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.
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
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 or we might as well completely surrender our online spaces.
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.
The corporate walled gardens are certainly a huge issue (with a fairly easy fix). But you can’t argue that anonymity “protects” queer kids who need online spaces to find acceptance when these exact spaces are now infested with bots and AI slop and ceding control to fascists. Facebook, Twitter, Reddit. What do you think happens when Ellison fully takes over TikTok? What is the upside of a teenager watching that pointless garbage instead of, say, reading a book?
These websites need to be inaccessible to anyone other than a human over the age of 21 who is verifiably who they say they are, or they need to cease to exist.
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. Why the fuck do they have smart phones? Why do they have access to YouTube or TikTok? Seriously what is the upside here? 54% of the population reads at a 6th grade level. What the fuck are we doing?
Drugs are way less harmful than ANY of this shit and we ban them until people are at least 18~21. Honestly, anyone who hasn’t interacted with the next generation let me paint you a picture: boomers, but proudly illiterate. It’s sad.
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?
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
Why if? It happened and it was a fucking drop in the bucket to their profits.
And they’ll do it again
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
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.
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.
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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
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.
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.
