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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)

#41

Post by like_any_other »

segasaturn wrote: post #14
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…

I agree with everything you're saying about how hard the privacy issue is, but would also like to add that the social media companies are incentivized to act like they have no idea how to implement a solution, because they want teens using their apps . The Facebook Files make it abundantly clear that social companies see teen users are their most valuable asset, since the rest of the culture tends to follow where tee…

The government passed the law, and funds lots of universities with CS and cryptography programs. If there was a privacy-preserving solution, they could have proposed it themselves. Just because someone is motivated to say something, doesn't mean they're wrong.

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

#43

Post by dyauspitr »

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.

Who cares? It’s not one unified place they can all congregate.

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

#45

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

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

#46

Post by antisol »

> How will Australia's under-16 social media ban work?

Ooh! Ooh! I know this one!

It won't.

There are a couple of ways I see it going.

1) Let's just say there are 300 days left before the ban takes effect. Option 1 is that in 298 days, after every tech person in the world telling them how stupid and ineffective the idea is, and when the dumb populace realises "wait now everybody is going to have to verify their id to use social media?", the law gets repealed. This will happen quietly and without any media circus, because Australia has no independent media, OR:

2) The ban goes into effect. On the same day, teens abandon social media en-masse. Nobody knows where they've gone. Weirdly, these events correlate with a spike in VPN subscriptions encrypted traffic to decentralised services.

I'm hoping for the second one - a more security aware next-generation would be a good thing.

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

#47

Post by averageRoyalty »

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.

The vast majority of teens don't have the skillset to cover their tracks like that. Although the vast majority of parents don't know how to check logs.

The issue here (as always) is a parenting one. If you are supervising your children (as is your responsibility) then these issues can't happen. I hear from people all the time that supervision is unrealistic and not feasible, from the same people who have 12+ hours of screen time reports on their phones...

No government policy or technical solution will cover for people being shitty, disconnected parents.

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

#48

Post by averageRoyalty »

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…

> The only thing is that the ban gives parents some way to say "no"

They can already say no. You know how? "No."

I think the concept of autonomy we teach to children has a lot of positives, but combined with an entire generation who want to be friends with - not parents to - their kids, it's causing a lot of problems.

You are the adult. If the kid says they want a phone, you can say no. If they want social media, you can say no. You can take away their things as punishment. You are a parent and you have a responsibility to sometimes be an arsehole when you don't want to be, for their sake.

Yes, there are consequnces to choices you make for your kids - from food to where you live to the role model you present to if they have social media. I highly doubt most normal parents have sat down and done a cost/benefit to their kids having access to this crap.

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

#49

Post by kennysoona »

averageRoyalty wrote: post #47
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.

The vast majority of teens don't have the skillset to cover their tracks like that. Although the vast majority of parents don't know how to check logs. The issue here (as always) is a parenting one. If you are supervising your children (as is your responsibility) then these issues can't happen. I hear from people all the time that supervision is unrealistic and not feasible, from the same people who have 12+ hours of…

> The vast majority of teens don't have the skillset to cover their tracks like that.

Every class has a classmate, or sibling or friend of a classmate who would have the skills, and you only need one such kid for a few hundred people.

> The issue here (as always) is a parenting one. If you are supervising your children (as is your responsibility) then these issues can't happen.

I would say teens shouldn't be supervised to this extent and pushback against such tight supervision is natural and IMO justified.

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

#50

Post by WarOnPrivacy »

Dylan16807 wrote: post #31
WarOnPrivacy wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

> That doesn't much line up with the process described in the article.

I think you're right this way: I quote part of the the official's comment, ending with ...

After that point in the comment, she pivots to FaceRec. Meanwhile I go off about problems with harvesting Gov ID data. I'd agree those two things don't align.

However, a larger point is she never actually says which tech methods will be in place in Dec 2025.

After half-dismissing Gov ID, she tosses FacRec out there in a way that suggests it'll glean age-from-face on login, without needing any other identifying info. She even qualifies a vendor as being 99% accurate - which is a worthless stat here because it has no context.

FacRec for ID is problem generator. It fails for white skin and fails more, the darker the skin is. Unlike AU's Ban official, I am not excited about tech that disproportionately misfires for AU's brown skinned population.

That's FR for ID, FR for age is magnitudes less capable. The odds it can distinguish between a teen of 15y363d and 16y0d is ~0.

Lastly she tosses beta hand-wavy tech out there as if it were an actual contender. In this interview, she should be reassuring us with known good+safe AgeVer methods. Instead, she takes a moment to tech-fantasize. Best case she's intentionally distracting us here. Worst case she's lost her own thread.

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