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Meta Platforms: Lobbying, dark money, and the App Store Accountability Act

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Re: Meta Platforms: Lobbying, dark money, and the App Store Accountability Act

#881

Post by ryukoposting »

smt88 wrote: post #865
ryukoposting wrote: post #851

Earlier quoted context omitted.

An unfortunate side effect of Epstein mania is that people (particularly legislators) are more receptive than ever to the "think of the children!" strawman. This approach is highly effective right now, and it might never work again in Zuckerberg's lifetime. America needs another Zappa.

My observation of Epstein "mania" is that politicians are revealing themselves to not particularly care about children being sexualized. The push for age verification seems to stem from conservative states trying to appear to care about children through symbolic gestures while cutting other funding and protections for children.

Conservative states? California passed this bill first! And it's on the docket in Colorado! This is weapons-grade dark money bullshit, not a blue-or-red problem.

Re: Meta Platforms: Lobbying, dark money, and the App Store Accountability Act

#882

Post by nine_k »

throwaway290 wrote: post #708
nine_k wrote: post #681

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Missing something? Perhaps. Pornography is a very convenient pretext. The real target is anonymity and pseudonymity. Both have been abundantly available on the early Internet. Both were and are being gradually squeezed out from it. Various law enforcement agencies would love to know more, always more. The more the users are required to identify themselves, link their online identity (maybe pseudonymous for other user…

incongruent. first you say "pornography is just pretext" then say "it's like real world now". where in "real world" can preteen kids go and see not just porn but people limbs removed and other stuff? pretending the actual issue doesn't exist will not help you stop laws like this

The pornography is a real issue, but not the real issue.

As many people have noted, a different system could delegate the enforcement to parents. Instead of forcing a web site (or an OS!) to collect identifying information and certify the age, we could demand that a web site would send a header stating the legal age boundary. The user's device then would be demanded to honor it, depending on device's settings. Parental controls should work, and parental controls are already there on most devices. Open-source software would have no trouble implementing parental controls, because they leave the responsibility and the choice with the user. No identity info would leak to third parties.

In a more elaborate case, a state identity provider (something that provides birth certificates, passports, etc) would provide an OAuth-like flow that would certify the age of a bearer of a short-lived token to a site which generated the token, without giving any details. This gives the parties more assurance, and gives the state a bit more visibility, but still mostly preserves the user's privacy.

I don't think that these simple ideas never came to the lawmakers' minds, or to their tech experts' minds. But it's less appealing to them, because it results in less control. Why not push for more disclosure when a chance presents itself?

Re: Meta Platforms: Lobbying, dark money, and the App Store Accountability Act

#883

Post by darkwater »

JoshTriplett wrote: post #864
skybrian wrote: post #843

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe that would work too, but “this device has a child lock turned on” seems like reasonable information to send? It’s a lot better than having to check ID’s.

You know what's even better? Not sending anything . There's no value in sending that bit of information rather than in using what's already readily provided.

Ok but I bet that's easy enough to classify the receiving browser behavior when it gets some rating value from the webserver and it cannot show certain content to user because parental control (i.e. it's not going to do more requests from the same browser fingerprint)

Re: Meta Platforms: Lobbying, dark money, and the App Store Accountability Act

#884

Post by notatoad »

hedora wrote: post #741
cycomanic wrote: post #721

These discussions remind me so much of the US discussions about federal ID documents as verification. There's a vocal portion of people which opposes any solution because "privacy, government overreach, surveillance ...". So instead of a solution like e.g. zero-proof age verification, that tries to minimize intrusions on privacy, the result is the worst of all worlds, maximum surveillance (but I guess it's ok if it i…

For there to be a solution, there needs to be a problem. These bills are not addressing a problem. Assume the online platform has a video feed of my kid, or their SSN, or a zero-knowledge-proof of age, or whatever. Now, what will the platform do with it? Concretely? As in: Name one bad outcome a reasonable parent would care about that's prohibited under these bills. If the bad thing happens due to willful negligence,…

>Name one bad outcome a reasonable parent would care about that's prohibited under these bills.

the bad outcomes don't need to be prohibited under these bills. it's already illegal to, for example, distribute pornography to minors. which i think is something that a reasonable parent would have a problem with.

but if there is no way to determine who is a minor and who isn't, then it's impossible to determine the difference between "willful negligence" and regular old negligence and enforce any consequences for breaking that law. age verification laws are about mechanisms to make other, already existing laws actually enforceable.

Re: Meta Platforms: Lobbying, dark money, and the App Store Accountability Act

#885

Post by colejohnson66 »

ori_b wrote: post #862
mapcars wrote: post #839

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That requires a high level of trust in your current government and whomever is in charge in the future. Some entity has to be trusted with our data anyway, at least government supposed to have some accountability before the citizens, corporations have much higher incentives for profit.

> Some entity has to be trusted with our data anyway Why?

Because the government needs to know who you are to do anything involving you. Taxes, drivers' licenses, passports, courts, etc.

Re: Meta Platforms: Lobbying, dark money, and the App Store Accountability Act

#886

Post by parineum »

array_key_first wrote: post #773
parineum wrote: post #738

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This is outlined in Project 2025 (which I have not read). Great sentence. Aside from making me completely doubt everything you're stating, I don't understand why people just take it as a given that Project 2025 is something the current administration gives two shits about. Is war in Iran in Project 2025?

Because almost every action of this admin is almost a direct translation from project 2025. Also, this administration has said they are not following project 2025. That means they are definitely following project 2025.

Rescheduling marijuana and invading Iran are conspicuously missing.

You can ignore anything in the category of immigration enforcement, DEI or gender issues in Project 2025 because Trump has been going on about that stuff long before project 2025 was ever published.

There's also a bunch of "End the Fed" type of libertarian stuff that Trump, showing himself to be a proponent, not opponent, of big government is never going to do.

Re: Meta Platforms: Lobbying, dark money, and the App Store Accountability Act

#887

Post by ibejoeb »

redm wrote: post #654

The question I keep coming back to regarding the recent debate around age verification is "Why now?" I'm 47, and I started using the internet in my early teens through BBS gateways. I've seen every age of the Internet, and there's always been widely available pornographic materials. Why all of a sudden is this a crisis? Perhaps I'm missing something?

This is better framed as something like "know your actor." The goal is to have everything attributable to a natural person. Nobody wants that, though, so we have say that porn isn't for kids. (Now, there's a lot of disagreement about that, but that's another matter.)

Re: Meta Platforms: Lobbying, dark money, and the App Store Accountability Act

#888

Post by Chance-Device »

nine_k wrote: post #681
redm wrote: post #654

The question I keep coming back to regarding the recent debate around age verification is "Why now?" I'm 47, and I started using the internet in my early teens through BBS gateways. I've seen every age of the Internet, and there's always been widely available pornographic materials. Why all of a sudden is this a crisis? Perhaps I'm missing something?

Missing something? Perhaps. Pornography is a very convenient pretext. The real target is anonymity and pseudonymity. Both have been abundantly available on the early Internet. Both were and are being gradually squeezed out from it. Various law enforcement agencies would love to know more, always more. The more the users are required to identify themselves, link their online identity (maybe pseudonymous for other user…

Quality comment, this is the answer. Also insightful how the nature of the internet and real world separation has changed with time. This should be obvious but this is the first time I’ve seen it stated explicitly like this.

Re: Meta Platforms: Lobbying, dark money, and the App Store Accountability Act

#889

Post by marssaxman »

cycomanic wrote: post #721

These discussions remind me so much of the US discussions about federal ID documents as verification. There's a vocal portion of people which opposes any solution because "privacy, government overreach, surveillance ...". So instead of a solution like e.g. zero-proof age verification, that tries to minimize intrusions on privacy, the result is the worst of all worlds, maximum surveillance (but I guess it's ok if it i…

> So instead of a solution like e.g. zero-proof age verification

A solution to what, though? I oppose any solution because I disagree with your premise: this is not a real problem. We do not need to do anything about it, and any cost would be too high.

Re: Meta Platforms: Lobbying, dark money, and the App Store Accountability Act

#890

Post by nostrademons »

vrganj wrote: post #853
ibejoeb wrote: post #846

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When I hear this argument ("better the government do it than a private company") I recoil. The government is sovereign, only accepts lawsuits at its discretion, and can use violence to get its way. We also know for a fact that it abuses its powers and conducts surreptitious unlawful campaigns against its citizens. I'm not on board with any of it, but the last thing I want is the government to control it.

The government is also, at least theoretically , democratic and accountable to the population. Meta on the other hand is a dictatorship run by Zuck that's only marginally accountable to stockholders (which are only a small subset of the population).

They're still accountable to customers/users. If you don't like their products, don't use them. I don't.

The unfortunate thing about this lobbying effort is that it's making the government accountable to Meta, which is the worst of all worlds.

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