Comment by pests
2 months ago
> visitors in France don't bother with any of that, proving that they aren't actually concerned about being blackmailed or outed as porn consumers by their ISP.
I don’t think that follows. Tons of people don’t have the technical means or ability to use those countermeasures. Some don’t even know they are being tracked.
I don’t think that implies they’re fine with being blackmailed.
True, and I addressed that a bit in my other comment here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44212409
The short version is that I think people who don't realize their ISP can see which sites they visit aren't any worse off by their ISP signing age-verification tokens. Those tokens give much less information about the content they consume than the metadata the ISP already has access too.
I would guess at least a double-digit percentage of internet users are in the clueless category that you describe, and in practice there isn't a huge problem of these dummies being outed/blackmailed by their ISPs. So I don't think it's realistic to expect that if ISPs were in the business of providing age guarantees they would be outing/blackmailing their customers, especially since their behavior of those ISPs would be scrutinized by more knowledgeable people, and any ISP not taking customer privacy seriously would be subject to both public criticism and legal action.