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Meta Platforms: Lobbying, dark money, and the App Store Accountability Act

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Re: Meta Platforms: Lobbying, dark money, and the App Store Accountability Act

#711

Post by Barbing »

armchairhacker wrote: post #547

Apparently most of the “original” report was done by Claude ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47366804 ). And now paraphrased on various ad-space (and in this case affiliate link) sellers, probably also by Claude. Claude is the only real journalist here. Personally I’d rather not see reposts of posts this recent, especially LLM posts.

I came to the comments dissatisfied with the writing.

Or maybe more specifically the structure, idk not much of a writer, but many of the sentences are solid journalist quality yet the right background is not being set nor the right transitions being given etc.

My dissatisfaction mode used to be boring high school newspaper sentences but the kids still seem to _assemble_ the details a tiny bit better.

Re: Meta Platforms: Lobbying, dark money, and the App Store Accountability Act

#712

Post by grandpoobah »

827a wrote: post #429
pwg wrote: post #406

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'm not sure I fully grok the hypothesis that Meta is materially advantaged by pushing for OS-level age verification. These laws, that attempt to move "age verification" into the OS, 100% absolve Meta (and all the Meta owned "properties") from any legal liability so long as all of Meta's app's follow the law's required "ask the OS for the age signal of the user". Any "bad stuff" which then gets shown to "underage u…

My point is that they already know how old you are, within some confidence interval, even if you never tell them or you lie to them, because they actively watch what you do and classify your behaviors with your age cohort. So why do they care so much that they gain another signal that only says "the user is over 18" rather than a much more valuable signal like "the user is 36 and lives in Albany" that they'd gain by…

OP answered your question. Meta is tired of being sued, so they're trying to make Apple & Co responsible instead. And honestly, can you blame them?

Re: Meta Platforms: Lobbying, dark money, and the App Store Accountability Act

#713

Post by bell-cot »

varispeed wrote: post #512

Why "lobbying" is not treated as corruption? This kind of corporate influence should be illegal.

Generally, a lobbyist is someone who is paid to give money to lawmakers.

And for a lawmaker who is considering retirement, "become a lobbyist" is often the most lucrative career option.

Now who are you imagining will pass effective laws against lobbying?

Re: Meta Platforms: Lobbying, dark money, and the App Store Accountability Act

#714

Post by xvector »

shevy-java wrote: post #629
pkphilip wrote: post #622

This is an underhand way of mandating digital id at the point of operating system boot or login

I am curious how this will play out for Linux. I won't accept any code that spies on my owned computer devices. No criminal goverment can force be to surrender my rights here. But it is interesting to see how easy it is to purchase legislation in the USA - well done, Facebook! I predict more people will abandon it though, now that they see that Meta is trying to push out global spying on regular people.

They will require remote attestation of your entire boot chain eventually.

Re: Meta Platforms: Lobbying, dark money, and the App Store Accountability Act

#715

Post by merpkz »

BatteryMountain wrote: post #686
redm wrote: post #654

The question I keep coming back to regarding the recent debate around age verification is "Why now?" I'm 47, and I started using the internet in my early teens through BBS gateways. I've seen every age of the Internet, and there's always been widely available pornographic materials. Why all of a sudden is this a crisis? Perhaps I'm missing something?

Locking down the entire chain of trust. Try to start an ISP and/or become a public Certificate Authority.You will quickly run into steep requirement (admin and financial). To buy IP address space, get peering partners for traffic transit, hosting dns, hosting email (good luck getting mail delivered to the big providers without having your own users verified via mobile number). Try to build a mobile app, or phone or r…

> Some kids will be trafficked with the help of all these tech solutions, because they know exactly where your kids are at every moment.

What the hell are you talking about? They already know where my kids are! At school which is funded by government.

Re: Meta Platforms: Lobbying, dark money, and the App Store Accountability Act

#716

Post by tzs »

abc123abc123 wrote: post #542
Cthulhu_ wrote: post #523

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think age verification laws are good in principle - there's a lot of stuff on the internet that people should be protected from. But it's the manner of age verification that is the issue. The EU has zero knowledge proof age verification systems, e.g. through your bank, which are secure and don't involve sending a copy of your ID and / or face scan to a dodgy US based 3rd party.

Zero knowledge is not true. All chains rely, ultimately, on a place where ID:s are stored, and from there, they will leak. That place can also be engineered to undo the zero knowledge design. Couple that with the already in place, surveillance by ISP:s within the EU, and it becomes obvious that zero knowledge is a scam, and only valid under unreal conditions that will never apply in the EU, and only in isolation, and…

> Zero knowledge is not true. All chains rely, ultimately, on a place where ID:s are stored, and from there, they will leak.

All of the systems I'm aware of rely on someplace your ID is already stored.

Re: Meta Platforms: Lobbying, dark money, and the App Store Accountability Act

#717

Post by Barbing »

guitarlimeo wrote: post #692
redm wrote: post #654

The question I keep coming back to regarding the recent debate around age verification is "Why now?" I'm 47, and I started using the internet in my early teens through BBS gateways. I've seen every age of the Internet, and there's always been widely available pornographic materials. Why all of a sudden is this a crisis? Perhaps I'm missing something?

Have you questioned whether you might have been better off without seeing ISIS decapitation videos when you were a teenager (you might be too old for that though)? Or maybe that you have something that makes you more immune to this stuff? I think that I'm biased to think "it shouldn't be a crisis" because I saw that stuff as a kid and turned out ok, it's a prime example of survivor bias, maybe someone who saw that st…

[dead]

Re: Meta Platforms: Lobbying, dark money, and the App Store Accountability Act

#718

Post by Aurornis »

xbar wrote: post #643
Aurornis wrote: post #635

I tried to read the research when it was posted on Reddit a few days ago, but it’s all AI slop. The person who uploaded it admitted that they just had Claude go out and explore their hypotheses, but they didn’t even spend the time trying to get the real documents into Claude. Claude identified documents it wanted but couldn’t access them, so it just proposed hypothetical connections. The research has a lot of these:…

Meta spent $2B to buy anti-privacy laws.

Meta didn’t spend $2B. Even the original report doesn’t say that Meta spent that amount.

The $2B number was the sum of all the numbers Claude could find, not the money Meta spent.

There is so much AI slop in this article and source that it should be tripping everyone’s clickbait detectors, not being taken as accurate reporting.

Re: Meta Platforms: Lobbying, dark money, and the App Store Accountability Act

#719

Post by nimbius »

XzAeRosho wrote: post #507

I know most of this affects only the US, but I'm wondering where this will go in the EU if the Age Verification Tech goes ahead in America. There's been lots of efforts to increase surveillance disguised as protection for kids in the EU and UK. The Swiss implementation of eID may be hint that governments may/will take the responsibility to implement and maintain the tech, but the multiple intrusions and lobbying by P…

one hypothesis for why meta wants this is because AI (including its own push for it) has turned much of the internet and its social media platforms into slopfarms and clickbots that advertisers are increasingly moving away from.

The real driver is as always, ad revenue. This time, advertisers want and need to know a real human is engaging the brand and Meta cannot see any other way in sight to assure this fact save for age verification.

this is just the latest evolution of surveillance capitalism.

Re: Meta Platforms: Lobbying, dark money, and the App Store Accountability Act

#720

Post by skydhash »

kakacik wrote: post #609
konart wrote: post #598

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>same way we handle knives I'm pretty sure most kids older than 12 do have access to kitchen knives. And actively use them too. I generally agree with your point. But at the same time access to the internet resouces and to gun or a chaisaw is not the same. I have no problem securing a few items if my home, but I have no control over whatever is available on the net. Sure, I can write some firewall rules or create "ki…

Even if you did, you just lower the chances. I've created Netflix kids account specifically for mine. On its own it suggests also various documentaries on top of cartoons. We took the first one it suggested, and IIRC in second episode there was a very gruesome and detailed part with polar bear eating baby seals, one chew at a time. One way to traumatize 4-year old, I'd say an effective one.

It’s a content issue mostly. Content providers do not want to properly tag and silo their content. And add parental control to kids account. They want to shift that burden to everyone but themselves.
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