When No ID Means No Internet | Hacker News Reader

When No ID Means No Internet

eff.org

50 pointsDASD22 comments

Title shortened from : When No ID Means No Internet: Age Verification and the Right to Access Information

Welp, gonna piss everyone off. Child access to the internet is a parent problem, not an ISP problem. And if someone doesn't have documents to prove their identity, it's the result of either not attaining or not affirming their legal status within their locality.

Ah, but you see, free speech is a far right dog whistle. Only fascists have ever cared about free speech, so censorship - run by the British Government - is a good thing, don'tcherknow.

Well, the way Labour have been going recently, maybe it is a far right dog whistle; they're the buggers barking at it...

(Those downvotes...) I was being sarcastic about free speech being a far right dogwhistle. That's what New Labour's bigwigs seem to think, about from Clive Lewis who is a very principled man. And he's like the only one who is not white. Or a Lord. Mayor Khan is a bit of a nuanced quality because he would think that after the Islamophobic abuse he got from that vile Elon. But Tom Watson MP, who used to be a privacy and free speech campaigner, knows better. He's just gone to work with Palantir. The Guardian, the champions of Snowden, have been calling for even more of this surveillance. They got a £50k donation from Meta recently. God, it's embarrassing being British. Polanski's the only party leader to speak out against this. It is quite refreshing.

The fact is, Yoti and these other companies are British big tech, and the argument over free speech vs. censorship is really just US and British big tech trying to compete in the surveillance capitalism space.

And what, even if they don't have documents through full fault of their own, they shouldn't be able to access information and means of communication?

And assuming everyone you care about is able to get documents, do you think they shouldn't be allowed to access information or means of communication anonymously?

The argument about people who can't prove their identity is a distraction. The argument should be why are we requiring anyone to do that in the first place?

Do you know how expensive it is to get a bleedin' passport these days...

Here is my take on it: I have a facial deformity, lots of kids have facial deformities, and anyone who wants to scan them can bugger right off. Respect existence or expect resistance, etc.

Fortunately, the Internet consists of more than antisocial media, gambling, and porn sites. Many (most? all?) of the "social" media laws also focus on specific user-hostile functionality too, which these companies could always not do. Or they could have a little toggle switch in the user settings to enable dark patterns, surveillance, and targeted propaganda, and only require ID to turn the switch on.

Meanwhile I expect that e.g. MIT OpenCourseWare will not be affected by ID laws. People can also self-publish. Windows used to come with a personal web server back when people saw computers as a means of empowering individuals instead of enslaving them. You could make your webpages in a WYSIWYG editor and just put it in your web folder. How about we bring that back instead of pretending that having ~3 companies in control of worldwide speech is somehow empowering and that their entrenchment makes them so important that we mustn't regulate them?

Absolutely - the problem is that outsourcing child safety to people like Elon Musk, a literal child pornographer, gives them a monopoly (aside from the obvious problems).

That is a wonderful idea with zero security implications whatsoever.

Also anyone with access to an LLM and half a brain can spin up a website.

It's the frictionless onboarding, simple UX and dopamine inducing content that enables those 3 companies rule the internet.

Nginx hasnt had a security advisory that affects a basic "share a static folder with http 1.0" setup in like a decade+. People always overstate "security implications."

And yes, that's why we don't need to act like they're somehow important. They are not. They are not the Internet. They don't even contribute toward the "useful" part of the Internet.

These are not sites where people "find essential information, build community, and weigh in on public discourse." They're not some classical forum where the adults hold important debates. These are sites that present a highly distorted view of reality to each individual so they can keep them engaged to feed them more propaganda. That and gambling/porn.

>The analysis finds that age verification laws have serious human rights implications and ironically harm the very individuals they deem to protect.

I wonder how expensive the mental gymnastics are that bring you from "no access to pr0n for kids is good" to "no access to pr0n for kids harms them".

Or the line:

>Unfortunately, age verification systems foster unequal access to information and provide an asymmetric solution to find essential information, build community, and weigh in on public discourse. As governments and companies increasingly require users to prove their age before accessing online services, these individuals risk being excluded from large parts of the internet altogether.

Yeah, that's the whole purpose. You're under the age of 18, no pr0n information for you.

Porn sites can be predatory to their adult users; that is all that needs to be said about why ID verification, run by porn sites, is a bad idea.

Or to put it another way, for someone who is apparently so hip to the creeps that run porn sites, you sure do like to trust them with IDs and face scans.

BEHOLD! A strawman!

Given [gestures vaguely at history], I really don't understand why someone would trust any tech company with their legal ID.

Explain how it is a strawman (admittedly it sounds a bit like one because I was being a sarcastic little shit, but still).

I should add - takes one to know one.

Anyone under 18-years-old cannot enter into a legally binding contract, so ISPs don't sell services to them. The adults providing internet access to minors are responsible for keeping them from accessing sites inappropriate for minors, and there's plenty of tools available to do so. There's no benefit to tracking users' identities.

> There's no benefit to tracking users' identities.

There's a good thread that's aligned to this going on right now about an open source voting system [0].

While there's benefit in the political sphere in tracking user identities and the underlying results, wouldn't the question here be: Is there any benefit in validating users' identities?

0 Source code of the Estonian online voting system (github.com/valimised) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50127586

Letting users sign communications is extremely beneficial, and it can be done without tracking.

That still leaves a lot of work, to issue keys and revoke and re-issue accidentally-shared private keys, but it could be tested out with one-time keys for specific elections.

Nobody said no access to porn harms children. They said that mandatory age verification, primarily but not exclusively targeting porn, has side effects that harm children, which is honestly very predictable.

Go look at some of these laws around the world, or especially the proposals that didn't make it through the first round and their proponents are trying again. It's never just porn.

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