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New Arkansas bill to keep minors off social media exempts most social platforms

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Re: New Arkansas bill to keep minors off social media exempts most social platforms

#131
post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yea that's BS. I didn't have any ID till I was 16 and got a driver's license. A lot of kids, like city kids, don't get one till years later. Are they planning to create a new type of ID for children? I wouldn't want my kids anywhere near social media either, but I wouldn't want to rely on the state to track and police their behaviour.

The law intentionally bans people under 18 (unless they get parental permission). So people under 16 not having IDs doesn't matter I don't think, since even if they did have IDs they would still be banned (unless they get parental permission).

The law prohibits people under 18 from being account holders without parental permission, but also requires “reasonable age verification” of all accountholders.

Being a minor and having parental permission does not bypass the age verification requirement (in fact, that’s how the platform identifies minors), which is what government ID is enumerated as a means to satisfy.

But, from a data security and privacy perspective its worse, because it maximizes initial distribution of PII by explicitly requiring use of a third-party vendor for age verification of all account holders, so you can’t limit use of platforms to vendors you trust, because they have to outsource age verification.

On the PII side, on the other hand, in what seems clearly to be a drafting error, as written, the law does not allow a social media company to retain “any identifying information of the individual” once access has been granted to the service, which... would be tricky to comply with.

Re: New Arkansas bill to keep minors off social media exempts most social platforms

#132

I'm baffled by the general lack of absolute outrage around these recent bills requiring government issued ID to use the internet. Most of the comments here are discussing irrelevant nuances like "oh, well it seems to only apply to platforms above a certain size," while ignoring the atrocity that these bills represent for the freedoms and privacy that we've all taken for granted up until now. Get your bloody hands off…

We require government ID for people to buy alcohol, because we don’t want children doing it. How is this any different? I agree this law is ridiculous, though.

For one, the scope is much more massive. One surrounds a single beverage category, the other basically every online communication platform. If the world wasn't more and more online, I could maybe consider the scope acceptable.

Another is how much it messes up the user flow. Buying alcohol? Hand over a plastic card to a cashier for a few seconds. Accessing a new website you want to try out? Scan your driver's license, upload to this random site, have it likely go through some black box algorithm that you hopefully don't get falsely flagged with no human response, and you're good. And that's the good flow. I don't want to imagine the headache of manual checking for every site.

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