so as to not hold the liability bag, devs will publish the majority of their apps as 18+ (we're back to the 2000s with porn banner ads everywhere), and children will ask their parents to use their computer (orly owl).
Meta Platforms: Lobbying, dark money, and the App Store Accountability Act
421–430 of 1001 posts
Re: Meta Platforms: Lobbying, dark money, and the App Store Accountability Act
#422Does this surprise anyone, just over a decade ago there was a whistleblower who said the government was spying on its own citizens. The president and half the country called him a traitor. The only way to stop this from happening is half the country refuse to buy any tech that implements OS age verification. That includes working any job that also requires the use of that tech(Basically all jobs). The only thing that…
> The president and half the country called him a traitor.
Turns out they were right
Re: Meta Platforms: Lobbying, dark money, and the App Store Accountability Act
#423Not surprisingly, Meta is possibly the worst "offender" behind funding of these campaigns.
They're a government contractor specializing in identity and a monopoly who loves not being regulated. They're really a straw donor - this is the government donating money to lobby itself. All of this is money leaving the government proper and being put through barely two degrees of indirection to be sent both to politicians whose job is to direct the government, and to the media to misdirect the public.
This (an end to general purpose computing) isn't anything that people can prevent through civil channels. It will happen with or without public approval. You will have as much control over it as you had over the decision to go to war with Iran. It will never be on any ballot. People who help will get rich, people who don't, won't. Eventually, people who help will barely be middle class, and people who don't, won't. Their kids will own your kids.
Re: Meta Platforms: Lobbying, dark money, and the App Store Accountability Act
#424Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sometimes something good (ATT). Sometimes something bad (this terrible age-verification thing that is a huge barrier to entry for small entrants and comes with massive state surveillance risk). In the end, all the little people are just collateral damage or occasionally they get some collateral benefits from wherever the munitions land.
Personally I've lived in the world of "small entrants" and can see that but I think the average voter doesn't really understand that "just anybody" could have created an online service. That is, they think you have to have VC money, be based in Silicon Valley, have to have connections at tha pp store, that it's a right for "them" and not for "us".
This isn't about the average voter-- this is about an entrenched industry creating structural barriers to entry to protect growing monopoly power.
Re: Meta Platforms: Lobbying, dark money, and the App Store Accountability Act
#425Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I want age verification Why?
Because it's absurd to allow children to simply click "I am 18." Nowhere else works like this.
R-rated movies, explicit graphic novels, health/anatomy books, romance novels. All example of material that are contemporary harmful to minors yet are simply accessible to minors. In the recent past you could add contraception and talking about STDs
The absurdity here comes from the fact that this is only illegal when one convinces a group of wetware about the dangers of porn addiction and LGBT, even more absurd this can only be done through misinformation since neither LGBT grooming rings nor porn addiction are real.
I see the absurdity in pushing for laws in the hope of preventing a disease that only exists in your mind? Can you? I believe you can if you step out of idpol and look at the cold data/dollars.
Re: Meta Platforms: Lobbying, dark money, and the App Store Accountability Act
#426Does this surprise anyone, just over a decade ago there was a whistleblower who said the government was spying on its own citizens. The president and half the country called him a traitor. The only way to stop this from happening is half the country refuse to buy any tech that implements OS age verification. That includes working any job that also requires the use of that tech(Basically all jobs). The only thing that…
> The only way to stop this from happening is half the country refuse to buy any tech that implements OS age verification No, the way to stop it is to talk to your representatives . You have the power. You just have to pick up a phone, and ask your friends, relatives, neighbors, to do the same. (They will, because it affects all of them.) Tell your reps to remove the legislation or you're voting them out. They don't…
> the way to stop it is to talk to your representatives.
I keep seeing this advice, yet whenever it actually matters, it doesn't really work
No amount of talking to representatives stopped the genocide in Gaza, no amount of talking to representatives is stopping what the US is doing now in Iran
Majority of Congress voted to continue war in Iran, despite an overwhelming majority of Americans being opposed to it
Re: Meta Platforms: Lobbying, dark money, and the App Store Accountability Act
#427Compare this to what the EU built. The EU Digital Identity Wallet under eIDAS 2.0 is open-source, self-hostable, and uses zero-knowledge proofs. You can prove you're over 18 without revealing your birth date, your name, or anything else. No per-check fees, no proprietary SDKs, no data going to a vendor's cloud. The EU's Digital Services Act puts age verification obligations on Very Large Online Platforms (45M+ monthl…
Zero knowledge proofs stops corporations from tracking you, but they don't stop the government from tracking which websites you visit.
They also require hardware attestation for them to work, which means you will be only allow to use a locked-down goverment-approved OS for age verification, and that opens the door for the government to control the software running on every device.
Re: Meta Platforms: Lobbying, dark money, and the App Store Accountability Act
#428Anyone reading this purely as a child safety or campaign finance story might miss the broader architectural war happening here. If you zoom out a little, this is the inevitable, scorched-earth retaliation for Apple's ATT rollout from a few years back. Apple cost Meta billions by cutting off their data pipeline at the OS level, justifying it with a unilateral privacy moral high ground. Now, Meta is returning the favor…
That law is perhaps an annoyance for Apple, but it can't cost them billions, can it? I seriously doubt that it would cost Apple more than the several hundred million dollars Meta still needs to funnel in order to get those laws passed in more states. Plus, Apple gets to be the gatekeeper for Meta and other apps which can't be good for meta, and Apple gets to know the age of its users, which in itself is monetizable.
> That law is perhaps an annoyance for Apple, but it can't cost them billions, can it?
The CEO has 24h in the day, and he/she is asked to be deposed (laws and legal system has that power), it chips away from grand visions. It isnt just money, you cant just stand up a team and be done with it. Everybody will be coming at you.
Expect to see a lot "Y alleges Apple didnt do enough to protect kids" and the burden of proof will be on Apple to make their executives available.
Re: Meta Platforms: Lobbying, dark money, and the App Store Accountability Act
#429I'm not sure I fully grok the hypothesis that Meta is materially advantaged by pushing for OS-level age verification. I suppose its another intelligence signal for ad targeting, but they have to believe that at least on platforms like iOS this signal is going to be obfuscated from them. Its hard to believe it'd be any more valuable than the other non-verified heuristics they're already gathering. Arguably they would…
> I'm not sure I fully grok the hypothesis that Meta is materially advantaged by pushing for OS-level age verification. These laws, that attempt to move "age verification" into the OS, 100% absolve Meta (and all the Meta owned "properties") from any legal liability so long as all of Meta's app's follow the law's required "ask the OS for the age signal of the user". Any "bad stuff" which then gets shown to "underage u…
My point is that they already know how old you are, within some confidence interval, even if you never tell them or you lie to them, because they actively watch what you do and classify your behaviors with your age cohort. So why do they care so much that they gain another signal that only says "the user is over 18" rather than a much more valuable signal like "the user is 36 and lives in Albany" that they'd gain by doing the KYC internally?
I don't think absolution of legal liability has ever crossed any of these fools' empty heads. The threat of being fined & punished by the USG for doing something bad hasn't been a factor in corporate decision-making for decades.
Re: Meta Platforms: Lobbying, dark money, and the App Store Accountability Act
#430When I moved from Sweden to Ireland and realized the Swedish central address registry makes moving fantastically easy, I started dreaming of a central registry where consumers and producers could meet. I can give my supplier access to exactly the information they need, and nothing else. I can revoke access when I feel like it. Like OAuth2 for personal data. They can subscribe to updates. It could be a federated proto…
Your idea has been implemented as datapods: https://www.capitalnumbers.com/blog/data-pod-decentralized-d...
It seems dead though...