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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

#481

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

I've been thinking a lot lately about decentralized moderation. All we need to do is replace the word "moderate" with "curate". Everything else is an attestation. We don't really need a blockchain, either. Attestations can be asserted by a web of trust. Simply choose a curator (or collection of curators) to trust, and you're done.

Yeah, blockchain is not needed at all. A computer savvy sheriff might do it, an official person of some kind. Or even private companies, see also "Fido alliance".

Additionally the map of governments which accept Esthonian passport might be of some relevancy here[1].

[1] https://passports.io/programs/EE1

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

#482

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 suggest looking up zero-knowledge proofs. Sure, but is the Florida legislature actually looking into stuff like this?

Why would they, when it is not in the governments interest?

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

#483

I remember when I was 10 years old at a computer camp during the summer at a local college. They had me set up my first email account with hotmail. They all asked us to lie about our age. I think even then they had restrictions that you had to be 13 years old. But - that was over 25 years ago. The internet was a much different place.

Fast forward to today. Ours came home with a google account in the 5th grade I think. Something I explicitly did not want. They didn't send a permission slip home like they do for everything else either.

Another teacher around the time had the kids set up on GoodReads. They were under 13 and there was a TOS at the time restricted to 13+. Mostly adults on that site.

Not happy with the school to say the least.

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

#484

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That's the protocol for the computer, similar to oauth. From the user perspective, your 94-year-old neighbor would have an account with id.gov that they've somehow previously established (potentially the DMV or the post office does this for them), and the user flow works much like "Sign in with Google" buttons do today.

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

#485

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…

If you can make active queries to the verifier, so can any adversarial party. These kinds of ZK-with-oracle schemes need to be very carefully gamed to ensure they're truly ZK, and not just "you learn nothing if you only query once."

> and the service would become suspicious if it saw lots of users verifying from the same IP address

This implodes under CGNAT, cafe internet, hotel internet, etc.

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

#486

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Government is not the correct word to use for this idea.

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

#487

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why does 16 seem ridiculously old?

Because 15 year-olds are the prime audience for a lot of social media. And while much of it is a waste of time at best or actively harmful at worst, a lot of it is also engaging or even educational content that high school students should be allowed to access. And will access regardless; it'll just be a hassle for them or their parents to have to jump through hoops to get to it.

> or their parents

There doesn't appear to be a parental approval exception, it's just a straight ban.

So kids will apparently be responsible enough to drive a car but not make a Facebook account.

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

#488
Everyone here seems to be forgetting the root of this problem:

Algorithms that select content (including ads) need to be treated as publishers rather than platforms.

"facebook.com/users/my_friend/posts_in_cronological_order" is a platform

"facebook.com/my_feed" is a publisher

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

#489

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> as a society we've made the dangers of alcohol and similar things so well understood that no parent wants to. Unfortunately, as a society, we have a much harder time grasping social media threat data. I suppose some of that is due to how news orgs consistently+bizarrely+hugely overstating the actual harms in the data. https://www.techdirt.com/2024/01/08/leading-save-the-kids-ad...

Oh totally! What I'm saying is that laws like this, even when not enforceable per se, can help move society towards that understanding.

[deleted]

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

#490
post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Your comment begs the question of whether or not those age restrictions are a "solved problem." In the US, government age restrictions on movies DO NOT exist for the exact reason the government cannot impose age restrictions on social media: the First Amendment flatly forbids it.
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