Dating apps face questions over age checks after report exposes child abuse

For a comprehensive scholarly treatment of this argument (with which I wholly concur), see Judith Rich Harris and The Nurture Assumption.

Her Wikipedia article offers a quick summary:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judith_Rich_Harris

In short, kids, especially teenagers, aren't out to be like their parents. They want to be like their peers. And what we often see as the effects of good parental influence or supervision may simply be heritable behavior.

>Parents aren't going to monitor their kids 24/7.

It's not about monitoring your kids 24/7. It's about instilling values in them precisely so they can monitor themselves. This is what differentiates good upbringing and clueless parenting looking for scapegoats.

Did you read the article?

It clearly states that tinder and grinder already monitor for minors. They state that they spend, and I'm guessing this wouldn't be an exaggeration given their volume, millions of dollars on this effort.

What lawmakers want is ID required.

This is an extremely burdensome requirement. To have every new user of any online platform have to verify photo ID against a webcam is... very onerous. And even then whats to stop a kid from using his parents confirmed account?

Alcohol is a transaction for a substance that is deadly and purchased in public. Comparing it to creating an online profile in the privacy of your home is a big stretch. It would be more like creating an account with... I don't know, maybe buying a can of figs off amazon.

Can a child buy a can of figs without ID? Not easily, but he could. Could he hurt himself with it? Yes. Should we require ID for this: I'd say not.

The article seems to not mention any of the age verification things the kids forged and their parents computer. But don't worry, if it was convenient for the powers that be, they would have framed this as: "Evil kids get into banking system by HACKING."

Funny how I'm sure they won't be asking Amazon to verify ID everytime a purchase is made. I mean, plenty of kids have ordered down right dangerous things this way, probably even caused a death.

The worst part of the authoritarian inclined who use the 'what about the children?' argument is that many times they ironically make it less safe for children since the solutions aren't particularly well thought through (see drinking age in the US) - all while making it worse for the rest of us.

The thing about the outrage crowd is they point to a problem with while implicitly saying 'anyone who doesn't support 'the solution' is in favor of the problem'. I'm not in favor of the problem. I'm in favor of fixing the problem IF it can be fixed in a cost effective way. Many people can't accept that there aren't widespread easy and simple solutions to giant complex social problems. Accepting that this behavior is an emergent quality from our individual actions and pruning one's own actions is very hard. Most people shy from this and look for externalizations.

Require a $5 CC payment and a photo ID where the picture matches their profile ID in order to create the account... The $5 would cover the cost of HUMAN verification.

Not every aspect of every interaction online needs to automate out human interaction.

The other aspect is to actively encourage REPORT for minors on the platform.

Another possibility is to allow 16+yo and wall them off from those over ~21 with a big fat banner on the account that it's a minor.

The difference is you can install a dating app and create a profile without providing a picture or providing a fake picture. This is what I did when I was 15 and just wanted to meet other gay people my age at a time when I was closeted and knew none. To the site operators, the profile looks just like any other. Unless they are actively reading private conversations between users, there is no way to tell a user is actually underage unless reported. Even then it may be difficult because oftentimes people don’t use the dating app itself to communicate but immediately take the conversation off the app to Snapchat or text, for example.

So to truly keep minors off adult dating apps you’d have to require everyone to submit photo ID and also somehow check that they haven’t just taken a picture of someone else’s ID and used that and I’m not sure how you’d enforce that.

Actually, this parent is demanding 100% certainty in an uncertain world. He is also shifting burden from himself to others.

This parent isn't understanding that there are cost benefits and diminishing returns. We already filter kids from such platforms and it works to 99.999%, so exactly where should it be? And at what cost?

This parent is also filled with innuendo, seemingly unable to make points that stand on their own with actual dialectics.

This is utterly damaging to democracy - a real democracy needs anonymity to survive. Removing anonymity will lead to people limiting for example posting critical opinions of the government or a political party.

The reason is simple: even if you trust the current government to not abuse all the tasty meta-data, who says the next government, led by the party you vocally criticized on the Internet, will look away?

Just look at China, or what Turkey is doing, or even what US border checks asking for your social media logins are doing right now.

Christ no. Not only is this the end of certain kinds of dissidence and protest, how does it apply to business communications and automated systems? The options are ludicrous - either you have the CEO personally criminally liable for a gazillion hacked routers, or you have an environment where dissidents can be hunted but all sorts of malicious foreign actors hide behind business fronts.

1. Yeah, you wouldn't want to roll this out to places like Egypt or Iran, for sure. And I usually am very pro-privacy, but since people either pay the companies that run these apps/sites/services or they use it for free but have it directly linked to their phone, google, etc., in reality these companies already have their true identities - or at least enough of it that if asked by any government entity they could produce it even if they didn't have the actual ID number of the government issued document. Isn't this how people buy alcohol online, though? I've never done it, but I recall someone telling me they had to upload their driver's license to the site they were buying from for age verification. So this seems to already be occurring elsewhere and I don't think anyone has complained about it.

2. Not sure I agree this is a violation of privacy since a) you would be providing them this exact same information when building your new profile upon account creation and b) you would agree to its collection as part of the signup process thereby waiving any privacy right you may or may not have in this regard. It would also be considered something a reasonable person would expect the third party to be given when supplying that identification number. For example, I assume that when I provided my information to my insurance company when applying for a personal disability policy that they checked everything on those documents for accuracy (name, age, address, etc.).

3. I was assuming this was legislation and would therefore apply to all services of this nature as long as they operate in the country/state where the legislation is effective.

4. 15 year olds are able to exist on these platforms in part because some 18 year olds look very young while others look much older. So someone can be 18 or 20 and look 15-16.

> And nobody is for trafficking

Nobody in first-world countries, you mean. In third-world countries, a lot of what gets categorized as “human trafficking” is just self-motivated border-crossing by career prostitutes.

You know how you might find a fellow working in America who is from, say, Bangladesh, and is here for the jobs that pay 100x as much as jobs in Bangladesh do, so he can send money home to his family? Well, in the hotbed countries of “human trafficking”, many of the women involved are just people who did exactly the same thing, moving from countries like Cambodia (“human trafficking source countries”) to countries like Thailand (“human trafficking destination countries”) because they know there’s far more of a market of sex tourists there with higher expectations of average prices. And her family back home? Thinks exactly the same of her as the family of the Bangladeshi man working in America does. “She’s providing for us; we’re proud of her.”

The annoying thing is that “human trafficking” was established to go after what is, at its core, a real and horrifying crime—the combination of kidnapping and slavery that mafias tend to consider the highest-margin way to operate brothels, factories, etc. If someone isn’t themselves doing the kidnapping, or operating the brothel, but is just, say, driving the kidnapped people around, we didn’t have a crime to charge them with and had to let them go, until we invented “human trafficking.” It was essentially a gang-busting crime, a way to put pressure on ground-level members to get them to give up their higher-ups. But now, basically everything related to the original intent seems to fall under the aegis of that crime†, and its scope has grown to the point that we’ve forgotten why we invented it.

† Probably because of motivated reasoning of statisticians working for the trafficking-related nonprofits. Sort of like the motivated reasoning of statisticians working for cigarette or sugary-cereal companies.

The UK has been pushing making adults register (with their ISP) to be able to access porn. Because of the children.

>then I'd do my damndest to have the restaurant shut down for facilitating the grooming of minors.

You lost me there. This is an entirely unreasonable burden.

> "Guns don't mass murder people, humans do"

Yes, that is true, even though you are being snarky. In fact, guns don't mass murder people, humans, put together into larger organizations (typically governments), do.