"Privacy preserving age verification" is bullshit

Summary

Today's links "Privacy preserving age verification" is bullshit (permalink) I don't think that it's impossible for politicians, even nontechnical politicians, to make good tech policy. After all, the fact that no one in Congress is a microbiologist doesn't stop federal standards from delivering potable water (and it doesn't excuse the ghastly failures, such as Flint, MI): https://pluralistic.net/2024/11/21/policy-based-evidence/ For politicians to make good policy, they don't need to be technical experts: they need to have solid, independent, well-resourced expert agencies. Those would be the very agencies that Trump and Musk have DOGEd into oblivion, which is pretty ominous, since the work of expert agencies is how you avoid dying of food poisoning, water poisoning, air poisoning, collapsing buildings, faulty antilock brakes, train explosions and plane-crashes. But when it comes to tech policy, politicians get it all so goddamned wrong. Partly that's because the cartel of tech companies lies to them like crazy, even under oath, leading to a kind of nihilistic refusal to believe any expert input. Mark Zuckerberg wants you to think that's it's inconceivable for you to have a social life without him eavesdropping on it, and any rule demanding this is a farce, like a demand to make water that's not wet: https://pluralistic.net/2022/11/08/divisibility/#technognosticism Big Tech's highly resourced bullshit machine convinces some politicians that technical expertise is not to be trusted, and gives other, more cynical politicians cover for ignoring experts by saying, "Oh you people are always telling us that this or that is impossible." For example, since the Clinton era, politicians all over the world demanded a kind of impossible encryption: encryption that works perfectly when it's doing something legitimate, like keeping hackers from pushing malware to your pacemaker or stealing your life's savings or listening in on you through your phone's microphone, but also they r...