[sspiff]

I'm fine with providing my identity for online banking and other finance platforms for legal & taxation purposes.

I can't think of a single other use case in which I'd be willing to verify my identity. I'd rather go back to hosting email myself, and am fine with circumventing content access control for all other platforms for personal use.

We're seeing the world slide towards authoritarian strongmen, and we want to give them a massive index of who we are and what we do? I'd rather not.

[marmarama]

The problem is those self-same authoritarian strongmen are very successfully using sockpuppeting to change national discourses in ways that benefit them and are detrimental to the targeted countries. Hybrid war is real and has been ongoing for more than a decade. LLMs make it way more cost effective.

Being able to limit the influence of external bad actors is the main goal of ID verification. Age verification is a useful side effect that makes it easier to sell to the general public.

Big Tech has had at least a decade to fix this, did nothing of note, and is all out of ideas. Privacy advocates had the same time to figure out a "least bad" technical solution, but got so obsessed with railing against it happening at all, that nothing got any traction.

So governments are here to legislate, for better or worse. They know it's a trade-off between being undermined by external forces vs. the systems being abused by future governments, but their take is that a future authoritarian government will end up implementing something similar anyway.

[malfist]

> Being able to limit the influence of external bad actors is the main goal of ID verification. Age verification is a useful side effect that makes it easier to sell to the general public.

How? People already sell their accounts to spammers. Why would that change?

[inkysigma]

Depending on the implementation, I could see that having rate limiting effects. There're only finitely many IDs so scaling sockpuppeting will saturate these IDs quickly but it's quite easy to spin up a new anonymous account. For example, I think the EU ID system has an upcoming way to create pseudo anonymous identifiers that can identify a user per website.

This presents the problem of governments being able to gatekeep speech which I am quite uncomfortable with but maybe there's some safeguard within the eIDAS proposal that makes this idea incorrect?

[hellojesus]

The internet is for the free exchange of ideas! Why would we want to limit it because some random gov somewhere is writing comments? Allow your citizens to think!

[ajam1507]

> Being able to limit the influence of external bad actors is the main goal of ID verification.

How does automatically determining your age serve the goal of ID verification? It seems like most sites are choosing this as the first option. If the point was to link your ID, why wouldn't they ask everyone to provide it?

[specialist]

Correct.

The choice is between democracy and our current ever worsening sociopolitical hellscape.

If eliminating bots and sockpuppets is the price for restoring some semblance of democracy, then gosh darn.

And if social media, targeted ads, and algorithmic hate machines are collateral damage, than gee double gosh darn.

Those sacrifices are a price I'm willing to pay.

[anextio]

> "Democracy" is when "bad actors" (as defined by the establishment) are shut out of all online discourse.

The point of ID laws is not to stop "bots" or "sockpuppets", it's to enable governments to shut down the speech of their political adversaries by painting them as dangerous. That is not democracy, that is authoritarianism, even if you absolutely hate the people that are being shut up.

Western countries are not in the midst of polarized political crises because of "external bad actors" or "sockpuppets". They're in these crises because of fundamental contradictions in values and desired policies between different segments of the populace.

The Europeans are currently full steam ahead in attempting to "fix" the situation by criminalizing dissent, which will, in the end, only exacerbate the political crisis by making the democratic system illegitimate.

[specialist]

> The point of ID laws is not to stop "bots"...

Then make it the point.

The Internet is already all but dead. We could fix it (as I propose). Or we let it die.

I'm fine with either outcome.

> criminalizing dissent

When has that not been true? Serious question.

Socrates was compelled to commit suicide. Jesus was nailed to a cross. Journalist and activists are routinely murdered. How many political prisoners are there right now?

The outcome you fear happened a long time ago.

[hellojesus]

Yet we discourse here just fine. The internet isn't dead. It's just boring if you go to the boring parts.

[specialist]

> The internet isn't dead.

I was referring to: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_Internet_theory#Claims

> Yet we discourse here just fine.

True. But what makes HN an outlier?

[areoform]

Do you truly believe that ID "verification" will do anything in a world where IDs are leaked by the tens of thousands to the millions?

You are shifting the onus on to the platforms, when the problem is pretty simple; with a few exceptions, we've failed as a species to learn how to think.

Also do you think that the TLAs don't know who the bots most likely are with all the surveillance data they're gathering? That the NSA doesn't have detailed telemetry of the surveillance ops??

Let me ask you the question, what have they done about it? And why not?

[jonathanstrange]

> Being able to limit the influence of external bad actors is the main goal of ID verification.

Then they should say so. Elected officials lying to and misleading the public when their real intentions differ is almost criminal. It's not a behavior anyone should ever support. I will not vote for people who do that.

[drawfloat]

The stated reason is also true in most cases. Imgur was caught harvesting and selling childrens’ data for advertising purposes, TikTok and others are also known to do this. There’s only so long you can avoid fixing a problem before states start to step in.

[jonathanstrange]

I don't think "we technically don't lie, we're only actively deceiving you" is a good defense strategy. The politicians you defend need to decide on a narrative for the justification, meandering between different ones is not increasing credibility and a problem on its own.

[Barbing]

>circumventing

I would say the time to buy mesh networking equipment is now. But it's not like I'm capable of defending the transmitter. So when they come for the VPNs, the VPSs, and encryption, I guess I'll just be out of luck.

(Out of luck = resigned to zero digital privacy. No matter I follow the law and “have nothing to hide” of course.)

Perhaps people will pass flash drives like North Korea or Cuba?

[p0w3n3d]

I've seen a channel demonetised because they showed how to use MP3 player and it was deemed "spreading piracy" by Google. So I guess flash drives would get illegal as well...

[jim33442]

Which channel and which MP3 player? Cause if you're talking about Limewire...

[p0w3n3d]

This is from Polish internet bubble.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sSxG8WHMw1g

Corrections: the channel was not demonetised, the video was removed

[chneu]

People trade away longevity for short term convenience. Then when that convenience is shown to be bad/unhealthy people refuse to give up that convenience.

So many aspects of our lives are like this now. People just accept defeat cuz it would mean giving up one click ordering or free return shipping or they might have to look at labels to avoid bad companies.

[p0w3n3d]

It's because people are too busy and distracted to understand and even listen to what dangers are heading towards them

[Henchman21]

And this WILL CONTINUE until we choose to turn off and walk away from THE GREAT DISTRACTION MACHINE. We call it “social media”.

[SiempreViernes]

Honestly I think these age verification laws are blunt instruments responding to the decade of avoided moderation the big platforms have managed to pull off.

I've run ad blockers for years now, but I'm still trying to forget those disgusting zit popping pictures that trended in ads for a while. Or those incredibly stupid life hack shorts, like the one where someone tied a cord around a mug and the hack to get it loose was smashing the cup... that crap made me despair for humanity as much as the Gaza genocide.

But google and facebook convinced the legislators that it would be impossible to keep that chum away from kids on their platform, so the legislators are going with the next option: banning the kids from the platforms.

[hellojesus]

Heaven forbid their parents denylist the urls on their routers...