Comment by Nursie
21 hours ago
> Age verification should be banned
Why?
> They already got so much data on their users
There are a variety of ways (see "Verifiable Credentials") that ages can be verified without handing over any data other than "Is old enough" to social media services.
Age verification obliviates anonymity on the internet. If everything you do, _can_ be tracked by the government, it _will_ be.
Allowing for more effective propaganda, electrol control, and lights a fire on the concept of a government _representing_ anyone.
> Age verification obliviates anonymity on the internet.
How so?
Please explain in detail, because there are already schemes such as "verifiable credentials" which allow people to prove they are of age without handing over ID to online services.
Last time my government tried that, they failed. [0]
You need to 100% trust those verification services. And considering their success rate [1], you shouldn't.
[0] https://thinkingcybersecurity.com/DigitalID/
[1] https://discord.com/press-releases/update-on-security-incide...
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because most implementations are not going to be like that.
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Ok, and? Presenting your ID at a number of IRL estamblishments also heavily reduces anonymity
The difference is that IRL establishments don't sell off that data to anyone else, nor do they have the ability to collate that data with data from other establishments to make a profile of you.
(at least not yet)
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But to get that ID from the bottleo, you need to hold them at gunpoint.
To get it from Discord you need to sneeze.
The internet has scale and availability, that physical locations do not.
The problem with this discussion is that this is a wonk solution for wonkish times. You're trying to thread the needle between various reasonable compromises. Ironically due to social media, that is simply not how politics and lawmaking works any more. Instead it's an emotionally driven fight between various different sorts of moral panic, and the only option is to get people more mad about surveillance than "think of the children".
You might be able to get somewhere by getting a tech company on your side, but they generally also hate adult content and don't mind banning it entirely.
(people are not going to get age verification _banned_ any time soon! That's simply not going to happen!)
It's a slippery slope.
This is the next two steps into 1984.
Once you start mandating this, there's no going back.
The next generation will start associating wrongthink with government IDs. (Wait, we already do that, right?)
The Party doesn't care about the Proles, only the members of the Outer Party.
I think that it's rather funny that people like to appeal to 1984 as if the only point of Mr. Orwell was that surveillance is bad, missing the entire point about stuff like the control of the language or the idea that the only self-justification of the (Inner) Party is power for the sake of power (see also: The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism).
I'd even go as far as to say that if "telescreens are horrible" is the only thing that someone takes away from 1984, they've frankly missed the point.
Unfortunately, having totally missed the point, they still get the same number of votes as you do.
> It's a slippery slope.
Is it? I thought that was a logical fallacy?
> This is the next two steps into 1984.
How so?
> Once you start mandating this, there's no going back. > The next generation will start associating wrongthink with government IDs.
Could you provide some more details on why you think this? For a start I talked about a scheme in which you don't hand over ID.
Slippery slope can be argumental if you provide the actual argumental reasoning for it as I was thought it could be used as deductive argumentation (though that does not say much). On itself it is a fallacy.
I don't see how verifiable credentials with zero knowledge proofs provide that however.
Read another book.