Posted by slowin 11 hours ago
I'm a Brit who wastes time web surfing and the total impact on me so far is reddit asked for a selfie. It's very different from areas where they did have a war on anonymity like bank accounts and investments where you have to scan passports and stuff. I've heard no one at all suggest that for general web surfing.
Whistle blowers, journalists, religious apostates, people unsure about their sexuality all rely on annonimity on the internet.
I can't find the Times article but government officials have clearly stated that this isn't about protecting children, it's about controlling political discourse online. They are now floating the idea of forcing YouTube to give "trusted" public service news sources prominence. Again to control the discourse. That includes the BBC, which I personally have completely lost trust in.
https://www.gov.uk/government/news/plans-for-prominence-of-t...
Sure - open an email not in your name, write to papers not in your name, whistle blow away. It still works. I've got various anon accounts - no problems so far.
Not sure about the trusted source bit although the likes of x and youtube seem to do that anyway a bit - give more prominence to medical experts than antivax cranks for example.
[1] there are caveats, but the crucial point is its a legal process, rather than bidding war.
IMHO you have more freedom in China than in Europe. Can you walk on the street and say "Fuck Xi Jinping" like you would in France with Macron? Probably not. But it's a completely useless freedom to have.
At least in China you get relative safety when you walk on the street at night. And when the government decides to restrict some liberties you don't have to pay tens of thousands of politicians and lobbyist to do it.
If you have to choose your poison pill, you might as well pick the cheap one that does bring a semblance of harmony and not complete polarization and chaos.
If you shout insults at Macron, you will be prosecuted. If you display insults about Macron, you will be prosecuted.
https://www.rue89strasbourg.com/insulte-macron-selestat-mani...
https://www.ouest-france.fr/societe/justice/un-homme-de-77-a...
You see, China and the US aren't that different you know. In the US, I can go up to Donald Trump and say "I don't like Donald Trump. The policies of the republican government are rubbish!"
In China, I can go up to Xi Jinping and say "I don't like Donald Trump! The policies of the republican government are rubbish!"
"None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free." – Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Also it's never been true you could just approach the American president or the Chinese one
And here's like ~120 of us who showed up to oppose AB 2023 (the 3D printer spyware bill). It was incredible. https://calmatters.digitaldemocracy.org/hearings/279741#t=19...
I think the easiest way to get involved is to become an EFF member. They'll keep you up to date on all the censorship and surveillance bills. Then you can contact your legislator, sent letters to the CA legislature committees, or show up to the hearings in Sacramento.
For example, all devices could require your ZKP ID attestation to be usable unfiltered. Then the relevant apps/sites would be equally inaccessible to children. And then you remove the ZKP ID attestation because the device owner (parent, school, etc) already knows when the user is a child.
ZKP ID would work but that’s essentially deanonymization because you have to provide your ID to someone though no one has total information. Also just checking for its absence doesn’t work because that’s opt in and less than 5% of parents would do it. Every individual, irrespective of age would have to have a valid one.
That said it was funny, yesterday Microsoft said I had to age verify my account. I went in basically with the intention of backing out of it at the first sign of over reach.
First step was, 'provide you email for this account'. So I did that and then... approved! You are certified over 18+. That is the flip side of this, some of these companies will put up some of the weakest barriers on this stuff.
It is more expensive today to maintain your privacy and anonymity than it is to surveil you. The collective surveillance grid makes it possible to track people's movements, whereabouts, their predilections, political views, personal images and more for a few cents every day. It's a bargain.
And in this new world, the eye watches everyone, all the time, forever. Most people, including people on HN, are still stuck in a human-first world. The new surveillance state isn't going to be thousands to hundreds of thousands of humans sitting in a shadow-y room going over pictures and videos. Today, a bunch of vectors and a large multi-modal model will do just fine. Servers are cheap (for a nation state) and never need to eat or sleep.
And they will be used to watch you. Especially if you're attractive. Or, valuable. Or, blackmail-able. After all, NSA employees routinely abuse multi-billion dollar surveillance assets to stalk women. It's so common that the NSA calls it LOVEINT.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LOVEINT
In the world to come, people are going to wish they were being surveilled by the NSA. Because at least the NSA punishes these people. Occasionally.
When this kind of technology becomes this cheap and this pervasive, then the end of anonymity means unaccountable sheriff deputies stalking their former spouse and family. Or, prospective romantic interests.
https://www.firstalert4.com/2026/08/03/brentwood-officer-acc...
https://www.yahoo.com/news/us/articles/cops-using-license-pl...
https://www.yahoo.com/news/us/articles/rogue-officers-turned...
https://www.newsweek.com/flock-camera-police-arrests-1226378...
https://ij.org/police-have-reportedly-used-license-plate-rea...
https://edition.cnn.com/2026/07/26/us/flock-cameras-surveill...
With this new oracle, these people will be able to set up alerts for when their spouse is thinking of leaving them. To catch their child accessing support for abuse or something more ephemeral like being an atheist, having different political views or LGBT+.
Anyone who doesn't see the forest for the trees, or who embraces this because "parental controls are too hard to use" will doom themselves and future generations to a world that's materially worse than our hyper-surveilled present.
I can't believe I'm saying this, but at this rate I'm going to miss the days when it was just the NSA reading my emails (and they still do! Howdy!). I know the track record. But at least the NSA has some sense of institutional responsibility and control. Most institutions in your life, including your HOA don't.
https://ktvz.com/cnn-regional/2021/07/22/arnold-residents-ce...
Cheaper computer technology has been great for the average persons uses but it cuts both ways. It also means much cheaper surveillance. I suspect that governmental/corporate surveillance now costs less than 1% of their spending, something that simple couldn't have been done even a few decades back.
I do wonder what the world would have been like is say computer technology peaked at 486 level performance/memory. Much of what we have today simply could not have happened in terms of surveillance and social media damages. Alas, this is the world we didn't get.
George Orwell was pretty on the mark.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Brother_(Nineteen_Eighty-F...
How would the Nazi Germany and Hitler gone if they had this system in place, telling them who and where every single Jewish, gay, gypsy, disabled, or just ideologically opposed to them person was, 24/7?
What about other insane rulers? What do you think they would - or rather, will - do with these systems?
The one thing he always said is, they have always been watching and know who is who, what these things do is allow it to be entered into the court of law. Now they can act on these things.
firstly the amount of money that the "UK lobby" are pushing is a drop of sand in the ocean.[1]
secondly, and most importantly, the USA has no (federally robust) legal protection for citizens to guard against data collection and aggregation. So whist this is being presented as a war on anonymity lead by the dirty British, this is basically "think of the children" play for protecting anonymity. There is nothing wrong with this, its a good argument, even though its obviously flawed.
If you want to dox someone, you just need to pay the right broker. That is, in the UK really difficult. (for example flock cameras are largely illegal in the UK, certainly no council or HOA can just install them. sure you can put in CCTV, but you cannot process that CCTV to track bystanders)
There are no useful controls for citizens to limit the collection and processing of personal information. so whilst in theory you can be anonymous in america, as soon as you use a phone, or any ISP you are effectively de anonymised. I can as a company, buy your location data, tie it to your IP, then cross check with various ad networks to get usernames. (the civil legal route here is file a john doe and ask for metadata in discovery. Higher legal bar, but I don't think thats something that can be done simply in the UK)
TLDR: Contrary to popular belief there are greater protections to anonymous behaviour in the UK. Yes they have been greatly eroded, but the difference here is that there are no legal ways for companies to unmask you for money[2]. In the USA there is no legal protection for someone to share your ID for money.
[1]musk is currently spending millions propping up convicted criminals.
[2] not without your permission, or without a robust legal proceeding.