Protecting children online is crucial, but forcing every user to hand over their ID is a privacy nightmare waiting to happen, according to the head of the Swiss privacy firm
Pre-tech phone books were the death of anonymity and no one seemed to care.
Hardly. If I buy a coffee and pay in cash, the phone book does jack shit to identify me. If I meet a neighbour in the city, we have a chat, nobody’s gonna look up our address if they don’t already know us. If I enter a chatroom using an alias, the phone book doesn’t help anyone if they don’t know my real name.
The phone book requires at least one piece of information about me to be useful. The identity control we’re facing is more like everyone requiring my ID to even let me order or chat with someone, basically handing over that piece of information along with every other piece.
And because all of this happens electronically and automatically, it’s far easier to evaluate for mass surveillance or to sell to interested parties than having someone manually check each ID.
Hardly. If I buy a coffee and pay in cash, the phone book does jack shit to identify me. If I meet a neighbour in the city, we have a chat, nobody’s gonna look up our address if they don’t already know us. If I enter a chatroom using an alias, the phone book doesn’t help anyone if they don’t know my real name.
The phone book requires at least one piece of information about me to be useful. The identity control we’re facing is more like everyone requiring my ID to even let me order or chat with someone, basically handing over that piece of information along with every other piece.
And because all of this happens electronically and automatically, it’s far easier to evaluate for mass surveillance or to sell to interested parties than having someone manually check each ID.