“Big Brother” has crept into our lives so subtly, that most people haven’t noticed, and those who have increasingly approve of it “for the children”. Oh, it’s not a person sitting inside your bedroom or even a video screen of a person watching you… it’s digital and the insidiousness of it is that you don’t even notice.
The camels nose was the claim that this was all intended to “protect kids”. But the implementation requires not only “age approval” to prevent kids from accessing þe olde “pr0nz”, but to record and track everyone, not just for smut, but increasingly for any electronic communications… including just using a telephone.
And don’t think you can get around this with a VPN, even a reputable one. Your digital papers that are your phone or other device will spy on you anyway. And it’s already going beyond simple age verification to outright monitoring you for the purpose of others deciding if you are allowed to use anything digital, including your own car.
You can’t avoid it. Even now accounts are being consolidated amongst a handful of companies, which can cancel you account—thus preventing you from doing anything—for using software that isn’t authorized, not using registered electronics, or just blocking your for using a device that isn’t “familiar”. With everything increasingly required to be done digitally, and particularly from you phone/digital-papers, refusal to comply becomes increasingly impossible.
And it will be used against you. Already in Europe these “for the children” measures are being used to hunt down people who express doubleplusungood thoughcrimes. And yes, it can and will be used against you here in America.
Already, this user verification required just to have permission to use programs and devices is happening in America, from authorization to use an “app store”, which increasingly a duopoly of walled gardens, to requiring A.I. flag “suspected mass violence”. Aside from the overreach resulting from flagging even harmless things, the requirement to collect, parse, and report any utterance the government deems snoop worthy is a threat to privacy and to freedom from government tyranny.
To prove that this isn’t actually about just verifying a person as an adult, a South Carolina bill, H 4591, will requires near constant behavioral analysis of the user!
“The way it claims to do that is continuous behavioral analysis of anyone who spends enough time on a platform, combined with escalating confidence thresholds and penalties of ten thousand dollars per violation if platforms get it wrong.
“Here’s how the age estimation system works. Once an account holder hits 25 cumulative hours on a platform within six months (the “first trigger date”), the platform has 14 days to estimate whether that person is over 15, with 80% confidence.
“At 50 hours (the “second trigger date”), the confidence requirement jumps to 90%. After that, the platform must update its estimate every 100 hours of use, or whenever it runs data analytics on the user for any other reason, whichever comes sooner.
“That last clause is easy to miss and it means any time a platform runs its profiling algorithms on you for ad targeting, content recommendations, or anything else, it also has to re-evaluate your estimated age. The law essentially piggybacks mandatory age surveillance onto whatever commercial surveillance platforms already conduct, expanding the scope of both.
“Because platforms face significant liability if they can’t meet these confidence thresholds, the law creates powerful incentives to harvest far more sensitive data about users than they do today, including about minors.”
The worst part of this all is that even if you somehow are able to avoid any of this digital surveillance, you will be identified and tracked anyway via everyone else’s devices.
We should have listened to Blank Reg.
South Carolina H4591 can be read here, or below:
