Congress wants to hand your parenting to big tech
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Because if you want to use these platforms this would mean you would have to prove your age.
Then I ask myself if I am wearing my tinfoil hat?
Sadly, nowadays, I am just not sure anymore.
It's just bribery, sorry I mean lobbying. Push this through, we make money and will fund your reelection.
They don't give a flying fuck about the children, they want to have total control over the citizens because all westerns countries are more or less slowly slipping towards authoritarianism.
Dictatorships in 21st century first world country will be impossible to topple, once the government can reliably link your ID to your online activity, you'll be arrested before you even know you'll commit an anti-governmental act.
Are governments good at regulating technology? Generally no. Is there a real problem that needs to be regulated: Oh my God, yes.
No identity checking system needed for using the general internet as a result.
You can still have a family ipad, TV, xbox, switch, laptop, school chromebook, large clunky semi-pro digital camera for movie club, a separate dedicated audio recorder, etc but the key is to stop gossip networks with video recordings / snapchat and make the digital experience similar to what millenials grew up with, the last generation who didn't get a huge spike in anxiety and depression.
Yes many teens will still get around it, but the idea is to add a lot of friction so you stop the network effects that are causing this in the first place.
Making a website adults-only should be as easy as setting a web server's config parameter. The fact that the industry has taken so long to come up with a decent Internet standard for this is pretty ludicrous. It doesn't have to be perfect. Even just a minimal implementation like requiring an "X-adult: yes" HTTP header from the browser would work for a locked-down client like an iPhone.
Sure, older kids will get around it but that's okay; they probably learned something.
1) software that makes it easy to do for the layman (browser extensions etc.), and
2) scams and malware that target children offering a "bypass" to access adult websites
Then parents, teachers, and administrators need to be aware of the latest bypass mechanism thus sending them on a wild goose chase. I think this would end up similar to the Do Not Track header which ultimately no one cared about or took seriously.
A locked down iPhone or Chromebook is going to thwart everyone but the most determined without compromising any privacy.
It's already a given that this only works on a locked-down device. Making it a simple binary "is this device owned by a minor" switch means parents will actually be able to understand it.
> 2) scams and malware that target children offering a "bypass" to access adult websites
And advertising to children should also be banned, so they won't be exposed to such scams, among other things. Thankfully this header lets the site know if they're breaking the law by showing scam ads, which makes prosecution super easy.
> I think this would end up similar to the Do Not Track header which ultimately no one cared about or took seriously.
Oh, of course none of this works unless it has the teeth of law to back it up.
Kids (especially ones close to the age of legal access anyway) will try (and succeed) in bypassing any sort of restriction on adult content including any of the digital ID garbage. There are any number of software scams targeting everybody, and your hypothetical just be another one; I doubt that it would increase the total number of such scams.
But requiring sites with adult content by law to require what would sort of be the opposite of Do Not Track flag (Let Me In?) would at least mean that kids would have to do something illicit on the client side to access adult websites that they would have to hide from their parents. If you made sure their phone or Chromebook was nerfed, you could make sure they couldn't install extensions or software that added the flag, you could strip it from their network requests; you could even strip it at the router. [edit: you could even opt-in with your phone company to strip it from your kid's phone's network requests.] You as a parent, and people who have nothing to do with kids, could trivially opt-in.
That was the first big problem. The second was that some versions of MSIE set the header by default, without the user having taken any action to request it. This made it infeasible for any major web sites to honor the header - by doing so, they'd break functionality for most MSIE users. (MSIE was, at the time, still the dominant desktop web browser.)
No, I would want children to know better than to buy cigarettes.
There is no standard ID check protocol at liquor stores. If you're old they can just look at ya, some just look at your ID, others scan the ID. The govt didn't need to provide a standard. Just don't sell to kids. Figure it out! It's not on the govt to figure it out for you!
Not complying is a different point.
It uses meta HTML tags and correct configuration of the browser to block/allow different ratings. I suppose one could use wget, curl, or lynx to bypass that stuff and download the HTML files, and then find the links to the the JPEGs in them...
(a) an identity provider needs to verify who is using the browser. If that can be strongly tied, then the identify provider could simply provide the "adult: yes" flag, on a need to know basis, but:
(b) the site consuming that header needs to trust that it came from a reliable source. So that flag needs to be signed/verified somehow, and the consuming site needs to trust that the identity provider doesn't lie. But also, the site consuming the header, by law, needs to do everything in can to ensure that it's not a child, so, it will need to ensure that the content is served ONLY to the web browser, and it trusts the web browser. Which means ....
(c) The browser will confirm to the site that it's real, it's trusted, it is not operated by some kind of relay/bot and won't send the content to anything other than the operator authenticated to the browser. So it's going to start signing it's requests with a secret key, but that key will need to be on the user's machine, which will need to be trusted, so ....
(d) the signing will have to happen in the secure element, and the key will have to be stored on the machine that the operator cannot access. So some kind of TPM/Measured computing will have to be in place so all parties can trust that nothing was tampered with, or relayed to something else that was not authenticated.
All these things exist today. So the simple law mandating "A site has to ensure that sensitive content is never served to a minor using the strongest technical means available" means anonymous access, untrusted computers on the network will no longer be allowed to work.
The problem is social media. Reddit isn’t adults only, nor is instagram. They’re just people putting stuff up for their friends.
Some of the nastiest stuff I ever seen was in the comments of YouTube.
not sure why they're framing this like it doesn't make sense. of course the people who've created the problem would be in a position to solve it.
The government makes many basic restrictions for protecting children: parents can't give their children drugs or alcohol, porn, guns etc. Social media definitely fits in this category because it has been shown to cause mental harm.
Being shown to cause harm is also a meaninglessly low standard. Bathtubs, pools, and bikes can cause harm. You would need to show an actually useful standard. Lets propose will cause an unacceptable level of harmn that cannot be mitigated by less restrictive means.
I don't buy the argument that you are unacceptably harmed because you aren't capable of denying your kid social media nor do I buy the idea that social media couldn't be regulated to be less shitty and harmful.
So precedent exists. Social media is at least as harmful as porn.
Before the internet as I kid I rewired our houses cable wiring and stole my dad's dirty magazines. Pretty sure damn near everyone saw adult material prior to 18.
This is why you find a circle of friends and like mind neighbors who raise their kids in a manner that makes you comfortable. It’s never 1:1, but it doesn’t have to be you against the entire world either. (Though it can certainly feel like that at times)
Think about EU standardizing USB-C for charging. Many people were up in arms: Do you want the state to decide these things? However, personally I benefited. Now I have to carry around only one charger for all my devices.
If the govt standardizes non-smart phones for kids we will all benefit.
Of course this doesn’t address tablets, netbooks etc.
So the actual answer is good parenting, which I posit is one of the bigger problems in the US today and has been for a long time.
Or we keep pretending that pushing education and passing laws about cell phones will somehow be a substitute for bad parenting. The US has been doing that for a long time as well, isn’t working.
Sorry, no, this is just abdicating your responsibility as a parent. "It's hard" isn't an excuse for throwing your hands up and handing your responsibility over to the state.
If YouTube really cared about kids they should allow users to pick a subset of channels and never ever mention again anything else. Alas, we all know this will never happen because YouTube doesn’t care about what people watch as long as they come back watching some more
One way of solving this is if the default was everything locked down, then effort needed to give the children anything, forcing parents to consider each permission.
However I also see that parents are addicted to their devices and social media, so don't see the problem.
Social media is by contrast fairly designed to spread 17 different kinds of poisonous stupidity. So you liked $conspiracy_theory... how about 10 more 3 of which suggest genocide!
> Kids as young as 3 years old can use mounted guns to shoot people to pieces and watch blood splatter on the screen. Kids get points for killing people. Parents eat pizza while their kids blow somebody up. I have friends who play them. Their eyes look crazy when they play them, and they get excited when the blood splatters and parts of bodies fly.
> The project is going to continue for a long time, because it is really hard to convince some people about the dangers. Some will not even listen. Some parents do not think it is harmful for a child to make blood splatter and body parts explode. I do not understand why they think it is okay to do this killing.
> Mortal Kombat series, Mortal Kombat Ultimate—This has joysticks. You use your fists and legs and feet. Bodies explode blood when you hit them. Mortal Kombat Ultimate says on the screen—‘‘There is no Knowledge that is not Power.’’ Does that mean that if you know how to kill someone, then you will have power?
It's very hard for me to read commentary on social media and not be reminded of this kind of rhetoric. All of the individual facts are true, it's hard to explain exactly what's wrong, and it's clear that everyone in this hearing passionately believed that disaster was incoming if we didn't take action. Yet I'm very confident that video games do not have the negative effects they thought were obvious.
1. Even in the 1990s, there were problems with child predators using chat rooms and Web forums to talk to minors for inappropriate, illegal purposes.
2. Social media “algorithms” (recommender systems) that are designed around increasing user engagement are a big problem.
I’m very cautious about poorly written legislation with too-broad definitions of social media that restrict useful forms of Internet access for children. However, I believe that algorithmic social media is harmful, especially to minors, and I am sympathetic to restrictions for minors provided that the laws are well-written.
Then you know that "but think of the children" is the most common fear-mongering approach to justify increased authoritarianism. I've seen no way to craft legislation on this issue that uses government force to achieve your desired outcome, that don't also create massive undesired effects like invasion of privacy or outlawing anonimity. Can you point to some model laws on this that you like?
There are plenty of apps that parents who care can install on their kids' devices or ISP and carrier services to limit kids' social media access.
No... They spent 13 years in government school, that is not the parents fault if they can't read. If we assume its the parents job to educate their kids, there will be some 1-5% of kids that fall through the cracks, damning millions of kids to failure.
For policy that we care about, it is not good enough to have parents decide.
If that school doesn't take into account parents' preferences it would be a farm, not a school.
> If we assume its the parents job to educate their kids
We should assume it's the school's job to educate kids approximately in alignment with the wishes of their parents.
> For policy that we care about, it is not good enough to have parents decide.
"Good enough" for whom? Who is supposed to decide to the exclusion of parents? How such a decision is going to be made? Who is going to be responsible for the inevitable failures which are now called "successes"?
> "Its the parents fault the kids can't read in college."
If you understand what I'm trying to say here, you'll know that parents will always get the blame, no other party is willing to accept even the slightest hint of responsibility.