We must keep age verification from killing anonymity online | Proton
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Powerful forces are exploiting parents’ fears to strengthen their toxic business models. Here’s how we stop them.

Online threats to children are real, but the headlong pursuit of age verification that we’re seeing around the world is unacceptable in its approach and far too broad in scope — and we simply can’t afford to get this wrong.

To be clear, parents’ concerns are valid and sincere. Few people would argue that kids should have unfettered access to adult material, to self-harm how-tos, to social media platforms that manipulate them and expose them to abuse.

But it’s the very depth of those worries that is being cynically exploited. Age verification as is currently being proposed in country after country would mean the death of anonymity online.

And we know exactly who stands to gain: The same tech giants who built the privacy nightmare that the internet is today.

  • Disillusionist@piefed.worldEnglish
    1·
    2 days ago

    I don’t profess to have “the answer”, and you’re right that it’s complicated. You’re also right that the state of things is bad and getting worse.

    I hear anti-privacy arguments as pivoting the call for transparency away from the companies providing the harmful, toxic, and exploitative services onto end-users. This effectively bypasses the discussion about corporate accountability, in effect enabling corporate abusers to largely reframe the problems they enable or facilitate as problems of the public at large. This means discussion and efforts become focused on how to apply regulation to the public rather than corporate providers.

    It’s a win-win for Big Tech, since they avoid serious talks about culpability for the harms they create, while simultaneously benefitting from the greater degree of data extraction made possible by the increased surveillance directed at consumers.

    One recent article at It’s Foss is about age verification and similar measures, and touched on a lot of this. Here are a couple quotes I found relevant:

    Safety becomes the moral language through which a more identity‑locked, surveilled, and centralized internet is made to feel inevitable.

    The saddest thing about this moment is how narrow the mainstream imagination of alternatives remains. The policy menu is filled with bans, curfews, and ID checks for the same extractive platforms. There is little serious talk of changing the infrastructure.

    This is pretty much exactly my sentiment. If we’re honestly looking for “answers” to these problems, we need to be willing to see them for what they are and where they actually lie. I’d say that goes for basically all kinds of problem solving, and I think that kind of common sense troubleshooting mindset is as necessary in this situation as any other. Just doing something to fix a problem rather than what’s actually appropriate is often a recipe for more problems.