Lord Gavin is very real (unfortunately for Californians). if you don’t think the executive, whether in Sacramento or DC has the power to regulate almost at whim, you are delusional. Both the California Legislature and U.S. Congress have ceded much of their constitutional power to the executive. We have not been a “nation of laws” for a very long time. We are, instead, a nation of regulations. Reprehensible behavior.
Sure, and California can’t tax our retirements when we reside in another state.
Edit: I call “bullshit” – discourse does not display my “sarcasm” HTML tags.
For security and usability reasons, most forum software restricts the HTML tags that may be used in a post to a small whitelist.
Ending a sentence or paragraph with “/s” is the accepted ‘syntax’ to indicate sarcasm.
It is likely that actual <sarcasm>…</sarcasm> tags wouldn’t work anyway if they were not outright blocked as they would be silently ignored by the reader’s browser as an unrecognised HTML element - but you can always do it as per this paragraph. (I’ve used HTML entity references to include the less-than and the greater-than characters. And if you want to geek out, there would be other ways.)
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I don’t know how well that would stand up in court in respect of digital products i.e. products made available via the internet for download. The vendor might have to demonstrate that it at least puts some kind of barrier in place e.g. geoblocking.
Regardless though, politically, I just don’t think that’s an option for Purism.
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If this is accurate, then Meta has been clandestinely funding lobbying groups in the push for age verification at the OS level: hekate/attestation-findings: Age attestation investigation - Forgejo: Beyond coding. We Forge.
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At least in the mobile device space, if not everywhere, that actually makes sense from their point of view i.e. push the responsibility onto someone else.
So, for example, the Australian government is forcing Facebook to guess about a user’s age. Wouldn’t it be better from their point of view if that was pushed onto e.g. Apple so that Apple is guessing about a user’s age and then Apple is just telling Facebook what Apple has determined? That I believe was Facebook’s submission to the Australian government during the consultation (coughfigleafcoughtickaboxcough) process on that legislation.
However far more sensible in an Australian context for mobile devices would have been to push the responsibility onto the mobile service provider because it is “impossible” to get a mobile service anonymously in Australia. You have to provide e.g. drivers licence - so they already know who you are and they already know your exact DOB and hence age - so it would be trivial to deny a mobile service to someone under a certain age, or to apply age-dependent restrictions to a mobile service, and of course to make that information available as some kind of Age Check API.
And by definition that approach would not force one country’s crap onto another country - since ultimately it is about regulating mobile service providers and each country clearly regulates its own mobile service providers (unlike crap that extends to operating systems or devices or web sites).
So it’s basically three parties (mobile service provider, operating system manufacturer, web site operator), none of whom actually want to do it, all of whom want to push the burden somewhere else, and of course large swathes of customers who don’t want this at all, and some customers who genuinely do want this.
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But not in the U.S… yet.
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Which would you rather? (if, very theoretically, the choice of poison were available to you)
And what is the position in other countries? (since this is obviously a global challenge)
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Ideally, neither. But if I had to go with one, it would be the mobile account.
Well, sure. Me too.
But unless you are paying by crypto, your relationship with your mobile service provider is not exactly anonymous anyway - and, because you are debtor to them for any postpaid plans, they are not likely to want you to be anonymous.
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Why do governments ignore the hell out of the people and create the same laws that Stalin would’ve praised.
'cause we let them.
'cause people elect the wrong people over and over again.
I’d like to remind you that the decision to do this was unanimous. There probably would have been no one to vote for who would have said no to it.
To see any change just from voting there are going to have to be changes to how voting works.
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And lots more awareness of the privacy impacts of ill-conceived legislation.
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All may not be lost… due to Michigan (of all places)?
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The risk though is that Apple (for example) just does it for all jurisdictions because it’s too much hassle to know whether you are in California or Michigan or Colorado or Brazil or Colombia or wherever, and that location determination would never be 100% reliable anyway (and phones can easily move around also).
So is it smart play on the part of Michigan? Get the increased surveillance but without paying the political price for it?
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In the UK, you don’t need to provide any kind of ID to get a pay as you go SIM card or to buy top-up vouchers. And since you can still use cash (and I didn’t see the person behind the till noting down bill numbers), there’s no trail from that route either.
A bit strange how this has continued given all the other authoritarian crap that my country is spewing. Hopefully I haven’t just jinxed it.
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2 posts were split to a new topic: California goes after 3D printers
Welp, it’s national legislation now.
https://www.congress.gov/bill/119th-congress/house-bill/8250/all-info
Notably, this is actually more personally identifying because it requires an exact date of birth, and means no operating system can even let you USE it in any capacity without providing it. There’s no age telemetry requirements, because California has that covered anyway, and no one is going to want to make a California specific version of their software. But this has just been introduced, so it can be changed to be even worse.
It seems pretty much inevitable that this is going to pass, since everyone with power would want universal digital ID associated with everything you do on the internet, because they don’t want anyone using the internet against them ever again. No need for Michigan to do it if its going to be global anyway.
I suppose the proper thing to do would be to suggest that they, require some kind of standardization on parental controls on consumer wifi routers, including ones issued by ISPs, and on cell phones. Possibly change it from the way they currently are (allow all by default) to allowing only “kid friendly” content by default, and require the solution to cover access to different parts of major social media sites somehow (having the router issue browser tokens perhaps).
But at this point I assume they’ll just have chatgpt read any email you send and draft a response without a single human being seeing it.