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Comment by program_whiz | Hacker News Reader

What are the negatives for doing so?

Forcing literally everyone else on the internet to give up privacy. No kids ever use my devices (there are no kids in my household), but in order to protect the non-existent children who theoretically would use my devices, I'd be forced to share information I don't want to and blindly trust that the process is done in a way that magically doesn't increase the ability to track me across websites.

That’s an extremely small negative. We’ve had nearly zero privacy for all of human history. A lockable door in your own home was an enormous revolution. There was a brief period where you could do super secretive things in your own home in America because it was the culture to move out the millisecond you can in order to live on your own, and roommates are viewed as an unfortunate obstacle.

Now that the 70-ish year experiment is over, we’re simply reverting to the way we’ve been since time immemorial.

> We’ve had nearly zero privacy for all of human history. A lockable door in your own home was an enormous revolution. There was a brief period where you could do super secretive things in your own home in America because it was the culture to move out the millisecond you can in order to live on your own, and roommates are viewed as an unfortunate obstacle.

The timeline you present is backwards because you misunderstand privacy as a binary. For most of human history we were extremely private to almost everybody in the world, and that's only changed relatively recently. There's a huge difference between my family or close neighbors knowing what I'm doing because of physical proximity and having to broadcast information about myself in order to take part in the way society has evolved to expect for mundane services.

- at a minimum, your id will be stored on random servers where it can be stolen

- at a medium, you will have annoying and intrusive identity checks required to use many common websites

- at a high medium, you will not be able to use a non trusted computer and identity stack: get on a windows, apple, or google device and use their identity services in their browsers, or else you cannot use the internet

- at a maximum, all activity you and everyone takes online will be monitored and faithfully tied to your or their verified identity. This total loss of privacy will result in a total loss of freedom of speech and assembly online.

That last point is the direct aim of the people driving these laws.

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