The UK's war on anonymity has come to America

It's sad that people don't see what's so obviously happening in the uk. Censorship is alive and well in the uk, and there are plans afoot to further the control of the online world.

The UK was an amazing leader on liberty in the days when absolute monarchies were the assumed default government, but their free speech standards are a long way from exemplary in modern times.

I find that all the metrics about CCTV very misleading, and the whole thing seems to be to distract that the article is blaming the UK for actions of the US and US based companies.

First, maybe we can just eventually require Flock cameras to also record only to encrypted storage accessible by a judicial warrant. Presumably you are perfectly OK with that?

Second, privacy advocates have much to say about being surveilled at all, regardless of whether the data is encrypted or not. They’re opposed to recording at all, not recording and then the judge gets to randomly decide when to release recordings.

Finally, the UK is part of Five Eyes.

I am nit saying the rest if the world is better BTW, just the problems and history have less in common.

Yeah, I think that's pretty much the definition of the right of asylum.

I don't know your political beliefs, but I'll say that conservatives make this nonsense argument all the time.

Focus: the person you're responding to is talking about people going to jail for criticizing a leader or being gay or trans. These are violations of human rights. I can't speak for noir_lord, but for me, human rights are more important than any law, full stop. If human rights are being violated by the law, the law is wrong and it is our ethical imperative to do everything within our power to hinder the enforcement of that law (note that what is within our power may not be much).

So when you say, "Some country has laws that some other country dislikes, therefore they should be able to ignore them?" my response is that if any country has laws that violate human rights, then it is our ethical obligation to ignore those laws. To be clear: I'll happily break the laws of my own country if those laws violate human rights. Human rights supersede laws in every case.

> I think comes down to what influence you think you have. I'm a backend developer and sys admin, when it comes to international law, I think of it in relation to hosting content in other countries or serving users in other countries. Judging the quality of laws on another country is beyond my scope, if it conflicts with my ethical constitution, I just don't provide service to that country, I don't provide service in an anonymous manner that makes it possible for users of that country to evade local law because I find the law may contain bad parts.

Standing up for human rights isn't beyond your scope, nor is it beyond your influence. You can provide service in an anonymous manner that makes it possible for users of that country to evade local laws, you just choose not to. And look, we all have limited resources--I'm not saying you're obligated to help with every human rights issue that you come across. But it seems like you're saying that nobody should help people break local laws, even when those laws are unethical. And frankly, that makes you unethical. It's no inconvenience to you if I help Saudi Arabian gays hide their sexual orientation or help Russians criticize Putin. If you're trying to get other people who want to protect human rights to stop doing that, you're de-facto supporting those human rights violations, whether you explicitly agree with them or not.

> What I'm not sure is whether you think of your influence on the subject as a sysadmin that actually wants to provide such services, or whether you think of it as some individual posturing, like a random citizen voicing their opinion on Israel v Palestina knowing full well you have no influence.

Disingenuous nonsense. Certainly a lot of what is done in the name of human rights is ineffective. But I'm not even seeing any indication you care about human rights. Why should someone who does care about human rights be taking strategic notes from you?

I can't see any reason that passes the sniff test to say otherwise.

Not just in child mode, because child mode would only exist in compliant operating systems. It would not exist in all Linux or Android distributions for instance.

So governments would have collude with or regulate hardware vendors to control and certify what can run on the hardware available in the country.

This would be a highly centralised system with the potential the become tyrannical.

> If I'm a parent, how do I prevent my kid from telling some website that they are an adult?

You don't need to because all content filters and permissions can be implemented on the client-side at the OS and app level. Rather than every service taking your child's age and deciding what to filter, you decide what to filter based on your child's level of maturity. You'll have total control over what runs on the hardware. Think: user accounts and permissions, local firewalls and traffic inspection, executable permissions, app installation locks, stripped down browsers and apps, small local neural networks, bootloader locking with custom password, etc. The market will follow the gradient of user value and spawn a bunch of OSes with different feature sets, probably better than what I can come up with, and you pick the OS with features that suit your needs.

I just don't buy that. I think it is perfectly feasible to mandate device makers support parental controls that include content maturity settings. In many ways that is easier than requiring every web site in the world to comply with age verification.

> The right people to protect children are those responsible for them - their parents and guardians.

My position is that there is a social responsibility to protect children which extends to the community at large, not just their immediate guardians.

For details of what is stored on that barcode:

https://www.aamva.org/getmedia/99ac7057-0f4d-4461-b0a2-3a553...

What's on passports and some identity docs:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Machine-readable_passport

There have been many cases where clubs stored the documents scanned which were then hacked. Or where club/bar staff used the scanned/stored documents to stalk attractive women.

Sample:

https://www.theverge.com/tech/947157/passports-data-breach-c...

Historically, many states in the US required blood tests of both partners prior to marriage. Mostly it was a test for syphilis, which was the main reason that 16th ^ 17th Century people used tons of makeup. Do not google what that disease looks like in the tertiary stage if you want to sleep at night.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Premarital_medical_examination

direct experience beats reasoning which beats testimony, if you want something else ponder.

> While I agree, I also think there's a role in society to help parents on how to parent, via e.g. education and awareness.

i was quite blunt and one sided in my previous as it was more about the HN “vibes” than actual parenting.

there is definitely more nuance to the whole topic of parenting!

[0] https://news.gallup.com/poll/1612/education.aspx

When I went to college, I met friends with dramatically different experiences in their schools than I had, and that was the first time the idea that school was more than just a babysitting camp had crossed my mind. My school was safe from exterior threats, and they took the bomb threats and jail breaks very seriously, even holding us in our classrooms late into the day until the perpetrator was caught, but internal threats caused by kids would always outnumber the teachers capacity to thwart. My parents choose where we lived based on the school having the least violence in the area so I know my experience wasn't even on the extreme end.

Edit: I realize I didn't address education. In short, in successful because my mom put a lot of work trying to educate me and ensure I took homework seriously. Even though I hardly attended my classes, I graduated top 10% because submitting homework was all you needed to do to surpass your peers. Any kids whose only educational influence was school itself, at least where I grew up, didn't receive much of an education.

Was I exposed to some clearly adult content? Yes. But I didn't find it particularly compelling, the video games I could download and other things I could explore were more interesting.

It is also concerning to me that gen-alpha (or whatever the age bracket is called) people are increasingly being pushed into walled garden, app-based social media platforms instead of actually learning what the Internet really is, and what it's capable of.

This is the "Christian moms need Congress to regulate Cable TV" problem all over again. Don't let them watch TV if you oppose what is on it. It's not HBO's responsibility to raise your child, it's yours.

Anonymity, the right to move privately and be private online is much bigger than parents who are frustrated with out of control capitalism.

Besides, this only benefits the big corporations. They of course will happily back anything that absolves them of their sins.

Kids are going to get into stuff you don’t want them to no matter how hard you try to prevent that, short of keeping them in locked padded rooms with no electronics (which would be abuse). Parents are right to want to steer them in the right direction and keep them out of the worst trouble, but that’s as far as it goes.

So really, both sides need to improve here.

You may not be aware of this, but Meta has been actively spending millions of dollars to redirect the rage against their algorithms and addictive harms, especially against children, and one of their strategies to try and help avoid liability is to put the onus on the federal government to pass ID legislation, to literally make it easier for Meta and similar companies to age gate most content under simple blanket policies. The way that they are doing this is by funding otherwise very small "parents rights organizations" with money and connections they otherwise wouldn't have. What does Meta gain from this? Less liability and lower cost in content moderation. What do the parents rights groups get? "Check ID laws".

That's enough motivation for both groups, it's very simple.

Now where do you get into "conspiracy theory" territory? Well thetr are also other groups that want online ID for their own purposes, and they are more than happy to help fund these groups to get something they also want.

All of this is very easy to provide backing links for with a simple Google search, if you're interested.

If you forgive the slight exaggeration in my use of "always", then I am half right - in fully half the cases, deanonymization is the first thing they try.

But let's look at those "just regulating parental controls" laws, the California one [1]. What does it do? Does it give parents/the owner the tools needed to limit child access? Does it require vendors to include such tools? No, neither of those. It just establishes how to collect (but not verify) and send age data, so someone else can act on it.

It does nothing to empower parents, but does lay the groundwork to grow an age control ecosystem that can later have verification easily added - all the apps and websites will already support it. Not all "regulation" is the same.

> People who conflate these two things are paid lobbyists of Meta

Meta is the most privacy-hostile company there is, despite fierce competition for that title, and nearly all their services are behind a login-wall, even read-only access, and they don't let you make an account without a phone number [2,3,4]. I avoid them like the plague, and they already go above and beyond what you would want of them.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_Digital_Age_Assuran...

[2] https://www.local3news.com/local-news/what-the-tech/what-the...

[3] Facebook now treats a phone number like a near-requirement - https://quackr.io/blog/facebook-account-without-phone-number

[4] https://www.reddit.com/r/privacy/comments/tyrs6c/so_i_had_to...

Yes it might actually work out ok if a mythical benevolent dictator could manage things with infinite precision and unlimited compassion. I would imagine that has never happened at any reasonable scale.

The Conservative folks seem to phrase this as a desire to “keep government small” - which always seemed a little clunky given the stakes and track record of these governments.

Not possible. You can strengthen defenses but you cannot guarantee it can withstand any possible, dynamic and adaptive attack strategies.

So what you say is impossible to do.

A LOT of damage is done that way.

You just posted the answer:

> Especially when there are very obvious and tangible harms from modern social media.

The addictive and manipulative dark patterns of the big techs are harmful and should be banned straight up for everyone. No need to spare the children and let adults get abused. No need to verify age at all.

So why don't we just ban it? Because that'd eat into profits so much it could actually kill their business models.

All this "children" bullshit is just them trying to preserve their business models. It's them saying "year we're harmful and addictive and gambling tier but look we're adult only now". This is why Meta's among the corporations lobbying for this stuff.

Manipulation stops working when the other party is aware of it. Bring their manipulation out into the light.

Of course, it's well-established that human beings are capable of making stuff up, and you can claim to be whatever age, but that's not the point.

What rights and freedoms should I worry about when a politician wants to make sure my child is fed by supporting food stamp programs or free hot lunches at school?

The idea that any attempt to help a child is inherently suspect honestly says something distrubing about your own worldview. You can't imagine someone genuinely caring for a child that isn't there own?

I do believe we should allow for a lot more nuance in our political opinions and avoid most statements that can be made in the constraints of a short comment on social media.

I work with those politicians. They have kids too and they are just as susceptible to media/propaganda/fearmongering as you are. However, unlike you and I, they can do something (usually wrong) about it.

We live in a society, you wouldn't be on HN otherwise.

There is direct evidence from trials, in which Meta researchers told executives that features like infinite scroll and others “ are inherently at odds with well-being”

There is no effective fight for freedom if there is no effective understanding of the politics and social forces driving change.

The freedom of the internet in the 90s was in itself a social revolution, not just a technological one.

Fighting for a status quo that didn’t work for children and even for many adults is a losing fight.

Fighting for privacy and against ad tech, and against addictive design features for all users is a far stronger fight.

Now if they are clearly acting in bad faith, then absolutely it's not worth treating that as a legitimate discussion. Now it's "kids", but yesterday it was "terrorists", way back it was "heretics" - there's always a magical word that ill intentioned people will use to bludgeon you with. But you shouldn't let them erase your ability to have honest discussions.

You do have to take enforcement into account when evaluating these laws. Some HNers interpret this as you go to jail for not scanning an ID (which makes sense to programmers because it's a simple if/then), but most of them are actually written as product safety laws, so the government can order you to comply or take your product off the market.

Whether individuals inside the system are true believers or cynical operators, the response to calling out their methods will be identical:

If they genuinely believe the rhetoric: They will simply double down and say, 'Yes, and protecting the children makes this absolutely necessary.'

If they know it is a manipulation tactic: They will still reply with, 'It is for the children,' because they know it is an impenetrable PR shield that gets them their way.

In either scenario, the bureaucracy is entirely immune to the criticism.

Exposing the game might help persuade third-party observers, but it does absolutely nothing to stop the bureaucratic machine from using that exact same line to steamroll the agenda forward.

Will you allow an argument against this?

I mean, I want to show an example where it is only a problem when someone else is not as convinced as yourself, one way or the other.

>so the way to refute is to ask for proof..

No use. The same proof will not be convincing for everyone. Let us take vaccine. The proof for a Vaccine for X saving Y lives is often the following.

"Before the vaccine there was Y deaths per year from X. But after vaccines there is zero deaths from X".

The implication is that vaccines saved X lives. This could convince most of the people. But someone can ask. Are those kids who are not dying of X (thanks to the vaccine), are dying of something else?

Now the picture is not so clear.

See, same data, different results depending on how deep you want to probe,

There's also the typical image crafting stuff that drives envy, insecurity, and so on - kids aren't sharing when they eat left overs mashed up in a bowl, but they are sharing when they go eat at an expensive steak restaurant. That bias already significantly affects adults perceptions of others' life/lifestyle, let alone children. And even without 'the algorithm', there's going to be FOMO and the general addictiveness of updates that's going to leave kids as zombies to their phones rather than interacting with each other as much in real life.

So I'm not really sure it's viable to try to 'fix' social media. You can certainly make it better than it currently is, but I think the issue is that we have horrible companies managing a horrible product.

If we actually cared about supporting children and parents as a country, parental controls and access, and making sure that systems were actually safe and protected privacy, would NOT be an afterthought.

I'm not trying to call everyone else voting for these things dumb, but does the average person who doesn't think about this stuff for a living actually know what they're voting for?

The answer every time is “well then Google/Apple/Facebook/Shopify/mcMaster Carr shouldn’t exist as a business” and if I’m being honest that is not an achievable target so you’re going to arrive at the attested internet.

The sentiment of "keep my kids safe on the internet" definitely comes from parents. Yes. We agree.

How we actually get there in a privacy-respecting way is the issue.

Parental controls already exist. Lawmakers want to step in and parent peoples' kids for them by removing these freedoms from everyone.

What a fucking stupid, impossible, idea.

Like, explain to me how you think this could be done meaningfully other than some setting that can just be arbitrarily flipped without adding massive complexity.

The alternative is what we're getting right now: laws that require verifying ID documents, often in ways that restrict even the notion of maintaining the user's privacy. Attestation might be an "OK" to "good" solution while this is between bad and really bad.

Unfortunately it's so much easier for lawmakers to slap down a law that says "you must verify IDs right now if you want to continue to exist" with no requirement, and often not even support for, privacy preserving ways to make this happen. The laws are happening now. The chance of reform to align with a privacy-preserving option once the laws are implemented is slim to none.

Your grandparents could walk to the next town over and give themselves a different name and nobody would ever know who they were. They could get a job, be paid in cash, and deposit that money in a bank account with no KYC. They could drop a letter in a public mailbox without a return address, or put up posters at night, or make phone calls from public telephones. Nobody would know who did it, and there would be no surveillance footage to review after the fact, no digital footprint to trace. They could write a letter to their local newspaper to be printed with a fake name, or publish a book or story or magazine under an assumed identity. There were no ALPRs, no automated facial recognition, no built-in vehicle telematics, no drones, no smartphones to track anyone’s movement, no doorbell cameras on every block, no video tapes, no serial numbers hidden in the printouts from copy machines, no DNA analysis, no databases instantly searchable with the click of a button.

Feel free to make a value judgement about whether what we have now is better or worse than the past, if you want, but don’t invent history to rationalise it. The internet did not invent anonymity. It used to be the default.

A cursory google suggests that the return-to-office movement is primarily driven by management's desire for voluntary turnover, avoiding the bad press of mass layoffs. But certainly doesn't show that it's 'been debunked 100 times'.

In my own experience, it's been 50/50 a desire for voluntary turnover, and also a control tactic. Employees are easier to strong-arm when they're immersed in the idea that company culture actually matters.

I haven't come across much of the debunking of the commercial property issue. I would say it's undeniably factor, but we can argue about the scale.

A total of $800 billion—in real terms—of value is at stake by 2030, and, on average, the total value of office space is expected to decline by 26 percent from 2019 to 2030.

https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/real-estate/our-insights...

As long as all the sources are listed and verifiable, of course.

I really like Google's FamilyLink, unfortunately my child's friend group all have iPhones and rely on FaceTime for social interaction, which made my child demand an iPhone as the primary phone.

EDIT: It looks like I just haven't correctly configured Apple's ScreenTime to remove the bypasses [0]. Yay for unhelpful default settings.

[0]: https://www.airdroid.com/ios-parental/how-kids-bypass-iphone...

Yes. Think of it this way: I make a profit from doing this, therefore I will lobby politicians to make my product mandatory.

It is absolutely failing of the government and the American legal system that nobody spent time in prison for Purdue's lies and poison, we're in full agreement there.

That said, this position alone doesn't suggest that otherwise law-abiding citizens should be more concerned about corporate surveillance than they are government surveillance.