them 10 nuts each day. He fell on hard times and told the monkeys: 'from now on I can only give you seven nuts a day. I will give you three in the morning and four in the afternoon.' The monkey s were furious and raised a great clamor. 'Very well,' said the man, 'I will give you 4 nuts in the morning and 3 in the afternoon.' The monkeys were delighted.

Engagement is not discourse.

This is the core strategy of the alt-right playbook. By replacing discourse with engagement, the logical structure of politics becomes meaningless, and victory becomes automatic.

The playbook worked. The alt-right is in power now. We won't get the power back by playing the very game they destroyed.

So yes, this started as a different situation, but in the end, power is power.

> the very game they destroyed

I am a minority who disagrees with liberals. Is it conservatives fault I get attacked by liberals for attempting to question them? No. Enough of this distortion.

Enough of what distortion? Could you be more specific?

Is it conservatives' success that liberals fail to represent your interests? Probably. Is that success a result of conservatives actually succeeding to represent your interests? Unlikely.

If politics were structured by reason, then liberals might stand a chance at losing that game. Wouldn't that be nice? Of course, that would imply a deserving winner, which is sorely missing from our post-reason situation.

Limbaugh > Fox media broke public discourse decades ago

In Russia, China, the people are under threat of literal torture and murder.

You gave up way before that

> The fact that many independent national newspapers (including this article from CNBC) are openly calling-out the surveillance state and entering the debate into the public conscience...

LMAO! Bro/sis/secret third thing, you won't even start to believe how brave our press was when Putin had not consolidated his power yet. Ever heard of NTV? Or maybe Sobesednik, which lasted until 2023 I think? TV 6 or TV2 perhaps?

Seriously, this better-than-thou attitude will be your downfall one day. I know it was ours.

> Man... How did yall white Westerners turn out to be the weakest people in the world?

Slowly, and then suddenly.

The cracks were obvious when digital records made record keeping more practical, and the first electronic payment systems appeared, but once everyone was doing everything online the damn just burst wide open.

Democracy had enemies before the founding of the Republic. Our founders warned us that it would require constant maintenance: "a republic, if you can keep it," warned Franklin.

Washington cautioned us that political parties would allow unprincipled men to subvert the power of the people.

Jefferson highlighted the criticality of public education: "If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be."

For Adams, it was the willingness of citizens to sacrifice their private interests for the sake of the community. He cautioned against purely self-interested rugged individualism, now a fake American ideal.

All of these have eroded from a combination of assault and neglect. This problem is asymmetric: those who assault democracy have more to gain than those who defend it (e.g. by looting it, or getting compensated by a foreign power, etc.)

In 1971, 2 months after Lewis Powell argued businesses use their political power to aggressively influence the law, Regan brought him on as a Supreme Court Justice. It was much more efficient to buy a justice for life. He helped set the stage for First Amendment protection of corporate speech, and Citizens United; ultimately legalizing the ability to secretly give a political candidate money.

The rot is really, really deep.

See also "boiling frogs".

But then I'm replying to @mr_toad so you probably knew that already.

Your sardonic comment says a lot but does not address the real freedom we have. Which is to NOT use those platforms that require age verification. The more people that don’t use them the more it will hurt the companies that loose a customer base; then maybe their lobbyists will force a change.

So you’ll just not use Windows, macOS, Linux, iOS, or Android? In other words, you’ll just not use any computers? Seems nonsensical.

Did I miss a memo on Linux somehow requiring age verification now? How would that even work?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47270784 "System76 on Age Verification Laws"

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47239736 "Ubuntu Planning Mandatory Age Verification"

I thought I saw one about Redhat too, but can't find it.

Laws and lawmakers just concern themselves with making broad "laws" with little regard to specificity and applicability. California, Colorado and Illinois mandate OS "providers" to generate a signal. It is a copy pasted bill with little grounding in reality but a lawmaker is not going to say no "protecting children".

Pushed by AVPA - a group of companies standing to profit from this: LexisNexis, some Thiel corp, etc.

You missed US states competing on setting up age verification legislation that lets anyone sue any developer who produces systems that don't do age verification for life-destroying amounts of money.

There was some proposal from California or something to require OSs to enforce age verification, it was discussed in some other thread.

There was a California bill that would basically require it.

> Which is to NOT use those platforms that require age verification.

That is getting harder and harder. Platforms that are not susceptible to age verification (yet?) are on their way out - when have you written an email the last time for personal (i.e. non-work, order or customer support related) reasons? A physical letter [1]? The (root) cause is, centralized platforms like Whatsapp are much much more convenient and on top of that network effects apply - when 90% of your social connections use Whatsapp exclusively, it's hard to not use Whatsapp as well.

And then you got digitalization of government services and banking. More and more governments push for the removal of paper forms and require a web service. Banking regulations enforce 2FA, which almost always comes in the form of a phone app. The web services require a browser and an OS, which may require age verification sooner than later (see the recent spat about California's law), and the phone apps are only available for the walled gardens of unrooted, Play Store certified Apple and Android phones - that can and will be forced to verify ages as well.

Hard cash is out as well, many governments have set hard caps on cash transactions due to "anti money laundering" laws, in other countries you need to have a bank account to pay for mandatory things like taxes or public broadcast fees [2], and an increasing number of vendors refuses to accept cash as well due to the associated handling cost and risk of fraud (i.e. employee theft) and robbery.

That last point alone will make it impossible to survive in society without engaging with one or more of the walled gardens.

And mercy be upon you if the US Government decides to put you on one of their black lists. No more banking, even as an European, because everything touches VISA/MC/SWIFT, your cloud accounts (and with it your phone and app stores), all gone, you are now an unperson [3].

[1] Some countries are already shutting down postal services over that, e.g. Denmark: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/dec/21/denmark-postno...

[2] https://www.verbraucherzentrale-niedersachsen.de/themen/rund...

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Executive_Order_14203

Complacency.

The west had a golden age from the fall of the Soviet Union, removing their main rival. It also reinforced its reinforced its belief in the inevitably of progress (the "end of history" nonsense, for example). They cannot now cope with threats or danger.

That said, comparing the west to Russia, China etc. is a gross exaggeration.

China has much lower crime, cheaper healthcare and is making progress in other aspects.

We’re rapidly regressing into prideful ignorance. People are being encouraged to drink raw milk and fear vaccines.

19 century illnesses are making a resurgence.

Citizens are being indefinitely detained for “looking” like immigrants.

> China has much lower crime, cheaper healthcare and is making progress in other aspects.

China is also a horrifying place to live unless you are content just to participate quietly in society and never put a political sign in your yard or even just talk about the wrong thing with your friend in a private WeChat.

https://reclaimthenet.org/china-man-chair-interrogation-soci...

I mean such is life for anyone who is not a full-blown citizen of the United States. If you speak bad of the current administration or its allies expect to be punished extrajudicially

I don't see much difference these days. Substitute wechat for X and that's the US for anyone non-white.

> China has much lower crime, cheaper healthcare and is making progress in other aspects.

It is also a totalitarian regime where criticising the state can get you, and possibly your family, ‘disappeared’

Sure it is, luckily we’re catching up!

> For Indigenous Americans it’s unthinkable, but true. ICE is arresting, detaining Native Americans.

https://idahocapitalsun.com/2026/02/10/for-indigenous-americ...

Detain first , ask pesky questions about citizenship and civil rights later.

China is also an ancient civilization. Americans view of themselves is highly inflated by the sheer luck of being two oceans away from everyone during both world wars. Save for Pearl Harbor there were no notable attacks on the American homeland. It's a lot easier to be a superpower when the world destroys itself and you step into the breach. Millions of Soviet civilians died on their own homeland. In their own cities. Millions. Most Americans have no idea and can't really comprehend it. Even today a shocking number of Americans don't have a passport and really know nothing about the world beyond their shores. These people are overrepresented in an American Congress that is anti-democratic. People on the coasts, like in New York City are underrepresented in American government. The entire state of New York gets the same amount of senators as flyover states, many of which are welfare states (take more funds than they contribute). This is because in a modern economy what NYC produces is more valuable than what a state with barely any people in the middle of nowhere produces. Yet the middle of nowhere is represented more. It makes no sense.

The current administration is only convincing the world that America is a threat. We live in an age where two oceans offer far less protection than they did when America rose to superpower status. The fact Russian intelligence operatives can so easily infiltrate American political discourse is just one example. Watch any congressional hearing about cyber and you might be forgiven for thinking we have already been invaded. Beating up on third world pariah states impresses no one but the current administration. The United States bombs Iran but blinks at Russia. The administration started a trade war with China then backed off, not one meaningful concession was achieved.

Unless America reverses course fast the decline will only continue. The world will move on. No country is inevitable.

> China is also an ancient civilization.

So is Europe, and we are talking about the west in general, not just the US.

> Americans view of themselves is highly inflated by the sheer luck of being two oceans away from everyone during both world wars.

Again, most of Europe suffered during the world wars.

> The fact Russian intelligence operatives can so easily infiltrate American political discourse is just one example

They also infiltrate European politics, as do the Chinese.

"Save for Pearl Harbor there were no notable attacks on the American homeland."

September 11, 2001 is why Iran is being attacked a quarter century later.

HAHAHAHAHA my goodness. You actually believe that?

Everyone in China is constantly violating laws, the difference is that black letter law is essentially meaningless and the country is run by an administrative state that is controlled by the party.

You can't really get things done without breaking the law. China doesn't properly tabulate, and therefore cannot release, anything like accurate crime data. But the crime rate is certainly higher since it's pretty much impossible to even go online and do just about anything without breaking some law. What is written is so vague and nearly any conduct can fall under it.

The ambiguity doesn't make the country safer, they just have a media hegemony and active censorship. Healthcare is woeful and "cheap" comes with "quotas on patients seen" meaning that doctors frequently have 1-2 minutes to see patients and one can become an MD much earlier than one can in the US. And since the perception is that no food is really 100% safe, it's more acquiescence, and not confidence, that people show.

Hell, you having the option of choosing to opt into vaccines is even an improvement. In China you are stuck with the state prescribed schedule and that's it. Unless you're extremely wealthy, but then again, where is that not an exception?

Convenient and Cheap. That's all most people care about.

Privacy was already lost when everyone adopted mobile phones and gave them everything with constant location tracking, and used the free email accounts.

It's interesting that age-verification is the straw that breaks the camels back, but I guess porn has that power.

Yeo, convenience is the most powerful "drug" we have ever come up with. We need our next hit... Now!

This. Every time I point out that I shouldn't have to leak my residential address to private businesses to register to vote or complete KYC, 15 people immediately come out of the woods to point out that addresses are public information.

The point is they shouldn't be. That's how people get stalked, harassed, and murdered at their home.

> shouldn't have to leak my residential address to private businesses to register to vote

If the 'SAVE America Act' passes, you're going to be open to leaking a heck of a lot more than that, and it'll all go in to a national database.

TBH I'm not opposed to the government knowing where I live. Having ways to find and lock up actual criminals is not a bad thing.

I'm also not opposed to certain private businesses or financial institutions needing to know who I am. Having ways to identify financial criminals is not a bad thing either.

What I'm vehemently opposed to is these private businesses needing to know where I live. They are not the ones doing the locking up. That's what the government does. Private businesses can identify individuals without needing to know their residential addresses.

This is HN mate.

It's full of people from ad-tech who believe data protection is the enemy and the GDPR is a European conspiracy against growth.

You should learn to simply bend over and grab your ankles with both hands whenever they (or anybody else) asks for your personal data.

EDIT: and predictable 'drive-by' downvotes from those in the industry too lazy to try and defend their position and write a rebuttle!

This totalitarian agenda has been in the works for far longer than a quarter century. It's not just rich old people either.

We're witnessing the creation of the beast system in real time. The one that is prophesized in the Book of Revelation.

It is both scary to watch and yet fun to be alive to see it come to fruition.

It is occurring in every dimension, including the ability to track who buys and sells with crypto currencies along with the ability to punish or reward people based on ai hardware software infrastructure deployments.

Reddit bans users based on what they upvoted:

https://www.reddit.com/r/RedditSafety/comments/1j4cd53/warni...

"We know that the culture of a community is not just what gets posted, but what is engaged with. Voting comes with responsibility."

Are you talking to someone else?

This seems like an unnecessary threat based in your bias.

Chatgpt seems to concur.

I appreciate you saying this. It gets SO OLD having everything in society dominated by "think of the children" rationales that basically translate to "increasing authority and further-reduced freedom", with a spicy dash of omnipresent surveillance.

Yeah unfortunately I suspect the authoritarian surveillance is the whole point. Protecting children is obviously not a priority for the Epstein class.

It was indescribably pathetic watching HN users of all people defend Client Side Scanning and Bitlocker flaws. The only people qualified to logically protest have already drank the Kool-aid.

yep. You are not wrong.

Those who trade freedom for security will obtain neither.

Because, at least in Europe, people got hooked on nanny state.

US domestic surveillance predates 9/11. It just became more open once an easy excuse was available.

When you take a high trust society and then endlessly lie to the people, what exactly are you expecting to happen? Serious question here, we are under direct assault from the "elites" here and we are clearly shell-shocked and not yet dealing with it.

Many of us are open to suggestion. But if all you're going to do is call us bitches, then shut the fuck up. Wanna help? Cool, I'm willing to accept it. Maybe try that.

Weak? We manufacture mighty strong propaganda.

> You were supposed to be the bastions of freedom and justice

That was a lie we told ourselves. In reality we started with slavery which is about as far from freedom and justice as you can get, and then shifted to mass incarceration (often just slavery with extra steps) locking up more of our own people than Russia or China ever did. These days our prison population is trending down as we're getting better at imprisoning people in their own homes and communities with GPS trackers and parole/probation requirements but it's still laughable to call ourselves the "land of the free"

I hear this point of view, that mass incarceration is slavery with extra steps. But a (very quick and not in depth) google search shows that the cost to keep a person in prison for a year is $60-100k. And as far as I can tell in the cases where prisoners are laboring, while for admittedly shit pay, its not in $50k/year let alone one where where a profit would be returned for the "owners/jailers"

Now, if you're saying that the slavery comparison is more in that prisoners are legit balance sheet items for private prisoners to collect tax money? Well there is an argument there to be sure. But this seems like a structural problem. The existence of private prisons at all.

None of that is arguing in favor of crazy sentences for non-violent crime, however directly comparing it to chattel slavery confuses the argument against mass incarceration.

Prisons and more specifically prisoners are massively profitable to their jailers/owners no matter if they're private, state, or federal. Even private corporations are profiting from the US prison system. The federal government runs a corporation called FPI/UNICOR which sells out prisoners for profit. States also have programs or companies that lease their prisoners out to private companies who pay those prisons (or the government) a lot of money to get an endless supply of workers who can't complain about working conditions or being paid pennies a day (almost all of which goes back to the prison anyway). Some prisoners are forced to work for no pay at all.

Prisons will let people who are supposedly so dangerous that they need to be locked up and denied parole out of jail long enough to work their shifts at fast food restaurants, retail stores, plants (like Tyson Foods) and warehouses and they'll run their own companies inside the prisons themselves like call centers which get contracted out to private corporations or government agencies for a profit.

Some prisons also run farms, modern day plantations, that use slave labor to sell millions of dollars worth of food and crops to corporations whose products show up in our stores. Whole foods, kroger, walmart, and target all sell products made by prison labor. Food and crops raised on prison farms even get exported to other countries.

Inside the prisons everything prisoners get they have to buy from the prison which overcharges them for everything. The workers make pennies but the markups on what they need can be 600%. The commissary vendors are for-profit and the prisons get kickbacks from them to get exclusive access to the captive customer base. Private companies partner with prisons for release cards and make profit from that. Phone calls from prisons can cost over $20 for just 15 minutes (https://brilliantmaps.com/jail-call-cost-usa/). The US prison system is designed to make money. Private prisons tend to make more profit on their prisoners, but so do state and federal prisons, the vendors they employ, and private corporations. Of course even while the government and corporations rake in money taxpayers are still on the hook for a lot of unnecessarily expenses, including the costs of policing and the court systems that feed the prison system a steady stream of new and returning prisoners. Everybody knows that we could save billions in tax payer money is we focused more on keeping people out of the system, but there's profit to be made from slaves so no one will fix it.

Everyone was just copying the French

It's almost as if there's nothing special or unspecial about any of these populations. Just transient cultural factors that (in addition to generally being understood in limited hindsight and through rose-tinted glasses) will inevitably erode and dissolve under sustained attack.

> lay down and crawl along and accept everything without even a whimper.

People just want to live their lives. Maybe you think you would be doing differently in their position, but until you've had a chance to prove it, I don't believe you.

Let’s not get carried away. Real people fought and died for things we have.

Yes, and they did so because of their specific circumstances and beliefs.

> Now your countries are little different from Russia or China or Dubai etc where the old money cabals run everything

If that's what you strongly believe then "western countries" are definitely quite bad at communication and the others quite good at propaganda.

Having lived in a communist country (years ago) and in the west I know from first hand experience that the difference is huge. No need to believe me, see for yourself if you can, alternatively distrust everybody similarly (Rusia, China and the west) - nobody wants your well-being...

Sad part is that probably the poor (everywhere) are the ones suffering the most from the wars and stupid decisions, it does not matter west/east/south/north. Western countries were a richer which means less poor, but it's not like it's a heaven for everybody either.

Years ago is different to now. Many places in Russia or China, Dubai etc is very livable. Even lots of people are going about their lives normally in Dubai - these days.

China is definitely not so shit like portrayed by western media. At the same time London is also not run by Islamic Extremists as portrayed by perhaps the top media station in USA.

> Sad part is that probably the poor (everywhere) are the on

totally true.

Having also lived in a communist country, I agree that 35 years ago the difference was huge.

Unfortunately, since around 2000 the differences have become less and less every year, so what has remained now is a very small fraction of what was a quarter of century ago.

The socialist economies from the past were just the extreme form of capitalist economies, where monopolies controlled every market. The western economies are quickly approaching this stage.

Extreme surveillance of everybody was how the communist elites preserved their power, but the surveillance was actually illegal, because the constitution "guaranteed" the secret of communications, e.g. of mail and telephone. While the secret police or equivalent organizations did not care about what is legal or not, they were nonetheless forced to keep appearances and do their work covertly. They also did not have enough resources to process in a centralized form all the data collected by surveillance.

Now, in the western countries surveillance has been legalized, so the governmental agencies no longer bother to hide their activities. They also now have the means to spy on an unlimited number of people among hundreds of millions or even billions, so surveillance is already worse than it was in the communist countries, even if the consequences of being spied are not yet so severe (hopefully).

> Now, in the western countries surveillance has been legalized, so the governmental agencies no longer bother to hide their activities.

Hiding or not 20 years ago the west was trying to surveil it's population as much as they could as well, see the Snowden/NSA scandal.

> even if the consequences of being spied are not yet so severe

Spot on. I would go even further and argue that "communist countries" used to rule through "fear of the state", while west ruled through (among others) "fear of others" (used to be communist, now becomes migrants or other religious groups).

For me the surveillance is not ideal, but the worst is the average education level of a population. Without any surveillance, if my neighbor will suddenly believe I am a witch and burn me at stake (it did happen in the west!) I will not feel good because I was not surveilled.

We never were? Neoliberal freedom never constituted strength nor is companies having the general public by the balls a new thing here.

> Man... How did yall white Westerners turn out to be the weakest people in the world? You were supposed to be the bastions of freedom and justice

This is a misunderstanding of American history. From its founding by wealthy white male landowners and slaveowners, the US was by design a plutocracy, enshrined in the Constitution with various anti-democratic (small "d") measures such as separation of powers, the electoral college, the Presidential veto, the unelected Supreme Court with lifetime tenure, and representation of land rather than population in the Senate. Originally, Senators weren't even directly elected. And of course neither women nor Black men had the right to vote. (EDIT: I forgot to mention the extreme difficulty of amending the Constitution, and as a result, the Constitution hasn't been amended much since the Bill of Rights.)

The only thing that held the plutocracy in check was "all political is local". The US was an agrarian nation, not yet hit by the industrial revolution. The fastest form of communication and tranportation was the horse. What has changed radically in the 20th and 21st centuries is that modern technology allows the ultra-wealthy to organize and conspire (see Epstein and friends, for example) on a national and even international scale. Political election campaigns have always been privately funded—another essential feature of the plutocracy—and now they're obscenely expensive with TV and internet advertising, which further consolidates the power of the ultra-wealthy campaign contributors.

The biggest problem with the US is that we haven't had a political revolution in 250 years. We're still operating under the ancient rules.

Even during the suffering of the Great Depression, it took a "white knight", an ultra-wealthy leader FDR with some sympathy for the lower classes, to provide some relief. And note that the most successful third-party Presidential candidate in recent history was Ross Perot, a billionaire who self-funded TV informercials to spread his message. The game is rigged in favor of big money and has always been so rigged.

Agree with all. Especially about nationalization.

The origins of each colony (a la Albion's Seed) continue to shape our politics. Spoiler: The Virginians won.

> it took a "white knight"

Yes and: each progressive reform, however modest, barely squeaked thru, overcoming huge opposition. The Farmstead Act (et al), New Deal, Great Society, ACA, IRA, etc.

Followed by an outsized reactionary backlash. Every single time. Just like the current cycle of revanchism.

Albion's Seed: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albion%27s_Seed

> with various anti-democratic (small "d")

Yes, because the designers of the system were well-read and understood that raw democracy, like oligarchy and autocracy, is something that republics devolve into.

Rule by the many is great, but the historical evidence shows it's clearly unstable. The Constitution is designed to maximize the advantages while hedging against its inherent instability.

> The game is rigged in favor of big money and has always been so rigged.

I would say the game is rigged in favor of production, of which capital is a big part, because those who don't produce end up being governed by those who do.

> Yes, because the designers of the system were well-read

Well-read in the 18th century. And they borrowed heavily from 17th century philosopher John Locke. Imagine relying on 17th or 18th century medicine now.

The founders weren't nearly as wise as they're alleged to be. For example, they thought their system would suppress political parties, and then political parties arose almost immediately.

> Rule by the many is great, but the historical evidence shows it's clearly unstable.

Which historical evidence are you referring to? Most of history is nondemocratic.

In any case, the US broke out into an extremely bloody civil war less than 75 years after the Constitution was ratified, so it hasn't been "stable", not that stability is even desirable under a plutocracy.

> I would say the game is rigged in favor of production, of which capital is a big part, because those who don't produce end up being governed by those who do.

Let's see a rich dude produce anything all by himself. We like the pretend that the one rich dude is producing everything and his thousands of employees are basically superfluous.

> Let's see a rich dude produce anything all by himself. We like the pretend that the one rich dude is producing everything and his thousands of employees are basically superfluous.

We're certainly in agreement here, but I would say that most modern wealth is fictional: based on equity, which is based on credit, which is based on confidence, which at the end of the day is just vibes. So most of the 'wealthy' people exist as such with social permission because they're employed in production, and if they fail at that job the wealth rapidly evaporates. However, they're definitely wildly overpaid in the US. That, imho, is because culturally this country still wants to cosplay at having an aristocracy.

Politicians have spent decades eroding our education systems, at least where I am located. Bread and circuses. Coming up next in Germany is how they will slash personal assets in quarter (not merely half), using a reform of support for unemployed people. Instead of working out how to get finances redistributed (oh wait, now I will be called a "communist" or "socialist" as if that were some devilish insult), they are working out how to get to the savings of the simple worker.

Congrats Germany, for electing another CDU government. We are digging our own graves here and we are too uninformed and too entertained to see it. Next election will probably be the breaking point, when AfD manages to get many majorities, due to how unhappy CDU, SPD, and other mainstream parties have made the populace. And then we will have these right-wing extremists as our government.

Looking to the US, they have hit it even worse now. Full authoritarian guy at the top, who might even prevent the next elections, unless he is sure that he will win or can make it so that he appears to have won.

The west is lost.

It will live on, encoded in the weights of LLMs

The world is lost, I don't think it is any better in non-western countries.

> Now your countries are little different from Russia or China or Dubai etc where the old money cabals run everything,

This is clearly propaganda manufactured by the evil tech cabal to suppress grassroots efforts to protect children from their brainwashing. /s

In all seriousness, populist outrage doesn't help anyone except for the power brokers who can hide their true intentions under all the noise. As much of an overreach I think the Patriot Act was for example, the degree of harm that resulted from it is minuscule compared to the brainrot caused by social media. If you want me to oppose the age verification laws, then you need to convince me that those laws won't actually reduce brainrot or that surveillance harms me more than I think and let me come to my own conclusion.

Would like to point out GenX is middle management age in the US.

It isn't the senile crowd running things anymore. It's 50-60 year old Thiel, Musk, health insurance CEO, crowd.

Professional consumer crowd that's taken the baton and never invented anything of their own. Electric cars and rockets, the internet, and society post-WW2 were originally grandpa's ideas.

I think that's the problem, the greatest generation were sort of a moral compass in the US (like it or not, they obv had their own problems - eg. racism). Without them to scold us, it seems we're all too infantile/selfish/greedy and can't even show each other basic respect or do something as simple as stop at a red light. Sure, the internet and social media accelerate it but I think there's also a fundamental loss of parental figures that went out with that generation too.

As a Gen X'er myself I know I grew up respecting the hell out of older people, especially 70+ ages. The past couple of decades as that cohort churns, I can't say the same. It's more of a case by case basis now, many of them seem outright evil in their self-righteousness. They all seem angry and ready to fight in any passing interaction (granted, I live in Texas where most of them are amped on FoxNews, too) and that's not how it used to be. They used to be the friendliest cohort alive, hell when I was maybe 10-14 I even used to volunteer at senior living homes just to hang out and chat with them and can't imagine anyone wanting to do that now.

The greatest generation and the silent generation spent their entire adult lives vesting power in institutions and they passed this on to the boomers.

Now, after the better part of a century of that running it's course with nearly no pressure to not chart a crap course it's falling apart.

It’s the stewardship that’s the problem not the institutions or existence of.

Deregulation of financial markets and glorification of monetary wealth above all else was also their doing? Gen X were kids when Carter and Regan sent us down the path we’re on now.

They're not kids now

They were not kids a decade ago

Two decades ago

Why is it 20-30 somethings of 40-50 years ago put the world on an immutable path but 20-30 somethings now are stuck with?

If prior 20-30 somethings that "put us on a path" had free agency we do too

Especially when those old 20-30 somethings are now 70-90 somethings

Kids in the 1980s who rolled over in their 20-30s

Who speaks old English and writes like Shakespeare? Social truths die off. So why do we still speak 1970?

What do you mean "the west"? The US is indeed lost, but don't bundle the rest of us in with those lunatics!

We are not really better. Chat control being pushed in the EU. The Online Safety Act already passed in the UK, and now legislation to give politicians the power to decide what websites need age verification. Crony capitalism/technofedualism/whatever all over the place. Hate speech laws that are often politicised and give the police and prosecutors a lot of room to target people they dislike (something the US has constitutional protections against). Extremist parties such as PVV and AfD getting a significant proportion of the vote.

The UK is lost too. Chat control is scary, but it's actually proof that the EU is not yet lost: that law keeps getting shot down.

We do need some kind of mechanism to prevent this kind of "keep trying until it passes" mechanism to lobbying/lawmaking that the people pushing chat control are using. That's a tricky issue though, as revisions on law proposals are an expected part of the process. Some sort of "dismiss with prejudice" would be nice tho

> but it's actually proof that the EU is not yet lost: that law keeps getting shot down.

Good things happen in the UK and US too and some bad laws get rejected. The overall trend is pretty clear though and is the same in the EU, and the rest of the west too.

Its not just one country or leader or political party. Its a cultural problem that affects the whole of the west. "We are going to hell slightly slower" is not a great place to claim to be.

I dunno, the UK seems to be doing its best to outcrazy the US

Leave parenting to the parents. Stopping bad/evil parents is not possible.

The tiktok/youtube recommendation algorithms will undoubtedly cause more harm to minors than wandering onto an adult website and learning about how babies are made.

Of course they are. That is their purpose.

And you could relatively well determine the age of a person, by looking at the age of his social graph. No kids knows more then 5 adults, except over family groups.. thuse age identification should be viable via social login even without beeing bound to a passport.

The race will be on for children to gain as many adult contacts as possible so they can pass age verification.

It's curious why there are no reverse systems where, when accessing an adult resource, you have to prove that you are a child?

I've seen some forums (mostly political) where you have to prove that you can act like a child to be welcome. So that's kind of like what you're talking about?

(If anyone is offended by this, don't worry, I'm talking about the other side; I'm sure your side is full of reasonable adults who just get a little carried away sometimes.)

Don't give them an inch. The US defense budget is $1T. They can't spend it all on surveillance, but let's say the tech companies and the government spends that much every year combined. Our victory condition is to increase the cost of surveillance and deanonymization to >$10K per person per year, which is very doable. Every little habit and precaution you take against online tracking will raise the cost, probably a lot more than you think. Spreading the word multiplies that. Every open-source program and protocol spec that aims to decentralize and anonymize is like an incinerator for the surveillance dollars. And if you're more competent than that, you may consider following in the footsteps of Daniel Bernstein or Edward Snowden and make some trillion-dollar dents.

Anonymous and uncensored information exchange can prevent the vast majority of violent conflicts and shorten the necessary ones. Most violence in human history could have been prevented if every human being had 1) the ability to telepathically communicate with anyone else in the world without being eavesdropped, and 2) the ability to broadcast information anonymously to all of humanity in real-time. I will leave the details of why for you to deduce. These things are within reach right now for the first time in history. So we can and should build the decentralized web, and democratize the entire computing supply chain all the way down to chip fabbing and electricity generation. It is the greatest unrealized potential of the Internet, and we mustn't cede ground to ensure the path to that future remains open.

This is probably fantastic news for the VPN providers. Lots of people who otherwise wouldn't have bothered are now likely incorporating VPN connectivity into their daily routine. This very obviously includes kids.

I also wouldn't be surprised if there were plenty of people only dimly aware of the idea of a VPN who are now sitting up and taking note.

VPNs only work while there are jurisdictions that don't have age verification laws and services don't ban access from those jurisdictions.

That's technically true right now, but I keep holding out hope that these sorts of draconian restrictions will drive even harder to stamp out privacy-preserving solutions. I'm old enough to remember the days before the internet well, when _everything_ was made for children because you never knew who was and wasn't. I was afraid that legislation would drive the internet back to public television (as it seems to be determined to do) and I was really grateful for Freenet when it was first announced. It never took off, but not because it didn't work, just because at the time not enough people thought it was necessary. Maybe this will be the push to get enough people on board to make it (or something like it) feasible? Anonymous communication is a technically solvable problem, as long as enough people agree that it's worth pursuing.

> Maybe this will be the push to get enough people on board to make it (or something like it) feasible?

That won't save you from being targeted. Flawed methodology from the prosecution doesn't matter if all your stuff gets seized, and they really want to hurt you. See Black Ice:

[1]https://old.reddit.com/r/Freenet/comments/4ebw9w/more_inform...

[2]https://retro64xyz.gitlab.io/assets/pdf/blackice_project.pdf

And kids will do very stupid things to get "free" VPN access.

Such as following directions from a YouTube video that instructs them to do sketchy things.

And old people will do stupid things as downloading APKs as well. But in both cases, the smart people and the careful people have to pay the cost of supporting the in-experienced whether via constant surveillance or via no more accessing apps to your own computer or phone

I personally don’t use VPN’s except for work but I have multiple clients installed on my devices “just in case”.

I mean, how much longer do you think VPNs will remain legal in the US?

They're used for more than just anonymization. You know, their original purpose.

and? they will not ban vpn, they will ban free vpn providers and require KYC for the other vpn providers.

Self-hosted vpns and b2b vpns will remain unaffected but that doesn't matter, they don't look for 100% coverage, 70%-80% is good enough

Fair point.

Why do people fall for propaganda so easily? Just sub out the words "child" with "memory" and you get Rust. The correct response is "Yes, you do cut out a class of memory related bugs, but you invented that class arbitrarily. There is no data suggesting that your class corresponds to reality."

It makes sense for some specific situations, but the goal is always to move towards a classes society. Classes (including Types, Traits, Lifetimes) are something you use because you have to, not because you want to. They warp thinking (and traceability) in measurable ways.

All actors already know your age with 99% accuracy: tech giants (Google/Meta etc through your searches/choices) and government though your... birth. The same holds for your gender, job, spouse and more. And they share all of it to many other endpoints. They just want age verification to cover the rest 1% and to transfer the responsibility to the user.

The problem with any online age verification system is not only that many other info is leaked (personal, IP address etc) but even the fact that YOU apply for such a service and might use it for nasty things.

I'm not convinced, as some are, that this is about surveilling adults. I also don't think it's about protecting kids from predators. I think it's actually about keeping young people from talking to one another on the internet. The one thing the nascent United States totalitarian government fears is young people, because people over 18 have already joined the workforce and are just trying to survive in this hellish economy.

Never provide such information. Forge it if you must

Companies have lost our data so many times with lost penalties. Anybody remember Cambridge Analytica? Hell no company is getting my personal data.

Not sending your ID to remote server is intuitively correct. What if they will force you to do it though?

Is your wallet big enough to afford to say no and unplug? Mine is but what about the 99%?

ZK proofs are the solution to this problem. Its a pity this tech is not taken more seriously. I recently used a product that required proof of country (or rather proof of not from certain countries). It was a very painless experience with https://zkpassport.id/

You're assuming that anonymous age verification is or ever was actually the end goal here.

Their comment is advertising a product that undermines user privacy, so I don't think they care.

403 for me

https://web.archive.org/web/20260308223909/https://www.cnbc....

Well if you want to ensure there person in front of a machine at that time is actually above certain age the only way to do it is to reveal their identity. Of couese one could imagine a cryptographic scheme where only a binary true comes back etc. but you could sell these like fake IDs to minors.

I always wonder if this will fix the bot and ad/click fraud issues rampant on the Internet.

> causing major headaches for social media companies attempting to strike a balance for users between legal compliance and privacy.

I can see how the problem is real. (Not sarcasm.)

In technical terms, "balance" is trivial. Put an air/security gap between information collected for age verification and the dossiers they have on users.

In business terms, conflict. They have relentless incentives and pressures to collect, collate and leverage every bit of information that can increase their return on users. Legal gray and black behaviors are rampant and tolerated where protectable. The number of paths to a creative interpretation of "balance" is unbounded. Right up to the c-suite.

It is sad, but self-aware, if they feel awkward trusting themselves with a mandated database full of tasty information they are not supposed to taste.

I figured that it would go without saying that the only way to do age-verification is to stop everybody at the proverbial tollbooth. Did people really think they were going to avoid the stop-and-frisk?

Or we could let parents raise their own damn kids without making our lives worse. Parents can sign up for parental monitoring or better yet spend some time with their kids.

Even with all age verifications implemented, some parents will just toss their phone with tiktoks to their toddler, just to keep them quiet for a second or two.

Even if they didn't track all possible details of current adults, they would contain the details of future adults.

But maybe this is yet another attemption to produce mindless factory workers who won't rise against their lords even if someone inserts something something to them. While recording it, of course. For the profit... Erm, science.

The only good internet is a dead internet.

Can anyone point to resources to help me end my habitual dependence on the internet?

> Social media company Discord announced plans in February to roll out mandatory age verification globally,

Discord’s age verification is optional and only required to disable the image content filter, join adult servers, and a couple other features. I’m not saying it’s a good decision, but I am getting tired of the repeated claim that it’s mandatory to go do age verification to use the service.

This lazy reporting is hurting the messaging because readers will believe that mandatory age verification was implemented and everything is fine, so new laws will not change anything for the worse. It needs to be clear that age verification laws would change the situation considerably, not be a nothingburger.

I don’t plan to do the Discord age verification and neither do most of the people I interact with on Discord. It’s not mandatory.

I don’t recommend anyone rush to do the Discord age verification unless you really need to for some reason. Don’t believe all of the lazy articles saying it’s mandatory.

You're downplaying it in the same way that others are overplaying it.

- There are servers that are labelled adult only because it's simpler to label _everything_ as causing cancer than it is to only label the correct things. I can't join channels for some games because they're "adult"; even though they're not

- There are servers that are getting rid of content because they don't want some automatic system to label them as adult, even though they're not. There's a game server that got rid of it's meme channel, because people could (but don't) post content that some system might see as adult.

So it is a bigger deal than you're making it out to be. It's negatively impacting people and servers that have no interest in having anything adult on them.

> It's negatively impacting people and servers that have no interest in having anything adult on them.

So who should police that? I am in certain communities that try to be stricter on moderation (which I love!) but it's hard work, lots of people trying to be at the edge of rules (with normal things like swearing, insults, etc.).

Whoever labels adult only and does not care is not wishing to put the effort to police that it actually is not.

Personally I do generally mind much more annoying, aggressive, stupid posters (in various channels), than the fact that I am not allowed to post some stupid adult-looking meme.

> So who should police that?

I don't have the right answers. I don't know that there _is_ a right answer.

> Whoever labels adult only and does not care is not wishing to put the effort to police that it actually is not.

Or they're unwilling to risk the consequences of making a mistake.

> the fact that I am not allowed to post some stupid adult-looking meme.

But, in my example, you don't lose the ability to post some stupid adult-looking meme. You lose the ability to post ANY meme. Because the risk of someone posting something over the line is that the entire server is suddenly adult only. And for something like a game server, that's can be a catastrophic change; it can destroy the community.

Is being able post memes that important? No, probably not. But giving up the entire ability to do something fun, that doesn't cause any real harm, because someone might do something stupid... and the response to that will be a full nuclear destruction of your community. Yeah, that part sucks.

>I don’t plan to do the Discord age verification and neither do most of the people I interact with on Discord.

until it becomes law, like it is (or in the process of becoming) ~everywhere.

Okay? Then we’ll deal with that if it happens. If it does happen then other services will have the same requirements.

The baby eating machine is busy telling us that it's coming to eat our babies and your best answer is "wait and see"?

No? I’m against age verification too. Please re-read my comment above for why the Discord example with wrong information is counterproductive to arguments against age verification.

It’s important to get facts right.

>If it does happen then other services will have the same requirements.

that is exactly what everyone is angry about.

And I am too! My comment above was that the claim that Discord’s age verification is mandatory was false.

It’s also misleading in the context of this journalism because it makes it look like it’s already done and therefore new laws wouldn’t change anything.

Maybe! But laws like California’s new law and the Texas law both are making it mandatory from a legal compliance point of view.

The direction of these restrictions is not “optional”

It will be when everyone starts leaking from the big players. Age verification will make software development impossible or be impossible to implement without huge investment.

> Age verification will make software development impossible or be impossible to implement without huge investment.

Not really, you'll just be forced to use services from eg google or meta. And pay for them. And share user data.

Just because it's not openly shared does not mean that there aren't large databases of everything from working refresh keys to entire profiles indexed out there for the large services. Most data leaks and breaches don't get reported, or acknowledged, or are downplayed in their potential effect (but weirdly, also given more weight than they deserve since it becomes pointless to have so much data that doesn't add anything new to, say, a profile of a person)

And if my foss software doesnt implement those systems? Or someone downloads my foss software and removes those restrictions?

You know that none of those things actually protect children from predators which is the supposed reason for these changes. So when they inevitably don't work Discord will take the next step of requiring age verification from everyone.

Why, oh why, would you give them the long term benefit of the doubt for literally no gain to you whatsoever?

> for literally no gain to you whatsoever?

I literally gain from using their services for communication and voice chat with friends.

“Literally no gain whatsoever” is completely wrong.

I’ve tried Matrix/Element for years. I’m still in some IRC channels. I know what the alternatives are I can confidently say I’m gaining value from the ease in which Discord allows us to voice chat, screen share, and invite less technical people to join.

You will gain nothing relative to the status quo today. You're giving up your identity in order to just... stay the same. This is a textbook definition of no upside.

They are extorting your identity from you and you're somehow OK with that.

> Discord’s age verification is optional

...for now ... What stops them from changing this in the future?

Additionally Discord may verify your age based on the collected data without consent.

> ...for now ... What stops them from changing this in the future?

Then I’ll deal with that situation if it arises.

You are totally downplaying it in an effort to not see what others are talking about.

Pretty sure in some EU countries it is mandatory now, iirc

You don't say.

Well, that's shocking news...said no one ever.

And as we all know it its USA monopoly privilege

no shit, this was obviously the point. the people who said so all along were correct, the people who insisted it wasn't were not speaking in good faith.

we, as a society, need to stop taking companies at their word when they say that the obvious harms that are right around the corner are overblown.

Water is wet.

All for making sites to send a header with restrictions as they apply in law (age rating per location for example -- so a site could send "US:16 US-TX:18 IE:14 GB:18 DE:16" etc), and even categorise as not required in law (category=gambling or category=healthcare)

That gives the browser/app/accessing device the power to display or not display

The second part of this is to empower parents -- let them choose the age rating which can only be changed with a parental code etc. Make this the law on all consumer commercial devices -- i.e phones, macbooks, windows.

This is trivial and worthwhile.

Yes some 15 year old will build something in python in a user session to work around it as they have a general purpose computer, that's a tiny amount of the problem. Solve the 90% problem first.

To the surprise of absolutely nobody.

Damn, can't have nothin nice

So what is Instagram doing?

I'm literally about to stop using the internet and go back to using cash for everything. These people can promptly (and sharply) go fuck themselves. so sick of mankind turning into a farm of the have-nots for the haves to profit off of.

And I'm sick of being strapped to a population of have-nots that are too fuck-dumb to do anything about it.

Working as designed.

#notabug #wontfix

>put people into mandatory age verification

>most people will not verify their age

>can't be sure they're an adult so treat everyone like children just in case

>wait what? the trojan horse allows them to monitor and surveil them?

I'm shocked. Shocked! Well, not that shocked.

It would be refreshing to see someone try to use "but think of the children" to actually help children, instead of just screwing over adults.

for found in kitchen!

is this the great innovation that the GDPR is stifling in Europe? (sorry for the snark)

Forgive the profanity, but no shit.

It's by design. Pedonazis have been used as the justification for the surveillance apparatus for decades now.

[0] "Cypherpunks Uncut." https://www.dailymotion.com/video/xt3hpb

Shocked! Shocked I tell you! Could not have seen that coming, nope not even for one second.

I am sympathetic to the privacy concerns.

But to be honest I don't understand where they come from. Seems people are upset about being de anonymized on the internet. It was my understanding that it is trivial for the government to deanonymize you directly through their own tooling and trivial for private industry to deanonymize you through statistical analysis.

So in that sense, what new thing are we fearing that will come to bear that hasn't come to bear already? Seems to me we are already in a post anonymous world and just maybe most people don't understand that memo until this story came out. Media runs with it so much because people read about it not because it is actually anything new per say.

We are not in a post-anonymous world. People who care can absolutely still remain anonymous, for the time being, with enough effort. However, the number of services we can use is being increasingly cut off by these measures. If the trend continues, then we will soon be in such a world, but we are not there yet.

I hate comments like yours beyond belief. "Oh, I'm so smart. It's too much effort to stay private, so I've accepted that a dystopian surveillance state where every action anyone ever takes is recorded permanently and accessible to anyone is inevitable. Look at these fucking idiots worrying about this issue. Can't they just accept it will happen and shut up?"

It is also worth noting that there is a distinction to be made between government and corporate surveillance. Even if it were possible for state actors to de-anonymize specific targets with reliability (it's not, with sufficient opsec), that is very different from a corporation being able to do it. Once a corporation has your data, they will sell it to anyone and everyone, making your entire life public record for anyone to find with a bit of digging. That is a threat model that is much more likely for Average Joe than being targeted by the government, but it is also a threat which is easier to defeat than that of a state actor. This cynical defeatism is baseless.

... says "asdff."

Lack of creativity for that username really. Slapped home row and called it a day. But still I'm sure FBI knows exactly who I am. Same for European and middle eastern intelligence orgs. I'm sure ad networks all over the world have me fingerprinted, especially considering I run firefox and block ads, like that alone narrows me down to probably less than a million people globally, maybe substantially less than that.

And this is just me spitballing. Imagine if this is your life's career, 40 hours a week for 40 years, plus a whole department of coworkers all on this effort. And multiple companies and governments each with their own departments on these efforts. How far this would have advanced by now what 30+ years into world wide public computer networks. How far ahead the state of the art actually is compared to what the public must assume. What lawmakers must assume.

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