Florida House of Representatives approves bill to ban social media for kids

Re: Florida House of Representatives approves bill to ban social media for kids < 16

#441

Post by paulryanrogers » Mon, Jan 29, 2024, 10:04 PM UTC

emporas wrote: post #347

jlokier wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But the only way to do this is to require ID checks, effectively regulating and destroying the anonymous nature of the internet That seems intuitive, but it's not actually true. I suggest looking up zero-knowledge proofs. Using modern cryptography, it is easy to send a machine-generated proof to your social media provider that your government-provided ID says your age is ≥ 16, without revealing anything else about…

Definitely, we can use a government issued id, or we can create our own. Social graphs i call em. Zero knowledge proofs have so many ground breaking applications. I have made a comment in the past, relevant to how could a social graph be build, without the need of any government [1]. We can create effectively one million new governments to compete with existing ones. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36421679

Governments monopolize violence. At least at the foundational level. When too many of them compete at once it can get very messy very quickly.

Re: Florida House of Representatives approves bill to ban social media for kids < 16

#442

Post by netsharc » Mon, Jan 29, 2024, 10:05 PM UTC

mrangle wrote: post #305

nerdjon wrote: post #266

I feel like I can almost guarantee that this bill has nothing to do with protecting children and has more to do with brainwashing children and restricting their access to opposing viewpoints, especially given this is Florida. That being said, I am not strictly opposed to a bill like this. But 16 is way too old. I feel like likely somewhere within the 10 to 13 range since most don't allow for under 13 anyways would be…

Restricting social media use is tantamount to brainwashing? I don't see the connection. As for restricting access to "opposing" (opposition to what?) viewpoints, what children can be exposed to has long been restricted. But since there isn't a syllabus for what children will be presented on social media, I don't see the viewpoint restriction angle either. In fact, that position is illogical to the point that it raise…

How TikTok users trolled the Trump campaign: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/trump-rally-tiktok-crowds-tulsa...

Well, true, TikTok probably has more negatives than positives, but I have a feeling the American Talibans[1] in power don't like teens organizing, and where do they organize? On social media...

[1] Yes this is an apt comparison. Suppression of opposing viewpoints, growing voter suppression and not even accepting results of democratic elections, and then the whole anti-Abortion movement.

Re: Florida House of Representatives approves bill to ban social media for kids < 16

#443

Post by thomastjeffery » Mon, Jan 29, 2024, 10:06 PM UTC

jlokier wrote: post #249

lukev wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But the only way to do this is to require ID checks, effectively regulating and destroying the anonymous nature of the internet (and probably unconstitutional under the First Amendment, to boot.) It's the same problem with requiring age verification for porn. It's not that anyone wants kids to have easy access to this stuff, but that any of these laws will either be (a) unenforceable and useless, or (b) draconian and…

> But the only way to do this is to require ID checks, effectively regulating and destroying the anonymous nature of the internet That seems intuitive, but it's not actually true. I suggest looking up zero-knowledge proofs. Using modern cryptography, it is easy to send a machine-generated proof to your social media provider that your government-provided ID says your age is ≥ 16, without revealing anything else about…

You can send a proof that someone's government-provided ID says that their age is ≥ 16.

That's not enough proof to levy a requirement.

Re: Florida House of Representatives approves bill to ban social media for kids < 16

#444

Post by Aurornis » Mon, Jan 29, 2024, 10:09 PM UTC

jlokier wrote: post #249

lukev wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But the only way to do this is to require ID checks, effectively regulating and destroying the anonymous nature of the internet (and probably unconstitutional under the First Amendment, to boot.) It's the same problem with requiring age verification for porn. It's not that anyone wants kids to have easy access to this stuff, but that any of these laws will either be (a) unenforceable and useless, or (b) draconian and…

> But the only way to do this is to require ID checks, effectively regulating and destroying the anonymous nature of the internet That seems intuitive, but it's not actually true. I suggest looking up zero-knowledge proofs. Using modern cryptography, it is easy to send a machine-generated proof to your social media provider that your government-provided ID says your age is ≥ 16, without revealing anything else about…

> The government doesn't learn which web sites you visit, and the web sites don't learn anything about you other than you are certified to be age ≥ 16.

If the zero-knowledge proof doesn't communicate anything other than the result of an age check, then the trivial exploit is for 1 person to upload an ID to the internet and every kid everywhere to use it.

It's not sufficient to check if someone has access to an ID where the age is over a threshold. Implementing a 1:1 linkage of real world ID to social media account closes the loophole where people borrow, steal, or duplicate IDs to bypass the check.

Re: Florida House of Representatives approves bill to ban social media for kids < 16

#445

Post by jf22 » Mon, Jan 29, 2024, 10:10 PM UTC

lukev wrote: post #270

einpoklum wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> destroying the anonymous nature of the internet Aren't the really problematic social networks the ones where you've lost your privacy and anonymity long ago and are being tracked and mined like crazy?

That's like saying "80% of the internet has gone to shit, might as well destroy the remaining good 20%".

I don't think it's like saying that at all.

Re: Florida House of Representatives approves bill to ban social media for kids < 16

#446

Post by basil-rash » Mon, Jan 29, 2024, 10:11 PM UTC

JeremyNT wrote: post #231

lukev wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But the only way to do this is to require ID checks, effectively regulating and destroying the anonymous nature of the internet (and probably unconstitutional under the First Amendment, to boot.) It's the same problem with requiring age verification for porn. It's not that anyone wants kids to have easy access to this stuff, but that any of these laws will either be (a) unenforceable and useless, or (b) draconian and…

Yes, this isn't the right solution. The power needs to be given to the users. A better solution is more robust device management, with control given to the device owner (read: the parent). The missing legislative piece is mandating that social media companies need to respond differently when the user agent tells them what to send. I should be able to take my daughter's phone (which I own), set an option somewhere tha…

Already exists, simply include the header

Rating: RTA-5042-1996-1400-1577-RTA

in HTTP responses that include adult content, and every parental controls software in existence will block it by default, including the ones built into iPhones/etc and embedded webviews. As far as I know all mainstream adult sites include this (or the equivalent meta tag) already.

In general, I don’t think communicating to every site you visit that you are a minor and asking them to do what they will with that information is a good idea. Better to filter on the user’s end.

Re: Florida House of Representatives approves bill to ban social media for kids < 16

#447

Post by onion2k » Mon, Jan 29, 2024, 10:12 PM UTC

lukev wrote: post #210

causal wrote: post #36

I might be the only one here in favor of this, and wanting to see a federal rollout. It is not reasonable to expect parents to spontaneously agree on a strategy for keeping kids off social media- and that kind of coordination is what it would take, because the kids + social media companies have more than enough time to coordinate workarounds. Have the law put the social media companies on the parents side, or these k…

But the only way to do this is to require ID checks, effectively regulating and destroying the anonymous nature of the internet (and probably unconstitutional under the First Amendment, to boot.) It's the same problem with requiring age verification for porn. It's not that anyone wants kids to have easy access to this stuff, but that any of these laws will either be (a) unenforceable and useless, or (b) draconian and…

effectively regulating and destroying the anonymous nature of the internet

Social media is on the internet. It is not the internet.

Re: Florida House of Representatives approves bill to ban social media for kids < 16

#448

Post by lazyasciiart » Mon, Jan 29, 2024, 10:12 PM UTC

thinkingtoilet wrote: post #358

woodruffw wrote: post #330

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think your comment would be much stronger if you laid out precisely what you think that line would be. Laws do not have to be perfect to be good, but they do have to be workable. It's not clear that there's a working definition of "social media" that includes both TikTok and Reddit but doesn't include random forums.

So if a random person on the internet doesn't have a perfect solution then it shouldn't be considered?

Their opinion that it would be straightforward shouldn’t be considered.

Re: Florida House of Representatives approves bill to ban social media for kids < 16

#449

Post by diputsmonro » Mon, Jan 29, 2024, 10:13 PM UTC

dylan604 wrote: post #439

diputsmonro wrote: post #434

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is talking to other people online really so bad that we need the government to step in and tell us who we can and can't talk to? How quickly will that power expand to what we can and can't talk about? I agree that neither solution is perfect, but exchanging an imperfect but undoubtedly free system of communication for one that is explicitly state-controlled censorship is an obvious step backwards. "Thinking about the…

I think you are willingly playing this down as "talking to people online" to make some point. However, it is beyond what one kid online says to another online. It is what predators say to those kids online. I don't just mean Chester and his panel van. I'm talking about anyone that is attempting to manipulate that kid regardless of the motive, they are all predators. Social media has long since past just being a means…

I think people are being incredibly disingenuous when they imagine that the government won't abuse this power to censor and harm marginalized communities. Many states are trying to remove LGBT books from school libraries for being "pornographic" right now, for example. All it takes is some fancy interpretations of "safety" and "social media" for it to become a full internet blackout, for fear of "the liberals" trying to "trans" their kids.

I don't deny that kids can get into trouble and find shocking or dangerous things online. But kids can also get in trouble walking down the street. We should not close streets or require ID checks for walking down them. Parents should teach their kids how to be safe online, set up network blocks for particularly bad sites, and have some kind of oversight for what their kids are doing.

Maybe these bills should mandate that sites have the ability to create "kid" accounts whose history can be checked and access to certain features can be managed by an associated "parent" account. Give parents better tools for keeping their kids safe, don't just give the government control over all internet traffic.

Re: Florida House of Representatives approves bill to ban social media for kids < 16

#450

Post by ndriscoll » Mon, Jan 29, 2024, 10:14 PM UTC

satellite2 wrote: post #420

jlokier wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But the only way to do this is to require ID checks, effectively regulating and destroying the anonymous nature of the internet That seems intuitive, but it's not actually true. I suggest looking up zero-knowledge proofs. Using modern cryptography, it is easy to send a machine-generated proof to your social media provider that your government-provided ID says your age is ≥ 16, without revealing anything else about…

I'm not a cryptographer so I might miss something but I have the impression that - either a stolen card can be reused thousands of time meaning that it's so easy to get a fake that it's not worth the implementation cost - either there is away to uniquely identify a card and then it becomes another identifier like tracking ids.

Assuming you can make active queries to the verifier, you could do something like

- Have your backend generate a temporary AES key, and create a request to the verifier saying "please encrypt a response using AES key A indicating that the user coming from ip X.Y.Z.W is over 16". Encrypt it with a known public key for the verifier. Save the temporary AES key to the user's session store.

- Hand that request to the user, who hands it to the verifier. The verifier authenticates the user and gives them the encrypted okay response.

- User gives the response back to your backend.

Potentially the user could still get someone to auth for them, but it'd at least have to be coming from the same IP address that the user tried to use to log into the service. The verifier could become suspicious if it sees lots of requests for the same user coming from different IP addresses, and the service would become suspicious if it saw lots of users verifying from the same IP address, so reselling wouldn't work. You could still find an over-16 friend and have them authenticate you without raising suspicions though, much like you can find an over-21 friend to buy you beer and cigarettes.

Since you use a different key with each user request, the verifier can't identify the requesting service. Both the service and the verifier know the user's IP, so that's not sensitive. If you used this scheme for over-16 vs. over-18 vs. over-21 services, the verifier does learn what level of service you are trying to access (i.e. are you buying alcohol, looking at porn, or signing up for social media). Harmonizing all age-restricted vices to a single age of majority can mitigate that. Or, you could choose to reveal the age bucket to the service instead of the verifier by having the verifier always send back the maximum bucket you qualify for instead of the service asking whether the user is in a specific bucket.