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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

#131

Post by AnthonyMouse »

riffraff wrote: post #121
AnthonyMouse wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

But this goes back to the original argument: maybe if you can't avoid causing harm then you shouldn't be allowed to operate? E.g. if you produce eggs and you can't avoid salmonella at some point your operation should be shut down. Facebook and its ilk have massive profits, they can afford more moderators.

> But this goes back to the original argument: maybe if you can't avoid causing harm then you shouldn't be allowed to operate?

By this principle the government can't operate the criminal justice system anymore because it has too many false positives and uncaptured negative externalities and then you don't have anything to use to tell Facebook to censor things.

> Facebook and its ilk have massive profits, they can afford more moderators.

They have large absolute profits because of the large number of users but the profit per user is in the neighborhood of $1/month. How much human moderation do you think you can get for that?

Re: Australians to face age checks from search engines

#132

Post by AnthonyMouse »

jackvalentine wrote: post #130
AnthonyMouse wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The trouble with that theory is that tech megacorps are a relatively recent development, whereas e.g. the court cases involving Larry Flynt were events from the 1970s and 80s and the likes of Hustler Magazine hardly had an outsized influence over the general media. Meanwhile morals panics are at least as old as the Salem Witch Trials.

Megacorps, simultaniously impotent and trillion dollar companies.

The US government has a multi-trillion dollar annual budget -- they spend more money every year than the entire market cap of any given megacorp -- and they can't solve it either. Maybe it's a hard problem?

Re: Australians to face age checks from search engines

#134

Post by Nasrudith »

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.

Are you sure you value privacy and civil liberties then if you fall for "Think of the Children" bollocks instead of wanting to throw politicians down wells to protect children from living in a dystopia?

Re: Australians to face age checks from search engines

#135

Post by SlowTao »

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…

> Thinking back to my teenage years I'm almost certain I would have been tempted to waste too much time online when it would have been better for me to be doing homework or playing sport.

That is true. I spent my time coding a 2D game engine on an 486, it eventually went nowhere, but it was still cool to do. But if I had the internet then, all that energy would have been put into pointless internet stuff.

Re: Australians to face age checks from search engines

#136

Post by SlowTao »

naruhodo wrote: post #86
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…

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 cannot find it any more due to the degradation of Google but there was a report on the amount of times this data was access in NSW for 2018 (?). It was something like 280,000 requests for that year alone!

Re: Australians to face age checks from search engines

#137

Post by Nasrudith »

jp0d wrote: post #29
OhioMan2943 wrote: post #10

As an australian citizen i'm all for it. Look at how the internet and social media has destroyed our current youth and their naivety and sense of emotional security. They all act like they're living in soviet russia at this point and have become so hard and jaded. Better I give a little bit of pii than some kid grows up too early. Would you be able to tell the difference if this policy came from a place of compassion…

As an Australian citizen I'm not fully in favour of this. But I think I agree that we need some protection from companies like Meta/Google etc influencing our youth based on the American political "situation".

So do you keep hemlock on hand just in case Socrates resurrects, too if you are that paralyzed of the youth being influenced by outside opinions?

Re: Australians to face age checks from search engines

#138

Post by Tade0 »

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…

My take is just like we have allowance to introduce children to the concept of money, parents could use data allowance to introduce children to the concept of the internet.

The worst content out there is typically data-heavy, the best - not necessarily, as it can well be text in most cases.

Re: Australians to face age checks from search engines

#139

Post by AnthonyMouse »

Nursie wrote: post #125
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 fact is that moderation is hard Moderation is hard when you prioritise growth and ad revenue over moderation, certainly. We know a good solution - throw a lot of manpower at it. That may not be feasible for the giant platforms... Oh no.

This is the weirdest theory. The premise is that you admit the huge corporations with billions of dollars don't have the resources to pay moderators to contend with the professional-grade malicious content by profitable criminal syndicates, but some tiny forum is supposed to be able to get it perfect so they don't go to jail?

Re: Australians to face age checks from search engines

#140

Post by Cartoxy »

Aims to protect kids online, but it could easily go too far. It covers way more than just search engines—pretty much anything that returns info, including AI tools.

It pushes for heavy content filtering, age checks, and algorithm tweaks to hide certain results. That means more data tracking and less control over what users see. Plus, regulators can order stuff to be removed from search results, which edges into censorship. Sets the stage for broader control, surveillance, and over-moderation. slowburn additions all stack up. digital ID ,NBN monopoly ISP locked DNS servers . TR-069 etc etc. Hidden VOIP credentials. Australia is like the west's testing ground this kind of policy it seams.

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