Luna :neurodiversity: :trans: on Nostr: Not enough people are paying attention to the deluge of threats to our digital ...

Not enough people are paying attention to the deluge of threats to our digital privacy. The EU is pushing digital sovereignty while they are also pushing for mandatory age verification. Several US states have started passing OS level age attestation laws. A bipartisan bill is being introduced to congress take this nationally.

There's also cases like the UK, Brazil, and Australia.

While this is framed as a means to protect children, any minority will tell you that women and children are often the shields used by powerful men to justify and enact oppression.

Everyone is willing to look at women and children as defenseless and in need of protecting but fail to look at those who are disadvantaged by the system who will be hurt by said protections. Meanwhile, women and children are unaffected at best or further harmed at worst.

This is because women and children are never really why these laws are passed. As I said, they are a shield meant to protect the true intentions of politicians and their masters. And the majority doesn't care because the harm done doesn't impact them.

These age verification and attestation laws are not about protecting children. They are about surveillance and business. This isn't just governments looking to spy on everything you do. This isn't just about governments deciding what is or is not okay for people to view on the internet. This is also not just about giving authoritarian regimes more power to control you. This is also about investors.

As I have grown older, scam calls have become more of a problem. Large tech companies are doing everything they can to harvest data from you. Right now we're talking about how this is being done to train AI. AI is an application of a problem that's already existed.

Lots of things these days are free provided you're willing to deal with privacy invading trackers and ever increasing ads. Everything wants you to sign up for subscriptions to such a degree that any account that isn't dedicated specifically to just writing email is just a fog of notifications and nonsense. Our homes are being filled with more and more smart devices that are marketed as making life convenient in ways that really don't matter. And even those spy on us. The Alexas and Google Homes are obvious but also your televisions, your washing machines, your thermostats, your refrigerators, your light bulbs. Every internet enabled thing is spying on you and they have been for years.

While not all of these laws are equally as bad, I'd rather say my age than pull out my drivers license, they all accomplish a goal of broadcasting even more data about you for big tech and data brokers to collect. Plenty of these laws are centered around biometric data.

Let's not get turned around. Biometric data is already a problem. When you use your fingerprints or face to sign into a device that is biometric data. While it's possible that Apple isn't using this for nefarious purposes, do you really think that's the case with Microsoft? Or Google? What about Meta? Let's assume that out of these four, one of them is actually interested in your privacy, can you really trust them all to be?

No. Of course you can't. One is Google and another is Meta. Of the four at best Apple has had instances where they refused to comply with government requests to unlock devices on principle, where as Microsoft will just give away your Bitlocker keys and is pretty well known for harvesting your data to such a degree that it inhibits the performance of their operating system. And even then, the one example I'm thinking of for Apple happened years ago, and they are a little too cozy with fascists for my comfort. And even if they aren't, how do I know they aren't selling my data somewhere down the line?

Like I said, one might be fine, another questionable, but two most certainly are. And even for the one that is fine, you are the frog and they are the scorpion on your back. You should assume they WILL sting you.

By enforcing biometrics instead of just having it as an option for convenience, governments are mandating that you do something that will be at the benefit of their capitalist masters.

You might assume that there would be a government database that would securely validate your data, keep it safe, and have people working around the clock to protect it and your privacy. Especially if you're living in a country that isn't doing EVERYTHING it can to break the global economy. I apologize but that is a terrible assumption to make.

Very likely, these services will be outsourced to your politicians' corporate masters. They're going to be handled by companies they trust or, more realistically, companies that paid them to trust them. Countries will gain an even greater ability to spy on what you're doing. Maybe it's legal under your country's free speech protections to say that your country is ruled by a sexist, genocidal, sentient tangerine who's beholden to Israel and Russia instead of the people who voted him in, and that he's engaged in a massive inhumane ethnic cleansing campaign. Also that his secret police should be abolished.

Well this biometric data might be used to single you out and prosecute you despite the fact that you legally did nothing wrong.

Meanwhile, the company gets a benefit too. It has your biometric data. That data isn't safe because for one they're going to sell it. They are absolutely going to sell it. And even if they don't, your data is now being broadcast to websites and applications. THEY'RE going to sell it.

The fact that they're already collecting data on you shouldn't be an excuse to write it off, It should be a reason to be angry. But that's not all.

We are going from a paradigm where our data is collected via things like our ISP, our IP address, and various other metrics. And those might include payment information like credit cards and banking details. Now we're going to be giving them even more information and that information will be centralized instead of distributed.

So when Palantir gets hacked, you are going to be even more at risk of identity theft than you already are! And frankly, if you're American I expect the identity theft risk is so high that the government should just give everyone new identity documentation and treat what came before as invalid. If you think it won't happen, look at Discord in Australia. There was a massive data breach centered specifically around age verification infrastructure.

Okay but surely this will be used to protect children on the internet, right?

No. It won't.

First problem is, even with age attestation, you are now broadcasting that a child is a child to the internet. A common criticism I've seen is that this will give predators more accurate information about who they're targeting. It won't stop children from accessing harmful materials. A lot of the verification laws that already exist were put into place to protect children from porn. Instead this drives people who want to see porn to less safe sites with more problematic content.

I will say, on some level I can understand why there would be some support for laws like this. I'm sure plenty of you have known people who bought their child a smart phone at 5-10 years old and just gave them unmoderated access to do whatever they wanted. And some of you may have remembered doing things your parents wouldn't have approved of that in hindsight you regret. Or even if not you might like the security of knowing that you're in a guaranteed adult space.

This isn't solved by surrendering your privacy and frankly it isn't going to be solved by you either.

One response to this is that instead of eroding the right to privacy parents should parent their children. I agree with this but I think it's unrealistic, especially for children who come from negligent and abusive households. I personally think that there should be education in schools to help give children a better understanding of how to use the internet safely.

I mean, in my country we set aside time to teach children what to do in the event of tornadoes, fires and,.... god dammit... active shooters...

We should also invest time in sex ed and online safety.

That said, if you really think this is about child safety, then why is Meta engaged in lobbying efforts?