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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

#941

Post by mrguyorama »

behringer wrote: post #630
wek wrote: post #599

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm concerned about these laws and their implications for privacy, but as a parent, I'm not sure what you mean to say parents should parent. How? What should the parent do? How would you recommend a parent protect a 13 year old who spends their time in their room and out with their friends on their phones?

Translation: you can't parent your own child so you want the government to do it, as if they'll do it properly.

Who needs age of consent laws, you should just parent your kids!

If they are having sex with people they shouldn't, you've just been a bad parent

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

#942

Post by skybrian »

JoshTriplett wrote: post #911
skybrian wrote: post #870

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which Internet standard are you referring to? I’d like to check browser support.

PICS is one older standard for this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Platform_for_Internet_Content_... There's also "Voluntary Content Rating", and the "RTA" marker.

PICS and its successor (Powder) both appear to be abandoned. “Voluntary content rating” and “Rta marker” must be pretty obscure since I’m not finding a good web page.

I think these would be better thought of as attempts to create a web standard rather than an actual web standard?

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

#943

Post by abustamam »

masklinn wrote: post #745
abustamam wrote: post #730

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think they're talking about proving your identity to a non govt entity. A few things that come to mind are any platform with a KYC, they require you to upload your ID and assure you they're secure with a little lock icon.

Even proving your identity to a government entity is non-trivial, as can be seen by the administration trying to use that as a new poll tax.

When I needed to get my newborn daughter's social security card I went to the local SS office, only to be turned away because I did not have an appointment. So I went home, finally got an appointment after an hour on the phone, trying to explain why I didn't have her SS card (apparently "it never arrived" did not compute), went back the next day with my passport card to provide as proof of identity. Only for them to say "we don't accept passport cards as ID. We can use your license though!"

Baffling.

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

#944

Post by vouwfietsman »

gzread wrote: post #871
vouwfietsman wrote: post #838

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Ignoring the reality that some system of age ... system is desired by a significant portion of the population How do you think this came to be?

I'm not sure. It dates back hundreds of years, since children weren't allowed in bars

Do you have a source for that? Does your source imply that this is desired by the population?

My question is mostly rhetorical: it is obvious that government & safety institutions are themselves fanning the flames of this ridiculous movement away from privacy and towards a surveillance state of over-protectionism. The world has not significantly changed in 50 years in terms of terrorist threats, (except for, ironically, threats to your identity online), yet suddenly now that we can track people online, we must to combat this non-changing threat factor? It's all security theater.

All intelligence agencies benefit from more data, and will happily use lack of data as a scapegoat for their own incompetence. They instill fear to justify their existence, unlawful behavior, and lack of results.

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

#945

Post by skybrian »

katsura wrote: post #930
skybrian wrote: post #892

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the browser has to do the same thing for adults and children (to avoid detection) then it’s going to be hard to build a system that does different things for adults versus children.

As you suggested, the websites could send information about themselves and the browser then could decide locally. Then there is no data leak. Obviously not perfect, because just like how the cookie law is abused, people could abuse this system as well. But the browser passing around headers is not the solution.

Another way to prevent a data leak would be for browsers to always fetch both web pages (with or without a child lock header) but obviously that doesn’t do what you want. It seems like what the browser displays is pretty important here and that goes beyond what gets disclosed in the original request.

Another way to look at it: a predator could make a website specifically for children and advertise it as such, while covertly doing something bad. How is that different? If they control the website, they can do what they want.

If you’re concerned about that then I think you need a whitelist of known good websites and you need to vet them by browsing it with the child lock turned on. Even then, it wouldn’t be hard to look harmless at first.

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

#946

Post by chao- »

cortesoft wrote: post #938
chao- wrote: post #894

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This isn't from the bill, but this is what I would like to see: Any endless scroll "feed" can only be chronological content only from people/orgs/entities you opt-in to see ("follow", "subscribe", what-have-you). Will that be bad for "engagement"? Yes. That's the point.

Why chronological? What is special about that ordering? You aren’t allowed any kind of filtering, or alternative ordering? Do you always view the ‘new’ feed on hackernews, or do you prefer looking at the front page? I much prefer the front page, for all sorts of reasons. The new feed has all sorts of spam and garbage posts. Reposts, troll bait, etc. The front page usually has much more interesting posts, and definite…

I am not so egotistical as to think I get to decide any of this. Hence, I did not say I "should" get to decide.

I simply said that if I could, that is what I would like to see.

I tried to phrase my comment to convey that I know it is not a popular opinion. I am not surprised that someone would disagree me with, and I am okay with that :)

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

#947

Post by __david__ »

sensanaty wrote: post #857
kakacik wrote: post #597

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can't just push responsibility for the kids to the parents, where is the world going? This is madness. The next thing you are going to claim kids from young age shouldn't have fully unlocked smart phones, shouldn't install any app and so on. Where is the end of this? Are you telling me parents should spend more time with kids, heck even be their role models although it is much harder compared to just giving up on…

It really isn't as simple as "Just be a better parent". To use my nephews as an example, my sisters take good care to make sure there's no device usage at home. They've got dumb phones, my sisters don't use their smartphones around the kids either unless it's to take a call, TV/screen time is extremely limited (1h on Saturdays). The older one (12) has an iPhone with parental controls on and tuned to the max, no Youtu…

Similarly, one of your nephews has a friend with parents that don’t lock their liquor cabinet, which means despite all the laws not allowing sales of alcohol to minors, they still have access to it.

I think what your sisters are doing is fine—they’re sending a signal to their kids that this stuff isn’t “good” and though they’ll undoubtedly encounter it in the world, they’re now going to be inherently biased a certain way. And that’s kinda the best you can hope for.

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

#948

Post by motohagiography »

ziml77 wrote: post #664
motohagiography wrote: post #525

Even steelmaning the case for age verification, does anyone really think the state is going to re-institute the innocence of childhood by filtering content and services? Of course not. There is no steelman. If you can do age, you can do identity, and the purpose of identity is recourse for authorities against truth and humor. Doing ID or this fake age verification with anything other than a physical secure element is…

What do you mean if you can do age you can do identity? If age is self-reported that's not true. Or if you need strong validation, ZKPs are possible where it is also not true.

design the protocol. we can run down the rabbit holes of anonymous attestation and yao's millionaire problem, but there's a simpler problem: the age of whom? Once you have a unique identifier, or even an anonymous one derived from a verified one, you are still creating an user identity scheme that is being imposed on people.

what is most likely in play, as we have seen in other identity schemes, is that the cryptography will be sufficiently opaque that experts won't be able to reason about it until after the products are forced on people, or, they will just accept junk protocols and use the law to shift liability to the user to comply with identifying themselves truthfully on the internet. the other scenario is if the protocol provides strong anonymity, it will use a bunch of new primitives without mature standards that happen to have escrow access built in.

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

#949

Post by bix6 »

_heimdall wrote: post #807
bix6 wrote: post #776

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This seems like a very easy problem. The government has birth records, passports, ssn, phone records, etc. so they could provide an age bracket to anybody that needs it. But instead a private corporation will get to do this and create an absolute mess à la Palantir.

That requires a high level of trust in your current government and whomever is in charge in the future. Its worth remembering how the Nazis so efficiently found Jews in the Netherlands. The Dutch government kept meticulous records, including things like your name, address, and religious affiliation. That wasn't a big deal until the Nazis rolled in, throw in some level of Nazi sympathizers in the Dutch government and…

Based on your other comments, I’m curious what your solution is?

The government needs our records to collect taxes. So at the minimum the government must have some information. We can argue over the mechanism and trust factor but that’s not the core issue here.

The private companies doing this is the core problem. This is a service that the government could provide for free with the most safeguards.

Or perhaps you have some other proposal? And I’m not interested in the no government anarchy you propose elsewhere.

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

#950

Post by AtlasBarfed »

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…

If a corporation has your information, multiple governments do as well, either legally or otherwise
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