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Age verification for social media, the beginning of the end for a free internet?

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Re: Age verification for social media, the beginning of the end for a free internet?

#381

Post by [deleted] »

jonplackett wrote: post #336
bluegatty wrote: post #333

It's absolutely a slippery slope - but most parents know how this is a very real thing as well. There's no controversy in having drugs, guns, alcohol, porn and other things 'behind the counter' - the intellectual debate over freedom of information is clouded by ideology. Definitely the 'slippery slope' debate is worth having, but that's way more relevant than the 'should 10-year-olds be able to do whatever' (aka all…

The point is there are much better ways to enforce this - like just setting up proper parental controls on a device. Kids can’t buy their own phone. So parents can always enforce stuff at a hardware level if they set it up properly. It would be much better to just mandate that phones set up with a kid profile cannot access social media.

[deleted]

Re: Age verification for social media, the beginning of the end for a free internet?

#382

Post by h4kunamata »

Good!

Internet has become a messy and dangerous place. Anybody with money can access it, that not necessarily means somebody with common sense.

90s, early 2000s, we would go to the internet to have good time.

2020s, people are ditching internet and new techs to afford having an offline life.

Re: Age verification for social media, the beginning of the end for a free internet?

#383

Post by bluebarbet »

lugu wrote: post #370
jonplackett wrote: post #336

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The point is there are much better ways to enforce this - like just setting up proper parental controls on a device. Kids can’t buy their own phone. So parents can always enforce stuff at a hardware level if they set it up properly. It would be much better to just mandate that phones set up with a kid profile cannot access social media.

I am curious if you know how to enforce this on a general purpose computer.

Thinking aloud here, but perhaps the answer is in the question: general-purpose computers get a free pass. Point being that kids generally don't use such things. Because otherwise I have exactly the same question as you. It's an existential question for software freedom.

Re: Age verification for social media, the beginning of the end for a free internet?

#384

Post by bluebarbet »

loopback_device wrote: post #329
drnick1 wrote: post #313

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Without American capitalism you wouldn't have computers, the Internet, smartphones, AI, electric cars and countless other things. That, and the Costco hot dogs mentioned in another reply.

Except that the www came out of Switzerland, the first electric vehicles out of Scotland and Germany, the earliest descriptions of neural networks - also Scotland, and countless other things, like Rockets and whatnot, also out of Europe. But, sure, congrats on that ARPANet thing.

Final sentence was unnecessary.

Re: Age verification for social media, the beginning of the end for a free internet?

#385

Post by nly »

hammock wrote: post #375
bluegatty wrote: post #333

It's absolutely a slippery slope - but most parents know how this is a very real thing as well. There's no controversy in having drugs, guns, alcohol, porn and other things 'behind the counter' - the intellectual debate over freedom of information is clouded by ideology. Definitely the 'slippery slope' debate is worth having, but that's way more relevant than the 'should 10-year-olds be able to do whatever' (aka all…

> It's absolutely a slippery slope The slope has already slipped. This is IDENTITY verification, not “age verification.” You cannot verify your age without uploading your ID.

In theory you could do this with 3rd party verification and zero knowledge proofs orchestrated by the users browser.

Mozilla Persona comes to mind.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Persona

This will never happen of course because the objective is to track your every move. The government want to know every pseudonym you use on every website.

Re: Age verification for social media, the beginning of the end for a free internet?

#386

Post by Aunche »

jonplackett wrote: post #336
bluegatty wrote: post #333

It's absolutely a slippery slope - but most parents know how this is a very real thing as well. There's no controversy in having drugs, guns, alcohol, porn and other things 'behind the counter' - the intellectual debate over freedom of information is clouded by ideology. Definitely the 'slippery slope' debate is worth having, but that's way more relevant than the 'should 10-year-olds be able to do whatever' (aka all…

The point is there are much better ways to enforce this - like just setting up proper parental controls on a device. Kids can’t buy their own phone. So parents can always enforce stuff at a hardware level if they set it up properly. It would be much better to just mandate that phones set up with a kid profile cannot access social media.

> like just setting up proper parental controls on a device

This is literally what is being written into California law. The OS will have an "age flag" that is configured at device setup that passed to other apps. The law explicitly was written such that it wouldn't need identity verification, but that isn't stopping scaremongers claiming it as such.

Re: Age verification for social media, the beginning of the end for a free internet?

#387

Post by noosphr »

s-zeng wrote: post #164
1vuio0pswjnm7 wrote: post #79

Back to the internet's peer-to-peer roots. Many protocols besides the www The www became infested with so-called "tech" companies acting as intermediaries (middlemen) Lots of folks making money from surveillance ad system on the www. Oversized, unmanageable websites calling themselves "platforms" The www is an ad network. Not a great place for non-commercial activity Fortunately, the internet is more than the www. Th…

I've really enjoyed playing around with https://github.com/markqvist/nomadnet and the reticulum protocol in general as a peer-to-peer alternative to www

That you link to a github is ironic in the worst way possible.

Re: Age verification for social media, the beginning of the end for a free internet?

#388

Post by txrx0000 »

bluegatty wrote: post #333

It's absolutely a slippery slope - but most parents know how this is a very real thing as well. There's no controversy in having drugs, guns, alcohol, porn and other things 'behind the counter' - the intellectual debate over freedom of information is clouded by ideology. Definitely the 'slippery slope' debate is worth having, but that's way more relevant than the 'should 10-year-olds be able to do whatever' (aka all…

> There's no controversy in having drugs, guns, alcohol, porn and other things 'behind the counter' - the intellectual debate over freedom of information is clouded by ideology.

The first three are physical things, not information. Porn can be debated, but the current age verification push is trying to impose blanket control on the entire information ecosystem. It's the digital equivalent of requiring ID to go anywhere or do anything, rather than just a few well-defined things.

Even if we view it as a good faith attempt (which it is not, remember what Edward Snowden exposed), the parental authority over a child's information diet is being transferred away from parents to tech companies. They're legally mandating you to give away your child's personal info (just age for now, but they'll demand more if we give them this) and make the decisions on what is suitable, instead of you making those decisions for your child.

Re: Age verification for social media, the beginning of the end for a free internet?

#389

Post by bradford »

jonplackett wrote: post #336
bluegatty wrote: post #333

It's absolutely a slippery slope - but most parents know how this is a very real thing as well. There's no controversy in having drugs, guns, alcohol, porn and other things 'behind the counter' - the intellectual debate over freedom of information is clouded by ideology. Definitely the 'slippery slope' debate is worth having, but that's way more relevant than the 'should 10-year-olds be able to do whatever' (aka all…

The point is there are much better ways to enforce this - like just setting up proper parental controls on a device. Kids can’t buy their own phone. So parents can always enforce stuff at a hardware level if they set it up properly. It would be much better to just mandate that phones set up with a kid profile cannot access social media.

I've been battling with locking down my kid's devices for much of my life.

I haven't found a parental control feature that works: we've tried several, but, generally, nothing survives the 'Hey, I'll just factory reset the device and start with a clean out-of-box-experience' bypass. Kids can figure this stuff out.

Even when we thought that things were under control, kids can easily procure new devices. Many families don't dispose of their old phones; it's not too hard for kids to find an older model that's been sitting around collecting dust, bring it to the schoolyard, and trade it like a baseball card.

I wish I had a good answer, and, distasteful as the age-verification might be, I'm open to such draconian measures at this point. If you say there are better ways to enforce this, I'd honestly love to hear the specifics.

Re: Age verification for social media, the beginning of the end for a free internet?

#390

Post by txrx0000 »

tifik wrote: post #376
jonplackett wrote: post #365

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The proposed solution though is that all adults going into the store have to provide their full name and address and have it recorded by the store to buy alcohol - or any other +18 product they want to buy. These things are not equal.

And that is where details matter. You can implement age verification in such a way that no data gets transmitted anywhere. Ofc I wouldn't expect Meta to not take a chance of collecting even more user data and blame a law for doing it, but if the law is written well enough, it won't mandate a specific method. If it does, definitely oppose it imo.

Age verification implies that some authority, usually the tech company, checks your age. It's mandatory personal data harvesting. A method that doesn't require data to be transmitted anywhere is just local permissions and filtering. The tech company should broadcast the metadata of the content they're serving, then the decision to filter it should be made on the client-side according to the device owner's preferences. But big tech is constantly trying to sabotage this permission model by removing root from phones, mandating cloud accounts to use your computer, etc.
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