Proton CEO warns global age verification push will mean "the death of anonymity online"

If you went to the next town over and had a coffee, no one knew who you were because you were in a phonebook. Your anonymity was intact. With these checks, any website anywhere will know exactly who you are.

Pre-tech phone books were the death of anonymity and no one seemed to care.

Hardly. If I buy a coffee and pay in cash, the phone book does jack shit to identify me. If I meet a neighbour in the city, we have a chat, nobody's gonna look up our address if they don't already know us. If I enter a chatroom using an alias, the phone book doesn't help anyone if they don't know my real name.

The phone book requires at least one piece of information about me to be useful. The identity control we're facing is more like everyone requiring my ID to even let me order or chat with someone, basically handing over that piece of information along with every other piece.

And because all of this happens electronically and automatically, it's far easier to evaluate for mass surveillance or to sell to interested parties than having someone manually check each ID.

What are they supposed to do when the police comes knocking with a warrant, not comply until they get shutdown for good?

Besides, afaik there has never been any instance where proton handed over any of the supposedly encrypted data like VPN traffic and EMails. They usually hand over the contact information that's part of the payment process people use, the stuff they are legally required to keep for 5+ years even if you send them a gdpr deletion request.

There was a lot of questionable stuff said and done by the board members and I'm really annoyed that they fight against ads but have the audacity to regularly send promotions themselves.

But in terms of data safety they do exactly what they advertise, keeping everything on their servers private.

already been accused/harassed on here of being pro-pedo for not being pro age-verification.

it sounds like you should switch instances to one where this opinion (fact) is shared by most.

I agree with the notion, but I'm mildly concerned with the fragmentation of solutions. We already have I2P, Yggdrasil Network, Gemini Network, the cjdns ecosystem, just to name a few. You can just run nodes on all of them at once, but that restricts accessibility to those who have the raw compute (and bandwidth) necessary, which isn't exactly conducive to what I'd consider a truly "open" internet, especially in the third world.

People in the privacy communities have known this for a while.

But because it's slightly technical at minimum, and nuanced, and about something not immediately tied directly to people's financial interest, the average person will never ever know, understand, or care about this.

that's not how it works. most of my harassment comes from .ml and far left instances. .ml users are especially aggressive and ignorant and eager to call you names. basically pro-authoritarian leftists.

i'm on .world. it's the most moderate instance in my experience. db0 and blahj are also instances from which i get a lot of harassment.

sadly lemmy doesn't let you block instances, only users or communities. so my user block list is like 500+ now.

Are you kidding? Instance blocking is almost necessary for surviving on Lemmy. Use a different client. Jesus bro, ya gotta block.

But it's in a new wrapper. Now it says "Good for humanity" on the label, still the same shit tho...

Totally valid idea, you just need to hope that there are enough people with you to give that decision weight or you'll eventually run out of alternatives.

I LOVE reticulum, the idea anyway. I2P is a great idea too. I run an I2P node just to contribute.

I started up reticulum on my Linux box, added sideband to my Android, setup an rnode. it was marginal. Text chat worked 90% of the time, I got a single image to come through, then never again. Something about it was either broken, or something I was doing was incompatible, but there weren't enough logs for me to figure it out.

I'm down with the while second internet over encryption, but none of them are straight forward enough I could get anyone outside of my extreme tech circle to consider it.

lemmy is a client. piefed is the only one i know that lets you block all users from an instance.

Reticulum is a backbone mesh. It speaks on all communication interfaces. Bluetooth, Wifi, LoRa, Serial.

Conceptually, if you can see your neighbors wifi, you could mesh. Suburbs could be pretty well connected. I doubt it'll scale past a small suburb, though. If someone has a high tower, you could LoRa line of sight to anywhere. The upside is, if you have a faster connection that LoRa, it can use it. If you just have LoRa, you can chat or maybe send small images or low quality voice chat.

I'll stop interacting online outside of a professional context. So this obviously sucks from an online perspective. It's will dampen online organization. But hopefully it increases community level interactions IRL. It'll probably be good for day-to-day mental health.

why lie about a group that is strongly anti-age-verification attacking you for being anti-age-verification and off endorsements from another group that is strongly pro-age-verification supporting you for your anti-age-verification opinions?

lemmy.ml isn't a unified group. it's individual people who think all sorts of crazy shit, that is often downright contradictory.

the only stance your instance takes is being pro marixist leninist. that has nothing to do with age-verification. if anything it's pro-authoritarian bent would most likely have it align with mechanisms mass state control of individuals .

they're unified when it comes to age verification.

Can you rephrase that? I'm not sure what "you nice it is used well enough" is supposed to mean.