A lot of studies came out kinda at the same time showing how harmful it is and people aren’t coming up with alternatives. What else can you do?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
We could recognize the attention economy as inherently destructive to society and ban it altogether.
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.
Educate the parents maybe?