Protecting children online is crucial, but forcing every user to hand over their ID is a privacy nightmare waiting to happen, according to the head of the Swiss privacy firm
I don’t have to worry about my OS because it’s open source. Yours should be too. They can’t actually enforce age verification on an open source OS because my OS can lie, and I can use its source code to make it lie if I have to (which I won’t, because many other people will do it for me). For that matter they’ll find ways to make Windows lie too, but you still shouldn’t be using it, it’s shit.
I don’t have to worry about my ISP either because I live in a still-civilized country, but yeah, if they really lock it down at that level that’s going to be tough, you’ll probably have to identify someone for that if that’s the next place where they go to. There are countermeasures and workarounds though. VPN, mesh networking, borrowing somebody else’s wifi or mobile data hotspot, finding open networks. Maybe we’ll get to the point where we need point to point links, pirate satellites, datajacking ourselves into communication lines, who knows.
But we’re not there yet. We’ll continue to develop more countermeasures as these sorts of hostile police surveillance state measures encroach on our freedom as it becomes necessary. You don’t have to let your identity be associated with anything beyond your ISP if you’re only using your ISP to get to somewhere you do trust with a VPN. If they block VPNs, then we will find other ways around the blocks. Are you familiar with I2P? If you aren’t, maybe you should get familiar with it. We already have plenty of ways of sneaking information into and out of even more totalitarian of states like China, Russia, at least until there’s an absolute shutdown like in Iran. You should also consider not living in a totalitarian country, and doing what you can to stop yours from becoming more totalitarian, because it’s only going to get harder the longer you let them do this. Give them your ID in exchange for internet access for now if you absolutely have to and can’t find any other option, but you might not absolutely have to, yet. And if you do have to, do it with caution: start learning and planning what you’re going to have to do after that and how you’re going to get very active in your resistance to being monitored and observed.
You sound like you’ve got a little bit of learned helplessness, but people in shitty, scary countries have been dealing with this for a long, long time. Yes, it sucks, but it’s not the end of freedom. You have to learn how to fight it.
I don’t have to worry about my OS because it’s open source. Yours should be too. They can’t actually enforce age verification on an open source OS because my OS can lie, and I can use its source code to make it lie if I have to (which I won’t, because many other people will do it for me). For that matter they’ll find ways to make Windows lie too, but you still shouldn’t be using it, it’s shit.
I don’t have to worry about my ISP either because I live in a still-civilized country, but yeah, if they really lock it down at that level that’s going to be tough, you’ll probably have to identify someone for that if that’s the next place where they go to. There are countermeasures and workarounds though. VPN, mesh networking, borrowing somebody else’s wifi or mobile data hotspot, finding open networks. Maybe we’ll get to the point where we need point to point links, pirate satellites, datajacking ourselves into communication lines, who knows.
But we’re not there yet. We’ll continue to develop more countermeasures as these sorts of hostile police surveillance state measures encroach on our freedom as it becomes necessary. You don’t have to let your identity be associated with anything beyond your ISP if you’re only using your ISP to get to somewhere you do trust with a VPN. If they block VPNs, then we will find other ways around the blocks. Are you familiar with I2P? If you aren’t, maybe you should get familiar with it. We already have plenty of ways of sneaking information into and out of even more totalitarian of states like China, Russia, at least until there’s an absolute shutdown like in Iran. You should also consider not living in a totalitarian country, and doing what you can to stop yours from becoming more totalitarian, because it’s only going to get harder the longer you let them do this. Give them your ID in exchange for internet access for now if you absolutely have to and can’t find any other option, but you might not absolutely have to, yet. And if you do have to, do it with caution: start learning and planning what you’re going to have to do after that and how you’re going to get very active in your resistance to being monitored and observed.
You sound like you’ve got a little bit of learned helplessness, but people in shitty, scary countries have been dealing with this for a long, long time. Yes, it sucks, but it’s not the end of freedom. You have to learn how to fight it.