Comment by MildlySerious
1 month ago
Two things can be true, and I am in the same boat. Should the next generation have their brains fried by ad-tech corporations and their algorithms? Absolutely not. Should the overdue off-ramp from this trend be the on-ramp to mass-surveillance and government overreach? Also a firm no.
I really wish this take was more prominent. I really don't buy that mass-surveillance should be required for age verification. There are plenty of very smart people who have created much more complicated things than a digital age verification that doesn't track every time you use it.
This also isn't helpful, but I think the sudden push of urgency isn't helping. The internet has existed without any kind of age verification or safety measures for about 30 years. We could have used that time to have a sensible conversation about policy trade offs, but instead we've waited till now to decide that everything has to be rushed through with minimal consideration.
You don't even need to go all high-tech with it: Children, by nature of being children, aren't going out and buying their own smartphones and computers. When Mom and Dad buy the device for their kid, just punch in the kid's age before handing it to them.
That's the flow that California's age verification system uses. Personally, I'm opposed to any age verification beyond the current "pinky promise you're 18" type deals, but California's is the least intrinsically offensive to me.
> When Mom and Dad buy the device for their kid, just punch in the kid's age before handing it to them.
Doing this doesn't accomplish anything in terms of protecting children from the harms of the internet. In fact it feeds your child's age to marketers and child predators.
Every website will get to decide how to handle the age data our devices will now be supplying them. In the case of facebook, it's not as if they had no idea the children endlessly posting selfies and posting "six seven" on their service weren't adults. Facebook was 100% aware that the children using their service were children. They knew what schools those kids went to, who their parents were, which other kids they hung out with. Facebook knew they were children and they took advantage of that fact.
The law California (and other states) passed doesn't define what content has to be blocked for which ages and doesn't give parents any ability to decide what content their children should or shouldn't be allowed to see. It takes control away from parents. As a parent, I might think that my 16 year old should be allowed to look up information on STDs but the websites that collect my child's age could decide they can't and I'll have no say in it.
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>used that time to have a sensible conversation about policy trade offs,
On HN itself, no way. Too many people here make far too much money on ads to want that. It seems the other part that want freedom also want so much freedom it gives huge corporations the freedom to crush them.
>things than a digital age verification that doesn't track every time you use it.
The big companies that pay the politicians don't want that, therefore we won't get that.
> On HN itself, no way. Too many people here make far too much money on ads to want that.
Ya know, this might explain why the warnings seem to fall on deaf ears here.
New favorite person on the internet.
> We could have used that time to have a sensible conversation about policy trade offs [of age verification]…
There is always a conversation, but it is often not the popular one and gets drown out by whatever everyone is excited about at the moment. You can find it if you seek it out.
Lawrence Lessig’s book “Code” (1999), for example, talks about how a completely unrelated internet is an anomaly, and that regulation will certainly be necessary, and advocates that it be done in a thoughtful manner.
It's not about doesn't - the government can always claim that it doesn't track you. That is unlikely to stay true.
It's really either they can't track you or they will track you.
Best time to plant a tree: 30 years ago.
Second best time to plant a tree: now.
A Kindernet would solve many problems. Hardware-gated access, local moderation and control, zero commerce or copyright, whatever you want to do to make the environment uninteresting to bad actors. Frame opposition to the concept as demand for access to your children.
Absolutely: I said something similar recently: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46766649
Exactly. There's a clear alternative in my mind, one I'm sure is objectionable in its own way but I think is the least evil of the three: require providers to label their content and make them liable for it. This allows parents to do the censoring, which is functionally impossible now because no parent can fight the slippery power of multibillion dollar software investments designed to prevent them from having control over what their kids see.
So you're saying these corporations are responsible for verifying the age of their users without verifying the age of their users?
I'm not saying that, nor did I allude to it in any way. I made no assertions as to what the solution should be.
The ideal scenario would be everyone choosing not to engage with these predatory platforms. Going from there, the right question to me is what steps we have to take as a society for that to become even remotely realistic and, subsequently, what role governments can or should have in that.
For starters, I would be in favor of fines that actually hurt the bottom line instead of this "cost of business" bullshit. We have handed these corporations unprecedented access to and control over our lives, to the point that they erode democracy and the social fabric itself. The inevitable abuse of that power when it comes with barely any strings attached needs to be punished in a way that makes it unattractive as a business model at the very least.
Instead of lowering the attack surface by locking out kids, and in turn introducing mass surveillance which at best also lends itself to abuse, the root issues of ruinous greed and lack of accountability need to be addressed. The whole concept that there is no price too high for profits needs to burn. Social media is just one of the more recent manifestations of it.
They’re the oil barons of our day. They frack our data and output psychological/social pollution.
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