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Now obviously one bad apple doesn't spoil the whole bunch [0] but it always struck me as the sort of thing that would ruffle feathers in parliament. I'm not surprised to see our regulations described as among the world's toughest and I doubt it is going to stop here, there is a very motivated faction who want to be able to shut troublemakers up.
[0] Barilaro was only the deputy premier of New South Wales at the time, not anything important. Ow my sarcasm gland is strained now.
I certainly don't think it has anything to do with this.
This is why forcing each site to restrict access is a terrible idea. It’s a backdoor to destroying everyone’s privacy.
What we really need is for each of these sites to advertise its category or age targets, similar to how TV shows have a rating. Then end user devices like phones and browsers should have the option of setting parental controls to lock out those sites. Countries could mandate that parents set age controls on their kids devices if they way. No privacy violations needed.
The problem is we seem to be entering an era where politicians (and many individuals, evidenced by the comments on Hacker News) want much more extreme control over other people’s and parent’s activity. They don’t care if this requires we all surrender our rights to privacy and turn over identification to megacorps to talk to each other on the internet. They’re hell bent on controlling what other people can do or see on the internet and they think these laws will surgically do that in their favor, often with the assumption that their own websites and services will be kindly exempted.
Yet we’re already seeing these laws or individual companies trying to get ahead of laws extend beyond what people thought the targets were going to be (TikTok, Facebook, Instagram) and into services most people use like YouTube, Reddit, and Discord. Everyone hates when this starts happening to them. It’s really scary that so many people are welcoming these heavy laws without stopping to think that they might be a bad solution because they never imagine it applying to themself, only to other people they want to control.
Two problems with this:
1. Any system which is anonymous becomes trivially abusable. A true anonymous system with no records kept means a single stolen or leaked ID could be used by everyone, defeating the system. You can try to search for and block leaked IDs but that doesn’t stop one kid from copying their 19 year old brother’s ID and using it to authorize the entire school. So these systems gain logging facilities to try to rate limit requests and the politicians don’t like it because it’s too easy to circumvent. They really want ID attached to accounts so there can be some consequences for ID fraud.
2. Routing every request through a government entity will not be anonymous or log-free, no matter how much you want it to be. With everything we know about government intrusion into services in the name of national security, you can’t expect a centralized service that gets access to people’s ID, IP address, and sites they visit to be kept as a special zone for privacy. It would be a top target.
So what better option can we think of, us smart people here?
The word “option” is a key difference. I don’t think we should be forcing everyone to go through these age checks or thinking we can actual ban under-16s or other age groups from sites. There’s no way to do this without forcing everyone through an ID process, which is where a lot of these laws are heading.
Make it a parental controls thing and spread information about how parental controls work.
Why is it not possible to require websites that wish to market to children to be certified as "child safe". Such sites would be audited by an independent entity that would grant them some form of encrypted key. These could be in age bands, e.g. <6yr, <12 yrs, <16 yrs, etc. also also possibly geographically.
We do this for many other things, from toys to public venues.
Parents could then set their child's device to only allow access to sites with the appropriate certification.
This way the children are as safe as their parents allow them to be, without sharing their child's identity, and the rest of the population also doesn't have to share their identity with dubious authentication service or the government.
There's probably something wrong with this idea, if so I'd be glad to hear it!
It's like asking tobacco companies to reduce the toxicity and addiction of their products, inevitable collapse.
The reality is that the business model itself is inherently toxic.
2. Leaving whether or not to allow social media use up to parental discretion creates a situation where some kids get permission to use social media and the rest use it anyways because of peer pressure.
3. If tackling the problem from the side of children and parents doesn't work, you can try to address it by acting on the social media companies themselves. Unfortunately, these companies will resist any effort to make their products less addictive. Social media companies are mostly American and lobby (bribe) the U.S. government into taking punitive action against anyone who tries to tax or regulate them in a way that actually impacts their bottom line. Since you can't tax/regulate them without facing reprisals, one alternative is to ban them as ineffectually as possible. e.g. Australian kids are still using social media, so the social media companies don't really care. They may actually benefit from the cool/rebel factor their services have been granted.
Parents would be much more able to restrict the devices a child has access to (or its controls) than the websites they visit (absent website certification).
2. Fine the parents
And if they are curious about the question, it would be better if they found sources that frame the issue appropriately for their age.
Canadian kids will be able to access social media, as long as that site has effective means to prevent bullying and similar restrictions.
https://www.canada.ca/en/canadian-heritage/services/safe-soc...
I doubt any sites are actually going to comply, so it'll be ban in practice.
The California law might interest you (but with reverse data flow - the way you proposed doesn't work because most websites have mixed content)
Mixed content isn't a problem for broadcast TV or newspapers. They simply avoid publishing material not appropriate for children, e.g. broadcast news programs don't show gore, even when a place has been bombed and is littered with body parts.
Think about the Twitter home page (back when it was Twitter). If someone tweeted something that should be restricted, what do you suggest?
Mark the whole page over-18 and effectively ban kids from using Twitter until it falls off the front page? That's ridiculous.
Ban people from tweeting over-18 content or hide it from everything except direct links? This is what Twitter management would choose, in reality, if the other option aa the above. They'd just make the whole platform child-safe. Remember how much outrage this caused when Tumblr tried it? But you want to force this on all platforms.
Hide the over-18 tweet from users who are under 18, but display the rest of the page? This is the obviously most sensible solution, and it requires the server to know whether the user is over 18.
Your proposal doesn't solve the actual problem.
We can fight this by supporting child protection mechanisms that don't act as mass surveillance, such as the one in California that merely reports whether root said the user is a child, and fighting ones that do, such as the one in New York that checks your ID.
I think most people agree that social media is toxic, not just for children, but adults too.
What I don't understand is why parents don't take responsibility for reducing the contact with such harmful products.
Even growing up in the 70's, most children didn't smoke or drink alcohol, not because they didn't have access to it, but because of the wrath of their parents.
I think you have answered your own question. The children who need this ban most are the children of parents who don't pay attention/care what their children are doing. So the state has to do it for them.
I seem to have struck lucky with a child who didn't want a mobile phone, but he was one of only two or three children a year of 200 at school that didn't have one. I can see that it's hard to deny your child something that every other child has and phones are useful when your child starts becoming more independent. I certainly wouldn't do a long journey without my phone myself. We obviously managed without phones as children, but if your child is going to school on public transport, I totally understand wanting them to have a phone in case of problems.
The apps and websites often have good (or relatively harmless!) parts to them e.g YouTube has tons of brilliant educational videos. There is no easy way as a parent to give them access to the good parts without access to the more harmful parts. You don't want to be a total killjoy and never let them play a computer game (plus playing games with them is fun!). Schools require internet usage for homework. You end up in lots of awkward grey areas. Is watching a video about building logic gates in Minecraft ok? If so, then what about Minecraft videos generally? You can't pre-vet everything they want to watch and then supervise them closely to make sure they don't stray from that.
It feels different from smoking/alcohol because there are so many grey areas and there isn't quite as clear evidence as to what exactly is harmful. Ideally you try and prevent your children smoking and drinking alcohol with education and setting a good example rather your wrath. That's trickier with social media.
I think the current proposals are non-ideal but a bit of a desperation measure because nobody has come up with anything better.
It's critical mass. I didn't want my 13-year-old daughter on social media, because even 7 years ago we knew the harms. We were firm, and we kept her off it. The problem was that we were attempting to help her with her mental health, but when you're literally the only kid who didn't read the group chat from your friend group the night before, that does remarkable damage to your mental health. It cuts off an enormous part of their social life.
If the majority of kids weren't using it then it'd be easy, but because it's their primary form of communication, it's incredibly difficult.
Adults setting up groups would be so that you could have a group for "year 11 maths class" but not for "people who hate susan"
The smoking rates and underage alcohol consumption went down since 1970ties. And afaik, most people start drinking alcohol as teenagers or sooner. What is stopping them is access or lack of it, not fear of parents.
Even the phrase “social media site” is a problem for these conversations because a lot of people don’t consider themselves as using social media. Yet we’re seeing laws start to cover YouTube and Reddit and companies like Discord are self-imposing age checks for features through an ID gating process. Once people start realizing that these laws are going to have broad impacts to internet sites they use, they will become much less popular.
This creates a grey zone where a 16yo could buy their own device and set themselves as an adult but grey zones like this aren't really a bad thing.
There's also no penalty for lying. If an adult wants a child to have an adult account, they can.
Grapheneos has stated that they won't be adding any identity verification or scanning, ever.
It's highly usable and has very similar UX to Pixels. I switched from iOS and have found the UI to be better although it's largely the same on stock Pixel.
There's over 99% app compatibility and the only failing apps are additional restrictions added by a small subset (less than 10%) of banking and government apps. There are also occasional crashes in apps when GrapheneOS blocks bugged code with their exploit protections, but these can be disabled.
iOS users can continue to use iMessage with OpenBubbles, but switching contacts to Signal is becoming easier with its growing popularity.
Not all do, but it's positioning itself as a legitimate secure OS and not some weird shady crap, so I heard some people had success petitioning their banks to allow it. Sometimes they have an OS whitelist to avoid shady or insecure devices (thanks government regulation!), but since GOS is not shady or insecure it just has to be added to the whitelist. Good luck reaching the right people, but if the alternative is closing your account... sometimes they listen. They might also have an account flag to bypass OS whitelist for you.
But mine just worked.
https://privsec.dev/posts/android/banking-applications-compa...
The UK tried to ban gambling advertising during football matches but... "There were over 5,000 visible gambling advertisements during a recent Premier League match despite a ban that was expected to result in a reduction, researchers found."[0] That's one (1) televised match (you'd expect 3-4 at least per weekend to be televised.)
Not to mention that the Sky Sports coverage is sponsored by Bet365 (a gambling company, obvs.)
I expect any regulation of social media dark patterns to be equally successful...
[0] https://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/football/articles/ce9ree15yd0o
Such is the way with UKGOV, sadly.
Zuckerberg apparently does the same.
What do the billionaires know that we don't?
I read an article where some children were asked about their social media use. A few made the point that they just felt crap after a scrolling session. I think everyone here knows what it's like to realise you just lost an hour to two of potential productive time to HN. And this is just a text site.
Social media is engineered to steal your attention and feed you junk, divisive information. Why on earth would we allow kids to become addicted to that?
No one will accept using their official electronic ID with Facebook etc
If that is how they implement it I expect a massive exodus from these platforms.
I think it's a jump to take that historic metric and expect the same results with ID verification...but we shall see.
I certainly don't know anyone in my peer group who would submit ID for account access. By the time the kids can finally sign up for there great shiny social media account with valid ID, hopefully something better has taken its place with roots pointing towards the old ways of the internet.
So, result is that people at best don't care. They see the whole fight as basically assholes vs assholes ... and tech is perceived as bigger assholes.
This could have easily been solved by parental controls and banning advertising towards children (or ban advertising all together for underage accounts, everywhere... by a new phone, set that it's a phone for an underage person, add a guardian who can unlock stuff if needed, and no ads anywhere are allowed).
But nope, instead we get face scans and digital IDs.
There are some people, many in uniform, who have already accepted the covenant that their actions are recorded and monitored each day. What do you have to hide? they ask rhetorically
Then the politics. Use the mass aggreavement, and accomplish the goals of the enforcement groups. Use the need to fix, to implement the rule, despite the protest and despite the civil liberties views. The politics needs the damage to push the unwanted changes. See also big business for a window into this.
Many parties have already heard (for thirty+ years?) that "freedom" builds a vigorous communications network. But now, this is different. These will be the rules (insert Law) and We will Enforce them (insert paid by taxes bureaucracies, and paid by penalties enforcements).
https://www.reuters.com/legal/government/australia-europe-co... (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48539393)
We mustn't forget that the Russians claimed that the internet was created by the CIA to attack Russia and steal its resources -- after a Russian clairvoyant told Vladimir Putin she read Madeleine Albright's mind and said that the US is plotting to weaken Russia and "steal its resources". We also must not forget that Russia is corrupt from top to bottom, and that Russian intelligence and organised crime have effectively merged into a lawless juggernaut that threatens the entire civilised world.
Today, Russian information-warfare specialists and gangsters have turned the Western information space into a free-fire zone. And there is literally NOTHING we can do about it, because weak minds and fifth-columnists on our side demand we unilaterally disarm and NOT enforce mandatory strong ID for activity on the internet.
It's time to see this aggression for what it is.
The real threat is homegrown authoritarian looters who would spend the whole treasury into their pockets if they could, while constantly tightening the screws on dissent to keep the grift going.
Fortunately you people are losing your grip on power. It won’t be long until you’re entirely evicted, fingers crossed. We’re reaching a societal breaking point and that should result in some kind of phase shift, for better or worse.
This argument simply doesn't work.
Today's rights will not matter tomorrow if the next generation is raised without any notion of privacy and ownership.
I also think your idea of rights may be skewed. It is your right to not give a name and address to a website. If a website requires it, then just skip it. If you cannot skip a website, then you've already lost your freedom.
The "rights" of my children to not be exploited by Zuckerberg and the rest of them are far more important as far as I'm concerned.
To counter the privacy nuts, no age gates and social media bans won't lead to a North Korean style government. If anything it is the antidote as children will have a chance to grow without being radicalised by the attention stealing algorithms. The Stasi in East Germany did rather well without internet age gates.
The only part the government needs to get involved in, is to ensure devices have a parental controls option that works. This may require including parental controls information in certain packets but provide no further restrictions once the client is known not to be using them.
Most child abductions and abuse[0] are from within the family or by people known to the child. Internet strangers are the absolute least of your worries.
[0] At least in the UK
The California law basically mandates devices (including Linux) to have a parental controls mode and mandates apps to obey them under penalty of law.
Frankly, this is nonsense. European countries like Germany or Switzerland of France find it completely normal for their kids to walk to school without parents (at 6 or even 5 years old) or to play outside without parents. That is responsible parenting and good for kids themselves.
The American idea that parents must not let kids out of their sight until they are 18 is absurd. And then again, even Americans complain about it, because it is nonsense to Americans too - it is just that rhetorical device to blame the victim rather then the perpetrator.
Serious topic, don't do that.
Protecting children is hard. Generations of parents have been put under loads of pointless stress so that they leave lots of education to "the system" and it's clerks, most of which were only good enough at their jobs. Things developed, and mistakes of deliberately mislead parents were conventionally framed as life and life's lessons.
We are talking about thousands of kids/adolescents raped every party weekend in US and Europe ( rape is jut one extreme example ).
The role of social media in the mere exposure effect to character types and behavioral patterns is obvious--and probably well studied--but "it's just social media - raise your kids well and stop blaming others" works about as well as outlining how certain pop segments were sabotaged for decades and couldn't even exert the free will to do things better/differently--even though they noticed the premises and conclusions of certain problems--because it went against the advice of figures who were perceived as authoritative.
It's silly to say "Get better at parenting", when parents who have no specialist training, are literally facing off against trillion-dollar companies with thousands of industrial psychologists and data scientists hell-bent on making their products as addictive and profitable as possible.
There are huge information- and power asymmetries at play here. Just shouting: "Parent your kids" better is simplistic, stupid and wrong IMHO.
The CEO of Roblox is probably the single easiest example to point at; when confronted about his platforms issues when it comes to enabling child abuse, the first response he had was to claim that child predators were an untapped market and then claim to be interested in adding a dating site feature to Roblox.
That's the kind of rethoric these bad laws are a response to, and is the elephant in the room that a lot of the tech industry fails to recognize. (Including the privacy advocates, for whom every nail looks like it has a hammer shaped solution.) Age verification isn't a good solution to this problem, but it at least forces the hands of these companies to address it if they don't want to face jailtime for knowingly abetting predators - they can't pretend to have clean hands anymore if they're mandated to verify user ages.
There's almost certainly better solutions, but that's also why attestation (where the source device transmits the user's age, rather than storing a ton of PII of them elsewhere) misses the mark. Attestation doesn't fix that problem.
It would be trivial to implement a challenge that would work like this: - the site requests you to sign a challenge
- you sign the challenge and provide it to third party verifier. (can be a gov site or a private company)
- service verifies your signature and gives you the copy of the challenge signed by itself only so your gov ID is never revealed.
- you supply the signed challenge to the original site. You prove you're an adult.
Being Polish and knowing our politics let me tell you how this will go down. The current gov is the one that will swallow everything that comes from the EU (because they are led by a guy that was the deputy leader of the biggest EU parliament party). Same guys that wasted billions trying to implement the e-prescription service that was implemented by the next gov in a fraction of time and cost.
In short they are horribly incompetent on tech so I expect the first version of this will be as bad as the crypto laws they proposed.
But thankfully the president is not from their camp and he will not sign any BS (if it starts looking like he might there will be mass protests - just look up the scale of protests last time they tried to censor the internet)
And then they will be forced to change it.
There is no technical reason why you should disclose your identity to proove you have one. That is the entire point of having those crypto identities. That you can manage how much information you provide.