Anybody else think it is weird that suddenly all Western countries suddenly want to lockdown the internet to "protect the children"? There is surely an international special interest group lobbying for this?
But we also have years of research about how social media and other internet phenomena are ruining kids' lives.
I don't disagree with the principle of a lot of these laws, but many implementations are too flawed to be a mistake.
It is not Meta working across the globe because they’re too lazy to implement age verification.
Previously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48708278
Also can I see an example of those ads? Google isn’t surfacing anything relevant
> Denmark’s digital affairs minister criticized Meta for an advertising campaign promoting regulations on age checks for social media in an interview with POLITICO.
[1] https://www.politico.eu/article/denmark-digital-minister-sla...
If Meta bans young people from their platforms, young people will just go to a different platform, and then Meta loses a generation of customers.
But if the age blocking affects all platforms, then the playing field is kept equal with respect to age blocking.
I still don’t think that is the case.
Meta, understanding that it will likely be the poster child for social media, knows that the laws will be likely written to make Meta enforce age verification on their platforms. This is expensive and ridden with liability traps, lawsuits, and government investigations.
SO
To stem the tide of this before it hits their shores, Meta is actively pushing hard to get age verification legislation in place on the OS level.
This would put Google, Apple, and Microsoft in the hot seat, and Meta can carry on while blaming them when kids get through cracks.
Meta is simply playing a strategy game to make everything shittier for everyone else (everyone uses an OS) in order to protect themselves (not everyone uses Meta).
You just summed up regulatory capture.
That's not the question. Some group is obviously pushing this agenda globally. Who?
can these banks/brokers get hacked?
I'd love to see a way for people to revoke/replace their personal info, kinda like rotating passwords or changing their names - but for street address, birthday, government ID numbers, etc.
Penalties (of any scale) are insufficient to ensure absolute security.
They're brokering the negotiation, they're not actually the identity provider. The broker has no knowledge of your actual identity. So in this case, the identity provider (such as your bank) knows that you've been referred by the broker and that you wish to provide your verified age and only that age. The social media company knows that you've chosen to use the specific broker to verify your age, but not who the actual identity provider is. The broker knows that a request with your metadata (IP addr, HTTP headers, etc.) has been initiated between a specific social media site and a specific identity provider, but they don't have access to your actual identity.
Nobody in the negotiation has a complete picture. To correlate it all together, you would need logs from all 3. And at least in the Australian case, due to our data retention laws, if you've got logs from the social media provider, then you can already associate the user with a specific identity by requesting the information from the ISP which they legally must retain for 2 years, so it's really not necessary.
All this concern about social media privacy is a little ridiculous IMO. If you're using social media then you've already compromised your identity. If somebody wants to find out who you are, they already can. They don't need a verified identity, and social media companies seem to me more than willing to cooperate with governments. Law enforcement has been using this type of correlating data for years to establish identity in CSAM investigations.
Is is an excuse for some, sure. But we will fail at pushing back if we ignore that there are a meaningful number of concerned parents who support solutions like this because they have become aware of the danger that social media presents. For many of them, self-attestation of age at the OS account level is likely sufficient, not to mention much simpler to implement and use.
But others are working hard to shift the narrative away from age attestation towards age verification or even identity verification. Government officials (on both the right and left) want to be able to police speech based on what is acceptable to those who are currently in power. Companies want to verify humans for advertising and training purposes. And some privacy advocates intentionally conflate age attestation (like California AB 1043) with age verification because it is an easier strawman to attack.
without a meaningful headcount of real users, advertisers will begin to push back on cost or even reduce and eliminate spending on social media altogether.
by proactively identifying real humans, you prevent the collapse of major social media outlets. by tracking their age and location directly, you restore that which AI took away from advertisers in the first place.
age verification makes sure surveillance capitalism continues to function.
Besides, major social media platforms can just generate ”verified” profiles to fit a demographic. There is no way for advertisers to verify the audiences are genuine. Even CTR is meaningless unless conversion is tracked. This means Meta et al. will soon be actually buying/scalping advertised products and offloading them onto a secondary market.
No shady agenda about killing public discourse is necessary if you view the push for identify verification in that light. (That doesn't mean it won't kill public discourse, but that's an unintended consequence.)
From a government perspective, it is a gold mine to know who's on the internet. For advertisers it is another goldmine - you can target at will without having to figure out first some demographics. An probably there are some angles I don't yet see, but the fact that this is a concentrated effort across the world make my spidey sense tingle.
And who doesn't want to protect the children?
Now as I've thought this through some, I could see where selected networking could be made kid friendly, you know, like a top level dns where you need to prove yourself to be underage or heavily vetted adult with id verification, and this entire tld could be made kid friendly. I don't doubt that most of today's dns infrastructure is probably not up to the job, but a very tight and heavily vetted registry for .kids for example (or maybe better as kids.<country> as laws vary) would solve all of this. Make a subset of the internet kid safe and serve the kids that.
The fact that all these proposed laws still give kids general tcp/ip access at the physical level means we do conclude exactly what my parent commenter says, its not really about the kids, its about the free and unfettered flow of information that must be stopped. In the US, its getting close to illegal to disseminate information but once factual information does indeed become criminal in nature, you need to catch the perps and thus the IDs attached to packets of fact carrying information.
Because big players have systems to fill in those information gaps, they have a moat that protects their position in the market.
If the data were instead just handed over, that would weaken those moats.
His words: “the most important purchase going on right now (Tiktok)” alleging its control could be “consequential.” [1]
When kids have alternative news your pointless religious wars or fake democratic freedom wars cannot be fought. [2]
[1] Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said in September "We have to fight with the weapons that apply to the battlefields in which we’re engaged. And the most important ones are on social media. And the most important purchase that is going on right now is TikTok. Number one. Number one.". Jonathan Greenblatt, CEO of the Anti‑Defamation League, warned last year: “TikTok, if you will, is the 24/7 news channel of so many of our young people, and it’s like Al‑Jazeera on steroids. It’s amplifying and intensifying the antisemitism and the anti‑Zionism with no repercussions.”
[2] "There’s an eighth front," he said, describing a struggle "for the hearts and minds of people, especially young people in the West, and for me especially in the United States.
Done. This alternative solves the whole problem and it's been brought up a million times, but it doesn't matter, because this isn't about protecting children or anything about ages. It's about locking down anonymity, and money for a few interests who want to be the verifiers and craft a future where they hold the keys.
And if you're a concerned government, make OS vendors support it and make parents criminally responsible for not setting it.
The school admins and teachers act in loco parentis when the child is in their custody, on their property etc. So, schools are often tasked with making difficult parentage decisions for children, and sometimes before the parents themselves can be looped in.
A notable tension today exists with gender identity, and whether schools should be compelled to always share the student's secrets with parents, or if the schools have a solemn duty to try and protect children's confidentiality and safety in this regard.
Another tension exists with medical care in hospitals. Once a child is admitted to the hospital, do the parents still have 100% control over life-saving treatments? Can the parents withdraw ordinary life-sustaining care? Can the hospital tell the parents when the child is "brain dead" or in a PVS, and can the parents go find a second opinion?
No system is going to fix "unresponsble" parents until we end up with a state completely replacing parent like in Brave New World.
You’re the person saying that we shouldn’t be default people to contributing to their retirement because people may choose not to. It’s not about perfectly capturing every possible person - you’re running a country, not a concentration camp.
Unfortunately, this doesn't address that problem.
At any rate, with age verification, un-concerned parent will likely just want their kid to shut up, and will verify using their own details to give the kid the (adult) access they want. So I don't think that changes much here.
Now that the 70-ish year experiment is over, we’re simply reverting to the way we’ve been since time immemorial.
The timeline you present is backwards because you misunderstand privacy as a binary. For most of human history we were extremely private to almost everybody in the world, and that's only changed relatively recently. There's a huge difference between my family or close neighbors knowing what I'm doing because of physical proximity and having to broadcast information about myself in order to take part in the way society has evolved to expect for mundane services.
- at a medium, you will have annoying and intrusive identity checks required to use many common websites
- at a high medium, you will not be able to use a non trusted computer and identity stack: get on a windows, apple, or google device and use their identity services in their browsers, or else you cannot use the internet
- at a maximum, all activity you and everyone takes online will be monitored and faithfully tied to your or their verified identity. This total loss of privacy will result in a total loss of freedom of speech and assembly online.
That last point is the direct aim of the people driving these laws.
Well, no, this is the slightly different classic question of whether, in order to prevent (or, more realistically, on the pretext of preventing) bad parenting, the state should impose a universal totalotarian papers-please approach to basic life activities which requires everyone to prove identity to refute the assumption that they are a child so that it may impose its own (also bad, because totally one-size-fits-all and corcumstance blind) parenting on every child, without regard to the imposition on the liberty of every adult necessary to do so.
Stepping in to correct bad parenting happens when there is a system to identify bad parenting requiring correction and intervene only where such is identified, not when you are imposing a universal regime on everyone on the justification that without it, some will act as bad parents. While both are approaches frequently proposed, they are different and should be distinguished.
You can set age in Google Accounts, but they can access pretty much anything when they reach age 13 (which is about the age a lot of these things start to become a real problem) and as a parent you don't have any way to limit that. They don't even need to ask to install new phone apps.
Children also use computers as well as phones and you don't want to stop them using a web browser! You also obviously can't supervise them every moment they are online even if you wanted to.
I think there are many ways to limit that. E.g. Google Android parental control https://support.google.com/families/answer/7103028?hl=en#zip...
I understand technological advancements can be overwhelming for older people. But that does not warrant giving up on kids...
But various groups are deliberately conflating that desire for self-attested flags with verification: Politicians who want to police speech, companies who want to advertise to verified humans, and privacy advocates who want an easier strawman to attack.
I suspect that depends on subtle phrasing.
If for the sake of argument I presuppose that film classification ratings are necessary to protect children’s mental health, then the un-filtered contents of shock sites and porn sites will have had an impact even in the early years of the internet.
However, the early years of the internet simply had a much smaller proportion of kids online to experience this.
No*, however the point is valid: the internet overall is indeed unfiltered far beyond what is allowed in even the highest cinematic ratings.
* I avoided such things, however I do know the low end of what they can be, and had in mind 2girls1cup which I understand to be criminal "extreme porn" by UK standards, though have never actually seen it.
But that wouldn't come with baked in surveillance, so "what else can you do" sounds a bit unnerving.
It really wouldn't be.
Do that at OSI layer 3, every routed packet would have to have an "was this sent by a kid's device" flag.
Higher levels aren't the ISP's role. Lower levels, you'd need duplicate hardware specifically for kids, which couldn't connect to the adult's internet.
In the real world, we're still arguing about something that was already embarrassingly slow in its roll-out during my degree, and I graduated 20 years ago: IPv6.
This would also breed more interest in hardware modifications and thus leading more kids into the technical field. Sounds like a win win situation.
Such things can't run modern websites either.
We don't need to compromise here, this already exists and works pretty well.
Also, further up chain, I was replying to:
> if we're willing to shift these costs and responsibility to ISPs, which could separate the internet into two networks, one for children and the other for the rest of us. This is technically just as feasible, and probably cheaper than requiring every website to process
What you suggest is not that.
Also also, what you suggest puts the hard problem (configuring software correctly) in the hands of normal people.
Software configuration is second nature to us nerds, so it's easy to forget that the average person probably only knows how to install pi-hole and one or two VPNs: https://xkcd.com/2501/
I'm not making a comment with respect to the actual safety these systems offer, just that alternatives exist, which would not all require modified hardware.
> what you suggest puts the hard problem (configuring software correctly) in the hands of normal people.
Pre bundled software, specifically browsers, exist. Colleges use them all the time to prevent cheating, e.g. the Lockdown Browser. Those don't require the student to configure anything, they just download the application and login.
So we already treat kids quite differently from adults. And tht is - imho - fine. Because kids are not just "small grown ups", they are just growing up.
I just do not think, that KYC/age verification is the right way to go - or even feasible in how it is being approached. I am for denying Meta, TikTok and the others the opportunity to exploit kids. But I would rather much have them regulated in a way that just forbidds them their predatory ways overall, then to give them even more data in the form of verified idetities and the knowledge that this account is within a specific age range ad also a "real human being", making that data even more valuable for advertisers.
Sorry for being not more clear.
This seems very naive to me, to be honest.
children don't tend to object to losing rights they never had in the first place.
get them used to livign with less rights and a lower standard of living and they wont' know what was taken away from them.
Tobacco companies: “CIGARETTES ARE FINE!”
Society: “we should regulate that.”
Social media companies: “SOCIAL MEDIA IS FINE!”
Society: “we should regulate that”
You, apparently: “if the tobacco industry lied, it proves… social media… is being honest???? Or something???”
A bunch of studies: “CIGARETTES ARE FINE!”
Tobacco industry: "We don't need to regulate that"
A bunch of studies: "SOCIAL MEDIA IS DANGEROUS"
Government: "We need to regulate that"
Never mind that there's widespread scientific consensus on plenty of things that we're actively dropping the ball on (e.g. human causes of climate change) that nobody seems to feel the need to rush on as much as this.
The last point you make is just lame whataboutism.
Sure, if you go out of your way to try to ignore pretty much everything about the conversation up to that point and half of what I said.
> The last point you make is just lame whataboutism.
The entire point I'm trying to make is that the priorities of the people in power reflect what they actually care about. You're disregarding a plausible explanation for why things are playing out the way they are by dismissing each individual point I make against it individually rather than addressing the combination of factors that make it so concerning.
It's honestly hard to tell if you actually do understanding my point like you're claiming to. If you were confident that I was wrong, I don't understand why you're straw-manning my argument. If you think I'm spinning conspiratorial bullshit, then I'm not sure why you're taking the time to argue against it poorly.
I don’t want to waste time making people in power “reflect what they care about”. I care about the harm being done to children with social media.
The question we have to ask ourselves is whether these "protect the children" laws are worth the internet freedoms they are about to erode. I would argue not.
1. It is not the state's responsibility to raise your children. They should ensure that safety is available, they should have some ability to deal with clear cases of abuse - but otherwise you're on your own. Anybody who thinks they want a nanny state just has to imagine the worst possible government abusing this power.
2. On the basis of providing safety, it would be enough for example for mobile phone OSes to provide parent restrictions (as they currently do). Kids can't afford to buy phones, so it's the parents in almost all cases giving them unfiltered access. If you really really want to ensure that all children have filtered access on phones, just spot check kid's phones and confiscate them if they do not have the locks enabled.
It seems insane to me that so many parents believe they have zero responsibility for their children's access to the internet, despite being the source of that access. I'm sorry, parents need to step up.
The default value assigned to a social study from academia should be zero these days, so there merely being a lot of them doesn't mean anything. You really need some very high quality evidence to justify this kind of huge change.
Until there's a solution that actually addresses the problem without creating more, we should just try to make sure more people also know the problem exists and try to help equip parents to deal with it as best they can for now.
Educate the parents maybe?
We could recognize the attention economy as inherently destructive to society and ban it altogether.
No joke our politicians subject us to something stupid, and then travel around telling their foreign peers how amazing and genius they are for doing so. They help write the legislation for other countries. Of course they later return and have to deal with the results of their stupidity, but its already been sold.
https://www.afr.com/technology/australia-takes-social-media-...
I know Aus and NZ are quite authoritarian when it comes to this stuff - I have seen it directly for myself. I was at the Christchurch Call public engagement meeting [1] when they were planning some of these things.
Somehow the US ones always fly under the radar: Bilderberg, Council on Foreign Relations, Jackson Hole banker meetup, Bohemian Grove, etc.
There has been a lot of propaganda since the mid teens targeting the social and psychological impacts of social media. It is certainly plausible that some group or the aforementioned entities had a big part of this. Regulatory capture is a real thing that makes companies or breaks companies.
This is not the first time media consumption has been labeled and targeted in a negative way and it will not be the last. We as a society have to adapt to changing landscapes.
We shouldn't burn books. We shouldn't ban dungeons and dragons. Video games do not make people in general homicidal. History is repeating itself.
Anecdotally, I have not ran into a single person who has suggested we need to age-gate social media. It is on the politicians mind, but not the lay-person, as far as I can tell.
But it's not worth the privacy impacts and chilling of free speech.
I'm really hoping smart people can figure out a good middleground before the government does something stupid. Because right now, their two cannons are either:
- Ban open-weight/open-source models and self-hosted LLMs
- Require internet passports to access any website and have everything recorded and monitored for signs of abuse that can be tied back to an individual and enforced in real life
What does a good middle-ground look like? I can't think of one. Neither of these outcomes is good and neither of them are enforceable. You ban something for law abiding citizens and only criminals will use it, and if you restrict everything behind internet passports then the criminals will just use the millions of stolen identities they already have access to.
Maybe biometrics that generate short-lived tokens that only the government can tie back to an individual? Like a "biometric session". Still though, you can kiss freedoms goodbye. It's no surprise Sam Altman started Orb so long ago, he obviously saw this one coming.
Combine it with harsh enough punishments and few criminals will be willing to risk it. That's how we deal with other crimes that are "hard to enforce" already.
And remember, the optimum amount of crime is not zero. Both because the cost of getting it to zero is too high to bear and because sometimes the morally correct thing to do is to break the rules-as-written.
Why do you require some special interest? Ordinary people are seeing the harm and demanding help. Tech companies did themselves no favors by locking down phones and accounts to the point that it's impossible for parents to police and/or check their kids phones.
So now that parents have been blocked from parenting, who else is going to do it?
It's so Facebook can prove to advertisers the views are not bots/AI.
the harm being us proles being able to communicate and organize. they don't give a fuck about kids, algorithmic feeds, or Russian/Chinese/other villains of the week disseminating propaganda to other bots in Facebook comments. they care exclusively about regaining some degree of control over the flow of information.
consider this: how many people in Europe would be against the ongoing replacement migration if it was still 1999 and 95% of people were still getting news exclusively from the TV and papers, where most incidents of cultural enrichment would never ever be mentioned? and on the other end of the spectrum, consider this: would the BLM protests of 2020 have the same scale and impact if there was no medium for people to spread the video and organize?
TLDR: Arab spring good, American/European spring bad.
> So now that parents have been blocked from parenting, who else is going to do it?
I'm a parent. Nobody has been blocked from parenting by tech companies.
> I'm a parent. Nobody has been blocked from parenting by tech companies.
What age? Because they absolutely have. Wait till your kid has instragram and snapchat and WhatsApp and they can talk to random adults, or get bullied and you have no way to know. Wait till they lock their phone, and you have no way to check it. Wait till they get addicted to content that basically blocks them from doing any part of normal life and all they want to do all day is sit and watch a phone.
It's really bad out there. This is the first generation to test as less intelligent than their parents. Read some of the articles on how kids are cheating with AI, and it's not just that AI is available, I think the kids simply can't do the work, and that's because they spend most of their time on the phone.
This doesn't bode well for the future, and something to restrict kids from phone is desperately needed. What it should look like, I'm not sure. I don't care about proving a specific ID for anything, just an age range is enough: Either your above 18, or what's your age when under 18, nothing more is needed.
Then apps can tailor themselves accordingly.
Why would they be allowed or even able to download Snapchat or WhatsApp if this is a concern?
> Wait till they lock their phone, and you have no way to check it.
OK, then their phone is taken away.
This is totally bizarre to me. You're talking about a world where parents have totally given up parenting already. There's nothing tech companies are going to be able to do to help.
How is it impossible? Worst case, parents can make the kids unlock the device and take it away if the kid does not comply. Not that such extreme measures should ever be needed if there aren't significant pre-existing parenting failures.
And at some age the parent's job should be to make sure the kid can act responsibly on its own rather than micromanaging every possible danger.
Anyway, Meta, really? Just to have more of our data? For the absolutely pedestrian explicit purpose of providing more information to advertisers?
This is why I don't buy into conspiracy theories. The truth is typically really boring and predictable - evil corporations will evily corporate.
I half wish for a more exciting villain that would give people a noticeable reason to stand up against - not just annoying people with intrusive ads.
Giving advertisers demographic information outright would actually weaken Meta’s moat.
yea, you know who they are, I know who they are and we all knoww what they are tryin to hide. but anyone who spells it out will get downvoted to hell here.
But the way it is done is weird for sure.
But how do you do it in a way that it isn’t a burden on the parents or peer pressure the issue that breaks the intent?
Or is your point that the internet should be used by children?
If so how do you propose restricting the harmful content?
From my point of view we are in the digital Middle Ages. We do not yet understand if this global connection is actually being good or bad in the long run. The only thing that starts to crystallize is that it isn’t great for children. Specifically social media, especially especially people gaining access to children on troves to spread ideology.
So how to solve it. And „I don’t like the current approach“ without having a better idea is not a solution.
Yea wouldn’t want to have parents be involved and managing what their kids interact with. What?
As it is all of the parental controls on all devices, apps, and services are extremely lackluster.
So I'd argue legally required, granular, parental controls and empowering parents would be a much better start to resolving this issue compared to blatant government privacy overreach.
It was only after all of that failed, with no measurable effect, that our governments, reluctantly and as a last resort, proposed these privacy-destroying measures. And even then, they respected their citizens' rejection of these proposals [1].
I mean I didn't actually check that this is how it went, but with all the lecturing about "democracy" from our rulers, surely that's how they went about it, right?
Parents will not solve this. They would need to first care and then to be as tech savvy as the people in this forum. And then all the content would need to be attributed correctly. If if if, and here we are
Why should we aim to do that ? Who give internet-enables device to their children? In most cases, who give pay for their internet access?
> So how to solve it. And „I don’t like the current approach“ without having a better idea is not a solution.
Defining the problem, and if it exist altogether should be a good start. I'm not even sure the problem is defined, even less it need a solution so badly that we should kill everyone privacy for it.
I was raised in am extremely oppressive and abusive religious household. I would not be who I am today if I didn't have access to opinions outside of those shoved down my throat. I couldn't even listen to radio stations that weren't corporate soft rock or Christian music.
The internet was the only free space I had. Without it, I would certainly have killed myself as a child, rather than continue to submit to violent physical and religious abuse.
If we would stop blindly reacting with short-term thinking to each issue in turn that Corpgov presents us, and actually think deeply about what kind of future we'd like to build for those after us, it becomes radically clear that both the problem and solution as presented to us are actually detrimental in the long term.
Without trying to offend you, but you are arguing this as: we don’t need to regulate alcohol or drugs because experiences, for everyone, will be better in the end…
You may have skipped over the part in my comment where I pointed out that this "problem" is ostensible at best, and is literally, intentionally presented in a way for you and others to remain engaged with that problem, talking loudly about it while others are trying to actually discuss the real problem being buried underneath:
Our corporate neoliberal authoritarian fascist governments are closing in fast to secure the surveillance state and consolidate their power through an unprecedented level of State control over our lives.
Again, "The children" is not the problem. That is literally the trojan horse being delivered to you through a type of propaganda which has already been well-documented.
> you are arguing this as: we don’t need to regulate alcohol or drugs because experiences, for everyone, will be better in the end…
I never made such an argument, or implied such an argument. What you've done here is present a complete straw man argument instead of critically engaging with the actual argument I've just made, which is that you're falling for corporate and government propaganda and taking up space serving their goals, instead of trying to serve the goals of your own society; and that's the twisted part, you think that you're doing exactly that by entertaining and fueling the "Think of the children" argument.
But in order to not be a sucker, you have to harness that desire to do the right thing and peel back the layers of deception. Fighting the right fight. And not misconstruing valid arguments by saying, "Oh well you just don't want anything to be regulated at all, do you! You want kids to be able to freely access heroin?"
Which, ignoring the fact that ~100 years ago you could go buy a heroin tincture at the pharmacy for your children, this is just a false dichotomy. The options are not between "require children (And adults! That's the point!) to show ID before freely accessing information" and "let the kids shoot up heroin".
Terribly ironic that this is up for a vote at the time of the United State's 250th birthday.
You make it a burden on the parents, like all parenting always has been.
In my opinion, US culture losing sight of this is part of why our country is spinning down the drain. Combining Ipad kids with "what do you mean my child is failing? Isn't it your job to fix that?" I suspect has lead to a populace that can't think for themselves.
Being willing to give up your online anonymity to be surveiled online and not only beliving it's not a problem, but really thinking it's to protect children is another result of this.