It’s so funny to me how badly people want this to be some nefarious governmental conspiracy. Listen, the government already has much better tools to track you online. Your computer has, on a hardware level, sent unique identifiers to ISPs and websites since Pentium IIIs. This age requirement thing isn’t a government conspiracy to track you, they already track you.
It is a *corporate *conspiracy. It’s Meta and other major websites, games, and applications companies that want to off load their liability. Meta and Alphabet just lost major lawsuits for their negligence in protecting kids on their own websites. There is a liability dam about to break for these companies and schools and other advocacy groups start their own lawsuits. That’s what this is about. That’s the real conspiracy.
Let’s say this is the official narrative. My argument:
Meta stands to consolidate power and revenue from further mapping devices to real people.
Meta was also originally backed by Peter Thiel, who trades in data mining for secret services, now much more energetically. Zuckerberg is a sexist idiot and his app had no more merit than MySpace. Thiel saw the potential of mapping real idenities to online behavior, and it is no accident Palantir was later implicated in Cambridge Analytica.
A redditor came up with concrete data that others have already posted, that show that Meta’s dark money are all over this case. As for the fine you say that completely explains this, is a very modest for Meta, who is used to pay such fines as a cost of doing business.
Amongst the orgs taking Meta’s money to push this are many conservative organizations, like Heritage but also others (anti-sex, anti-abortion, and anti-trans organizations), who know that these laws will effectively suppress speech. Much like the trans moral panics, the laws are not as stupid as they appear, but carefully designed to obliquely achieve their goals (e.g. police bodies with wombs, in line with the same orgs’ anti-abortion positions).
Governments watch closely as the new corporatist technofascism undoes regulations and checks and balances. They stand to gain from the turmoil and increase their surveillance capabilities even more. Alternatively, some EU goverments might be thinking that this is a way to stick it to US tech monopolies that brainwash their constituents, but they are wrong.
In fact, the approach and outcomes hints toward government contractors in cahoots with surveillance agencies, that it would be surprising if there is no adjacency to Analytica personnel and/or the benefits for state actors and spooks are just an unplanned side-effect.
Conclusion: There is sufficient basis to consider that the official narrative is not the whole story.
The biggest problem with conspiracy theories like this is always the number of people involved keeping their mouths shut. Anyone that has ever managed a large project knows how impossible it is to keep a large group of people quiet about something. In real life, there are conspiracies. Often very large ones. But they didn’t stay secret for long.
What is easier to believe: (1) that all these people involved, across countries with leaders of many different political varieties, all agreed to stick to a single narrative in order to cover up a deep international conspiracy to build a massive international database of people’s ages online, OR (2) Meta and other orgs are doing a normal business thing and trying to reduce their liability costs.
Not everyone needs to be ‘in the know’, in fact most of the time people won’t even try to think through a position and it’s consequences. They’ll just support it based on surface level arguments. Also Meta isn’t exactly drowning in liability when they’re raking in billions in profit. Power stands to gain when information is controlled
It is in fact a government conspiracy to track you. Not necessarily to gather data on you, which can be purchased from brokers, but so that they can also control what you can access.
There’s no mechanism that the government currently has that can track you as effectively as these age verification laws can.
Buying profiling data from Google is not nearly as effective at tracking and controlling your online activity as integrating facial scans and government ID checks into every website or even directly into your operating system.
Frankly a brand new account pushing the “The government is already tracking you, there’s nothing you can do about it, don’t worry about all the new ways they can track you, just give in” narrative is a little suspicious.
That’s not the computer doing it, that’s the services you use going out of their way to gather one by combining data which has other legitimate purposes. Not so much being “sent” as it is being “abused”.
Unless we want to count Microsoft’s “advertiser ID”.
They also want a reliable way to differentiate between chatbots and real users, because advertising isn’t very effective on chatbots.
But also, one benefit of ID laws for the government is that it makes court proceedings much faster and cheaper. Sure, they’re tracking everyone online, but a lot of that information is locked behind procedure. By just requiring ID to log in they can sidestep the procedures, because they can just ask corporations nicely for ID information and they’ll eagerly comply.
I didn’t know about that. Maybe that’s plays into it too. But I’m generally a “simpler answer is more likely the most correct” type of guy.
In this case the simple answer is that Meta and others just had their “Tobacco Lawsuits” moment in court and liability floodgates are any to open wide, and they are pushing these laws to divert their liability onto someone else.
“Corporations want a way to verify the humanity of users” is a simple answer.
“Governments want a way to easily prosecute users” is also a simple answer.
I don’t see why it can’t be all of these things. There is actually a more complicated answer that I didn’t bring up, which is that smaller websites will have a hard time complying with ID laws, which gives preferential treatment to large websites. That locks out potential competition, hinders smaller projects like lemmy or mastodon, and helps secure the current social media monopolies.
That one might just be a useful side effect, rather than the intentional outcome.
It’s so funny to me how badly people want this to be some nefarious governmental conspiracy. Listen, the government already has much better tools to track you online. Your computer has, on a hardware level, sent unique identifiers to ISPs and websites since Pentium IIIs. This age requirement thing isn’t a government conspiracy to track you, they already track you.
It is a *corporate *conspiracy. It’s Meta and other major websites, games, and applications companies that want to off load their liability. Meta and Alphabet just lost major lawsuits for their negligence in protecting kids on their own websites. There is a liability dam about to break for these companies and schools and other advocacy groups start their own lawsuits. That’s what this is about. That’s the real conspiracy.
Let’s say this is the official narrative. My argument:
Conclusion: There is sufficient basis to consider that the official narrative is not the whole story.
The biggest problem with conspiracy theories like this is always the number of people involved keeping their mouths shut. Anyone that has ever managed a large project knows how impossible it is to keep a large group of people quiet about something. In real life, there are conspiracies. Often very large ones. But they didn’t stay secret for long.
What is easier to believe: (1) that all these people involved, across countries with leaders of many different political varieties, all agreed to stick to a single narrative in order to cover up a deep international conspiracy to build a massive international database of people’s ages online, OR (2) Meta and other orgs are doing a normal business thing and trying to reduce their liability costs.
Not everyone needs to be ‘in the know’, in fact most of the time people won’t even try to think through a position and it’s consequences. They’ll just support it based on surface level arguments. Also Meta isn’t exactly drowning in liability when they’re raking in billions in profit. Power stands to gain when information is controlled
Counter-example: Epstein. But just continue to collect the checks for campaigning in favour of big brother Zuck, Thiel and friends. LoL
It is in fact a government conspiracy to track you. Not necessarily to gather data on you, which can be purchased from brokers, but so that they can also control what you can access.
There’s no mechanism that the government currently has that can track you as effectively as these age verification laws can.
“There’s no mechanism that the government currently has that can track you as effectively as these age verification laws can.”
I honestly can’t tell if you were serious or not.
The governments just buy your data from Google. Do you have any idea how much information on you Google has?
Buying profiling data from Google is not nearly as effective at tracking and controlling your online activity as integrating facial scans and government ID checks into every website or even directly into your operating system.
Frankly a brand new account pushing the “The government is already tracking you, there’s nothing you can do about it, don’t worry about all the new ways they can track you, just give in” narrative is a little suspicious.
Just to clear something up, my brand new account is only new because lemmings.world is closing and I had to migrate to a new server.
Source: trust me bro
Source.
Google “Protected Processor Identification Number (PPIN)” to learn more.
When is this being sent
as claimed?
I’m not the person who made the claim but Device Fingerprinting has been around for decades and Hardware ID is certainly part of that.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Device_fingerprint
That’s not the computer doing it, that’s the services you use going out of their way to gather one by combining data which has other legitimate purposes. Not so much being “sent” as it is being “abused”.
Unless we want to count Microsoft’s “advertiser ID”.
They also want a reliable way to differentiate between chatbots and real users, because advertising isn’t very effective on chatbots.
But also, one benefit of ID laws for the government is that it makes court proceedings much faster and cheaper. Sure, they’re tracking everyone online, but a lot of that information is locked behind procedure. By just requiring ID to log in they can sidestep the procedures, because they can just ask corporations nicely for ID information and they’ll eagerly comply.
I didn’t know about that. Maybe that’s plays into it too. But I’m generally a “simpler answer is more likely the most correct” type of guy.
In this case the simple answer is that Meta and others just had their “Tobacco Lawsuits” moment in court and liability floodgates are any to open wide, and they are pushing these laws to divert their liability onto someone else.
“Corporations want a way to verify the humanity of users” is a simple answer.
“Governments want a way to easily prosecute users” is also a simple answer.
I don’t see why it can’t be all of these things. There is actually a more complicated answer that I didn’t bring up, which is that smaller websites will have a hard time complying with ID laws, which gives preferential treatment to large websites. That locks out potential competition, hinders smaller projects like lemmy or mastodon, and helps secure the current social media monopolies.
That one might just be a useful side effect, rather than the intentional outcome.