Comment by redczar
4 months ago
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?
Since Obama’s presidency we know dragnet surveillance by the government is already the norm.
So after a protracted back and forth your reasoning comes down to the following. The government is already engaging in dragnet surveillance. Somehow this automagically unmasks VPN usage (global dragnet (as opposed to targeted) traffic correlation on that scale would be a seriously impressive feat) in addition to any other privacy measures a typical individual might take. Therefore we should be okay with a system that enables the government to see you registering with various websites, or alternatively with a system that reveals various personal information to said website operator, or alternatively both simultaneously.
Or to summarize, the situation is already organically bad so everyone should be okay if we enact laws that artificially make it even worse in new ways.
To be blunt your reasoning seems entirely specious to me.
2 replies →
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.