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This is a little bit of a tangent compared to the post, but can someone explain to me why it's NOW that we have multiple countries (USA, Canada, UK, Australia, and probably others that I am not aware of) all looking at age verification for a technology (the internet and all the things it lets you access) has existed for over 2 decades, and has been mature for at least 10 years? You could buy illicit drugs and watch porn on the internet since the 2000s, but it's NOW that we're legislating things (in incomprehensibly stupid and hopelessly unenforceable ways)?

The worst part is these are all stupid poorly thought out band-aid solutions to "protect the kids" from platforms that are also detrimental to adults.

At Disneyland, there are separate park entrance lanes that don't use facial recognition software. I like that I can opt-out passively there.

At TSA checkpoints at the airport, you have to actively ask to opt-out.

I'm always worried that actively opting-out puts you on a government list and there could be later, much larger ramifications, so I passively opt-in to blend in with the masses.

Im sure a lot of people know about tor on this site...but let me remind everyone.

Tor is not for criminals. It's for you and me. And happens to be good enough that criminals use it too. This is the two sided nature of technology.

Tor is a networks of peers across the globe volunteering their network bandwidth to support people under oppression by their government.

The amount of privacy that can be gained from tor is proportional to the amount of people using it. The more that people utilize the technology, the more that everyone looks the same, and protects the people that need it the most.

Tor enables me to say no to these things and carry on, without permission.

Can't we even write a short text like this without LLMs anymore, not even when it's really important, when it's about humans against the inhumane?

Age assurance is the law in California and age verification is illegal in California. We should push more jurisdictions to adopt this model. While many age verification laws are malicious mass surveillance, some are because politicians didn't see a better option.

Here in the US, there’s a giant database of faces the government uses to ID people with an app. In the UK, they want this same level of invasive policing. Technology will always be used nefariously by police agencies until someone stops them, which no one will. No one, politically, wants to come out and “restrain policing” but that’s how the rich will position it so they can sell more flock cameras, more app platforms, more tech to the ever bottomless pockets of government. We are in a Thiel world.

I agree 100% with the message and think we should strive to reject this kind of gathering wherever possible, but it feels like the horse is already out of the barn insofar as each and every one of our faces being out there. Hell, we have entire states where people can't watch porn without uploading their ID. The inertia is such that (I'm in the U.S.) we really need a constitutional amendment at this point to stop this.

Is there even an option at the airport to refuse face scanning? I assume that signs you up for a one way trip to a cavity search.

TSA does it, Customs does it when entering the USA after a trip too.

I completely agree with this, but my banking apps, my broker, my health insurance, my simcard provider all already require my face for identification.

I just have obs with a video of mkbhd downloaded playing in a loop, whenever I am asked for age verification I just start the virtual camera, use it into the age verification website and it immediately passes it. MKBHD was just the first person that I could come up with that records extremely high res video.

I particularly like the form at the bottom for collecting your email address and adding it to a big list.

Has it ever occurred to you that this is intentional?

All those Bilderberg and WEF forums and Peter Thiel's Dialog Club are not for nothing

If we're going to have self-censorship due to everything we say online tied to our real identity can we at least get some shiny buildings and high speed trains out of the deal too? I've been online since early 2000s internet and for all the soapboxing about freedom of speech over the years it seems a foregone conclusion that we'll get the same surveillance state as those other "less free" countries else without anything to show for it.

Democracies building the tools of total autocracy. Real but fringe threats used to create the ultimate centralization of leverage.

Can we actually think of the children? All the children? Their future?

When democracies forget that government is the greatest natural threat to freedom, they forget and undermine the reason we have democracies.

Technical solutions to zero-knowledge proofs of age-of-adulthood without loss of anonymity are recent but available now. The strongest argument for these is to take the wind out of alternatives.

Strangely, promoters of surveillance avoid these solutions.

Even stranger: the bizarre but prevalent counter argument that anonymity protecting solutions won't work, because the surreptitious goal of other solutions is precisely to strip anonymity. We apparently shouldn't do that, because the abusers won't like the wind being taken out of their "front" problems, with real but freedom-preserving solutions!

Can we start a trend of wearing ski masks and other face coverings in public?

Sorry. You can refuse the covid vaccine, but that won't stop everyone else from blithly accepting it. Then once the critical mass is reached, your ability to buy groceries can just be terminated. The 20% of the population that refuses just isn't important enough to matter.

You have the same problem here. You're going to have to actively fight this to stop it. Just saying no isn't enough. You have to stop the people who will sleepwalk into the surveillance state.