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Australians to face age checks from search engines

ia.acs.org.au

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Re: Australians to face age checks from search engines

#71

Post by bigfatkitten »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #67
jackvalentine wrote: post #6

Australians are broadly supportive of these kind of actions - there is a view that foreign internet behemoths have failed to moderate for themselves and will therefore have moderation imposed on them however imperfect. Can’t say I blame them.

> there is a view that foreign internet behemoths have failed to moderate for themselves and will therefore have moderation imposed on them however imperfect. This view is manufactured. The premise is that better moderation is available and despite that, literally no one is choosing to do it. The fact is that moderation is hard and in particular excluding all actually bad things without also having a catastrophically…

> The premise is that better moderation is available and despite that, literally no one is choosing to do it.

It’s worse than that. Companies actively refuse to do anything about content that is reported to them directly, at least until the media kicks up a stink.

Nobody disputes that reliably detecting bad content is hard, but doing nothing about bad content you know about is inexcusable.

https://archive.is/8dq8q

Re: Australians to face age checks from search engines

#72

Post by tacticus »

hilbert42 wrote: post #13

A resident of said country here. Another questionable measure by Government to protect our mollycoddled, insufficiently-resilient society. That said, a better approach would be to limit kids under certain age from owning smartphones with full internet access. Instead, they could have a phone without internet access—dumb phones—or ones with curated/limited access. Personally, I'm not too worried about what risqué stuf…

> That said, a better approach would be to limit kids under certain age from owning smartphones with full internet access. Instead, they could have a phone without internet access—dumb phones—or ones with curated/limited access.

This wouldn't allow them to watch gambling ads or enjoy murdoch venues.

Re: Australians to face age checks from search engines

#73

Post by marcus_holmes »

defrost wrote: post #65
dfxm12 wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So some government officials were probably in the pocket of Halliburton (i.e., just like the US government) while selling a weak justification to the public. https://www.greenleft.org.au/content/halliburton-australia-p...

Such things play a part, of course, however at a nation level the first order consideration would have been ANZUS like defence agreements and a sense that ongoing regional support from the US rested on Australian support for the US, right or wrong. Been ongoing for a while now: https://roncobb.net/img/cartoons/aus/k5092-on-Tucker_Box-cuu...

This. Whether the USA had a mandate to go into Iraq wouldn't have been questioned. Australia jumped in because we always jumps in to whatever bullshit war the USA dreams up. For some reason we see it as an obligation to support our allies in all their wars, even when we think their reasons are ridiculous and even when we know they won't support us in return.

This has lead to serious problems in the case of the Afghan war, where it was clear that this whole conflict had nothing to do with Australia, could not even vaguely be construed as "defence", achieved nothing, cost Australian lives, and was a completely fabricated mess that we got into for really bad reasons (I paraphrase). The SAS war crimes thing was a symptom of our unease at our involvement (imho) - we would not normally question the things that soldiers do in conflict, this was more a way of questioning why we were in the conflict in the first place.

Re: Australians to face age checks from search engines

#74

Post by marcus_holmes »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #67
jackvalentine wrote: post #6

Australians are broadly supportive of these kind of actions - there is a view that foreign internet behemoths have failed to moderate for themselves and will therefore have moderation imposed on them however imperfect. Can’t say I blame them.

> there is a view that foreign internet behemoths have failed to moderate for themselves and will therefore have moderation imposed on them however imperfect. This view is manufactured. The premise is that better moderation is available and despite that, literally no one is choosing to do it. The fact is that moderation is hard and in particular excluding all actually bad things without also having a catastrophically…

This. This legislation has got nothing to do with moderation or "protecting children" - that's just the excuse that the government is using to push the legislation through. There are better ways of achieving that goal if that was the goal.

The actual goal is, as always, complete control over what Australians can see and do on the internet, and complete knowledge of what we see and do on the internet.

Re: Australians to face age checks from search engines

#75

Post by marcus_holmes »

m3sta wrote: post #64
marcus_holmes wrote: post #24

2025: if you're logged in, then we check your age to see if you can do or see some stuff 2027: the companies providing the logins must provide government with the identities 2028: because VPNs are being used to circumvent the law, if the logging entity knows you're an Australian citizen, even if you're not in Australia or using an Aussie IP address then they must still apply the law 2030: you must be logged in to vis…

Australian politicians, police, and a specific chunk of the population would be exempt from this... like with privacy laws.

indeed. Rules for thee but not for me.

Re: Australians to face age checks from search engines

#76

Post by frollogaston »

bamboozled wrote: post #40
hilbert42 wrote: post #13

A resident of said country here. Another questionable measure by Government to protect our mollycoddled, insufficiently-resilient society. That said, a better approach would be to limit kids under certain age from owning smartphones with full internet access. Instead, they could have a phone without internet access—dumb phones—or ones with curated/limited access. Personally, I'm not too worried about what risqué stuf…

[flagged]

or just don't get them smartphones

Re: Australians to face age checks from search engines

#77

Post by AnthonyMouse »

bigfatkitten wrote: post #71
AnthonyMouse wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> there is a view that foreign internet behemoths have failed to moderate for themselves and will therefore have moderation imposed on them however imperfect. This view is manufactured. The premise is that better moderation is available and despite that, literally no one is choosing to do it. The fact is that moderation is hard and in particular excluding all actually bad things without also having a catastrophically…

> The premise is that better moderation is available and despite that, literally no one is choosing to do it. It’s worse than that. Companies actively refuse to do anything about content that is reported to them directly, at least until the media kicks up a stink. Nobody disputes that reliably detecting bad content is hard, but doing nothing about bad content you know about is inexcusable. https://archive.is/8dq8q

Your link says the opposite of what you claim:

> Meta said it has in the past two years taken down 27 pedophile networks and is planning more removals.

Moreover, the rest of the article is describing the difficulty in doing moderation. If you make a general purpose algorithm that links up people with similar interests and then there is a group of people with an interest in child abuse, the algorithm doesn't inherently know that and if you push on it to try to make it do something different in that case than it does in the general case, the people you're trying to thwart will actively take countermeasures like using different keywords or using coded language.

Meanwhile user reporting features are also full of false positives or corporate and political operatives trying to have legitimate content removed, so expecting them to both immediately and perfectly respond to every report is unreasonable.

Pretending that this is easy to solve is the thing authoritarians do to justify steamrolling innocent people because nobody can fully eliminate the problem nobody has any good way to fully eliminate.

Re: Australians to face age checks from search engines

#78

Post by frollogaston »

Sevrene wrote: post #25

I’m an Australian who values privacy and civil liberties more than most I meet. While I yearn for the more authentic and sincere days of the internet I grew up on, I recognize very quickly by visiting x or facebook how much it isn’t that, and hasn’t been for a long time. I think this bill is a good thing and I support it.

The AI-based version of this looks fine, the ID checks are odd though

Re: Australians to face age checks from search engines

#79

Post by Ycros »

incompatible wrote: post #27

Do they realise that some of us may be using computers that don't even have a camera, and open source software that could in theory upload any image we like?

It uses a video feed and asks you to look in certain directions. At least the one instance I've encountered did.
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