Comment by Scaled
9 hours ago
Didn't know ACM was anti-privacy. Glad I haven't paid dues in who knows how long if they're spending them to platform these noxious opinions.
9 hours ago
Didn't know ACM was anti-privacy. Glad I haven't paid dues in who knows how long if they're spending them to platform these noxious opinions.
Wow, re-read the fine article. He was NOT stating that he wants the outcome you think. He is afraid it is going to happen because the younger generation has no clue or ability to maintain FOSS.
It's not anti-privacy to point out the obvious that privacy-advocacy is sometimes at odds with governments and the will of voters at large.
Privacy is being abused by criminals to victimize people at scale. Just because privacy is a moral good doesn't mean you are morally off the hook for enabling criminals.
Governments are so aware of this they're passing sweeping laws against it. This is your new reality -- you can't just bury your head in the sand. The whole point was saying that there could have been a middle ground that protected more of your rights than where you're at now if it weren't for the absolutism.
Turns out that being an absolutist isn't helpful.
Age verification is not the will of the voters. It is the will of large political donors (specifically tech companies and religious censorship groups). It is certainly not the will of adult citizens who use adult websites, who have overwhelming shown in their usage patterns they will abandon any website that tries to do age verification.
Parental controls remains the right way to do age gating. It works today and has no privacy impacts.
Just for those who aren't aware, most of the recent push for these laws has been bankrolled by Meta. They wish to avoid legal responsibility for their attacks on democracy and human health by convincing governments that people don't need any right to anonymous speech, and thusly free speech, as much as Meta needs to not have to pay moderators.
Nobody wants age verification (except Zuck), but most people want children kept away from social media, and nobody's suggested a better option. Why haven't we suggested a better option? Well it's because we called the whole thing authoritarianism and refused to get involved.
You know who didn't refuse to get involved? Larry Ellison, Peter Thiel, Mark Zuckerberg. They made suggestions to governments about how to solve this problem, and the best proposed solution was adopted and made the law.
Parental control does not work today, it's too fragmented and too difficult.
6 replies →
Please provide citations regarding public support for age verification. Surveys show majority support, for dating sites, social media, adult content, and sports betting.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42867716 - January 2025 ("The places with the most single parents tend to be, to put it bluntly, struggling. The strongest predictors of single parenthood are high poverty rates and high shares of the population receiving government assistance." [There are ~13.6M single parents in the U.S. raising over 21M children. This means single parents head roughly one in three households and approximately 34% of all U.S. children live in a single-parent family.])
Parents Under Pressure: The U.S. Surgeon General's Advisory on the Mental Health & Well-Being of Parents - https://www.hhs.gov/sites/default/files/parents-under-pressu... - 2024
> When stress is severe or prolonged, it can have a deleterious effect; 41% of parents say that most days they are so stressed they cannot function and 48% say that most days their stress is completely overwhelming compared to other adults (20% and 26%, respectively).
> Nearly 70% of parents say parenting is now more difficult than it was 20 years ago, with children’s use of technology and social media as the top two cited reasons.
> Recent data from 2021-2022 indicate that among parents, 23.9% (or 20.3 million) had any mental illness and 5.7% (or 4.8 million) of parents had a serious mental illness.
> Lastly, many other caregivers assume primary caregiving responsibility when parents cannot, thus acting as a critical safety net for children. In recent years, there has been a notable increase in such individuals taking on caregiving responsibilities for children, with approximately 2.4 million children being raised by grandparents, other relatives, or family friends, without their biological parent(s) in the household.
U.S. has world’s highest rate of children living in single-parent households - https://www.visualcapitalist.com/how-american-households-hav... ("A record 58.4% of American households now consist of married or single adults without children. Only 25.3% of American households contain children.")
The laws they pass do nothing to stop the criminals. Do you think an “age verification” law can stop any criminals?
The laws not stopping the criminals isn't the point. People are calling on their governments to do something and thus governments are going to do what they are going to do.
It's a mix of what they can do and what they're likely to do. They just have to be able to go back to voters and say they're doing something.
If you think that the fact that they did the wrong thing is an argument for not doing anything, you clearly are blind to politics & history.
And age verification being the wrong solution to the "privacy problem" doesn't remove privacy from lawmakers' crosshairs.
5 replies →
> Privacy is being abused by criminals to victimize people at scale.
Almost all victimization is being done without end to end encryption. This is not a problem caused by privacy.
Yep. For example on Instagram DMs, which is why Instagram abolished E2EE, and we all went into an uproar.
Also on Discord and Roblox, they are apparently the biggest platforms for this, but they're not E2EE anyway, they're just hiding it because their executives like what's happening.
And I guess you have statistics about how much victimization happens over e2e?:)
Gotta disagree. The encryption part needed to happen: without it, there's just too much opportunity for governments to intercept unencrypted traffic and abscond with it. We saw that occur with Snowden, and with programs like MUSCULAR in particular.
I don't think it's that encryption was harmful, it's that it wasn't enough, and in a sense I agree with TFA & the Sun Tzu bit: it needed to be complemented by legislation that added decent privacy protections, and it largely wasn't. That was a mistake, I suppose, but the current political situation, esp. in the USA, disfavors privacy regulation getting done, ever. The Democrats are … maybe spiritually for it? … but not terrible effectual at getting it done; Obama's response to Snowden was "meh" at best, and Congresspeople, in particular Feinstein especially, let the DNI walk all over her. The GOP has no interest at all in regulating corporations, at all, ever, so with the House/Senate/POTUS all (R) at the moment, it's going to be until at least Nov before it is possible to even think that these might get addressed, and even that's … generous, and I won't be holding my breath for it to occur.
Stuff like what we saw in another thread today — with LG wantonly installing spyware — and things like Flock would have happened in addition to network intercepts; they are not happening instead of. Corporations and the government will do whatever the People permit them to get away with.
The guy’s logic is “if only we had allowed a small backdoor from the start they wouldn’t be forced to install a large backdoor now”. Other technologies that were open to the law were endlessly abused for surveillance.
His theory is bunk, there is absolutely no middle ground to be had with the people who want a backdoor. There are no small backdoors.
What do you consider a backdoor though? Saying that devices must have parental controls isn't a backdoor. Saying that devices must scan your ID is a backdoor to break anonymity, but is he saying that?
If we had parental controls that actually worked it would forestall any talk about ID scanning because parents could just enable parental controls.
1 reply →
He's very clearly arguing against absolute privacy on the Internet and is saying that the people who advocated for it, which he besmirches as "tech bros", are responsible for the governments going too far now, instead of a happy compromise having been set out at the beginning, which by the way totally mischaracterizes the history of the Internet, where the governments were trying to impose total surveillance from the very beginning.
Wow, you missed the entire point of the article.
Honestly? It's weirdly written and incredibly hard to understand what their point is. I can't tell if they hate or love privacy.
> Please make my predictions come out wrong.
6 replies →