Ask Lemmy

While an international cabal of rich white men participate in a pedophile club run by america/israeli rich white other men, we need to ensure that the youth of today don't prematurely access "racy" pictures. Make it make sense.

Because parents are responsible for stuff their off-spring does and the government should not be needed to do that.
At the very most, provide tools to help parents (e.g. on device filtering etc. or require companies to provide APIs to facilitate the same goal)

Other than that: Fuck off of my phone.

because its designed to feed surveillance data to Palintir, which allows governments all over the west to monitor any dissident movements, or relatives of "dissidents" against right wing governments. dont know of any computer system requiring your ID/ or birthday, you can always fake a birthday.

right now the biggest threat to conservative governments is anyone "left" of them.

Wrong technical solution to a made up problem.

Governments have commissioned enough studies to know that education, training, and parental controls filtering content at the receiving end are more effective & less infringing of civil rights than laws imposing restrictions & penalties on website operators to comply with online age verification. Laws could instead allocate resources to promote the former in a major way, setup independent evaluations reporting the effectiveness of child protection technologies to the public, promote standards & the development of better standards in the industry. Laws of the latter kind simply aren't needed & also suffer technical defects.

The most fatal technical defect is they lack enforceability on websites outside their jurisdiction. They're limited to HTTP (or successor). They practically rule out dynamic content (chat, fora) for minors unless that content is dynamically prescreened. Parental control filters lack all these defects, and they don't adversely impact privacy, fundamental rights, and law enforcement.

Governments know better & choose worse, because it's not about promoting the public good, it's about imposing control.

There is a difference between providing the capability, and requiring that capability.

Under this law, something as simple as sharing a Google Drive could make you an "app store" and potentially liable for penalties.

These laws are specifically designed to be broadly interpreted. We have no idea just how widely the nets will be cast, either tomorrow, or 10 years from now. It is prudent to assume the absolute worst case.

Tools should be provided if you want to do that but shouldn't be standard. People should have freedom of choice on how to use their own property, in terms of computers, and how they manage/raise their children.

Imagine a hacker who’s also coincidently a pedo Now we all know hackers can easily coincidently access webcams Now we all know atleast a few kids with laptops or computers left on quite a lot, note with a convenient little flag telling everyone online they’re underaged Now we all know companies are corrupt and target children (look at any cartoon channel there’s so many toy ads!) Little Timmy wants the 99$ toy that everyone has because marketing is making him develop fomo!

It will start with age and that’s pretty bad but who’s to say it will stop there? This isn’t actually about children (while it will put them into some pretty big risks) it’s actually about more control of the population. More control to companies to advertise and push their products to you and to transfer wealth even faster than before. They want no anons they want your every thought. It’ll start with your age and in the end you’re social security.

But between setting up the birthdate when creating my children’s local account on their computers, and having to send a copy of their ID to every platform under the sun, I’d easily chose the former.

That's your decision. The rest of us shouldn't be forced into it just because you're to lazy to watch what your kids are doing online. If a website thinks they need to my my age they can ask me and I'll decide if I want to provide it or not. I don't want my OS just handing it out to anyone who asks.

Because I don't give a shit what your kids do on the Internet, and there are already plenty of tools for you to curate the experience for them.

So

1. Unenforceable
2. Inaccurate
3. Over-reaching
4. PII not protected

What's wrong with it then? By the numbers, it seems everything is wrong with it.

When you go order something from Amazon, you're using about 15-20 computers in a row; probably more. PROVE you have the right. Yes, the server farm you're using to make an order is included, and it's a lot of machines.

Who pays to make sure Ticketmaster server farm is 'used' by age-appropriate customers and the code to check that is installed and maintained? Why, you, of course. The order panel at the burger joint? You, eventually. Toll ticket at Airport Parking? You're gonna love this. Guess what's in your cable box? Guess how often you'll have to have your face scanned just to turn on the TV? TV too. Fancy thermostat? There's a computer Nesting in there. Scan that face, bucko; on the new unit you have to buy because, dude, that and your microwave just became e-waste.

The list is unending. The implementation is shit. The data leak has already been shown with .. discord, right?

It's a slippery slope and also regulatory capture as the only ones with the means to actually pull this off are the Big Tech companies.

Because I should not have to. Im fine with them selling specially child computers that are listed as under 18 you can buy for your kids but I don't want that crap on mine.

Because it has little to do with protecting anyone and is another gross violation of privacy to serve corporate interests.

You aren't setting up your childrens accounts. You're setting up your accounts to show that you're not a child. And suddenly, every single thing you use, from apps to websites, is gatekept behind an API that is controlled by the government. If checking age on social media is all it ever does, then sure, whatever. But that isn't all it will ever do. It will creep further and further, and the details you need to provide will increase, one shitty government term at a time. And then one day, they'll able able to decide that people in your country shouldn't be able to see safe sex information, or abortion information, and the framework to deny the whole country access is already there, and just one small tweak away from locking you out of information that is deemed inappropriate.

But between setting up the birthdate when creating my children's local account on their computers, and having to send a copy of their ID to every platform under the sun, I'd easily chose the former.

This is how they move the goalpost. They changed the argument.

You currently can just create a local account - period. It's yours. No tracking. No personal info.

But now you're accepting that you're willing to give a third party information, even just a little.

The next argument is: "If giving your age is okay, why not your home address?"

This is what police do to fish information out of you.

I'd even agree to a simple protocol (HTTP X-Over-18 / X-Over-21 headers?) to that.

In a era where privacy conscious people don't even connect their TV to the internet... This is okay to you?

You went from "Why do they want my information?"

To

"I'm not concerned with sharing my age. But how should we do it?"

And that itself is the root issue.

Show us your ID, then. Or even just your age. Now your children too.

Don't want to? That's why.

Because they don't care about your age. They want to tie you to your ID, so everything you say and do online can be tracked and tied to you as a person.

Meanwhile the leader of one of their countries has raped women and teenagers and even a couple of children, but they don't do anything about it. But you can be jailed for decades for seeing a picture or video of it. But the actual act? They don't care about that. (I'm saying you can be jailed for simply seeing CSAM online, but if you're a billionaire actually doing the things, you won't be tried for the actual CSA being recorded.)

So as you can see, it's not your age, but your identity.

Most people think the Nazis only locked up Jews. Some realise they also locked up minorities. Historians know it was also anyone who disagreed with them. Anyone who spoke out against them. Anyone who wouldn't wear the armband. And they're afraid history will repeat. And they're right to be afraid.

On the one hand, it is a privacy nightmare.

On the other hand, those laws are so badly written, they will apply to things you would never consider an issue. E.g. a security camera, a router, a NAS. For each of them, the law applies, because they have an OS, they are attached to a network, and they have logins. Think about it, and it basically applies to any network enabled device.

The issue with "children" local accounts (assuming they ever remained 100% local anyway) is that for it to be effective, you would have to control who install the OS for it to be effective.

I have been managing my own OS install since I was a teen, so I could have just created an adult account for me. But, okay, you could say that you could just regularly check your child hasn't reinstalled the machine.

Well, see, they could just install a Virtual Machine. There is plenty of Virtual Machine software out there, and then we're back at whoever installs it being responsible for filling in that information. And Virtual Machines are very useful for a bunch of things: from running software not made for your hardware (see Android emulators, WSL), to being safer around dodgy software.

You could counter that by not letting them install things with your permissions... but there are portable versions of software that people make for a bunch of reasons which don't recall an installation. And I am not talking about hypotheticals: back when I was in school people would carry portable versions of games in USB sticks to copy around school machines so they could play video games during IT class.

Never mind that it means that whenever they want to install something, they will poke you about it, and now you're on the hook for reviewing that. Which you should already be doing because you care about what your child does and they don't have the years of experience to not break their OS.

But if you are doing that, why not use proper parental control software that let's you have much finer-grained control over what they can see or not online, along with other controls around how much time they can spend on the machine and a few nicer things?

My calculator doesn't need to know how old anyone is. Nor does my refrigerator. I suppose a case could be made for a router if you are all onboard for age gating everything privacy and freedom be damned. An OS isn't just Mac or Windows... the CA law is just so so dumb as written that I have zero faith in anything from Silicon valley.

Having a gatekeeper behind what you can use on your own hardware is always bad.

Lots of the criticisms will eventually start sounding like seatbelt law opponents. Lots of “it should be optional, if you want to do it that’s fine but don’t force me to, I feel safer without it, it’s each individual’s responsibility and shouldn’t be mandated, etc” types of arguments.

The problem with the current implementation is that it isn’t done privately. There are several ways to do secure and private age verifications, where your device never passes your browsing history off to the government, and the individual sites never get your personal info. But lawmakers have been lobbied by companies who want to insert themselves as the age verifiers to skim your data. So the current laws being passed are written in such a way that they’ll result in massive privacy violations.

If opponents truly wanted to prevent privacy violations, they would be devising ways to get lawmakers on board with secure age verification. That way the laws would actually reflect best practices, and wouldn’t just result in less privacy. But they’re still trapped in the knee jerk “but my privacy” reactions, which shuts down any further discussion and leaves the door wide open for lobbyists to write and pass whatever legislation they want.