The problem is privacy activists and free speech activists (though there's some overlap between the two they aren't the same) oppose age verification by any means since it has the potential to infringe on both ever so slightly. Meanwhile age verification gates are being demanded and thrown up all over the Internet at a frightening pace. So we get only the maximal data collection solutions implemented by people who don't give a shit about privacy or free speech. And the mass surveillance cheerleaders egg them on.
If privacy and free speech activists understood that a proactive, privacy-preserving approach to age verification is the best outcome we'd be better off.
> You need to process that other people disagree with that claim
I think I already said that in my original post.
> We should not accept the Overton window shifting here
Great! Let's say you and I refuse to accept it. How do we keep Discord from demanding passports or selfies? How can we get France[1] or Finland[2] to roll back age restrictions on social media?
You'll never convince a majority of voters in democracies that nothing online should be age-restricted. These are the people that the enemies of anonymity and free speech are counting on to advance their agenda.
At the same time a majority of voters is currently quite content with the state of age verification for access to tobacco and alcohol. Both its strictness (or lack thereof) and privacy preservation (almost perfect).
I'm not saying my proposal is the one that should be adopted. I honestly don't care which idea gets picked and I don't want anything from it. But it's a virtual guarantee that in the absence of a competing good-enough, privacy-preserving implementation, only the most privacy-invasive idea will be implemented.
> How do we keep Discord from demanding passports or selfies?
Build and promote alternatives that don't. Fight the political efforts trying to require it, and identify them as the attempts at control they are.
> How can we get France[1] or Finland[2] to roll back age restrictions on social media?
Host services elsewhere, and ignore claims that a country's laws extend beyond its borders. Support folks trying to fight such efforts politically, where possible.
> Host services elsewhere, and ignore claims that a country's laws extend beyond its borders
The moment you want to collect money from people in a country, their laws extend to you. You do not get to export electronics to France and ignore their RF spectrum allocations, for example.
How well has that worked? Social media and messaging apps have network effects.
> Host services elsewhere, ignore claims that a country's laws extend beyond its borders.
That doesn't help the French or the Finns. Unless they use a VPN. And access the fragmented, lightly-used alternative services from the IPs of the fewer and fewer countries that don't pass such laws.
Your vision leads to a world where the privacy-conscious 1% congregate in echo chambers on Mastodon instances hosted in international waters. Everyone else uploads their passport to FaceSnapTok.
That's not a real solution. It's a cope. That's my opinion and I have no illusions I've changed your mind about anything. I already alluded to that in my original post. Privacy activists think age verification is not a problem that needs to be solved. By maintaining that belief they're ceding ground to bad actors who will "solve" it in a maximally privacy-invading fashion. This will leave the vast majority of internet users worse off.
> Privacy activists think age verification is not a problem that needs to be solved.
Correct. But more importantly, privacy activists understand that the "problem" governments are trying to solve with "age" verification is people having privacy.
This isn't something we can solve with purely technological solutions. It requires political action to defeat the attempted control, and pushing back on every instance of people trying to paint that attempted control as mere "age verification" and other "think of the children" takes.
> privacy activists understand that the "problem" governments are trying to solve with "age" verification is people having privacy
That is correct. But they refuse to go a level deeper and understand why governments are succeeding at this. Why people are seemingly ok giving up their privacy.
> This isn't something we can solve with purely technological solutions
The solution I proposed wasn't purely technological. It had a substantial legal component and public education component. It satisfies the "save the children" crowd while giving the spooks nothing.
> It requires political action to defeat the attempted control
I see no sign of this "political action", do you? I only see country after country banning minors from social media. This is like the encryption backdoor debate - they only have to win once, we have to win every time. Only in this case, it's possible to keep most kids off social media without screwing everyone else. This issue can go away.
> mere "age verification" and other "think of the children" takes.
Privacy activists have to accept that "think of the children" is a real issue for voters. Your views are valid, but it's equally valid to believe that children should not have unfettered access to the Internet. That social media is as addictive and harmful as tobacco. You may not like it but lots of people believe these things and they tell their lawmakers and vote.
The more we resist turning this into a state-sided solution which provides a service to private companies with a YES/NO age verification, the more likely your data is going to be given to botton-of-the-barrel third party private companies.
I'm genuinely curious what the argument is against state-run privacy focused age verification is here. We already protect real life adult spaces with IDs. You hand your ID to a random store clerk who scans it with a random device when you want to buy alcohol or cigarettes.
What makes these social media platforms special that they have entirely different rules?
I will say, if they came for small privately-hosted communities, I can understand the cause for alarm. But so far it appears to be limited to massive misinformation machines.
Much like DRM, there is no good option. Its a fundamentally bad thing. If parents want to abdicate their parental responsibilities, their children should bare the cost of that, not millions of strangers.
The issue with your solution still comes down to yet another centralizing middleman with no real incentive to be efficient. And all the incentive to lobby governments and extract more wealth from the people.
This can of course be done government by government, but that isn't scalable for a global company.
the middlemen aren't intercompatible. it's like saying anyone can make paypal.
If you try to start your own paypal, no vendors will sign up because you have no clients. No clients will sign up because you have no vendors.
My university forced everyone to use duo mobile for years, with no other option for OTP. That's what this reminds me of. Sure, there is a sense in which the university can choose to use a different 2fa service, but there is nothing forcing them and the consequences are on the user side.
There are multiple credit card companies. They try to attract customers and merchants with promotions and lower fees. Even Paypal has competition.
Companies have cracked the problem of signing up clients and vendors simultaneously in other sectors of the internet economy. This is an annually recurring revenue stream that virtually every adult will spend money on. I'm not super concerned about competition, as long as anti-trust enforcement remains strong.
It’s not “slightly”. They’ll start with claiming to protect people under 18 from obviously problematic content — porn, grooming, etc.
It won’t stop there. The scope creep will extend to expressing or reading “incorrect” or “dangerous” views.
They’ll probably call some of it “hate speech”, but hate speech is whatever the people in power say it is; on X, “cisgender” is designated as a slur and gets your post censored.
The slippery slope fallacy is only a fallacy if the slope isn’t slippery — “think of the children” is a wedge bad actors are once again trying to use to open the floodgates of censorship.
They don’t even need to target adults; if you control what children can see and express, you have enormous control over all future generations of voters.
I agree, but the powers that be loathe the phrase "hate speech". I'm betting the next encroachment will be on "violence", "terrorism" or even Russian-style "promotion of nontraditional values".
It's already happening. What's your alternative? Not VPNs because every jurisdiction and website will eventually have equivalent laws or terms of service.
Nearly all big websites, probably, but there are enough tiny countries that I think at least one will opt to act as a safe haven for VPN servers and website hosting services, acting as the only remaining window to the free internet. It could be a lucrative practice, similar to how Panama and some other countries position themselves as places to register ships to avoid regulation.
Who said anything about a solution? I'm not saying this is good, I just brought it up as a potential end point of what's currently happening to the internet. I don't think there is anything that people like us can do, we can only watch.
So if I build an apartment building on some lots zoned for single-family and someone complains, they're a "tattletale" too? And nobody should like that either?
Why don't we let people who like living in dense housing build and live in dense housing? And leave those who don't in peace? Right now we only do the second one but make the first one illegal.
Sure, we do let people do that. The thing that's objectionable is when a suburban neighborhood is rezoned by people who live hundreds of miles away, and developers get the green light to build towers there. Why do people who don't live in a place think they're entitled to change the zoning of that place?
What's to stop them from saying that it should now be zoned for industrial, and a chemical treatment plant can open up next door to a school? It's the same line of thinking.
When someone buys land, they should be allowed to do whatever they want to do to it, subject to the zoning laws that were in effect at the time of purchase, or passed by a majority of voters in that area after purchase.
If you're talking about CA's state laws, you're right that they supersede local laws. You'll notice that I used the word "should" in my comment, indicating a normative view. I think CA's state legislators have passed many laws that were unwise, including several that voters have had to undo via constitutional amendments.
While I would place state laws passed by popular vote above local laws passed by popular vote, I would say that laws passed by representatives, without much awareness of voters that this was their intention, should not necessarily be put above local laws passed by voters themselves.
A Reddit-style reply feels apropos here: "That's just like...your opinion man."
And in this case "local laws passed by voters themselves" are one of the causes of the state's housing crisis. I think the state has a legitimate interest in overriding local laws here.
Like if you don't want high density in your neighborhood, buy all the houses. Form a neighborhood association and buy every house that's put up for sale. When selling properties, include covenants restricting resale to a developer, or giving the association first right of refusal. Spend your own money. Don't use state violence to achieve private ends.
Is it wrong? If I try to build an apartment building on land I legally own in violation of a zoning law voted in before I was born, by people who never paid a cent for my land, the sheriffs department pays me a visit.
And that would be totally unfair if the law was kept secret, and then sprung on unsuspecting property owners.
But we all know that's not the case. Prospective purchasers are well aware of zoning laws. Same reason you can't build a fuel refinery on your tidy plot of R1 land. It would put existing owners, who have a reliance interest in existing zoning laws being respected, in an awfully unfair position.
Is it demand for condos or is it demand for reasonably-priced housing and condos are the only even remote possibility?
I've met a few people who really loved condo living but almost every one would have taken the single family home next to the condo building if it had been even remotely similar in price.
Those are the same thing? Not sure what youre asking, there is limited space, people recognize that having a SFH involves tradeoffs, just as most other things in life do.
People who are living like that are being invaded by high density people who want to live in high density in their communities. They want to take over and force people out.
And generally they just want to flip. Find somewhere cheap and make it expensive to make money by lowering everybody's quality of life and calling it progress.
How do you "force" people out? The existing owners have to sell land, and once they do the new owners have as much right to decide as the other residents. Are there thugs going door to door forcing sellers to sign papers?
Allowing higher density construction doesn't mean higher density must get built there. That's still up to the property owner to decide. True freedom.
> Property taxes...causing people who own to be priced out
That's an important price signal that the land is under-utilized. If we actually allowed denser residential then those people could sell their land to a condominium or townhouse developer in exchange for a new unit and some cash. They get to stay in the same place, their property taxes stay roughly the same, and they get to enjoy the cash. While everyone else also benefits from more housing. Win-win-win.
> 1 people per square mile... Then the state decided that this was the perfect place to build 100 MW of 630 foot wind turbines
That is correct, for the reason you yourself gave. Since it bothers you so much personally, I'm very sorry about your bad luck. But it was objectively the right decision.
Is it always true? More than once I heard fears about undesirables moving in, crime rate growing, the neighborhood "losing its character" that commands the high prices, etc. The resistance is real at some places.
The land value argument is downstream of the real issues - some people don't want change and fight it.
If it was purely a money question you could just get some billionaire to go around buying out entire neighborhoods, redeveloping them, and turning around and selling them off for a profit (because they'd be worth more, right?) - the fact that this is not being done either means there's a great new startup or there are other issues.
Literal NIMBY-ism, where the backyard is one's own property, is just straightforward property rights. They want to control other people's property and tell them what they can and can't do with it. That's basically communism.
Tariffs.
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