Google asks Congress to not ban teens from social media

Jungle George 🌴@lemmy.world to Technology@lemmy.world – 149 points –
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:::spoiler Rambling I'm not super against the idea of age verification online. I'm against the idea of these companies having my ID. A better (but still very imperfect) solution would be to have the government itself provide a login that would simply send a true/false back to the service you're trying to access.

But even this has problems, beyond just privacy ones. There's many who don't have ID, who can't get ID, and even more who don't have ID that would be recognized in the local jurisdiction (whether it be from a foreign national, or someone in the USA with a Driver's License from New Mexico). :::

Anyways, the practice of age verification itself I don't have a problem with, but any implementation I can conceive is full of glaring issues that render it impossible without us forfeiting our rights to anonymity and/or surrendering our data to an untrustworthy source and or just being plain unreliable to attempt to use.

Yeah Louisiana implemented a government portal that does exactly what you claim through the driver's license app. Their database was hacked a little under a year ago with basically all private citizen information stolen.

If you set up a system to use these mechanisms the data WILL BE stolen or mishandled.

We have eID features withiut such big problems.
Simply because the data resides on the card itself and can only be read using a certified terminal.

e.g. A website can get a certificate to establish a secure tunnel between them and your card through e.g. your phone.
Then the certificate only allows getting specific data e.g. if you are over 18 or not.

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This idea scares me as well. State would have it so much easier to track what adult content you are visiting. Not a fan, even though I personally only do pretty tame stuff.

You dont have e-ID features? Wild..
Just last semester i learned how they are implemented and which protections they have in place to preserve privacy like specific identifiers
So a certain terminal can only get certain information e.g. over 18? yes/no
Our cigarett dispensers use this feature (those without a person to check)

You have unmanned cigarette sales? What country, if you don't mind my asking?

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