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This is absolutely insane. Creating a surveillance dystopia “for the children”. What about that even sounds like a good idea?
Greetings from germany to my fellow germans who had a light chuckle seeing Censorsula announcing a zero knowledge app.
She must be very envious of Xi, or rather, her lobbyists are. The place for rotten corrupt politicians should be in prison for life, not on a comfortable throne in Brussels.
Why the comparisons with China? Doubt that they’re using zero knowledge proofs and open source.
None of that matters because the objective is the same. This measure is simply the normalization of government and corporate overreach towards authoritarianism under the flimsy excuse that it’s to protect children.
They know very well that it’s unpopular, and therefore western leaders are coming up with the strategy of implementing this crap all at once and taking a certain care to generate as little further distrust as possible. The enshitification will come later.
The verification making sense and trust in government are 2 separate problems. Not defending here one or the other, just saying that the mixing up doesn’t help.
The verification could make sense with something like a physical gift card.
Go to a store or kiosk, show them your ID card or driver’s license, and they’ll give you a card randomly chosen from the shelf with a code to activate the +18 version of any social network of your choice.
Each code could only be used once. People would have to buy more, at a symbolic cost, for each social network they wished to activate.
I would tend to be against this on principle in the same way, but at least it would be something I could understand where the objective is actually what is being presented (protecting the children), albeit misguided, because to me it is clear that what is currently being promoted and proposed has nothing to do with age verification, but rather with mass surveillance, marketing and censorship. Fascistic authoritarianism.
But now you’re giving your id to third parties. Why do you trust them more than your government, which has that data anyway?
I’d like a more credible source that this is zero knowledge.
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The trust problem in open source is that we can audit the published code, but we have no assurance that what’s published is what’s running
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I would be more interested in EU-wide firewall that blocks all advertisements from outside. Just a little quality of life.
Taxes for big Internet platforms please, and remove any copyright laws that US media imposes in Europe. Looking at the broken YouTube copyright system where anyone can strike channels without any proof or review in particular…
While I understand that China gets much hate for not respecting american copyrights or patents, copying them in Europe might be the right choice. USA is mostly patent trolls anyway
Where are the photos of the document processed though? And if not on the phone itself, is the server backend open source as well? Can I self-host it? And is the data which is used to generate certificates deleted immediately or stored in the backend? I have questions.
Agreed.
It sounds like a better solution than sending photos of ID documents anywhere and everywhere, but at the same time it’s not really different, it’s just centralized. It removes other vectors of privacy breaches, but it doesn’t remove the possibility of a breach entirely.
Just stop requiring age verification to protect an open and anonymous internet. If governments are worried about what kids are doing online, start charging their parents with neglect, because they’re supposed to be the responsible party for their kids’ behavior.
Disagree. Parents apparently cannot oversee the harm they are causing. And the social pressure is too high. So it needs to be regulated.
Parents apparently cannot oversee the harm they are causing.
Then that’s still the parents’ fault, IMO. If you can’t teach your child to use the internet safely and responsibly, or adequately monitor the services they use, then you don’t give them internet-enabled devices.
Imagine if instead of the internet, we were talking about going out after dark. A few kids go out and do stupid things at night, but instead of blaming the parents who let them out unsupervised, we set a national curfew for everyone unless you obtain a nighttime permit from the government. Does that sound reasonable?
Sure it’s the parents fault. The discussion is not whose fault it is but the result. Which means → regulate it.
Your comparison with going out after dark is totally off. It’s much easier to monitor if the kid is in the house than if they access web site they shouldn’t.
Just to blame the parents is too easy. There’s a reason why porn, alcohol, and cigarettes is not allowed to be sold to minors in shops. What you’re asking is that parents shouldn’t allow their kids to to go to shops, just so you don’t have to be provide proof of your age to access to alcohol in your local shop.
More and more of our lives are online and I totally see why we need to do propper online verification for some things.
That’s a lot of very misdirected effort, with a lot of bad and not-at-all-necessary consequences.
I could not imagine myself in this timeline.
Virkkunen said the Commission will also establish a European co-ordination mechanism to ensure consistency as member states implement their own national age verification schemes, which currently vary significantly in approach and minimum age thresholds.
The app arrives as at least a dozen European countries, including the UK and Norway, have enacted or are actively considering legislation setting minimum age limits for social media, typically between 13 and 16 years.
Part of a global lobbying effort as Canada’s governing party, the Liberal Party of Canada, is also discussing age verification simultaneously, as are a number of US states.
“Online platforms can easily rely on our age verification app so there are no more excuses. We will have zero tolerance for companies that do not respect our children’s rights.”
Not being able to access a website is not a right. Being able to browse the web without being exposed to disturbing material without consent can be seen as a right, but it doesn’t require age verification beyond a simple “are you over 18 years old?”.
Being forced to provide an image of yourself or your ID to a website that you can’t trust if you want to access a website or service, if there’s also the option to do it with a zero-knowledge proof, could maybe be seen as a violation of one’s privacy rights (non-functionally-necessary data must be opt-in, AFAIK). But these rights are not limited to children, and it doesn’t apply to under-age them as they won’t be able to access the service anyways.
Zero-knowledge proofs are cool, the german id card has such a feature, afaik. It just certifies that the user is >18 years old, and doesn’t leak the actual age, your name, or other identifiable information, afaik. (I’ve never used it.) I can’t judge what they implemented, or if one can trust that they implement what they specify, or what metadata might be involved.
Being able to access the 18+ side of the web without having to worry about privacy is an important right. It weights more than protecting children from the consequences of their own free decisions in this case, imo.
And I still don’t give a shit what your children do on the Internet. Even the hassle is more than I care to abide, even if it is somehow perfectly safe and private.
A lesser violation of privacy is still a violation of privacy. “It could be worse” isn’t a particularly persuasive argument
Yeah, I also wouldn’t like that kind of argument. My point there was that I don’t know if the implementation actually is not violating privacy.
Fair point. Sorry if I misread it
I’m reminded almost daily of someone saying during the Cheney Administration “1984 was a warning, not a handbook!”
but it doesn’t require age verification beyond a simple “are you over 18 years old?”.
In what world does that stop any kid? Should a bartender also just ask if people are over 18 (or what your drinking age limit is) and then just believe whatever little Johnny says?
Of course it only stops children that want to be stopped, aka it protects them from stuff they want to be protected from.
See also my last sentence:
It weights more than protecting children from the consequences of their own free decisions in this case, imo.
Of course, you can disagree here. The fundamental question is, do we want to let the subject decide by itself, or do - as the lawmaker - the decision for all subjects.
For drinking alcohol I’d prefer latter, because:
- Young humans are less resistant against the bad effects of alcohol than adult ones. (==> Makes sense to restrict only a part of the population.)
- It can be addicting. (==> Hard to make own decision.)
- There can be peer pressure to take drugs. (==> Hard to make own decision.)
- The damages would be expensive for the health care system. (==> Negative effects for all of us, not just the individual.)
For gore and porn I don’t see such points.
If you dont think people can get issues from watching things, you should look up issues people have gotten from having a job of reviewing flagged content on social media sites.
I’m a little confused at what you’re writing, as it seems like you think the children that should choose if they should access a porn (or other adult content) site. They will of cause continue to watch. Just like they would eat doughnuts as a meal all the time if they had the choice.
If you dont think people can get issues from watching things
I do not not think this.
it seems like you think the children that should choose if they should access a porn (or other adult content) site.
Yes. The website should have a warning about its content (one could also make a law that it has to put more information there, about the risks and whatnot. we have this for other things). If the child is old enough to find such content and be curious, they’re probably mature enough to make their own decision.
They will of cause continue to watch.
If it’s that bad that it hurts them immediately, they won’t. And otherwise, it’s still not like they’d get addicted, and so I do not think a short exposure would have negative enough effects to strictly enforce age verification.
Just like they would eat doughnuts as a meal all the time if they had the choice.
Children are allowed to buy food (here in germany). They just need the money and access to a store.
