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Do Not Turn Child Protection into Internet Access Control

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Re: Do Not Turn Child Protection into Internet Access Control

#371

Post by choo-t »

NeutralCrane wrote: post #96
bilekas wrote: post #9

It's too late and never about children, simply deeper forms of data harvesting and surveillance. What makes me extremely sad and concerned is that more recent generations simply have no idea or expectation of privacy online anymore. There will never be more of a fight against all this Orwellian behavior.

I live in an area that has been declared among the safest in America. Two months ago a 17 year old girl from our city disappeared. Turns out she had been being groomed for a year over Discord and in Roblox by a 39 year old the next state over. He eventually convinced her to let him pick her up, after which he filmed himself having sex with her, killed her, and then dismembered her body. He apparently was grooming oth…

> But declaring the situation to simply be a facade to harvest people’s data seems to me like a reflexive response to avoid uncomfortable truths regarding the situation.

Well, your example wouldn't be solved by age verification in any way. They could still legally access Roblox or a discord private chat (or even another private chat method) after this law.

So the example show how it is about irrational fear and not protection in any way.

And this is an tragic edge case, if you want to take this kind of edge case in consideration, you also have to take in consideration what the age verification would imply as tragic edge case.

Re: Do Not Turn Child Protection into Internet Access Control

#372

Post by mk89 »

They are doing crazy things to not do the one single thing that had to be done years ago - make Facebook, Instagram and Co. pay hard for the damage they brought on our kids and society. 90% of the crap our kids are exposed to comes from there. Not sure what's left to tackle, once you remove these websites from the picture - videogames? News??

Oh right, the kids...

Re: Do Not Turn Child Protection into Internet Access Control

#373

Post by PeterStuer »

abracadaniel wrote: post #273
totetsu wrote: post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s not very soon, it’s already the case that if one wants to enable the latest models in the OpenAI api you have to submit your details to their “identity provider”.

Which is why it’s important to be able to run models locally. Which also might explain the strategy behind buying all of the memory that is or will exist for at least a year out. Maybe we’ll eventually see AI safety be used to prevent people from running local models.

You mean having to sign into your Microsoft account to get your bootloader co-signed before your legally mandated TPU 3.1 allows you to install a govenment blessed and sufficiently telemetrized signed OS to "your" computer if you are on the whitelist of not-yet-misinformation-spreaders?

Re: Do Not Turn Child Protection into Internet Access Control

#374

Post by malwrar »

gruez wrote: post #156
tangotaylor wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Their real goals are even worse than that. Some of these groups have admitted they're also about suppressing LGBT+ content. As the Heritage Foundation admitted: > Keeping trans content away from children is protecting kids. No child should be conditioned to think that permanently damaging their healthy bodies to try to become something they can never be is even remotely a good idea. https://arstechnica.com/tech-polic…

>they're also about suppressing LGBT+ content >> Keeping trans content away [...] Isn't it a stretch to round off "trans content" to "LGBT+ content"? I mean, from a pure logical point of view the statement is correct, because "trans content" is a subset of "LGBT+ content", and therefore "suppressing LGBT+ content" is technically correct, but it's at least misleading. The left's version of this would be something like…

> Isn't it a stretch to round off "trans content" to "LGBT+ content"?

Not really. Do you think the people attempting to ban trans content are otherwise fine with kids being gay/lesbian/etc? Do you think they view gay/lesbian identities as legitimate, rather than unnatural perversion? It’s the same rhetoric in my experience, we’re all just deviants making choices. It seems like casual uninvested people just got used to gays being in the public eye and anti-gay people lost the ability to get anyone to care about that position. Turns out they’re just normal people trying to live their lives.

> Immigrants being lynched is certainly a subset of "anti-immigration", but it's still misleading

I don’t think your analogy works unless you believe that transgender people are uniquely extreme compared to other identities. If true, I think that more shows your prejudice than anything. Maybe if enough trans people end up in the public eye, casual uninvested people will stop thinking negatively about trans people generally too. Maybe one day they’re realize we’re just people trying to live our lives.

Re: Do Not Turn Child Protection into Internet Access Control

#375

Post by txrx0000 »

BlackFly wrote: post #349
txrx0000 wrote: post #316

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The California law is horrible because it forces everyone to let tech companies and governments decide what's suitable for children, rather than let parents decide. It's telling parents to give every app their child's age and trust that the apps will do the right thing. It also legitimizes personal data collection (in this case, the user's age) for every app and service on the Internet that wants to know your age. Th…

The California law is the closest thing to what we do in the physical world but better. We already decided as a society to limit the purchase of pornography, gambling, alcohol, tobacco, prostitution, drugs, via age gates and require the merchant to be liable for that. We already find this reasonable as a society. The California law recognizes the tracking problems of requiring a verifiable id online and instead recog…

We have decided as a society to age-gate the purchase of a very small selection of goods and services, but this did not require a law that says all merchants have the right to know your age. And in this case, it's not even just all merchants, but anyone that serves you any kind of information. The real world equivalent of this California bill would be more like: anyone you've ever talked to has the right to know your age.

A more reasonable approach would be for parents to keep tabs on (or for stricter parents, control) who their child is associating with and where they're going, and advise their child on who/what to stay away from if they're out alone. And of course that takes parenting effort. The digital equivalent of this are things like password-gating app installation in the OS and website-blocking in the WiFi router. But I will say, I don't think these kinds of analogies are good because the Internet is too different from the physical world.

And let's not underestimate the tracking power of a legally mandated data point: the age contains about 6 bits of information that can be used to identify your user account on the Internet across apps and websites, even if your inputted age is fake.

Re: Do Not Turn Child Protection into Internet Access Control

#376

Post by verisimi »

2duct wrote: post #369
verisimi wrote: post #358

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I was a kid with unrestricted, unsupervised internet access, and it definitely affected many things in my life. If I happen to have a child in the future, they won't go through that. I've heard this a few times, but what was so bad? And, sorry to break it you, reality has some bad bits to it - do you think being ignorant of these is useful, or that it just sets you up for a bigger fall? Why do you think removing in…

To me the question is more who is going to nanny me, and ideally its myself (the mature option), but in my experience starting as a child and going into adulthood, mental health can break this down to where people can't nanny/take care of themselves. In that case, the question at hand is: who is going to protect you from yourself? The state? Your family? Your friends? Oftentimes the answer is "nobody". There's just n…

I agree, and thank you for your comment.

However, I don't think the medical establishment will necessarily help. Or looking outside generally - this will probably only compound or defer the problem. You will have to deal with it yourself in the end. I believe everyone already has all they need in themselves to do this.

Re: Do Not Turn Child Protection into Internet Access Control

#377

Post by simonask »

kdheiwns wrote: post #268
simonask wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I truly share your concerns, especially as someone belonging to a minority. At the same time, we have to be real: Online anonymity has significant, real-world drawbacks. I don't think it's reasonable to keep dreaming of the 90s or 00s when the internet was a comparatively innocent place. As society is more and more digitized, the stakes become much, much higher. An information leak 30 years ago was bad, but it had a…

I feel like I see these comments basically verbatim and it's freaking me out. The whole "I share your concerns, but hear me out: anonymity is bad." It's basically identical wording every single time. I think people who say this should back it up by posting their full name, date of birth, SSN or other ID number, and address. A phone number would also be helpful so we can call and verify that they made the post. Otherw…

Never once did I say that "anonymity is bad", but people in this thread and piling on as if that's what I said. I said there are drawbacks, and that those drawbacks are real.

Re: Do Not Turn Child Protection into Internet Access Control

#378

Post by jiggawatts »

Auracle wrote: post #272
simonask wrote: post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OK, sure, there’s going to be confused and vulnerable people making mistakes. As I understand it, the detrans community is a tiny fraction of an already tiny fraction who ever in their life identified as trans. This isn’t an actual risk to anybody, and I can’t believe I have to say that.

It’s weird to say in the same comment “it happens but as far as I know it’s rare” and “this isn’t an actual risk to anybody.” I do wonder how many would detransition if it wasn’t too embarrassing for them or because they’re effectively stuck that way if they did bottom surgery. Certainly I’m sure there are many more that quietly do it and not be a part of a community around it - I know of one person who did. I’m sure…

> It’s weird to say in the same comment “it happens but as far as I know it’s rare” and “this isn’t an actual risk to anybody.”

Orders of magnitude more people are maimed, disfigured, or outright killed by:

1. Guns.

2. Vehicles.

3. Alcohol.

Weirdly, suspiciously weirdly, the people that are vehemently for age-verification to protect potential trans-indoctrination victims from any risk of bodily harm are the very same people that are very much in favour of those three things. Or at least, show zero apparent interest in using age verification to block 2nd amendment nuts spreading their propaganda -- and I use the word very literally -- because the NRA is funded by Russia[1], or blocking young impressionable kids watching Nascar and being influenced to engage in dangerous speeding, or blocking alcohol advertising from ever being seen by a minor.

[1] https://www.npr.org/2019/09/27/764879242/nra-was-foreign-ass...

Re: Do Not Turn Child Protection into Internet Access Control

#379

Post by simonask »

fc417fc802 wrote: post #259
simonask wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I truly share your concerns, especially as someone belonging to a minority. At the same time, we have to be real: Online anonymity has significant, real-world drawbacks. I don't think it's reasonable to keep dreaming of the 90s or 00s when the internet was a comparatively innocent place. As society is more and more digitized, the stakes become much, much higher. An information leak 30 years ago was bad, but it had a…

> Online anonymity has significant, real-world drawbacks. Do please be specific about those. Provide concrete examples and justify for the class why those involved couldn't have voluntarily done away with anonymity for that particular interaction. Hypothetically someone can browse a tor site in one tab, post on 4chan in a second one, all while accessing online banking in a third. The bank can use hardware backed 2FA…

> Do please be specific about those.

Here is one example: It's likely that we will never know who was behind the attempted backdoor in the xz library, which was almost successful in making a huge number of Linux installations worldwide vulnerable to remote exploitation. [1]

That malicious contributor is protected by online anonymity. Now, I know that it's probable that a state actor was behind "Jia Tan", meaning they could have been supplied with a fake ID as well, but that's still a higher barrier.

I don't think (and have not stated) that anonymity is worthless - it definitely is, especially if you're persecuted minority or under other kinds of threat. I just don't think it's helpful to pretend that it is completely unproblematic.

[1]: https://tukaani.org/xz-backdoor/

Re: Do Not Turn Child Protection into Internet Access Control

#380

Post by simonask »

Aurornis wrote: post #241
simonask wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

> I neither believe nor did express any of the opinions you accuse me of. I directly quoted your beliefs that minor information leaks on the internet can lose your house and get you killed, as well as your claim that the internet was significantly more innocent in the past. These were the points you were putting forward along with your insistence that we have to “be real” about the problems of anonymity on the intern…

You said:

> So you are afraid of minor information leaks getting you killed, but you’re also trying to tell us that online anonymity is a bad thing?

Which is a really severe misrepresentation of my argument.

My argument is that anonymity has drawbacks, and that it's bad to just ignore those drawbacks.

> Its hard for me to believe that you don’t recognize the dissonance between the two points you were putting forward.

But there absolutely is a dissonance? This is what's called a dilemma: Online anonymity protects some people, and puts other people at risk. If competent people ignore the latter, incompetent people will be trying to solve it instead, so we get these laws.

> Your silly “Are you an American” attempt at an insult or rebuttal reveals the level of conversation you’re having, though.

Sorry about the accusation, it was somewhat flippant. It just seems you and others read an opinion that goes slightly against your own, and immediately you assume that I actually hold the polar opposite opinion, which I don't.

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