Comment by AJRF
20 hours ago
The path ahead in the next few years (at least for the UK)
1. Age gating + VPN ban under the guise of protecting children from social media
2. Few years pass, Identity Passport gets ushered in under guise of convenience of not having to repeat those pesky age verification checks.
3. Utilities start to require ID Passport. Including signing up with an ISP.
4. Renting starts to require ID Passport.
5. Work requires ID Passport.
6. Well done, you built the torment nexus!
Renting and work already require ID in the UK. Every landlord and employer is supposed to take a copy of original documents proving the right to rent/work in the UK. Technically you can do that without handing the docs to the government, but there's less potential liability to do so via the Home Office website.
That did not stop the Government from pushing digital id in order to prevent illegal working, did it ?
You miss the point - they are stitching it all together in a way that deanonymize you to your ISP under the guise of save the kids and then convenience
This is a very libertarian and ultimately low-trust forum where most people seem to think the government is out to get you, but I have to say: what's so great about having complete online anonymity anyway? I mean, seriously. Real life is not anonymous and consequence free either, why should online life be?
It's not as if there are no downsides. There are, and some of them are so severe that they are impacting the whole of society.
People can impersonate to be 500 or 5000 or 500000 people from another country and all echo some detrimental or even treasonous sentiment, critically influencing and steering voters, which changes politics and election outcomes and thereby the trajectories of whole countries. I cannot understate how serious that is.
If we can make sure that every real person can only have 1 social media account per platform, and if we can check that someone is an adult, and if (and only if) we can do that in a privacy preserving manner... then honestly, I don't see why I would be against that. I'm ok with being held accountable for what I do online. I want to pay that price to prevent the severe outside interference we've seen in elections and in our politics.
You and many others might not be, but it seems like you've lost the argument.
11 replies →
Do you want to help stop that, or do you just want to feel smarter than other people? If you happened to have seen my comments in other threads, you'd know I'm against all this. But telling people they are idiots isn't going to win them over. This is not just a criticism of your comment, it's widespread in these discussions.
Opposing this requires:
* Linking to specific harms, which the public can emotionally resonate with. For example, scanning billions of photos for suspicions of child abuse will result in false positives that cause innocent people's kids to be taken away.
* Not seeming like an overheated conspiracy theorist. Feeling angry about this is legitimate, but it's not necessary to communicate in the same emotional register that you are feeling, even if it feels inauthentic not to. The public are saturated with people being publicly angry, much of which is purely performance. Deep concern may work better.
* Have plausible reasons for why this is happening. Yes, a few individuals like Thiel want to create a digital Stasi, but this would still be happening without them. Mostly this is driven by companies that want to make money, and officials who have a bias towards centralised processes, and are tunnel-visioned with respect to some issue. And people who are genuinely concerned about kids and haven't been given another convincing solution.
* Get facts straight. (Eg, rent/job IDs aren't a future threat. They are here)
4 replies →
Isn't this already the case in a lot of the Continent? I was just in CH and it seemed impossible to have anonymous Wi-Fi without a Swiss SMS or a airline boarding pass.
Here in Australia we already have the first part of 1 then most of 3,4,5. We are almost there. And you thought our wildlife was the torment nexus.