Discussion

Reddit User Uncovers Who Is Behind Meta’s $2B Lobbying for Invasive Age Verification Tech

TZubiri: >"Here’s where the lobbying gets surgical. The proposed laws hammer Apple’s App Store and Google Play with compliance requirements but reportedly spare social media platforms—Meta’s core businesBecause social media already has the age info exactly?I think an OS and a web platform with accounts are different product categories. Not even sure what an interpretation of the bill that would affect meta would be.

soco: Here's some more technical details of the Swiss new official way (yet to be implemented) of doing age verification and more: https://www.liip.ch/en/blog/swiss-eid-from-a-developer-persp...

swores: Discussed a few days ago, 554 comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47362528(But it's a big enough story that I'm glad to see it on front page again.)

speefers: why do moderators go round looking to police the tone of conversation but allow duplicates and spam and decades old news?

pezgrande: It was even published by Yahoo lol [0].0: https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/reddit-user-uncovers-beh...

XzAeRosho: I know most of this affects only the US, but I'm wondering where this will go in the EU if the Age Verification Tech goes ahead in America. There's been lots of efforts to increase surveillance disguised as protection for kids in the EU and UK.The Swiss implementation of eID may be hint that governments may/will take the responsibility to implement and maintain the tech, but the multiple intrusions and lobbying by Palantir and friends in the EU gives me the ick.

singingwolfboy: https://archive.ph/6kiqr

bradley13: The article makes one mistake: praising Europe for having a better approach. Governments here are pushing hard to force ID requirements. Sure, they start by pretending it's "for the children" and they "only want age verification". They also claim that e-IDs will be voluntary. Camel. Nose. Tent.These are the same governments that file criminal charges when you compare lying leader to Pinocchio (Germany). The UK records something like 30 arrests per day for social media posts. Just imagine how much better they could do, if you were not pseudo-anonymous in the Internet!

varispeed: Why "lobbying" is not treated as corruption? This kind of corporate influence should be illegal.

dreadnip: I quite like the EU approach. It's a decent spec. Most countries already have digital apps to verify identity, like Denmark's MitID (https://www.mitid.dk/en-gb/get-started-with-mitid/). These could be expanded to fully EUDI compliant wallets and deliver encrypted proof-of-age without exposing any other identity.For example a gambling site could require MitID auth, but only request proof-of-age and nothing else. You can see in the app which information is being requested, like with OAuth.

PokemonNoGo: "Because social media already has the age info exactly?" I don't know what this question means. What information does social media have "exactly"?

ceejayoz: Facebook can make a very accurate guess from your photos, your posts, your friends' ages, and the data brokers they link it all up with.

ceejayoz: Because https://xkcd.com/1053/ applies to dupes and "old news", but not being a dick.

chistev: What's the origin of that comic site? I like it.

ceejayoz: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xkcd

Cthulhu_: I think age verification laws are good in principle - there's a lot of stuff on the internet that people should be protected from. But it's the manner of age verification that is the issue.The EU has zero knowledge proof age verification systems, e.g. through your bank, which are secure and don't involve sending a copy of your ID and / or face scan to a dodgy US based 3rd party.

cwmoore: Because freedom, and surveillance capitalism, have different effects depending on which side of the PR apparatus you find yourself on, and the laws that get passed are written by and for the industries and not crabs in the barrel voters who rely on them for income.Power corrupts.

pgwhalen: Lobbying is literally half of what representative democracy is. First, you elect representatives to office. Then, you try to get them to do what you want. The latter is lobbying.Of course, when money becomes a significant portion of how the second one happens, things can get complicated.

y-curious: I don’t mean to be as aggressive as this sounds but the frogs probably liked the increasingly warm water too until it started boiling. How many steps between MitID and a fork that is used to enforce extreme censorship?

badpenny: It's an important story, and I'm glad it's getting exposure, but this "article" is some really blatant AI slop. Go and read the original Reddit thread by the human being who did the work instead of this lazy regurgitated shit.

jwr: The EU, unfortunately, has shown to be very susceptible to this kind of lobbying in the past. We regularly see legislation that is being rammed and rushed through in spite of vocal opposition. I would be very, very worried. (EU citizen)

Ysx: > Because social media already has the age info exactly?Then it shouldn't be difficult to comply.

jamesnorden: Technically because citizens are also allowed to lobby, but in practice only corporations get to play, so it becomes "legal bribing".

guywhocodes: This is probably protected free speech

pjc50: The UK is absolutely picking the most stupid option (delegate it to US companies doing face recognition)

boesboes: Everything is a slippery slope if you tilt & twist it enough...

snackbroken: This particular slope has consistently had people pratfalling over and over again for hundreds of years.

snackbroken: If there's no information provided beyond proof-of-age, what's stopping my friend's 18 year old brother from lending his ID to every 14 year old at school? IRL that's negated by the liquor store clerk looking at the kid who is obviously underage and seeing that his face doesn't match the borrowed card he just nervously presented.

snowwrestler: The environmental movement and labor movement are two examples where citizens organize to go up against corporate interests and win pretty regularly and durably.Most of those folks would not call it lobbying because of the negative associations of the word. “We have activists, our opponents have lobbyists.” But it works the same way.It is specifically protected in the First Amendment: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”Emphasis mine.

cwmoore: You have the right to remain silent, but you must assert it verbally.

SkyeCA: > organizations like the Digital Childhood Alliance (DCA)

cluckindan: The Reddit post mentions that DCA does not exist in any official record. It seems to be a ghost organization for the purpose of controlling perceptions.

enoint: I think it exists, as an umbrella group. It might only be 3 weeks old. But it seems preoccupied with minors accessing online pharmacies. Very preoccupied with that.

boesboes: As mentioned in the article, the EU already has a different plan

cwmoore: I’m not so sure. First the representatives are selected to be elected.A significant portion of both of your suggested halves are “complicated” by money.

motohagiography: Even steelmaning the case for age verification, does anyone really think the state is going to re-institute the innocence of childhood by filtering content and services? Of course not. There is no steelman. If you can do age, you can do identity, and the purpose of identity is recourse for authorities against truth and humor.Doing ID or this fake age verification with anything other than a physical secure element is a dumb regulation that going to create its own regulatory arbitrages and spawn very powerful and profitable black and grey markets. Poor laws create criminal economic opportunity, and digital id is just creating a massive one.Between Meta being behind a digital id initiative under the pretext of alleged "age verification" and the Debian project leads pivoting to political objectives, it appears gen Z now has a cause to build tech against and fight for. These are dying organizations that cannot innovate and they've attracted a pestilence that is pivoting them to the easier problem of political maneuvering. as it's easier to militate for what nobody wants than to make something anyone actually wants.The upside is that people get to be hackers again. Tools to cleanse our networks and systems of Meta and other surveillance companies and the influence of these compromised organizations are an OS install and a vibecoding weekend away.

armchairhacker: Apparently most of the “original” report was done by Claude (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47366804). And now re-transcribed on various ad-space sellers, probably also by Claude. Claude is the only real journalist here.Personally I’d rather not see reposts of posts this recent, especially LLM posts.

enoint: What makes you think Debian leads have taken a stand?

orthoxerox: If this lobbying forces Microsoft to finally add local child accounts to Windows, I'll consider Meta's money well-spent.

hliyan: Why can't we handle this the same way we handle knives, guns and chainsaws: require adults to secure the device before letting minors near them? All the devices need is the ability to create limited access profiles. A human adult performs age verification by only providing the minor with creditals to a limited profile. Trying to perform that verification so far away from the minor, after they have got to the last gate, seems like the worst way to do it.

bluGill: I want my kids to grow up in a world where they can install linux themselves. I don't want them to grow up in a world where they can't walk to a neighborhood park without me.

abc123abc123: Zero knowledge is not true. All chains rely, ultimately, on a place where ID:s are stored, and from there, they will leak. That place can also be engineered to undo the zero knowledge design. Couple that with the already in place, surveillance by ISP:s within the EU, and it becomes obvious that zero knowledge is a scam, and only valid under unreal conditions that will never apply in the EU, and only in isolation, and not looking at the entire system.

abc123abc123: Yep. Sadly the EU is more or less lost, and freedom online will be squashed. I would not be surprised if age verification will tie in with the EU digital wallet, and with the EU democracy shield surveillance project, so that any opposition to Brussels ideological stance will get you disconnected from your bank, money, purchases, and your ability to ID yourself.Basically, the chinese, through WTO, managed to utilize corona to show politicians, regardless of color, the enormous power of complete digital control of the population.Our spineless and incompetent EU politicians thought it very erotic, and are now ramming it down our throats.I don't really see a way to stop this apart from moving to south america or africa, to a small country with a weak government.

dreadnip: MitID is run by the government. How would anyone fork it? Any service implementing MitID auth can verify through signatures that they're connecting to the official service.I don't want my kids to have access to gambling websites like Stake, but I also want to keep my digital identity anonymous. The eIDAS is a solution that achieves both of these goals.If you can choose between the discord shitshow with a face scan, or a digital encrypted proof-of-age in a 2FA app you already use, issues and verified only by the government of your country (who have all your personal details anyway), what would you choose?

wildzzz: The original reddit post was also written by AI

djxfade: I disagree. What if, hear me out, parents actually parent, instead of relegating the parenting to companies, and ruining the internet for the rest of us?

pzo: agree, also they should take into account that their children will be eventually an adult and will be living in such system. Goverments should only focus on educating parents (available tools, recommendations) and maybe provide some open source tooling for parents.

SiempreViernes: > During the 19th century, several experiments were performed to observe the reaction of frogs to slowly heated water. In 1869, while doing experiments searching for the location of the soul, German physiologist Friedrich Goltz demonstrated that a frog that has had its brain removed will remain in slowly heated water, but an intact frog attempted to escape the water when it reached 25 °C.From wikipedia.

systima: Follow what Nick Clegg has been saying post-Meta. He might give a big clue.

pjc50: .. do you think you could quote it here to save time please?

pgwhalen: You could break it down further if you like, yes.Everything is complicated by money. I wish we were better about shielding politics from money. So much about society in general is about money, it ain’t easy.

cwmoore: No, not “if I like”, everything touches money, and “it ain’t easy”.Your breakdown was so simple, it was simply wrong.

domh: I keep emailing my (Labour) MP about this, I suggest you do the same! I get the standard "protecting the children" response. I am not voting Labour again if this madness is still in place (or worse!) at the next GE.

SiempreViernes: Not sure I see the crossover between activities performed at home and problems of car centric street design and the resulting poor pedestrian traffic safety?

bluGill: If I have to watch my kids 100% of the time they can't walk to the park.Nothing to do with street design - most suburbs have a park a safe walk near any house. That kids are not walking there is nothing to do with street design.

SiempreViernes: Dude, do you not know who's president in the US right now? Getting paid is easily the biggest* reason he ran!

dotandgtfo: What examples of this do you have in recent years (post 2016)? The clearest example of lobbying (chat control) has repeatedly been struck down.

latexr: > The clearest example of lobbying (chat control) has repeatedly been struck down.So far. It ain’t over until it’s over.> What examples of this do you have in recent years (post 2016)?Digital Omnibus is another.https://www.business-humanrights.org/en/latest-news/eu-digit...

hallway_monitor: Well son, sometimes when a man and a pencil love each other very much,

stavros: Your premise is flawed, you can do age without doing identity. Not that I'm a fan of either, I just wanted to point out the flaw.

pjc50: > Debian project leads pivoting to political objectivesWhat does this mean? Free software was always a politics of itself.

izacus: Having the government be the issuer and verifier of personal IDs is hardly a "boiling frog" situation anywhere in the world.

pjc50: Gambling sites already have payment information, which should include real names! (no, you should not be allowed to do non-KYC gambling, that's just money laundering)

sschueller: The Swiss eID is open source[1] and it's usage will be limited. Any type of age verification for online service would need go to a vote and would probably loose. "Eigenverantwortung", it is the parents job to look after the kids, not the state.[1] https://github.com/swiyu-admin-ch

timmmmmmay: "repeatedly struck down" means somebody keeps bringing it back

raverbashing: This is a common argument, but the problem is the kids who have deadbeat parentsOr even kids whose parents don't have the technical knowledge neededYes I do agree the responsibility is with the parents, but it's these kids who are majoritarily affected by (bad internet actors) AND (bad offline actors)

roysting: Is it stupid or intentional? I believe the latter. There are many layers that these kinds of things go through before they are pushed in that manner and not in a "smart" manner that respects rights of the majority of the population. They are chasing this path for deliberate reasons, regardless of what they may be, or whether you like it or not. Ironically, they can only engage in these "stupid" things because people don't force them to not engage in "stupid things". Silence in consent in these kinds of cases.

latexr: > The clearest example of lobbying (chat control) has repeatedly been struck down.So far. But they’ll keep lobbying and we’ll need to keep fighting.> What examples of this do you have in recent years (post 2016)?Digital Omnibus is another.https://noyb.eu/en/gdpr-omnibus-eu-simplification-far-remove...https://www.business-humanrights.org/en/latest-news/eu-digit...

varispeed: It's not democracy if one with the most money gets their way.

Mashimo: But how do you go from real name to age verification?

cwmoore: You might want to look into the industry funding of environmental organizations and the decline of union membership before you decide with your whole heart.