6 ms·

You say that like it's a bad thing. Not everyone thinks so.

by ropable 4mo ago

mort96 4mo ago
You're right, some people are misguided and think age verification can be done in a way that isn't the death of privacy and anonymity online.
- tardedmeme 4mo ago
  Don't we all hate social media? From that standpoint, anything that makes it hard to use or come with direct negative consequences is good.
  - whateverboat 4mo ago
    Age verification for social media looks like it is different from age verification for internet. But it really is not.
    - tardedmeme 4mo ago
      Is social media the internet? You could also open a website.
  - mort96 4mo ago
    What do you mean by "social media"? We all hate Facebook, but do we all hate Hacker News? Mastodon? A Discord or IRC community for an online game? I'm all for age restrictions for certain kinds of social media, but age verification is a system of surveillance and the death of online privacy.
    - tardedmeme 4mo ago
      So, the actual laws are targeting things more specifically than just "social media". Some are talking about intentionally addictive content algorithms, or personalized algorithms. Others are naming specific named companies. Don't confuse social media with social networks. Social media is media - they select what you watch, like a TV channel, but personalized for each user. You might get a narrow choice from several options they selected. Social networks are just tools for communication. I used the word "algorithm" so I'm going to preemptively point out that it means something in relation to social media that's more specific than what it means in computer science.
      - omegastick 4mo ago
        In the UK they are not. In fact they are significantly broader. Anything which hosts "user-generated content" visible to other users.
  - antirealist 4mo ago
    I wholeheartedly disagree. When we consider a policy, it's not enough that the narrow outcome is good. What also matters are the broad outcomes and whether or not the policy is principled. We presumably all hate Alex Jones. Does that mean the goverment saying "Alex Jones is banned from communicating publically" is good policy? Even if we agree the direct outcome is good (which I do), the principle of "the governement can silence people it doesn't like" is profoundly dangerous. In such a case I would argue we should all resist such a policy, even if we like the outcome (Alex Jones being silenced) because the principle (the majority can use the governement to silence a minority) is terrible. This isn't even accounting for the messy second order effects, e.g. radicalising Alex Jones supporters. I think that applies to social media too. I don't like social media. However even more than that I'm scared of people using the government to limit what other people what they can and can't do for "their own good". This isn't a principle I think we can get behind. I think it's a principle that has motivated a lot of misguided acts in the past (e.g. criminalisation of drugs, sex work, taking the kids of first nations people in Australia, ...).
    - tardedmeme 4mo ago
      The categorical imperative should be used here. "Arrest people I don't like" fails the categorical imperative. However, "check things that destroy society and make everyone worse off except for a select few if left unchecked" easily passes the bar. Nothing is absolute. There is a spectrum without an obvious optimal point. The recent neonazi rally in the UK did a lot of damage that could have easily been prevented. Why does most of Europe have such a higher standard of living?
      - antirealist 4mo ago
        So I agree that "check things that destroy society and make everyone worse off except for a select few if left unchecked" might indeed pass as a valid categorical imperitive. Putting aside the slew of problems with Kantianism, the main issue here is one of epistemology. You think social media is destroying society. Some people think a departure from traditional family values is destroying society. You might be pretty sure you're right, but they're pretty sure they're right too. I'd argue it's better we all just agree these questions are ambiguous and should in principle be outside of the power of the state to mediate. Especially since people are free to not use social media if they don't want to, or to have traditional families if they do want to. Otherwise we're all just fighting to impose our vision on everyone else. And even if you are right - that social media is destroying society - these policies aren't going to stop social media. Even if they could in theory, they will in practive be shoddily designed and implemented and have lots of other messy consequences (e.g. requiring me to upload photos of my face to use things, trusting that companies forced to handle that data will not only not misuse that data, but also be unhackable). > Why does most of Europe have such a higher standard of living? I'm not sure that's true, but even if it is the answer is much more complicated than that they have proactive goverments.
  - Ey7NFZ3P0nzAe 4mo ago
    Adding regulations like this makes it way harder for any competition to come out of the ground.
  - Aerroon 4mo ago
    I don't hate social media. It's very amusing to me to hear about how much people hate social media... on social media. I really think people need to stop using social media for a couple of months and see what it's like to not use it. Personally I find the lack of social media use to be a downside. I never used Facebook and I do occasionally think that I missed out on a lot of stuff because of it.
  - Nasrudith 4mo ago
    We already learned long ago that real name policies don't make people less toxic - they just double down on their bullshit. Seriously it is a sacrifice fallacy that we will actually gain anything by giving up anominity. This black and white thinking that anything bad for things you dislike is frankly just incredibly spiteful and stupid.
  - Chu4eeno 4mo ago
    They should've social media outright if that was the point (it's no more healthy for adults).
- Fnoord 4mo ago
  Which is true. Irma/Yivi [1] in NL/BE proves that to be the case. But it always works with a trusted third party. The client, after confirming auth with the human, generates a unique key for the platform. The platform asks the trusted third party to verify this key, and then a scope is defined. For example: 'is this person 18+?' the response to the platform is then 'Yes' or 'No'. [1] https://yivi.app https://yivi.app
  - chopin 4mo ago
    So, the trusted third party gets to know which sites you visit?
    - essentia0 4mo ago
      No.
    - Fnoord 4mo ago
      No, they don't have to (this is a common myth and FUD). That data can remain encrypted and private. For example, the token could be signed with the private key from person and TTP. They do know when people visit a website (or other entity requiring auth) but anyone with network access does. All the platform gets to know a person 18+ is visiting their platform. In their data analysis, they could add such information to the rest of their data analysis such as IP, but this wouldn't be within scope (illegal in EU). Just worth it to mention in case a platform gets compromised. So: Username Bob, age 18+ (verified), from IPv4 1.2.3.4, visited PronHub, at 2 AM, with browser XYZ. vs Username Bob, from IPv4 1.2.3.4, visited PronHub, at 2 AM, with browser XYZ. If Bob isn't logged in, they have to auth every time they visit. And this is going to happen due to nefarious actors. LLMs (AI), as well as state actors in countries behind the other fence of Iron Curtsin in the New Cold War.
      - chopin 4mo ago
        How can the third party not know I visited pronhub when pronhub verifies a token with the third party handed to me by the third party? This may protect my privacy towards pronhub if I am not logged in. But not my privacy against the third party where I need to be logged in and who likely knows my real identity.
onion2k 4mo ago
Some people think it'd be reasonable to have every car reporting it's GPS position and speed to the government to stop people speeding, or to have facial recognition cameras on ever corner to catch criminals, or to make everyone carry an ID card that people can demand to see. On the face of it living in a police state is safe, and secure, and actually increases your freedom to just live your life without pain. And if these systems were never abused that might be true. But sadly, the reality is that every time these things are implemented they end up being used against the citizens. So they're always a terrible idea.
- weezing 4mo ago
  I guess some people living in countries with high crime rates are just tired of it, therefore they are just looking for any solution. In safer countries where you don't have potential criminals on every corner the perspective is different. I wouldn't want 24/7 surveillance in Poland or Czechia but I would consider them being lesser evil in big US or UK cities.
  - graemep 4mo ago
    Which UK cities have high crime rates? The murder rate in the UK is much lower than in the US and slightly higher than in Poland, been trending down for a long time and pretty typical for a developed country.
    - amanaplanacanal 4mo ago
      Which points to another issue: people's perception of how much crime exists probably correlates more with how much media they consume than what the real crime rates are.
- ropable 4mo ago
  Nice straw man! Be a shame if it was a logical fallacy.
selfhoster1312 4mo ago
I'd be interested to know how it could be a good thing. I'm all for shutting down Facebook entirely and jailing their executives, but i don't think age verification is an appropriate answer. It's already common at least here in France for Facebook to request user ID cards (wtf) and that has not at all stopped harassment, nazism, fake news, etc...
- divan 4mo ago
  What age verification has to do with stopping fake news or harassment?
- knorker 4mo ago
  Are you talking about the goal being bad, or the methods being bad, or that the goal inherently cannot be achieved without bad methods? E.g. I think something pretty uncontroversial would be a goal of blocking kids from the likes of TikTok & Instagram between 22:00 and 08:00.[1] But if I'm an adult, that's a different matter. Ok, so how do I prove I'm an adult, without society turning into a surveillance state, or surveillance capitalism? Next up: wouldn't it be nice if e.g. someone over the age of 30 couldn't initiate chats (including comments on posts) with 13 year olds? For hobby exceptions (e.g. joining a computer or chess club) it would make sense to either have parental approval, or some moderation requirements for parental approval exempt groups. [1] I'm here not saying that this is the biggest problem, but it should at least be uncontroversial.
  - fsflover 4mo ago
    [dead]
  - selfhoster1312 4mo ago
    The goal is good. Like i said, i think those kinds of social networks are evil and their executives should be jailed. That being said, the methods are really bad. Are they efficient? No. Kids can still access discord despite age verification. And some kids can still max out their parent's credit card despite not being old enough to own a bank account. Do those methods produce other net negatives? Yes. Standardizing digital identity leads us one step closer to dystopian nightmares from sci-fi books. Are there better alternatives? Yes. Jail the CEOs. And if your government is too corrupt for that, they could at the very least raise awareness. Governments didn't have to mandate fingerprint readers on cigarettes to fight smoking. They found other ways and there are less kids smoking now than in the previous generation. Also, they could still jail the tobacco CEOs who lied publicly (and under oath) for decades.
fsflover 4mo ago
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47952306 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47952306

You say that like it's a bad thing. Not everyone thinks so.

by ropable 4mo ago

You say that like it's a bad thing. Not everyone thinks so.

You're right, some people are misguided and think age verification can be done in a way that isn't the death of privacy and anonymity online.

tardedmeme 4mo ago
Don't we all hate social media? From that standpoint, anything that makes it hard to use or come with direct negative consequences is good.
- whateverboat 4mo ago
  Age verification for social media looks like it is different from age verification for internet. But it really is not.
  - tardedmeme 4mo ago
    Is social media the internet? You could also open a website.
- mort96 4mo ago
  What do you mean by "social media"? We all hate Facebook, but do we all hate Hacker News? Mastodon? A Discord or IRC community for an online game? I'm all for age restrictions for certain kinds of social media, but age verification is a system of surveillance and the death of online privacy.
  - tardedmeme 4mo ago
    So, the actual laws are targeting things more specifically than just "social media". Some are talking about intentionally addictive content algorithms, or personalized algorithms. Others are naming specific named companies. Don't confuse social media with social networks. Social media is media - they select what you watch, like a TV channel, but personalized for each user. You might get a narrow choice from several options they selected. Social networks are just tools for communication. I used the word "algorithm" so I'm going to preemptively point out that it means something in relation to social media that's more specific than what it means in computer science.
    - omegastick 4mo ago
      In the UK they are not. In fact they are significantly broader. Anything which hosts "user-generated content" visible to other users.
- antirealist 4mo ago
  I wholeheartedly disagree. When we consider a policy, it's not enough that the narrow outcome is good. What also matters are the broad outcomes and whether or not the policy is principled. We presumably all hate Alex Jones. Does that mean the goverment saying "Alex Jones is banned from communicating publically" is good policy? Even if we agree the direct outcome is good (which I do), the principle of "the governement can silence people it doesn't like" is profoundly dangerous. In such a case I would argue we should all resist such a policy, even if we like the outcome (Alex Jones being silenced) because the principle (the majority can use the governement to silence a minority) is terrible. This isn't even accounting for the messy second order effects, e.g. radicalising Alex Jones supporters. I think that applies to social media too. I don't like social media. However even more than that I'm scared of people using the government to limit what other people what they can and can't do for "their own good". This isn't a principle I think we can get behind. I think it's a principle that has motivated a lot of misguided acts in the past (e.g. criminalisation of drugs, sex work, taking the kids of first nations people in Australia, ...).
  - tardedmeme 4mo ago
    The categorical imperative should be used here. "Arrest people I don't like" fails the categorical imperative. However, "check things that destroy society and make everyone worse off except for a select few if left unchecked" easily passes the bar. Nothing is absolute. There is a spectrum without an obvious optimal point. The recent neonazi rally in the UK did a lot of damage that could have easily been prevented. Why does most of Europe have such a higher standard of living?
    - antirealist 4mo ago
      So I agree that "check things that destroy society and make everyone worse off except for a select few if left unchecked" might indeed pass as a valid categorical imperitive. Putting aside the slew of problems with Kantianism, the main issue here is one of epistemology. You think social media is destroying society. Some people think a departure from traditional family values is destroying society. You might be pretty sure you're right, but they're pretty sure they're right too. I'd argue it's better we all just agree these questions are ambiguous and should in principle be outside of the power of the state to mediate. Especially since people are free to not use social media if they don't want to, or to have traditional families if they do want to. Otherwise we're all just fighting to impose our vision on everyone else. And even if you are right - that social media is destroying society - these policies aren't going to stop social media. Even if they could in theory, they will in practive be shoddily designed and implemented and have lots of other messy consequences (e.g. requiring me to upload photos of my face to use things, trusting that companies forced to handle that data will not only not misuse that data, but also be unhackable). > Why does most of Europe have such a higher standard of living? I'm not sure that's true, but even if it is the answer is much more complicated than that they have proactive goverments.
- Ey7NFZ3P0nzAe 4mo ago
  Adding regulations like this makes it way harder for any competition to come out of the ground.
- Aerroon 4mo ago
  I don't hate social media. It's very amusing to me to hear about how much people hate social media... on social media. I really think people need to stop using social media for a couple of months and see what it's like to not use it. Personally I find the lack of social media use to be a downside. I never used Facebook and I do occasionally think that I missed out on a lot of stuff because of it.
- Nasrudith 4mo ago
  We already learned long ago that real name policies don't make people less toxic - they just double down on their bullshit. Seriously it is a sacrifice fallacy that we will actually gain anything by giving up anominity. This black and white thinking that anything bad for things you dislike is frankly just incredibly spiteful and stupid.
- Chu4eeno 4mo ago
  They should've social media outright if that was the point (it's no more healthy for adults).
Fnoord 4mo ago
Which is true. Irma/Yivi [1] in NL/BE proves that to be the case. But it always works with a trusted third party. The client, after confirming auth with the human, generates a unique key for the platform. The platform asks the trusted third party to verify this key, and then a scope is defined. For example: 'is this person 18+?' the response to the platform is then 'Yes' or 'No'. [1] https://yivi.app https://yivi.app
- chopin 4mo ago
  So, the trusted third party gets to know which sites you visit?
  - essentia0 4mo ago
    No.
  - Fnoord 4mo ago
    No, they don't have to (this is a common myth and FUD). That data can remain encrypted and private. For example, the token could be signed with the private key from person and TTP. They do know when people visit a website (or other entity requiring auth) but anyone with network access does. All the platform gets to know a person 18+ is visiting their platform. In their data analysis, they could add such information to the rest of their data analysis such as IP, but this wouldn't be within scope (illegal in EU). Just worth it to mention in case a platform gets compromised. So: Username Bob, age 18+ (verified), from IPv4 1.2.3.4, visited PronHub, at 2 AM, with browser XYZ. vs Username Bob, from IPv4 1.2.3.4, visited PronHub, at 2 AM, with browser XYZ. If Bob isn't logged in, they have to auth every time they visit. And this is going to happen due to nefarious actors. LLMs (AI), as well as state actors in countries behind the other fence of Iron Curtsin in the New Cold War.
    - chopin 4mo ago
      How can the third party not know I visited pronhub when pronhub verifies a token with the third party handed to me by the third party? This may protect my privacy towards pronhub if I am not logged in. But not my privacy against the third party where I need to be logged in and who likely knows my real identity.

onion2k 4mo ago

Some people think it'd be reasonable to have every car reporting it's GPS position and speed to the government to stop people speeding, or to have facial recognition cameras on ever corner to catch criminals, or to make everyone carry an ID card that people can demand to see. On the face of it living in a police state is safe, and secure, and actually increases your freedom to just live your life without pain. And if these systems were never abused that might be true. But sadly, the reality is that every time these things are implemented they end up being used against the citizens. So they're always a terrible idea.

weezing 4mo ago
I guess some people living in countries with high crime rates are just tired of it, therefore they are just looking for any solution. In safer countries where you don't have potential criminals on every corner the perspective is different. I wouldn't want 24/7 surveillance in Poland or Czechia but I would consider them being lesser evil in big US or UK cities.
- graemep 4mo ago
  Which UK cities have high crime rates? The murder rate in the UK is much lower than in the US and slightly higher than in Poland, been trending down for a long time and pretty typical for a developed country.
  - amanaplanacanal 4mo ago
    Which points to another issue: people's perception of how much crime exists probably correlates more with how much media they consume than what the real crime rates are.
ropable 4mo ago
Nice straw man! Be a shame if it was a logical fallacy.

selfhoster1312 4mo ago

I'd be interested to know how it could be a good thing. I'm all for shutting down Facebook entirely and jailing their executives, but i don't think age verification is an appropriate answer. It's already common at least here in France for Facebook to request user ID cards (wtf) and that has not at all stopped harassment, nazism, fake news, etc...

divan 4mo ago
What age verification has to do with stopping fake news or harassment?
knorker 4mo ago
Are you talking about the goal being bad, or the methods being bad, or that the goal inherently cannot be achieved without bad methods? E.g. I think something pretty uncontroversial would be a goal of blocking kids from the likes of TikTok & Instagram between 22:00 and 08:00.[1] But if I'm an adult, that's a different matter. Ok, so how do I prove I'm an adult, without society turning into a surveillance state, or surveillance capitalism? Next up: wouldn't it be nice if e.g. someone over the age of 30 couldn't initiate chats (including comments on posts) with 13 year olds? For hobby exceptions (e.g. joining a computer or chess club) it would make sense to either have parental approval, or some moderation requirements for parental approval exempt groups. [1] I'm here not saying that this is the biggest problem, but it should at least be uncontroversial.
- fsflover 4mo ago
  [dead]
- selfhoster1312 4mo ago
  The goal is good. Like i said, i think those kinds of social networks are evil and their executives should be jailed. That being said, the methods are really bad. Are they efficient? No. Kids can still access discord despite age verification. And some kids can still max out their parent's credit card despite not being old enough to own a bank account. Do those methods produce other net negatives? Yes. Standardizing digital identity leads us one step closer to dystopian nightmares from sci-fi books. Are there better alternatives? Yes. Jail the CEOs. And if your government is too corrupt for that, they could at the very least raise awareness. Governments didn't have to mandate fingerprint readers on cigarettes to fight smoking. They found other ways and there are less kids smoking now than in the previous generation. Also, they could still jail the tobacco CEOs who lied publicly (and under oath) for decades.

fsflover 4mo ago

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47952306 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47952306