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.

  • Canaconda@lemmy.caEnglish
    201·
    5 hours ago

    This whole conversation is such a false dichotomy. The laws can absolutely be written such that companies are required to suspend service to any suspected child without requiring ID to use the service.

    But just like pollution and everything else we’ve let them push the buck to us.

    The problem is that politicians don’t want to legislate enforcement/oversight entities as those would piss off their owners.

    Democracies need to replace their lame duck politicians with ones that aren’t bought and owned by the shareholder class who also own the social media corporations.

    • DefederateLemmyMl@feddit.nlEnglish
      71·
      3 hours ago

      The laws can absolutely be written such that companies are required to suspend service to any suspected child without requiring ID to use the service.

      The laws shouldn’t focus on “harming children” so much, but on “harming humans”.

      The big tech companies should be held responsible for the actual damage they are inflicting upon society, and their methods to artificially inflate “engagement” (or whatever the hell they call it) should be held to scrutiny. Whether or not the damage is inflicted upon an underage person or an adult, is merely a distraction.

      Those assholes would love it if we all had to identify ourselves and prove our age, if it means they get to keep inflicting their shit upon us.

      • Canaconda@lemmy.caEnglish
        11·
        2 hours ago

        I agree but like that’s a much bigger discussion.

        I think there is an immediate opportunity to mitigate harm in the long term that doesn’t require us finding a perfect solution to corporate-greed(capitalism).

        Similar to how prohibiting tobacco sales to minors has drastically reduced the number of smokers. Ask anyone over 70 when they started smoking. Almost all of them started when they were young teenagers.