- cross-posted to:
- privacy@programming.dev
- cross-posted to:
- privacy@programming.dev
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It’s so funny to me how badly people want this to be some nefarious governmental conspiracy. Listen, the government already has much better tools to track you online. Your computer has, on a hardware level, sent unique identifiers to ISPs and websites since Pentium IIIs. This age requirement thing isn’t a government conspiracy to track you, they already track you.
It is a *corporate *conspiracy. It’s Meta and other major websites, games, and applications companies that want to off load their liability. Meta and Alphabet just lost major lawsuits for their negligence in protecting kids on their own websites. There is a liability dam about to break for these companies and schools and other advocacy groups start their own lawsuits. That’s what this is about. That’s the real conspiracy.
They also want a reliable way to differentiate between chatbots and real users, because advertising isn’t very effective on chatbots.
But also, one benefit of ID laws for the government is that it makes court proceedings much faster and cheaper. Sure, they’re tracking everyone online, but a lot of that information is locked behind procedure. By just requiring ID to log in they can sidestep the procedures, because they can just ask corporations nicely for ID information and they’ll eagerly comply.
I didn’t know about that. Maybe that’s plays into it too. But I’m generally a “simpler answer is more likely the most correct” type of guy.
In this case the simple answer is that Meta and others just had their “Tobacco Lawsuits” moment in court and liability floodgates are any to open wide, and they are pushing these laws to divert their liability onto someone else.
“Corporations want a way to verify the humanity of users” is a simple answer.
“Governments want a way to easily prosecute users” is also a simple answer.
I don’t see why it can’t be all of these things. There is actually a more complicated answer that I didn’t bring up, which is that smaller websites will have a hard time complying with ID laws, which gives preferential treatment to large websites. That locks out potential competition, hinders smaller projects like lemmy or mastodon, and helps secure the current social media monopolies.
That one might just be a useful side effect, rather than the intentional outcome.
Your computer has, on a hardware level, sent unique identifiers to ISPs and websites since Pentium IIIs.
Source?
Source.
I’m not the person who made the claim but Device Fingerprinting has been around for decades and Hardware ID is certainly part of that.
That’s not the computer doing it, that’s the services you use going out of their way to gather one by combining data which has other legitimate purposes. Not so much being “sent” as it is being “abused”.
Unless we want to count Microsoft’s “advertiser ID”.
Google “Protected Processor Identification Number (PPIN)” to learn more.
When is this being sent
to ISPs and websites
as claimed?
Let’s say this is the official narrative. My argument:
- Meta stands to consolidate power and revenue from further mapping devices to real people.
- Meta was also originally backed by Peter Thiel, who trades in data mining for secret services, now much more energetically. Zuckerberg is a sexist idiot and his app had no more merit than MySpace. Thiel saw the potential of mapping real idenities to online behavior, and it is no accident Palantir was later implicated in Cambridge Analytica.
- A redditor came up with concrete data that others have already posted, that show that Meta’s dark money are all over this case. As for the fine you say that completely explains this, is a very modest for Meta, who is used to pay such fines as a cost of doing business.
- Amongst the orgs taking Meta’s money to push this are many conservative organizations, like Heritage but also others (anti-sex, anti-abortion, and anti-trans organizations), who know that these laws will effectively suppress speech. Much like the trans moral panics, the laws are not as stupid as they appear, but carefully designed to obliquely achieve their goals (e.g. police bodies with wombs, in line with the same orgs’ anti-abortion positions).
- Governments watch closely as the new corporatist technofascism undoes regulations and checks and balances. They stand to gain from the turmoil and increase their surveillance capabilities even more. Alternatively, some EU goverments might be thinking that this is a way to stick it to US tech monopolies that brainwash their constituents, but they are wrong.
- In fact, the approach and outcomes hints toward government contractors in cahoots with surveillance agencies, that it would be surprising if there is no adjacency to Analytica personnel and/or the benefits for state actors and spooks are just an unplanned side-effect.
Conclusion: There is sufficient basis to consider that the official narrative is not the whole story.
The biggest problem with conspiracy theories like this is always the number of people involved keeping their mouths shut. Anyone that has ever managed a large project knows how impossible it is to keep a large group of people quiet about something. In real life, there are conspiracies. Often very large ones. But they didn’t stay secret for long.
What is easier to believe: (1) that all these people involved, across countries with leaders of many different political varieties, all agreed to stick to a single narrative in order to cover up a deep international conspiracy to build a massive international database of people’s ages online, OR (2) Meta and other orgs are doing a normal business thing and trying to reduce their liability costs.
Not everyone needs to be ‘in the know’, in fact most of the time people won’t even try to think through a position and it’s consequences. They’ll just support it based on surface level arguments. Also Meta isn’t exactly drowning in liability when they’re raking in billions in profit. Power stands to gain when information is controlled
You really underestimate the trouble meta and YouTube are in. The specific rulings were barely tickets to them, but if they are upheld then follows flood gates of identical lawsuits are going to be opened up. They had millions and millions of child users in the 2010s that they knowingly served an addictive product to. If the current ruling is upheld, then there will likely be a very large class action settlement to payoff all the past injured users. But instead of changing their product going forward they want to get rid of the responsibility for their product entirely.
Stop making up fake conspiracies and be mad about that.
Source: trust me bro
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I’m starting to think the tinfoil hat people were onto something
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Just admit that we’re in an informational WWIII already.
Separate issue I think but yeah, we are
Nanny state surveillance.
Welp, this was bound to happen, wasn’t it? I’m pretty sure they’re referring to this application, which I stumbled upon a while back. If I remember correctly, the app “allows” (or implicitly forces) the user to store a government issued identity: able to attest to an age-restricted website, whether or not the user is of age.
It does this, supposedly by “just” sharing an age-bracket with the website; but here’s the kicker: the Union, in its generosity, has granted their citizens an in-app option, to withdraw this signal from the websites it has been provided to. What this means in practice, is the app storing one’s government-issued identify, also ties back to every account requiring “age-verification”…
So now, every device containing the app, has the owner’s government-issued identify on it, together with connections to every age-restricted service. And considering the apps are maintained by the Union, or member states (through their own implementations), creating a backdoor to the application’s contents… I mean to “observe app usage”, would be absolutely trivial.
Again, I’ve read it a while back, so some things might’ve changed, and my memory might be spotty; but I’m quite sure it’s along the lines I’ve described.
Kill your fucking owners or you cannot have nice things.
We have too much tech. Capitalism and authoritarianism are no longer compatible with progress or survival.
Fuck it, I’ll just host my own Lemmy instance.
Unless it becomes bigger, after that they’ll come for you.
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just ban this bigtech “social” media for everyone and push people to fediverse then.
What about this is particularly “co-ordinated”? I’m not in favour of this at all but conspiratorial thinking is unhelpful.
The headline literally says that Macron is pushing for a coordinated approach with the rest of the EU. From the article; “The main goal is to act in a coordinated manner and push the European Commission, in the positive sense of the term, to move ahead at the same pace as member states.” I’m not particularly sure why you’re dismissing this as conspiratorial. It’s just out in the open.
Yes, pushing for. That means it’s not yet. The commenter in the OP says it’s “already so coordinated” as if there’s a shadowy force behind it all pulling the strings.
Do you think it doesn’t require coordination to have a meeting? Without coordination, no one shows up.
The coordination is already happening and after this it will likely increase.
Sure, if calling for a meeting is “already SO coordinated” as to be worth mentioning, I suppose.
It’s absolutely worth mentioning that they are coordinated enough to all meet up to discuss their plans for us. If this was a fringe idea it wouldn’t go anywhere, everyone is ready to consider the idea even if they still need to be convinced to implement it.
Every single part of this is coordinated. The people do not want this but the governments are pushing it through top down.
That’s not what coordinated means.
It shall be banned for kids/teenagers. The problem is the prehistoric usage of ID. It is possible to have IDs which just disclose the answer to ‘are you above legal age?’ with a boolean and not the age. The question is, do they want to push for global surveillance, because they know we don’t have ZK-featured IDs in most countries? (Based on zero knowledge proofs).
These people do not care about protecting kids. Most kids are molested or abused by their loved ones. These “leaders” have their friends and family raping kids bffr.
Didn’t the tech companies threaten to leave if they were taxed? Seems easier to tax the tech companies than force people to identify themselves.
Banning social media for minors isn’t a new thing they are pushing. At all.
It’s not a new thing but what’s new is the coordinated top-down push for it.
And this isn’t just about banning social media for minors. It’s about how to verify if someone is an adult.
It’s only been in talks for what? two years max?
So what if you do not verify you wont able to browse p0rn or what?
No. There will still be a billion ways to acquire pornography. This won’t solve anything. Personally I don’t think this is something that needs solving, all the tools required to do so are already available for those that want them.
This is about surveillance.
