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?
What does this have to do with age verification?
Google will expand age checks on Android worldwide till the end of the year
71–80 of 549 posts
Re: Google will expand age checks on Android worldwide till the end of the year
#72Earlier quoted context omitted.
There should be a law that forces social media companies to use a different algorithm for anyone under a certain age and be required to disclose it to the public. Possibly different algorithm depending on age group. There should however be no force age verification. Social media companies already know how old you are or very close to it using the data they collect everyday. Using this data they should be required to…
> There should be a law that forces social media companies to use a different algorithm for anyone under a certain age and be required to disclose it to the public. Possibly different algorithm depending on age group. Frankly, in that case I want the kids algorithm. It is preferable for me as an adult, I do not want the intentionally harmful one either.
You can often do that via settings. But we could do with a law that makes it a crime to override a user setting that has been explicitly set, without notifying the user.
Re: Google will expand age checks on Android worldwide till the end of the year
#73I don't understand why apps need to know anything about a specific age. If we have to go down this road, which I really don't, why can't we just simply have verification whether or not an age fits within a range better yet a category. Yes, age can still be inferred, for example, under 21 or over 21.
Because it's not about age at all. That's just ruse to get a lever to lock people out of their devices if they don't behave.
It's amazing how naive and gullible people are even after all the many thousands of examples of lies and gaslighting over many generations now. It seems to be a permanent characteristic of a certain subset of people, and seemingly a majority of people, at least in the west and at least in this era.
It always gives me the "he only beats me because he loves me" or "he wouldn't beat me if I knew how to behave better" vibes. It's not healthy, not sane, not rational.
One disagreement though; I don't even think they will lock people out of their devices outside of very narrow and specific instances or examples to "cut the grass" as the Israelis call it, to scare and remind people they are the slaves and the long arm of the tyranny can reach out and crush them if they don't self-censor and self-subjugate. Psychological and ideological control has very much proved itself far more effective than physical control in all circumstances. They want to be able to monitor and then use methods and technologies to control that have not really come to light in society even thought they were systematized through the Iraq war. You are now the "insurgents", are you old enough to remember those, those insurgents in their own country?
Re: Google will expand age checks on Android worldwide till the end of the year
#74Earlier quoted context omitted.
The parenting argument is a complete cop-out. There's no universe where you can be shoulder hovering 24/7. This could've been solved years ago with robust parental controls. But companies like Google just didn't want to because they wanted to shove ads in kids' faces.
I think we can approach this from more than one angle. Yes, it cannot be entirely on parents, but parents should bear some responsibility to not just hand a device over to their children with unrestricted access to the entire internet.
Up until relatively recently you would have to install custom VPNs and maybe add Pihole into the mix to achieve anything close to that. Easy for us here, but we're in a small minority.
Re: Google will expand age checks on Android worldwide till the end of the year
#75Earlier quoted context omitted.
The API behaves this way: > To request a user's age range and sharing status, you call the Play Age Signals API (beta) from your app at runtime. The default age ranges the API returns are 0-12, 13-15, 16-17, and 18+, but you can receive custom age ranges. https://developer.android.com/google/play/age-signals/use-ag... But I don't find it any better. I don't see any viable reason to provide identification to my phone'…
You can also get GrapheneOS right now on Google-branded hardware, which is expensive but not enshittified.
LineageOS is still a thing too.
Re: Google will expand age checks on Android worldwide till the end of the year
#76Safety!
Re: Google will expand age checks on Android worldwide till the end of the year
#77Earlier quoted context omitted.
> There should be a law that forces social media companies to use a different algorithm for anyone under a certain age and be required to disclose it to the public. Possibly different algorithm depending on age group. Frankly, in that case I want the kids algorithm. It is preferable for me as an adult, I do not want the intentionally harmful one either.
This. Just give me the option to have pagination. Sweet, old, pagination. Like here on Hacker News. I can then review one or maybe 2 pages, and that is all. Like a physical magazine where there's a clear end. I have the firm belief that infinite scrolling is one of the darkest pattern that was ever invented.
Hang on... Hacker News very clearly has a complex, opaque [1] algorithm that orders stuff. Maybe it's not user-specific, and maybe that's a good dividing line, but these are the kinds of factors we're going to have to think about if we want to introduce regulation around 'algorithms'.
Infinite scrolling is a very different issue (although it's definitely a contributor to the harm, I agree).
([1] Unless I'm being unfair here; maybe the algorithm is available somewhere, I just don't see it obviously linked anywhere)
Re: Google will expand age checks on Android worldwide till the end of the year
#78Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
A big concern around age verification is that some people will be locked out because they can't prove their age.
Your solution here has the same flaw, I think. If the algorithm thinks I'm underage, I'm locked out.
Re: Google will expand age checks on Android worldwide till the end of the year
#79I 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 think you've done a great job identifying the three main options and why two of them (parents, censorship-by-default) just will not work. That leaves regulation; the only way we will prevent children—or anyone —from coming to harm is to stop companies from producing this harmful content in the first place. Either that, or just accept the harm.
Who decides what is harm? An unelected bureaucrat? Now you’re going into censorship area
Re: Google will expand age checks on Android worldwide till the end of the year
#80This 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…
The authorities open letters all the time. Try sending a letter to prison without it getting scanned.
The problem with this comparison is that the authorities can open a letter if they need to for various well-intended reasons, but they cannot open an encrypted message. Either the authorities can scan all messages, or they can scan no messages, there's no inbetween.
The mandate to verify age before selling alcohol has been around forever. This is not a new idea. The biggest restriction until now has been that there was no good way to do these kinds of age verification, but that problem has been solved. You can still debate whether or not age verification is a good idea for specific subjects, but selling 10 year olds alcohol or porn has been illegal for much longer than the internet has existed.