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Illinois just told every operating system to start reporting your kid's age

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Re: Illinois just told every operating system to start reporting your kid's age

#81
post #21

Background: Meta/Facebook, Google and Apple all support age verification. It gives them legal cover and for their ad platforms gives better data. But Meta/FB have been strongly lobbying to make it required at the OS level, so they aren't responsible for it, whereas Google and Apple both want it to be an application responsibility. I think the CA version of this ended up with a carve-out for open source? I can't recal…

> all support age verification No, they all support harvesting your data so they can continue doing what they do best: building shadow profiles and targeting ads. Nothing a signal of an age group tells them more than "send me more ads for XX year-olds". Why do you think it's always a question asked in online surveys?

eh, I'd say their lawyers want them to not be liable for the utter harms their apps have on children.

The other stuff they already get enough off. They dont need to know you're over 18. They don't want the liabilities of children killing themselves because an AI app told them something stupid.

Re: Illinois just told every operating system to start reporting your kid's age

#82

What's most shocking to me is the willingness to comply on display here and elsewhere. If the state proposes you stick a corncob up your rear, your initial response shouldn't be to ask if they prefer you use a rubber or wooden mallet to achieve compliance.

If the state proposed every OS must have parental controls activated via a checkbox would you say the same? Because that's what they actually did except the checkbox is a numeric text field.

Re: Illinois just told every operating system to start reporting your kid's age

#83
post #10

From reading the article, it sounds like an enforced standardisation? Like, asking for account age bracket and then having a standard API to ask for it would be easy, right? Just write it to a root owned `~/.age-bracket` for each user or something (obviously something better). It's a feature many apps implement in all kinds of ways already, especially games and social media stuff, so this, in theory, just makes it ea…

It passes responsibility and accountability from the large platforms to the open-source communities and to parents who are most likely tech illiterate. Facebook, etc. can wash their hands when they "accidentally" serve gambling ads (or whatever) to children and say "well it's not our fault the parent has the laptop misconfigured" It's classic blaming the victim.

Isn't that a good design though?

And it isn't blaming anyone, it's a design.

Re: Illinois just told every operating system to start reporting your kid's age

#84
post #65
post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The parents are the ones who should be supervising. Ok. When Alice & Bob come home from school what steps should every parent take to supervise A&B's phone and device usage over the past 48 hours? Internet history, of course - for all the browsers, including those hidden away? But what if the logs are wiped or the second BraveFoxChrome installation isn't obvious? Must every parent have an IT degree? What if the par…

If the kids are clever enough to have a second browser the parents don't know about, I'm pretty sure they'll find a way to bypass this. For example, who's stopping an older sibling giving remote desktop access to his browser? It's the same as age limits on energy drinks, alcohol, tobacco etc. More of an inconvenience than a restriction if someone is determined enough. We should focus on having parents teach their kid…

Inconvenience rather than a restriction is the point though. Less kids smoke because of the inconvenience, and the world doesn't have to become a panopticon like it would to get 100% enforcement.

Re: Illinois just told every operating system to start reporting your kid's age

#85
post #72
post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There should be parental controls that disallows installing apps, so there is no hidden browsers. Google and apple has an entire walled garden infra setup that they are using for control and hoovering up all the user data, the same infra can be uses for this.

Winner winner, chicken dinner. This, and more - device makers and those upstream of the parents need to make "child safe" phones .. and probably (uh, oh) make them that way by default so that tech savvy types can disengage restrictions (and have that restrictions lifted state glaringly obvious for non tech savvy parents). The raison d'etre for my above framed question was to highlight that non tech parents can not be…

That's basically what this law is, but it's not saying there has to be a wholly separate phone model, but it's saying every phone (or desktop or laptop or tablet or ...) must have a child safe mode.

Re: Illinois just told every operating system to start reporting your kid's age

#86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If their eyes and thumbs are that little perhaps you as a parent shouldn’t buy them devices, but let them play outside.

Our family computer when I was a kid was in my parents bedroom. There was only one one. Kids should have dumb phones not supercomputers in their pocket connected to everyone everywhere all at once.

I had one in my bedroom but it didn't have the internet. I had a box of appropriate games on CDs.

Re: Illinois just told every operating system to start reporting your kid's age

#87
post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It passes responsibility and accountability from the large platforms to the open-source communities and to parents who are most likely tech illiterate. Facebook, etc. can wash their hands when they "accidentally" serve gambling ads (or whatever) to children and say "well it's not our fault the parent has the laptop misconfigured" It's classic blaming the victim.

Why exactly are some of you guys advocating for platforms to have increased responsibility for verifying the age of their users? Why exactly do you want platforms to collect government IDs or contract with third party ID brokers? How is that an improvement over the user agent attesting to the age of the user?

It's liber-contrarianism, they hate when the government does stuff so they instinctively oppose it even though the opposite is worse.

Re: Illinois just told every operating system to start reporting your kid's age

#88

Are they expecting parents to be held responsible when their kid gets given a laptop and doesn't put in the right age? Or is it just a best effort thing that "parents who want to" can opt in to and which mostly serves as a shield for online platforms who wave the "but age API said" flag whenever something sketch happens?

It's opt in. You can say your kid was born in 1900 if you want an unrestricted internet.

Re: Illinois just told every operating system to start reporting your kid's age

#89
post #55

What if you make your app refuse to load in Illinois just opens a banner saying why and who to lobby.

Then your app would be rightfully decried as a whiny bitch and people would use other apps that aren't whiny bitches.

It would be like making an app refuse to load in California because of Prop 65, or refused to load in NYC because of rent control. Totally irrelevant nonsense and the wrong political stand to take.

Re: Illinois just told every operating system to start reporting your kid's age

#90
post #34

That's the correct way to do it. Age should be something reported by browser/os/hardware. Something similar to User-Agent. I really hope this will end the whole third party age verification farce.

it's not age verification laws have little to do with protecting anyone, and social media companies are attempting to remove themselves from liability for their dangerous product by pushing for it social media in its current unregulated state is harmful as has been demonstrated repeatedly with (suppressed) studies, and the push for age verification instead of regulation on the actual harmful content age verification…

The social media company wouldn't be liable for not knowing someone's age but it would be liable if someone indicated as under-13 was shown porn or gambling ads or whatever they're trying to block. I see that as a win.

Note there's no verification in this law. "Age verification" is a deliberate misnomer.

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