Age verification is just a precursor to automated attribution of speech

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• Hacker News
• In the intel industry, it is known that metadata is more or less enough to identify people. That's state/military intel. Several countries have already implemented bulk acquisition / collection of data that "crosses the borders", which is a ridiculous concept.

  If you're located in, say, Norway - and send someone who is also located in Norway a message via Messenger, there's a good likelihood that message will go to some foreign located Meta server, and back to Norway.

  When this was being implemented, there was some noise and protests from experts, but that's about it. For the general population it went quietly and without notice.

  by TrackerFF
• This is already happening if you want to visit the US. Customs officers will look at your social media accounts to make sure you are compliant.
  by iamflimflam1
• This is a reminder to curate and prune all your past social media contribution, because when this goes thru, you KNOW they will apply it retroactively. You'd loathe to lose your cushy job over a moment of lucid honesty back in 2011.
  by btbuildem
• Cory Doctorow had a very profound talk about it very long time ago (10+years).

  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HUEvRyemKSg

  As the internet become the place where people do a lot of things, no government (and especially no security services) will be able to keep themselves from trying to control it or at least monitor it. And with the new LLM features they can automatically do much more than before.

  Human nature is a constant and when the government sees an easy way to enforce something, many more bureaucrats will try to do it.

  by freefaler
• Age verification starts the gating of Internet access by governments.

  Any site, with any concern about age of user liability, is likely to adopt the practice. Strong laws, sold on their face value safety benefits, will increase that liability.

  You won’t see any laws removing or limiting that liability.

  The trend will be many more sites becoming government-gated, than we are imagining now.

  Beyond surveillance, it’s a real step into government permissioned internet access, on an individual citizen level.

  by Nevermark
• It gives a new spin to:

  > Everything you say CAN and WILL be used against you.

  Especially when what you said has already been recorded and tied to your identity before you faced the authorities.

  Edit: from last week https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48632269

  by firefoxd
• Age verification is just one part of this crackdown.

  Device attestation is another - making sure you're using an unmodified government approved operating system and apps linked to your ID.

  by RachelF
• If we taught systems thinking in schools things like internet age verification would never get past being an idea on the back of a napkin. People struggle to consider the second-, third-, and nth-order effects of anything so asking them to consider what else might happen if we bring in laws and technical mechanisms to 'protect the children' is unfortunately too a big leap for a lot of them. Most people are bad at spotting causal links between parts of a system, and people who are good at it exploit that.
  by onion2k