Comment by EpicQuest_246 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by EpicQuest_246 | Hacker News Reader

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If I choose to buy alcohol or cigarettes and I look over 25 in the UK I do not have to show any ID. If I do need to show ID, it doesn't get tracked by the government. It is only seen by the whoever is serving me at the checkout. I don't honestly believe that you don't understand how this is different.

> It's illuminating that your post is both "tech can't solve it" and so brazenly pro-tech with manifestations of its laziest arguments each way.

I believe that the only way to stop enforcement is to make it impossible to enforce. This would require new software that is easy to use by the majority of people. I don't see this happening in the near term.

> Of course tech can solve the ID problem. It could solve it in a way that doesn't need to give ground to your slippery slope argument too. It just doesn't have the incentive model to do so. Any "control" in this space would reduce the marketable headcount and so it's not in tech's interests to solve - without government intervention.

I am not sure what you are trying to say here. The fact is that some sort of government ID will be required or a credit card and that would be directly linked to any accounts you may have. Simply this is a bad idea for my own security, I don't want to be giving my government ID to some social media company in the first place or a third party that I maybe unfamiliar with. That before we get into any other wider reaching concerns.

The problem is you’re simultaneously arguing two points and relying on whichever point gives you the most leverage at each juncture.

If .gov == bad guy then you’re screwed whether or not you leave a digital trail on social media because you’re already leaving one anyway (unless you’re a marginal outlier that isn’t worth considering for this “problem”). If that’s your threat model then you’re either super-important or I worry you’ve been sold a scary story by social media algorithms.

On the other hand, the idea that this is an impossible tech problem to solve is also disingenuous. My point is that it could be solved. And quickly and easily too. If the incentive model were there. And whilst I’ve not given the solution a huge amount of thought (I’m not actually that interested in solving it) I’m certain that an authenticated assertion could be made that wasn’t directly attributable to an individual - i.e., a mechanism could be developed that would solve for both problems.

Which brings us back to the fundamental point here: the people who would need to implement the solution have no incentive model in place to motivate them to do so.

> The problem is you’re simultaneously arguing two points and relying on whichever point gives you the most leverage at each juncture.

No I am not.

> If .gov == bad guy then you’re screwed whether or not you leave a digital trail on social media because you’re already leaving one anyway (unless you’re a marginal outlier that isn’t worth considering for this “problem”). If that’s your threat model then you’re either super-important or I worry you’ve been sold a scary story by social media algorithms.

You are pretending as if one would need perfect op-sec (which is impossible). If you have a throwaway email, a sim paid for via cash and a VPN/Tor will make you much more difficult to track down and most of this can be learned via watching a few YouTube videos. You don't even have to do the more crazy stuff like running Tails.

Having an ID requirement will make it much more difficult as I suspect other regions will soon follow suite in implementing something similar.

There are also benefits to pseudo-anonymity. I want to keep my online life and my real life separate. This will mean that they can never be separate.

> On the other hand, the idea that this is an impossible tech problem to solve is also disingenuous. My point is that it could be solved. And quickly and easily too. If the incentive model were there. And whilst I’ve not given the solution a huge amount of thought (I’m not actually that interested in solving it) I’m certain that an authenticated assertion could be made that wasn’t directly attributable to an individual - i.e., a mechanism could be developed that would solve for both problems.

I never said that the tech problem was impossible to resolve. Again that is your assertion. I simply stated what I believe is most likely to happen in the near to medium term.

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