"Don't let them win. Don't verify your age. Don't give up your identity. If you absolutely must, find one of the numerous age verification services and pay in Monero."
Better yet, how about - "call your representatives"?
Some nerds, for lack of a better term, think crypto and cryptography are the answers to every privacy problem. The only way to fix society and the law is by engaging with those things. Not sidestepping them with cryptography, an unscalable approach in any case.
I'm deeply pessimistic about the future. The only group competent enough to oppose identity verification has its head in the sand.
Have you been to a city council meeting lately ? Ever?
I'm trying to push for surveillance regulation where I live. I'm there monthly.
Calling your representative is the best way to realise that they don't give a fuck. Yesterday I was editing a clip of one of them lying overtly. It will be a minor inconveniences.
what we call democracy is a dog and ponies show.
So maybe cryptography is not that ridiculous, after all
Of course the system has a rather obvious remediation for that. You could also run for office or find a kindred spirit to support.
Trying to one to one with a representative or a council just sends them a signal to not care. You're one of n constituents. Showing up to the city council meeting without bringing an exponential curve of people with you over a short enough amount of time in support of your cause simply confirms to your representatives your cause is marginal.
If you are already cutting clips you might as well bite the bullet and run for office. Best of luck with your foray in democracy!
You are cute.
I'm part of org working with ACLU, EFF and actual more important and active orgs that would would not know about.
When I go to city council, its with 50 other peoples and 4 or 5 other speakers.
Me and other folks in that loose network of org have forced our city to pass regulations, have our police force admit they use surveillance without oversifht, and expose their poor security practice overall.
Good luck in our comfort that your country is not broken
Not every lawmaker is the same and there's more than one way to get a lawmaker's attention.
Get more people with you. Or convince a group that's previously established trust in your jurisdiction to join you in speaking out. Or find out what causes the policymakers do care about and think of a compelling way to frame arguments against age verification in those terms. Heck - if you can get a local government agency to officially back you up, all the better.
There's more to politics than just going to town hall meetings or sending emails or making phone calls!
They'll just do that trick where they ignore you while the government starts investigating your tax history and some private contractor starts investigating and reframing your romantic history.
Despite this, and despite the fact that all of your communications are monitored, you manage to get a crowd of people to a meeting - where you are allowed to "comment" (i.e. speak, while nobody is obliged to listen to you or react), your crowd makes a lot of joyful noise which is never broadcast on television news, and is deleted within minutes from Tiktok, Facebook, and Youtube for vague policy violations (your third appeal on youtube is accepted, and the video returns to the web a month and a half after it was filmed.)
This protest really energizes you all until the vote, when the bill you were protesting passes unanimously. Afterwards, three out of the nine people on the committee lose their seats (the other six weren't up for election that year.) One of them gets a new appointment to a more-powerful higher-paying government job; the second joins a venerable contractor that immediately starts lobbying the state for the contract; and the third, a moron, didn't realize the others were being controlled and ends up assistant manager at a local car dealership. Everything is forgotten by the next election cycle, especially because all of the leaders who showed up at meetings and wrote their representatives were smeared in the media as bad parents with questionable tattoos, and eventually moved away due to loss of employment, housing, and shortly later banking and insurance coverage.
There's a real childishness in these 50s-propaganda style views of civics. The only way something gets accomplished like that is if there is no money against it, and your "activism" makes the politician thinks that there might ultimately be money (or money-equivalent) in taking your side.
But e.g. $10M is pocket lint to people and organizations pushing this stuff. They can go around like fairies changing everyone's lives who are willing to sell out, and politicians are already pre-configured for that. They've been dreaming all their lives of selling out. Your angry letters to the manager notwithstanding.
The reasons these are eventually getting passed have nothing to do with people not speaking up or not getting their lawmaker's attention. They have to do with power, who has it, and who doesn't. It's not about whose the most virtuous and persuasive. The case for age verification is not persuasive, to anyone, and barely makes an attempt to be - they just go immediately into calling people alt-left Chinese pedophile terrorists. It's not because they're dumb.
> There's more to politics than just going to town hall meetings or sending emails or making phone calls!
Going to town hall meetings, sending emails, and making phone calls is already an enormous amount of work. It is also simply advisory to lawmakers who are not obliged to listen to you or care; trying to get daddy to understand is a good tactic only because daddy loves you.
What real politics consists of is threats. You can't threaten somebody who has backing from somebody with a hundred million dollars and an opportunity for more if they get a few votes to go the right way. Even a well-framed argument is a tool to make people who ignore it feel threatened by people who are convinced by it. Where is the threat?
There's no political way to stop this. I absolutely believe that the only reason they move even this slowly is because powerful people feel like they could be in personal physical danger if they were near the center of particular decisions or particular acts based on those decisions. It's a waiting and boiling game, where the media and government messaging gradually change public perceptions and attitudes until doing things like age gating the entire internet seem safe to do.
> Calling your representative is the best way to realise that they don't give a fuck
That just means not enough people did it.
> So maybe cryptography is not that ridiculous, after all
Until they make that illegal. What'll you do then?
It. Doesn't. Scale.
Law alone cannot fix it. Tech alone cannot fix it.
If we wish to preserve the values we grew up with, we need both.
Law can fix 90% of it. Tech can fix 10%.
As cynical as it sounds given its frequent use in marketing and often inappropriate use in legal circles, securing what data is collected is important too.
Raise the bar for a data breach. It has value. Much more value if the law did a much better job of restricting what is collected in the first place and its dissemination.
Punishing companies for data breaches will solve more data breaches than any amount of encryption.
I find that particularly unrealistic that we can arrive at a good place solely by fining companies for data breaches.
Seems to mostly work in Europe. Did you know that a European person's advertising tracking data is the most expensive because it's so hard to get?
hear hear