I think that’s what it is.
What it is today. But these things tend to slip-slope their way to worse privacy violations over time. Oh, children are getting around the setting? Well, we better tie it to a government ID.
I’m more afraid of what it becomes than what it starts as.
sounds to me like you’d have to have some stuff posted online under your real name for it to find and match to
They probably only need a reliable IRL ID for one of them. That’s a weaker requirement than posting under your name. Your name can be discovered other ways. For example browser fingerprinting, where that fingerprint is also associated with a “KYC” login elsewhere. There is a whole industry for using non-name signals to ID people. Big data is powerful.
Ofc there are ways to frustrate that. Yet the attacker only has to win once. The defender has to win every time.
But it will be statistical in nature. They’ll have some confidence attached to it. That could be very low, or quite high. Depends on how much you have disclosed online.
Excellent point.
For very long, I have thought vocabulary alone would be enough footprint to ID someone. If you had enough sample of their writing ofc. It’s like browser fingerprints. The words you use, and how often you use them, is a fingerprint. As UnknowableNight points out, some patterns are very unique, nearly enough alone. Yet even without those, you have enough signals. Sentence length. Whether you spell colour or color. Regional expressions. Word use frequency. Whether you bring in vocabulary used mostly in a certain profession, like medicine or law. Whether you use more paragraphs or more single liners. None alone are enough. All together, with the 100 other ones smart people can figure out? Probably enough.
Long ago it would be too much effort, only good for targeted cases. Today? Maybe you can do it dragnet, seeking to ID every person who writes online.
I do not know if that happens today. Yet I do not see anything to stop it.
About that, here is the statement from FDroid:
If it were to be put into effect, the developer registration decree will end the F-Droid project and other free/open-source app distribution sources as we know them today, and the world will be deprived of the safety and security of the catalog of thousands of apps that can be trusted and verified by any and all. F-Droid’s myriad users will be left adrift, with no means to install — or even update their existing installed — applications. (How many F-Droid users are there, exactly? We don’t know, because we don’t track users or have any registration: “No user accounts, by design”)
The two phone OSs which have together 98% of market would be under locked control of big tech companies. You could argue Android is still slightly less locked than iOS. But it seems like a distinction with not so much practical difference.
It’s a corporate capture of mobile computing. Not only they sell you the device, but the device will answer to its master only. That is not you.
If you are over 18 click yes
Years ago, I heard of a guy who failed one of the voluntary “enter your age” checks because it thought he was 7 years old. He was actually 107, but the system only considered the last two digits.
I mostly agree. But sometimes if a single jurisdiction gets regulation in place, it can be cheaper for companies to produce a single model to comply with all of them, rather than make multiple models. Even if they do make multiple models, it still means there is a supply of privacy-spec cars.
California in the USA has been more privacy friendly than most states. If California would crank up some car privacy regs, maybe work with the Europeans and Canada on a common legal standard, that is a huge foot in the door! It means people in other US states could buy a California-spec car. If the momentum builds enough, maybe companies would say screw it and sell the privacy-spec cars everywhere. That happened in the past with car safety regs. It went from auto companies whining about it, to the same companies featuring it as a selling point. Look how well our cars do in crash tests!
I agree car privacy is going to be a hard fight. Auto companies will fight dirty to avoid privacy regs. But we can push on this. A groundswell of public support can’t hurt.
Yah. Unfortunately, we’ve got it though. :( :( :(
People I know, some friends, they are completely oblivious to how much it will surveillance them. Or how much Meta already does, in other ways. “I don’t care, I’m not doing anything wrong”.
Constant surveillance erodes a society. It erodes democracy.