Comment by electric_muse
1 month ago
The same company intentionally driving minors towards this content (despite claiming to care about them) is also lobbying in secrecy for requiring all of us to scan our ID and face in order to use our phones and computers.
Their stated reason? Child safety.
Their actual reason? You can figure that out.
The actual reason: child safety regulations
They don't care about child safety as long as it doesn't become so bad as to impact their revenue negatively. But they see that governments all over the world push for some kinds of age restrictions, and they know they are a prime target and it is hard for them to push back against that.
The reason they are (not so secretly) lobbying for requiring us to ID ourselves at the device level is that they don't want to be the gatekeepers. They want to make creating an account as effortless as possible and having to prove your age is a barrier that make turn off some people, including adults, and they may instead turn to services that don't require age verification. By moving the age verification in the OS, not only the responsibility shifts to the OS or hardware vendor, but it also removes the disadvantage they have against services that don't require age verification.
For a similar issue, PornHub is currently blocked in France, because they don't want to comply with the law related to age verification. Here is their argument: https://www.aylo.com/newsroom/aylo-suspends-access-to-pornhu...
If you read between the lines, you will see that they have the same stance: "put age verification at the OS level, so that people don't discriminate against us". They know they are not in a position to argue against "child safety" laws, so instead, they lobby for making it worse for everyone instead of just themselves.
The other "real reason" is the solution will end up looking like a super cookie and enable machine-level tracking across every app.
Meta is like one giant cancer that grew a few small tumors of benign[1] nature, like some of their efforts in open source and open research (React, Llama, etc.).
[1]: I could be wrong thinking those are benign.
>Meta is like one giant cancer
Cancer is a great metaphor because its a perversion of natural, healthy processes. So called social media is nearly that, but actually grotesquely unhealthy.
People are dramatically unwell when they are not social, but that unregulated process is also negative up to and including being lethal.
Exactly. It started out as something good: see what friends and family are up to. But now: scroll infinite algorithmically placed or sponsored rage bait trying to trigger you into behaving the way that advances certain corporate or foreign interests at the expense of whatever was left of our already tattered social fabric and our collective mental or literal health.
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Being on "social media" is a fundamentally unsocial activity: you do it alone, it makes you lonely, and it separates you from others. Some people manage to bootstrap a social layer on top of the base medium, but most are being driven apart for profit.
I call it _anti_social media.
Facebook was the Eternal September of the Web. Netiquette died when it was made generally available, as did the culture that spawned it.
I think you can tell approximately how old someone is by when they believe Eternal September started on the internet. Nobody believes it was when they started enjoying the internet. It was always when some other generation or service arrived after them.
The internet was not a calm and well behaved place before Facebook arrived. The original “Eternal September” was in the early 90s. Usenet, forums, Reddit, comment sections, and every other social part of the internet have been full of bad behavior long before Facebook came along.
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As a Millennial, I'm sad to say that it wasn't even older generations' fault, but our own (+Gen X). The tipping point was letting in normies who traded in photos and money instead of text and art.
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Everything consumer facing from meta is like a toxic waste hazard. It makes me sad seeing people stuck on those platforms.
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I think Zstandard would be the most benign example.
Zstandard was created by one amazing person. Pretty sure he would have done it even if meta didn't exist.
A few weeks after they expanded access beyond .edu domains, I deleted my account. Haven't looked back since. Not an ounce of regret.
Exactly. Why should furrin students get a look in?
React benign? That’s the first time I’ve seen this suggestion on HN. Usually it’s held responsible for great crimes and wrongs.
Ha, I think the great crimes and wrongs title goes to Angular. I became a front-end guy specifically to avoid all the OOP verbosity. I'm just trying to call some APIs and render some data on a web page. I don't need layers of abstraction to do that.
Anyways, is there a "just use vue" effort like there is with postgres :)
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Actually. Meta is spending millions to push the age verification requirement off to the app store providers, such as Google and Apple. It's an attempt to shield Meta from liability, transfer it to the app providers.
Having clear laws about what's allowed and what isn't is a lot cheaper than getting repeatedly sued for hundreds of millions for not doing things there was never a clear legal requirement to do.
They are winning.
In the UK, you cannot use App Store and iPhone (your own phone) without verifying your identity:
https://x.com/WindsorDebs/status/2036727466597712008
Google play store still works fine in the UK, so idk.
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>to push the age verification requirement off to the app store providers,
and makes more sense, Apple and Google have your credit card , or if you are a parent that bought soem phone for you child then at first boot up as a parent should be your job to setup a child account.
> Apple and Google have your credit card
They don't have mine.
Even if they did, having a credit card is not proof of age.
> if you are a parent that bought soem phone for you child then at first boot up as a parent should be your job to setup a child account
Setting up a "child account" shouldn't involve setting some age field. Setting up a "child account" should involve restricting permissions.
Why leave it to the OS or a company to decide what is "age appropriate"? Leave it to the parent to decide what the child should or should not have access to. Extra bonus: that same "child account" can then also be used for other restricted purposes. Want a guest account which limits activity? Want an incognito account? Want a sandbox account? None of these should require setting some age.
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> at first boot up as a parent should be your job to setup a child account.
Something I would be 100% OK with is some regulation that at first boot, you have to present information about what parental controls are available on the device and ask if you'd like them enabled.
I haven't set up a phone in a hot minute, I only do it once every few years, is this something they already do?
I'd imagine there's a lot of cases where a parent buys a new phone and hands down the old one to their kid without enabling safety features. I don't know if there's a good way to help with that - maybe something like, whenever you go to set a new password, prompt "hey is this for a kid?" and go through the safety features again?
Just spitballing, that last one may not be a good idea, not really sure.
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Of course it's for the protection of the children!
Why else would they want to sneakily add facial recognition to smart glasses?! /s https://www.businessinsider.com/meta-ray-ban-smart-glasses-f...
My guess: to discriminate whether traffic is from a humam or bot to improve ad delivery metrics.
Most sites are not going to implement this themselves. I think they're in prime position to become a key broker of identity in the same way that a lot of people already log in with their meta or google account to unrelated websites. They become very entrenched and get a ton of data that way.
As more and more people essentially lock themselves in with these identitybrokers tho I imagine it has a very stifling effect on speech tho. Imagine getting banned from those.
Aren't they incentive to treat bot impressions as real?
Not quite. If it's widely known that bot impressions aren't being filtered out, then people are less likely to place ads with Meta.
Not if they can charge more for “certified” human impressions
> Their actual reason? You can figure that out.
This is unfalsifiable. Just say what you think it is explicitly.
Isn't this conversation, not publishing scientific hypotheses, theories and findings?
If so, it is customarily permissible to use rhetoric and sarcasm to more strongly emphasize a point. Or, to leave the conclusion as an exercise for the reader.
By intentionally hiding their position (and simultaneously acting as though it is completely obvious) the OP shuts down any useful conversation that might follow. Do they think Meta will sell the user's data? Do they think different people are in charge of different policies at Meta leading to actions that appear to be in conflict with each other? Do they think they will use this information to train AI models? Do they think they will use this information to serve Ads?
There are many interesting ways that the conversation could have been carried forward but there is no way to continue the conservation as the OP doesn't make it clear what they think.
The only thing I can say is: No I cannot figure it out, please tell me what you're trying to say here.
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Why defend Zuck??
Cause on a website fellating CEOs and capitalism, "CEO's Lives Matter".
I mean, their telemetry crap is on a lot of apps too. I remember someone DMing me something very niche on Discord, and by chance I opened up Facebook, it gave me ads for that very, very niche thing I have never even looked up on Google, or Facebook, it was like IMMEDIATE. I opened up Facebook by chance, and voila.
The other one was the time I was speaking to my brother in law, who had just paved his driveway, he said "I could have used airport grade tar, but thought it was too much" and we were in front of his Nest security cam is the only thing I can think of, but the very next morning, I'm scrolling through Facebook, and sure enough, someone local is advertising airport grade tar. Why? I didn't google this, I only heard it from them.
There's some serious shenanigans going on with ad companies, and we just seem to handwave it around.
Coincidentally, I remember both experiences very very vividly, because this was the last time I used either platform in any meaningful capacity.
> The other one was the time I was speaking to my brother in law, who had just paved his driveway, he said "I could have used airport grade tar, but thought it was too much" and we were in front of his Nest security cam is the only thing I can think of, but the very next morning, I'm scrolling through Facebook, and sure enough, someone local is advertising airport grade tar. Why? I didn't google this, I only heard it from them.
Option A: The Nest camera not only listened to the conversation and picked out "Airport Grade Tar" and decided it needed to show adverts about it to people, but the camera also identified you to the point it could isolate your FB account in order to serve you those adverts.
(I'm making some assumptions but...)
Option B: Your brother had done various searches for airport grade tar from his home (in order to know how expensive it was). You, whilst visiting his home, were on his Wifi and therefore shared the same external IP address, your phone did enough activity whilst at his house (FB app checked in to their servers in the background, or used Messenger, etc) to get the "thinking of buying airport grade tar" associated with his external IP address associated with your FB account that was temporarily on that IP.
I had a friend who was convinced that some device in his house was listening in on his conversations with his wife as he kept on getting adverts for things they'd been talking about buying the day before but he hadn't searched for. (But she was searching for it from their home wifi, which is why it appeared in his adverts afterwards.)
Option C: no cameras or crude wifi tracing needed; they know who you talk to / associate with based on location data and the full profile of both sides, and can estimate things like 'will have mentioned X' -> can dispatch that via heuristic like 'show ads for X thing that was also mentioned by someone adjacent on that social graph'.
That is, BiL was marked as 'spreader for airport grade tar' based on recent activity, marked as having been in contact with spreadee, and then spreadee was marked as having received the spreading. P(conversion) high, so the ad is shown.
It's just contact tracing, it works well and is really easy even without literally watching what goes on in interactions.
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No surprise there, Discord sells user data to Meta and X.
Easy: regulation always favors incumbents.
Only as long as corps are allowed to lobby or introduce financial incentives into policy making
So any day ending in y for the US Congress?
I can't figure it out so please enlighten me.
Basically these age attestation/verification laws are being pushed as a "save the children!" scenario. But if you read the laws - all they really do is shift responsibility around.
Currently, websites and apps are supposed to ensure they don't have kids under 13, or if they do - that they have the parents permission. That's federal law in the US.
These laws make the operating system or app store (depends on the particular law) responsible for being the age gate.
This doesn't stop the federal law from being enforced or anything, but the idea is apps/websites don't handle it directly, that's handled by the operating system or app store.
So now - companies like Meta can throw up their hands and say "hey, the operating system told us they were of age, not our fault." It also makes some things murkier. Now if Meta gets sued, can they bring Google/Apple/Microsoft in as some kind of co-defendent?
I think that murkiness is the point. They don't need to create the most bullet-proof set of regulations that 100% absolves them of all responsibility, they just need to create enough to save some money next time they get sued.
I can think of a ton of regulations we could create to better help protect kids. We could mandate that mobile phones, upon first setup, tell the user about parental controls that are available on the device and ask if they'd like to be enabled. Establish a baseline set of parental controls that need to be implemented and available by phone manufacturers, like an approval process that you need to go through to hit store shelves.
We could create educational programs. Remember being in school and having anti-drug shit come through the school? It could be like that but about social media (and also not like that because it wouldn't just be "social media is bad," hopefully).
Again all these laws do is take what should be Meta's burden, and make it everybody else's burden.
Forget about the stated reason for the laws. The fact is that it makes sense that people using a service are age-appropriate. And there is no market mechanism (I mean tort law) because of Section 230.
Now the easiest law change - that wouldn't required anyone to change anything - would be to revoke Section 230. This would make service providers liable. Everything else is a band-aid. I doubt that this verdict will survive appeal (due to Section 230). But if it does, then again there is no need for any new regulations. The tort lawyers will solve the problem for us.
If we do have device age verification, then it still doesn't shield Meta. The lawyers will sue everyone involved, and disclosure will show if Meta had data that will have shown that user should have been blocked.
The purpose of age verification is to avoid all this. Of course the current proposals suck and won't achieve this. The market will not accept an approach that would work - which would be for anything with a screen or speaker to be permanently tied to an individual user. "OS verification" cannot succeed - it must be one-time hardware attestation. Even a factory reset wouldn't remove the user assignment.
Just remember that these capacities will never be used to exonerate - only crucify.
> is also lobbying in secrecy for requiring all of us to scan our ID and face in order to use our phones and computers.
You’re conflating different things. The OS-level age setting proposals are not the same as scanning IDs and faces.
I’m anti age check legislation, too, but the misinformation is getting so bad that it’s starting to weaken the counter-arguments.
> Their stated reason? Child safety.
> Their actual reason? You can figure that out.
We’re commenting under an article about one $375M lawsuit over child safety and many more on the way. They are obviously being pressured for child safety by over zealous prosecutors. This is why they reversed course and removed end-to-end encryption from Instagram because it was brought up as a threat to child safety.
Also your “you can figure that out” implication doesn’t even make sense. The proposal to move age verification to the OS level would give Meta less information about the user, because the OS, not Meta apps, would be responsible for gating age content. I’m not agreeing with the proposal, but it’s easy to see that it would be more privacy-preserving than having to submit your ID to Meta.
> The proposal to move age verification to the OS level would give Meta less information about the user, because the OS, not Meta apps, would be responsible for gating age content.
I find it hard to believe that meta doesn't already have a pretty good age estimate for 95%+ of their users.
What offloading the responsibility to the app stores (or OS vendors) gives Meta is exactly that, offloading responsibility. In a future lawsuit, they can say that someone else provided them with incorrect information.
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I get the frustration, but I think it's worth separating two things: failing at moderation vs pushing for stricter identity controls
It is most likely not them but they proxie for the US. Under another administration they would use an NGO to advance the agenda. The goal is to facescan the world.
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To be fair, they're just an evil corporation making lemonade out of lemons. I'm sure they'd be happier pushing porn and nazism to hundreds of millions of underage users, but if certain governments want them to write all that bunk code to verify everyone's ID, they might as well make money off the data.
They're a lot more likely to push socialism than nazism. Hence all the socialism and the lack of nazism.