Online threats to children are real, but the headlong pursuit of age verification that we’re seeing around the world is unacceptable in its approach and far too broad in scope — and we simply can’t afford to get this wrong.
To be clear, parents’ concerns are valid and sincere. Few people would argue that kids should have unfettered access to adult material, to self-harm how-tos, to social media platforms that manipulate them and expose them to abuse.
But it’s the very depth of those worries that is being cynically exploited. Age verification as is currently being proposed in country after country would mean the death of anonymity online.
And we know exactly who stands to gain: The same tech giants who built the privacy nightmare that the internet is today.
It bothers me that we know that this bullshit has nothing to do with the kids and is probably being lobbied by the genocide gang and AI companies, even more that it has become obvious that the only value AI has is mass monitoring, but nobody abords the real issue. We are playing their book.
99.9% navigate the system and grow up perfectly fine, or fine enough. We shouldn’t have to completely surrender our anonymity for the tiny percentage that went wrong.
Before the Internet, some people got weird, and in the Internet era, some people are going to go weird. Age verification isn’t going to change that.
This isn’t about the kids. We all know it.
Kids don’t have unfettered access if they are supervised, lol. And age gating will fail regardless. So it’s a failure followed by another failure, sigh.
Indeed, unfettered in a literal sense cannot happen even with the most minimum supervision, but regardless of the threshold in parenting (I am not going to pardon parents responsibility on this, but good luck asserting 100% supervision), circumventions will always take place, so with more reason it cannot be used the “kids safety” argument to bring Orwellian levels to everybody’s lifes
just out of curiosity, what do you consider minimum supervision to be?
The theoretical minimum would be sharing any instant of their lives, during which they could not sustain an unfettered access to anything, not like I would consider it a decent minimum in any case (I was revolving around the “unfettered access” concept of the previous comment), but I cannot imagine how it would exists any threshold of supervision above which you can exclude any unfettered access at any given moment of their existence, risk of harmful exposition never drops to zero, so argue an Orwellian measure for the indiscriminate shake of their safety has no sense to me…
“It’s for the KIDS, you COMMIE!”
It’s time we stop accepting that rationalization as valid.
How long before we get a Meshtastic style, decentralized internet?
What can I, as a regular guy, do to help make this happen?
I know you mean a Meshtastic style internet in general. But this is too fascinating to not share. Meshtastic is amazing:
Meshcore has worked far better in my exp although there’s been some controversy recently
I have to admit I am a fan from afar, I just enjoy keeping up with new devices and so on.
But I do love drama, so I’ll go check that out now!
Yeah some guy named Andy used the brand to advertise ai made software
Meshtastic does seem very cool
While Meshtastic is great, I believe Reticulum has a more suitable approach for this: https://reticulum.network/
I definitely agree. Meshtastic has its uses but being a wide area network replacement is not one of them. Reticulum seems to be the mesh we all want and the technology is here, we just need to organize to make it happen.
Wifi HaLow is a bit closer to capable of early 00s internet speeds while reaching 1km, meshtastic and mescore reach 100x further and are good enough for text but not really capable of any media.
More people need to adopt both, here’s hoping.
“Could” is a funny way of saying “are obviously intended to”. Stop playing around, call it out directly. Points where you must have your ID checked are, in fact, ID checkpoints.
Maybe Kaczynski had a point by running off to the woods and living in a cabin.
Let’s just go all the way back to Walden pond.
No that’s too far I like espresso. How about the coffee shop half a block from Walden?
If this becomes widespread, I just won’t use any websites that require it. There will always be ways around it or alternatives for people opposed to losing their privacy. There already are at least 2 Internets. There’s reddit and Facebook and Twitter and all the corporate news sites, and then there’s Lemmy and archive.org and the dark web and dev pages and independent websites and piracy. I find I rarely care about the former anyway. It’ll just mean being blocked off from all the corporate slop, which may be a blessing in disguise.
I am readying myselft for the end of internet since years. I guess we are at the end of the dead internet theory where they have to ID humans to be able to differentiate them from bots and be able yo target them more specifically.
Lol, is that why? Advertising dollars.
It’s tough for millennials, who saw the potential and the promise of the Internet.
It’s important to note the Arab Spring and the One Piece (whatever we’ll name it).
Even now the remnants of the forth estate, are literally vlogging news on tube sites and substack.
But yeah, Internet is ever inching forward to becoming TV or radio. Centralized information is power.
I maintain that we lost the Internet when we accepted asynchronous data connection.
The positive thing about age checks is the technology that will come out to by pass the system.
I’m working on ways it right now. Aliexpress wants me to do a face check for some items. I’ve been a customer long enough to have been born and become a legal adult as a customer!
They don’t want my face for verification. It’s an excuse to feed their AI, which is already scary good at voice.
Could? Will.
It’s been fun lads. Let’s make agreements for where we will touch grass together when this happens. Follow-up events will be decided on location
I think these laws are not for we’ll just get around it or not use services that require it, for now at least.
Time for a different internet then.
Another one. Or two.
well to be pedantic, this really affects the web, which runs in the application layer of the internet. since i am sure they arent going to require refrigerators to have id, the intetnet should remain open. we will just communicate over different protocols
Time to become a refigerator i guess
love your optimism
I’m only surprised they’ve taken this long to get anonymity removed from the internet. Using kids as the lever isn’t surprising either.
Now that the dead internet theory is spreading company start to wonder if the stats reported by advertising company are not 90% bots.
Next up, bots get IDs
I other words, a pipe dream for the likes of weird freaks like Yarvin and Thiel and Musk and Zuck and Bezos and Ellison…
Shocking news! The sky is blue
That’s exactly what they (billionaires) are trying to achieve. Because they’re getting scared of us getting organised and doing more than burning down warehouses.
its to cut off things like organization, information to keep people ignorant. they only dream of able to turn off internet like iran does to keep people ignorant.
