New U.S laws designed to protect minors are pulling millions of adult Americans into mandatory age-verification gates to access online content, leading to backlash from users and criticism from privacy advocates that a free and open internet is at stake. Roughly half of U.S. states have enacted or are advancing laws requiring platforms — including adult content sites, online gaming services, and social media apps — to block underage users, forcing companies to screen everyone who approaches these digital gates.
Yeah, that headline is incorrect. The laws are there specifically to surveil adults, “for child safety” is a smokescreen justification. This isn’t a “we tried to do a good thing, but there’s this unfortunate side effect,” the surveillance was the goal.
No reason it can’t be both.
Sure, no reason it couldn’t be, other than it isn’t.
If they wanted to actually protect children, they’d be arresting the pedophiles, not forcing everyone to identify themselves on the Internet.
Remember that “they” (at least here in the US) are as varied in opinion as are we.
The ones who have a sincere desire to protect children want them to have limited exposure to content online.
My personal thought is children should generally not be engaging others online, but it should be a social push (“don’t talk to strangers online” “don’t allow your children to be unsupervised online” ).
As for arresting child abusers, we seem to be in the habit of putting them in high office.
Children shouldn’t be on Reddit or Lemmy. And if anyone disagrees, they better not be complaining about idiots on those platforms.
My statements are about participation, not about how the enforcement should be handled.
I agree, children shouldn’t be on tiktok or any of these kinds of platforms.
And yes, it should be social pressure rather than legal pressure.
Parents who care are doing that. The amount of parents who don’t give a fuck and will just put their id in for their kids to watch porn would shock you. Shit the amount of them that would sell their kids to sex slavery is higher than you probably think.
Fuck this law they don’t give a fuck about kids.
When I was younger, there use to be “public service announcements” on TV that provided education for the kids and adults watching.
Those people should probably start parenting their own children instead of begging for the government to do it for them, then.
And yes, it’s usually the same people.
If politicians truly cared about the children, then Trump and half his administration would have been strung up by their thumbs at this point. It’s not about the children.
Politicians are humans, just like us (with MAYBE just a larger helping of narcism). They’re also required to work within the law.
I understand the reason I’m getting down votes. We’re in a really really frustrating time. Lots of angry people (me too).
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The ones listed are not working within the law. They raped children.
What exactly has caused the outrage and need to identify the users age today? Why do we need this law now?
It isn’t both.
This has nothing at all to do with “child safety”. It’s all about data mining. And controlling what everyone can see or say online.
also to monitor any left leaning activisim/dissidents , or associated agaisnt conservative governments.
Who’s dumb enough to believe it was ever for child safety?
The sort of morons who shouldn’t be using the internet anyway. I miss when the internet was for nerds.
Probably most of the same people who believe ICE is only rounding up “illegals”.
I can’t wait until it’s leaked that these child accounts are being used to target minors for whatever: ads, sexual exploitation, etc.
Terrifying once you realize what they really mean by “think of the children”
For real. What is stopping a program from querying if an account is an adult or child, and then seeing if there’s an email or username or whatever tied to that account age?
So now we have a database of children with their names and emails? Addresses? Or if a system gets hacked and that information is sold to bad actors?
What is stopping a pedophile from making a “child” account and then being lumped in with a group of other children?
These are things you think about in the first 10 minutes of questioning whether something like this is viable and how it can be exploited.
I think that ICE will be sent information about children, and then they will ship the good looking kids to the highest bidder.
Picasochu?
My head hurts.
surveillience data for palintir, to look for political dissidents and associated families, nothing more.
Can we please start our own mesh network completely decentralized from the main web?
This mesh would need to be completely anonymous where people can connect and disconnect from surrounding nodes and people could host their own websites.
I discovered this recently, looks like a fairly promising beginning: https://reticulum.network/
This looks very interesting thanks for sharing! I am definitely going to look into this deeper and see what I need to get something up and running as a start.
A lot of the pieces are already there.
Decentralized, fast, light and performant, encrypted but not anonymous: Yggdrasil Decentralized, slow, obscured identity: I2P Multi-medium bridging: reticulum
For most of us, Yggdrasil solves the problem. Going decentralized takes power away from the techbros that made this shit possible in the first place. You stop using their services they aren’t going to be happy and will resist the regime that cost them money.
For spreading news that powerful people don’t wants spread, I2P. TOR has been compromised for years now. I2P isn’t perfect. It can be taken down from time to time and it’s slow as balls, but it’ll allow reporters to be safer and for any evidence to be distributed so wide they will never contain it all.
Reticulum will help users hop across multiple mediums and at this point could be usable for adapting lora stuff like meshtastic applications into the network too. It’s most useful for jumping across different modes of communication. Yggdrasil is likely going to outperform this but reticulum solves additional problems Yggdrasil itself cannot so they are both valuable.
The people who dont care kids are killed almost daily at school which they have no choice but attend. The people watch movies and buy products from businesses literally destroying the environment. The people who vote for people who rape and eat children to run the government. I totally believe you have the countries kids best interests in mind /s [x]
They people who wave away bombing a school and killing 175 because “it’s war”(that we unilaterally started). These are definitely the people who you want to trust on child safety and well-being.
Nah man it’s not war didn’t you hear bro? It’s not war bro the department of
defenseWardefense says it’s not brah!
If they cared about children, they’d prosecute everyone in the Epstein list.
I should be able to go to a convenience store, hand them hard cash after showing my id. And get a random credential that I can give websites.
That’s an interesting idea! Provides a level of abstraction, and maintains a semblance of privacy.
In the uk, you have to have your face filmed at different angles with your webcam. Spooky…
Just to be able to access Reddit
Also fuck reddit and fuck Spez
Fuck that
I assume you can still use a foreign VPN?
No one cares.
Maybe I’m just down today, but most everyone I know is getting sucked into ChatGPT, short form videos, Discord, political extremism, getting screwed by the corporations they work for, you name it. They get their eyeballs scanned, they do the verification; no one cares. They aren’t even intrerested in basic privacy steps.
And even in things I have some expertise in (like transformers LLMs), I can’t talk anyone out of anything.
Even Lemmy feels like its spiraling.
It feels like humanity is losing.
I feel like you’d have to be a serious “hacker” kind of person to be anonymous on the internet.
Majority of people use their phone. I’m sure the government right now could tell who I actually am if they wanted to know. I wouldn’t be surprised if someone on Lemmy could even figure it out.
Home WiFi?
Let me go sign up for a VPN with all my info…
I mean is it all really worth it?
I could be in the minority but I would rather watch tailored ads than hear another medication commercial.
Do I care that “they” know what kind of YouTube videos I watch? Do I even care what kind of porn I watch?
I am all for privacy and freedom don’t get me wrong. I think we should fight.
But it does feel like we have lost the fight. What’s wrong is we have to worry about what the government will do with that information.
We make a big deal about giving Pornhub our information but gladly hand it over to Amazon. Hell people would probably send in blood to get free 2-day shipping.
I don’t mean being anonymous, but basic hygeine.
Block ads.
Use startpage or something instead of Google.
Avoid getting stuck on YouTube Shorts for hours, don’t trust ChatGPT implicitly. Maybe use a password manager.
It is not that hard. But, even compared to a dysfunctional person like me, people literally cannot help themselves, apparently.
I’m already pissy about them constantly trying to have my cc data everytime I make on online purchase. Windows asks, Google asks, ebay ask, and then my browser asks.
The answer is always no.
To ID verification, My discord is a decade old. If you can’t do math well enough to guess that I wasn’t 8 when I made it then that’s a you problem.
What’s a distribution of Linux that is not made in the US and is not subject to these insane laws?
This is not done via OS.
