Comment by cebert
21 hours ago
I am shocked that there isn’t more opposition from the general public to policies like this that erode privacy and freedom. I am a parent and can appreciate the need to control what children do on the internet, but at some point parents need to parent. I fear we’re giving up a lot of freedom and adding unneeded complexity under the guise of keeping children safe.
I think because most people, even tech savvy ones don’t understand how this might effect their lives. It’s too abstract. At least how it’s portrayed here.
Contrast that with chat control.
My government can read my WhatsApp messages? Not good!
What’s the non-technical narrative here?
The non-technical narrative is very simple: Google, Apple, or the German government can revoke your ID at any time. You cannot purchase or sell anything[1], sign any contracts, have a job, rent an apartment, use public transportation, or receive any kind of government services without an ID. This should sound extremely alarming to everyone regardless of technical knowledge.
[1] Maybe with cash, for now, but cash is clearly not long for this world, and your bank account will be inaccessible already.
It also makes you sound like a conspiracy theory nutjob, and the current political climate in Europe is such that people are really sensitive to this sort of alarmist messaging (which they erroneously perceive as fascist rhetoric) and will not listen to you because they don't want to be associated with those people.
I don't think we can win this fight. Personally I tried to advocate against eIDAS in Austria and I've had negative success. After my warnings, people like it more.
"Oh, it's an EU thing? it must be good!".
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> Write too many color emojis in a row on a YouTube livestream chat
> Get banned from society for life
Well, it affects a tiny percentage of people today, so why would they see it as impacting them?
Do people in Europe not intuitively understand that willingly making yourself [more] dependent on a foreign corporation is disadvantageous to you?
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"My government can read my XXX" also affects only a tiny percentage of people today, but due to historical precedents and a lot of history and civics lessons, everyone thinks it affects them personally.
But there is nothing abstract here. A private entity, situated in a country that is very hostile and pro-Russia, controls parts of the software stack and implementation here. That's a law written by lobbyists.
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Germany is distracted with its version of “the gun debate” aka speed limits.
Like every school shooting, every energy crisis brings opportunity to saturate the airwaves with shallow noise that gets people overly upset and they’ll ignore everything else.
Every player on both sides is abusing this mechanic for all eternity.
I think this view is too reductionist, as people can (and usually do) debate more than one topic at a time. The problem is that technological dependence isn't gaining enough precaution when commodity products are being discussed.
What worries me is that it's a real global problem in all of our non-autocratic societies. On a positive note, I can see how this is actually becoming a common understanding and gaining traction, as hyped AI products are seen by some as 3rd-party- or SaaS-killers. It seems like we know how to differentiate between independence and dependence, and evaluate any risks affiliated with such a decision. But it baffles me that this differentiation manages to float as some ironic stream in our Zeitgeist, and just barely manages to be taken seriously.
Nobody is seriously discussing speed limits right now ...
all speed limits in highways are stupid. It should be follow distance enforcement instead.
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Imagine we had real democracy where people vote on issues. Speed limits? Vote once every 7 years or so on it and be done with it. Same for abortion laws, drug laws, gambling laws. Have a debate, vote, come back to it in 7 years if there is public interest. Preferably vote locally on issues that can be applied locally (like speed limits/enforcement etc.).
Public debate and assessing politicians and parties would be so much cleaner then if they couldn't use polarizing issues to rally their support and do w/e they please on all other issues.
Popular vote would have made sure civil rights legislation never passed and everything down to the schools and bathrooms would still be segregated.
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As a Swiss all I can say is that this is not how that would work out. Some of the most polarising statements I have ever heard come from Swiss politicians.
Although it is a more recent development since a certain billionaire (what else) took up politics as a side hustle.
I would hate to live in that political system. Just imagining the ways it would be gamed and the billionaire press would leverage these votes makes me shudder.
So far the best modern improvement I’ve seen (and it could be further improved of course) is the increasing use of citizens assemblies.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizens%27_assembly
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> every energy crisis brings opportunity to saturate the airwaves with shallow noise that gets people overly upset and they’ll ignore everything else.
At least their version has an obvious solution: Make electric cars and solar panels and then stop having oil problems.
The speeding debate won't go away with this, though, as speeding is not about oil.
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As far as I can tell, people are getting blitzed. People I know are incredibly deep in their personalized bubble and genuinely aren't even hearing about it. It's genuinely distressing. In general and for the future of democracy.
It feels like this era of hyper-individualism requires too much attention from each individual and favors those that can afford to outsource the work. While that stabilizes the role of society as a system, I feel like this is most worrisome for the less privileged in any low-trust environment.
I'm not. Parents are very much in favour of restrictions on what can be accessed online.
Parents can't control what their children are doing 24/7, and neither should they. But they should expect a society where children are protected from billion dollar corporations stealing their attention and radicalising them, at least until they are old enough to leave mandatory schooling.
There are many "real world" age restrictions that exist, and we have decided those are of benefit to society in general. The "online world" is no different.
If we can't have age restrictions online then they should just be abolished in the real world as well, in the name of preserving "privacy and freedom". The online world doesn't exist in isolation like it did in the 90s and 00s.
Because it requires tech iCal knowledge which 99% of the population don't have.
This is because the EU is basically designed as a lobbying platform. Note that lobbying by its own citizen is possible and welcome but expensive and require a some coordination, so basically foreign actors and big corporations are dominating. This is not a secret, the process is actually very transparent but it is "hidden" in all the documents nobody really want to dig into.
Also the EU and all those states are also highly incompetent and pretty much only depends on low quality contractors. For example there is very little discussion and info about the fact that the EU digital infrastructure just got owned by what seems to be a random hacker group [0].
- [0] https://cyberalert.com.pl/articles/shinyhunters-eu-europa-br...
> at some point parents need to parent
You write it as if companies provided tons of help to parents and children. Meanwhile, they spend a lot of money to make it as hard as possible.
Second, kids in Germany have generally a lot more freedom and there is less of knee jerk impulse to blame parents for every accident. Expectation is that adults dont harm them without parents having perfect control every sevond.
The age verification sniffing laws will come to the EU and Germany too, so your assessment is, in my opinion, too limited and incomplete. It's not really about parenting, it is about grabbing more and more data from people.
What percentage of people have a phone that is not apple or google?
My uncle has lost 4 Google accounts. Two to password loss, one to a fire, one to being banned for crimes against currency (having the audacity to live in several countries with different currencies)
The issue isn't the phone, it's that a __government__ is depending on an unregulated private enterprise.
> one to being banned for crimes against currency (having the audacity to live in several countries with different currencies)
What does this "crimes against currency" mean? I live in several countries at once with different currencies, and I never had a problem with this. And top of this, I travel a lot. I have accounts in 5 countries, in 6 currencies. Should I pay attention to something?
I think the point is rather what percentage of people will continue to need to have a phone that is Apple or Google, due to death by a million decisions like these.
Well the comment above was expressing disbelief that more people are not up in arms about this.
When you realize the tiny tiny percentage of people that have a phone that is not apple or google, you understand why few people are up in arms.
It simply doesn’t affect many people.
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Are you saying there's a threshold percentage somewhere below which you're happy to
A: exclude these people from society or force them to switch to big tech, and
B: accept the consequence where a single other country holds access to everyone's identity information for convenience reasons (because it works for the 99% that are too tech-illiterate to install software that they control instead of the other way around)