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> You have no such guarantee when you upload government IDs to a server.

The problem is that so many people here look at this purely from a USA perspective.

An age check in many European requires no uploading of any ID. It’s an API call toward an ID service, it will tell you which data the service gets access to, and there’s strict regulations and liability around data retention.

I’m not concerned about the government. If they become authoritarian enough to worry, they will impose far tighter surveillance anyway. What we have now is the naive idea that just by not doing ID check, government surveillance is a solved problem in the free democratic world. It’s not. Avoiding ID checks just makes the problem worse because it makes the regular person complacent. The surveillance is implicit and hidden. If we understand that it’s nearly impossible for a non-tech person to avoid being tracked by corporations and governments, then we start working on the things that really help: super tight regulations about what can and can’t be tracked. Requiring audits of large corporations. Solutions that give corporations access to only the data they absolutely need and nothing else (the lack of such things is how we end up by uploading whole ID documents)

> The surveillance is implicit and hidden. If we understand that it’s nearly impossible for a non-tech person to avoid being tracked by corporations and governments, then we start working on the things that really help: super tight regulations about what can and can’t be tracked.

We can't get perfect privacy so we should normalize not having any? Leave it to the government we're distrusting to handle our privacy?

> If they become authoritarian enough to worry, they will impose far tighter surveillance anyway.

What is this logic? Let's not worry about creeping there because if they want it they'll force it? That's not how it works. Getting to a surveillance state needs acceptance. To get that, rather than dropping people in boiling water, you slowly heat the pot, which is what this is.

Just a few decades years ago, everyone's names and phones in the US were freely available to anyone with a phone book. Communications were done in the clear, either via letters (hardly tamper-proof), or via phone (that anyone with access could tap).

Did every American live in a "surveillance state" back then?

What could be tracked from phones back then compared to now is completely different. Phones are basically only called "phones" for historical reasons.

So what? Some things are exceptionally hard to track now (like e2ee messages) that were trivial to track back then.

Every remote communication could only be had in the clear. Everyone was fine with that. Was the US in the 80s a surveillance state?

Back then there was only the possibility of listening-in on particulars, and even then people did worry. They weren't fine with that. That's why there's wiretapping laws enacted in the 80s.

Today, and as things continue to progress with speech-recognition, LLMs, video recognition, etc. surveillance can be automated. It's looking conceivable to be able to process all communication population-wide in real-time. That would have been unimaginable back then.

Now, texts and calls today are only a small role of phones. For many people, it's their primary general computing device. It's how they interact with the world. It contains their entire digital life.

Couldn't look at your photo reels and videos, and diary, and every purchase you've ever made, every opinion you've ever said on a public space, every community you've ever interacted with, every location you've ever been in down to the room, from wiretapping a phone in the 80s.

> Some things are exceptionally hard to track now (like e2ee messages) that were trivial to track back then.

Can be easier than back then if stuff like chat-control comes to pass, because now the message can be obtained, processed and stored indefinitely in an automated fashion for everybody at once. E2EE becomes security theater for the most part.

You just said it yourself: the perceived danger of overreach was averted through new laws and control over what the government is doing.

If citizens still have a capacity to restrict the government via (enforced) laws, it doesn't matter much that the communications are in the clear. You can layer something on top just to be sure, but the foundation is laws and a functioning political system.

If there's no functioning political system, the government will just do whatever, like buying the same data they ostensibly can't collect from commercial providers (who weren't restricted from collecting it because there's no US GDPR).

If a country has a functioning political system, it can just do things like ban gun ownership, introduce mandatory IDs, publish everyone's yearly income, or criminalise calling other people slurs in public and not become an uncontrollable dictatorship. If it doesn't, corruption and democratic backsliding will happen regardless. Hyper-focusing on a few tools and superficial traits of a particular system in a particular moment is myopic.

> You just said it yourself: the perceived danger of overreach was averted through new laws and control over what the government is doing. If citizens still have a capacity to restrict the government via (enforced) laws

Restricting the government via laws... The government implements the laws. Trying to restrict the government via laws is mostly just asking "pretty-please don't screw us over." They're not going to make a difference to a corrupt government. Government corruption will become more enticing too because of the added concentration of power it would have. How have laws been working for restricting Trump? He's shown how easily they can be sidestepped and manipulated.

Also, back then implementing end-to-end encryption of all calls wasn't feasible. That would have been the preferred option. It's feasible now. We have it. Why rely on something as fallible as government-restricting laws when we have better options?

It's better for power to be decentralized, as it is with every device owner having sole access to their own devices. As well as being able to communicate anonymously, which is huge for matters of free-speech and democracy.

Indeed, Trump is a great example of democratic backsliding completely unfettered by "freedoms" often mistaken for the actual freedom. The way forward is being able to change things or regaining this ability if it's lost, not trying to carve out some bit that's not under the government's control yet. That's just a form of escapism.

There is a malaise permeating modern culture, where social action does not enter the mind at all, possibly because it does not provide instant results. Collective action and organising local communities has always been the solution to social ills. It's why I'm looking forward to the progressives in US, they seem to be organising themselves quite well.

Bad analogy. A phone book tells you nothing about who you are talking to or what you are talking about over the phone. Most free countries don't let law enforcement read letters without a warrant. And even in authoritarian states the police couldn't wiretap everyone or read every letter. The volume was simply too massive for any manual operation.

Digitalization and now AI technology changes this drastically because it makes it drastically cheaper to record and flag human communications.

do parents not control routers and cell plans? I feel like it would be easy to look here for header based solutions. They probably exist tbh. Then just ban your kid from VPNs.

Any time I've been in an age-restricted venue here in Australia they have taken a picture of me and my ID at the door.

Even so, they likely aren't recording everything your eyes see and for how long they linger. They likely aren't recording your entire traversal through the venue, what you do, what you say, what times you go there, from where you connect, etc. Simply being at a public place is one data point. A full history of your entire interaction is a magnitude different.