Comment by ghusto
4 days ago
If you want to stop this instance of "think of the children", build a working and cheap alternative that respects privacy. It is technically possible, so if you feel as strongly about it as your words suggest, do it. Once it's ready, spread awareness through old-media, new-media, politicians, everything and every means.
Here's my working and cheap alternative that respects privacy: Don't do it!
Seriously now, if you give in to demanding people, they will just demand more. Appeasement does not work.
To be even more specific then: Working and cheap alternative to the very real problem that this solves. It's not a made up problem, even though the current proposed solution was just shopping for a problem to solve so it could sell itself.
I was a bit upset to see vitriolic opposition online to systemd adding a field to store, entirely locally to a Linux system, the user's age.
I think opponents to these bills frame it as current state vs complete, invasive third-party identity verification. That's a very unfortunate framing because, as you say, it would be possible to take the wind out of the identity-verification proponents' sails by implementing better on-device controls.
Alternative what? Government?
Isn't knowing if someone is above or below a certain age already privacy invasive if one chooses they don't want to share that? At least under GDPR age is protected as an indirect identifier.