Comment by tqi
20 hours ago
> You’re not happy about it, but you hand over a photo of your passport and hope it doesn’t come back to haunt you.
I think for this argument to carry weight with voters, privacy advocates need to be much more specific about what "coming back to haunt you" looks like. They do a little bit of it later on[1], but I think most people do a rough cost benefit in their head and decide that the small benefit outweighs the small risk (to them).
[1] "And that creates a lot of risks for data breaches, overly broad data collection and retention, censorial legal demands for collected data, corporate and governmental malfeasance, pressure to self-censor, and perhaps blatant First Amendment violations. Every new layer and every new mandate brings more potential for risk. As we’ve unfortunately seen many times over the years, people including high-level government officials will maliciously seek to root out the identities of their critics, so the more layers of anonymity we can preserve in online speech, the better."
According to the article:
> Australia does order that personal information collected for age verification “must be destroyed once all purposes have been met.”
Most likely there's some huge breach where all the IDs are stolen and resold, which would maybe fix this problem while creating a bunch of others.
The biggest angle for me is censorship. You associate your online identity with your legal identity, there is no longer any recourse if you are banned from a platform. You could easily be arrested if your posts are determined to be 'offensive' in some manner considered to be in breach of the law, or simply have no ability to rejoin a platform under a new identity, or have identities across multiple platforms banned in parallel.
I've found that many people are actually in favor of these when they believe that it will only be enforced against people they disagree with. I'm hoping that people will be more likely to listen when they realize that their enemies may in future be able to get into power and change the definition of what is 'offensive', 'misinformation' or 'disinformation' to their own personal opinions.
No matter what you do if you are on one of these platforms (this one included probably) they, Palantir and multiple other entities know you really are and where you live.
Your defense against censorship and retaliation is not faux anonymity, but a functioning liberal democracy.
> privacy advocates need to be much more specific
I'm starting to think we need to lean on conspiracy theories in order to get broader population on train with this - and I'm saying this in utmost regret. That's a borrowing game from a right wing/extremist playbook.
Start with this: requiring IDs online is a first step in micro-chipping the population.
...or how about this: marxists/atifa/nazis/zionists/islamist/whoever-group-people-think-is-in-power want to erode your privacy online so it can be used against you. Some nefarious group what to know your every move!
...or how about this: remember Epstein files!? Well the pedos now want to id your children online!
I simply saying truth/evidence/rational based approach to this will not get people attention. People just don't care.
Just say that the government will control every single device that's controlled to the Internet and they can add government viruses that you can't remove and they can remotely control all of your devices and brick them if you try to send anything that the government doesn't like.
That's not even an exaggeration, once they enforce OS-level age verification via remote attestation they don't even have to pass a law to do this, they can send a secret order to Big Tech to do this.
I absolutely love meta-irony in this discussion.
Perhaps “censorship” & manufacturing consent?
I think both political extremes have their own angles: liberals might be concerned that conservative censors will censor kids from learning about LGBT people and minorities, conservatives will be concerned that liberals will force too much LGBT and minority content onto kids. Or whatever issue, they want to control what your kids read!
This will almost certainly be used to censor adults too, the only reason we aren’t doing that is because it hasn’t been possible to consistently identify people before. Considering who is pushing for this, they’re absolutely going to tie this into advertising, and if they know who you are so do all of the spooky upper echelons who could implement a true censorship regime.
“The only way they can do this is by controlling what you read, shouldn’t that be the parent’s choice?”
> Or whatever issue, they want to control what your kids read!
Considering demographic trends, soon such arguments will sound very hollow.
It's been decades since the very phrase "conspiracy theory" was introduced as a means to convert looking closer into something cringe. The normie position on most things is to accept something as no problem unless the mainstream designates it as such aliens), or it blows up enough that even unmotivated normies can't help but take notice (rich new york caribbean islanders). Privacy got close to that with Snowden, but it fizzled into apathy for most because imo there was no clear harm to present, it was perceived as abstract.
To me the connotation is that it's always an unreasonable theory, such as one that requires thousands of people to maintain nearly perfect secrecy for an indefinite period, with no mistakes and dedication even when they'd benefit from blabbing.
In contrast, imagine a 2-person conspiracy where both have lifelong reasons to keep it secret. Yeah, I could have a theory about that conspiracy existing, but it wouldn't be, y'know, a conspiracy theory in the usual sense.
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> I'm starting to think we need to lean on conspiracy theories in order to get broader population on train with this - and I'm saying this in utmost regret. That's a borrowing game from a right wing/extremist playbook.
How about "if you want to buy a dildo on aliexpress, you have to do a full scan of your face and send it to israelis"?
I mean.. au10tix does age verification for aliexpress, it is an israeli firm, and you can't even buy a scalpel (the DIY crafts one) without having to scan your face there due to EU regulation.
It always gets back to the evil Jews with some people and ideologies. Sheesh.
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