Comment by ranyume
1 day ago
This might be off-topic but on-topic about child safety... but I'm surprised people are being myopic about age verification. Age verification should be banned, but people ignore that nowadays most widely used online services already ask for your age and act accordingly: twitter, youtube, google in general, any online marketplace. They already got so much data on their users and optimize their algorithms for those groups in an opaque way.
So yeah, age verification should be taken down, as well as the datamining these companies do and the opaque tunning of their algorithms. It baffles me: people are concerned about their children's DMs but are not concerned about what companies serves them and what they do with their data.
> people are concerned about their children's DMs but are not concerned about what companies serves them and what they do with their data.
Hogwash.
Where are these mythical people who aren’t concerned with both?
> Where are these mythical people who aren’t concerned with both?
People don't care about "what companies serve them". They only care if the children see sexual content (or things considered deviant). Once sexual and deviant content is filtered, they're happy to give away their children's development to the company's algos.
In effect, the people don't want to concern themselves with what their children consume, unless they're outraged by things normally taboo in their age group. Besides, if everyone is in it "it's not that wrong". They seek reactive entertainment rather than proactive engagement in their children's development.
> Where are these mythical people who aren’t concerned with both?
They're called politicians.
Monitoring children's DMs is the responsibility of the parents, not megacorps. If a parent wants to install a keylogger or screen recorder on their child's PC, that's their decision. But Google should not be able to. Neither should... literally anyone else except maybe an employer on a work-provided device.
> Monitoring children's DMs is the responsibility of the parents, not megacorps
Absolutely. But what responsibilities do megacorps have? Right now, everyone seems to avoid this question, and make do with megacorps not being responsible. This means: "we'll allow megacorps to be as they are and not take any responsibilities for the effects they cause to society". Instead of them taking responsibilities, we're collecting everyone's data and calling it a day by banning children from social networks... and this is because there are many interests involved (not related to child development and safety).
> But what responsibilities do megacorps have? Right now, everyone seems to avoid this question
Clear, simple, direct: Whatever was required of The Bell Telephone Company and nothing more.
10 replies →
> But what responsibilities do megacorps have?
fake and scam AD.
they literally profit from those ADs. When the AD distributes malware or make scam, they don't take any responsibility
> But what responsibilities do megacorps have?
They should have a responsibility of transparency, accountability and empathy towards users. They should work for the user and in the interests of the user. But multiple constraints make this impossible in practice.
> Monitoring children's DMs is the responsibility of the parents, not megacorps.
Yup, but the tools provided make that easy or hard.
But putting that emotive bit to one side, Megacorps have a vested interest in not being responsible to children. They need children's eye balls to drive advertising revenue. If that means sending them corrosive shit, then so be it.
Its a bigger issue than encryption, its editorial choice.
The simplest way that can work is for the child account to be linked to a parent account, and the parent account can see the child account's DMs.
I also think children do/should have a right to privacy and their parents do not have to know everything.
Kids should be able to write a journal or talk to friends with total trust that this information will not reach their parents.
Mega corps should be compelled to and rewarded for allowing parents to monitor their children’s dms.
> maybe an employer on a work-provided device.
The children yearn for the mines(?).
I'm all for helping parents to do this. Any site requiring age verification should indicate this as a http header or whatever, and the browser I allow my child to use should respect that and the parental controls should be easy for me to engage with
Many parental controls are massive pains to get working. Apple does fairly well (although I don't get a parental pin number to unlock the phone, which is normally fine as my child will tell me, but in some circumstances it wouldn't be), but does require the parent to be on the apple ecosystem too.
EA and Microsoft however are terrible, especially as it's likely the child will be playing fortnite/minecraft and the parent won't have ever touched it. I think with minecraft we had to make something like 5 or 6 accounts across three different sites to allow online minecraft play from a nintendo switch.
Parents shouldn't give their child access to a device that allows DMs.
That said, these platforms are making it impossible for parents to monitor anything. They're literally designed to profit off addiction in children.
Why? Plenty of children benefit from talking to other people. Some children need careful monitoring, and some children shouldn't be allowed to use DMs, but it's not universal and should be up to the parents.
1 reply →
I thought it was common knowledge to just set your birthdate to 1970 or something
You can make it a nice round 2000 these days.
> Age verification should be banned
Why?
> They already got so much data on their users
There are a variety of ways (see "Verifiable Credentials") that ages can be verified without handing over any data other than "Is old enough" to social media services.
Age verification obliviates anonymity on the internet. If everything you do, _can_ be tracked by the government, it _will_ be.
Allowing for more effective propaganda, electrol control, and lights a fire on the concept of a government _representing_ anyone.
> Age verification obliviates anonymity on the internet.
How so?
Please explain in detail, because there are already schemes such as "verifiable credentials" which allow people to prove they are of age without handing over ID to online services.
14 replies →
Ok, and? Presenting your ID at a number of IRL estamblishments also heavily reduces anonymity
3 replies →
The problem with this discussion is that this is a wonk solution for wonkish times. You're trying to thread the needle between various reasonable compromises. Ironically due to social media, that is simply not how politics and lawmaking works any more. Instead it's an emotionally driven fight between various different sorts of moral panic, and the only option is to get people more mad about surveillance than "think of the children".
You might be able to get somewhere by getting a tech company on your side, but they generally also hate adult content and don't mind banning it entirely.
(people are not going to get age verification _banned_ any time soon! That's simply not going to happen!)
It's a slippery slope.
This is the next two steps into 1984.
Once you start mandating this, there's no going back.
The next generation will start associating wrongthink with government IDs. (Wait, we already do that, right?)
The Party doesn't care about the Proles, only the members of the Outer Party.
I think that it's rather funny that people like to appeal to 1984 as if the only point of Mr. Orwell was that surveillance is bad, missing the entire point about stuff like the control of the language or the idea that the only self-justification of the (Inner) Party is power for the sake of power (see also: The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism).
I'd even go as far as to say that if "telescreens are horrible" is the only thing that someone takes away from 1984, they've frankly missed the point.
1 reply →
> It's a slippery slope.
Is it? I thought that was a logical fallacy?
> This is the next two steps into 1984.
How so?
> Once you start mandating this, there's no going back. > The next generation will start associating wrongthink with government IDs.
Could you provide some more details on why you think this? For a start I talked about a scheme in which you don't hand over ID.
1 reply →
Read another book.