So, OS-level age-gating is going federal, which will effectively kill your rights to device ownership and what’s left of free speech and expression.
Enjoy your free speech while you still have it because this is a clear attempt to erase that right.
SOPA never died, it just went into hiding until time to reemerge, and now’s that time, this is basically SOPA in a save the kids trenchcoat.
I hate this shit as much as the next guy, but can we cool it with the exaggerations, please? There is no more free speech and expression in the US now because of this? What? When it comes to free speech, we’re crying wolf at this point. I agree that this bill is terrible and a move in the wrong direction, but it’s not exactly killing off free speech. I mean, come on. People can’t take us seriously when we talk like this.
There is some nuance to the language, and there might be litigation to follow; but age attestation and age verification are wildly different things:
Age attestation is just providing a birthday, like many sites such as steam, require before accessing most games. There’s nothing stopping a 10-year-old from claiming to be 30.
Age verification, though, will be more of a legal process: requiring government documentation, biometrics, ai data harvesting, tracking, etc. and will result in the OS theoretically being required to keep your specific pii to provide to downstream consumers of this data.
Those of us who grew up in the age of the early Internet have ‘handles’ or ‘usernames’. Those that grew up in the later Facebook age use their real names. Us elders see this tying of identity to computation as an invasion of privacy.
I’ve had this handle for decades across multiple platforms. I’ve probably identified myself, but you would need to put in at least some work to figure out what human being I am. We call that doxxing right now, and it’s generally seen as hostile. This bill eradicates even that layer of defense by requiring my computer to know who I am, and sharing that data with Meta, Google, Facebook, Lemmy, etc. effectively my computer will doxx me.
While the intermediate result is not that my privacy is instantly compromised, anyone with a clue can see the future here: if the OS knows who you are because of this law, then the browser can know who you are, and the website can know who you are and when you say things the government doesn’t like, you can be… Removed.
This is what we call a chilling effect. And that is also generally understood to be bad.
This bill, and all others like it, are bad.
Edit: And if this bill is defeated, there will be others. This is not going to end, and each version will be an existential threat to privacy.
Edit 2, coming back later with more thoughts:
The real difference is that Attestation, or lack thereof, puts any legal issue on the user who claimed to be something they were not, whereas Verification will put the onus on the OS developer, API developer, app developer and anyone else in the chain, which is just insane.
Parent walks in on kid watching porn? That’s not the fucking OS developer’s fault, and needs to be handled inside the household and not in court, if at all. I could have a whole conversation about what I fear that my son might find online, and it’s not PornHub, it’s Joe Rogan or similar “influencers” and grifters.
Whole tangent into “protecting the children”:
In a sane, non-fascist surveillance-state world, this would be called parental controls, and be something opted-into instead of forced – and it used to be a thing. I’m all for an OS that has the ability to have supervising user with parental controls, and will chose to install those on my kid’s devices. My son has a phone that doesn’t have unrestricted access to the internet because he’s a pre-teen and is still developing the ability to discern reality from propaganda. He also has a Nintendo Switch with screen time and game limits so that he can play, but can’t play ALL the time and can only play things I’ve approved (As of like 2020, hes gotten older and I’ve removed most restrictions – hooray growth!).
He hates the restrictions, but that’s tough stuff for him because he can text his friends to coordinate an online game session, call me if he gets in trouble, map his way home, calculate pi, etc, which I couldn’t do in my pre-teen years before pocket computers. I think it’s OK for there to be options for parents to manage their kid’s digital existences and, critically, I think it’s OK when my son escapes my borders through skills he learned. When he installs his first VPN on his phone, I’ll be so proud.
It was a rite of passage when we learned how to get a terminal in an ancient MacOS, or use notepad to launch a program like a browser on a school computer. These guardrails will always fail and the only way to solve them is human to human conversation.
Not Legislation. Call your Representatives (And Senators if this or something like it escapes the House) and tell them this shit is not acceptable.
This is just the first step. Soon you’ll need a government ID to operate your network card, then they’ll control what you post, the thoughts you can have.
Try thinking for yourself while you still can.
… thats a nice tinfoil hat you got there
This post was unironically made a year after the start of an American authoritarian government, concentration camps, public executions and genocide.
God some of you people are stupid.
The whole point of free speech is that it is free. If you need to hide anonymously, then it’s not free, it’s simply bypassing censorship.
Suppressing online anonymity is very problematic, but free speech is absolutely not one of them.
Oh so your argument is that people are still free to speak, just not on online platforms.
Yeah I’m not going to take the time to break your argument down; it’s fucking dumb, do some reflecting.
Free speech as a right is an ideal. In practice, any given government of a country that purports to grant its citizens freedom of speech will have types of speech that it wants to censor (despite its legality) and will use whatever means available to subvert that right. As such, speech is only free insofar as it can be protected. Online anonymity is one such protection.
Once upon a time, people were against social security because they believed the government would use the individual numbers assigned to everyone as a form of identification…
History may not repeat itself, but it rhymes.
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It may seem like that if you’ve been walking through the last couple years with your eyes closed.
Exaggerations? Either we put them in a simulation of hell, or they put us. That’s where we are at.
All means are justified!
Most people in this thread have no clue what free speech is apparently. But Yankees love talking about how much freedom they have, so if that’s what it takes to rally them, so be it I imagine?
There’s a host of other reasons people can’t take Americans seriously, and I assure you that acknowledging reality is not one of them lol