…so why are people so up in arms against bans and restrictions on children having access to social media, where they have even less oversight and can do so themselves?
…so why are people so up in arms against bans and restrictions on children having access to social media, where they have even less oversight and can do so themselves?
It’s not the desired outcome people are against, it’s the implementation.
I think you’ll have a hard time finding anyone who disagrees with the idea that children shouldn’t be exposed to the full power of the unfiltered internet, and that’s what makes these laws so insidious.
The issue lies in how governments hope to achieve this goal. Current laws propose that users provide the private company hosting the site (Facebook, TikTok, etc.) an image of their government-issued ID and/or other identifying information. The primary concerns are 1) these companies will have even more access to private information about their users, and 2) any security breach of these companies would risk the identities of their millions of users.
Imagine being able to apply for millions of stolen credit cards because of one successful hack. That’s the risk being created.
Yes, I am.
“Children” being people of what age?
The Internet is a communication system originally intended for military communication; the WWW for exchange of articles and data among scientists and academics. It has evolved, from those roots, to being a collection of nearly all human knowledge, all human endeavors and thoughts. But its intent was never that it would conform to any cultural (or even legal) ideas of what is appropriate for young people to see…
If parents (who are supposed to be experts on their children) believe that their child isn’t yet developmentally ready to be exposed to nearly all human knowledge, endeavors, and thoughts, then they shouldn’t give that child (unsupervised) access to a communication system that contains exactly that. But I personally believe it’s generally good for children, certainly older ones and definitely teenagers, to be exposed to a wide variety of ideas, exactly as can be found on the Internet…
That’s up to the parents, not me, you, or the government, or any corporation.
Completely agree that parents, not governments or corporations, should be responsible for policing their kids’ online activity. But that shouldn’t mean Roblox should be able to ignore reports of groomers on their platform just because they buy a shit load of V Bucks (yes, this happens).
Agreed that everything on the internet should be there and is 99% fine. But I think we can also agree that no ten-year-old needs to see Funky Town or One Guy One Jar. Does that mean Motherless or the government needs to involved to make sure that doesn’t happen? I don’t think so.
As for groomers on Roblox, this just sounds like https://www.techdirt.com/2019/11/20/masnicks-impossibility-theorem-content-moderation-scale-is-impossible-to-do-well/
I got my first own computer at age 10 and from then on usually browsed the Internet unsupervised.
I remember that for the first few years of doing so, I took age checks very seriously. A website says “this is an adult website, you must be over 18”? I would click cancel. A forum has a checkbox “I agree to the terms and conditions and am at least 13 years old”? Not registering there (a few years later: wait, I can now honestly say yes to this!).
This of course changed when I became a teenager, but I knew what I was getting into at that point. I don’t think this is that atypical…
You’re not caught up with the Schlep-Roblox controversy, are you?
No, I don’t recall hearing about it before (maybe because I find Roblox an utterly uninteresting topic); reading up on it now.
The question still remains, as parents, do you want your child to have access to information that might influence them to do things that they otherwise weren’t even exposed to. This means that it’s not 99 percent harmless. Information itself is dangerous. One has to expand their mind to the true source of stupid shit kids do. And that includes the fact that if parents can shield their kids from it, out of sight out of mind and your kid grows up responsible. This will ultimately be the parents decision regardless because if a parent is permitting enough they could just let their child use their account if an ID registration was implemented.
Is the better, more acceptable solution to have a person’s government be in charge of identity verification and offer some sort of secured API that sites can use for confirmation?
Quite frankly yes. Proof of identity is kind of one of the core roles of government. Handing it off to private corporations is like entrusting a nation’s military to private militias and policing to gangs.
Age verification doesn’t have to mean identity verification.
Parents and human moderators solved this problem just fine. Everything changed when every platform wanted to be the first to cut moderation costs by using LLMs instead.
They abandoned a perfectly working system and have been pitching a fit about restarting it because “it costs too much” ever since.
I’ll grant it’s an automation issue. Age verification is always identity verification when it’s automated. It doesn’t matter how much you try to scrub the data. If it has to be done algorithmically, there’s no possible circumstance where an unaccountable third party should have that data.
“Better” and “more acceptable” are very subjective.
If you’re asking me what I think, I think a solution that verifies identity is uncalled for. I think the problem, though real, is also greatly exaggerated and mostly caused by a failure of platforms to moderate (Roblox, for example).
Companies don’t want to moderate their platforms because that costs money. Developers need to add the reporting functionality and paid staff need to review and action the reports. I think this is one reason tech companies are so interested in AI; automated moderation. But, AI still requires compute power, which is still a cost.
If tech companies can claim handing over your ID will solve the problem, they get that sweet private info they want so badly for free, AND they get a cost-free way of claiming their platform is moderated; it’s a double win.
I think requiring platforms to moderate themselves with humans is a very small price to pay in exchange for the broad access to our private data and hundreds of billions of dollars of advertising revenue they enjoy, and a much better, much more acceptable solution.
Edit: Just remembered, another big component to all this is, big platforms like Meta and Reddit are getting hammered by AI scrapers, which drives up hosting costs, and being bombarded with AI slop, which negatively affects their engagement KPIs. ID verification will solve both of these problems.
It’s pathetic because, the only time laws or regulations ever get passed is when one oligarch wants to weaponize the government against their competition. It’s a sick game, and we all lose every time a move is made.
Bingo.
No, because it’s a 3 way information exchange.
When you visit a site, you, the site and the government know that you went there.
In cases where the company can exploit that information because it can 100% verify you are a real person that’s bad.
But when the people in government can identify that their political opposition did “bad things” online and exploit that against them, that’s also bad. Also, the people in charge can always fake that if they want to, and if the system exists, because there is little oversight over the currently planned systems.
We’re not talking about “normal and legal behavior”, it needs to be tamper proof and safe against malicious actors inside the system. That’s nearly impossible to do, so the safe option is to not create that system.
It can be simpler than that. If operating systems offered an option to create a user account flagged as a child account, it could also come with software to limit the use of child accounts on the local machine, and let the parent configure what is/not blocked.
I know third-party solutions exist for this use case. My point is that the functionality could be implemented better and use of it could be more mainstream.
My ideal solution would be a parent controlled OS based “child account” that has a white list for allowed apps and websites and parents who then use that feature.
I would like to avoid any solution where the website learns anything about the users. Including what facebook has proposed and done in the US, making the age API request thing a law. They’re doing that to make their ad targeting more precise, not to protect anyone.
A government that’s that untrustworthy, doesn’t deserve to exist.
Sure, but they still do exist.
Yes. Like sexual predators they’re more common than people like to admit and I’ve had the displeasure of knowing a few. Also like sexual predators, living like they’re ubiquitous instead of taking out the trash is not the best way to deal with them.
It’s not about who is/not worthy of that level of trust. It’s about the risks associated with putting that much private information in any one place.
Even if you trust the person you’re giving your info to completely, mistakes happen every day, that many identities in one place is an attractive target for hackers, and there are very few regulations that would require a private company to disclose such a breach, even fewer that would require them to compensate you for any damages resulting from such.
Nope, all you have to do is regulate ISPs and Telcos so they don’t sell Internet connections to kids. Make that the offense.
If parents want their kid to have an internet connection, the parents have to buy the kids-only Internet. If that’s the aim, then do that!
Most people are fine with that, most people have their names on their bank accounts and show proof of age when buying a sim card or ISP connection, but don’t want to give it over to EVERY social media site they’re ever going to interact with. This isn’t a TikTok level of responsibility, it’s an ISP and Telco/bank card level.
If you want kids to be kids, then parents have to be parents. Don’t wreck the Internet because little Timmy is shithead on reddit.
That would be better, but better still would be to find a solution that doesn’t enable surveillance of the uninvolved. Most people trust neither their government nor corporations to not misuse or abuse the power of their data. Certain public key cryptography techniques could be used, but because companies can’t make money from it, it’ll never happen.