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Age verification tech could put children at greater risk, says think tank

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Re: Age verification tech could put children at greater risk, says think tank

#31

Post by SoftTalker »

fc417fc802 wrote: post #24
SoftTalker wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Simple, sites without a rating are not viewable if parental controls are enabled. That will be motivation for site publishers to get their ratings in order.

No, the browsers would need to reject the sites unconditionally since no one is going to enable parental controls if it breaks everything. Otherwise I expect the current situation of parental controls not working and thus everyone avoiding them and complaining would continue. Recall that this is exactly what happened with TLS. When browsers started gating all new features behind TLS being active suddenly all the main…

Sounds good to me. Why didn't Google, Apple, Facebook, Twitter, and the porn industry do this 15 years ago? Why did they pretend to have no responsibility for the content they were publishing? Why did they think clicking "Yes" on an "I am 18 years of age" popup was sufficient?

Re: Age verification tech could put children at greater risk, says think tank

#32

Post by pjc50 »

CrzyLngPwd wrote: post #27

"with nine out of 10 parents saying they are in favour of a ban in response to a government consultation" I wonder why those 90% of parents don't cut their children off from social media right now. They have the power to do it.

I suspect they don't really; once you give a teen a smartphone your control over what websites they visit ends.

(you will reply "don't do that then")

But also: cutting one kid off from social networks ostracises them. The parents recognize it's a collective action problem.

Re: Age verification tech could put children at greater risk, says think tank

#33

Post by Broken_Hippo »

Hugsbox wrote: post #29
CrzyLngPwd wrote: post #27

"with nine out of 10 parents saying they are in favour of a ban in response to a government consultation" I wonder why those 90% of parents don't cut their children off from social media right now. They have the power to do it.

Yeah, this I will seriously never understand. When I was a kid, if my mother didn't want me doing something then she would make sure I couldn't do it. Is nobody parenting their children anymore? Do they just let them do whatever they want these days? I've got a 2 year old of my own and can't imagine just handing him an iPad and ignoring him all day like I see other parents do. I can't tell if it's laziness, or ignora…

Uh-huh. For me, that meant that I didn't do something At Home, and was pretty much unsupervised other places. My mother was strict at a time when a lot of kids had freedom. I couldn't do much that other kids did. When I could, I had to jump through hoops.

I lied to my mother a lot. My mother still isn't in the loop with my life - I'm in my late 40s now. It would have been much better to have been able to talk to my parents honestly about stuff I went through. It would have been much better to talk to me about things and get honest information about dangers.

Re: Age verification tech could put children at greater risk, says think tank

#34

Post by goodcanadian »

pjc50 wrote: post #32
CrzyLngPwd wrote: post #27

"with nine out of 10 parents saying they are in favour of a ban in response to a government consultation" I wonder why those 90% of parents don't cut their children off from social media right now. They have the power to do it.

I suspect they don't really; once you give a teen a smartphone your control over what websites they visit ends. (you will reply "don't do that then") But also: cutting one kid off from social networks ostracises them. The parents recognize it's a collective action problem.

Also, it is arguably dangerous to not let your teen have a phone in a time when payphones (and to a great extent landlines) no longer exist.

Re: Age verification tech could put children at greater risk, says think tank

#35

Post by bluGill »

CrzyLngPwd wrote: post #27

"with nine out of 10 parents saying they are in favour of a ban in response to a government consultation" I wonder why those 90% of parents don't cut their children off from social media right now. They have the power to do it.

You fail to understand just how good kids are at getting around restrictions. This despite having been a kid yourself who would have found ways around it.

Often we don't really have the power we want either. It is easy to say ban everything. However realistically that isn't the correct answer, too much school work really is on devices - often provided by the school so I can't lock them (except for the limited controls the school gives to us - if the correct app works on our devices that then we are expected to have). Every week some new hole in their block app gets spread around school - until the school figures it out and blocks it all the kids have it.

The only think unique about the above is devices. I guarantee if you go back 3000 years in history you will find parents complaining about their kids in similar ways.

Re: Age verification tech could put children at greater risk, says think tank

#36

Post by bluGill »

goodcanadian wrote: post #34
pjc50 wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I suspect they don't really; once you give a teen a smartphone your control over what websites they visit ends. (you will reply "don't do that then") But also: cutting one kid off from social networks ostracises them. The parents recognize it's a collective action problem.

Also, it is arguably dangerous to not let your teen have a phone in a time when payphones (and to a great extent landlines) no longer exist.

Not really because nearly every adult has a phone with unlimited calling, and will allow you to make a call from their phone. I don't want my kids to be someplace where there are not some responsible adults around (drunk adults are not responsible)

Note that I agree with your point overall. My kids have phones for times when they are away and might need to contact me. I'm just saying it isn't as bad as it sounds.

Re: Age verification tech could put children at greater risk, says think tank

#37

Post by Hugsbox »

Broken_Hippo wrote: post #33
Hugsbox wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, this I will seriously never understand. When I was a kid, if my mother didn't want me doing something then she would make sure I couldn't do it. Is nobody parenting their children anymore? Do they just let them do whatever they want these days? I've got a 2 year old of my own and can't imagine just handing him an iPad and ignoring him all day like I see other parents do. I can't tell if it's laziness, or ignora…

Uh-huh. For me, that meant that I didn't do something At Home, and was pretty much unsupervised other places. My mother was strict at a time when a lot of kids had freedom. I couldn't do much that other kids did. When I could, I had to jump through hoops. I lied to my mother a lot. My mother still isn't in the loop with my life - I'm in my late 40s now. It would have been much better to have been able to talk to my p…

I relate to this quite a lot, to be honest. There has to be some happy medium somewhere, though.

Re: Age verification tech could put children at greater risk, says think tank

#38

Post by mobiuscog »

musha68k wrote: post #16

Another instance of pure power games if you track the political "reasonings" and technological "solutions". It's the same fight with yet another face; we must keep pushing back at the hydra.

The other 'side' is playing the same power games.

None of this is truly about the people (even though the sentiment is) - it's the elites vying for power against each other.

The internet is not tribal, but humans are. Those seeking to divide are pushing their hardest right now, because they know division will empower them more.

Re: Age verification tech could put children at greater risk, says think tank

#39

Post by jmyeet »

I believe we could solve a lot of these problems by making it illegal to advertise to minors.

I'm reminded of the settlement with Facebook where it was illegally allowing racial targeting in ads for housing, which is illegal [1]. If platforms were suddenly liable for allowing or failing to stop the targeting of minors, they'd suddenly have a lot of incentive to figure this out.

The beauty of this is that they already do it. Your profile with FB, Google, etc has a lot of implied demographic information based on your activity because they want to sell audiences with certain demographics.

As an aside, whenever I see "think tank" my first question is "who is funding this?" and I learned something I didn't know previously. In the UK, these bodies often aren't legal charities. Instead they are non-profit companies limited by guarantee [2]. One consequence of that is that they don't have to reveal their funding like a 501(c)(3) would (and, yes, US think tanks are generally 501(c)(3)s).

I didn't see any obvious red flags in the trustees for Foundation for Information Policy Research for what it's worth and it's an almost 30 year old organization.

[1]: https://www.justice.gov/archives/opa/pr/justice-department-s...

[2]: https://www.funded.team/advice/charity-vs-cic-vs-clg

Re: Age verification tech could put children at greater risk, says think tank

#40

Post by bluGill »

M95D wrote: post #23

The nice solution would be content tags, standardized by w3c.

Those can only work if there is some way to ensure that everyone uses them correctly. I guarantee there will be many sites that don't - every single week the kids will discover a new one and spread it to all their friends (in their school)
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