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So, you’ve hit an age gate. What now?

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Re: So, you’ve hit an age gate. What now?

#231

Post by ryandrake »

Aurornis wrote: post #228
ryandrake wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The fundamental question that needs answering is: should we actually prevent minors below the age of X from accessing social media site Y? This is only an interesting question if we can prevent it. We couldn't prevent minors from smoking, and that was in a world where you had to physically walk into a store to buy cigarettes. The internet is even more anonymous, remote-controlled, and wild-west. What makes us think…

> We couldn't prevent minors from smoking, Smoking rates among minors have plummeted and continue to decline. That's not really a good example because the war on underage smoking has been a resounding success. Yeah we didn't stop every single minor everywhere from ever smoking at any time, but the decline was dramatic.

I'd argue that the reduction of underage smoking has much more to do with things like social acceptability and education about the dangers of smoking, and not about physical controls on the distribution of and access to cigarettes. There also appears to be a recent trend of younger people not drinking alcohol to the extent that my generation and Boomers did, which is wonderful, but probably has nothing to do with physical access to beer.

This is the right way to reduce childhood social media use: Make it socially disgusting, and make it widely known to be dangerous.

Re: So, you’ve hit an age gate. What now?

#232

Post by ryandrake »

doctorpangloss wrote: post #184
ryandrake wrote: post #27

My kid has recently just quit playing Roblox because of the sketchy facial age check process. She said that her and all her friends know not to ever upload a picture of themselves to the Internet (good job, fellow Other Parents!!) so they're either moving on to other games or just downloading stock photos of people from the internet and uploading those (which apparently works). What a total joke. These companies need…

> She said that her and all her friends know not to ever upload a picture of themselves to the Internet (good job, fellow Other Parents!!) it's a video game, it's an aesthetic experience, if uploading a photo of yourself doesn't feel good, it's valid to say, it's a bad game or whatever. but by some more objective criteria, this photo upload thing that you are saying doesn't really matter. they are uploading photos of…

> they are uploading photos of themselves to the Internet all the time

I worried about this at first, too. But I also check, like a good parent. And to my surprise my kid already learned on her own how to mask/blur faces and even details about the inside of her room when sharing photos. And her friends do, too. They are surprisingly savvy about Internet privacy and risks for their age--certainly more cognizant of the dangers than my generation was growing up with the Wild West Internet.

Re: So, you’ve hit an age gate. What now?

#233

Post by jeroenhd »

WhyNotHugo wrote: post #215
ryandrake wrote: post #27

My kid has recently just quit playing Roblox because of the sketchy facial age check process. She said that her and all her friends know not to ever upload a picture of themselves to the Internet (good job, fellow Other Parents!!) so they're either moving on to other games or just downloading stock photos of people from the internet and uploading those (which apparently works). What a total joke. These companies need…

> These companies need to stop normalizing the sharing of personal private photos. It's literally the opposite direction from good Internet hygiene, especially for kids! While I agree with you entirely, it's important to remember that these companies want to mis-educate the masses (and especially children) against their own interest. It's not just unfortunate that they're normalising uploading a photo just to play a…

Most of these companies don't even want to add age gates. They get in the way of their normal predatory marketing schemes, the little bits of extra data isn't worth it.

Stupid laws are forcing these companies to implement something. In most countries, there is no privacy-preserving way to verify that you're old enough digitally, so when these companies are forced to get something good enough going, they're going to go with the cheapest offer they can legally get away with.

Governments know this. They want certain websites to disappear entirely, and for certain platforms to just stop existing. Both sides are using weaponised incompetence to blame the other and users end up losing regardless of whose fault it is.

Re: So, you’ve hit an age gate. What now?

#234

Post by jeroenhd »

cons0le wrote: post #6

>If Google can guess your age, you may never even see an age verification screen. Your Google account is typically connected to your YouTube account, so if (like mine) your YouTube account is old enough to vote, you may not need to verify your Google account at all. This has been proven false a bunch of times, at least if the 1000s of people complaining online about it are to be believed. My google account is definit…

I believe YouTube got hit with some EU compliance law at some point. My Google account was old enough to vote but I still had to verify it to watch certain YouTube videos. They put a one cent reservation on my credit card IIRC, no need to actually upload ID.

It happened right after ElsaGate, so they probably went overboard to cover for the weird shit happening on their platform. YouTube is full of pedo farms and weird porn if you know where to look for it, so they need something to point at so they can shout "look, we tried!"

Re: So, you’ve hit an age gate. What now?

#235

Post by 972811 »

einpoklum wrote: post #224
blacksmith_tb wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree they want the face data, but I think it's less clear they want to "hand it" (presumably that's really "sell it"?) to third parties. My sense is Google and Apple and Meta are amassing data for their own uses, but I haven't gotten the impression they're very interested in sharing it?

Then you have not been paying attention for the past decade, I'm afraid... Ed Snowden revealed that these companies share their data with the US government: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jun/06/us-tech-giants... also, even you think about using it "their own uses" - much of that is scrutinizing you to make you better susceptible to ads and other solicitations by their paying clients. I mean, people are not t…

your links don't disprove OP's main point at all. being forced to share data to the government is different than actively collecting data to sell to other third parties. these companies have tons of incentive to collect user data, but very little to sell it. i think that nuance is important to understand. if you think i'm wrong, try going to facebook or google and asking to buy some user data. you cannot.

Re: So, you’ve hit an age gate. What now?

#237

Post by layer8 »

seb1204 wrote: post #226
layer8 wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Many people don’t struggle to let privacy go.

I get the impression that you purposely misunderstood. Parent suggested to evaluate if you can let go of the anti-privacy service. E.g. stop using YouTube not the way you worded it.

My point is that it’s not about the inability to “simply” let things go in general, as the wording suggests throughout the comment. That’s too simplistic. It matters which things we are talking about, or in other words, which things people care more about.

I’m not advocating letting go of privacy, just addressing the reality of how people make choices.

Re: So, you’ve hit an age gate. What now?

#238

Post by stickfigure »

Aurornis wrote: post #228
ryandrake wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The fundamental question that needs answering is: should we actually prevent minors below the age of X from accessing social media site Y? This is only an interesting question if we can prevent it. We couldn't prevent minors from smoking, and that was in a world where you had to physically walk into a store to buy cigarettes. The internet is even more anonymous, remote-controlled, and wild-west. What makes us think…

> We couldn't prevent minors from smoking, Smoking rates among minors have plummeted and continue to decline. That's not really a good example because the war on underage smoking has been a resounding success. Yeah we didn't stop every single minor everywhere from ever smoking at any time, but the decline was dramatic.

Have you met a horny teenager? The war on porn will not be a resounding success.

Re: So, you’ve hit an age gate. What now?

#239

Post by dlcarrier »

btown wrote: post #61
ryandrake wrote: post #27

My kid has recently just quit playing Roblox because of the sketchy facial age check process. She said that her and all her friends know not to ever upload a picture of themselves to the Internet (good job, fellow Other Parents!!) so they're either moving on to other games or just downloading stock photos of people from the internet and uploading those (which apparently works). What a total joke. These companies need…

One aspect of this normalization of photo uploading is that, if a platform allows user-generated content that can splash a modal to kids, a bad actor can do things like say “you need to re-verify or you’ll lose all your in-game currency, go here” and then collect photo identification without even needing to compromise identity verification providers! I truly fear the harm that will be done before legislators realize…

Every once in a while, eBay emails me out of the blue and asks me to update my personal details, with a link to a web page.

I always assumed they were phishing scams, but I looked closer at one, and it is a real link too a real page on their site. It's like they're training people to fall for phishing scams. One of them even displayed the name of a variable, instead of my user name.

Re: So, you’ve hit an age gate. What now?

#240

Post by derektank »

drnick1 wrote: post #118

If this is about porn or other content deemed age-sensitive, the moment it becomes difficult to source through "official," mainstream platforms, the content will move underground (P2P networks), making it even more difficult to analyze and regulate. So this is a very shortsighted move.

To be fair, this is sort of pitting two policy objectives against each other, preventing children from accessing pornography meant for adults on one hand and preventing the distribution of pornography illegal in all cases (e.g. revenge porn, CSAM) on the other. Reasonable people can disagree on which is more important and which should take priority (though I would agree that the latter should take priority)
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