Effective in that its easily bypassed, and dangerous insofar as the government appears to be happy for the use to continue as long as kids use their dogs face to bypass it.
Of course, when you point this out they step into "Oh but we knew it wouldn't work immediately" which is so silly its staggering.
But of course, the technology has been applied immediately to moral panic stuff like porn also.
It is, provided there is a broad consensuss of experts in the field who agree on the danger and what to about it, the government regulates based on that information and that the regulation is effective.
Apart from those things, the Australian government did an excellent job.
>Our membership is made up of advocates, service providers, individuals and experts, speaking with a united voice to promote and realise the rights of Australian children.
>The Child Rights Taskforce is co-convened by UNICEF Australia and James McDougall and is led by a Steering Committee of child rights organisations and experts.
but uh here I am on a social media site rebroadcasting that message... I'll add that I'm for an open internet, I don't think we need age verification. Walled gardens have a lot more shade then alternatives. Becoming aware of the many forms of abstracted gambling (time, tokens, or otherwise) makes the internet a much more affordable and sane place.
I wholeheartedly disagree. When we consider a policy, it's not enough that the narrow outcome is good. What also matters are the broad outcomes and whether or not the policy is principled.
We presumably all hate Alex Jones. Does that mean the goverment saying "Alex Jones is banned from communicating publically" is good policy? Even if we agree the direct outcome is good (which I do), the principle of "the governement can silence people it doesn't like" is profoundly dangerous. In such a case I would argue we should all resist such a policy, even if we like the outcome (Alex Jones being silenced) because the principle (the majority can use the governement to silence a minority) is terrible. This isn't even accounting for the messy second order effects, e.g. radicalising Alex Jones supporters.
I think that applies to social media too. I don't like social media. However even more than that I'm scared of people using the government to limit what other people what they can and can't do for "their own good". This isn't a principle I think we can get behind. I think it's a principle that has motivated a lot of misguided acts in the past (e.g. criminalisation of drugs, sex work, taking the kids of first nations people in Australia, ...).
The categorical imperative should be used here. "Arrest people I don't like" fails the categorical imperative. However, "check things that destroy society and make everyone worse off except for a select few if left unchecked" easily passes the bar.
Nothing is absolute. There is a spectrum without an obvious optimal point. The recent neonazi rally in the UK did a lot of damage that could have easily been prevented.
Why does most of Europe have such a higher standard of living?
So I agree that "check things that destroy society and make everyone worse off except for a select few if left unchecked" might indeed pass as a valid categorical imperitive.
Putting aside the slew of problems with Kantianism, the main issue here is one of epistemology. You think social media is destroying society. Some people think a departure from traditional family values is destroying society. You might be pretty sure you're right, but they're pretty sure they're right too.
I'd argue it's better we all just agree these questions are ambiguous and should in principle be outside of the power of the state to mediate. Especially since people are free to not use social media if they don't want to, or to have traditional families if they do want to. Otherwise we're all just fighting to impose our vision on everyone else. And even if you are right - that social media is destroying society - these policies aren't going to stop social media. Even if they could in theory, they will in practive be shoddily designed and implemented and have lots of other messy consequences (e.g. requiring me to upload photos of my face to use things, trusting that companies forced to handle that data will not only not misuse that data, but also be unhackable).
> Why does most of Europe have such a higher standard of living?
I'm not sure that's true, but even if it is the answer is much more complicated than that they have proactive goverments.
Murder is directly and non-consentually harming another person. Having a traditional family or using social media are choices you can, in our current world, make or not make for yourself. That's an important - and I think pretty philosophically clear - distinction.
And FWIW if the killing was consensual (i.e. euthenasia) then I think it should be legal.
With that position you would have made an excellent bishop or mufti in the 19th century. But today your position needs justification and you will probably not be able to convince a democratic majority to do away with hard earned and liked freedoms.
So, the actual laws are targeting things more specifically than just "social media". Some are talking about intentionally addictive content algorithms, or personalized algorithms. Others are naming specific named companies.
Don't confuse social media with social networks. Social media is media - they select what you watch, like a TV channel, but personalized for each user. You might get a narrow choice from several options they selected. Social networks are just tools for communication.
I used the word "algorithm" so I'm going to preemptively point out that it means something in relation to social media that's more specific than what it means in computer science.
I don't hate social media. It's very amusing to me to hear about how much people hate social media... on social media. I really think people need to stop using social media for a couple of months and see what it's like to not use it.
Personally I find the lack of social media use to be a downside. I never used Facebook and I do occasionally think that I missed out on a lot of stuff because of it.
Which is true. Irma/Yivi [1] in NL/BE proves that to be the case. But it always works with a trusted third party. The client, after confirming auth with the human, generates a unique key for the platform. The platform asks the trusted third party to verify this key, and then a scope is defined. For example: 'is this person 18+?' the response to the platform is then 'Yes' or 'No'.
No, they don't have to (this is a common myth and FUD). That data can remain encrypted and private. For example, the token could be signed with the private key from person and TTP. They do know when people visit a website (or other entity requiring auth) but anyone with network access does.
All the platform gets to know a person 18+ is visiting their platform. In their data analysis, they could add such information to the rest of their data analysis such as IP, but this wouldn't be within scope (illegal in EU). Just worth it to mention in case a platform gets compromised.
So:
Username Bob, age 18+ (verified), from IPv4 1.2.3.4, visited PronHub, at 2 AM, with browser XYZ.
vs
Username Bob, from IPv4 1.2.3.4, visited PronHub, at 2 AM, with browser XYZ.
If Bob isn't logged in, they have to auth every time they visit.
And this is going to happen due to nefarious actors. LLMs (AI), as well as state actors in countries behind the other fence of Iron Curtsin in the New Cold War.
How can the third party not know I visited pronhub when pronhub verifies a token with the third party handed to me by the third party?
This may protect my privacy towards pronhub if I am not logged in. But not my privacy against the third party where I need to be logged in and who likely knows my real identity.
The third party is never trustworthy. Such a system is the death of all things good in effect - it makes a single party very attractive to compromise. Compromise is so easy in practice that imagining a group of people is preventing it at any kind of scale is purely magical thinking.
I'd be interested to know how it could be a good thing.
I'm all for shutting down Facebook entirely and jailing their executives, but i don't think age verification is an appropriate answer. It's already common at least here in France for Facebook to request user ID cards (wtf) and that has not at all stopped harassment, nazism, fake news, etc...
Are you talking about the goal being bad, or the methods being bad, or that the goal inherently cannot be achieved without bad methods?
E.g. I think something pretty uncontroversial would be a goal of blocking kids from the likes of TikTok & Instagram between 22:00 and 08:00.[1] But if I'm an adult, that's a different matter. Ok, so how do I prove I'm an adult, without society turning into a surveillance state, or surveillance capitalism?
Next up: wouldn't it be nice if e.g. someone over the age of 30 couldn't initiate chats (including comments on posts) with 13 year olds? For hobby exceptions (e.g. joining a computer or chess club) it would make sense to either have parental approval, or some moderation requirements for parental approval exempt groups.
[1] I'm here not saying that this is the biggest problem, but it should at least be uncontroversial.
The goal is good. Like i said, i think those kinds of social networks are evil and their executives should be jailed.
That being said, the methods are really bad. Are they efficient? No. Kids can still access discord despite age verification. And some kids can still max out their parent's credit card despite not being old enough to own a bank account.
Do those methods produce other net negatives? Yes. Standardizing digital identity leads us one step closer to dystopian nightmares from sci-fi books.
Are there better alternatives? Yes. Jail the CEOs. And if your government is too corrupt for that, they could at the very least raise awareness. Governments didn't have to mandate fingerprint readers on cigarettes to fight smoking. They found other ways and there are less kids smoking now than in the previous generation. Also, they could still jail the tobacco CEOs who lied publicly (and under oath) for decades.
Any time someone builds a social network, they'll be equally liable for any danger for kids that result? De facto making social networks illegal?
Or is a moral/legal social network possible? If so, then it seems we're talking about two different things: 1. jail the CEOs of these companies… for… something (it's unclear to me. Not that I disagree, but you've not made the case). 2. How can we make social networks "a good"?
Surely you can't mean banning all social networks, because HN is a kind of social network.
What is an evil "kind" of social network? "I know it when I see it"?
I'm not sure that's step one. But at least it's a good selling point to say we can do something very quickly about that problem, and almost everybody agrees (except for a few tech bros and every government on the planet). Step one is taking back control: empowering alternatives, providing free psychological services for the people who've been harmed by Facebook & such, seizing all the money they have defrauded via tax evasion (double irish sandwich), etc...
And if society wants to put people on trial, don't forget to put the engineers up there. The CEOs/managers may give orders but the engineers also have personal responsibility. They knew what they were doing (a few spoke out), and they certainly make sure their own kids don't use their own products. Technology is not neutral, and following orders is not an excuse for cruelty (see also, Nuremberg trials).
> De facto making social networks illegal?
I think there's a margin for interpretation, though i'm neither a lawyer nor a judge. A few criteria which may already be illegal, to determine whether a social network is evil:
- leading and using research on attention/addiction to keep people hooked
- having platform-controlled advertisement (an incentive to keep people captive)
- having posts on "your" feed not determined by your own subscriptions, but by an opaque algorithm where the platform decides what you see
- mandating a civil identity to join the social network (sometimes even requiring users to submit an ID card), which was promoted 15 years ago as an anti-harassment measure but actually had the exact opposite effect
That's just a few criteria that came to mind. We can probably find more. HN, a mailing list or a forum fills exactly 0 of these criteria.
> What is an evil "kind" of social network? "I know it when I see it"?
I'm not sure. But i'm sure we as a society need to think about it, because the neo-fascist tech-bros running those social networks certainly have.
Some people think it'd be reasonable to have every car reporting it's GPS position and speed to the government to stop people speeding, or to have facial recognition cameras on ever corner to catch criminals, or to make everyone carry an ID card that people can demand to see.
On the face of it living in a police state is safe, and secure, and actually increases your freedom to just live your life without pain. And if these systems were never abused that might be true. But sadly, the reality is that every time these things are implemented they end up being used against the citizens. So they're always a terrible idea.
I guess some people living in countries with high crime rates are just tired of it, therefore they are just looking for any solution. In safer countries where you don't have potential criminals on every corner the perspective is different. I wouldn't want 24/7 surveillance in Poland or Czechia but I would consider them being lesser evil in big US or UK cities.
Which UK cities have high crime rates? The murder rate in the UK is much lower than in the US and slightly higher than in Poland, been trending down for a long time and pretty typical for a developed country.
Which points to another issue: people's perception of how much crime exists probably correlates more with how much media they consume than what the real crime rates are.
Eh, I'm no big fan of the eSafety Office but if it was taken to an election there'd either be vague general support or just a lack of interest - no big opposition outside maybe The Greens and civil/digital rights groups.
They probably should at least update it -- I don't think a government should recommend free VPN services. Too many of them are a form of botnet, malware, ddos, etc.
They never went away, just from your mind. Look at cheap xfinity wifi hotspots everywhere that still steal your credentials in the form of phone number and email address. The bar I went to last night has a free wifi hotspot like every establishment ever.
Misinformation smells like your own farts, disgusting to everyone but you.
But unfortunately, a VPN won't protect you from captive portals. So not entirely sure what your comment adds to the discussion other than being unnecessarily rude.
For other readers who may be too young to remember, improper privacy controls (unenforced HTTPS, poor encryption in the form of WEP, easy MitM attacks, etc) meant that public/untrusted WiFi was a legitimate security risk as things like passwords, bank details, etc were very easy to steal as they were sent unencrypted over the air. This is fortunately much less true these days with the advent of better protections across the entire stack (HTTPS everywhere, WPA*, etc) but unscrupulous VPN merchants still use this outdated argument to try to sell their products to less technically-savvy customers.
What these technologies (and VPNs) _do not_ prevent is the legitimate (and consensual) capture of user data by captive portal software (email, phone, etc), which is typically submitted by a user wishing to connect to a public network. This is what the parent comment is mentioning. Different risk profiles, obviously.
Yeah the being asked for an email or phone for free wifi option is completely different from the “I can MITM all your web requests” which is what needs a VPN.
I usually give a fake email or phone number to get free wifi anyway.
Historically (hysterically?);
Joseph Pujol (June 1, 1857 – August 8, 1945), better known by his stage name Le Pétomane, was a French flatulist (professional fartist), comedian and entertainer. He was famous for his remarkable control of the abdominal muscles, which enabled him to seemingly fart at will. His stage name combines the French verb péter, "to fart" with the -mane, "-maniac" suffix, which translates to "fartomaniac". The profession is referred to as "flatulist", "farteur", or "fartiste".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Le_Pétomane
– I bet you a beer you can't make a logical, grammatical sentence with five ands in a row
– I used to be a sign writer in a previous life and one of the jobs I had was to repaint the sign hanging over the door to this very pub. Except the publican was adamant that he wanted more space between the words. Where exactly I asked? In between the Pig and and, and and and Whistle he replied.
