Age signals from the OS? Need to provide a channel of information available to applications. Applications already talk to servers with unchecked commonality.
Biometric data? Today it unlocks your private key. Tomorrow it's used to verify you are the same person that was used during sign-up -- the same that was "age-verified".
Next year, the application needs to "double-check" your identity. That missile that's coming to you? Definitely not AI-controlled, definitely not coming to destroy the "verified" person who posted a threatening comment about the AI system's god complex. Nope, it's coming to deliver freedom verification.
Rocket is obvious and spectacular. Those are for amateurs.
A journalist got beaten up to the brink of death and will never walk again by 'unknown perpetrators'? Well, it's a dangerous country, and he had it coming, maybe some concerned citizens went a bit too far, but our dear leader cannot watch over everybody.
Scaling: do you think other journalists will not take notice?
And he will still be alive to reminder them how they may end up.
If you want to see how far imagination can go here, look up Artyom Kamardin and think how would you behave after hearing his story .
And turns out power-tripping men offered raw power over other humans on threat of violence is something they like.
And ICE? Remember J6 and Three Percenter's and all those right wing militias? They ended up in ICE. Same reasons.
Meanwhile, regular cops have been doing the same awful things that they've always been doing, literally at the command of Democratic mayors who are pompously declaring that they won't enforce immigration law in speeches. They'll send cops to throw your shit into the street when your rent suddenly doubles, and won't report an illegal immigrant felon (whose history we know nothing about) to ICE.
Organized white supremacists are nobodies with no power, they're all over the military, the cops, prison guards, and ICE. Meanwhile, Parchman Farm in Mississippi doesn't even report the people who are dying there, and has plastic all over the floors because the roofs are open to the elements. That's just legal American black people who this country actually owes something to, though. That was trendy like five years ago, it's so over now.
Now you obviously shouldn't set social justice aside, and given the choice, I absolutely prefer the capitalist hellscape where my friends and I are not being rounded up and killed, but that's a REMARKABLY low standard I've had to settle on as a voter.
The Democrats and Republicans both are different approaches for the same billionaire class.
They're not "opposite sides of the same coin". Instead, they're more akin to 2 sock puppets. One wears red, and the other blue.
Like the Trump tariffs? They were initially Biden's tariffs that Trump increased and extended. Different clothes, same game.
But I'd be willing to try a good run with democratic socialism, or hell, communism. What we have is the cushy gold-parachute socialism for the elite, and unabashed hardcore capitalism for the poorest. And that fucking sucks. Burn it down.
That was from a quick search, no doubt there's more. Now it gets down to trust issues on reporting.
"Disabled spending" already happened to the people in the ICC that acted contrary to Trump's diktats[0], without the need for a digital panopticon, both the banks and the government know who you are.
[0] https://www.irishtimes.com/world/us/2025/12/12/its-surreal-u...
Never stopped people overengineering :P
> Nobody stops the government from sending goons to your door right now for a snarky comment.
This is just dumb. They literally don't know who wrote it, and have to assign somebody to track you down. The fact that they're putting infrastructure on your computer and on the network to make this one click away for them matters.
I've wondered if FaceID and the Android counterpart are actively creating an extraordinary labeled dataset for facial expressions at the point of sale.
With users trained to scan their face before every transaction, tech companies could correlate transactions to facial expressions, facial expressions to emotions, and emotions to device content. I can imagine algorithms that subtly curate the user experience, selectively showing notifications, content, advertising to coax users towards "retail therapy".
Also keep in mind keystroke dynamics can probably do that too and has been a topic of study in one form or another since the nineteenth century vis-a-vis telegraph operators.
Cpt America in the Winter Soldier
This is a non-issue because it's almost certainly going to be gated behind a permission prompt. There are more invasive things sites/apps can ask for, and we seem to be doing fine, eg. location. Moreover is it really that much of a privacy loss if you go on steam, it asks you to verify you're over 18, and the OS says you're actually over 18?
>Biometric data? Today it unlocks your private key. Tomorrow it's used to verify you are the same person that was used during sign-up -- the same that was "age-verified".
Given touch id was introduced over a decade ago, and the associated doom-mongering predilections did not come to pass, I think it's fair to conclude it's a dud.
Watch as apps refuse to work when you deny them permission. Also the OS (and “privileged apps”) don’t ask for permission, they have full unfettered access to everything already.
If you can't trust the OS, you have bigger issues than it knowing whether you're 18 or not. At the very least it has a camera pointed at you at all moments you're using it, and can eavesdrop in all your conversations.
If your OS prevented encryption, because one of the anti-encryption laws got passed, would you still trust its privacy and security?
lol.
> Moreover is it really that much of a privacy loss if you go on steam, it asks you to verify you're over 18, and the OS says you're actually over 18?
Slippery slope, but an interesting argument. While SteamOS is a thing, Steam isn't my OS.
> Given touch id was introduced over a decade ago, and the associated doom-mongering predilections did not come to pass, I think it's fair to conclude it's a dud.
Really? You think that things built decades ago can't be further built-upon in the now or the future?
You mean non slippery slope?
>Really? You think that things built decades ago can't be further built-upon in the now or the future?
If there's no deadlines for predilections, how can we score them? Should we still be worried about some yet undiscovered way that cell phones are causing cancer, despite decades of apparently no harmful side effects?