Once you force OS to communicate data about the user, here we’re talking age, is it a slippery slope? Once the architecture is created, why not put other things about you in there?
You might think you can keep 16 year olds from looking at porn, if they want to. You can't. You have never been able to. All you can do is teach them that the law is stupid and pointless, and they should treat rules with contempt. But they'll still be able to look at porn.
What you can do is allow the government and private companies to track everyone, everywhere, all the time. And you can create more gatekeepers that hold personal identity data, misuse it, and leak it.
Yeah, I agree with this. I think age-related content moderation is a losing fight and one that will create more contempt for laws, more surveillance, and much more PII surface area that will be exploited.
There are really two "core" issues at play:
1. The prudish nature of US society
2. The fact that we don't have data privacy laws and restrictions on digital surveillance by private companies
Sixteen year olds? Sure, mysterious Forest Porn and the older brother who'd give you skin mags have always existed. And Cinemax at night, catching the odd frame that somehow gets thought the scrambler. Whatever.
But we can't realize all the supposed glorious promise of all this tech bullcrap for education and free exploration of younger kids if we can't at least come pretty damn close to guaranteeing that an eight-year-old won't stumble on Rotten.com or hardcore porn if an adult isn't looking over their shoulder constantly. And whatever that solution is needs to work for parents who don't have the know-how or time to be sysadmins for their household.
I'm not overly concerned with 16 year olds. But the tools for protecting younger children suck. A consistent account setting and header would do a lot to improve parental controls.
> What you can do is allow the government and private companies to track everyone, everywhere, all the time. And you can create more gatekeepers that hold personal identity data, misuse it, and leak it.
This is already happening. A central setting would improve privacy over the way things are right now.
A), which is the status quo. I don't see any other option as realistic.
B) makes things worse in several ways, but primarily by stifling innovation. Only large incumbents will have no trouble paying for the measures required to ensure compliance.
There's also the cost of enforcement, which will likely have to be borne by the taxpayers. I don't think this is a good thing to spend money on.
C) cannot be enforced, and any good faith attempts will cost more than the damage from harm they're supposed to prevent.
Option A isn't really the status quo. The status quo has a bunch of sites doing invasive checks and other sites region blocking users.
> Only large incumbents will have no trouble paying for the measures required to ensure compliance.
Oh my gawwwwwd. People trot this out any time any regulation is mentioned. Option B is a single easily accessible age category value. It's simpler than the status quo.
Does "the government doesn't get to decide what people can look at on the internet" count as C or D to you? It is the situation we've been in technically for 20 years now anyway; the world hasn't ended and it generally seems to be pretty workable. The status quo isn't an especially radical one.
20 years ago was only 2006. The internet has been around for much longer. The first consumer focused ISPs launched in the early 90’s, 35 years ago, but CompuServe and others were providing access to chat and BBS’s in the 80s.
I’d say nearly 50 years is precedent enough that government intervention is unnecessary.
What about every other system where we rely on parents to parent?
Kids can turn apple juice into wine in their closet
they can drive their bicycle to a drug dealer
they can rub a butter knife against the sidewalk until it's pointy
Do we need govt AI cameras in kids closets and on their bicycles? How do we verify they're cycling somewhere safe? How do we make sure they're not getting shitfaced on bootleg hooch they made with bakers yeast and a latex glove?
This is more like a store being able to see their age just by looking at them, and make restrictions because of that. We don't rely on parents to prevent a 10 year old from going into a bar.
C and D, combined. New internet for kids-only. This internet would be WHITELIST only. We would not be wack-a-mole trying to catch porn sites (sigh...)
Rather, companies would have to submit a formal proposal to get their website listed on Kid Internet. This inverts the responsibility. It's not my cost, or your cost, it's their cost now. If they want kids, they better prove it.
Then, you can trivially configure your router or any computer, with any operating system, to use the Kid Internet DNS. It's now completely operating system and device agnostic. It can be organizational wide with the flick of a switch. It can be global, if we want.
The proposal we're seeing here is bad, bad, bad. Not just for privacy reasons, but because it will not work. Not might, will. This will not work. For many reasons:
1. Most operating systems are not going to implement some stupid ass bullshit.
2. Most websites do not give a single fuck. Porn websites will not care. Trying to play wack-a-mole is ALWAYS a losing game, no exceptions.
3. This is trivial to bypass.
4. If it's not trivial to bypass, it still will not work, but it will now be the end of computing as we know it.
So we have some kind of control to stop your router from connecting to Adult Internet DNS? Because the difficult bit here is not allowing connections to the Kid Internet, but stopping connections to the Adult Internet.
How do we decide what sites resolve as part of the Kid Internet? Is there some process where a site submits itself for approval to be part of the Adult Internet?
How do we stop the government from using this to stop access to parts of the internet it doesn't like?
E. Platforms that want to serve violent, sexual, predatory, scammy, snake oil content in the most addictive way possible to exploit minors and other vulnerable populations for profit should save some of their revenue for lawsuits when they hurt people. Hold products that cause harm responsible.
The Illinois bill is not about 18+ content. It's about controlling who your children can talk to on social media. The OS age check is just a means to that end. The end is blatantly unconstitutional. The bill of rights doesn't mention age limits. Freedom of assosiation applies to kids just as much as it does to adults. If the bill passes, then any racist parent could block all comms from kids of a different color for example.
I get what you’re saying but it’s a false premise. In today’s era, racist parents already block their children from even attending school with someone of a different color. Merely blocking comms would be a step before that in severity of control.
Parents have always had the ability (though maybe not explicitly the right to) control their children’s environment for the purposes of teaching personal beliefs. So long as the belief itself wasn’t deemed harmful to the child, society would allow it to continue propagate that way. Racism unfortunately has never been seen as innately harmful. It’s looked down on, yes, but not to the point of making it illegal to enforce in family life.
To be fair, as a parent I don’t want my under age children hooking up with literal nazis on social platforms, whoever that might be. The current tools and controls are lacking. A lot.
The spin control on this story is intense. Saying that it's "just parental controls" when we've had fscking parental controls since the 1990s is disingenuous as hell. Obviously it's something new, but that's really all they have got to try to spin it back into their favor.
I'm reminded of a video essay I watched about AI once, which took a side tangent into surveillance capitalism:
"Google's data harvesting operation became a load bearing piece of the Internet before the public understood digital privacy. And now we can't get rid of it."
The public has been conditioned to expect web services free at point of use. Legitimately it's hard to monetize things like YouTube without ads, and I get that. But turning our entire ecosystem of tech into a massive surveillance mini-state seems like an astonishingly shitty idea compared to just... finding a way to do advertising that DOESN'T involve 30 shadowy ad companies knowing your resting blood pressure. My otherwise creative and amazing industry seems utterly unwilling to confront this.
Edit: Like, I don't know, am I crazy for thinking that simply because we can target ads this granularity, that it simply must be that? I get that the ad-tech companies do not want to go back to blind-firing ads into the digital ether on the hope that they'll be seen, but that's also plus or minus the entirety of the history of advertising as an industry, with the last 20 or so years being a weird blip where you could show your add to INCREDIBLY specific demographics. And I wouldn't give a shit except the tech permitting those functions seems to be socially corrosive and is requiring even further erosion of already pretty porous user privacy to keep being legally tenable.
Society won’t delay reward now for future good on its own. Even if one person will, there’s a line of people who will step in to pollute the lake or kill the whales for a bag of money.
It will just decay until it’s a short squeeze into oligarchy or worse (the corrupt will be forced into an arms race of accelerating corruption as opportunity becomes scarce). Then some other country who isn’t leaving it up to their society to do the right thing will be in charge. Until the same happens to them.
This is the value of religion historically, one of the few ways of coercing a population into doing the right thing for their own good. But every group can be spoiled or hijacked by a small handful of bad actors who are willing to do what others are not.
Once you force OS to communicate data about the user, here we’re talking age, is it a slippery slope? Once the architecture is created, why not put other things about you in there?
So which situation do you want instead of anonymous age verification:
A) 18+ content is behind a pinky swear
B) 18+ content is behind a parental control (what this bill would do)
C) The internet can't have 18+ content anymore
D) Some other system? Please describe it.
(A), honestly.
You might think you can keep 16 year olds from looking at porn, if they want to. You can't. You have never been able to. All you can do is teach them that the law is stupid and pointless, and they should treat rules with contempt. But they'll still be able to look at porn.
What you can do is allow the government and private companies to track everyone, everywhere, all the time. And you can create more gatekeepers that hold personal identity data, misuse it, and leak it.
Yeah, I agree with this. I think age-related content moderation is a losing fight and one that will create more contempt for laws, more surveillance, and much more PII surface area that will be exploited.
There are really two "core" issues at play:
1. The prudish nature of US society
2. The fact that we don't have data privacy laws and restrictions on digital surveillance by private companies
Sixteen year olds? Sure, mysterious Forest Porn and the older brother who'd give you skin mags have always existed. And Cinemax at night, catching the odd frame that somehow gets thought the scrambler. Whatever.
But we can't realize all the supposed glorious promise of all this tech bullcrap for education and free exploration of younger kids if we can't at least come pretty damn close to guaranteeing that an eight-year-old won't stumble on Rotten.com or hardcore porn if an adult isn't looking over their shoulder constantly. And whatever that solution is needs to work for parents who don't have the know-how or time to be sysadmins for their household.
1 reply →
I'm not overly concerned with 16 year olds. But the tools for protecting younger children suck. A consistent account setting and header would do a lot to improve parental controls.
> What you can do is allow the government and private companies to track everyone, everywhere, all the time. And you can create more gatekeepers that hold personal identity data, misuse it, and leak it.
This is already happening. A central setting would improve privacy over the way things are right now.
21 replies →
A), which is the status quo. I don't see any other option as realistic.
B) makes things worse in several ways, but primarily by stifling innovation. Only large incumbents will have no trouble paying for the measures required to ensure compliance.
There's also the cost of enforcement, which will likely have to be borne by the taxpayers. I don't think this is a good thing to spend money on.
C) cannot be enforced, and any good faith attempts will cost more than the damage from harm they're supposed to prevent.
Option A isn't really the status quo. The status quo has a bunch of sites doing invasive checks and other sites region blocking users.
> Only large incumbents will have no trouble paying for the measures required to ensure compliance.
Oh my gawwwwwd. People trot this out any time any regulation is mentioned. Option B is a single easily accessible age category value. It's simpler than the status quo.
11 replies →
Does "the government doesn't get to decide what people can look at on the internet" count as C or D to you? It is the situation we've been in technically for 20 years now anyway; the world hasn't ended and it generally seems to be pretty workable. The status quo isn't an especially radical one.
20 years ago was only 2006. The internet has been around for much longer. The first consumer focused ISPs launched in the early 90’s, 35 years ago, but CompuServe and others were providing access to chat and BBS’s in the 80s.
I’d say nearly 50 years is precedent enough that government intervention is unnecessary.
1 reply →
What about every other system where we rely on parents to parent?
Kids can turn apple juice into wine in their closet
they can drive their bicycle to a drug dealer
they can rub a butter knife against the sidewalk until it's pointy
Do we need govt AI cameras in kids closets and on their bicycles? How do we verify they're cycling somewhere safe? How do we make sure they're not getting shitfaced on bootleg hooch they made with bakers yeast and a latex glove?
This is more like a store being able to see their age just by looking at them, and make restrictions because of that. We don't rely on parents to prevent a 10 year old from going into a bar.
1 reply →
[flagged]
D) Parents take sole responsibility for this.
C and D, combined. New internet for kids-only. This internet would be WHITELIST only. We would not be wack-a-mole trying to catch porn sites (sigh...)
Rather, companies would have to submit a formal proposal to get their website listed on Kid Internet. This inverts the responsibility. It's not my cost, or your cost, it's their cost now. If they want kids, they better prove it.
Then, you can trivially configure your router or any computer, with any operating system, to use the Kid Internet DNS. It's now completely operating system and device agnostic. It can be organizational wide with the flick of a switch. It can be global, if we want.
The proposal we're seeing here is bad, bad, bad. Not just for privacy reasons, but because it will not work. Not might, will. This will not work. For many reasons:
1. Most operating systems are not going to implement some stupid ass bullshit.
2. Most websites do not give a single fuck. Porn websites will not care. Trying to play wack-a-mole is ALWAYS a losing game, no exceptions.
3. This is trivial to bypass.
4. If it's not trivial to bypass, it still will not work, but it will now be the end of computing as we know it.
So we have some kind of control to stop your router from connecting to Adult Internet DNS? Because the difficult bit here is not allowing connections to the Kid Internet, but stopping connections to the Adult Internet.
How do we decide what sites resolve as part of the Kid Internet? Is there some process where a site submits itself for approval to be part of the Adult Internet?
How do we stop the government from using this to stop access to parts of the internet it doesn't like?
This proposal looks even less workable
7 replies →
D) Parenting
I think parents should have access to easy to operate parental controls to help them do their parenting.
2 replies →
Is D) parenting what they do for cigarettes in stores today as well?
>A) 18+ content is behind a pinky swear
Things were way, way, way sketchier in like 2005 than they are now and those people turned out mostly fine.
E. Platforms that want to serve violent, sexual, predatory, scammy, snake oil content in the most addictive way possible to exploit minors and other vulnerable populations for profit should save some of their revenue for lawsuits when they hurt people. Hold products that cause harm responsible.
This can only work if the damages cost less than the business is worth.
And there's plenty of examples (J&J, oil titans) escaping financial consequences by other means.
The Illinois bill is not about 18+ content. It's about controlling who your children can talk to on social media. The OS age check is just a means to that end. The end is blatantly unconstitutional. The bill of rights doesn't mention age limits. Freedom of assosiation applies to kids just as much as it does to adults. If the bill passes, then any racist parent could block all comms from kids of a different color for example.
I get what you’re saying but it’s a false premise. In today’s era, racist parents already block their children from even attending school with someone of a different color. Merely blocking comms would be a step before that in severity of control.
Parents have always had the ability (though maybe not explicitly the right to) control their children’s environment for the purposes of teaching personal beliefs. So long as the belief itself wasn’t deemed harmful to the child, society would allow it to continue propagate that way. Racism unfortunately has never been seen as innately harmful. It’s looked down on, yes, but not to the point of making it illegal to enforce in family life.
To be fair, as a parent I don’t want my under age children hooking up with literal nazis on social platforms, whoever that might be. The current tools and controls are lacking. A lot.
E) parenting
A. Not even a thought required.
The spin control on this story is intense. Saying that it's "just parental controls" when we've had fscking parental controls since the 1990s is disingenuous as hell. Obviously it's something new, but that's really all they have got to try to spin it back into their favor.
Every system intended to protect children ends up patronizing everyone as a child.
Protect people's rights and don't get tricked in to giving them up just cause someone has a story about a child.
I'm reminded of a video essay I watched about AI once, which took a side tangent into surveillance capitalism:
"Google's data harvesting operation became a load bearing piece of the Internet before the public understood digital privacy. And now we can't get rid of it."
The public has been conditioned to expect web services free at point of use. Legitimately it's hard to monetize things like YouTube without ads, and I get that. But turning our entire ecosystem of tech into a massive surveillance mini-state seems like an astonishingly shitty idea compared to just... finding a way to do advertising that DOESN'T involve 30 shadowy ad companies knowing your resting blood pressure. My otherwise creative and amazing industry seems utterly unwilling to confront this.
Edit: Like, I don't know, am I crazy for thinking that simply because we can target ads this granularity, that it simply must be that? I get that the ad-tech companies do not want to go back to blind-firing ads into the digital ether on the hope that they'll be seen, but that's also plus or minus the entirety of the history of advertising as an industry, with the last 20 or so years being a weird blip where you could show your add to INCREDIBLY specific demographics. And I wouldn't give a shit except the tech permitting those functions seems to be socially corrosive and is requiring even further erosion of already pretty porous user privacy to keep being legally tenable.
You are not crazy for thinking that.
However it appears that it takes pretty disasterous consequences for us to be able to walk anything back.
Society won’t delay reward now for future good on its own. Even if one person will, there’s a line of people who will step in to pollute the lake or kill the whales for a bag of money.
It will just decay until it’s a short squeeze into oligarchy or worse (the corrupt will be forced into an arms race of accelerating corruption as opportunity becomes scarce). Then some other country who isn’t leaving it up to their society to do the right thing will be in charge. Until the same happens to them.
This is the value of religion historically, one of the few ways of coercing a population into doing the right thing for their own good. But every group can be spoiled or hijacked by a small handful of bad actors who are willing to do what others are not.
It's not the gun that kills. It's not the computer that spies.
Agreed! We shouldn't be because wouldn't we go to jail for shit like that if it were you or I?
“Impossible to get a man to understand a thing, when his paycheck depends on his not understanding it.”