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by rTX5CMRXIfFG 33 days ago
Violation of rights to privacy — age verification ties an identity to the request, so if you’re surfing porn or browsing controversial threads, you could be flagged by law enforcement or the other third parties that the state might be sharing data with, such as insurance companies that might infer the wrong things about you. You could be blackmailed, too.

And then there’s also the leakage of those data points to rival nation states, in case of a security breach.

Plenty of bad nth order effects if you just think about it

1 comments

What right to privacy do you have online? For the record, I am fully against this but people just throw the word "right" around. In another thread here people had a "right" to Anthropic's latest model. It almost becomes a joke. You have a right not to use the internet, but if you do the government can make laws, however shitty, if they want to. Relying on "rights" as an argument fails quickly in my opinion. You have a right to buy a gun, but a lot of places require verification. You have the right to be alcohol or porn, but that requires age verification. What right do you have to go online without providing verification? If you can't provide a legal basis, come up with a better argument because yours is easily dismissed.
Uh, why do you think that a legal basis is the correct foundation on which to anchor an argument in favor of privacy? Laws vary per jurisdiction. Which country’s laws are you saying is the correct point of reference?

Besides, for democracies, explicit mentions of a “right to privacy” would typically be enshrined in a bill of rights which isn’t “law” in itself, but only cited as founding principles behind actual laws, such as those against wiretapping, which you probably have wherever you live.

I’m not sure why you think that legality is a meaningful point of discussion at all. The subject is clearly a matter of principle. Heck, authoritarian states probably don’t have bills of rights and commit all sorts of atrocities on their citizens, but I’d talk about the right to a fair trial all the same.

And please don’t conflate this with other issues and other threads