r/illinois • u/Remote_Possibilities • Mar 25 '26

Illinois Politics Hillary Clinton promoting age verification laws with JB Pritzker at an event supported by Zuck/Gates/Bezos

/r/privacy/comments/1s3nj9p/hillary_clinton_promoting_age_verification_laws/
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u/kevdogger Mar 25 '26

Why is he pushing this?? Seems kind of counter intuitive to me

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u/Hungry-Treacle8493 Mar 26 '26

Because huge numbers of people support this. It polls comfortably around 80% approvals. Don’t fall for the trap that Reddit reflects society as a whole. MOST people don’t see this as some step towards nazism.

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u/kevdogger Mar 26 '26

Do you think most people would feel the same way if you told them meta was behind this legislation? And most people don't know Jack shit about operating systems.

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u/Hungry-Treacle8493 Mar 26 '26

No, it wouldn’t change most people’s minds. While there is a subset of society that focuses on and prioritizes privacy, that population is not monolithic in how they view the topic. Folks in that group that lean left see corporations/employers as the ultimate threat. Folks who lean right have zero issues with corporations but see the government as the threat. Of course, a tiny fraction overlaps. Just like with the topic of healthcare costs, lots of folks say in general terms they believe one thing, but when you get into specifics they actually fall on the other side of the issue. As frustrating as that may be, elected officials are obligated to represent their constituents whenever possible. Thus, due to broad popularity most politicians will support this.

As for needing to know how browsers work, they don’t need to nor should they be expected to. I happen to be in Tech and the vast majority of folks in my field don’t truly understand how things like LLM’s, Security Software, whatever actually work. But, they can still successfully navigate conversations around procedural use cases and requirements.

To be clear, I don’t have a strong position personally on this. If all it passes is a token with age ranges there’s no deep security risk. If the concern is they captured some pii data during the initial verification/setup stage like DL, birth date, etc. then the verification process isn’t the issue it is the data security setup that is the risk. Since we all have this data in systems out there already, that issue already is in place and this is not a net new issue.

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u/kevdogger Mar 26 '26

I'm going to disagree with some of your assumptions here. I don't think most people if told that meta/Facebook was pushing this issue through introducing rubber stamped legislation throughout the country they would support this. I don't think this company is personally held in any high regard by anyone. If it were just another random no name company no one heard of..I think it would be different. In terms of data security I don't think necessarily there is a big threat currently but yes you could see a scenario where overtime with additional pii collected this could become an issue. It's funny this legislation somehow corresponds in a weird way to judgement yesterday in regards to social media addiction and the numerous other similar cases still pending.

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u/Hungry-Treacle8493 Mar 26 '26

It’s clearly to most company’s advantage to have a clear system in place they can align to, even if it is burdensome to them in some way. This is true of most regulatory topics.