Comment by Dylan16807
6 days ago
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.
I’m still trying to figure out why mysterious forest porn was a thing. I definitely encountered it.
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 central setting would improve privacy over the way things are right now.
What? How? What improvement are you seeing that I'm not?
Putting all our PII into one huge repository and then letting corps and govts access it sounds like a dystopian nightmare. This is why we don't like Palantir.
What happens if a bad guy steals that data and your identity? They go and look at CSAM using your ID? The police turn up at your door and cart you off to prison? Are you really going to be able to argue that it wasn't you? If so, what is the point of the system? If we're relying on IP addresses and other evidence for access (so you can fight these charges) can't we just use them in the first place?
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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.
> Option B is […] simpler than the status quo.
This bill FORBIDS platforms from operating in the state unless they provide age verification.
Forbid an OS for operating in Illinois? Sounds insane to me. When I bring my Linux laptop from California, what happens?
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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.
Yeah but most people weren't on the internet access in the early 90s. It is more a 2005+ phenomenon.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_Internet_usage
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.
Which, unlike this, does not create issues, since the bar is a place staffed by people, employed to serve drinks, who can reasonably be required to look at their customers, while an operating system is some software, perhaps written by an enthusiast, which cannot reasonably be required to inspect its users.
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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
> So we have some kind of control to stop your router from connecting to Adult Internet DNS?
Yes, all routers currently have this built-in. Most software outside of routers does, too.
Will it be perfect? No. But, for example, this is how content filters work at schools and just about every workplace. And it seems to be good enough for them.
And, this will work better than that. Because the key point is we're not blacklisting anything. Nobody has to maintain a list of banned websites.
> How do we decide what sites resolve as part of the Kid Internet?
Companies or people send an application. The website is reviewed by a human, and they get approved or denied. If you don't care to target kids, which most people don't, you do nothing.
So I don't have to do anything, nor do you. But Meta does. Google does. I'm fine with that.
And, this "board" or whatever who hands out Kid-Friendly certificates can also take complaints. Why not?
> Is there some process where a site submits itself for approval to be part of the Adult Internet?
No, this it the beauty of it. If you want to be a part of adult internet, you do nothing. You already are.
Every website is implicitly adult internet, and it naturally completely subsumes kid internet. So, if you're just making a blog or whatever, nothing changes. In fact, you don't have to update anything from right now. It will all still work. Because Kid Internet is new thing, and it's whitelist only.
> How do we stop the government from using this to stop access to parts of the internet it doesn't like?
Related to above, adult internet is what we currently have. Nothing changes. You and I won't notice, and we can't notice. There will be the free-range internet, and then the subset of the internet approved for kids.
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D) Parenting
I think parents should have access to easy to operate parental controls to help them do their parenting.
Yes, parental controls already exist. You’re up and down this thread advocating for this particular bill, but what does the technical solution actually look like to you beyond the controls already available? And with regards to account creation specifically, what do you see as a workable solution that isn’t defeated by a “pinky swear”?
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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.