Next, how exactly is being in the blockchain something that helps guarantee anonymity in an age verification access control system? The whole point of the blockchain is to guaranteed non-deniability, the exact opposite. At best it stinks of “we’ve thrown a bunch of techno-fads into this proposal to make it appealing to ignorant techno-fans”.
Then, there are a TON of ways of de-anonimizing data if the thing isn’t perfectly done, especially when it gets crossed with other data. Is there a group of independent experts analysing each and every version of the protocol and the app to make sure it’s not just directly anonymous but also resilient to de-anonimization?
Next, even assuming the whole thing is perfect and has been checked and confirmed by independent experts, how do you guarantee that once the infrastructure is in place the whole age-gating software isn’t just made closed source and covertly of changed to turn it into a full-blown civil society surveillance system?
Also, who gets to chose which sites are locked behind age-gates and which are not. Is the list open? Can it be appealed? How easy it is the appeals process? Is there Court supervision of the whole process or is it some people in a closed room with no Judicial oversight choosing what gets put behind that lock and what doesn’t.
Beyond that, it’s the responsibility of parents to watch over and control what their children are doing, not everybody else. The whole focus should be on giving parents the tools for that (for example, with a standard protocol for sites to inform browsers and home firewalls that they’re serving adult content, thus allowing parents to block it internally without the information of who is watching what ever leaving their home network), not mandated government software supposedly controlling the access of the whole fucking civil society to arbitrary web-sites and who knows what else.
Last but not least, it’s literally the smallest impact and easiest to achieve option to have the websites push out standard markers for “adult content” to browsers and home firewalls so that parents can restrict their children’s access, not putting locks on every such site AND having age identification on any and all means of accessing those websites on every single piece of networked computing hardware that anybody in Estonia might use to access such websites.
The entire thing is far too heavy and affects way too many devices and too much software to be the “best solution” for the problem of protecting children from adult content, but it sure is the best solution for the objective of having government access control software in every single computing device used in Estonia.
I meant the blockchain for the chatcontrol app, not for the age verification app btw, and you make good points for sure.
Is there a group of independent experts analysing each and every version of the protocol and the app to make sure it’s not just directly anonymous but also resilient to de-anonimization?
I mean it’s open-source and we have privacy watch-dogs so yes? and maybe they will create a group for it, like Germany
Next, even assuming the whole thing is perfect and has been checked and confirmed by independent experts, how do you guarantee that once the infrastructure is in place the whole age-gating software isn’t just made closed source and covertly of changed to turn it into a full-blown civil society surveillance system?
For chat control app: blockchain where only recognized child safety organizations can add photo-hashes
For age verification app: it’s zero knowledge proof, so you get a white card without any private data? so how can that turn into full blown surveillance system? The only thing I don’t like is uploading my ID online to the app, let me get verified by showing my ID to municipal services without uploading it, would be good ig
Also, who gets to chose which sites are locked behind age-gates and which are not. Is the list open? Can it be appealed? How easy it is the appeals process? Is there Court supervision of the whole process or is it some people in a closed room with no Judicial oversight choosing what gets put behind that lock and what doesn’t.
Child safety organizations? Independent organizations with clear criteria or something? But yeah good questions idk
Beyond that, it’s the responsibility of parents to watch over and control what their children are doing, not everybody else. The whole focus should be on giving parents the tools for that (for example, with a standard protocol for sites to inform browsers and home firewalls that they’re serving adult content, thus allowing parents to block it internally without the information of who is watching what ever leaving their home network), not mandated government software supposedly controlling the access of the whole fucking civil society to arbitrary web-sites and who knows what else.
Then you must make sure the parents aren’t tech-illiterate and invest in educating parents for parental controls etc but truth, good point… Child-safe should be the standard in new devices and browsers if those parents stay being tech illiterates.
easiest to achieve option to have the websites push out standard markers for “adult content” to browsers and home firewalls so that parents can restrict their children’s access
Yeah agreed that this is the best solution but how do you make sure those websites apply for such a marker? Use AI to scan them lol And its still the best solution, together with focussing on education parents as well as children and to educate parents on parental control and screen time, and let them sort it out locally, instead of enforcing age verification deffo agreed on that
"Next, even assuming the whole thing is perfect and has been checked and confirmed by independent experts, how do you guarantee that once the infrastructure is in place the whole age-gating software isn’t just made closed source and covertly of changed to turn it into a full-blown civil society surveillance system?"
For chat control app: blockchain where only recognized child safety organizations can add photo-hashes For age verification app: it’s zero knowledge proof, so you get a white card without any private data? so how can that turn into full blown surveillance system? The only thing I don’t like is uploading my ID online to the app, let me get verified by showing my ID to municipal services without uploading it, would be good ig
Oh man, so much superficial stuff there.
For starters you did not answer my main question: How exactly does any of this stop the authorities from just making the app close source and changing it to do whatever the fuck they want?
Next “recognized child safety organizations” just moves the problem of “who choses what gets blocked” around. Who “recognizes” an organisation as genuinelly for child safety? Who authorizes them to add photo-hashes to the blockchain? What is the official process for all of that? Where is the Judicial oversight? Where is the fucking Judicial oversight? You know, the way by which for example an artist can get their tasteful drawing which is not adult but “had too much skin” for some moralistic type in one of those organisations taken of the blockchain.
Further: Who gives you the “white card without any private data”? How do you for sure it doesn’t have some kind of ID and it’s not in some database right linked with your personal info?
“Also, who gets to chose which sites are locked behind age-gates and which are not. Is the list open? Can it be appealed? How easy it is the appeals process? Is there Court supervision of the whole process or is it some people in a closed room with no Judicial oversight choosing what gets put behind that lock and what doesn’t.”
Child safety organizations? Independent organizations with clear criteria or something? But yeah good questions idk
Again, PROCESS. Who approves anybody to oversee this? What power do they those people have? What’s the process to reverse bad decisions?
Further, you can hardly reconstruct the picture for validation from the hashes in blockchain, so it’s not really public, now is it?! The hashes are public but the content represented by them is not, so de facto the list of what’s being blocked is not public, so how would the public know that it’s actually correct and not, say, some moralist blocking sex-education images?
I mean a very common trick by politicians in areas prone to Corruption, such as public contracts or public-private initiatives is to set some shit up with potential to abuse and then a toothless or captured “independent” overseer - it provides the appearence of honesty whilst in practice being the very opposite.
Further, your answer is again superficial. “Child safety organisations”? Meaningless without a detailed definition of what’s considered child safety, how they’re overseen to actually abide by such definition rather than say, being moralists or well-meaning but incompetent amateurs. If I was to proclaim to the Estonian Authorities that “I’m a ‘child safety organisation’” would they just let me put whatever I wanted on that blockchain? Dive beyond the surface with even the minimum analysis of the problem space and, as usual, the devil is in the details.
This isn’t just a technical problem, it’s a process problem and a regulatory problem - if this is not done properly whatever technical appearence of anynomity you have can be defeated by the process side of things (like having a record somewhere linking that “anonymous” white card with you or whatever state sanctioned app mandated to run in your devices being turned closed source and changed to covertly track you) and that applies not just on the user side but also the lists side of things (how the sites to block are chosen can be abused to block people from seeing things which are not adult but rather political) and the server side of things (as in, is there any software the sites have to run and what independent oversight is there for what it does).
Tech does not work in a vacuum and is not the whole system by itself - it exists in a human context, not least because it’s done by people (or at least in accordance to the specifications of people if you’re vibe coding it), it’s installed or distributed by people, it gets data that ultimatelly comes from people, and it’s use by people - there is literally no point in tech that does not in some way affect or is affected by people - and thus tech can be abused and subverted by the human/process side of things. This is why good hackers also use social hacking - because you can subvert tech via the human side.
So the bits that have to be protected for this to not just do what it’s claimed by people that it’s supposed to do (and to keep on doing it even when bad actors get a hold of it), extend all the way to the process side of things and into things like Judicial oversight (because any human process that’s not overseen by a powerful independent entity gets abused sooner or later). And, guess what, all of that if far heavier than a pie in the sky list of tech fads.
My core concern is that a technical infrastructure of mandatory government software in people’s devices (which is a requirement of this, otherwise there’s nothing there to stop children from acessing whatever the fuck has hashes in that blockchain), once in place can be abused, and as we’ve already seen in Europe, Democracies can and do turn into Fascism at any point and Fascists just love to have an infrastructure in place that can easilly be changed (just push an updated version down) to, say, eavesdrop on people or block everybody from accessing specific political content.
Oh, there are so many iffy things there.
For starters:
Next, how exactly is being in the blockchain something that helps guarantee anonymity in an age verification access control system? The whole point of the blockchain is to guaranteed non-deniability, the exact opposite. At best it stinks of “we’ve thrown a bunch of techno-fads into this proposal to make it appealing to ignorant techno-fans”.
Then, there are a TON of ways of de-anonimizing data if the thing isn’t perfectly done, especially when it gets crossed with other data. Is there a group of independent experts analysing each and every version of the protocol and the app to make sure it’s not just directly anonymous but also resilient to de-anonimization?
Next, even assuming the whole thing is perfect and has been checked and confirmed by independent experts, how do you guarantee that once the infrastructure is in place the whole age-gating software isn’t just made closed source and covertly of changed to turn it into a full-blown civil society surveillance system?
Also, who gets to chose which sites are locked behind age-gates and which are not. Is the list open? Can it be appealed? How easy it is the appeals process? Is there Court supervision of the whole process or is it some people in a closed room with no Judicial oversight choosing what gets put behind that lock and what doesn’t.
Beyond that, it’s the responsibility of parents to watch over and control what their children are doing, not everybody else. The whole focus should be on giving parents the tools for that (for example, with a standard protocol for sites to inform browsers and home firewalls that they’re serving adult content, thus allowing parents to block it internally without the information of who is watching what ever leaving their home network), not mandated government software supposedly controlling the access of the whole fucking civil society to arbitrary web-sites and who knows what else.
Last but not least, it’s literally the smallest impact and easiest to achieve option to have the websites push out standard markers for “adult content” to browsers and home firewalls so that parents can restrict their children’s access, not putting locks on every such site AND having age identification on any and all means of accessing those websites on every single piece of networked computing hardware that anybody in Estonia might use to access such websites.
The entire thing is far too heavy and affects way too many devices and too much software to be the “best solution” for the problem of protecting children from adult content, but it sure is the best solution for the objective of having government access control software in every single computing device used in Estonia.
Thank you for your service, kind lemmy-goer
I meant the blockchain for the chatcontrol app, not for the age verification app btw, and you make good points for sure.
I mean it’s open-source and we have privacy watch-dogs so yes? and maybe they will create a group for it, like Germany
For chat control app: blockchain where only recognized child safety organizations can add photo-hashes For age verification app: it’s zero knowledge proof, so you get a white card without any private data? so how can that turn into full blown surveillance system? The only thing I don’t like is uploading my ID online to the app, let me get verified by showing my ID to municipal services without uploading it, would be good ig
Child safety organizations? Independent organizations with clear criteria or something? But yeah good questions idk
Then you must make sure the parents aren’t tech-illiterate and invest in educating parents for parental controls etc but truth, good point… Child-safe should be the standard in new devices and browsers if those parents stay being tech illiterates.
Yeah agreed that this is the best solution but how do you make sure those websites apply for such a marker? Use AI to scan them lol And its still the best solution, together with focussing on education parents as well as children and to educate parents on parental control and screen time, and let them sort it out locally, instead of enforcing age verification deffo agreed on that
Oh man, so much superficial stuff there.
For starters you did not answer my main question: How exactly does any of this stop the authorities from just making the app close source and changing it to do whatever the fuck they want?
Next “recognized child safety organizations” just moves the problem of “who choses what gets blocked” around. Who “recognizes” an organisation as genuinelly for child safety? Who authorizes them to add photo-hashes to the blockchain? What is the official process for all of that? Where is the Judicial oversight? Where is the fucking Judicial oversight? You know, the way by which for example an artist can get their tasteful drawing which is not adult but “had too much skin” for some moralistic type in one of those organisations taken of the blockchain.
Further: Who gives you the “white card without any private data”? How do you for sure it doesn’t have some kind of ID and it’s not in some database right linked with your personal info?
Again, PROCESS. Who approves anybody to oversee this? What power do they those people have? What’s the process to reverse bad decisions?
Further, you can hardly reconstruct the picture for validation from the hashes in blockchain, so it’s not really public, now is it?! The hashes are public but the content represented by them is not, so de facto the list of what’s being blocked is not public, so how would the public know that it’s actually correct and not, say, some moralist blocking sex-education images?
I mean a very common trick by politicians in areas prone to Corruption, such as public contracts or public-private initiatives is to set some shit up with potential to abuse and then a toothless or captured “independent” overseer - it provides the appearence of honesty whilst in practice being the very opposite.
Further, your answer is again superficial. “Child safety organisations”? Meaningless without a detailed definition of what’s considered child safety, how they’re overseen to actually abide by such definition rather than say, being moralists or well-meaning but incompetent amateurs. If I was to proclaim to the Estonian Authorities that “I’m a ‘child safety organisation’” would they just let me put whatever I wanted on that blockchain? Dive beyond the surface with even the minimum analysis of the problem space and, as usual, the devil is in the details.
This isn’t just a technical problem, it’s a process problem and a regulatory problem - if this is not done properly whatever technical appearence of anynomity you have can be defeated by the process side of things (like having a record somewhere linking that “anonymous” white card with you or whatever state sanctioned app mandated to run in your devices being turned closed source and changed to covertly track you) and that applies not just on the user side but also the lists side of things (how the sites to block are chosen can be abused to block people from seeing things which are not adult but rather political) and the server side of things (as in, is there any software the sites have to run and what independent oversight is there for what it does).
Tech does not work in a vacuum and is not the whole system by itself - it exists in a human context, not least because it’s done by people (or at least in accordance to the specifications of people if you’re vibe coding it), it’s installed or distributed by people, it gets data that ultimatelly comes from people, and it’s use by people - there is literally no point in tech that does not in some way affect or is affected by people - and thus tech can be abused and subverted by the human/process side of things. This is why good hackers also use social hacking - because you can subvert tech via the human side.
So the bits that have to be protected for this to not just do what it’s claimed by people that it’s supposed to do (and to keep on doing it even when bad actors get a hold of it), extend all the way to the process side of things and into things like Judicial oversight (because any human process that’s not overseen by a powerful independent entity gets abused sooner or later). And, guess what, all of that if far heavier than a pie in the sky list of tech fads.
My core concern is that a technical infrastructure of mandatory government software in people’s devices (which is a requirement of this, otherwise there’s nothing there to stop children from acessing whatever the fuck has hashes in that blockchain), once in place can be abused, and as we’ve already seen in Europe, Democracies can and do turn into Fascism at any point and Fascists just love to have an infrastructure in place that can easilly be changed (just push an updated version down) to, say, eavesdrop on people or block everybody from accessing specific political content.