Josh Withrow

I’m tired of all of this bull and scare tactics on Age Verification. I’ve been in AI for 25 years, held above TS clearances, mentored and worked with numerous companies in security and compliance. I’ve worked with non profits and groups rooting out horrific abuse of children and seen where ‘privacy’ was invoked to keep law enforcement from getting access to the phones of terrorists AFTER they had killed people. Here’s the truth: Modern tech approaches don’t require any persistence at all of someone’s ID. It’s just a lie. Zero Knowledge Proof approaches makes the risk basically zero. Those that say it isn’t enough actually have to make a case that any presentation of proof is a burden (so they are basically anarchists). And moreover - nearly all of these companies know who you are and what you like and do more than your family does. It’s their business model. It’s wrong and we should have had a real privacy law a long time ago. They don’t need laws to know more about you.They just don’t want liability when they have kids illegally on their platforms and hide behind the ‘actual knowledge standard’ to avoid paying for the harms they occur. They want to shape the AV laws now that the public is waking up to the truth around the world. They want to shape the new laws and put bad ones in place of good new ones so they can delay the reckoning for longer. It has nothing to do with knowing more about you. Zero. Everyone arguing otherwise is either paid off, a useful idiot, or a degenerate anarchist that thinks that defiling childhood is part of ‘freedom.’ They don’t realize that freedom to survive requires a moral society - that respects human dignity. Without that there will be no respect for privacy or protection against exploitation. PS- Whats really hilarious is it’s totally intellectually incoherent to be for the SAVE Act or any form of voterID and against modern AV tech.

'They don't care if it's porn, self-harm, suicide... As long as they keep you online.' Tech companies' resistance to regulation 'isn't about free speech', Baroness Kidron argues, it's about keeping you addicted.

App stores should be held to the same standards as their brick-and-mortar counterparts. Age verification measures for app purchases are common sense solutions to give parents oversight of their kids' online experience. The App Store Accountability Act does just that, helping put parents in charge and protecting kids' privacy online.