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Comment by cynicalsecurity | Hacker News Reader

This smells like Soviet Union. The next step will be a requirement to confirm your identity - trying to justify it with a wicked manipulation tactic "we need to know your are not lying when selecting your age". No one asked for it to begin with. Android is normalising totalitarianism and mass spying on citizens, one step at a time. This is a very bad feature and a very bad development.

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Its the same thing with Europe allowing scans of private chats now. Nobody would tolerate a person opening the letters from ur physical mail box and reading through each of them just to see if you do [insert illegal activity]. But once this stuff happens digitally, people seem to simply tolerate it. If I remember correctly, in 2019 there were huge protests against upload filters were people actually protested on the streets in Europe. Now there is almost NOTHING for chat scans, NOTHING for age verifications, NOTHING for making Android less open. Its really frightening what the general public tolerates nowadays.

The authorities open letters all the time. Try sending a letter to prison without it getting scanned.

The problem with this comparison is that the authorities can open a letter if they need to for various well-intended reasons, but they cannot open an encrypted message. Either the authorities can scan all messages, or they can scan no messages, there's no inbetween.

The mandate to verify age before selling alcohol has been around forever. This is not a new idea. The biggest restriction until now has been that there was no good way to do these kinds of age verification, but that problem has been solved. You can still debate whether or not age verification is a good idea for specific subjects, but selling 10 year olds alcohol or porn has been illegal for much longer than the internet has existed.

Communicating via PGP encrypted snail mail seems an attractive option.

It would make for a good alternative, but so would any app that doesn't implement scanning. If they can force Signal to implement client-side scanning or ban it entirely, they can do the same to PGP software. In theory you could do RSA by hand, but it would require a lot of hard work.

Signal would rather tell a government to fuck off than implement any sort of client side scanning.

Last time I checked an Android phone was not selling me alcohol or porn. It requires specific deliberate actions to get access to anything like this with a phone. Any checks could be justified on the store or web-site level, not on the phone level. Treating every citizen as a child or even worse a potential criminal who needs to be constantly checked at numerous checkpoints the state so kindly put everywhere is exactly the stinking smells of the Soviet Union I'm talking about.

Play Store absolutely is selling apps with 18+ restrictions, so most of your post is based on false premise.

Google Play != Android, so your comment is based on a false premise.

And if everyone is treated the same as someone who has been tried and convicted of a crime worthy of incarceration we are well into the dystopia.

Yes, checking the age of people when accessing and buying things (like alcohol at 21) is absolutely a Soviet Union invention.

Modern democracies like USA would never check for age of people when entering clubs or buying drugs.

Do you listen to yourself?

Good job on putting words in my mouth, tovarishch.

Of course every Android is like a crack house. Can't even get to the home screen without my phone offering me sex, drugs and alcohol.

Not just android

I think you're misinformed, they didn't have age checks on smartphones in Soviet Union.

But there're countries where that already exists. They usually get labelled as a threat to democracy. Isn't it ironic? It's as if our own governments are the greatest threat to our way of life.

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