So what is Instagram doing?
Online age-verification tools for child safety are surveilling adults
341–350 of 371 posts
Re: Online age-verification tools for child safety are surveilling adults
#342Age verification inherently requires identity verification. The UK's Online Safety Act originally had a proposal that would allow users to purchase an ID code anonymously in cash from a corner store, presenting only ID to the cashier the same way as buying alcohol. This was never implemented, because it's more useful for the government and corporations to link all online usage to a government ID.
> Age verification inherently requires identity verification.
Not necessarily. There are facial scan tools which make a guess based on visual appearance of the face. They aren’t perfect, but they might have error rates comparable to systems which require linking to government ID systems.
Re: Online age-verification tools for child safety are surveilling adults
#343The uncomfortable part is that they try to solve a real problem (protecting minors) by requiring universal identification. In practice this means every adult has to prove who they are just to access any part of the internet. Once that infrastructure exists, it’s hard to imagine it not expanding beyond its original purpose.
Discord specifically wanted to solve this by assuming everyone was a minor until they proved their age. Minors still have access to most spaces unless that space (or DMs with adults) was flagged / identified as adult-content.
This is a pretty clear counter example to your snowball fallacy.
Re: Online age-verification tools for child safety are surveilling adults
#344Why do people fall for propaganda so easily? Just sub out the words "child" with "memory" and you get Rust. The correct response is "Yes, you do cut out a class of memory related bugs, but you invented that class arbitrarily. There is no data suggesting that your class corresponds to reality."
It makes sense for some specific situations, but the goal is always to move towards a classes society. Classes (including Types, Traits, Lifetimes) are something you use because you have to, not because you want to. They warp thinking (and traceability) in measurable ways.
Re: Online age-verification tools for child safety are surveilling adults
#345The uncomfortable part is that they try to solve a real problem (protecting minors) by requiring universal identification. In practice this means every adult has to prove who they are just to access any part of the internet. Once that infrastructure exists, it’s hard to imagine it not expanding beyond its original purpose.
Protecting children means protecting them from people who wish to harm them, that includes the government and platform owners, since these laws don't provide any actual protections to children from those two entities it's reasonable to assume that the law is trying to facilitate child exploitation rather than prevent it.
You have to keep in mind your idea of child protection is likely different from most of Americas'. The law makers' idea is to maximally enable them to perform (largely) uncompensated white collar work. Protected means that by the time they are 22 they have maximally warped their brain into an economically viable specialty and are in massive personal debt. If they make Roblox a $1M in the meantime of course that money won't go to their brainwashing, that would make them lazy.
Re: Online age-verification tools for child safety are surveilling adults
#346The EU is rolling out the EUDI system this year where citizens can verify their age (>16, >18, >21) without revealing any personal information. This is a solved problem over there.
Will this work without Google/Apple services shown down my throat?
Re: Online age-verification tools for child safety are surveilling adults
#347Earlier quoted context omitted.
Birthday, zip code and gender is enough to uniquely identify most Americans.
Well don't reveal your birthday then. Wait 5 days to confirm >18. If you run into a liquor store yelling "Im finally 18, here's proof." that's on you?
Of course you can still break the law. People are complaining that it's now illegal to do what you suggested
1 it requires DOB
2 it requires DOB to be accurate
Re: Online age-verification tools for child safety are surveilling adults
#348Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is what I'm getting at, this is an ideological position. You are of course welcome to hold it, but you will have a way worse solution forced on you by normal people who will not go along with this binary view of the world. The default position will be that kids come first.
Rejecting "trust"-based models is a purely technical position. You can disagree with my stance, but unless you have the authority to disprove me then you're just voicing an opinion too. "Trust" has no built-in validation, there is valid reason to be skeptical. I agree that the "think of the kids/terrorists/puppy killers" rhetoric is effective, but I don't think that's a reason to dilute my stance. I haven't seen a si…
Well the direction of travel now is that you provide your identification documents to all providers, that feels like a far worse solution that some trusted attestation nodes to me.
The options available are not "perfect solution" and "do nothing". It's currently "terrible solution" or we fill in the second option. If there is no perfect solution to put on the table then "do nothing" doesn't suddenly become available.
Re: Online age-verification tools for child safety are surveilling adults
#349Earlier quoted context omitted.
What's wrong with being flagged a non-adult? Being a non-adult means you are limited to supervised child-safe spaces. Child-safe doesn't mean "no adults" allowed. It means "monitored and censored"
Well, ad are supposed to be different for children, right? So in theory we would get less ads by being ID'd as a child. Now, this would probably cause a new law where they would allow child ads...
Less no, different yes. Instead of dodgy meds and dating sites we'd have games and cosmetics and whatever other junk folks are punting at adolescents. If anything, I suspect there would be more ads.
Re: Online age-verification tools for child safety are surveilling adults
#350> An FTC spokesperson told CNBC that companies must limit how collected information is used. [...] The agency pointed to existing rules requiring firms to retain personal information only as long as reasonably necessary and to safeguard its confidentiality and integrity. the very same rules that have allowed literally every single piece of my data to be leaked several separate times, and now i have free credit monito…
I prefer facial recognition. Probably good that there isn't a popular face-spoofer app, since it would put attention to the efficiency of these verifications.
Credit card info is a bad solution. In many countries they still are rare and it would very likely exclude as much adults as children.
The real answer is that while we should expect children to be online, it is the responsibility of the parents to moderate their usage. Add a standard header to every http request to support filter solutions. That is the only viable solution that is of a technical nature.
The whole ZKP idea is futile, no model works if you also have connection information, which states tend to save too.
Anonymous internet usage is pretty awesome. For adults and kids for that matter. And that doesn't change because there are also bad advertisers that practically can identify and track you. If you want to protect kids, have those be imprisoned first. Strong opinion, I know, but also the correct one.