alt Hacker NewsThe only way to have age verification on an international level, is to have treaties allowing for the sharing of information about citizens, digitally, in that context.
And this is that level of cooperation. And it has all the hallmarks of what comes next, identity verification. And this, is what this is for.
In order to prosecute anyone, you need to validate who did the crime. And that requires knowing who that person is. Not hearsay, not postulated, but validated "who this is". So you need to lock down anonymous access to the internet, in order to ensure you can easily and always prosecute such crimes.
And one of the issues right now, is that if someone in the UK does "bad thing" in Canada via the internet? It's doubly hard to track. So creating frameworks which will (on the backend) require some form of identity verification to work effectively, well... that tracks from where I sit and have seen in the last 2 years.
Frankly, from a government's perspective, this is no different than all the changes with KYC, for example 50 years ago the Government of Canada knew pretty much nothing about its citizenry. Certainly, it had no clue about bank account balances, transactions, investment holdings, a person's wealth and more. Now it knows enormous amounts of data, perhaps an arbitrary example is that your RRSP and TFSA(like American 501k) information, balances, and more are now yearly sent to the GoC. I believe also all information on trades made are, too, even in non-registered accounts. This absolutely wasn't the case, not to this degree, even a decade or two ago.
Some of these obligations are via ratified international treaties. The degree of surveillance, fiscally, is astonishing now. Americans know of this of course, after 9/11 they gave their government enormous data, and keep giving it, eg credit card transactions.
I remember when I was young, my parents arguing about having to get SIN cards (social insurance number). While it as introduced in the 60s, something happened which made it more of a requirement. Its only purpose at the time was for Revenue Canada to track info. Everyone argued about it, discussed it, was upset! It was the first time people needed "a number" to open certain bank accounts.
Yet we come from that, to this in really one generation's lifetime.
One of the problems is that, there is a massive, immense, enormous problem here right now, in terms of bots/foreign actors/asshats spreading immense disinformation for profit or state actor based goals. And with LLMs, it's going to get so much worse. People on HN at least are capable of some filtering, but the average Joe just sees video and 100% believes it is factual and true.
I wish I could see another path to locking out the asshattery, whilst keeping the internet anonymous. But I don't really. And unless a grass roots movement comes around, to ensure that every crime on the internet has a very high degree of success for prosecution? Then we'll be getting an identity managed internet.
I'm sure a lot of people will say "We can force companies to filter!", well, can you? For every forum out there? For torrents? For everything? And even if you think the "big boys" can be the main filter points, well, do you want a private company to decide what you post or not? And they'll need some way to ensure people don't just create a new account when banned! So they'll want ID too, if they're legislated to filter.
And if they're legislated to filter, can you fight decisions in court? Do you have the presumption on innocence? Do you have the right to face your accusers? A jury of your peers? With Google, Facebook, anyone these days, you get banned and it's nigh impossible to even find out why.
While there are exceptions, our governments are required to have criminal courts, and things prosecuted there.
I really don't want private, fiscally motivated companies to be the gatekeepers, if gatekeepers there must be.
Ah well. This is all a very unpleasant path.
Replies
"We wish it could have a better solution, but you all just couldn't behave" is often the argument in these debates. You seem to be dissatisfied with it, but tacitly accept it as the only way. Let me put a finger on why I will never agree with it:
1. The current situation isn't that apocalyptic.
2. The alternative is so much more horrifying.
The first is a weaker argument because there is always a bottomless bag for the opponents to reach into and grab counterexamples. But none of these things are new. It's been 30 years since the average person could freely communicate with anyone in the world over the internet. 20 or so since the maturing of online scams. Probably at least 15 since nation-level actors started using the internet for propaganda purposes. The elephant in the room is AI, but I feel like AI use has diminishing returns, much like in any other fields. It offers a quick boost, but it's not infinitely scalable. The internet can't be completely taken over by scams and garbage in a way where everyone just keeps consuming it and goes crazy in their own ways. It's almost an ecosystem - pour too much garbage in, and you'll see people retreating into private communities and self-enforce trust, no universal carding necessary. Right now it's just tech people doing this on a large scale, but at a certain point of misinformation and incomprehensibility, treating the internet as untrustworthy by default would just become a mainstream view. It would likely fracture into massive social networks with strong identity verification and small communities that enforce trust in their own ways. As much as I don't like most private businesses, but your suggestion that they could take upon the role of the verifier is more palatable to me because that still leaves air in the room for small, private communities, and because businesses don't have perfect communication with each other or the government, preventing the universal tracking of everything.
The second argument is the real one. Technology would enable governments to track absolutely everything about everyone if we let them. Now this is a space where AI actually provides a novel use case - if before you had to have suspicion about a specific person and have someone look into them, AI will enable them to inspect everything and then form suspicion or document undesirable behaviors by default. It will be like having a personal private investigator that sees everything you do, being on the lookout for anything unusual 24/7. Online identity verification is nothing like having a SIN or a driver's license, because those two are used in specific contexts and don't enable tracking-by-default. The internet is used for ALL communications, so automated tracking of it is tracking of everything we do and say. Instead of showing your driver's license to the officer one time in a defined spot, the officer would come to you because your driver's license is etched into your skin for all to see at all times, and they're concerned about your recent movements that were automatically recorded and processed by a billion cameras. It would be a world without secrets, a world of perfect knowledge and ruthless enforcement. I don't want to live in it. I'm fine with the current world, thank you.
this is insightful.. From a behavioral psychology point of view, there is an assumption among many law and order adherents that "we just need more control-info-courts-punishment" and we will have this done. However, history has shown enormous missteps and in fact tragic actions of harm, from the very people that claim to be the ones that are Doing The Right Thing.
Does an entire society have to make the same choices of autonomy and record keeping that are common among members of the uniformed services? Mostly in the West, the answer was "No" but, here we go again.
I wish this was setup like a certificate authority so only the government is able to unmask an individual, but it's going to be pictures of government ID.
I don't think the government themselves are prepared for the amount of identity theft that is going to follow mass collection of government documents.