I wrote this a week ago. Lisa, for the first time ever, told me that the filters were going to block my Tidbit.
This is my version 2.0 with softer words.
Increasingly, around the world, we are seeing legal requirements to either prove who you actually are before you can use certain sites. Or you must let the website use AI to build a web profile of you so it can determine your age and use the site.
Depending on where you are in the world, this could be anything from a Social Credit type system where there is good speech and bad speech, but no anonymous speech. It could be attempts to protect children from select content based on age or subject matter.
Michigan is proposing a law that would make it illegal to use a VPN to anonymize a user's online activity!
Both YouTube and Roblox are stating they will start building AI profiles to determine whether the person behind the keyboard is underage for certain content.
There are philosophical questions like, "Is it ok to not be anonymous on the internet?" We can all agree that there are lots of people who say very aggressive things when they are hiding behind a keyboard. But how does that conflict with our Constitutional right to free speech? At last weekend's rally, protesters didn't have to wear name tags in public or register each protester individually. Should the internet be anything different?
Then, how do you feel about a vendor building an AI profile of your kid? That feels like data collection to me. How does that intersect data privacy agreements between vendors and schools? We constantly see the same big names get slapped for data collection on children despite promises not to do so.
Then there is the reality that it seems like site after site is being hacked. Many of these sites now capture your government ID, like a license, a real picture of your face, and personally identifiable information just to sign on.
There is some pushback on the facts from Discord, but a whole lot of the industry believes that Discord had a breach and that upwards of 70,000 IDs were compromised. Many of those IDs have government IDs in their records.
A hacker's dream is to breach a site that requires and tracks government IDs.
This is the world we live in now.
I know of no magic bullet here.
You need to be vigilant about protecting your personal and family information. You need to think very deeply about whether you are comfortable giving that level of information to get onto a particular site.
Choose wisely.