When I called my federal representative about the laws and the miles wide holes in Australian privacy laws and more particularly who would be responsible for covering the costs associated with helping citizens recover in the cases of rampant identity theft these laws are going enable, I got assurances that the eSafety Commissioner would be able to hold large tech companies to account. I pointed out that if Meta was to suffer a breach that exposed the details of say a thousand Australians I could see them ponying up the fine, just cost of doing business, if the details of 2 million Australians got leaked then with potential fines stretching into the billions why would they even fight it, so much simpler to cut Australia off like a gangrenous limb. I was assured that the eSafety commissioner would be monitoring these large companies to ensure their data security was up to standard, I laughed. I was told that our parliament may be looking in to strengthening data protection laws and was promised an email with details about this (3 weeks ago with not even a message to say sorry for the delay). I was thoroughly disgusted, this I'll thought out plan to scrape as much data as Australians can be tricked into handing over is going to result in massive costs to the tax payer before too long. Discord has already leaked data related to age verification and Australia hasn't even got its law started yet.

I really think we need remove a lot of the protections from Politicians: "You want to spy on the Australian public at the behest of a shadowy cabal of Intelligence Community wonks? Ok we can do that, but you are personally liable for it when it goes wrong, you will be personally paying all the costs associated with the following scenarios we are categorically stating will occur if you proceed with this nonsense. If you do not have sufficient money to cover these costs all of your assets will be sold and you will become an indentured servant of the Australian public until your debt is cleared."

I got an interesting response when I told the guy at the MPs office that I would shutdown or abandon any app, website or service that demanded my ID. There is no service online which is worth providing a drivers license or sufficient photos to create a reasonable reproduction of my face.

I dont even think this is related to the intelligence community, who are happy to spy on anyone regardless of age, I think it's just a poorly thought out law.

They definitely need to own the responsibility though. When these ID databases leak, and they will, hundreds of thousands of vulnerable people are going to be caught up in the mess, such as:

• Closeted LGBTQ individuals, who may get outed.
• Domestic violence victims trying to escape.

Doxing/Outing these people will result in significant harm, upto and including death. These inevitable deaths with be on the politicians hands.

And the worst part? It won't stop kids getting online or bullying each other.

Personally, I may just intentionally leak my drivers licence online, and get it reissued or something. Give plausible deniability to anything that happens associated with the ID. Not sure exactly what the ramifications are for doing that though.

I think pretty solidly this is being driven by business and intelligence communities, our police and spy agencies have been trying to get around encryption and online anonymity for years. They desperately want to be able to tie every bit of data that moves around the internet to an individual without getting the courts involved, and bear in mind since Australia is a Five Eyes nation not all of that pressure is onshore. It is getting the limpest push back from these big tech companies though because how much more valuable is your advertising profile if they can associate it with tour government ID, or birth certificate, or confirmed validated biometric data.

I know of a Telco that had to pay to move a family to a different state after they provided their address to a man who posed a credible risk to their lives. They had to buy this family a new house, pay movers, and buy then a new car. The telco preempted the court on this so it wouldn't become a national story in the media and they could minimise the eventual fine they faced.

That one incident 2 decades ago cost more than half a million dollars to fix, uprooted a family and caused unknown amounts of trauma. Do we seriously think Twitter will take a similar incident as seriously? Google? Facebook? But I guarantee they will slurp up every bit of data they can.

Graphene is bult on top of android AOSP, which is owned by google... And of course they are fucking it over.

Check calyxos.org s recent blog posts, it is basically dying (and graphene is the same)

Most F-Droid users are NOT custom ROMs.
This means that as long as F-Droid does not get their own developer key - it will become useless.
F-Droid is privacy focused - both dev and user, and they oppose requiring devs to essentially give up their privacy and sign the APK with their own dev key.

Now, if F-Droid is dead, GrapheneOS becomes useless. Who would want to develop apps for the 0.0001% of the population (i.e custom ROM users)

All APKs will need a valid Google developer signature.

Doesn't matter if it's installed from GitHub or F-Droid, no signature, no installation.

But ADB bypasses it.

(for now, at least)

Big gov and big corp are essentially the same thing. And while the people jump ship to be at the mercy of the "better side", the elites are sharing a cocktail in secret.

The scale still remains, however one side tilted more so than the other.