Not a single government today is beholden to its citizens.
We are all cattle and donkeys so people richer than us can live like gods.
They did well with this one
But at least we’re doing something. Just not the things that would start to fix all that
Gold
Ironically, if age estimation was done via usage history algorithms, it’d be a much more privacy preserving technique than literally scanning your face or ID into a website that then hands it off to a barely known biometrics company so you can keep using your account…
It’s so strange how this legislation apparently is supposed to safeguard the safety of kids on the internet, but hands tremendous risk to adults who verify, or parents who’s kids sneakily took their ID to verify their accounts, since it seems that we may be the cyberattack victim capital of the world; see Qantas, Lattitude Financial, Optus, Medibank, and so on until the end of time.
Why is this bad? What is the upside of anyone under 16 using social media?
EDIT: the last 20 years have been an experiment in online anonymity, and the result is a dead internet infested by AI bots and foreign disinformation. At this point, I think civilized nations with free-speech protections should experiment with this sort of thing.
The problem isnt the idea of preventing people under 16 from getting on social media, but how you enforce that.
The only real way is to make every user submit a government ID, which becomes a massive privacy AND security issue with how often every online service gets compromised or leaks user data
If a banks suddenly and frequently lost data on all their users people wouldn’t be screaming that banks should be completely anonymous. The banks would have fines and need to meet high standards to keep doing business
We have lots of societal issues that are made worse with the internet being a wild west and founding logical arguments on the premise that it is insecure also has issues. If a website is so questionable it might leak, it probably shouldn’t be in common use
Cybersecurity: where defenders have to win every day and attackers only have to win once.
Anything like age verification should probably be handled with absolute minimum identifiable information (i.e. you’re older than X true / false) from an authoritative source like say the people who give out IDs (because if they’re broken into everyone’s screwed anyway). Instead OzGov has dumped it in the laps of the corpos, who will hoover up pictures of IDs or faces instead. As of a couple of days beforehand there’s still no actual information on these age verification protocols to my knowledge, very untransparent, very disturbing. Corpos being required to moderate their platforms would be good, this is not that.
Anything like age verification should probably be handled with absolute minimum identifiable information (i.e. you’re older than X true / false)
Ahh… thats not age verification. And yes verification is one of the hard parts with problems but this isn’t even an attempt at age verification
Oh, you’re not saying the user answers this question. You’re saying someone like the Department of Licensing does?
Pretty much that government API you mentioned, rather than the platform self regulating. Fox guarding the hen house and all…
Yeah and when your government is experiencing some troubles themselves the whole shit comes down. We’ve experienced a little downtime here for regional government and it lasted quite a while. Centralisation introduces its own weaknesses. Additionally, at some point, we could address this by just having parents accountable in this specific use case. Wtf do we need a technological solution to address parenting? This small subset thereof.
Yeah, agreed that every government that makes decisions like this (I think porn restrictions and UK age verification has come up) should be offering a government API to tie into. Governments need to have this data to function and have the resources to handle this (but not a great track record).
I just don’t think essentially making the argument “there are all these problems but that’s the way it’s always been” gets us to a better future. And I think most improvements are iterative and need to start somewhere. I’m also not expecting this to be a slam dunk but I do think some countries need to try this and other tech company restrictions to find out what will make a better future.
Why if? It happened and it was a fucking drop in the bucket to their profits.
And they’ll do it again
If a website is so questionable it might leak, it probably shouldn’t be in common use
Tell me you know nothing about software without telling me you know nothing about software.
Yeah, it was a bit ill thought out but I’d argue its more idealistically unrealistic
We could live in a world something along the lines of websites sending HTTPS certs based on users location with the cert granted by those governments and if you sell or store customers data then you need a security audit for the code.
That would obviously need tweaking and is a long way away from where the world is today, but a world where any website could be malicious is about as necessary as a country where walking into any restaurant has a probable chance of you being shot. A nice part of that analogy is that the main thing holding both together is strong trustworthy institutions. But the web is that way more from history rather than a deep technical issue that forces the internet to be that way. Also probably time, that sort of audit is probably prohibitively expensive, but that could be considered part of the true cost to society that we’re ignoring
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I’ve got a bit of an ignorant question and I think all the downvotes here make this a good place for someone to set me straight.
One of my pet peeves in the last few years has been booking an Airbnb and the host pushing you to their system where you need to fill in all the same information Airbnb has and this includes uploading some form of ID. Around the same time period, airport checkins have also required uploads of your passport.
Are these two examples that different from the changes that a lot of people are saying will be terrible and risky, or am I just missing something? Agreed it’s increasing the attack surface but I’m also a bit curious why there isn’t public pushback on these systems if that is genuinely a large concern
Edit: Most of these are international so that probably explains the lack of pushback on these systems
the verification process. you could be 42 and never signed up for social media and now you decide you want to post comments on tiktok. Welp now you gotta verify that you’re not a teenager. So provide your ID, provide a photo of yourself holding your ID, and hope some company that is obtaining that information either doesn’t sell it or doesn’t have a security breach. and a bonus to all that is the potential to further track all activities you do online. they can now easily build a profile of you via the social networks you sign up for.
that’s the problem.
Would you upload your government ID just to access the web? Would you be content knowing that a leak at a social media company could lead to your identity being stolen just because your government wants to keep under 16s off of mainstream social media. Would you be happy with your child using 4chan because they are banned from using safer social media websites? I personally know several people who would not be around today if online safe spaces didn’t exist to give them an escape from bullying, queerphobia or domestic violence. I can understand why someone might agree with the sentiment “people under 16 shouldn’t be on social media”, but I cannot understand why someone would be okay with the specifics of this legislation. People are going to have their lives ruined because of this new law and it doesn’t even succeed in what it sets out to do (nominally) in the first place. The true reason for this bill is not to “protect children from radicalisation”, but to drive viewer/readership of Murdoch media, if it were about protecting children from radicalisation and bullying, why are the worst of these social media sites not included in the ban?
Tying all your previously anonymous activities to a real life photo, ID, and address.
Good luck trying to criticize an oppressive government again. Or just having an “unapproved” opinion online in general.
Do you realize that lemmy is also social media? I wouldn’t be here posting if I had to verify my ID, which is what all these age verification measures do instead of just checking age.
Yes, and while I like being anonymous, I don’t like literally half the internet being made of bots and foreign trolls. Lemmy is such a tiny community that we haven’t attracted their attention, but these bot farms and state-sponsored disinformation campaigns could crush this website in a weekend if they directed their attention here.
I would argue that the internet has died partly as a result of removing anonymity from the internet, not because of it. The massive centralization of the internet into corporate walled gardens where they can control the narrative is what made your criticisms possible. The early internet was a wild west where you could find anything and everything, for better and worse.
The big issue I have with this is that it isolates queer kids from any sense of community. Trans kids can’t avoid permanent damage from the wrong puberty if they don’t have access to the knowledge that they could be taking puberty blockers. Without access to that community, I didn’t even learn that trans people existed and I could put a word to that existential distress until I was in college.
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I somehow managed to delete my long-winded reply while I was typing it, so I’m gonna try to condense it down into something semi coherent.
In short, it’s not the anonymity that I’m arguing for (though I think there’s a very important debate to be had about the erosion of privacy through removing anonymity on the net), but the strengths of social platforms on the internet that are being abused by bots and AI slop. I think that a blanket ban is throwing the baby out with the bathwater. We need to regulate the bad actors somehow and moderate the amount of social media that kids use, but to effectively ban kids from being able to interact with people outside of their local communities is a bad precedent.
The big strength of the internet (and why it’s so important in empowering oppressed groups like the queer community) is in the ability to connect people and rapidly spread information regardless of distance. They want to take over TikTok because it’s been credited as a major platform in dispelling the Israeli funded myths about the genocide of the Palestinians. Protests of college students broke out on campuses all over the US over colleges getting funding from Israel and the production and sale of weaponry. That didn’t just appear out of nowhere, that information was spread through social media in real time. You can’t get that from a book at the local library (you should still support your local library though, they do so much for a community beyond being a source of knowledge). But this rapid spread of information is exactly what makes the AI slop and all the other garbage (ads, misinformation, the list goes on and on) such a problem, because the bad stuff makes money for the big corporations who run the social media platforms we use. But that doesn’t mean we should ban a tool because people use it maliciously or excessively to the point of harm. Nobody is calling for a ban on TV for kids under 16 despite it having a negative effect on our attention span and being filled with channels like Fox News.
Plus, I am always wary of these “protect the children” campaigns because they are often a false flag to actually restrict minorities’ rights - often queer people. You see this most prominently with porn bans, but stuff like this that allows a government/group to better censor information and control the narrative come up time and time again. There was an attempt not long ago to get rid of Massachusetts’ multi-grade standardized test program called the MCAS. Standardized testing has its issues, but the groups pushing for the removal had no plans to replace it with any form of statewide teaching standards or anything, they just wanted to be able to teach kids that evolution is fake and gay kids go to Hell.
Also, I work with teenagers. They can’t read. Every year standardized tests get easier. The average ACT score in Florida is now 18. That’s almost the same as answering at random, and these kids pay for the exam in an effort to go to college.
I hate to tell you this, but I think this is a Florida issue. Florida is one of the worst states in a country that has been fighting against intelligence for decades now. Boomers but proudly illiterate is exactly what those in power - especially people like DeSantis - want. But the same internet that allows this to happen can also be used to give these kids a better chance. I go on YouTube and see videos of people making a fully working jet engine out of a can of Coke or a hobbyist launching a 3d printed rocket that breaks the sound barrier. I see kids learning about orbital mechanics and reentry heating through Kerbal Space Program and simple circuitry through Red Stone Minecraft tutorials. I see trans elders supporting trans kids who may otherwise never make it to adulthood - sometimes even to the point of telling them their legal rights and helping them get out of abusive households. I see up to the minute medical research news coming from furries who worked on the COVID vaccines on Bluesky. I see so much art, music, and support for passion projects that introduce people to interests that they never knew they had. And I would never want to take all that from kids.
