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Illinois just told every operating system to start reporting your kid's age

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Re: Illinois just told every operating system to start reporting your kid's age

#101
post #39
post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The same steps you take to make sure they are not smoking in a back alley on the way home.

You sniff their clothing for evidence of a porn site or chatting with a predator?

You teach them the harm of smoking and online grooming. You teach them to not accept cigarettes or sexual advances from others. And you build a trusting relationship with them so in the unfortunate case they do mess up, they trust you enough that they tell you what's going on, instead of hiding abuse they suffered from others so their parents don't berate them for going unsupervised online.

Idealistic, I know, I know. But so is the idea that you can seal your kids in an airtight bubble and never risk any harm without the harm avoidance becoming harmful in itself. Or that the lawmakers in this country and elsewhere actually care about child safety at all, when they will not move a finger to prosecute those who hanged out with Epstein on his island.

Re: Illinois just told every operating system to start reporting your kid's age

#102
post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The parents are the ones who should be supervising. Ok. When Alice & Bob come home from school what steps should every parent take to supervise A&B's phone and device usage over the past 48 hours? Internet history, of course - for all the browsers, including those hidden away? But what if the logs are wiped or the second BraveFoxChrome installation isn't obvious? Must every parent have an IT degree? What if the par…

> What if the parents are very good plumbers and car mechanics, should they also be expert in software design and installation? You know who else are not experts in software design and installation? Fossil politicians and slimy bureaucrats. Name one public sector state or local website that isn't utter garbage and a nightmare to use. Go ahead I'll wait. They need to get their sticky donut-eating fingers out of my per…

This is a really weak argument. High-quality government websites exist, most notably the British gov.uk system. All this is beside the point - the current age verification proposals are wrong, and attempt to solve the wrong problem in ways that look very much as if they are primarily intended for surveillance rather than child protection.

'Child safe' internet access by default with a very low bar to let adults enable their devices to access the public internet is the solution. The UK's mobile providers already offer this by default - all you have to do is to call your network provider and ask for the restrictions to be turned off, and you have full internet access. Any legislation to create 'child safe' filtering should mandate that vendors provide ways for adults to turn the filtering off, easily, quickly and no questions asked - and that it should be viewed as the responsible moral default for adults to have full access to the world in order to be able to exercise their responsibilities as citizens, not some sort of option for degenerates. Whether you do this device side or network side is a technical detail.

The other sane way to do this - and what we should have done from the start, instead of providing kids with full access to the adult world by default - would be to have created 'child safe' devices to provide children with filtered access. Parents could then be in charge of whether they want their children to have that access and at what age. However, that boat has sailed.

Re: Illinois just told every operating system to start reporting your kid's age

#103
post #27
post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The parents are the ones who should be supervising. Ok. When Alice & Bob come home from school what steps should every parent take to supervise A&B's phone and device usage over the past 48 hours? Internet history, of course - for all the browsers, including those hidden away? But what if the logs are wiped or the second BraveFoxChrome installation isn't obvious? Must every parent have an IT degree? What if the par…

The same steps you take to make sure they are not smoking in a back alley on the way home.

That one is actually enforced by police, by general society that calls police when they see junkies. Limits on smoking and alcohol are enforced by sellers who cant sell to kids and regulators who punish sellers who do.

Parents are not expected to follow the kid home from school and watch it every second. Parents are expected to have general talk about drugs.

Oh yeah, and it is illegal to maket smoking to kids. Meanwhile, facebook spends billions on A/B testing increasingly sophisticated addiction builders ... and you expect the kids and parents to just be able to win over it with no support.

Re: Illinois just told every operating system to start reporting your kid's age

#104

The breathless fearmongering over an age field on account set up is just completely over-the-top. This is probably the least bad out of all possible ways to implement age checking. The benefit of this is that it can short-circuit support for more onerous age verification. The writing has been on the wall for some time now: the era of completely unrestricted internet is coming to an end. The question is how awful will…

> This is probably the least bad out of all possible ways to implement age checking. Less bad is still bad. Normalizing a gated, state controlled internet is bad.

We are on the path to gated monopoly controlled internet.

So, goverment controlled is better then Musk, Zuckenberg and Altman controlled.

Re: Illinois just told every operating system to start reporting your kid's age

#105
post #21

Background: Meta/Facebook, Google and Apple all support age verification. It gives them legal cover and for their ad platforms gives better data. But Meta/FB have been strongly lobbying to make it required at the OS level, so they aren't responsible for it, whereas Google and Apple both want it to be an application responsibility. I think the CA version of this ended up with a carve-out for open source? I can't recal…

> all support age verification No, they all support harvesting your data so they can continue doing what they do best: building shadow profiles and targeting ads. Nothing a signal of an age group tells them more than "send me more ads for XX year-olds". Why do you think it's always a question asked in online surveys?

thats why i always click 25-34

those buckets get the funnest ads

Re: Illinois just told every operating system to start reporting your kid's age

#106
post #88

Are they expecting parents to be held responsible when their kid gets given a laptop and doesn't put in the right age? Or is it just a best effort thing that "parents who want to" can opt in to and which mostly serves as a shield for online platforms who wave the "but age API said" flag whenever something sketch happens?

It's opt in. You can say your kid was born in 1900 if you want an unrestricted internet.

Meh. It's a trick by facebook and others to harvest data and blame people later saying people volunteered the data.

Feels like hn is filled with these proxy accounts to support fb, google.

Re: Illinois just told every operating system to start reporting your kid's age

#107
post #82

What's most shocking to me is the willingness to comply on display here and elsewhere. If the state proposes you stick a corncob up your rear, your initial response shouldn't be to ask if they prefer you use a rubber or wooden mallet to achieve compliance.

If the state proposed every OS must have parental controls activated via a checkbox would you say the same? Because that's what they actually did except the checkbox is a numeric text field.

Yes. Seems like accounts are made by fb/meta to support them in hn.

Re: Illinois just told every operating system to start reporting your kid's age

#108
post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> for their ad platforms gives better data > No, they all support harvesting your data so they can continue doing what they do best: building shadow profiles and targeting ads. I think we are agreeing adamantly here?

You said that Meta doesn't want to be responsible for age verification - they absolutely do, because that gives them every single user's identity. Forcing it at the OS level is not an attempt to put the responsibility on the OS, it's an attempt to drive a wedge into the OS where Apple can't hide users' identities.

No, they are far more cunning than you give them credit, they want to have the information but bare no responsibility for both collecting and validating it themselves nor for when the kids circumvent it.

So they are in the golden zone of maximum exploitation and plausible deniability.

They will literally say:

Of course, we showed that one teen 500 gambling and porn ads a day, Apple/Google/Microsoft told us he is 65, it's their fault! Sure every other word he posted was rizz, but how could we possibly know he was not 65.

Re: Illinois just told every operating system to start reporting your kid's age

#109
post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's opt in. You can say your kid was born in 1900 if you want an unrestricted internet.

Meh. It's a trick by facebook and others to harvest data and blame people later saying people volunteered the data. Feels like hn is filled with these proxy accounts to support fb, google.

But they get less data because of this, not more. They're supporting this to offload liability, not to get more data.

Re: Illinois just told every operating system to start reporting your kid's age

#110
post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The parents are the ones who should be supervising. Ok. When Alice & Bob come home from school what steps should every parent take to supervise A&B's phone and device usage over the past 48 hours? Internet history, of course - for all the browsers, including those hidden away? But what if the logs are wiped or the second BraveFoxChrome installation isn't obvious? Must every parent have an IT degree? What if the par…

> What if the parents are very good plumbers and car mechanics, should they also be expert in software design and installation? You know who else are not experts in software design and installation? Fossil politicians and slimy bureaucrats. Name one public sector state or local website that isn't utter garbage and a nightmare to use. Go ahead I'll wait. They need to get their sticky donut-eating fingers out of my per…

The politicians and bureaucrats aren't generally the ones making the web sites.
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