If they are so dead set on protecting children, I suggest starting with:
Gaza Strip and the West Bank (Palestine) Ukraine Sudan Myanmar Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) Syria Yemen Ethiopia Afghanistan Haiti Niger Mali Burkina Faso
Zuks wallet will do just fine in the mean time
Can we stop pretend they give a single fuck about kids?
Edit: poor choice of words. Thats the only thing they give kids.
What a relief that would be. “We are compromising your personal rights with protecting children as a cover, children safety has nothing to do with it, in fact we don’t give a single fuck about anything but revenue. It sounds better to save children than revenue”
Parents should protect children online.
I largely agree with you.
But please can you tell me how you believe this differs from age-gating the purchase of cigarettes, lottery tickets, age restricted cinema tickets, alcohol, firearms and so many other things we already have age-gating on?
Edit: I’d love any one of the downvoters to comment and actually explain what I’ve said that’s so atrocious? We DO age gate many things in society and many, I dare say most, would not want cigarettes to be available to a 13 year old. So what is it about online that makes it so different? If we CAN make age checks online anonymous (and indeed the EU standard downright requires it) why don’t we want this online?
You dont have your id printed on every cigarette. The government doesnt dilute the alcohol with unique radiomarkers to track your piss (yet). Firearms tracking is nowhere near this comprehensive or invasive anywhere in the world. Not even on military ranges. Cinema tickets? Really?
Qnd as pointed elsewhere: you font need to show ID if youre just buyong pink monster vegan jerky condoms and new usb cable for your fav sex toy.
But have you read the EU standard? Anonymity is a requirement. There is no tracking. The age check does not refer back to you. Indeed, it cannot.
You can of course believe that the legal requirements aren’t adhered to and that the state is actually lying, but if you believe that the state already has a million ways to track you, including 99.9999% of us who carry our phones around with us and pay with credit cards in physical stores.
@sunbeam60 @Squizzy forr me the issue is mass survilance… Gate keeping cigarretes dont record the number of times a kid or a adult tried to but cigarretes
I don’t believe this is an honest question. They aren’t age-gating, they’re checking IDs of everyone so they know exactly who is saying everything online, and can easily persecute opposing viewpoints. The excuse is kids, they don’t give a shit about kids.
Where have you read that this is about checking everyone’s ID?
They are specifically building an anonymous system for verifying age required to buy to products and access media that we already check ID for (not anonymously, but distributed) in physical stores.
Most countries don’t have age gates for accessing social media and, under the EU system proposed for the EU, if they did, this system is exactly providing a method of verifying a user’s age without knowing who the user is. So it’s literally the opposite of what you claim it to be.
How many of your rights are you willing to give up so little Timmy doesn’t search titties on Google.
I don’t have to give up any rights for age gating to work anonymously and properly. Neither do you.
Explain basically every privacy, cyber security and child safety organization saying this is a bad idea, then.
I’d love to engage in this. Before we do that, please can we be clear if we are talking about the EU system, or the USA-proposed OS-based system? Given they are not the same, the reactions to these two systems have also not been the same.
Both. There’s a difference between showing some clerk your ID compared to uploading it to the internet. It’s not a question of if it being hacked. It will be. Denial of this is dangerous. If you don’t see this as important, you’re desensitized by the sheer number of yearly cyber attacks.
And that’s only the start. Children will only be marginalized. Protected groups will be increasingly threatened. Take your pick on whatever organization you want to look at, and they’ll say this doesn’t help anyone, except maybe foreign adversaries and hacking groups. What happens when the next government comes along and decides to make a more US kind of implementation? The point is, that we should not make this the precedent. Ever. Kick it while it’s down.
Ok, but for what it’s worth, I’m only trying to defend the EU proposal. This discussion was about the EU proposal, from the very first OP. The US proposal, such as I understand it (I haven’t looked into it that much, since I don’t live there), seems a huge privacy risk that plays into the hands of corporations. No thanks.
In the EU system, you start with a verifiable online identity system. These differ from country to country but all perform the same task: They allow you to prove who you are.
So you go to an online portal and you log in, as you. This system issues you a set of tokens, which does not hold your PII. They solely say “This person is over 18”. If you want a token to say “this person is over 13”, you need a different token. A token is a number that has been signed by the issuing authority in a way that can only be done by the issuing authority. You store these tokens, encrypted, in your age verification app.
Now IF the issuing authority stored “I issued token X to person Y” we would have a huge problem. They don’t. All they do is store “this token was issued”. If they chose to store that a specific token was issued to a specific person, they could track what sites you used the tokens at. So you have to trust your state here, just like you have to trust them not to access your phone records, or your credit card transactions or which mobile mast your phone logs on to.
You proceed to a site that requires an age gate. You are presented with QR code, which you scan with your age verification app (the one that stores the age verification tokens). This QR code contains a URL that holds the verification attempt ID (created by the gater) and your app now connects to this URL (be advised this URL is not the URL of the gater, but of a third party gating service) and sends one of your verification tokens. The third party verification service checks this with the issuing authority and confirms it is a valid token, then retires it if it is. The third party service now calls to the gater and says “this verification attempt has indeed proven their age”.
The gater then lets you proceed.
Throughout this attempt the only place that can be hacked to reveal your PII would be the issuing authority - no other services knows anything about you. What a hacker would have to do is insert code that captures the issuing of tokens and somehow grabs your PII at tha time. But what’s important to understand is that the issuing service also doesn’t know who you are, because they don’t store all your PII when they issue your tokens - they just have the required information about you from the identity service you used to log in (chiefly your age). So even if a hacker got in here, they couldn’t grab who you were, merely when you were born).
Many security experts have analysed this flow and supported it. I myself cannot see what a hacker could really do here. So, in this case, specifically for the EU system, which this post was about, I am willing to accept that the advantages of not having minors access tobacco, alcohol or age gated media far outweighs the privacy risks.
Those are physical things you purchase in real life.
A cinema screening is not a physical good. Yet we still age gate it.
How do you attend the cinema?
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Liberals. It’s systemic like it has always been. As cathartic as it is to remember the French Revolution, it’s not like it worked and ended stratification and imperialism. Liberalism will always seek as much control as possible, and the internet has proven to be a huge fucking problem exactly because it is so impossible to control.
Exactly. Centrism, and the very idea that there is “moderation” to be sought between progressive ideals and back-assward conservatism, is a fucking plague. We all suffer because people don’t want to seem “extreme” and I’m fucking tired of it. We have to commit to being progressive and admit that all centrism has ever done is seek validation for and to normalize right-wing viewpoints long enough that we stop paying attention.
Only siths deal in absolutes.
Ok?
I’m also not talking about absolutes, unless you’re participating in relativistic politics that only care about ideologies in reference to other ideologies and is a practice used by people too stupid to form their own opinions about platforms they’ve actually looked into.
It was a quote from the star wars prequels
We all know that, it just doesn’t really fit here.
Lies
OK lib.
Found the cave man
The victors of WW2.
bad title, this isnt about protecting kids online
this isnt about protecting kids online
It never is, but they always try to sell unpopular things as “protecting the kids”.
How about being a fucking parent instead of letting the government do it?
The government isn’t doing shit except censorship and mass data surveillance. This has less than nothing to do with kids.
I get my porn from illegal download sites that aren’t interested in age-verification.
Like all Prohibition Policies, this is only going to push people toward more illegal outlets, which demonstrate more morality than the legal ones.
Or, as is the case with a lot of sex work, push people into more dangerous situations.
The pedophile class is tightening the noose
I don’t use apps from official software installation sources. I will boycott any site or service that asks me for unnecessary information.
Until you can’t because they will deploy this absolutely everywhere to “protect the children” from whatever real or imaginary threat.
It will be banking that is used as the wedge for this. You’ll have to use an approved device / OS / App to get access to the banking system. To protect the children.
I can use a phone to do business with my bank, dumb phone -> call number -> do banking, then again, I can also send up to $3k with no fee
I use the bank web site, with a hardware TAN generator. If no bank offers that option you can use a dedicated device that is used just for that. My bank’s app works on Graphene OS though.
We can always self-host. We’re using such a resource right now. Of course they can start blocking and persecuting, like they’re doing in Russia right now. At which point you should start learning about fpv drones as a hobby, particularly the fiber-optic kind.
still 99% of ppl especially youngsters use this bullshit social media and will fall for this spy company
Wrong. This is to violate everyone’s rights and target children. This is fucking abhorrent and needs to be stopped.
Lotta internet users are going to suddenly be from outside the EU, just like the UK population suddenly all moved to the Netherlands after their own version of this.
If this is not the most crooked EU Comission ever, it’s a pretty close second.
Welp, this was bound to happen, wasn’t it? I’m pretty sure they’re referring to this application, which I stumbled upon a while back. If I remember correctly, the app “allows” (or implicitly forces) the user to store a government issued identity: able to attest to an age-restricted website, whether or not the user is of age.
It does this, supposedly by “just” sharing an age-bracket with the website; but here’s the kicker: the Union, in its generosity, has granted their citizens an in-app option, to withdraw this signal from the websites it has been provided to. What this means in practice, is the app storing one’s government-issued identify, also ties back to every account requiring “age-verification”…
So now, every device containing the app, has the owner’s government-issued identify on it, together with connections to every age-restricted service. And considering the apps are maintained by the Union, or member states (through their own implementations), creating a backdoor to the application’s contents… I mean to “observe app usage”, would be absolutely trivial.
Again, I’ve read it a while back, so some things might’ve changed, and my memory might be spotty; but I’m quite sure it’s along the lines I’ve described.
I see how this would be considered a problem in the US.
In Europe we see these things differently. I have a number of apps already, that knows my government id. Honestly I don’t know how many, I haven’t needed to keep track.
All sorts of apps from drivers license to a social networking app, which all needs to know my exact id to work. Even my kids has their government id on their phones. This includes an app which only purpose is to prove the users identity.
Having one more appwith your id is not a problem. Specially when its purpos is to NOT show your id.
Why does any of your apps need to involve a government ID? Why do kids need ID on their phone?
First, government id has a very different ring here, than in the us. It’s not that different from a name or a face. It’s not s big deal. Almost anytime there’s any need to be recognized formally, the government id is an easy way to do it.
We don’t really use “all names and addresses you’ve had the past 5 years” and all that.
So think about any app, where you need to id yourself better than just an email adress or phone number. It will be all of those.
I have an app to access my medical record. Nobody accesses my medical record without identifying themselves, in a trustworthy way.
My bank app, with access to all my financials, including pension funds - same deal.
There’s a payment app that is very popular here, the kids uses it too. It requires id. That id solves some issues that could have been solved in other ways, but since id is no big deal here, that’s the easiest solution by far.
Exactly. We’re not afraid of government overreach, but corporate overreach. In the US it’s the opposite (if you include regulatory capture as government overreach). Both regions are underestimating risks in one of these areas. Dictatorship and oligarchy can happen and we should be careful
I’m an European (specifically from an EU country). I was born still in a Dictatorship, before the Revolution which brought Democracy, and I grew up hearing the stories of Censorship and the Political Police arresting people for criticizing the local Dictator.
I don’t know who your “we” is, but it sure as hell ain’t me or most of my countrymen.
A mandatory Government app on your phone is the kind of thing that rings alarm bells in people’s minds around here because it stinks of Dictatorship and is a wet dream come true for a Political Police.
I lived elsewhere in Europe, so I can understand that people in countries which have long been stable and Democratic (say, The Netherlands and all of Scandinavia), have no memory of Authoritarianism and think that the Authorities only ever act for the greater good (which is why, for example, Swedes have zero concerns about every single payment they do ending up in a database), but pretty much everbody from Southern and Eastern Europe have either direct memories or heard the stories of just how bad the Authorities can be and just how bad it is to let them know what you’re doing.
You’re right, I meant western first world Europe, not formerly communist Europe
Clearly, if you’re really from Europe (and not just a paid propagandist or troll), you’re not from one of those countries which freed themselves from some dictatorship or other recently enough for most people in that country having themselves or their parents been alive during the dictatorship days.
One thing is some kind of passive ID, be it in a card or in digital format, another very different thing is software running on your devices which is capable of automatically reporting to the authorities everything you do.
As the US is showing right now, it doesn’t take much to go from absolutelly legit activity - say having an abortion - and innocent apps with some kind of “phone home” ability - say something to help women track their periods - doing no harm to anybody, to extreme prison sentences (for murder, even) and said apps being used to catch and prosecute women for it.
Anybody who has even just heard the stories from their parents and grandparents about whatever the version of the Stasi in their country used to do in the Dictatorship days would be profoundly against any “report to the authorities” software even if it’s sold by politicians as “think of the children”.
you’re not from one of those countries which freed themselves from some dictatorship or other recently
This is true.
software running on your devices which is capable of automatically reporting to the authorities everything you do.
This would be my only government app that is NOT capable of doing that, because it’s open source. If they start doing that, it will be all over the media.
I already have at least 7 apps where that could do that and get away with it. That should be the concern, not this new app.
As the US is showing right now, it doesn’t take much to go from absolutelly legit activity
If our government was like yours (even the way it was before Teump), I would be as concerned as you are. But it’s not.
I’m making the bet that if the government changes, I will have time to adapt. (Yes, I could be wrong.)
profoundly against any “report to the authorities”
Yeah, but that’s not what’s happening here, so I don’t feel like discussing that here.
I’m making the bet that if the government changes, I will have time to adapt. (Yes, I could be wrong.)
The thing with data is that once it’s out, it’s out.
If tomorrow whatever you do today starts getting deemed a perversion or even a crime, the data related to you doing sent out today will at the very least put you at the front of the list of people to be investigated for it.
Best to have as little as possible about me and my activities (no matter how innocent) out there in an easy to access form, IMHO. If I have to trade a bit of convenience for it, so be it.
I’m a European, and yet I wrote this; but I would agree many people (regardless of whether or not European) have progressively been accustomed, to having their personal identify tied to their devices (often for the sake of convenience, or out of necessity: the uncalled-for Two Factor Authentication (2FA) applications, for accessing government or work-related services, being an example), and I’ve not been an exception to that rule.
For me these were limited to applications, typically where a higher degree of security is expected: banking applications, the before mentioned 2FA applications, government mailbox applications, etc. But I’ve also once sent, a nearly fully redacted copy of my driver’s license to YouTube, in order to listen to music with naughty artwork (which I already believed to be ridiculous at the time, but gave into nevertheless).
Currently I would never let such applications near devices for general use, and it wouldn’t even cross my mind, to ever send any signal that signifies I’m not, in fact, a child, and shouldn’t be treated as such; ultimately so abusive services are green-lit to surveil me as an adult, instead of having to be more conservative (as data collection on children is typically more strict: for whatever reason… instead of people, regardless of age, being treated with dignity).
So no, not everybody has applications on their device, which link to, or directly store one’s personal identity. I rarely have to interact with financial or government services, and have zero interest, in being required to do so in order to access “age-restricted” content online. I like my pseudo-anonymity, and do not at all, trust a government application, which links this pseudo-anonymous activity to my personal identity.
Democracies: Hey we have to stop the onslaught of right wing populism
Also Democracies: Let’s push moral policies that right wing populists thrive on.
It will help the pedophile class and Israeli backed oligarchs mass surveil us more effectively
This has nothing to do with protecting children
