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Australians to face age checks from search engines

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Re: Australians to face age checks from search engines

#101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Slippery slope is only a fallacy when there is no reason to believe the end state is likely or desired. It seems quite likely that governments want to continuously chip away at privacy.

Slippery slope is specifically about opening the gates to further slipping. This clearly isn't the case since there is going to be slipping regardless of this specific instance going through all the way or not.

> It's wrong to call this a slippery slope because we're not at the top but instead already well on our way down a slope that is indeed slippery.

Not a convincing take.

Re: Australians to face age checks from search engines

#102

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.

Oh, the cynicism of some people. :-)

Yes, that empire exported itself to where it would have the greatest effect—cause the most damage.

Re: Australians to face age checks from search engines

#103
post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

or just don't get them smartphones

Misinformation and propaganda are not only on smartphones.

Still those do make it awfully easy to subscribe to notifications that actively push all sorts of problematic things onto you at an alarming rate. A high rate of exposure to something can lead to problems where there otherwise wouldn't be any.

Re: Australians to face age checks from search engines

#104

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…

If only there was a name for this fallacy. Something slope something

more like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incrementalism

Re: Australians to face age checks from search engines

#105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Your link says the opposite of what you claim I don’t know where you got that from. Meta’s self-congratulatory takedown of “27 pedophile networks” is a drop in the ocean. Here’s a fairly typical example of them actively deciding to do nothing in response to a report. This mirrors my own experience. > Like other platforms, Instagram says it enlists its users to help detect accounts that are breaking rules. But those…

Your claim was that they "actively refuse" to do anything about it, but they clearly do actually take measures. As mentioned, the issue is that they get zillions of reports and vast numbers of them are organized scammers trying to get them to take down legitimate content. Then you report something real and it gets lost in an sea of fake reports. What are they supposed to do about that? It takes far fewer resources to…

Active refusal can (and commonly does) take the form of intentionally being unable to respond or merely putting on such an appearance. One of the curious things about Twitter pre-aquisition was that underage content somewhat frequently stayed up for months while discriminatory remarks were generally taken down rapidly. Post acquisition such content seemed to disappear approximately overnight.

If the system is pathologically unable to deal with false reports to the extent that moderation has effectively ground to a standstill perhaps the regulator ought to get involved at that point and force the company to either change its ways or go out of business trying?

Re: Australians to face age checks from search engines

#106
It's interesting how all countries work in tandem implementing these measures. UK, EU, some US States and now Australia all require or will soon require age verification under certain conditions.

It seems like it would make more sense to implement it at the browser level. Let the website return a header (ala RTA) or trigger some JavaScript API o indicate that the browser should block the tab until the user verifies their age.

Re: Australians to face age checks from search engines

#107
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.

Evidently the bar for valuing such things is set very low in Australia.

Re: Australians to face age checks from search engines

#108

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]

> it would suck for the ruling class though because we'd have to stop feeding kids religion

This seems out of place and unrelated. If anything Gen Z and presumable Alpha, eventually, are more religious than their parents.

Re: Australians to face age checks from search engines

#109

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…

Mate... > 2038: all visits to all sites will be recorded That's been the case since 2015. ISPs are required to record customer ID, record date, time and IP address and retain it for two years to be accessed by government agencies. It was meant to be gated by warrants, but a bunch of non-law-enforcement entities applied for warrantless access, including local councils, the RSPCA (animal protection charity), and fuckin…

I didn't know that. Thanks

Re: Australians to face age checks from search engines

#110

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.

I'm split on it. 100% agree that kids being off social media is better for society. But I can't see how it could be enforced without privacy implications for adults.

Perhaps enforcement at the user end isn't what's needed. A perfect solution is likewise probably unnecessary.

As but one possible example. Common infrastructure to handle whitelisting would probably go a long way here. Just being able to tag a phone, for example, as being possessed by a minor would enable all sorts of voluntary filtering with only minimal cooperation required.

Many sites already have "are you 18 or older" type banners on entry. Imagine if those same sites attached a plaintext flag to all of their traffic so the ISP, home firewall, school firewall, or anyone else would then know to filter that stream for certain (tagged) accounts.

I doubt that's the best way to go about it but there's so much focus on other solutions that are more cumbersome and invasive so I thought it would be interesting to write out the hypothetical.

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