Comment by reedf1
7 days ago
Phishing for material for sextortion has never been more trivial. The implementation of this is going to lead to mass fraud. Walk into parliament, ask who is willing to go to jail in defense of the act if and when the first lot of randy pensioners are bankrupted, or kid commits suicide out of shame - and if no one raises their hand, repeal it.
This is absolutely going to lead to the black mail of people in both the private and public sector. Ruling parties are going to have access to this information and will use it to force votes. Intelligence agencies will do the same. On top of that its only a matter of time before you get a Tea app style leak where this data was simply not secured. Forcing people to identify themselves before engaging in their sexual peculiarities is a recipe for disaster and the rationale behind it is weak at best. Its about control, nothing else.
Note: Forgot to add, this is going to give some low level data or software engineer access to all of your darkest secrets and what is to stop them from using that to blackmail you? Some guy is going to ring up their local millionaire and say "I see you are into X, give me a 100k or everyone else will know as well" There is no end to how bad of an idea this is.
Not just blackmail, but also harvesting of ID.
They are normalising people being asked by potentially shady sites to subject to identification procedures, after all.
If I was inclined to sell such information illegally, I'd set up a bunch of honeypots and "verify" users and just hoard the data to sell.
plus once they have your id, what is to stop them from just using it for themselves whenever they want to join a site? It allows them to access all manner of heinous things using your name and likeness. If a crime occurs how much money is it going to cost to clear your name if you are even able to?
It seems that your argument is more about the way the verification is implemented and not about the idea of verification by itself.
The idea that you should verify your legal identity to load a website is reprehensible and not something that should be treated seriously. It should be ridiculed like the authoritarian nonsense it is.
On a factual point, you don't have to verify your legal identity. You can also do age verification by uploading a selfie. (I'm sure that won't change how you feel about this legislation, but let's not spread inaccurate information about it.)
Maybe, maybe not. It should be debated, and all the pros and cons should be considered.
But age verification as a concept is a completely separate issue from the implementation of the verification system itself.
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To be clear - I disagree with both the implementation and the idea of verification. I believe one is criminal and the other is misguided.
Yes, in a perfect world the downsides are limited. But in the world we live in I predict a lot more leaks similar to the Tea app hack (which contained a lot of passports, linked to some quite private data from chats like medical documents)
The biggest hope I see is that the EU also wants to implement age restrictions, but with a lot more effort to get it right and make it compatible with a strong desire for privacy. Maybe that will make "proper" implementations easy and common enough that many of the downsides will be mitigated
Leaks of what? The tea app are morons — they literally stored the data! Why did they do it? Why not to delete immediately after verification?
Anyway, there are two questions here:
1. Do we need to verify the age of internet users?
2. How can we do it without sacrificing privacy of everyone involved?
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The only property of the implementation necessary for sextortion to happen is that it will be imperfect, at least once. Which is guaranteed.
It seems to me that your argument is: if the system can make mistakes, it should not exist.
However, no systems are fault free. Whether we are talking about computing systems, mechanical systems, or societal ones.
Sometimes police can arrest an innocent person before they realize the mistake and release them.
Should we stop policing completely? Or maybe the right question to ask is “how do we minimize the chance for police to make mistakes?”. Note, these are two separate issues:
1. Do we need the police at all?
2. How do we make police to not arrest innocent people all the time?
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