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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

#781

Post by furyofantares »

devmor wrote: post #779
furyofantares wrote: post #759

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm the same age as you, started when I was maybe 15 on BBSes. The porn was certainly a lot harder to come by, still images that took a while to download, had to do it when family was out of sight on the family computer and clean up history after. Kids have personal devices and can go down a rabbit hole of content in their room. It seems fairly different. Age ranges are different too, 10 year olds have phones and hav…

> at whatever point parents stop monitoring, they would like the kids to not be fully in the deep end Parents want to stop monitoring their kids, but still want their kids' experiences to be catered to their ideals, so the rest of society must now bend towards what you want for your kids specifically? What about parents who want a different set of guardrails for their kids - more limited or less limited than you? Wha…

You assume from my tone I'm in support of it when I literally said I'm not presenting any such argument?

I agree with everything you said.

I just think "we turned out fine" is always a garbage argument, and worse, fails to understand what drives people to want stuff like this.

I think it's better to acknowledge the real issues parents have, and then explain why age verification is an extremely naive solution that won't solve the problems and comes with a host of other problems.

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

#782

Post by deejaaymac »

throwaway290 wrote: post #747
hedora wrote: post #722

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These bills are specifically exempting platforms that distributed the ISIS videos (like meta), and including platforms that did not. apt-get install isis-beheading-vids doesn't work on any Linux distribution I've seen, and it's not like Microsoft or Apple were preloading them on laptops. These bills have nothing to do with online safety. They exist purely to establish a police state (that will currently be run by a c…

"bills trying to fix it are bad" != "the problem doesn't exist" if you agree that online safety problem exists then suggest better solution. if you disagree then keep on living in a fantasy world

Pretty sure Vlad the Impaler, Hitler, etc. did worse things to people than anything any of us saw on the internet. So, should we censor history books?

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

#784

Post by derektank »

sippeangelo wrote: post #760
cycomanic wrote: post #721

These discussions remind me so much of the US discussions about federal ID documents as verification. There's a vocal portion of people which opposes any solution because "privacy, government overreach, surveillance ...". So instead of a solution like e.g. zero-proof age verification, that tries to minimize intrusions on privacy, the result is the worst of all worlds, maximum surveillance (but I guess it's ok if it i…

Please explain how opposition to privacy invasive solutions result in even more privacy invasive solutions being implemented? Is it purely out of spite from the lawmakers? This logic doesn't follow.

It’s obviously worse for your privacy to have third parties handle full images of your drivers license or video of your entire face, which can then be leaked, rather than using a zero knowledge proof that only sends e.g. a birth year. And no, it’s not spite, it’s incoherence. Lawmakers are single minded seekers of re-election to a first degree approximation and will do things to get votes, even if those things don’t logically make sense together, such as requiring age verification without providing the tools for companies to abide by the law themselves.

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

#785

Post by dylan604 »

sippeangelo wrote: post #760
cycomanic wrote: post #721

These discussions remind me so much of the US discussions about federal ID documents as verification. There's a vocal portion of people which opposes any solution because "privacy, government overreach, surveillance ...". So instead of a solution like e.g. zero-proof age verification, that tries to minimize intrusions on privacy, the result is the worst of all worlds, maximum surveillance (but I guess it's ok if it i…

Please explain how opposition to privacy invasive solutions result in even more privacy invasive solutions being implemented? Is it purely out of spite from the lawmakers? This logic doesn't follow.

The logic not flowing is the point. People against a federal ID say it is government overreach into state's rights. They consider it the feds invading citizen's rights. They have no need, as it is the purview of the states. So in lieu of a federal ID, private companies are coming up with privacy invading techniques to attempt to verify age. How would one be okay with a private company's invasion of privacy yet not the government's? An invasion of privacy is an invasion of privacy regardless of the one doing the invading.

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

#786

Post by saltcured »

systima wrote: post #589
pjc50 wrote: post #572

Earlier quoted context omitted.

.. do you think you could quote it here to save time please?

"But there is an obvious solution: mandate the operating systems (iOS and Android) to share device users' ages when they download apps from the app stores – data the operating systems get as part of the hardware acquisition already. This would be a simple one-step way for parents to control all the different apps that their kids use (in the US, the average teen uses forty different apps per month) and would remedy th…

Everything else aside, this naive belief system is right up there with "10 Myths every programmer should know about X" where X is email addresses, legal names, postal addresses, dates, timestamps, etc.

Or perhaps they are envisioning a "hardware acquisition" process where the purchaser is forced to take some oath and sign an attestation about all future users of the device...

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

#787

Post by dylan604 »

sigmoid10 wrote: post #735
sieep wrote: post #723

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Just look at the freaking mess that is trying to proof your identity in the US. Care to elaborate? I'm not sure what's a mess about a driver's license, social security card. I've never once had any issue with my identity.

Not everyone has (or can have) a driver's license and a social security card literally says it is *not* for identification because it lacks even the most basic aspects. But since the US never managed to come up with an actual system, companies started using SSNs like an identity verifier, because it is the one thing everyone has across every state. But that also makes identity theft or credit fraud trivial in the US…

> a social security card literally says it is not for identification

It no longer says this, and has not for a long long time. My parent's cards did, but mine does not. Also, I'm old (for this forum at least), so this isn't a recent change.

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

#788

Post by shit_game »

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?

"Now" is when this level and depth of mass identification and surveilance has become technologically feasible, financially valuable, and politically possible.

The political planets have aligned in many nations for private industry to lobby for this power, sating their own goals as advertisers and the state's goals as authoritarians. This is an open conspiracy between every tech giant and every government to perpetually identify every action that every person ever makes online for the sakes of advertising, propagandizing, surveiling, persecuting, and imprisoning people.

It is not a coincidence that this is occurring in all western nations at the same time; these economies are incredibly large and active, and these governments have been under attack from the far-right for decades.

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

#789

Post by mothballed »

Palomides wrote: post #769
cycomanic wrote: post #721

These discussions remind me so much of the US discussions about federal ID documents as verification. There's a vocal portion of people which opposes any solution because "privacy, government overreach, surveillance ...". So instead of a solution like e.g. zero-proof age verification, that tries to minimize intrusions on privacy, the result is the worst of all worlds, maximum surveillance (but I guess it's ok if it i…

this position assumes the surveillance state or megacorps would be satisfied with a zero knowledge proof based ID/age verification system, which is not at all obvious to me meta could spend their billions lobbying for that, if they wanted to edit: to be clear, I do think a government developed and maintained ZKP ID/age system is the best possible compromise, I just don't think we have any chance of getting it

It's a bait and switch that can be seen by even Ray Charles from a mile away. ZKP assurances is just part of the high-IQ "useful idiots" spreading buy in for the bait.

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

#790

Post by cheesecompiler »

Aurornis wrote: post #718
xbar wrote: post #643

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Does the amount listed change the underlying point?
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