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Posted by bilsbie 2 days ago

The 'papers, please' era of the internet will decimate your privacy(expression.fire.org)
1138 points | 605 commentspage 7
Bender 1 day ago|
The 'papers, please' era of the internet will decimate your privacy

Others perhaps, not mine. I will not participate in the 3rd party madness. It will be local stores for me, private forums for the local community self contained within the ISP. At most I will add RTA headers to my private and semi-private sites that are already hard to reach by bots. Any process that involves 3rd parties or magic math is going to expose many people both adults and children to risk they did not consent to and that will harm them throughout the rest of their lives.

lokar 2 days ago||
Is a 10% reduction that bad?
HackerThemAll 2 days ago||
My Google account is 21 years old already. Is that enough of a proof?
timbit42 1 day ago|
It might be if this was about age verification, but it isn't, so it isn't.
luciana1u 2 days ago||
my toaster is about to ask for my social security number
madrox 2 days ago||
I'm pretty sure this is a "pick your poison" problem. We as a society are damned no matter what we do or do not do. For my part, we need to do something, because things are not fine the way they are, including the half ass Australian solution. We can't keep putting the onus on private enterprise to address social issues.

I may sound crazy for saying so, but I think the answer is more government run infrastructure for enabling identity-based operations, like payments and authentication, with rules about standards, open source, contractor selection, and audit that make operation transparent. It can work if technical operations are legislated instead of "left for the engineers to figure out." Then at least the evolution of systems can become real political issues that map to election cycles.

My stance is probably a polarizing one, but this is precisely why we need to be able to debate the minutae of these systems through our political discourse instead of just "will we; won't we" legislation. This should be debated in democratic process.

Geezus_42 2 days ago||
We could try investing in positive infrastructure that improves peoples life's in stead of creating the panopticon torment nexus. Things like third spaces where people can spend time is save spaces where they form communities and public transit so that people can get to those places. Incentivize positive behaviors instead of closing off public spaces and pricing more and more people out of being able to do anything with the minuscule amount of free time they have besides going on the internet.
madrox 2 days ago||
That sounds like a great idea, but I think we should also try to solve human trafficking online.
Geezus_42 2 days ago||
Creating a surveillance state isn't going to solve human trafficing.
intended 1 day ago|||
As the parent poster pointed out, doing nothing and pretending this doesn’t happen doesn’t fly anymore.

I guess, welcome to the middle age of tech? The part where you have to pick up the pieces and clean up the mess that you see around you.

izacus 1 day ago|||
Allowing the relevant authorities to control, shut down and arrest serious crimes doesn't turn a country into a surveillance state.

Poor surveillance controls do though - let's perhaps fix those instead of allowing garbage like Flock to spread and then hand wring? EU started with GDPR, let's see others follow and build on it?

steve_taylor 1 day ago|||
> including the half ass Australian solution.

It was designed to be half-arsed so Digital ID can come along and save the day. Australia's Digital ID opens up to the private sector on 30 November.

bigbuppo 2 days ago||
And yet as the article mentioned, the "problem" is a lie... an excuse to justify the surveillance state.
madrox 2 days ago||
I think the lie is to look at the problems we have that the internet has enabled and say "things are ok as they are don't try to do anything to solve it."
bigbuppo 2 days ago|||
If the problem is "social media bad for kids" then any parent that allows their children to access social media is as guilty of abuse or neglect as a parent that lets them play in traffic. Throw the parents in prison and put the kids in foster care. Problem solved.
sdfsdfsd3443f 1 day ago|||
People make problems where there are none. Parents all around me are giving smartphones to their eight year olds without supervision.

I have kids and no amount of bullshit is going to convince me this is necessary for social interaction of any kind. If anything the "phone kids" are the weird ones.

People are creating this problem. You can easily, very easily, say "no" to a kid. I pay to keep you bloody alive and I will defend your sanity with everything I got because these kids are our future. Being disliked or "hated" by them is the least of my worries. Are we adults or what?

Sometimes I think there is a severe lack of "adulting" lately. No amount of legislation will fix that.

bigbuppo 1 day ago||
Well, as I said, we figured out ways to make parents big-r Responsible by applying harsh penalties when they abuse or neglect their children. We spend countless billions on government agenices whose sole purpose is to intervene when parents fail their children. We should use this pre-existing system to deal with the problem of parents allowing their children to use social media.
madrox 2 days ago||||
If you think any attempt at a solve goes immediately to 11, sure, but I hope you believe in nuance or else we’re all lost.
intended 1 day ago|||
That is a bold statement to make, and I wonder how many more people would be willing to make the same statement whenever these conversations come up on HN.
JoshTriplett 1 day ago|||
Things are, in fact, okay as they are, attempts to impose identity requirements would make things less okay, and people trying to claim they aren't okay need to be defeated.
izacus 1 day ago||
Putting your head in the sand from position of wealthy privilege doesn't change the reality.
JoshTriplett 1 day ago||
Oh, a great many things are broken and need fixing. "The internet doesn't have enough surveillance and deanonymization" is just not one of those things.
uwagar 2 days ago||
if i run a pain vanilla website with no need for user accounts, do i have to age verify? will icann also ask for id when i register a new domain?
josefritzishere 2 days ago||
This would never be used to do evil of course...
A_Duck 1 day ago||
There is a real problem here to be solved.

Whenever I speak to someone who's planning to vote Reform (UK hard-right party) their views are primarily shaped by seeing AI slop videos on TikTok/Instagram, showing immigrants doing crimes etc etc

Reform will probably win the next election because of this, unless we find a way to make platforms manage the situation.

Interesting example: https://www.londoncentric.media/p/london-tiktok-fake-news-cr...

Tangurena2 1 day ago|
The simplest cure, even though it is US law but would also benefit the UK, would be to repeal Section 230 safe-harbors when the platform uses an algorithm to curate content. If they are covered by the "safe harbor" then they are not responsible for the content. Otherwise, they'd be liable for libel/defamation/conspiracy stuff.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Section_230

A "safe harbor" is a section of the law where they basically say "as long as you do X, those other laws won't apply". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Safe_harbor_(law)#

__MatrixMan__ 1 day ago||
It's just the web we're losing. The internet is still free. As for the web, good riddance, let's build something new.
globular-toast 1 day ago|
The internet is not free. We've been running out of IP addresses for ages and most people don't have direct internet access these days so are completely dependent on man-in-the-middle servers. All it would take is a broad ban on VPN and end-to-end encryption. Governments have been wanting to ban strong encryption ever since the public got access to it in the 90s (see PGP/Zimmermann).
itssoover1 1 day ago|
What privacy? With the enactment of the USA PATRIOT Act in 2001 it was game over. Were you not born then?
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