Comment by redczar
4 months ago
Years ago Google released anonymized browsing data to researchers. The researchers were able to determine who did the searches. I imagine a state actor can already determine almost everyone’s online activity.
4 months ago
Years ago Google released anonymized browsing data to researchers. The researchers were able to determine who did the searches. I imagine a state actor can already determine almost everyone’s online activity.
There's definitely some critical information missing there. I don't think you could individually identify me if all you had to go on was the text and timestamp of the searches I made within the past 24 hours. At least yesterday I didn't even look up any local businesses on maps.
State actor and porn site operator are two very different things. Pointing to the former in this context reads like a non sequitur to me.
I believe most websites keep track of viewing history and ip addresses of where that history comes from. I believe if the government wanted to determine what your internet history is they could do so with a great deal of accuracy. As such I think the complaint that requiring proof of age would be a privacy nightmare is not relevant.
We already live in an age of relatively little privacy.
A targeted investigation by the government is not the same as dragnet surveillance is not the same as sharing the equivalent of my driver's license with some random site operator who can potentially turn around and sell that data (or just inadvertently leak it). The complaint is relevant because the proposed measure would make the status quo significantly worse than it currently is. That applies regardless of how bad it already is at present.
The government could fairly easily gain access to the contents of a security deposit box. That doesn't justify a policy requiring proactively declaring their contents to the authorities.
And all of that is before we even get to the essential question - would the proposed measure actually accomplish the officially stated goal?
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The fact that there are already many threats to our privacy is not a reason to not push back on new threats. Rather, it's a reason to push back harder, and then try to fix the existing threats, too.