There are a lot of people on Mastodon who are genuinely as insane as X users. I recently opened up my account and saw people engaging with al quds brigade accounts.
The argument is that there are parents who are too stupid/lazy to enable parental controls on kids devices and society has a duty to protect kids even if their parents are negligent. Also, kids interact with other kids, so even if you do everything right your kids wind up with access/peer pressure through the kids with bad parents.
I dunno if I agree but I think that's the thrust of it.
There are systems in place dealing with negligent parents. They could be better, but they exist. If kids were banned, there couldn't be that much peer pressure.
Think about it, how many kids will get a gun just because some of the kids have access to guns through their negligent parents? If it's banned the path to getting it won't be straightforward.
I feel like if we can throw parents in jail for allowing their children to walk unsupervised, we can probably toss them in prison for giving them unrestricted access to the internet.
Funny was just testing the pilot of the Irish Government Digital Wallet. Definitely seems like the way forward if we're intent on doing identity verification. I'd rather the government mediate this than a bunch of random 3rd parties.
We also have a Danish wallet now, AltID, which implements an anonymized (assuming no collusion between issuer and eavesdropper or service provider) age verification protocol based on batches of single-use tokens which contain no personal information (except that they can be traced back to you by the issuer).
It's been released and in production since summer. Since then, several social networks have apparently started A/B testing age verification for their EU users, but how many of them actually integrate with the anonymous solution that is now available and in production? To my knowledge: 0. They all use Persona.
This highlights one of my main criticisms of EU's naive approach to regulation of tech companies. They fail to realize that any regulation that they impose will be complied with in the most malicious way possible, which is how we got cookie banners with dark patterns instead of a simple HTTP header saying no thanks to cookies.
Well, that's at least a positive. I hope this means they are also forced to accept the weakest credential type, and that they can't require you to present the identity proof that the wallet also provides when verifying your age. Because if they are allowed to do that, then that is what will happen.
The problem in much of the west is that even if verification is initially government funded/run and secure, the neoliberal ratchet (underfunding>degraded service>privatize) ensures that it will eventually be privatized and enshittified.
Here in the US, we have login.gov, but many government services use the private ID.me instead.
Any time the government says it needs to “cut spending”, it instead sells off critical infrastructure to friends of government who then permanently extract a private tax on the public.
In Finland they outsource the system to banks and telephone operators. Its a very strange system. As far as I know, its not possible to access government services just by being a citizen. You also have to have an account with one of these third parties to get in.
You can, but there's a couple extra hoops to jump through. You first have to go to the police station and get a state ID because banks don't accept US passports or Finnish residence permits for whatever reason. Then you can open an account at Nordea. Then you can go through Nordea's system for e-identification.
probably gov will outsource to 3rd party for gov to build system to track and manage ID. Sometimes though also to manage, as in Denmark's MitID mainly managed by NETS under government set rules.
As a citizen under the France Passoire[1] and in an increasingly fascist chauvinist nationalist drifting in the geopolitical landscape, I wouldn’t be that found of delegating too much of these responsibilities to some centralized governmental institutions.
Note that’s this is not here some rant against any governmental power, just that in context, large private group use them as puppets and shrink their budget which of course impact quality of deliveries (not shaming the people who do the hard job without the relevant means). And while more distributed governmental topologies would have their own caveats, at least it would less likely offer opportunities for single point of failure.
I live in the UK and was having this exact discussion with someone recently - I'd actually prefer Apple to be the owners of my digital identity over the UK government who would happily throw you in jail for expressing support for Palestine Action.
I think this is a bit of a non sequitur. The government will still be able to throw you in prison in either scenario. They will also be able to compel disclosure of your records in either scenario. So the difference is really just that in the scenario where apple verifies your identity there's an additional actor in the mix over who you have zero influence. It seems strictly worse.
I understand the sentiment, but your government you can actually fix by voting.
If Apple (or another large international company) suffers from decreasing margins, gets a new CEO and decides to turn the data it sits on into money there is absolutely nothing you can do, and you might in fact still stay a "forced" customer because of network effects (=> just consider whatsapp being an important communication channel in many places worldwide).
I think this attitude in general is often harmful; if your government sucks, fix the government instead of making yourself dependent on some quasi-monopolist private company.
> You can fix companies by voting a government too
Indirectly only. This is typically also always too late; instead of doing "the right thing" in the first place, companies are disincentivized by regulation from doing "bad things" again.
Regulations are like scar tissue, they don't help against getting burnt in the first place.
Preemptive regulation typically sucks, and is admittedly extremely difficult to get right; most governments don't even bother trying.
Corporation know this and exploit it ruthlessly-- there are almost never consequences as long as they keep to the letter of the law, even when acting with intent, against better knowledge and causing astronomical damage to society (just consider the whole leaded gas disaster for an extremely clear example).
Your digital identity would then be under the jurisdiction of the US government, who (despite talking a big game) are arguably worse for that same sort of behaviour.
If anyone has to have this type of control, better it be a local national government that you can in at least some small way influence.
No it isn't. The 1A is held strongly even by the most reactionary parts of American politics and jurisdiction. You will not be thrown into a jail just for expressing your support for a group as it happens in the UK.
> throw you in jail for expressing support for Palestine Action.
For those unfamiliar, you are, of course, allowed to peacefully protest in support of Palestine in the UK.
Palestine Action is a specific group that was controversially labelled as a terrorist group after they broke onto a runway and spray painted military planes.
LOL, no, not in this side thanks. Be it by giant transnational corp or centralized all powerful government, the ruin of the noosphere is equally awful.
It would be best for any such ID system to capture only the minimum data to fulfil their function. Pre-WW2 Dutch records also listed religion, which made it very easy for the Nazis to round up and murder them. Some examples from Kansas show that even recording sex/gender is risky - state law requires driving licenses to record the original sex/gender from the first birth certificate leading to trans women having an M sex/gender marker getting arrested and prosecuted for identity fraud.
On the end of the day, it is the state that issues these ID documents. So if you let the government go bad, IMHO the form of the documents does not matter that much.
During the totalitarian communist rule in Czechoslovakia, the state would regularly interfere with passports of people considered not loyal enough - withholding them outright or inventing extra paperwork that was necessary for the border police to let you out of the country. They also controlled all supply of foreign currency, both in an out.
Then if someone was actually allowed to travel outside the country but failed to return, their family and relatives would be punished, including demotion at work & prohibition of higher education.
So if your government goes bad, this is what will happen - the form of the ID takes at that point does not make much difference.
What always strikes me is that someone, 40,000 years ago, using a pointy stone and some ivory, can make a better looking statuette than I could manage with the best modelling clay and tools available today.
It's not irrational if you know that the insurance company has mispriced your policy, and filing a claim won't be more trouble than it's worth.
Getting a contents policy in a safe neighborhood where you know that there's little risk is likely not a good deal. Getting a contents policy when you've learned that your neighbors are getting into hard drugs is probably a good deal.
Paying $19/mo for third-party full coverage + theft on your $1,000 mobile phone is probably not a good deal even if you know you are high risk, for the simple reason that at $19, they game must be that they will find any reason to refuse to pay, and will give you a poorly refurbished phone for your troubles if you make them honor the insurance.
The funny thing is I bet ending birthright citizenship is an amendment that could actually be passed. You don't have to be a virulent racist to think the context has changed when you can get almost anywhere in the world in about 24 hours.
(I'm not sure where I stand on it but I can at least see an argument for revisiting the question)
If you're late enough in your pregnancy that giving birth during your vacation is realistic, you're likely to be refused boarding or turned back at the border. Birthright citizenship tourism is much smaller of an issue than stated.
Because US has no other form of becoming a citizen other than naturalization.
Also frankly it's a bit silly when you are born to two residents of a country but don't become a citizen. Why does it matter what passports they hold if they live and work in america like american citizens? People being born on the same soil being given second class citizen treatment is pretty despicable imo.
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