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US Bill Mandates On-Device Age Verification

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Re: US Bill Mandates On-Device Age Verification

#221

Post by kmeisthax »

progval wrote: post #29
kmeisthax wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Facebook. There's a wave of child endangerment lawsuits incoming and they want to head that off at the pass by having governments shift all that liability over to the OS vendors.

How does that help Facebook? They already have plenty of signals to guess their users' age, what would they do with an other one? They are not going to ban children anyway.

Every one of these age assurance laws basically says:

1. The OS vendor must provide an age bucket using the minimum amount of data necessary

2. App vendors (i.e. Facebook) must use the OS vendor's age buckets to determine age

The idea is that the next time Facebook gets hit with a child endangerment lawsuit, they can say "Well, we used the age buckets the government told us to, and they said the plaintiff was 18+, so we're not liable".

This, of course, assumes that most social media and Internet regulation will continue being targeted at children only, both because courts are reluctant to enforce 1A on laws that censor children[0] and because the current political class actually benefits from the harms Facebook does to adults. Like, a good chunk of government surveillance is just buying data from Google and Facebook.

[0] The root password to the US constitution is "th1nk0fth3cHIldren!!1" after all

Re: US Bill Mandates On-Device Age Verification

#222

Post by mcmcmc »

GaryBluto wrote: post #219
HumblyTossed wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would rather them write a bill that says all kids are provided lunches at schools ("free lunch" if you will). I believe that would help kids out much more than this shit bill would.

>("free lunch" if you will). TANSTAAFL.

Whoa you mean public services are funded by taxes? I knew those free books at the library were too good to be true

Re: US Bill Mandates On-Device Age Verification

#223

Post by mindslight »

Ajedi32 wrote: post #183

Based on the few snippets quoted in the article, I think as written this bill gets closer to a good, privacy-preserving, non-authoritarian version of "age verification" than any of the attempts so far. What it seems to be aiming for is essentially mandatory parental controls at the OS level. No ID checking or government/third party involvement, it just uses whatever age the parents enter when they set up the device/u…

No, this technical implementation is straightforwardly bad. The information flow and point of decision making are completely backwards as the bill was written by Facebook/Meta purely to absolve themselves of liability and foist it into others, including onto parents themselves!

The right way to facilitate parental controls with legislation is to put a requirement on service providers [over a certain number of users] to publish well-known tags stating the age suitability of their site/app/pages. Then put a requirement on mass-market device manufacturers [over a certain size] to include parental control software that can filter based on these tags. When parental controls are enabled on a device, any site/app without tags "fails closed" and doesn't display - meaning the open web and open devices continue to coexist with the tag system.

The key parts 1. the information signals flow the correct way, from the company with a well-known identity to the end-users' device where it can be acted upon per the device owner's desires 2. the legal liability lands in the right place - tags signify legal representations of the suitability of content and 3. the long tail of small-scale websites and devices are completely unaffected

This would also leave the makers of parental control software (bundled with device or third-party aftermarket) free to implement additional features that parents desire (eg block social media, even if the site says it's fine for <18), rather than leaving those decisions entirely in the hands of corporate lawyers (as this bill does, because once again it was written by Facebook/Meta).

Re: US Bill Mandates On-Device Age Verification

#224

Post by gibsonsmog »

HumblyTossed wrote: post #217
snaking0776 wrote: post #116

Politicians will do any draconian measure to help kids except try and improve the lives of their parents so that they can actually dedicate time to parenting. Making it slightly harder to access the internet fixes nothing. What if instead of having the largest prison population in the world our government supported communities that make raising good children possible? Our society needs to lose this urge to diagnose e…

I would rather them write a bill that says all kids are provided lunches at schools ("free lunch" if you will). I believe that would help kids out much more than this shit bill would.

Feed, cloth and educate our population? What's next? Structure society in a way that benefits the people? How horrifying!

Re: US Bill Mandates On-Device Age Verification

#225

Post by edg5000 »

Ajedi32 wrote: post #183

Based on the few snippets quoted in the article, I think as written this bill gets closer to a good, privacy-preserving, non-authoritarian version of "age verification" than any of the attempts so far. What it seems to be aiming for is essentially mandatory parental controls at the OS level. No ID checking or government/third party involvement, it just uses whatever age the parents enter when they set up the device/u…

It's always the same pattern. There is no way to protect the children while also preserving freedom. The rationale behind it is irrelevant. For this to work everything would have to be locked down right?

This is not in the interest of the people nor any children.

Re: US Bill Mandates On-Device Age Verification

#227

Post by mistrial9 »

gnarlouse wrote: post #203

Listen, I would actually be willing to support something like this, but Jesus Christ when will we put somebody in congress with a CS background who can literally just chime in and say "use Zero Knowledge Proofs for this, people might actually buy that you're not just building a surveillance state."

there is a significant population in management, court and law enforcement that does support state-mandated registration using full profile ID for using public infrastructure. It was on the railroad system in the USA, and was part of the profound shift to individual cars.

Re: US Bill Mandates On-Device Age Verification

#228

Post by enceladus06 »

throw1234567891 wrote: post #182
snaking0776 wrote: post #116

Politicians will do any draconian measure to help kids except try and improve the lives of their parents so that they can actually dedicate time to parenting. Making it slightly harder to access the internet fixes nothing. What if instead of having the largest prison population in the world our government supported communities that make raising good children possible? Our society needs to lose this urge to diagnose e…

> Politicians will do any draconian measure to help kids except try and improve the lives of their parents so that they can actually dedicate time to parenting. Because in their eyes your children are not your children. You are simply a custodian of their future work force asset. If you educate your children too much into individualism, they (today’s politicians) may see a diminished return of whatever they want to a…

Translation: government is the problem not the solution.

Re: US Bill Mandates On-Device Age Verification

#229

Post by edg5000 »

laughing_man wrote: post #133

I'm glad I got to see the era where the internet was useful and exciting. I feel like every major change since about 2010 has pushed it more toward blandness and made it less useful. This will be a big one. They're building the groundwork for a world-wide dystopia.

I always felt this moment would come eventually. The trend is centralisation of power and control. It's depressing. It's been a long time coming at a slow but consistent cadence.

Re: US Bill Mandates On-Device Age Verification

#230

Post by BatteryMountain »

This is so dumb. There are 100 other ways to protect children that would be more effective than this. Not only will this approach not actually protect children, this will violate the privacy of billions of people. It will introduce identity theft at mass scale (good luck solving that on short notice) and it will make activist/journalists/military/political opposition vulnerable. Perhaps this is the purpose. Who would benefit from such a scenario...mmm?
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