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Comments (173)

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  onion2k
  If we taught systems thinking in schools things like internet age verification would never get past being an idea on the back of a napkin. People struggle to consider the second-, third-, and nth-order effects of anything so asking them to consider what else might happen if we bring in laws and technical mechanisms to 'protect the children' is unfortunately too a big leap for a lot of them. Most people are bad at spotting causal links between parts of a system, and people who are good at it exploit that.
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  RachelF
  Age verification is just one part of this crackdown.Device attestation is another - making sure you're using an unmodified government approved operating system and apps linked to your ID.
• firefoxd
  It gives a new spin to:> Everything you say CAN and WILL be used against you.Especially when what you said has already been recorded and tied to your identity before you faced the authorities.Edit: from last week https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48632269
• freefaler
  Cory Doctorow had a very profound talk about it very long time ago (10+years).https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HUEvRyemKSgAs the internet become the place where people do a lot of things, no government (and especially no security services) will be able to keep themselves from trying to control it or at least monitor it. And with the new LLM features they can automatically do much more than before.Human nature is a constant and when the government sees an easy way to enforce something, many more bureaucrats will try to do it.
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  iamflimflam1
  This is already happening if you want to visit the US. Customs officers will look at your social media accounts to make sure you are compliant.
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  h4kunamata
  Age verification is an excuse to hide the fact that parents have become useless and should have their rights of becoming parents revoked.If you ask any millenial, none of this bs existed during our time, parents wouldn't think twice to educate you, if you know you know hahaThat statement is weird in itself because said parents are yesterday's millenial.Add to that how companies and governments are trying to become a China. You cannot silence those that you don't know who they are.Ohh did you say something a politician or a cop didn't like??? Now they can hunt you down and force you to delete the post or whatever.Sci-fi movies are no longer just si-fi movies, it is easier than never to:1. Know how you are and all the consequence behind that2. Be a victim of identity theft. Look at how many millions of personal information including passports have been leaked into the dark web. In 2026, if you have the right skill and like doing the wrong thing, you can be anyone because their name, address, phone, photo, passporte, everything, is right there.What gives me peace of mind is that by the time everything goes to shit, I am not longer in this world lmao haha
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  zarzavat
  I don't like age verification. However I'm not concerned about it.The internet needs new spaces that are more decentralized and less in bed with governments.We already lost our freedom when we agreed to move from IRC to Discord, from phpBB to Reddit, etc.The teenagers who are blocked from mainstream social media will deliver us new free online spaces that are better than what they're blocked from.
• mawadev
  If you look at how workers are mistreated in authoritarian corporations and how some people say it is perfectly fine because you get paid a lot of money to be used and abused, I can't imagine what a reality like this would look like. It does not stop with what you post online, we still can't really tell how our phones know about stuff we talk about irl to serve ads.
• SwellJoe
  It's also a huge gift to the very surveillance capitalists they're pretending to protect children from. It de-anonymizes everyone, including children, and with the first exploit and dump of of the database (which will absolutely happen), all those children's real identities will be known to every predator in the world in addition to the social media companies who've already shown they can't be trusted with personal data or the ability to track people across the internet.It is a catastrophically dangerous idea, and it's exactly what the abusive social media companies want.
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  btbuildem
  This is a reminder to curate and prune all your past social media contribution, because when this goes thru, you KNOW they will apply it retroactively. You'd loathe to lose your cushy job over a moment of lucid honesty back in 2011.
• Garlef
  The bad thing about this:Can you trust future governments to respect "Nulla poena sine lege"?
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  aucisson_masque
  If I say something illegal during a meeting, people will notice it and will report it to the police. Then I may get arrested or fined.Why should it be different on the internet ? Provided we live in countries where freedom of speech is enacted.Of course in Russia or china it's different but surely they already have tools like that.
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  stretchwithme
  Maybe it should be possible for a parent to set a child age in a device.Everyone else can stay anonymous.I look forward to hearing why that won't work and what problems it will cause.
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  initramfs
  "The Carnival in Venice was first documented in 1296, with a proclamation by the Venetian Senate announcing a public festival the day before the start of Lent. Unquestionably one of the most well-known Carnival festivities in the world, the Carnival of Venice is rife with mystery, adventure, and conspiracy. The day served to break down barriers between people of different economic standings and religious beliefs. During the Renaissance, masked comic performers performed in Venice's piazzas."https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carnival_in_Italy#Venice"The tradition of wearing masks seems to stem from the 13th century. During the ages the Venetians disguised themselves with mask whenever they thought necessary. It allowed them to escape from the rigid rules of the class hierarchy. All classes could mingle, men could be women, women could be men. It also led to unwanted behaviour, from throwing eggs filled with ink to all imaginable kinds of vulgarities. Masks made people unrecognisable, so they could not be prosecuted.Near the end of the Republic, the right to wear masks in daily life was severely restricted. By the 18th century, it was limited to three months starting at December 26 and ending on the last day of Carnival, Shrove Tuesday. Masks were also used in ceremonies, eg. when ambassadors arrived and at the five ritual grand banquets offered each year to Venetian dignitaries by the doge. This resembles the Masquerade Balls during Carnival nowadays. Venetian noblemen and noblewomen wore a costume called a bautta consisting of a white mask (volto), a tricorn hat (tricorno), a hood worn under the hat (zendale) and a tabarro, a loose-fitting cloak. There were subtle differences between noble and non-noble (cittadini or popolani), and the popolani were known to wear more colorful, fun masks to festivities like the bull runs."https://www.carnival-in-venice.eu/venetian-carnival-masks.ht...
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  LandenLove
  My theory is that age verification is just another way to push human verification. These large tech companies need a way to verify a user is a real person and not an AI bot. Both for displaying ads to real users and cutting down on spam.Nobody would support a "give away my anonymity online so I can be shown an ad for Coca Cola" bill. But it's easier to sell a law to boomers and lawmakers if you use the disguise of "It's for the children ." As if any of these companies care about the well being of children. See Meta confirming their platforms affect the mental health of children and doing nothing about it. Also platforms like TikTok and YouTube optimizing their algorithms for stealing user's attention spans.
• anon-3988
  Right now, our identity is kinda tied to a string of letter (password). This password can technically be passed around, created and destroyed at will. Tomorrow, our identity is going to be tied to you as a person. So messages will be signed by YOU as a person.
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  triceratops
  "Don't let them win. Don't verify your age. Don't give up your identity. If you absolutely must, find one of the numerous age verification services and pay in Monero."Better yet, how about - "call your representatives"?Some nerds, for lack of a better term, think crypto and cryptography are the answers to every privacy problem. The only way to fix society and the law is by engaging with those things. Not sidestepping them with cryptography, an unscalable approach in any case.I'm deeply pessimistic about the future. The only group competent enough to oppose identity verification has its head in the sand.
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  wuyuan
  You're right. Many countries use the protection of minors as an excuse, but in reality, they just want to strengthen the regulation of speech.
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  sixsupersoup
  Automated fines, like traffic radar control for free speech, will also become a norm as they won't be able to put everyone in jail. But I'm not sure the liberal anarcho-tyranny power will be indefinitely immutable. Speech control might be one their last try to keep control in the west. They will crumble like soviet union.
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  NoPicklez
  I think you can look at all things pessimistically, like this article does but at the end of the day we all agree that there are things online we don't want our kids seeing or engaging with and it takes regulators to push how we protect them from those online places. What other options to regulators have?Age restriction has been around for longer than the internet itself, so its regulators applying that logic to the online world.Whilst I think age verification has its issues, I don't see what other options they actually have. I'll also make the point that in Australia, our regulations explicitly require that Government ID verification CANNOT be the only way and that companies must adopt an additional approach.Almost everything in technology used to protect us can be used against us by those want or choosing to do the wrong thing, does that mean we don't do anything?
• quotemstr
  It doesn't have to be, FWIW. We have all the technology we need to decouple attribution from identity. We can achieve efficient and mathematically perfect unlinkability.Yet the powerful continue to insist on "papers, please" anonymity-rending personal authentication over anonymous authorization. It's not often that the villains of history so clearly identify themselves.My bunch is that the people driving this stuff were unaware that age verification could be privacy-preserving and can't exactly back down now.
• bluegatty
  The author made an assertive statement without any hint of rhetoric, reasoning, historical parallel, evidence, legislative example etc.
• BenFranklin100
  Calls to mind a quote attributed to Cardinal Richelieu, 16th century Secretary of State for France:‘If you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men, I will find something in them which will hang him”
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  jimbob45
  What would you say to someone who is afraid that a bad actor will find their kids on Discord/Minecraft/4chan and encourage them to commit suicide or shoot up their school?
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  OutOfHere
  We do need a decentralized scalable permissionless platform for speech. For it to remain sustainable, there should be a slight cost in Monero to making each post on it, preloadable in batches.
• thomastjeffery
  That, and it defines children as perpetrators instead of victims. What right could a citizen ever claim in a world where even children are guilty?There is a huge difference between protecting children and prosecuting/punishing children. Age verification can only be an implementation of the latter.
• jauntywundrkind
  Look at W Social. The governments will team up with anyone, no matter how shady, as long as they promise to try to restrict free, unattributed speech. They'll team up with absolute sharks, as long as those sharks are gonna help sack and battle the Declaration of Independence of Cyberspace. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48584497
• piokoch
  Yup "protecting kids" has a long, long history of being used as an excuse to restrict citizens rights, yet something like Epstein Island was happening with all the proponents of child protection being happy visitors of the said island.
• microgpt
  What are you talking about. They already have automated attribution of speech.
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  shevy-java
  Fascism will lose in the long run. Right now the lobbyists coordinate rather effectively, looking at how many democracies already succumbed here. Well, we need direct democracy - the system that we have right now with regard to democracies, is undermined by corruption.
• raugustinus
  [flagged]
• ropable
  [flagged]
• NoPicklez
  > These "age verification" laws are - by design - identity attribution systems. They attribute digital identities (accounts) to physical identities (SSN, ID, etc..). This is government's ideal situation, the ability to quickly (automatically?) get identifying information about inconvenient people regardless if they're a criminal or not.I'll call it out because your article doesn't, but does reference Australia. Here our eSafety commissioner has set the requirements such that the use of Government ID for verification must not be the only option.There are other age verification technologies that do not assign identity but use other means as a method to identify age. For example, when our ban came into play I wasn't all of a sudden required to offer my ID.
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  derektank
  Disliking data centers, illegal immigration, or taxes is not a crime in the United States, nor is posting inconvenient messages about politicians, nor is getting a little too rowdy in a group chat. And none of these things are likely to be made illegal any time soon.I always find this form of argument in favor of privacy (which is valuable in its own right to be clear) so roundabout. If you’re concerned about the government impinging on your freedom of speech, then why not write an essay arguing for expansive freedom of speech protections? That seems like a much more direct solution to the problem presented in this essay.