Privacy
A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world.
Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.
In this community everyone is welcome to post links and discuss topics related to privacy.
Some Rules
- Posting a link to a website containing tracking isn't great, if contents of the website are behind a paywall maybe copy them into the post
- Don't promote proprietary software
- Try to keep things on topic
- If you have a question, please try searching for previous discussions, maybe it has already been answered
- Reposts are fine, but should have at least a couple of weeks in between so that the post can reach a new audience
- Be nice :)
Related communities
much thanks to @gary_host_laptop for the logo design :)
And this is as it should be. Fuck the state.
And this is how they want to suppress speech.
May nothing but futility be exposed. "El paquete" flash drives shall flow into the state if need be.
It would be like requiring age verification to subscribe to an RSS feed
It's so funny to me how they always word it as if they're a corporate entity or some sort of "competitor" on "the market" when in reality it's just an implementation of a common protocol. I have yet to see other ActivityPub Projects being acknowledged by journalists. Focusing only on Mastodon is like focusing only on Gmail while completely ignoring the existence of E-Mail.
I don't think they actually understand that Mastodon is a network in a traditional sense that works the way the internet was meant to operate before the corporate takeover. People have been so conditioned that the internet is just 5 corps in a trench coat, that they don't have the cognitive tools to engage with something like the fediverse.
Also, they dumb it down in order to make it readable for the widest possible audience so they get the highest possible revenue.
IDK if it's just me growing up but I swear news from when I was a kid was more technically worded than now. We literally used news articles in school to learn technical words. Now they're so patronizing.
Oh for sure, I find most tech news articles are just painful to read nowadays. I also distinctly remember this was not the case before.
I think they would implode if we went back to signing up to multiple different forums. The internet is just a vastly different place than it was 20 years ago. It's very consolidated now and that sucks.
I still use some forums. Love forums.
They have moneybrain they can't understand human activity other the profit-centric attention capture.
I can tell you where this will eventually, they will attack the software dev teams as "facilitators of non-compliance" and then we will have a fit of forking, we're going to all go "I'm Spartacus" to human shield the devs but the effect will be a delegitimization and going underground of the dev teams.
If that's a good or bad thing depends of how good or bad custodian they have been of our space.
That is an recurrent problem of ancient lawmakers which confuse an remote control with an smartphone and think that all social networks are centralized like Facebook or X, while the only search is made by Google or even use still an FAX.
😭 would someone think of the children('s idiot parents)
Can they be called parents when they don't seem to want to do much parenting?
Huge W for mastodon
Why do you think everyone wants to use age verification. To rectrict us to only corporate media and to stop the little online anonymity and privacy we have left.
UNSanctioned opinions tied to your identity will be used as a tool of oppression.
The mastodon.social is in the EU though, where this also seems to be coming next year: https://leminal.space/post/25089051/17854998 (Unless we all call up our EU representatives and get this reversed or something.)
Nah the EU has GDPR. Any age verification is completely anonymous.
Read here why anonymous age verification isn't a thing: https://pluralistic.net/2025/08/14/bellovin/#wont-someone-think-of-the-cryptographers
From your source:
These are used in zero-knowledge proofs (ZKP) – a way for two parties to validate that one of them asserts a fact without learning what that fact is in the process (this is super cool stuff). Users can send their subcredentials to a third party, who can use a ZKP to validate them without learning anything else about the user – so you could prove your age (or even just prove that you are over 18 without disclosing your age at all) without disclosing your identity.
All the arguments against ZKP on the following paragraphs misunderstand the way the state and intergovernmental institutions, and the rule of law work in the EU. Many EU countries already have digital identity providers that are used every day by their citizens. I think very few people are arguing in favor of dismantling them.
I don't think arguing "a fascist government can easily force now separate institutions to connect in the future" is a misunderstanding. My apologies if I didn't read your point right, however.
Thanks for the discussion and thanks for raising the issue.
Yeah, I think its a misunderstanding of European political development to think that EU governments would willingly violate their code of human rights like that.
The same anarchist argument could be made about pensions or the military, but the societal benefits of those institutions outweigh the risks of their potential corruption by autocrats.
Anarchism does have its place, and it's important that the EU weighs the risk and reward of centralized idps carefully, and doesn't blindly go for the save the children argument. The use of strict age verification probably isn't worth the risk outside of extreme risks to children's health, like pornography, gambling, and drugs. That is something that the European Commission themselves have said too. Stuff that completely misses that balance like Chat Control needs to die.
I agree the EU has shown a higher human rights interest. But if the temptation is too high, like with a digital ID everyone is habituated to using daily, they'll likely falter eventually. That seems to be Cory Doctorow's angle as well. Edit: shortened.
And poorly educated takes like this is why the regims will succeed of slipping these oppressive laws through.
You see a unique challenge. I see a feature.
Sounds like its working as intended.
Would this only apply to servers hosted in Mississippi (or wherever)? Or any server with users registering from Mississippi IPs?
Edit: I'm guessing it's the latter.
🤌🤌🤌