[ggm]

Online discussion of this tends to the super negative. I've said here and in reddit flows that I think digerati seriously underestimate how concerned parents are. I think this move is possibly more popular than people give credence to. (-my son is 32 and I do not claim to be super concerned on his behalf)

It's clear from this article your historical relationship with a search agent like Google can inform their sense of need to check ID: I have a 20+ year old google identity and they know me inside out.

I also tend to hammer on about homomorphic encryption. There is no need for a third party who sees your 100pts identity checks to know where you go. For me personally, noting a technical fix to a social problem is unusual, I tend to say it's a mistake to reach for tech fixing society, but the paranoia around "the government sees my activity proving who I am" has a specific, cryptographically defined solution.

[jiggawatts]

There’s a much simpler solution: the government can stay out of my personal pastimes.

It’s simply none of their business.

Parents have commercially available solutions for censoring their own home internet if they choose.

They and the government has no need to track my activities online to do so.

PS: The Australian Government says they can be trusted with this power but has abused it every time. Every. Time.

[ggm]

If they used homomorphic third party checks, they wouldn't be in your search. It's none of their business and they can't know.

Look I get it, I'll probably be in VPN too sometimes. But you kind of delivered my message: you hate it, you don't seem to think a LOT of parents will want it.

Clean feed DNS is only so useful.

I'm guessing you also don't like MyGov ID either. Or Hawk's Australia card. Personally I like one stop shop for my tax and medicals and centrelink.

So what abuse specifically are you referring to in "this power" and abuse? Police access? ASIO access?

[jiggawatts]

There’s nothing wrong with government ID for government services. They need to know who I am to serve me.

Government tracking which sites I visit is not okay.

PS: I’ve worked for every organisation you’ve mentioned. I trust none of them, at all, precisely because I’ve seen how ineptly they deal with citizen data first hand. Not a single person I’ve met in the IT departments of any of those orgs could spell homomorphic, let alone implement such an algorithm in a meaningfully privacy preserving way.

[ggm]

Forgive a non cryptographers naieve question, but isn't the whole point the third party acts as a cut out so the only role of government is to warrant the KYC 100pts has been met, not in what context the question is being asked?

Ie, it explicitly doesn't trust government to "not do the bad thing" by hiding the information from them.

[jiggawatts]

Apologies if I misunderstood your question, but I suspect it doesn't matter because the answer would be the same in any event.

This whole discussion for me is a bit like hearing that my child is safe at the kindergarten because the male staff promise to always use condoms.

The relative safety of various cryptographic approaches (or fancy protocols) is irrelevant when the fundamental problem is that it is deeply suspicious that the government keeps trying to insert themselves into my private life. In my crude analogy, they'd be a registered sex offender working in child care.

Any such repeated attempt at spying on the public, blocking opposing political voices, silencing journalists, or anything at all that even smells like those things must be vehemently opposed. Platitudes and assurances can never be enough from a government with a history of abusing this kind of power.