Comment by drob518
3 days ago
It’s not for the kids. That’s just the excuse. In order to validate kids, they really need to identify everyone. That’s the real play.
3 days ago
It’s not for the kids. That’s just the excuse. In order to validate kids, they really need to identify everyone. That’s the real play.
In Australia, the government has certified OAuth2 Identity Providers which act as a broker between social media sites and a provider that can verify your age, such as a bank. This allows age to be verified by a provider, with the social media provider having no access to your identity. If the social media companies chose to support this, they would be complying with the legislation. It's not the government forcing you to identify yourself.
This gives the identity brokers full insight into what sites you are visiting. Worse yet, it consolidates the information in one, easily leaned-on place: If I provide an ID to 3 non-Australian companies, sure, those companies know who I am, but the government or other companies would need to extract that information from each one. With an OAuth scheme, all that information is in one convenient place for the surveillance freaks.
https://connectid.com.au/
They're brokering the negotiation, they're not actually the identity provider. The broker has no knowledge of your actual identity. So in this case, the identity provider (such as your bank) knows that you've been referred by the broker and that you wish to provide your verified age and only that age. The social media company knows that you've chosen to use the specific broker to verify your age, but not who the actual identity provider is. The broker knows that a request with your metadata (IP addr, HTTP headers, etc.) has been initiated between a specific social media site and a specific identity provider, but they don't have access to your actual identity.
Nobody in the negotiation has a complete picture. To correlate it all together, you would need logs from all 3. And at least in the Australian case, due to our data retention laws, if you've got logs from the social media provider, then you can already associate the user with a specific identity by requesting the information from the ISP which they legally must retain for 2 years, so it's really not necessary.
All this concern about social media privacy is a little ridiculous IMO. If you're using social media then you've already compromised your identity. If somebody wants to find out who you are, they already can. They don't need a verified identity, and social media companies seem to me more than willing to cooperate with governments. Law enforcement has been using this type of correlating data for years to establish identity in CSAM investigations.
It should be written into law that they (the intermediary identity brokers) cannot sell or share any information with data brokers. They should be an independent organization funded by the government, but without its funding tied to yearly renewals (otherwise they would need to curry favor on a yearly manner to whomever is in power).
2 replies →
can these banks/brokers sell the data?
can these banks/brokers get hacked?
I'd love to see a way for people to revoke/replace their personal info, kinda like rotating passwords or changing their names - but for street address, birthday, government ID numbers, etc.
Penalties (of any scale) are insufficient to ensure absolute security.
Are these providers private owned?
the effort is being driven by a handful of tech and social media companies who have suddenly realized they cannot close the pandoras box of AI.
without a meaningful headcount of real users, advertisers will begin to push back on cost or even reduce and eliminate spending on social media altogether.
by proactively identifying real humans, you prevent the collapse of major social media outlets. by tracking their age and location directly, you restore that which AI took away from advertisers in the first place.
age verification makes sure surveillance capitalism continues to function.
I hadn't heard this take before but I find it very compelling. The supply of raw materials for their product pipeline has become contaminated and they need to weed out the adulterant.
No shady agenda about killing public discourse is necessary if you view the push for identify verification in that light. (That doesn't mean it won't kill public discourse, but that's an unintended consequence.)
So now there is a market for verified identities. Good job making the numbers go up.
Besides, major social media platforms can just generate ”verified” profiles to fit a demographic. There is no way for advertisers to verify the audiences are genuine. Even CTR is meaningless unless conversion is tracked. This means Meta et al. will soon be actually buying/scalping advertised products and offloading them onto a secondary market.
> It’s not for the kids. That’s just the excuse.
Is is an excuse for some, sure. But we will fail at pushing back if we ignore that there are a meaningful number of concerned parents who support solutions like this because they have become aware of the danger that social media presents. For many of them, self-attestation of age at the OS account level is likely sufficient, not to mention much simpler to implement and use.
But others are working hard to shift the narrative away from age attestation towards age verification or even identity verification. Government officials (on both the right and left) want to be able to police speech based on what is acceptable to those who are currently in power. Companies want to verify humans for advertising and training purposes. And some privacy advocates intentionally conflate age attestation (like California AB 1043) with age verification because it is an easier strawman to attack.
To be sure, social media is a problem for our children. No doubt about it. But the solution is to take screens from the children, not set up the foundation of a police state.
Yes, but do you have any specifics? No one seems to have any specifics. I don't mean "plausible explanations of what the government might wish to to" -- I mean "specific actors pushing specific agendas."
Even if they aren’t pushing it yet, as soon as everyone is identified and characterized, the data exists and can be used for anything.
Of course, but why now?