Comment by jgaa
4 months ago
This is never about protecting the children.
This is always about government overreach.
People are less likely to criticize the government, or even participate in political debate, if their online identities are know by the government. Governments like obedient, scared citizens.
The only ethical response to laws like this, is for websites and apps to terminate operations completely in countries that create them. Citizens who elect politicians without respect for human rights and privacy don't really deserve anything nice anyway.
Providing identity and access services at scale is certainly a few people's next big plan, and it appears they've managed to sell the representatives of their own states on it first.
This sort of thing can't happen except through the largest tech companies in the world, who are coincidentally already poised to be the world's official providers of digital identity, and private internet enclaves.
Look at what Microsoft has done with Windows - mandatory minimum TPM to install and a Microsoft account registration for a local user. Try using an Apple iPad or iPhone without an iCloud account or adding a payment method. Google wants you to sign in with them, everywhere, aggressively. Cloudflare has been the web's own private gatekeeper for the last decade. Facebook's whole product is identity. IBM has sold surveillance, IAM, and facial recognition services for decades.
Instead of a clunky IP-based Great Firewall, imagine being able to render VPNs ineffective and unnecessary everywhere on the planet by a person's (verified national) identity. Click. Block and deactivate all members of group "Islamic State" on your platform. Click. Allow IDs registered to this ZIP Code to vote in this election. Click. CortanaSupreme, please dashboard viewer metrics by usage patterns that indicate loneliness, filtering for height, last assessed property values, and marriage status, and show their locations.
Currently, laws don't require age verification, just that ineligible parties are excluded. There's no legal requirement to card someone before selling them alcohol, and there's no reason anyone would need a depth map of someone's face when we could safely assume that the holder of a >5 year old email account is likely to be 18 if 13 is the minimum age to register with the provider.
Shifting the onus to parents to control what their kids do on the internet hasn't worked. However, that's a bare sliver of what's at stake here.
The anonymous, unchecked Internet got us where we are today. It was a great experiment in worldwide communication, but has now been converted into a weapon for the same type of authoritarians that previously used traditional media and propaganda channels. AI is only accelerating the possibilities for abuse. Critical thinking skills taught from a young age is the only defense.
That’s a very strange take on governments, treating them as a singular entity. A government that deserves that name is first and foremost and elected set of representatives of the constituents, and thus like citizens that vote for them again, act in their interests.
If the government is not working like that, you have an administrative problem, not a societal one. A state is its population.
> A state is its population.
Very dangerous thinking. Unless each and every citizens has approved the elected "representative" and every decision they made (which will never happen), you cannot assimilate the state and the population. The state has to be considered a separate entity, one which operate beyond the common man's thinking.
> Unless each and every citizens has approved the elected "representative" and every decision they made
But they have, by electing the representatives that ought to represent them, and thereby yield the power to make decisions on behalf of their constituents. If they do no not act accordingly, they will not be elected again in subsequent terms; if they act against the law, they will be fairly tried; and if the laws don't sufficiently capture the reality anymore, they will be adapted. That is how a representative democracy should work. If it doesn't, you have an implementation problem, not a systemic one (admittedly, this is almost a true Scotsman, but still.)
> The state has to be considered a separate entity, one which operate beyond the common man's thinking.
This isn't mutually exclusive. Of course the state has to make higher-level considerations and people in power will invariably be corrupted to some degree, but concluding that the state is your enemy and cannot be trusted is the wrong one, in my opinion. With that attitude, you're just waiting for it to become truly evil so you can say "See? I told you all along." Better to try and shape the state you have into something better while you still can.
5 replies →
> A state is its population.
Oh that's not true at all. A state is an institution which is influenced by its population, but if anything, the attitudes of the population are more a product of the state, its constituent political parties, and the associated media apparatuses than of a freestanding "will of the people."
To give a trivial counterexample, if the American state "is" its population, then why does your presidential vote only matter if you live in a swing state, and why can you only vote for one of two candidates? Surely your vote should reflect all of your policy preferences and have equal influence no matter where you live.
I would say it is a realistic take, and yours is idealistic.
It isn’t realistic, it’s pessimistic. If the government, the system, is your opponent, there is no other outcome than subversion, everything is futile anyway. That leaves no room for democratic participation, for any kind of peaceful change, if you’re being earnest with it. And that seems very cynical and ideologically driven to me. There’s a lot of room for improvement that doesn’t involve tearing everything down because it’s beyond the pale anyway; it isn’t.
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> treating them as a singular entity
The entities that keep pushing for that stuff tends to be quite centralized.
> Citizens who elect politicians without respect for human rights and privacy don't really deserve anything nice anyway.
Unfortunately things don't always work out that cleanly:
- Sometimes you vote for the pro-freedom candidate, but your candidate loses. - Sometimes there are only two dominant candidates, and both disrespect human rights. - Sometimes one candidate disrespects human rights in some particular way, but the other candidate has different, bigger problems, so you vote for the lesser of two evils. - Sometimes a candidate says one thing while campaigning, and then when elected does something different.