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Google will expand age checks on Android worldwide till the end of the year

android-developers.googleblog.com

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Re: Google will expand age checks on Android worldwide till the end of the year

#41
post #18
post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can also get GrapheneOS right now on Google-branded hardware, which is expensive but not enshittified.

>which is expensive The rumored Motorola devices are even more expensive. It's the signature and some foldables, all in the 1000+ MSRP range. At least with pixels you can get the a series for as little as 400 on sale.

If you buy one of the Motorola Grapheneos phones, you're gonna be marked. You will stand out in the crowd. It has happened before and will happen more frequently as the world becomes more authoritarian.

Re: Google will expand age checks on Android worldwide till the end of the year

#43

Can't we build a gateway in the internet that detects if someone is a influential CEO or something and just bar access to the internet?

I was just saying yesterday that we (Finland) could take the bullet and create a luxury resort for all the zillionaires in the world.

Connect them with each other and populate their air-gapped "Internet" with like-minded authoritarian AI-bots and create special news like Don and Vladimir are being fed to keep them from tantrums. A win win for everyone!

Ooh, and mental health services. Plenty of mental health services as we're so poor of a race that even our richest can't afford enough therapy to feel alright!

Re: Google will expand age checks on Android worldwide till the end of the year

#44

I find myself stuck on the fence with age checks. Companies have show that they are incapable or unwilling to address the problems they cause. And market forces are not working to correct things. It’s also pretty obvious that saying “parent should take responsibility” is also not working. Just observe the world around you to know it’s a non starter. This is where regulation is supposed to come in. At the same time, c…

The EU actually has a very good, privacy protecting way of doing this based on zero knowledge proofs. Unfortunately they completely botched it by having the proof-of-concept app rely on Apple & Googles integrity APIs - which a bunch of countries copied.

ZKPs may as well just be unencrypted HTTP headers which would be way simpler and easier to implement. All a ZKP proves is that at least one person in the world is over 18.

Re: Google will expand age checks on Android worldwide till the end of the year

#45
post #23

I find myself stuck on the fence with age checks. Companies have show that they are incapable or unwilling to address the problems they cause. And market forces are not working to correct things. It’s also pretty obvious that saying “parent should take responsibility” is also not working. Just observe the world around you to know it’s a non starter. This is where regulation is supposed to come in. At the same time, c…

I have a feeling that, in order to protect privacy, those regulations must fall on the parents too. It is their primary responsibility to take care of their children. Maintaining your kids digital hygiene should be important to the lawmakers and the child protections services.

What should they do about it?

Re: Google will expand age checks on Android worldwide till the end of the year

#46
post #24

I find myself stuck on the fence with age checks. Companies have show that they are incapable or unwilling to address the problems they cause. And market forces are not working to correct things. It’s also pretty obvious that saying “parent should take responsibility” is also not working. Just observe the world around you to know it’s a non starter. This is where regulation is supposed to come in. At the same time, c…

I don't want the market solving this. If we are going to do age checks it should be based on public key cryptography, be open source, and handled by the government. You verify with the government (or don't since they already know your age), you get some form of cryptographic attestation, present said attestation to websites/apps. I'm not a fan of age verification in the first place, but I am extremely not a fan of ra…

Why do we need to verify age?

You can't tell me that these social media companies don't already know exactly how old someone is just based on the enormous data that is collected.

Re: Google will expand age checks on Android worldwide till the end of the year

#48
post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>which is expensive The rumored Motorola devices are even more expensive. It's the signature and some foldables, all in the 1000+ MSRP range. At least with pixels you can get the a series for as little as 400 on sale.

If you buy one of the Motorola Grapheneos phones, you're gonna be marked. You will stand out in the crowd. It has happened before and will happen more frequently as the world becomes more authoritarian.

Yes, people can tell a phone is running Graphene. They just can't get in.

Re: Google will expand age checks on Android worldwide till the end of the year

#49

This smells like Soviet Union. The next step will be a requirement to confirm your identity - trying to justify it with a wicked manipulation tactic "we need to know your are not lying when selecting your age". No one asked for it to begin with. Android is normalising totalitarianism and mass spying on citizens, one step at a time. This is a very bad feature and a very bad development.

Its the same thing with Europe allowing scans of private chats now. Nobody would tolerate a person opening the letters from ur physical mail box and reading through each of them just to see if you do [insert illegal activity]. But once this stuff happens digitally, people seem to simply tolerate it. If I remember correctly, in 2019 there were huge protests against upload filters were people actually protested on the streets in Europe. Now there is almost NOTHING for chat scans, NOTHING for age verifications, NOTHING for making Android less open. Its really frightening what the general public tolerates nowadays.
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