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How will Australia's under-16 social media ban work? We asked the law's enforcer (2024)

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Re: How will Australia's under-16 social media ban work? We asked the law's enforcer (2024)

#31

Post by Dylan16807 »

WarOnPrivacy wrote: post #9
Dylan16807 wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess it depends on what the ID data is? If it's just a couple pictures and maybe not even your name then there's not much impact in a leak.

> I guess it depends on what the ID data is? At the minimimum it will be Everything on a Gov ID All info demanded during the original collection process + demands that get added v2, v3 ... All possible metadata Data from other sources, added downstream to make it more valuable to govs/corps The ages of leak victims: 16 and 17 yo Under 16 because many will try Everyone else

That doesn't much line up with the process described in the article. Why would you try to derive their age from photo/video if you have access to their birth certificate, for example?

Re: How will Australia's under-16 social media ban work? We asked the law's enforcer (2024)

#32

Post by proxynoproxy »

Grand Censor Fascist Julie Inman Grant, Cyber Karen of Australia, will get her wish - excommunication of the Australian people.

Social media will block Australian users of all ages. Australian users were really not that valuable anyway, and this just isn’t worth the trouble.

Re: How will Australia's under-16 social media ban work? We asked the law's enforcer (2024)

#33

Post by proxynoproxy »

ggm wrote: post #16

Homomorphic encryption and trusted third parties. It's what the Australian Privacy Commission, and the CSIRO (government funded (commonwealth) scientific industrial research organisation) said would probably work.

Nah, that kid of math is illegal in Australia.

“The laws of mathematics are very commendable, but the only law that applies in Australia is the law of Australia”

Re: How will Australia's under-16 social media ban work? We asked the law's enforcer (2024)

#34

Post by noselasd »

mcdeltat wrote: post #23
jakub_g wrote: post #21

> 84% of 8- to 12-year-olds are already on social media. And interestingly, we asked, "Were your parents or any adults aware that you were setting up these social media accounts early?" And 80% of them said yes. And in 90% of cases, it was parents that helped them set up their accounts What's preventing the parents to do the account creation verification for the kids, and then kids just taking over the account? (Unle…

84% of 8 year olds? What the heck? What is an 8 year old even doing on social media? I knew many teenagers use social media, but kids under 10? Sure there's no way social media is a meaningful/useful experience at that stage of brain and social development.

8 year olds can watch TikTok videos for hours

Re: How will Australia's under-16 social media ban work? We asked the law's enforcer (2024)

#35

Post by XorNot »

notTooFarGone wrote: post #19
WarOnPrivacy wrote: post #5

From top AU banning official: all [age verification methods] have privacy implications. There was big concern with providing government ID. But there are digital identity providers... This is the point where Gov officials shift from talking about privacy concerns to pretending. In this case, she's predictably offloading responsibility to a 3rd party provider. I will guess the official is minimally aware that leaks ar…

What I don't get is why not use the fucking ID card? The government can build a service to verify ones identity and age and social media apps don't have to save IDs. The whole privacy shit is just weaseling out of responsibility.

There's no national ID card in Australia, and the law specifically (because there was a large outcry against it) disallows providers from only allowing the use of official ID to verify age.

Because the reality of course is, if you absolutely had to determine how old someone is...you'd ask for their ID. That's how pubs do it, and someone somewhere has had the galaxy-brain idea of going "well, sometimes bouncers just know so like, can't a computer do that?" without really thinking through the constraints of the problem (or that an absolute ton of underage people still get through).

EDIT: It's worth adding - ID cards don't work for this either. The most obvious thing to do is just photoshop the ID you send whoever. But that of course creates a real problem for the "protecting the kids" people. Modern AI would let you run a client-side web-app which would fake an ID for you, but legally the issue with fake ID is that it's considered "forging official documents" which is a crime on the part of the person doing it not the person being fooled by it.

Which in turn means that your "protect the kids" policy is actually a "prosecute the kids policy" if you setup a situation where a bunch of people are pretty likely to think (without knowing the ramifications) that they should just send a fake ID image.

Re: How will Australia's under-16 social media ban work? We asked the law's enforcer (2024)

#36

Post by XorNot »

Calamityjanitor wrote: post #28

Poor Grant in this article was always against the law but now has to talk as if it's a good idea. I looked into who was pushing for this law; a personality on a Murdoch owned radio station, along with Murdoch's News corp, a TV advertising company owner, and Jonathan Haidt as mentioned in the article, who is an anti-woke anti-academia hack https://3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2024/07/why-academics-... Feels weird and…

Well, it's also because apparently the gambling lobby donates a ton of money to whoever is in government and there's just absolutely no possible way we could stop every vacant TV spot, bus side and radio station being wall to wall sports betting advertising.

Roll out Matt Damon to talk about the potential of it!

Re: How will Australia's under-16 social media ban work? We asked the law's enforcer (2024)

#37

Post by reshlo »

mianos wrote: post #15

As an Australian parent of a 14-year-old, I find social media to be a significant hassle. Yet, I know delivery drivers who are far more technologically proficient than many government leaders. I had expected that, even if the public face was somewhat just a pretty face and a good talker, there would be a knowledgeable team working behind the scenes. However, this ban has convinced me that there isn’t a single informe…

And if you weren’t already convinced, along comes the article to drive that point home…

> “I think the genesis of this movement has been Jonathan Haidt, author of the book The Anxious Generation, and he even admits some of the research is mixed. And it's true that it is not necessarily causal.”

Re: How will Australia's under-16 social media ban work? We asked the law's enforcer (2024)

#38

Post by aaplok »

kennysoona wrote: post #8

It can't work. Teens will just jump to mastodon instances. I can even see it being the case where running an instance become like being able to make fake ids or sell some weed or something, one person will do it and be cool have friends because of that. Parents won't know about it and it won't raise any flags in logs if done well. Not to mention just using a VPN or something.

There are many things that are illegal to minors around the world, and that teenagers do anyway. That's what (healthy) teenagers do: disobey.

The purpose of these laws is to make it illegal for adults to encourage those behaviours.

Re: How will Australia's under-16 social media ban work? We asked the law's enforcer (2024)

#39

Post by reshlo »

somanyphotons wrote: post #26
kennysoona wrote: post #8

It can't work. Teens will just jump to mastodon instances. I can even see it being the case where running an instance become like being able to make fake ids or sell some weed or something, one person will do it and be cool have friends because of that. Parents won't know about it and it won't raise any flags in logs if done well. Not to mention just using a VPN or something.

> It can't work Depends on what 'work' means. Pre-internet Australia had pretty strong media censorship. I view this a quiet attempt to disentangle Australia from any foreign company that isn't willing to jump through longer-term censorship hoops.

There’s also that law allowing the Australian government to compel any tech employee in Australia to covertly insert a backdoor into the encrypted communication systems that their employer builds, which feels very similar.

> The founder of an encrypted messaging app who left Australia for Switzerland after police unexpectedly visited an employee’s home says he had left because of Australia’s “hostile” stance against developers building privacy-focused apps…

> Linton also pointed to the expected arrival of age assurance for social media, as well as a new code coming into effect in December on cloud and encrypted messaging providers from the eSafety commissioner, as other evidence of the hostile environment for privacy-focused apps.

https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2024/nov/05/sessi...

Re: How will Australia's under-16 social media ban work? We asked the law's enforcer (2024)

#40

Post by mianos »

reshlo wrote: post #37
mianos wrote: post #15

As an Australian parent of a 14-year-old, I find social media to be a significant hassle. Yet, I know delivery drivers who are far more technologically proficient than many government leaders. I had expected that, even if the public face was somewhat just a pretty face and a good talker, there would be a knowledgeable team working behind the scenes. However, this ban has convinced me that there isn’t a single informe…

And if you weren’t already convinced, along comes the article to drive that point home… > “I think the genesis of this movement has been Jonathan Haidt, author of the book The Anxious Generation, and he even admits some of the research is mixed. And it's true that it is not necessarily causal.”

I am pretty sure that even without social media, I would face similar challenges in other aspects of life. Growing up in an era without the internet did not prevent my brother from engaging in all sorts of outrageous, and even illegal, antics. The defining characteristic of social media, however, is its unparalleled provision of convenient access to anxiety.
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