Comment by Retr0id
7 hours ago
What is there to research? Yes, VPNs can be used to circumvent geofences (and by extension, regional age restrictions). Yes, attempting to age-restrict VPNs is at odds with strong privacy guarantees. Privacy is a human right, and one which is essential for effective democracy.
> What is there to research?
The trade-offs and how many people care and about what specifically.
E.g., you say "Privacy is a human right", so why is it that half the websites I visit ask for permission to share details of how I use those sites with more corporate "trusted partners" than there were students and staff combined in my secondary school? I'm all on board with just banning this kind of analytics, but there's a lot of people who are more angry with the EU for forcing companies to at least ask for permission before they sell your data to all those analytics firms.
Because they ask for permission, get it?
> E.g., you say "Privacy is a human right", so why is it that half the websites I visit ask for permission to share details of how I use those sites with more corporate "trusted partners" than there were students and staff combined in my secondary school?
Because capitalism itself is the enemy.
And information assymmetry is a potent tool, as is constant and persistent surveillance. All of these enable extracting more money.
>Because capitalism itself is the enemy.
Let's be real here. It's investor-monopoly capitalism that is the problem. Individuals worth less than $100,000,000 owning private property or their businesses isn't the problem, it's the Financial-Industrial-Complex with its Dodge vs Ford ruling (established duty to maximize shareholder returns) that is the problem. People owning their homes, cars, agriculture fields, tractors, semi-trucks, and small/medium business are not the cause of our ills. The cause is the financialization of everything, turning everyone into rent-paying debtors always on the precarious edge. Free enterprise is good, but monopoly enterprise is not. Quit making people race to the bottom in competition for basic survival, and start making the moneyed monopolists do it instead!
Yeah, you don't have these issues in communist countries. . .
2 replies →
It's the UK gov. Rather than do something, it's endless inquiries and 'research'.
Example, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lower_Thames_Crossing - the planning application is 360,000 pages and not a single shovel is in the ground. Or HS2. The list goes on. This is a really, really minor example of the same sickness that infests British politics for the last few decades.
I don't know how this works in the UK, but where I am at that would look like politicians just fishing for bribes while they stall committing to any action which also helps in PR.
Are there ways of doing age gating while preserving privacy? For whom? How many people need that kind of privacy, would it impact lots of (say) teens seeking help or is this about whistleblowers? Are many under 18s using VPNs for porn? Or have they just shifted to other platforms anyway? If we implemented it “perfectly” would it even do the thing we wanted?
What are the actual numbers here? If there’s lots of fuss about vpns but actually while there’s been a big jump in use it’s not under 18s anyway it wouldn’t help.
> Privacy is a human right, and one which is essential for effective democracy.
And does this get broken enough for age gating something? We age gate alcohol to reasonable success, sometimes that involves showing id.
I’m not arguing for age gating here but I do think understanding the tradeoffs may require more evidence.
>We age gate alcohol to reasonable success,
We shouldn't.
>sometimes that involves showing id.
Then the yokel checkout attendant proceeds to punch the 8 digit birthday into the keyboard, which serializes you as one of less than 30,000 customers in the area. Birthdays are leaky identifiers.
Good thing then that Democracy isn’t gonna defend itself.
But that's the point, circumvent democracy, to set the stage for techno-fascism. The citizen has no rights which the state is bound to respect.
By all means.
For example the vast majority of the UK residents is against the ongoing support and complicity of the UK in the genocide of Palestinians, to which the government orchestrated the whole operation to turn the protest into act of terrorism (!).
Etc.
> What is there to research?
Probably how they can best attach a license to VPN use like they're doing with TV.
Hi! It sounds like you may have misunderstood the TV license as you seem to be describing it as a recent thing whereas it was introduced 80 years ago in 1946. The point of the license was always to fund broadcast content--not sure how this could apply to VPN use. I think the discussion of VPNs relates to how, if we decided it was appropriate to block foreign sites, you'd accomplish this. As somebody who grew up in the heady days of the early internet this who conversation saddens me, but when you hear for example interviews with the folks running Roblox you can see where these ideas come from....