This only applies if you take all those "protect the children" initiatives at face value. It seems to me that the actual reasons are different. Governments want to police speech online and be able to arrest people who say things they don't approve of, so they are pushing platforms to collect user's PID. Some also want to discourage people from doing things they don't want them to do but that are politically unfeasible to criminalize (watching videos of consenting adults engaging in all kinds of sexual acts) and adding more and more friction to the process (no pun intended!) is the best thing they can get. And the internet companies want more of your data to track you.
Yeah I 100% agree - but if you give them an alternative way to do the same thing without everyone having to get IDed - then I’d they still want that they’ll have to come out and be explicit.
> someone should burn down a hotel full of migrants
> you don't like the president
One of these things is not like the other. In the second case, it's expressing disagreement with a political figure that has directed multiple mass murders of vulnerable people.
But in the first, it's promoting the mass murder of vulnerable people. Free speech isn't freedom to promote hate crimes.
Do you think someone should be arrested for encouraging the burning down of a hotel full of people in real life? If so, why should it be different online? If not, well then you have more serious problems.
I do, but a lot of people don't think it should be possible for the government to track down the person who tweeted let's burn down the migrants hotel.
Does not having government-controlled cameras in our apartments make it impossible for police to prosecute wife-beaters? Can police do some actual work to catch "bad people" as opposed to making internet a panopticon?
UK also apparently arrest people for posting videos of zieg heiling dogs and other such nonsense. Which is exactly my point - once the instruments to track and de-anonymize people online are set up, they eventually will be used for all kinds of purposes.
Should it be legal to tweet a sieg heiling dog in Germany, when it's your dog, and you taught it to sieg heil, and you filmed it at Auschwitz? Or what's the exact boundary between acceptable and unacceptable?
> Should it be legal to tweet a sieg heiling dog in Germany, when it's your dog, and you taught it to sieg heil, and you filmed it at Auschwitz? Or what's the exact boundary between acceptable and unacceptable?
Yes? Yes, of course? Being an idiot on internet has traditionally been legal in civilized liberal western countries. Such person could be banned by a platform that doesn't want such content and ostracized by their peers (they guy who made sieg heiling dog video claimed he did it for his girlfriend or something and I would dump him, if I was her) but I don't want my government to build a panopticon to prevent such behavior and I don't want my taxes wasted on policing it.
That would either mean you can tell the device to lie (which makes it useless), or that you don't own the device you use (which makes it unacceptable).
Apple actually has this already. For countries that support IDs in Apple Wallet there is a "Verify with Wallet API" [1] and for other countries the app developer can get the age range from the iCloud Account [2] - but that is not verified with any legal authority and only based on user input.
I really think on device verification is the way to go - and I don’t even see why we need to use ID.
Parents are always in control of a kids device. Just mandate devices have a child mode that parents can activate and have it send a ‘this is a child’ flag to all websites and apps.
But this assumes this isn’t all about ID checking everyone online, which is what it’s really about.
I have my Gmail account since they were on invitations, circa 2004, and Google certainly knows this. That's the ultimate proof I'm an adult :-) That information could be exposed and used by 3rd parties.
And then social media platforms should be able to have the device confirm the user is over 18 and that’s all they need to know.