RE: https://infosec.exchange/@patrickcmiller/115994009296716938
This is bullshit. Online age verification is trivial for tech-savvy children to bypass using AI-generated video, and inevitably leads to breach of identity documents, while directing the computer illiterate towards websites with zero concern for US or comparable laws (e.g., those hosted in Russia).
On-device parental controls, competently administered, are far more effective. If governments actually cared about protecting children, they'd be funding and promoting education for parents in the administration of parental controls, not attempting to force porn companies and other adult-oriented website and app producers to do a vital part of citizens' parenting for them.
Online age verification is only good for wholesale ID theft facilitation, for favouring of oligarch owned companies (one of the two real reasons for such laws), for furthering corporate-captured (proto-)fascist surveillance state entrenchment (the other real reason), and for driving traffic and revenue to sites wilfully hosting Russian child sex traffickers and CSAM producers.
@giacomo All good except the mistaken suggestion that #KOSA could make anything better. KOSA would prevent any effective access to privacy, including the minimum necessary to bypass ideological censorship or to stay safe from abusively controlling parents, while also facilitating government censorship and wholesale identity theft against adults.
It would render Signal and Mastodon—two of the most important technologies for free expression—unlawful.
Prohibiting addiction-oriented algorithms would be beneficial. However, enforcing online age verification (as opposed to on-device parental controls) is always harmful: in a multitude of ways.
