Comment by jdprgm
2 months ago
I don't understand why it feels like out of the blue there is suddenly a rampant and somehow worldwide effort left and right to increase censorship, age verification, etc on the internet. Also I don't get why it seems like so few people care in comparison to years ago during the whole SOPA/PIPA thing where there seemed to be widespread and significant vocal opposition.
On the age verification thing the only reasonable proposition i've heard would be a feature that allows parents to set some setting that gives a device users age or age range for mobiles and tablets. I think this covers a reasonable percentage of use cases if your goal is actually protecting kids and not just using that as deceptive cover to sneak in widespread surveillance laws. A simple setting that says for example this ipad user is 10-13yrs is privacy preserving enough and would not negatively impact adults and because it would be coming from the device itself would actually be harder to get around vs VPN's or spoofing IDs, etc.
The idea of trying to address all devices in all scenarios is absolutely preposterous in my opinion.
it's a mixture of
1. easy wins for politicians in conservative areas of "won't somebody think of the children?!?!" so they can look like they're doing stuff to stick it to big tech while appealing to their voters' sensibilities
2. wanting to de-anonymize the internet as much as possible in the name of CSAM and anti-terrorism but is actually about wanting unchecked surveillance. the same reason we have to bang the drum against anti-encryption laws that they try to pass every several years