Impose an insanely steep tax (say, 10,000%) on all ads revenue tied to underage individuals.
Now it's possible to pursue the Al Capone prosecution: tax fraud.
SocMed cos. will avoid anyone underage like the plauge.
________________________________
Notes:
1. "How Target Figured Out A Teen Girl Was Pregnant Before Her Father Did" <https://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2012/02/16/how-targ...>, discussed on HN at the time: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3601354> (17 Feb 2012).
But yes, the Al Capone solution seems like it would work.
Not reliably so, and not people who are deliberately trying to fake the system.
Looking at the ads FB are showing me, they are not well targetted at all. I can see an add about AI in education that seems to be aimed at teachers (not a teacher), one from a charity aimed at people with spare rooms that could be used to accommodate human trafficking survivors (I do not have a spare room), a summer school for kids who might do a history related subject at university (that one is well targetted), one advertising admin jobs at British intelligence agencies (I only just meet security requirements and I do not have relevant experience). I get shown multiple ads aimed at Muslims (I am not a Muslim). In the past I have been shown ads for Judaism GCSE courses (not Jewish either, and my kids did not do any religion GCSEs).
Saying that though, it does seem like as soon as I click one advert (either out of curiosity, or to waste obvious scam advertisers budget), I'm suddenly inundated with similar adverts.
Worse I've clicked an ad, bought a product and still seen adverts for the same product from the vendor after the fact. I'm pretty sure there are ways for vendors to preclude such wasteful ad spend.
Also, it's not like the platform is going to give advertisers access to its full capabilities. For one, they don't need to - they only need to sell the minimum it takes to keep the advertisers on board. Two, they wouldn't want some clever advertisers to extract juicy data indirectly and cut out the middleman.
Better capabilities for customers, they reach more customers, more revenue = they may increase ad spending because they see it working
What am I missing here? Don't you still need the platform to actually advertise on? How could I extract data and use that to advertise to someone?
Maybe there’s a reason they want me to rewatch things, but I find it extremely annoying to have the first rows of recommendations be things I watched recently.
"...way to perfectly identify somebody on the internet..."
nature-nurture x game-theory anxiety/thrill VS. consciousness & planetary/colony-wide awareness; and I'm not talking about some esoteric spirituality or whatever the fuck.
we are always in a natural balance, established by those who do and those who don't. all of us compartmentalise. and good/noble/grand people in law are rare and entirely absent in politics.
TV & the radio made a lot of destructive behaviours look cool (all that finboy shit) and so did feel-good literature like Siddharta.
and then there's the myth of "hard decisions" that can only be made by certain kinds of characters.
young ppl are easy to bend towards hierarchies that reward certain kinds of behaviour and convictions. makes em feel proud.
and in the end we are all just doin our job ^^
It's Australia, who often rank very low for a western country on human rights.
https://www.amnesty.org/en/location/asia-and-the-pacific/sou...
Secret trials https://www.hrlc.org.au/news/2023/4/19/secret-trials-have-no...
Secret laws https://www.theguardian.com/law/2023/mar/28/more-than-800-se...
Secret ministries https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2022/aug/19/scott...
Secret backdoors https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2018/12/new_australia...
Introducing Digital ID system that may be enabler for this https://www.oaic.gov.au/digital-id
While trying to introduce laws to weaken encryption an ex Australia prime minister famously said:
> "The laws of mathematics are very commendable, but the only law that applies in Australia is the law of Australia" Malcolm Turnbull.
What's crazy the west look at places such as China as dystopian with the great firewall etc, it appears China was just ahead of the game.
Australia is probably the easiest place to introduce a system to block social media, a experimentation ground for five eyes. Easy to push things through, protesting isn't an Australian pass time, not that big of a country, not that small of a country.
Never forget that the Western worlds first, most successful racist genocide occurred in Australia, and the same racist reasoning that allowed it to maintain White Australia policies into the 80's are still being used to justify the slaughter of innocent human beings all over the world.
When the USA wants something dirty done, in yet another illegal war, Australia is ready with hat in hand, willful and subservient, to commit yet more crimes against humanity and get away with it.
Australia is where the apparatus designed, with intent, to massively violate the human rights of over a billion human beings currently operates, at insane scales, every second of the day. Australians are fine with it.
(Disclaimer: White Stolen Generation Australian.)
The White Stolen Generation is a real thing. If you don't know about it, you're not qualified to dismiss it:
https://www.creativespirits.info/aboriginalculture/politics/...
(EDIT: please look at the URL, which includes the anchor directly to the section on the "White Stolen Generation" - for some reason when following the URL through HN, the jump to the anchor for that section is not followed, giving the impression that there is no "White Stolen Generation" section on the given website, when .. indeed .. there is.)
Those who don't want to confront this painful aspect of Australia's terrible history tend to want to muddy the waters, but those of us who actually suffered under the forced human trafficking regime that was official Australian government policy see things a lot more clearly...
No, it was not an unfortunate typo. You have merely not bothered to take anything more than a superficial glance at the details.
Please, before you rush to be right about something you know nothing about, try a simple google search, at least - especially for such a subject where some of us were victimized by our own governments.
The link given goes directly to the section on the White Stolen Generation:
https://www.creativespirits.info/aboriginalculture/politics/...
(Look at the URL...)
The "white stolen generations"
Did you know that in Australia there is another stolen generation, one which shares the pain and consequences? It's called the "white stolen generation" to distinguish it from the Aboriginal stolen generation.
In the five decades up to 1982, the newborn babies of young, single women were forcibly removed from them for adoption, a practice sometimes called 'baby farming'. Mothers were drugged, tethered to beds, not allowed to see their babies, told they were dead. [54] Many of these adoptions occurred after the mothers were sent away by their families due to the stigma associated with being pregnant and unmarried.
More than 250,000 white mothers lost their babies to forcible removal at birth by these past illegal adoption practices. Groups such as Adoption Loss Adult Support and Apology Alliance offer help and support.
Between 2010 and 2012 apologies were offered by Western Australia, South Australia, ACT, New South Wales, Victoria and Tasmania. Prime Minister Julia Gillard offered a national apology to those affected by forced adoptions in 2013.
Source: A guide to Australia's Stolen Generations - Creative Spirits, retrieved from https://www.creativespirits.info/aboriginalculture/politics/...
Then there is this:
https://www.smh.com.au/politics/federal/white-mothers-of-sto...
.. and of course you could read what Wikipedia has to say about it:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forced_adoption_in_Australia
In fact, an "apology" was given by the Australian government, but as we can see, it was not enough.
General public awareness of the subject, as you have demonstrated, is terrible. And, yet again, Australia gets away with it as a result.
I don’t have a dog in this fight and know very little about this piece of history, so I am bowing out. I did think it was legitimately a typo
Yes, white children were stolen and officially trafficked by their governments, as official policy. From around the Commonwealth, in fact.
And some of us are still suffering.
>Sounds like you're not qualified to talk on it.
What part of "(Disclaimer: White Stolen Generation Australian.)" didn't you understand?
That didn't turn out well thanks to kiddy fiddling "Christian Brothers" at multiple institutes across Australia who worked their way through literal boatloads of children.
eg: https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2017/mar/02/child-migran...
Clontarf Boys Town, Castledare, Bindoon, and several other sites in this state alone were the subject of a massive nation wide Royal Commission into child abuse.
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/australasia/bindoon...
I think the kinetic testing is done all over the middle east. The mind-control stuff is pretty successfully deployed down under, though.
For those who are reading this thread in disbelief at the magnitude of Australia's dark history, this is a compelling read:
https://research-repository.griffith.edu.au/items/02ba5454-5...
oh dear, have we forgotten about The Holocaust so soon?
Or are we just going to let slide mis-information on true historical events that don't need lying to relay the injustice, and support justice?
Btw we are not going to accept that you mistyped, Again.
I don’t understand what is dystopian about knowing where I left my keys, and seeing how my wife’s commute home is doing without phoning her while she is driving, assuming we always both have mobile phones.
EDIT: toned down the term I used.
Way to rationalize stalking away.
They do the same in Chris Hansen's show. They are there only to check upon the safety of the minor.
I do not see how following her every step would help her though.
We are usually in a call whenever she is outside, but I feel like even this is futile were anything bad to happen.
I remember watching my sister and her husband calling each other frequently with, "How far are you away from home?" and just kind of scratched my head. (I think I have sinced talked them into enabling Find My.)
When my wife or I want to call a daughter we can see immediately if they are at work or at home... things like that are nice. There's also an indescribable sweetness to just looking longingly in on a daughter who is far away and wondering how her day is going. Empty nest blues? (Or maybe Miner at the Dial-A-View.)
Can you at least conceive that some people might find it deeply creepy that someone can follow their every step, and equally creepy to be able to 'spy' on another person 24/7?
But I don’t think it’s a distopian nightmare that I want it.
I find data collection and tracking disconcerting not because I'm doing anything nefarious, unlawful or something I'm ashamed of—my life is pretty boring and uninteresting—but because it has the effect of reducing one's autonomy. If one knows one's data is monitored and one is being tracked then one acts differently. For some, they'll make minor changes in behavior, for others a lot. Even for those who've no idea about others tracking or collecting data about them there's the broader issue of how society ought to be conducted. That's a very big issue I can't address here.
Of course, the authoritarians amongst us would argue that monitoring is good thing as people won't be tempted to misbehave, commit crimes and such. I'd answer that by saying those who've nefarious intent will find ways of circumventing the surveillance so the net effect on society is negative as the 'innocent' are the onrs who are targeted without a good or just reason.
Right, pretty much everyone has a mobile phone. What has truly surprised me is how many people are prepared to trade data and being surveiled for convenience. I often wonder if they make such conscious decisions knowing the full implications of that surveillance. I suspect most do not.
Having a mobile phone it's inevitable I will be tracked by multiple entities from government to Google. My response is governed by how much I am prepared to trade privacy and autonomy for convenience and I reckon that's a large amount. Not having Google account and killing and or removing all Google services goes some considerable way but I'm under no illusion that Big Tech is still tracking me. That said, the info colllected wouldn't hold much value.
Not, it's not. You could use a GNU/Linux phone with hardware kill switches for modem and WiFi/Bluetooth: Librem 5. This is what I do.
WiFi is set to only reconnect manually and mobile data is off until needed. There's lots of other protections too such as no Chrome browser and JS is turned off by default on the browsers (I've three different browsers set for different jobs, none keep cookies between sessions). With ad protection and JS off I never see ads. I've no social media accounts, HN is pretty much it—and you can hardly call it social media. YouTube is viewed through NewPipe and so on.
That's pretty tight. But it's easy for me because I've no need of social media and such. Right, my ISP can track me but I'm not in the drug trade or espionage so that's pretty irrelevant.
I've a box of older phones and GNU/Linux is a pending project for them. I'm watching Librem and I'll likely go that way eventually.
What I really want on my phones are manual click-type (air gap) off switches to switch the phone off in a split second, same with WiFi. Unfortunately, I've been spoiled forever. My ancient Nokia had a battery with a quick release button on the back. If say I was in a meeting and wanted to kill the phone quickly I could reach into my pocket and push the button and slide the battery abount 1cm which disconnected it—the phone was off in a fraction of a second, none of this nonsense waiting for the phone to shut down.
I miss that feature with a passion and I want it back.
The loss of privacy was something that was totally foreseeable (by me, at least) but embraced by the general population. The general embrace has meant that we all operate within a panopticon-like system - this itself modifies behaviour. No alternative choices are available - as a collective all have to 'follow the herd', with phones etc being essential to modern existence, despite the privacy reservations felt by many.
I'm taking the opportunity to express the idea that it is possible to find appeal in this or that tech feature and to lose sight of the broader ramifications. Each incremental change can be justified (no batteries makes my phone slimmer, 'finding my' is useful, its good to know my blood pressure, etc) but to imagine that the rollout of these features is a natural unfolding of reality without preordained end goal (technocratic governance) is naive.
Technocratic governance is not a goal that anyone would accept if it was proposed in a straightforward way - hence the duplicity, incrementalism, destruction of existing institutions, etc.
Huxley's "Brave New World" was published 1932
If say an adult is incapable to setup a phone/tablet, then a person at the store would help them set the initial part but skip the login with Google/Apple etc.
No idea why this was not tried and then see if it fails.
What? you mean asking the parent to enter a date of birth before giftin the child a phone and setting it in child mode is like burning things?
Did you really relied to me? Then explain
Seems to me a better idea then government IDs or sending your ID to Facebook.
I could guess why Google did nlot add this feature to Android , they want the money from ads, and maybe Apple wants Google to bhave money to share with them.
How do you want to enforce it? Everyone who grew up as Internet started knows that everyone is over 18 on the Internet. Or did you, as a kid, ever put your real birth date on a form asking for it for purposes of age-walling you?
And if not voluntary, then... it's either companies asking for government-issued IDs on a case-by-case basis, or a larger system, perhaps legally mandated, that forces you to tie your government-issued ID into it so age information is automatically propagated in the background.
Easy
1 make it illegal for children to buy smarthpones, tablets.
2 make the OS vendors to add a parent mode/child control API, when the phone starts first time the parent enters the details
3 inform the buyer that if he is a parent he is responsible for the child not the government, the parent must set the correct birthdate on the device and set the device in child mode , they can decide to trust the child but then the government is not responsible.
4 the browssers on this locked devices will report to the websites if the user is adult or not, they will not report he brithdate just a true /false
5 if a website fails to read the age from the browser and still offers oillegal content to a browser that is marked as minor then the website is repossible and it is fined.
At no point the child is asked to enter his age so there is not similar to current place where you click I am over 18.
If you have children you might have made an account for them to use a smartphone, Did you lied bout their birthdate ? Did you gave them the new phone in a box and let them set it up because you were to busy ?
8 years old doom scrolling tiktok is a dystopia we are experiencing right now, pick your flavor
Why not just (a) make it illegal so the parents and tech companies see it that way and (b) put some fines on the responsible adult parties if violations are found?
Sure enforcement would be spotty and loose, but tickets for parents and fines for tech companies would go a long way to establish the cultural change without the need for "verification"
If companies are motivated and parents are motivated to prevent it and schools have the cover to also police it, then social media usage probably won't hit critical mass for kids and they won't feel FOMO to get it.
"it's illegal" is usually a decent enough hard stop to most kids for "why can't I have it"
Should just age-restrict smartphones altogether imo lol. Entire generations survived without mobile phones and it would remove entire issues around addictive mobile games, social media abuse, attention/focus issues
and you'ld learn how to code just like millions have for decades - in school or library computer rooms, or with an age-restricted computer that your family would provide.
A company can't work like that - the tech company will need to do it's upmost to avoid the fines, and so will implement verification that is both unsafe, incredibly invasive, discriminatory but crucially has an audit trail, and it's insane to suggest they would do anything else.
It depends on the assumptions you're willing to make.
Imagine if Australia introduces a block that works really well, and preserves privacy, but you can bypass it by using a VPN, or by rooting your phone.
Would that be good enough, because only 1% of kids will figure out those bypasses? Or will the knowledge spread like wildfire until 90% of kids are using VPNs or rooting their phones?
If you assume such bypasses would spread like wildfire, Australia would also need to block all VPNs or make every phone impossible to root. Tough to do that in a way that isn't dystopian.
In the US, children under 13 are usually forbidden from having online accounts. Do some kids lie? For sure, but the sites will try to ban those accounts.
In practice, this legislation would be very positive because it would establish the expectation that young teens _are not on social media_. This only works if it's national legislation: No kid will feel left out because his/her friends are on SnapGramTok. They are all banned. They can be mad at the unfair government/adults together.
What is social media exactly?
This would need to be ban on specific blocklisted companies and services which might be a good thing because alternatives might arise that could try to do their best to not end up on the blocklist.
Location tracking is just another knife.
Although reasonable restrictions on all technologies aren't inherently bad.
Restrictions imposed pre-emptively just because nightmare scenarios are easy to imagine and captivating are not great.
Not in the hand of a government that has a monopoly on violence. Most governments in the world dont have your best interests in mind and being tracked 24/7 is a bad deal to get.
Monopoly on violence is the most significant cultural development that allowed incredible wealth and societal development.
Currently we are in the age of commonality of surveillance. If this turns out to be harmful enough we might as well move towards monopoly on surveillance and it might be an improvement.
Personally I think it won't be necessary.
I'm sure of one thing. Surveillance won't go away because it's a useful technological tool.
- You don't have full control over the knife. In fact it's not about your use of the knife.
- The people in control of the knife have a poor track record at caring about you, and belong to a category that history has proven we should not trust.
- Every time you use the knife, you sign a blank contract giving full authorization to future non-specified knife usage to people you don't know nor do you know their motive. And you trust none of those people, for an indefinite length of time, will abuse it.
- Cumulative use of the knife can accumulate stabs that may be delt to you and all your love ones one day all at once.
- Use of knife can be automated and scale at the level of all countries.
- Most people are not knowledgeable about the knife, don't know much about it, and it's invisible to them.
There are many knives in your relative proximity all the time. Some of them are used for your benefit, other are used for other's benefit, every one have potential to be abused against you by evil actor.
> The people in control of the knife have a poor track record at caring about you, and belong to a category that history has proven we should not trust.
Scrutiny should be proportional severity of harm times the frequency of harm.
> Every time you use the knife, you sign a blank contract giving full authorization to future non-specified knife usage to people you don't know nor do you know their motive. And you trust none of those people, for an indefinite length of time, will abuse it.
Everytime you enter restaurant or even leave your house you are giving full authorization to people around you who posses knives to use those knives for non-specified purposes. You can only hope they are reasonable and won't cause you harm.
> Cumulative use of the knife can accumulate stabs that may be delt to you and all your love ones one day all at once
Knives don't need to accumulate anything. One misapplication can end your life literally
> Use of knife can be automated and scale at the level of all countries.
There are many machines that are basically bunch of fast moving knives. It's on you to not be where they are. Their operators are bound to take precautions proportional to harm times the frequency of harm.
> Most people are not knowledgeable about the knife, don't know much about it, and it's invisible to them
You usually can't really tell how many knives are around you and most are hidden at most times.
> What the hell is going on?
Because they weren't all that dystopian? Maybe people had the good sense of being able to see the amazing aspects of those future technologies even when the authors tried to paint them darkly? Or maybe we rightly all realized - even if just at subconscious, emotional level - that those fictional dystopias are thin, simplistic narrative devices, and "no one would be stupid enough to" actually implement them?
What we didn't predict was adtech. For all the anti-corporate fiction that was part of, or adjacent to, science fiction of that era, the western culture is still obsessed with self-made people, glorifying entrepreneurship, making money. Well, turns out there's hardly a difference between small businesses and large corporations. The incentives are the same regardless of size; sole proprietorships and multinationals aren't some sworn enemies, they're just different size of the same thing.
What we didn't realize - and many still don't - is that, while no one may be stupid enough to implement the techno-dystopia outright, many will happily do whatever it takes, no matter how unscrupulous and underhanded, to secure their income. We didn't realize that glorifying "business sharks" means creating an entrepreneurship culture where customers are resources to be exploited, not human beings. Iterate on it enough, and we get to techno-dystopia indirectly, with no stupid steps made on the way - just plenty of exploitative ones.
Perhaps the memory of the first 3/4 of the 20th century has us put too much focus on the governments, and blind to private interests. A particular pet peeve of mine, for example:
> My German ex was born in East Germany, 11 years before the fall of the Berlin Wall. She thinks people are mad to believe that tracking is not going to be abused.
Yes, and at least some people who think alike also like to bring up Nazis pulling census records to make their purges more efficient. But frankly, I don't think this is a good argument against censuses, or contact tracing. It's not the census that put minorities in concentration camps, it's the Nazis. They wouldn't have stopped if that data didn't exist, they'd find some other proxy or just do it systematically, like they did elsewhere.
A better argument is to perhaps not collect data you don't need. A census without religious affiliation would be less useful to Nazis and the like, and it's questionable how useful having this information was for the purposes it was collected. But my ultimate point is, when your government turns evil, you're screwed anyway. We need to try and prevent it from going bad in the first place. It may indeed involve fighting against badly justified surveillance overreach, but trying to take away tools that an okay-ish government uses for good, only because they'll be used for bad things when the government turns evil, is just self-destructive behavior.
I mean, you could argue that teaching a person how to grow strength and keep a healthy body, how to read, write, plan, think, negotiate, convince, are all bad because what if that person becomes a criminal or a dictator? Yes, it would be much better if murderers and tyrants didn't know how to use a knife or a gun, or how to talk people into helping them. But we consider that risk to be worth it because of all the good it brings to everyone else, continuously.
And yeah, we're all so focused on the idea of governments going full-Nazi again, that we've ignored the gradual overreach of private interests, which at this point not only actively screws with our everyday lives all the time (hello advertising industry), but also undermines our governments too. Even worse, all the "dual-use" tech and data private interests have, that okay-ish governments would love to access but have good sense to refrain themselves, sits there gift-wrapped for any evil government willing to reach for it. We ended up choosing the worst option of all: all the downsides of tech being abused by private interests now and evil governments in the future, with none of the upsides of okay governments using it for good today.
So perhaps we should concentrate less on things like AirTags being potentially deadly in hands of the next Stalin, and focus more on fighting private and public attempts at abusing them early, while maximizing the benefits society can get from such technologies.
Or, in short, let's pay less attention to how some tech could be abused in principle, and more attention to people who are trying to abuse others.
Although I think it's only for government sites. I believe it could probably be used to verify only age in a privacy-respecting fashion.
But let's be real. We all know this isn't about protecting children, because it never is.
Nope, it does not require this.
What you can do is to construct a zero-knowledge proof of the age of the smartphone user. You can do this based on the certificate that is provisioned in modern electronic passports. The proof construction can choose to ignore expiry date, so the government can offer to issue expired passports with blank photos for the instances of people who should not have functioning passports.
Then you need the social media sites to agree on a common auth mechanism that uses the zero-knowledge proof, and if the same proof gets used on multiple devices, you log out the previously used device.
So even if a parent lets their kid use the parent's passport to generate the proof on the kids phone, every time the kid uses this proof, the parent gets logged out of Facebook and all other social media apps.
Then no parents are going to let the kids use their ID, because of the negative impact to themselves. And you have no more means of tracking than already exists today.
This also offers interesting possibilities for a startup! In the EU today, there are essentially zero legal ways for a 12-year-old to have a group chat with their friends, apart from RCS and iMessage, which then divides the friend group into two halves. Imagine then a chat app aimed specifically at group conversations for teens, where every user has a verified age. This type of app is something parents will pay good money for.
> So even if a parent lets their kid use the parent's passport to generate the proof on the kids phone, every time the kid uses this proof, the parent gets logged out of Facebook and all other social media apps.
Doesn't this automatically give the "common auth mechanism" perfect knowledge of all the parent's social media accounts, whether under a real name or a pseudonym? That sounds like an additional means of tracking.
Also, what if the parent legitimately has multiple devices that they use for social media (e.g., a phone and a laptop)? You might say, "log them out if it's used simultaneously from multiple devices", but then you're tracking all social-media usage everywhere in realtime.
It does not require this, and in fact the solution may be almost entirely outside of the technology realm.
Simply making it illegal would be enough to:
1. Deter a lot of people from enabling social media on the smartphone of their kids
2. Enable a lot of parents to tell their kids that what they are doing is illegal
3. Force BigTech to implement whatever solution fits best to control the age of the user before install. The onus to respect the law is on them.
It's a very technical misunderstanding of how law works, or the effects law have on society. Legality isn't technicality. Something being physically possible doesn't "break" the law, and breaking a law doesn't render that law useless.
Piracy would be a good comparison to this law. We all know how that turned out.
Also we have to consider that gov spying programs are developed everywhere in the world, and the fact CP has been used as an excuse to pass questionable bills again and again.
What's even crazier is that we have to even argue this is a problem.
And that intelligent people are arguing that this is all OK. People that read history books, saw PRISM and Snowden, heard about cops abusing their system already, etc.
There aren’t big tech companies running piracy services.
You could put them under the rule of law if they did.
No, but the ease of breaking the law does need to be weighed against the costs it imposes on everyone else. Carrying a driver's license is almost a non-cost, and is really only necessary til people hit 28 or so and cashiers largely stop checking.
Needing to verify age online could place very real costs on people. Enabling surveillance is an issue. The chilling effect of knowing that database leaks are going to tie your real identity to your online one is an issue (think the Ashley Madison leaks, but for your old angsty teenager Reddit account). There are a lot of small groups who don't want their membership revealed, like LGBT people in countries with laws against it, domestic abuse victims, support groups for people with trauma, etc, etc.
I don't think I've seen a system that doesn't involve those issues. I'm sure one is hypothetically possible, but that never seems to be a goal of these laws.
So the question is whether restricting social media use by age is worth those drawbacks. My personal values say it's not, but I do recognize that's a value call to some degree and views will differ.
You can make social media illegal for under 16s without requiring online age validation.
After all, a form of this already exists with the US COPPA [1] law, and the presence of that law hasn't forced age validation on everyone.
If the US can make it de-facto illegal for companies to let under 13s use social media, and has been the case for over 20 years, then it shouldn't be a sudden privacy-ending problem for Australia to make it illegal for under 16s to use social media.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Children%27s_Online_Privacy_Pr...
Furthermore, now I have to navigate the morality of encouraging my own kid to lie, just so she can use an online service that I approve of as a parent. Terrible law.
If it becomes commonplace, the iPhone could vouch for you about your age, without disclosing your identity.
No, it really couldn't. If it can't disclose your identity, then there's no mechanism to revoke a compromised or cloned identifier, and no ability to demonstrate in court that you performed the necessary diligence correctly.
Age verification systems must, inherently, either produce a secure proof of age with no genuine anonymity, or a chocolate teapot highly insecure proof of age that's no better than a "I am over 18" tickbox that isn't going to protect websites in court from these clumsy laws.
See, e.g., the GDPR, which as written has strong language against storing data, but as applied is riddled with 'reasonable' exceptions that have never been tested in court. It's like Schrödinger's regulation, it's both incredibly restrictive and trivial to comply with (unless you're Super Evil™) at the same time, somehow.
Surely even a flag locked behind the "parental controls" section of an iPhone is much better than a tickbox.
When it comes through, theres like 10 other interest groups who want to immediately use it for their thing.
The problem is, what is "it"? Are applications like WhatsApp and iMessage social media? They seem to be significant sources of teenage angst but they are also incredibly useful tools. What about Hacker News? Is it social media?
How do you prove it?
Which would comfortably cover every method of person to person communication from SMS to the telephone app.
Am I correct in this assumption?
The slide to dystopia which is described or implied by countless fictional books is, in fact, really easy to pull off. It's death by a thousand socially convenient compromises.
I remember when a significant portion of people thought carrying phones around was creepy, or that spending your life looking at screens was antisocial, and these things were actively proclaimed. Contrary to popularly repeated historical revisionist tropes, lots of people had to be cajoled and prodded and pressured into the "digital revolution". Surely others remember that?
And now we're at a stage now where if you don't have something like whatsapp or facebook or instagram or whatever, depending on the culture and the age group, there's a real chance that you'll be socially confronted, and even belittled in some circumstances.
It's crazy that all the things we considered the worst of dystopia in the 80's, thinking nobody would be stupid enough to do, and that those societies in SF books were only distant fictions, are things we are actively seeking now.
Things like "Find my" and "air tags" are already beloved my millions, people use it to track loved ones and they swear by it. Even very intelligent, educated people.
There is such a cognitive dissonance between people swearing the last election meant a likely dictatorship and the same people setting up a tech rope around their necks in case a dictatorship does happen.
My now-dead Jewish grandfather met my grandmother during the French occupation because she was making fake papers. He would be horrified if he knew what we are doing right now with our data.
My German ex was born in East Germany, 11 years before the fall of the Berlin Wall. She thinks people are mad to believe that tracking is not going to be abused.
What the hell is going on?