I watched Bryan Lunduke's video where he defends real ID on the Internet. One thing in the video that I don't see talked about is that he offers an alternative solution that is just *SLIGHTLY* better.
Basically, you could have cards with serial numbers that you can purchase at a 7/11 or something. Kind of like an Amazon or eBay gift card, and you can enter that serial number when signing up for a website to prove your over 18 or that you are not a bot. It sounds better but I see potential problems with it:
1. There are too many random variables that make it less than anonymous. Does the cashier scan your ID or does he just look at it? Can you buy the card with cash or only with debit/credit? Are there facial recognition cameras in the store? The company/organization providing the cards might even require all retailers to not accept cash and to have the customer's driver's license scanned and have all that data report back to them.
2. Cards obviously cost money to produce and ship so one can make the argument that it is cheaper and more efficient to just have users provide ID on whatever website they are trying to access.
3. Opponents to such proposal could point out that an adult could buy a bunch of cards and give/sell them to minors just like we see with alcohol/tobacco.
Obviously, I would rather not have any of this verification crap at all and just stick to the honor system we have now. I don't even think this store-bought card system would be considered because there clearly are people who want to end anonymity online and age verification provides the perfect stepping stone.
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@xianc78 these theoretical serial cards would probably just be treated the same as alcohol/cigarettes, or anything else for that matter. you need to provide your ID for r-rated movies, m-rated games, things like that too. we've just gotten used to not having to use our ID on the internet because we've never had to. the other problem is of course that instead of someone just looking at your ID and saying "yup it's good" we have to worry about there being a database that stores it permanently or whatever. if it were actually illegal to retain that information then i think it might help ease the transition a lot.
that's part of why AI might be a good fit for this. it's not even a person looking at your shit, it's a robot that checks it and then discards it and just sets an 18+ flag on your account or something.
to be honest, if we're either going to go the route of sanitizing the entire internet or needing to provide ID to see stuff that isn't sanitized, i'd rather have the latter. especially if we can reverse some of the sanitization that's already happened. but yeah it would have to go through some really good encryption or just be checked and then erased.
@beardalaxy Unless you have physical access to the scanners or servers, there is no way to prove that the data is erased after verification. Of course the government could make storing that data illegal, but they could also be storing the data themselves through mandated backdoors.
>to be honest, if we're either going to go the route of sanitizing the entire internet or needing to provide ID to see stuff that isn't sanitized, i'd rather have the latter. especially if we can reverse some of the sanitization that's already happened. but yeah it would have to go through some really good encryption or just be checked and then erased.
I would also have the latter, but I don't want the Internet to be the next HAM radio where you have to jump through a bunch of state mandated hoops just to use the damn thing or at least a certain layer of it.
Honestly, the real ID thing reminds me of Ender's Game. The book was written before the Internet went public, but the book featured an Internet like network called "the nets" and unlike the Internet we have, most of it is invite-only and heavily moderated, and I remember that users would have to buy passports from the government in order to use it. However, the ironic thing is is that there is a subplot where two kids use pseudonyms to publish essays on the nets to influence people in order to set up a world government, which wouldn't happen in real-life as the government could just link the passports to the usernames and tell everyone "these are a bunch of kids, don't listen to them."
