Internet

I have recently been asked by the Panoptykon Foundation if it was possible to create an online age verification system that would not be a privacy nightmare. I highly recommend reading their piece, which dives into several issues around age verification.

I replied that yes, under certain assumptions, this is possible. And provided a rough sketch of such a system.

But before we dive into it, I have to be clear: I am not a fan of introducing online age verification systems. Privacy is just one of the many issues related to them. I dive into some of those later in this post.

However, the broader context is that age verification is becoming required by law in for a lot of services. And systems that are used for it are horrendously bad – like, say, Discord’s idea to verify age of people either by requring a scan of an ID, or enabling the camera in order to let them analyze our face.

I read reddit. Yeah, I know. Plain People of Crooked Timber: “why would you go and do a thing like that when you could sit on the kitchen floor and watch your packet of English muffins slowly pass its sell-by date and develop that unpleasant sour flavour you usually don’t notice until it’s too late […]

A few weeks ago, Daniel Dennett published an alarmist essay (“Creating counterfeit digital people risks destroying our civilization”) in The Atlantic that amplified concerns Yuval Noah Harari expressed in the Economist.+ (If you are in a rush, feel free to skip to the next paragraph because what follows are three quasi-sociological remarks.) First, Dennett’s piece is (sociologically) notable because in […]

For quite some time, TikTok has been recruiting former State Department officials to run its operations.

The post TIKTOK: Chinese “Trojan Horse” Is Run By State Department Officials appeared first on scheerpost.com.

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Hello! My name is Kevin Munger, and I’m delighted to have gotten the call up to the blogging big leagues. I’ve been blogging since the beginning of the pandemic at Never Met a Science, a combination of meta-science (get it) and media theory that I intend to continue here. Crooked Timber has been around for […]