EU chief calls for a bloc-wide push on an age verification app to protect children online. If enforced, users will have to prove their age to access legally restricted sites.
But please can you tell me how you believe this differs from age-gating the purchase of cigarettes, lottery tickets, age restricted cinema tickets, alcohol, firearms and so many other things we already have age-gating on?
Edit: I’d love any one of the downvoters to comment and actually explain what I’ve said that’s so atrocious? We DO age gate many things in society and many, I dare say most, would not want cigarettes to be available to a 13 year old. So what is it about online that makes it so different? If we CAN make age checks online anonymous (and indeed the EU standard downright requires it) why don’t we want this online?
When you go to purchase those things in person, you present your ID, but then it is given back. They do not keep your ID. They do not get to make a copy of it’s information for them to store and sell and track you with. It is presented at that particular moment, and then control of it is returned to you.
That is not the case with these digital ID requirements. With these digital ID requirements, they absolutely make and keep a copy. They absolutely use the information from that copy to track you and sell your data on to others. They use it to build a profile on you about your behaviours and purchases etc which will absolutely be used to tighten the noose of control. And we’ve already seen, over and over and over again that pretty much every time they claim they aren’t doing those things, they absolutely still are. Even if they weren’t, they’ve also repeatedly demonstrated a complete and utter inability to secure that data from third parties accessing it too.
It is completely different and enormously more invasive than presenting your ID in person.
You don’t need to show ID to enter the store just because they sell cigarettes at the front counter. The staff person checking the OD at the front counter isn’t memorizing the information on the ID and using it to track every other purchase you make in the store, or to piece together what you’re doing once you leave the store.
Locking individual content behind age verification (and it entirely depends on how they are handling the age verification), is different than a blanket identification check to use the platform at all. Age verification is used to prevent children from buying cigarettes from a store while under aged, but it’s up to parents to prevent them from getting cigarettes other ways.
But let’s separate the technical/privacy discussion of age gating from the discussion about age gating social media platforms.
If I go to a Scottish distillery website and buys chocolate, they are not going to age gate me. If I buy whisky they will. That’s not age gating at the door, that’s age gating for a specific product that we, our democratic society, have decided, through democratic means, should not be available to minors.
Regulating social media age gating is a different discussion altogether. The discussion is about whether we want to be able to anonymously check (again, the EU standard requires anonymity) someone’s age online.
Stop moving the goal posts. Also, no one has convincingly shown they can do that anonymously, but lots have shown they CAN’T. You can’t divorce the privacy implications because they are intrinsically linked right now and there is no evidence supporting the ability to unlink them.
You dont have your id printed on every cigarette. The government doesnt dilute the alcohol with unique radiomarkers to track your piss (yet). Firearms tracking is nowhere near this comprehensive or invasive anywhere in the world. Not even on military ranges. Cinema tickets? Really?
Qnd as pointed elsewhere: you font need to show ID if youre just buyong pink monster vegan jerky condoms and new usb cable for your fav sex toy.
But have you read the EU standard? Anonymity is a requirement. There is no tracking. The age check does not refer back to you. Indeed, it cannot.
You can of course believe that the legal requirements aren’t adhered to and that the state is actually lying, but if you believe that the state already has a million ways to track you, including 99.9999% of us who carry our phones around with us and pay with credit cards in physical stores.
It can’t be anonymous if you need a google or apple account to use. I’m not concerned about what the government tracks (well, not in this context at least), I’m concerned about who and what they’re working with to do the tracking. If the app verifies me as an adult but I couldn’t use the app without google butting in, google now has yet another data point in a secret ad profile that the government should be putting a stop to, not helping them build up. It’d be like announcing a plan to stop illegal drug usage by partnering with the cartel.
If they wanted a government-sponsored age verification sort of thing, it should’ve been an app whose only job was to type in a code you got from going in person to some government body and verifying in person. Town office, DMV, somewhere like that.
More fundamentally, though, “protecting the children” shouldn’t go anywhere near anything that can be used for identity theft. Showing my ID to the cashier at the cigarette shop is significantly safer than showing it to any business on the internet, because sharing a high-quality picture of something is giving them a copy. The cashier gets to see it, but it never leaves my sight and isn’t recorded in any way except probably some dodgy security camera where you can’t read it anyway.
When you say “Google butting in” can you be more specific about what it is you believe Google tracks in an app they haven’t made themselves but only ingested in their store? Is it your belief that Google tracks all app interactions even in apps without firebase or Google Ads SDK?
Honestly, I don’t know exactly what google can or can’t track if the app developer doesn’t specifically enable them. I don’t have specific evidence that they’ll even be able to tell if the user was verified or not
What I do know is they have repeatedly shown that they’re happy to hide or lie about what and how they track people, and more broadly about their business as a whole.
Again I cite the drug analogy. Google is in the business of tracking people and harvesting data for ads. It’s like inviting the cartel to the DARE program and expecting everything to go swimmingly.
If they want their age verification app to actually be anonymous, they shouldn’t force people to use a tracking service to use it. The app specifically won’t be functional on degoogled android phones and won’t be offered on desktop computers. Maybe Google can’t spy on anything going on in the app, but even so, they could correlate “used verification app, roblox usage went up” or “used verification app, continued to use Tinder, concluded adult, ignoring ‘do not track’ preference as it doesn’t violate laws about tracking minors”.
It’s true that a minority of users have taken the steps where this inferred information would be particularly helpful to google, but not having the option to opt out is going to get harder and harder, and this service doesn’t provide enough good to give the information cartel that is Google any more information, even inferred, in my opinion.
@sunbeam60@Squizzy forr me the issue is mass survilance… Gate keeping cigarretes dont record the number of times a kid or a adult tried to but cigarretes
Parents should protect children online.
I largely agree with you.
But please can you tell me how you believe this differs from age-gating the purchase of cigarettes, lottery tickets, age restricted cinema tickets, alcohol, firearms and so many other things we already have age-gating on?
Edit: I’d love any one of the downvoters to comment and actually explain what I’ve said that’s so atrocious? We DO age gate many things in society and many, I dare say most, would not want cigarettes to be available to a 13 year old. So what is it about online that makes it so different? If we CAN make age checks online anonymous (and indeed the EU standard downright requires it) why don’t we want this online?
Those are physical things you purchase in real life.
A cinema screening is not a physical good. Yet we still age gate it.
When you go to purchase those things in person, you present your ID, but then it is given back. They do not keep your ID. They do not get to make a copy of it’s information for them to store and sell and track you with. It is presented at that particular moment, and then control of it is returned to you.
That is not the case with these digital ID requirements. With these digital ID requirements, they absolutely make and keep a copy. They absolutely use the information from that copy to track you and sell your data on to others. They use it to build a profile on you about your behaviours and purchases etc which will absolutely be used to tighten the noose of control. And we’ve already seen, over and over and over again that pretty much every time they claim they aren’t doing those things, they absolutely still are. Even if they weren’t, they’ve also repeatedly demonstrated a complete and utter inability to secure that data from third parties accessing it too.
It is completely different and enormously more invasive than presenting your ID in person.
You don’t need to show ID to enter the store just because they sell cigarettes at the front counter. The staff person checking the OD at the front counter isn’t memorizing the information on the ID and using it to track every other purchase you make in the store, or to piece together what you’re doing once you leave the store.
Locking individual content behind age verification (and it entirely depends on how they are handling the age verification), is different than a blanket identification check to use the platform at all. Age verification is used to prevent children from buying cigarettes from a store while under aged, but it’s up to parents to prevent them from getting cigarettes other ways.
But let’s separate the technical/privacy discussion of age gating from the discussion about age gating social media platforms.
If I go to a Scottish distillery website and buys chocolate, they are not going to age gate me. If I buy whisky they will. That’s not age gating at the door, that’s age gating for a specific product that we, our democratic society, have decided, through democratic means, should not be available to minors.
Regulating social media age gating is a different discussion altogether. The discussion is about whether we want to be able to anonymously check (again, the EU standard requires anonymity) someone’s age online.
Stop moving the goal posts. Also, no one has convincingly shown they can do that anonymously, but lots have shown they CAN’T. You can’t divorce the privacy implications because they are intrinsically linked right now and there is no evidence supporting the ability to unlink them.
You dont have your id printed on every cigarette. The government doesnt dilute the alcohol with unique radiomarkers to track your piss (yet). Firearms tracking is nowhere near this comprehensive or invasive anywhere in the world. Not even on military ranges. Cinema tickets? Really?
Qnd as pointed elsewhere: you font need to show ID if youre just buyong pink monster vegan jerky condoms and new usb cable for your fav sex toy.
But have you read the EU standard? Anonymity is a requirement. There is no tracking. The age check does not refer back to you. Indeed, it cannot.
You can of course believe that the legal requirements aren’t adhered to and that the state is actually lying, but if you believe that the state already has a million ways to track you, including 99.9999% of us who carry our phones around with us and pay with credit cards in physical stores.
It can’t be anonymous if you need a google or apple account to use. I’m not concerned about what the government tracks (well, not in this context at least), I’m concerned about who and what they’re working with to do the tracking. If the app verifies me as an adult but I couldn’t use the app without google butting in, google now has yet another data point in a secret ad profile that the government should be putting a stop to, not helping them build up. It’d be like announcing a plan to stop illegal drug usage by partnering with the cartel.
If they wanted a government-sponsored age verification sort of thing, it should’ve been an app whose only job was to type in a code you got from going in person to some government body and verifying in person. Town office, DMV, somewhere like that.
More fundamentally, though, “protecting the children” shouldn’t go anywhere near anything that can be used for identity theft. Showing my ID to the cashier at the cigarette shop is significantly safer than showing it to any business on the internet, because sharing a high-quality picture of something is giving them a copy. The cashier gets to see it, but it never leaves my sight and isn’t recorded in any way except probably some dodgy security camera where you can’t read it anyway.
Ok, so it’s about Google and Apple accounts.
When you say “Google butting in” can you be more specific about what it is you believe Google tracks in an app they haven’t made themselves but only ingested in their store? Is it your belief that Google tracks all app interactions even in apps without firebase or Google Ads SDK?
Honestly, I don’t know exactly what google can or can’t track if the app developer doesn’t specifically enable them. I don’t have specific evidence that they’ll even be able to tell if the user was verified or not
What I do know is they have repeatedly shown that they’re happy to hide or lie about what and how they track people, and more broadly about their business as a whole.
Again I cite the drug analogy. Google is in the business of tracking people and harvesting data for ads. It’s like inviting the cartel to the DARE program and expecting everything to go swimmingly.
If they want their age verification app to actually be anonymous, they shouldn’t force people to use a tracking service to use it. The app specifically won’t be functional on degoogled android phones and won’t be offered on desktop computers. Maybe Google can’t spy on anything going on in the app, but even so, they could correlate “used verification app, roblox usage went up” or “used verification app, continued to use Tinder, concluded adult, ignoring ‘do not track’ preference as it doesn’t violate laws about tracking minors”.
It’s true that a minority of users have taken the steps where this inferred information would be particularly helpful to google, but not having the option to opt out is going to get harder and harder, and this service doesn’t provide enough good to give the information cartel that is Google any more information, even inferred, in my opinion.
@sunbeam60 @Squizzy forr me the issue is mass survilance… Gate keeping cigarretes dont record the number of times a kid or a adult tried to but cigarretes