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

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

#471
post #49
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…

I'm in favor of kids not using social media, but not of the government forcing this on people nor spinning up whatever absurd regulatory regime is required. And the chance of actually enforcing it is zero anyway. It's no more realistic to expect this to work than to expect all parents to do it as you say. It's just wasted money plus personal intrusion that won't achieve anything.

I'm in favor of kids not using social media, but not of the government forcing this on people nor spinning up whatever absurd regulatory regime is required.

People said the same thing about age restrictions for smoking, alcohol, movies, and on and on and on.

It's not some unsolvable new problem just because it's the ad-tech industry.

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

#472

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

There is no way my 94-year-old neighbor can successfully do any of that.

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

#473

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Let's suppose that 1 million new governments are founded, and violence still can be enforced only by the existing ones. The new governments will be in charge of ids, signatures, property ownership and reputation. Governments of Rust programmers, or Python programmers, or football players, or pool players, or truck drivers will be created.

When a citizen of Rust programmers social graph uploads code, he can prove his citizenship via his id. We may not even know his name, but he can prove his citizenship. He can sign his code via his signature, even pull request in other projects. He can prove his ownership of an IT company, as it's CEO, the stock shares and what not. And he will be tied to a reputation system, so when a supply attack happens, his reputation will be tainted. Other citizens of Rust's social graph, will be able to single out the id of the developer, and future code from him will be rejected, as well as code from non-citizens.

Speaking of supply chains, how about the king of supply chains of products and physical goods? By transferring products around, in a more trustworthy way, by random people tied to reputation, Amazon may get a little bit of competition ain't it?

see also an older comment of mine https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38800744

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

#474

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?

This is not a charitable reading. Nobody is asking for a perfect solution; it is reasonable to demonstrate some prior consideration for the ways in which most solutions are dangerously imperfect.

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

#475
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…

[flagged]

Government knows best when it comes to minors, right? And all of us need to have our government papers ready if we want to participate in the most important forum of communication of our time. Talk about power imbalance.

> who can’t even articulate the difference between man and woman

Can you articulate that difference? Personally, I'd expect a more complete definition from a kid today than I would from a conservative adult. For example, my dad might refer to DNA when explaining the difference between a man and a woman, and he would also confidently say he's a man (I mean, he is my dad), but since he's never had a DNA test, how can he be sure? It's obviously about more than DNA. My mom might say a woman is someone who can have children, but what about women who cannot have children, are they not women? Etc.

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

#476

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Finds out" is the operative part. COPPA is not a proactive requirement; it's a reactive one. Proactive legislation is a newer harm that can't easily be predicted based on past experiences with reactive laws.

Indeed, nothing is stopping said companies from scanning and assessing age of a user uploading selfies though. This is allegedly something that TikTok does. My point being, the framework is there, and then people actually report minors, the companies have to take it seriously, or face serious legal consequences.

How do you know the selfie is from the "primary" user? And how do you know they're underage, versus being a chubby-faced 18 year old (like yours truly was?)

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

#477
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 need not know what sites you visit. It is damaging enough that the government know that you are visiting sites that require an age verification. You can then be flagged for parallel construction if you should, I don't know, start a rival political party.

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

#478
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…

[flagged]

> who can’t even articulate the difference between man and woman

Ahh, you're one of those people. I now can just discount everything you said.

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

#479
post #431

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It would be neat if some authority like the passport office or social security office also provided a virtual ID that includes the features OP described and allowed specific individual attributes to be shared or not shared, revoked any time, much like when you authenticate a 3rd party app to gmail or etc.

These are the things that the post office should be handling.

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

#480

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A small transaction would cover 99% of cases (e.g., pay a dollar that's immediately refunded). It would stop kids from casually creating accounts. The kids who can do this are already precocious enough to bypass any other verification steps you could come up with. Maybe if they use a profile pic that you algorithmically determine is someone underage, you could do some additional checks. The smart ones would learn not…

You could even shave a fraction of a penny off with each transaction and they would never notice!

I understand the point you're trying to make with this (social media will definitely abuse the additional knowledge/opportunities they get by having compulsory credit card info), but chargebacks are actually a pretty effective incentive against this. Given that chargeback fees are ~$20-$100 per incidence, you'd only need 5% or less of users calling out the social media site's false charge for that company to be netting a loss.

I would relish the opportunity to cost Facebook $20 because they gave back a couple cents less than they should have.

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