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UK.gov to make adults give credit card details for access to Facebook or TikTok

theregister.com

111–120 of 185 posts

Re: UK.gov to make adults give credit card details for access to Facebook or TikTok

#111

I don’t care for porn as the motivator, but social media should be absolutely unavailable to children.

I don’t know.

Wireless radio (it will mean mothers no longer sing to their children), various genres of music over the years (will harm development of children), newspapers (in the 30s there was an obsession with young men reading newspapers rather than talking to their colleagues or family, like a mobile phone concern but in the 30s - if you Google this story you can find some impressive pictures of lines of men waiting at a bus stop and every single one is reading a newspaper).

It wouldn’t surprise me if kids are better adjusted to social media than adults. The kids don’t need to go through a readjustment period of trying to convert their expectations to the new reality.

Kids will still bully each other with or without social media. There will Still exist dangers which can’t be controlled without active parenting and an attentive society.

I see the attraction of banning social media below a certain age but i can’t help think that open discussion with kids would be far more effective.

Re: UK.gov to make adults give credit card details for access to Facebook or TikTok

#112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OAuth 2.0 resolves this. The government can be in control of maintaining citizens' identities and citizens can likewise request claims from the government's auth server regarding their age or any other matter. That claim as a signed message can be provided to third-party services which need only validate the signed message using the public key associated with the secret key that signed the claim message.

I don't think oauth 2 would give the required privacy protection. How would the flow go? Click on an age verification link on a site. It redirects to the gov site, where you authenticate and it returns a signed claim. Now the government knows what sites you are visiting. Not something I suspect most people will want when accessing porn sites...

I refreshed my understanding of OAuth 2.0 and sure, its typical flows which are meant for convenience do not offer the level of privacy protection as you mention. But if we replace that convenience with some effort from the user, we can get the privacy protection as well.

The flow can be as follows:

The user authenticates itself via government's site and is presented with a page which lets them create government-signed messages using claims provided by the government.

The concerned site can generate a random string during their registration/verification process which they expect to be part of the signed message that the user is to provide them.

The user enters that random string on government's site and checks/selects the age claim for it to be included in the signed message. The government adds timestamp to it and a key id based on the private key which it used to sign the message.

The user posts the signed message on the concerned site during the registration/verification process. The site uses the government's well-known address to fetch the public key associated with the key id (mentioned in the signed message). It then uses the public key to verify the signed message alongside checking the timestamp for recency and presence of the exact random string in the signed message. Ultimately checking the age claim.

So now, instead of providing credit card details, the signed message was provided by the user which the concerned site can validate on its own without the government knowing.

Re: UK.gov to make adults give credit card details for access to Facebook or TikTok

#113

I don’t care for porn as the motivator, but social media should be absolutely unavailable to children.

I don’t know. Wireless radio (it will mean mothers no longer sing to their children), various genres of music over the years (will harm development of children), newspapers (in the 30s there was an obsession with young men reading newspapers rather than talking to their colleagues or family, like a mobile phone concern but in the 30s - if you Google this story you can find some impressive pictures of lines of men wai…

We don’t need to guess. It’s been well studied and reviewed. Social media is extremely harmful for children, and especially young girls.

It’s also extremely harmful for adults, but adults can make their own decisions.

Re: UK.gov to make adults give credit card details for access to Facebook or TikTok

#114
post #38

There was a thread about this yesterday [0], this is almost certainly not going to happen. I think based on the number of times they have tried to legislate for this, most recently in 2019, I would put the odds of it happening (even in a hamstrung way) at less than 10%. Big company’s (Facebook, etc) will lobby against it, they will argue about what the threshold of requirement is. Then there is the logistics, privacy…

It happened in the EU. Why wouldn't it happen in the UK?

I think the age restrictions are bullshit as well, try this userscript: https://github.com/zerodytrash/Simple-YouTube-Age-Restrictio...

Re: UK.gov to make adults give credit card details for access to Facebook or TikTok

#116
post #23

People don’t realize how invasive the UK govt is when it comes to internet monitoring. Today if you try to access adult content on a UK mobile device you get blocked by age verification. You have to call your mobile provider and prove your age (it’s a once-per-contract thing). One of the ways you can prove your age is with a credit card. But I imagine it’s a large deterrent because not many people want to call Vodafo…

No post body was provided.

Re: UK.gov to make adults give credit card details for access to Facebook or TikTok

#117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t know. Wireless radio (it will mean mothers no longer sing to their children), various genres of music over the years (will harm development of children), newspapers (in the 30s there was an obsession with young men reading newspapers rather than talking to their colleagues or family, like a mobile phone concern but in the 30s - if you Google this story you can find some impressive pictures of lines of men wai…

We don’t need to guess. It’s been well studied and reviewed. Social media is extremely harmful for children, and especially young girls. It’s also extremely harmful for adults, but adults can make their own decisions.

[deleted]

Re: UK.gov to make adults give credit card details for access to Facebook or TikTok

#118

I don’t care for porn as the motivator, but social media should be absolutely unavailable to children.

I don’t know. Wireless radio (it will mean mothers no longer sing to their children), various genres of music over the years (will harm development of children), newspapers (in the 30s there was an obsession with young men reading newspapers rather than talking to their colleagues or family, like a mobile phone concern but in the 30s - if you Google this story you can find some impressive pictures of lines of men wai…

Young victims of schoolyard bullying could in the past retreat to safe spaces - a friend’s house, a favorite art or music teacher’s classroom, the computer club. Today, the bullies are posting cruel messages and media about you in huge group chats and creating fake social media accounts under your name to embarrass you. The abuse follows them into their bedrooms. There’s literally nowhere for them to go to hide. This is why tween suicide rates are skyrocketing, especially for girls.

Re: UK.gov to make adults give credit card details for access to Facebook or TikTok

#119

Easy solution … give up Facebook and TikTok and all the other social media addictions like a sane and healthy person. Social media is essentially the tobacco of today; a toxic, destructive, addictive force.

As with tobacco, giving it up is not as easy as saying it.

We can do without it if it was just switched off, but everyone else who is using it, is itself a reason to be part of it.

Re: UK.gov to make adults give credit card details for access to Facebook or TikTok

#120
post #23

People don’t realize how invasive the UK govt is when it comes to internet monitoring. Today if you try to access adult content on a UK mobile device you get blocked by age verification. You have to call your mobile provider and prove your age (it’s a once-per-contract thing). One of the ways you can prove your age is with a credit card. But I imagine it’s a large deterrent because not many people want to call Vodafo…

Quoted post unavailable.

> I was at the pool this summer and overheard this 15 year old boy ask (and then nag) a 16 year old girl what her onlyfans was bc she admitted to havi g one underage.

> What we've done to ourselves as a society in this regard is pathetic.

I fail to see how that's substantively different/worse than the cat-calling, profanities and other verbal abuse that women and girls have unfortunately suffered throughout history; often out of sight, and hence less amenable to third-party anecdotes.

Your argument would have more merit if it were based on actual data, showing some sort of historical trend. As far as I'm aware, historical trends show the exact opposite of your argument; i.e. that winding-back the clock would increase the abuse and violence that women and girls suffer.

> Meanwhile our art and entertainment these days are void of any real complex romantic plots or subplots.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosy_retrospection

> The US should actually enforce the age restrictions.

The goal is to create infrastructure and laws to censor arbitrary content, and deanonymise users. "Think of the children" is, as always, just a distraction.

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