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The 'papers, please' era of the internet will decimate your privacy

The 'papers, please' era of the internet will decimate your privacy

bilsbie

Comments (189)

  • j2kun
    There are at least some technological solutions here, such as anonymous credentials. [1] Modern versions of this technique allow one to associate metadata (like a proof of age exceeding a threshold) in such a way that the verifier can't even correlate repeated requests across users.Governments that are serious about age verification and individual privacy (which, doubtful they truly are) should agree on a protocol and set up certificate issuers that are associated with a digital ID. Then age verification will not be an invasive procedure or risk data leaks or insider threats.[1]: https://blog.cryptographyengineering.com/2026/03/02/anonymou...
  • tqi
    > You’re not happy about it, but you hand over a photo of your passport and hope it doesn’t come back to haunt you.I think for this argument to carry weight with voters, privacy advocates need to be much more specific about what "coming back to haunt you" looks like. They do a little bit of it later on[1], but I think most people do a rough cost benefit in their head and decide that the small benefit outweighs the small risk (to them).[1] "And that creates a lot of risks for data breaches, overly broad data collection and retention, censorial legal demands for collected data, corporate and governmental malfeasance, pressure to self-censor, and perhaps blatant First Amendment violations. Every new layer and every new mandate brings more potential for risk. As we’ve unfortunately seen many times over the years, people including high-level government officials will maliciously seek to root out the identities of their critics, so the more layers of anonymity we can preserve in online speech, the better."
  • hendersoon
    All I can say is I will never vote for any politician who votes for any form of this. Even if the bill fails to pass, they will never, ever get my vote.
  • miiiiiike
    I’m glad this is finally becoming the cause célèbre du jour. This feels like THE FIGHT or at least one of the TOP 3 THE FIGHTS and it hasn’t had even a fraction of the public’s attention until now.
  • mossTechnician
    I appreciate the wealth of technical solutions that don't violate privacy, but isn't this overlooking an important point: that children don't need to be connected to the Internet at all times from such an early age? Many internet and cell phone providers seem to take it for granted that children must be online, which is already a net loss for their privacy as they mature.
  • HoldOnAMinute
    Assuming no revolutionary changes are coming to the USA, I am planning to opt out of the digital world when I retire. Physical media only. No subscriptions. Spend lots of time in the library. Find like-minded people and meet in person. Will only keep the bare minimum for survival, like banking.
  • AJRF
    The path ahead in the next few years (at least for the UK)1. Age gating + VPN ban under the guise of protecting children from social media2. Few years pass, Identity Passport gets ushered in under guise of convenience of not having to repeat those pesky age verification checks.3. Utilities start to require ID Passport. Including signing up with an ISP.4. Renting starts to require ID Passport.5. Work requires ID Passport.6. Well done, you built the torment nexus!
  • DrammBA
  • InvertedRhodium
    No, it won’t. The internet is just getting smaller from my perspective because there’s no way I’m handing over my identification and allowing every connection made to a server to be tracked back to me.It’s simply not on the cards, and I live a frugal enough life in a high paying industry that I can retire in a few years. If I was willing to bank on inheritance then I could retire now.I feel for the people that are forced to engage though. But too many of them simply don’t care about privacy, which is why we’re here.
  • zaptheimpaler
    This seems more like a technical problem that we could actually solve well if we wanted to and had competent people advising the governments. You go to DMV and they generate a keypair and an entry in a DB. App looks up your age with your public key + signed private key authorization from you. Apps can ask for specific checks like is_over_21, is_citizen or whatever without any more data. Something like that, details are probably off ;) The whole infrastructure could be open source. Age verification doesn't need to equal identity verification by a 3rd party company that will leak your IDs.
  • gchamonlive
    Who'd have guessed hitting the library would become an act of rebellious defiance
  • Kuyawa
    There is absolutely no privacy on the internet, Snowden told us 13 years ago but we all forgot.The government already knows everything about us, and I mean everything. It is extremely naive to think they don't or that you are safe behind a VPN.
  • sscaryterry
    This just legitimises the existing practices. They already know who you are.
  • epsteingpt
    it is the fight, but the game is already over.what do people think the billions of billions of pattern matching used in ads will be used for?people think 'anonymous' credentialing will work here?they've captured scroll patterns, typing patterns, language patterns, all sorts of fingerprinting.the game unfortunately is basically already over.
  • flenserboy
    There will be your internet-connected computer which will be assumed to be compromised, & which little, if anything of use will be kept on, & then there will be the airgapped system you do work on, which will probably be the last trusted version of a Linux distro you have multiple copies stashed away of. It will be a very old-fashioned experience, & moving/sharing data will become a dicey business.
  • agentultra
    > * whether you’re protected from hackers or data breaches*Not a matter of if, but when, a breach happens.
  • trumpdong
    Age verification is identity verification... except when it's in California or Illinois?
  • kulahan
    I can’t think of a better solution to the issue of children being so aggressively harmed by the internet. That doesn’t remove any of the problems associated with this.
  • HackerThemAll
    My Google account is 21 years old already. Is that enough of a proof?
  • madrox
    I'm pretty sure this is a "pick your poison" problem. We as a society are damned no matter what we do or do not do. For my part, we need to do something, because things are not fine the way they are, including the half ass Australian solution. We can't keep putting the onus on private enterprise to address social issues.I may sound crazy for saying so, but I think the answer is more government run infrastructure for enabling identity-based operations, like payments and authentication, with rules about standards, open source, contractor selection, and audit that make operation transparent. It can work if technical operations are legislated instead of "left for the engineers to figure out." Then at least the evolution of systems can become real political issues that map to election cycles.My stance is probably a polarizing one, but this is precisely why we need to be able to debate the minutae of these systems through our political discourse instead of just "will we; won't we" legislation. This should be debated in democratic process.
  • clickety_clack
    This was in part caused by the general public’s comfort with federated identity for OAuth. If everyone already has one anyway (the thinking may go), why not mandate it?
  • uwagar
    if i run a pain vanilla website with no need for user accounts, do i have to age verify? will icann also ask for id when i register a new domain?
  • andrewlin247
    privacy online is already largely gone
  • dools
    How is it any different from being required to identify yourself to get a phone or electricity account? Identifying yourself on the internet is long overdue.
  • lokar
    Is a 10% reduction that bad?
  • SidewaysView
    And we all know why lolberts are worried about kids and privacy online... Regret voting for Trump yet, chuds? You can't hide once we know who you are.
  • paulsutter
    Interesting trivia: 90% of people don’t know the definition of decimate
  • dmfdmf
    So everyone is on the same page on this issue. The First Amendment is the right to anonymous free speech. I doubt they teach it in the govt schools but the Federalist papers, which argued for the US Constitution, was published anonymously.
  • josefritzishere
    This would never be used to do evil of course...
  • jauntywundrkind
    Singing: nobody wants this everybody hates you! Governments burning their capital hard to try to prove what tough guys they are against the Declaration of Independence of Cyberspace.
  • motohagiography
    The discussion is not about whether it's a good or bad idea, but whether we will yield the power to these people to ratchet in further oppressive laws onto formerly free countries.Tech companies should ignore it and just publicly name whoever attempts to prosecute them and see how the population responds. I think people today are orders of magnitude more informed about their privacy and the consequences of digital ID laws. A few countries are on the edge of revolt at the moment anyway, and this would be a good way to get young people into the streets.20 years ago, people would have had no defense against it or understanding of what was being imposed on them. Today, normal people use Signal and encrypted messengers, faraday bags, and leave their phones at home. Where we were nerdy security guys back then, non-technologist women and girls use spy tradecraft level electronic opsec for their own safety and security from middle school. People are much more sophisticated about their privacy now. They're ready to take this on.The laws coming into force are on people who are not in favour of them, and I'm so optimistic that I will not interrupt the enemies of privacy and human dignity while they are making a mistake.
  • sublinear
    I'm not sure "social media" is the best example. You've never had complete freedom of speech on there.It's been true for decades in the USA that if they want to arrest you, they will. The age verification doesn't make this situation better, but at this point it's almost just a formality.
  • anon
    undefined
  • 4d4m
    Wait till someone liberates all this poorly protected data
  • lovich
    My privacy is already decimated. For 2 decades we’ve already known about the NSA slurping up everything[1] on top of the Snowden leaks.Then you have the mega corps like Facebook who can figure out every detail about you even from merely _not_ using their system because of the hole you leave in your social network that does use them.The only privacy left is from anonymous troll farms claiming to be an American while talking about how the Texas oblast is valuable for its warm water ports.I am fine for privacy on consumption of content, but you should be forced to identify yourself for posting so the common man at least has a chance to evaluate your statements instead of being misled, all while, as stated above, our governments and corporations don’t have that limitation.[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room_641A
  • greatgib
    What scary me a lot, is the amount of people here or in real life that are not concerned about that, and that are like "it is to protect the children, so whatever it is, it worth it. And what else we can do?". And often it goes on with things like "anyway, social media are bad, they ruin people even adult, so good thing". Literally they all look like repeating a carefully crafted propaganda without that much more deep thinking.Basically, to mean it is brain rot. The problem is that it might concern a big part of the population and that is why we have such laws.To me, it is exactly what was described in G. Orwell "Animal farm" book. Pigs are now in control and big part of the crowd are "sheeps".Afterward, we always have hard time to understand how people could have let Nazi, Stasi, or Stalin come in power and do such awful things. But it never came in one day, and with the "i don't care, they probably now better" attitude of the current western country populations, you understand easily how all of that could have happened in a first place.In the recent, and most recent history, let's not forget what happened to Putin's Russia. Russia was opening and on a very good course for individual freedom and rights, then a ex-KGB officer took control of the power and little by little, year after year, suppressed freedom, privacy, and opposition to reach the point of today where the country is a total nightmare for human rights and liberty.
  • g023
    Anything to close Pandora's box. "They" liked the eras they could control the communications, and therefore the narrative. Boomers on their last legs, question is, will the future undo the unjustness that was forced upon them? Restore the rungs of the ladders that were removed, so they could have a chance too? Or are they going to stay in the fear narrative, and make this tragedy worse?
  • TurdF3rguson
    Maybe it will kill social media? And maybe that's a good thing?