Why is this bad? What is the upside of anyone under 16 using social media?
EDIT: these criticisms are valid. However, the last 20 years have been an experiment in online anonymity, and the result is a dead internet infested by bots and foreign actors. At this point, I think civilized nations with free-speech protections need to experiment with this sort of thing or we might as well completely give up our online spaces to bots and foreign trolls. Because how the fuck is that better?
Do you realize that lemmy is also social media? I wouldn’t be here posting if I had to verify my ID, which is what all these age verification measures do instead of just checking age.
Yes, and while I like being anonymous, I don’t like literally half the internet being made of bots and foreign trolls. Lemmy is such a tiny community that we haven’t attracted their attention, but these bot farms and state-sponsored disinformation campaigns could crush this website in a weekend if they directed their attention here.
the verification process. you could be 42 and never signed up for social media and now you decide you want to post comments on tiktok. Welp now you gotta verify that you’re not a teenager. So provide your ID, provide a photo of yourself holding your ID, and hope some company that is obtaining that information either doesn’t sell it or doesn’t have a security breach. and a bonus to all that is the potential to further track all activities you do online. they can now easily build a profile of you via the social networks you sign up for.
The problem isnt the idea of preventing people under 16 from getting on social media, but how you enforce that.
The only real way is to make every user submit a government ID, which becomes a massive privacy AND security issue with how often every online service gets compromised or leaks user data
If a banks suddenly and frequently lost data on all their users people wouldn’t be screaming that banks should be completely anonymous. The banks would have fines and need to meet high standards to keep doing business
We have lots of societal issues that are made worse with the internet being a wild west and founding logical arguments on the premise that it is insecure also has issues. If a website is so questionable it might leak, it probably shouldn’t be in common use
Cybersecurity: where defenders have to win every day and attackers only have to win once.
Anything like age verification should probably be handled with absolute minimum identifiable information (i.e. you’re older than X true / false) from an authoritative source like say the people who give out IDs (because if they’re broken into everyone’s screwed anyway). Instead OzGov has dumped it in the laps of the corpos, who will hoover up pictures of IDs or faces instead. As of a couple of days beforehand there’s still no actual information on these age verification protocols to my knowledge, very untransparent, very disturbing. Corpos being required to moderate their platforms would be good, this is not that.
Yeah and when your government is experiencing some troubles themselves the whole shit comes down. We’ve experienced a little downtime here for regional government and it lasted quite a while.
Centralisation introduces its own weaknesses. Additionally, at some point, we could address this by just having parents accountable in this specific use case.
Wtf do we need a technological solution to address parenting? This small subset thereof.
Yeah, agreed that every government that makes decisions like this (I think porn restrictions and UK age verification has come up) should be offering a government API to tie into. Governments need to have this data to function and have the resources to handle this (but not a great track record).
I just don’t think essentially making the argument “there are all these problems but that’s the way it’s always been” gets us to a better future. And I think most improvements are iterative and need to start somewhere. I’m also not expecting this to be a slam dunk but I do think some countries need to try this and other tech company restrictions to find out what will make a better future.
Yeah, it was a bit ill thought out but I’d argue its more idealistically unrealistic
We could live in a world something along the lines of websites sending HTTPS certs based on users location with the cert granted by those governments and if you sell or store customers data then you need a security audit for the code.
That would obviously need tweaking and is a long way away from where the world is today, but a world where any website could be malicious is about as necessary as a country where walking into any restaurant has a probable chance of you being shot. A nice part of that analogy is that the main thing holding both together is strong trustworthy institutions. But the web is that way more from history rather than a deep technical issue that forces the internet to be that way. Also probably time, that sort of audit is probably prohibitively expensive, but that could be considered part of the true cost to society that we’re ignoring
Why is this bad? What is the upside of anyone under 16 using social media?
EDIT: these criticisms are valid. However, the last 20 years have been an experiment in online anonymity, and the result is a dead internet infested by bots and foreign actors. At this point, I think civilized nations with free-speech protections need to experiment with this sort of thing or we might as well completely give up our online spaces to bots and foreign trolls. Because how the fuck is that better?
Do you realize that lemmy is also social media? I wouldn’t be here posting if I had to verify my ID, which is what all these age verification measures do instead of just checking age.
Yes, and while I like being anonymous, I don’t like literally half the internet being made of bots and foreign trolls. Lemmy is such a tiny community that we haven’t attracted their attention, but these bot farms and state-sponsored disinformation campaigns could crush this website in a weekend if they directed their attention here.
Tying all your previously anonymous activities to a real life photo, ID, and address.
Good luck trying to criticize an oppressive government again. Or just having an “unapproved” opinion online in general.
the verification process. you could be 42 and never signed up for social media and now you decide you want to post comments on tiktok. Welp now you gotta verify that you’re not a teenager. So provide your ID, provide a photo of yourself holding your ID, and hope some company that is obtaining that information either doesn’t sell it or doesn’t have a security breach. and a bonus to all that is the potential to further track all activities you do online. they can now easily build a profile of you via the social networks you sign up for.
that’s the problem.
The problem isnt the idea of preventing people under 16 from getting on social media, but how you enforce that.
The only real way is to make every user submit a government ID, which becomes a massive privacy AND security issue with how often every online service gets compromised or leaks user data
If a banks suddenly and frequently lost data on all their users people wouldn’t be screaming that banks should be completely anonymous. The banks would have fines and need to meet high standards to keep doing business
We have lots of societal issues that are made worse with the internet being a wild west and founding logical arguments on the premise that it is insecure also has issues. If a website is so questionable it might leak, it probably shouldn’t be in common use
Cybersecurity: where defenders have to win every day and attackers only have to win once.
Anything like age verification should probably be handled with absolute minimum identifiable information (i.e. you’re older than X true / false) from an authoritative source like say the people who give out IDs (because if they’re broken into everyone’s screwed anyway). Instead OzGov has dumped it in the laps of the corpos, who will hoover up pictures of IDs or faces instead. As of a couple of days beforehand there’s still no actual information on these age verification protocols to my knowledge, very untransparent, very disturbing. Corpos being required to moderate their platforms would be good, this is not that.
Ahh… thats not age verification. And yes verification is one of the hard parts with problems but this isn’t even an attempt at age verification
Oh, you’re not saying the user answers this question. You’re saying someone like the Department of Licensing does?
Pretty much that government API you mentioned, rather than the platform self regulating. Fox guarding the hen house and all…
Yeah and when your government is experiencing some troubles themselves the whole shit comes down. We’ve experienced a little downtime here for regional government and it lasted quite a while. Centralisation introduces its own weaknesses. Additionally, at some point, we could address this by just having parents accountable in this specific use case. Wtf do we need a technological solution to address parenting? This small subset thereof.
Exactly! Parents should be in charge of child not smoking or drinking! What sort of countries would also hold stores accountable… wait up…
Yeah, agreed that every government that makes decisions like this (I think porn restrictions and UK age verification has come up) should be offering a government API to tie into. Governments need to have this data to function and have the resources to handle this (but not a great track record).
I just don’t think essentially making the argument “there are all these problems but that’s the way it’s always been” gets us to a better future. And I think most improvements are iterative and need to start somewhere. I’m also not expecting this to be a slam dunk but I do think some countries need to try this and other tech company restrictions to find out what will make a better future.
Tell me you know nothing about software without telling me you know nothing about software.
Yeah, it was a bit ill thought out but I’d argue its more idealistically unrealistic
We could live in a world something along the lines of websites sending HTTPS certs based on users location with the cert granted by those governments and if you sell or store customers data then you need a security audit for the code.
That would obviously need tweaking and is a long way away from where the world is today, but a world where any website could be malicious is about as necessary as a country where walking into any restaurant has a probable chance of you being shot. A nice part of that analogy is that the main thing holding both together is strong trustworthy institutions. But the web is that way more from history rather than a deep technical issue that forces the internet to be that way. Also probably time, that sort of audit is probably prohibitively expensive, but that could be considered part of the true cost to society that we’re ignoring
deleted by creator