Whenever one of my students is sluggish and exhausted, I ask them when they went to bed. The answer is invariably something like “2 AM.” I then ask why they were up so late, and they shrug, and I...
Exemplary
Whenever one of my students is sluggish and exhausted, I ask them when they went to bed. The answer is invariably something like “2 AM.”
I then ask why they were up so late, and they shrug, and I say “were you on your phone?” and they usually quietly admit “…yeah.”
I don’t blame the students. Unfettered phone access is like a drug. I have to institute a phone curfew for myself, otherwise my sleep is interrupted. Even then I still break it all the time, even though I know it’s bad for me and I shouldn’t do it. Also I’m an adult with a fully-developed brain, not a kid with a still-developing brain. If it’s hard for me to resist the lure of my phone at bedtime, then it’s probably 10-100x harder for them.
At lunch just yesterday, one of the other teachers I work with talked about how she puts her phone on the other side of her house to charge when she goes to bed, so she won’t be tempted by it.
I do know that a lot more parents are restricting their kids’ phone access. The tools for that have gotten a lot better too. It used to be that a majority of my students came in looking like zombies, and now it’s pretty clear who has limits on their phone access and who doesn’t. I legitimately feel bad for the ones who don’t. School and adolescence is already hard enough for kids, but they’re downright miserable when you’re chronically sleep deprived.
I would really like the platforms themselves to take some initiative here, since I guarantee you they have years of hard, very specific data on just how much kids are on their apps, but we of course know that will never happen. TikTok’s gonna TikTok and Insta’s gonna Insta, even if they’re hurting kids while doing it.
To be fair, smartphones didn't take off until I was near graduating high school, and I still stayed up until early in the morning some nights. Smartphones might make this easier than using up...
Whenever one of my students is sluggish and exhausted, I ask them when they went to bed. The answer is invariably something like “2 AM.”
I then ask why they were up so late, and they shrug, and I say “were you on your phone?” and they usually quietly admit “…yeah.”
To be fair, smartphones didn't take off until I was near graduating high school, and I still stayed up until early in the morning some nights. Smartphones might make this easier than using up limited texts on my flip phone or hiding my laptop under the covers as a teen or even reading books under the covers as a preteen, but a big part of this is just dumb decision making because they're kids.
Yep. As someone who was a high schooler in the early-mid 2000s, I spent many nights up late working on projects, raiding with my guild in WoW, or just spending time on the internet. Usually woke...
Yep. As someone who was a high schooler in the early-mid 2000s, I spent many nights up late working on projects, raiding with my guild in WoW, or just spending time on the internet. Usually woke up early too so I could make sure to fit in a bit of computer time and a shower before school. Just had to make a stop by the vending machine for a caffeinated soda after arriving at school to keep me going.
I wasn’t a stellar performer but did pretty well in most classes, aside from maths which I attribute mostly to the “survival of the fittest” attitude that my math teachers tended to have.
I was a very successful student, and I still remember nights spent until 5am texting my crush. I think sometimes kids are just gonna do shit like this, and the technology is really just something...
I was a very successful student, and I still remember nights spent until 5am texting my crush. I think sometimes kids are just gonna do shit like this, and the technology is really just something that makes it easier or harder to do so. If I had kids now, I'd probably have a "no phones in bed" rule for them, but I can't even enforce that rule for myself atm lol so I suspect they'd still manage to get one over on me in that respect.
I thought about this some more after my initial comment, and I think it’s a combination of “teens have always stayed up too late” and the ease of access to an entertainment device you’re not just...
I thought about this some more after my initial comment, and I think it’s a combination of “teens have always stayed up too late” and the ease of access to an entertainment device you’re not just figuratively addicted to. Maybe this is similar/comparable to excessive pornography consumption in adults becoming more of an issue with increased internet adoption.
In the case of teenagers, their circadian rhythm is also just naturally shifted later. It shouldn't be surprising they don't get enough sleep when they don't start getting tired until 12 or later...
In the case of teenagers, their circadian rhythm is also just naturally shifted later. It shouldn't be surprising they don't get enough sleep when they don't start getting tired until 12 or later and have to be at school at 7 or 8.
Yeah. I never had my phone by my bed (though sometimes I'd read books waaaay too long), but I spent many hours as a teen lying in bed just trying to fall asleep. I had no idea about circadian...
Yeah. I never had my phone by my bed (though sometimes I'd read books waaaay too long), but I spent many hours as a teen lying in bed just trying to fall asleep. I had no idea about circadian rhythms being different for teens, so I was convinced I had insomnia and needed medication. I remember once going downstairs and leaving a note for my parents saying "It's 2:10 am and I'm still awake, we need to get me a prescription."
I never asked for a prescription, but I was definitely the same as you! Lying awake for hours just to be forcefully woken up for school when you finally get into a good, deep sleep - then being...
I never asked for a prescription, but I was definitely the same as you! Lying awake for hours just to be forcefully woken up for school when you finally get into a good, deep sleep - then being exhausted throughout the day, just to have the cycle somehow repeat and not be able to fall asleep that night. Even now I'm pretty sure I have a delayed sleep phase - getting up early just doesn't work for me.
I feel bad for the kids dealing with that today. 90% of their life seems to be online, and it's not easy to just ignore that, especially when social media is designed to addict them. If you throw ADHD or even just not caring about school in the mix (which is becoming increasingly easy to do), there's no chance they'll ever get sufficient sleep.
I definitely did the same myself! I don't think they're the sole reason, but I do think phones are far more potent stay-up mechanisms than anything kids have ever had access to before.
I definitely did the same myself! I don't think they're the sole reason, but I do think phones are far more potent stay-up mechanisms than anything kids have ever had access to before.
Yeah, I think they do enable the same behavior more easily than a lot of previous alternatives. I myself am nearly 30 and still stay up well past midnight on my phone in bed a lot of times (albeit...
Yeah, I think they do enable the same behavior more easily than a lot of previous alternatives. I myself am nearly 30 and still stay up well past midnight on my phone in bed a lot of times (albeit without needing to wake up early anymore). I'd probably try to keep a kid of mine from having their phone in bed, but I suspect they'd get pissed at my hypocrisy.
Were there functional (read: non-bribable, efficient) lawmaking available to us, we wouldn’t have to rely on companies obviously not deciding against their own best interests. I’ve been meaning to...
I would really like the platforms themselves to take some initiative here […], but we of course know that will never happen
Were there functional (read: non-bribable, efficient) lawmaking available to us, we wouldn’t have to rely on companies obviously not deciding against their own best interests.
I’ve been meaning to write my state, federal, and EU representatives about this for a while now. Maybe I can finally get around to doing it. Who can, in good faith, argue against a time limit, mandatorily enforced by social media platforms, of say six hours per day for teens? (Yes, that’s already way too long, but you gotta start somewhere.) It’s not like with the complete bans where there are legitimate arguments against it, like kids being excluded from their way of following the news and such.
Sure. Requiring identity information to engage with web sites is an invasion of privacy that hinders anonymity and facilitates government and corporate monitoring. Enforcing a quota would also...
Who can, in good faith, argue against a time limit, mandatorily enforced by social media platforms, of say six hours per day for teens?
Sure. Requiring identity information to engage with web sites is an invasion of privacy that hinders anonymity and facilitates government and corporate monitoring.
Enforcing a quota would also require invasive reporting infrastructure to exist. Otherwise how is Instagram going to know someone already spent six hours on TikTok and four hours on YouTube? Never mind, what constitutes "social media?" Is talking to friends on Discord (which I certainly use more than iMessage these days) "social media?" How about WhatsApp? All this requires determining which platforms qualify and building an identity apparatus that can also collect usage data, making it accessible to other companies and governments.
Such limitations would also be an infringement upon the teens' right to freedom of association.
Late edit: see to the very bottom of this comment. Good point, I agree as a privacy-minded person that there need to be very careful approaches regarding legislation like this, and I hadn’t really...
Late edit: see to the very bottom of this comment.
Good point, I agree as a privacy-minded person that there need to be very careful approaches regarding legislation like this, and I hadn’t really thought about it in my original comment. That said, it is technically very much possible, although not in the current state of most governments, to implement this well, i.e. privacy-respecting (see below).
I think in general most things regarding this issue ought to be possible to do, we just gotta get a bit creative with it. I will try, and please point out any flaws you (to any reader) see:
Requiring identity information
Government service which gives out a yes or no for being aged over 18 or not, and maybe one for 16/13 or wherever the other line gets drawn. No name, no ID number, sure as hell no image/video of the ID gets transmitted, uploaded, let alone stored anywhere.
extensive reporting infrastructure
Start by making it per-app, then. Or have the OS enforce it via some screen-time mechanism already in place (which in turn complicates it for kids with e.g. phone + tablet, meaning at some point some people smarter than me will have to come up with a better mechanism, which I’m sure is feasible.
apparatus that can also collect usage data, making it accessible to other companies and governments.
In an ideal world, the above age verification mechanism would be anonymous (to the providing authority) to use and verifiably doesn’t log which citizen used it where. I know that is unlikely, but if we want to make things better, we gotta start somewhere. Besides, I consider this effectively a thought experiment due to the likelihood of such legislation coming, so let’s treat it as a creative exercise…
Never mind, what constitutes "social media?"
(At least for the initial implementation phase) don’t get philosophical, use app store categories for this. Or screen time categories. Or start simple with an explicit set of like 4-5 obvious, clear-cut social platforms which don’t have messaging as the primary purpose. That’d already help. Since we’re not trying to implement aforementioned full ban, we don’t face all the same issues those lawmakers did/do.
The effects of reduced self-esteem, online bullying or other “algorithmic feed” effects on kids and teens are well-documented. I’ve said it on here before under different topics too, but it’s time to do something about it because it sure as hell cannot be left to a handful of tech companies to dictate the next generations’ addictions. This goes for the status quo on misinformation/fake news too, but I think that’s a related, yet separate can of worms.
Where there is a will, there is a way to do it (that also doesn’t completely suck). I just think there is no political will to begin with, at least as of today’s majority of people. Probably because most don’t even know about the issues, much less care a lot.
The aforementioned late edit;
I guess what I really wanted to bring across with my post, originally, wasn’t a discussion of the (important to discuss!) technicalities involved in setting a law like this up in a reasonable way, but rather: who would be against screen time limitations, if that were the only consideration in place and implementing it was easy, safe, and issue-free? And why? Since most of the argument since then has revolved around the “how,” I feel that the real issue – at least here – isn’t the thing this idea is actually about, but rather in what way to bring it into existence. Which is important nonetheless, but not what I meant with “who could argue against screen time limits being a thing.”
Please explain how you prevent identity fraud in a way which requires no personally identifying information. Mother's maiden name? Historical addresses? I feel like you might be oversimplifying...
Government service which gives out a yes or no for being aged over 18 or not, and maybe one for 16/13 or wherever the other line gets drawn. No name, no ID number, sure as hell no image/video of the ID gets transmitted, uploaded, let alone stored anywhere.
Please explain how you prevent identity fraud in a way which requires no personally identifying information. Mother's maiden name? Historical addresses? I feel like you might be oversimplifying the challenges here.
I’m not the person you responded to, but I can imagine one that’s going to require some setup, but isn’t insurmountable. Starting from the fact that already, there’s a way to verify identity with...
I’m not the person you responded to, but I can imagine one that’s going to require some setup, but isn’t insurmountable.
Starting from the fact that already, there’s a way to verify identity with some acceptable level of false positives and/or false negatives — consider a teenager who wants to open their first bank account under their own name. There’s some burden of proof required to verify they are who they say they are. This involves some amount of information being passed between organisations with privacy laws protecting against misuse. Society already accepts that this isn’t flawless, but it’s considered good enough.
Now imagine this same burden of identity being required to verify you are who you say you are, to link your identity to some government identity app on your phone. For example, my banking app has recently switched from using a password login to only allowing login via biometrics. If I lose my phone, or uninstall and reinstall the app, or I want to do the biometric version of “reset my password” then I have to go through the original authentication process to link my biometrics to my account again. Most (all?) smartphones that can be used for social media also have some version of biometrics built in, so the govt ID app can use the same.
This hypothetical government authentication app would have the same burden of biometrics to open the app, and the same authentication requirements to set up your account in the first place. I’m not trying to reinvent the wheel here, just build off existing infrastructure that society already trusts for identification and security.
The way this app would work is that when you open your social media app, it asks for an “age key” in the same way that many apps require 2FA. You’d then log into your govt ID app, get a single-use key, then give that to the social media app. The social media app then checks with the govt service for whether or not that key is valid, and the govt app would respond with something like “this person is allowed X more minutes today” or “this person is now older than the limited age, grant their account full access for the rest of their life” depending on the details.
This way, the social media app still adheres to the limits without ever seeing actual private identifying info at any stage, and this system should only ever get in the way of adults once per account, and then that account is flagged as unrestricted.
I’m not going to try and claim this system is perfect or has no workarounds, but I think if it’s good enough for a bank to open a credit card against your name, it should be good enough for social media verification.
I’m writing this late in the afternoon after a very busy day at work, so if I’m not making sense or there’s something I’ve missed or you’ve spotted a flaw in my idea, please let me know. I’d love to keep exploring this idea, and challenging the stuff I’ve missed helps me reinforce my ideas to be more robust for the future.
Congratulations on passing the system design portion of the interview! I broadly like the 2FA approach with biometrics although I think it'd have to support PINs/passwords as well for...
Congratulations on passing the system design portion of the interview! I broadly like the 2FA approach with biometrics although I think it'd have to support PINs/passwords as well for accessibility reasons.
Here are the problems I see: what's to stop me from using another person's codes? Is there something that uniquely ties my codes to my account on the site? I think that'd be possible with some cryptography, but I'd be worried about how traceable those codes are. Could websites start sharing them as cross-site user profiles for ad data?
I'm ignoring all the international issues we haven't discussed because global standards always end up a mess.
That’s a good point that I hadn’t considered, but again that seems to be within the acceptable requirements of other secure authentication that’s already in place. I could imagine the government...
Congratulations on passing the system design portion of the interview! I broadly like the 2FA approach with biometrics although I think it'd have to support PINs/passwords as well for accessibility reasons.
That’s a good point that I hadn’t considered, but again that seems to be within the acceptable requirements of other secure authentication that’s already in place.
Here are the problems I see: what's to stop me from using another person's codes? Is there something that uniquely ties my codes to my account on the site? I think that'd be possible with some cryptography, but I'd be worried about how traceable those codes are. Could websites start sharing them as cross-site user profiles for ad data?
I could imagine the government side could do that when it receives the request from the social media site — if the government ID starts off receiving requests linked to the account @Minori and later starts receiving requests linked to the account @ThrowdoBaggins, it could throw up an error or at least a soft flag. If some social media account always sends requests from @ThrowdoBaggins then that means the person who first created the social media account and the govt ID are likely the same person, or that they’re actually pretty good at identity theft.
On the other hand that could be a deliberate feature — maybe on the govt side, you could have one ID flagged as “parent/guardian” for another ID, and therefore the parent account could grant an override for the child account to give extra access or something.
I think as long as most of the trust is happening on the govt side, there shouldn’t be significantly more risk than anything else that requires identify verification.
I'm ignoring all the international issues we haven't discussed because global standards always end up a mess.
I agree, any implementation is going to be messy, but while it’s not easy or convenient, people do move overseas and start a new life (bank account, credit, drivers licences etc) so it’s not insurmountable.
Also I just wanted to finish with a thank you for engaging with my comment and providing genuine critique. I appreciate it.
It's also worth considering what happens to foreigners living in a given country even with such a government ID system. Germany actually already has an online government ID login system that's...
It's also worth considering what happens to foreigners living in a given country even with such a government ID system. Germany actually already has an online government ID login system that's similar to what you suggest (though it's only used for things related to various government offices, not anything like social media). It works with government IDs and some residence permits -- but there are a lot of foreigners for whom it doesn't work even without thinking about tourists. I lived here legally for three months before getting my first residence permit (which wasn't the right kind for that digital login anyway), for instance.
Do you live someplace that doesn’t have national ID? Genuine question. I’ll link to previous discussion on here which greatly shaped my own opinions on the topic (I thought it impossible prior to...
Do you live someplace that doesn’t have national ID? Genuine question.
I’ll link to previous discussion on here which greatly shaped my own opinions on the topic (I thought it impossible prior to that comment, too). TL;DR it is not only very much possible, but has been done so in e.g. Sweden with BankID for years now.
Admittedly, the above example is not quite the same principle as what I described earlier, but again… This was supposed to be a “what if” scenario that required open source government code bases first (for the independent verification of “as few data retained as possible”). The takeaway is that this is definitely possible to implement, so even if it may not be feasible currently, I believe we should consider working towards it.
I didn’t really intend for this to result in a realistic, practical, step-by-step guide with no further changes needed, I hope it didn’t come off as such.
The US doesn't have a national ID which can be publicly shared without opening yourself up to identity fraud. u/ThrowdoBaggins walked through a functioning implementation. I'm generally opposed to...
The US doesn't have a national ID which can be publicly shared without opening yourself up to identity fraud. u/ThrowdoBaggins walked through a functioning implementation.
I'm generally opposed to the government trying to limit screen time or age restrict the internet though.
Perhaps ironically, given my other wall-of-text comments, I think I agree with you here. I’m not a fan of it, but given the provable harms, I’m not sure what other options there are. For...
I'm generally opposed to the government trying to limit screen time or age restrict the internet though
Perhaps ironically, given my other wall-of-text comments, I think I agree with you here. I’m not a fan of it, but given the provable harms, I’m not sure what other options there are.
For comparison, I also think cigarettes and alcohol are harmful, and while I wouldn’t want an outright ban, I think taxes and regulations to mitigate their harms or disincentivise their consumption tend to make the world better off than the freedoms (that would come from lack of regulation) would grant
Good comparison, imo. History has proven e.g. prohibition to be… bad, but increasing prices on alcohol and nicotine definitely works. So it would seem our core issue here, in comparison to the...
Good comparison, imo. History has proven e.g. prohibition to be… bad, but increasing prices on alcohol and nicotine definitelyworks.
So it would seem our core issue here, in comparison to the other addiction examples society has deemed undesirable, might be that a “free” (unpaid) online service cannot – especially for minors – be meaningfully taxed?
We could outlaw ad-based models which incentivize infinite scrolling and encourage more premium services instead, but I'm not sure how popular that would be.
We could outlaw ad-based models which incentivize infinite scrolling and encourage more premium services instead, but I'm not sure how popular that would be.
Whenever one of my students is sluggish and exhausted, I ask them when they went to bed. The answer is invariably something like “2 AM.”
I then ask why they were up so late, and they shrug, and I say “were you on your phone?” and they usually quietly admit “…yeah.”
I don’t blame the students. Unfettered phone access is like a drug. I have to institute a phone curfew for myself, otherwise my sleep is interrupted. Even then I still break it all the time, even though I know it’s bad for me and I shouldn’t do it. Also I’m an adult with a fully-developed brain, not a kid with a still-developing brain. If it’s hard for me to resist the lure of my phone at bedtime, then it’s probably 10-100x harder for them.
At lunch just yesterday, one of the other teachers I work with talked about how she puts her phone on the other side of her house to charge when she goes to bed, so she won’t be tempted by it.
I do know that a lot more parents are restricting their kids’ phone access. The tools for that have gotten a lot better too. It used to be that a majority of my students came in looking like zombies, and now it’s pretty clear who has limits on their phone access and who doesn’t. I legitimately feel bad for the ones who don’t. School and adolescence is already hard enough for kids, but they’re downright miserable when you’re chronically sleep deprived.
I would really like the platforms themselves to take some initiative here, since I guarantee you they have years of hard, very specific data on just how much kids are on their apps, but we of course know that will never happen. TikTok’s gonna TikTok and Insta’s gonna Insta, even if they’re hurting kids while doing it.
To be fair, smartphones didn't take off until I was near graduating high school, and I still stayed up until early in the morning some nights. Smartphones might make this easier than using up limited texts on my flip phone or hiding my laptop under the covers as a teen or even reading books under the covers as a preteen, but a big part of this is just dumb decision making because they're kids.
Yep. As someone who was a high schooler in the early-mid 2000s, I spent many nights up late working on projects, raiding with my guild in WoW, or just spending time on the internet. Usually woke up early too so I could make sure to fit in a bit of computer time and a shower before school. Just had to make a stop by the vending machine for a caffeinated soda after arriving at school to keep me going.
I wasn’t a stellar performer but did pretty well in most classes, aside from maths which I attribute mostly to the “survival of the fittest” attitude that my math teachers tended to have.
I was a very successful student, and I still remember nights spent until 5am texting my crush. I think sometimes kids are just gonna do shit like this, and the technology is really just something that makes it easier or harder to do so. If I had kids now, I'd probably have a "no phones in bed" rule for them, but I can't even enforce that rule for myself atm lol so I suspect they'd still manage to get one over on me in that respect.
I thought about this some more after my initial comment, and I think it’s a combination of “teens have always stayed up too late” and the ease of access to an entertainment device you’re not just figuratively addicted to. Maybe this is similar/comparable to excessive pornography consumption in adults becoming more of an issue with increased internet adoption.
In the case of teenagers, their circadian rhythm is also just naturally shifted later. It shouldn't be surprising they don't get enough sleep when they don't start getting tired until 12 or later and have to be at school at 7 or 8.
Yeah. I never had my phone by my bed (though sometimes I'd read books waaaay too long), but I spent many hours as a teen lying in bed just trying to fall asleep. I had no idea about circadian rhythms being different for teens, so I was convinced I had insomnia and needed medication. I remember once going downstairs and leaving a note for my parents saying "It's 2:10 am and I'm still awake, we need to get me a prescription."
I never asked for a prescription, but I was definitely the same as you! Lying awake for hours just to be forcefully woken up for school when you finally get into a good, deep sleep - then being exhausted throughout the day, just to have the cycle somehow repeat and not be able to fall asleep that night. Even now I'm pretty sure I have a delayed sleep phase - getting up early just doesn't work for me.
I feel bad for the kids dealing with that today. 90% of their life seems to be online, and it's not easy to just ignore that, especially when social media is designed to addict them. If you throw ADHD or even just not caring about school in the mix (which is becoming increasingly easy to do), there's no chance they'll ever get sufficient sleep.
I definitely did the same myself! I don't think they're the sole reason, but I do think phones are far more potent stay-up mechanisms than anything kids have ever had access to before.
Yeah, I think they do enable the same behavior more easily than a lot of previous alternatives. I myself am nearly 30 and still stay up well past midnight on my phone in bed a lot of times (albeit without needing to wake up early anymore). I'd probably try to keep a kid of mine from having their phone in bed, but I suspect they'd get pissed at my hypocrisy.
Were there functional (read: non-bribable, efficient) lawmaking available to us, we wouldn’t have to rely on companies obviously not deciding against their own best interests.
I’ve been meaning to write my state, federal, and EU representatives about this for a while now. Maybe I can finally get around to doing it. Who can, in good faith, argue against a time limit, mandatorily enforced by social media platforms, of say six hours per day for teens? (Yes, that’s already way too long, but you gotta start somewhere.) It’s not like with the complete bans where there are legitimate arguments against it, like kids being excluded from their way of following the news and such.
Sure. Requiring identity information to engage with web sites is an invasion of privacy that hinders anonymity and facilitates government and corporate monitoring.
Enforcing a quota would also require invasive reporting infrastructure to exist. Otherwise how is Instagram going to know someone already spent six hours on TikTok and four hours on YouTube? Never mind, what constitutes "social media?" Is talking to friends on Discord (which I certainly use more than iMessage these days) "social media?" How about WhatsApp? All this requires determining which platforms qualify and building an identity apparatus that can also collect usage data, making it accessible to other companies and governments.
Such limitations would also be an infringement upon the teens' right to freedom of association.
It's dystopian.
Late edit: see to the very bottom of this comment.
Good point, I agree as a privacy-minded person that there need to be very careful approaches regarding legislation like this, and I hadn’t really thought about it in my original comment. That said, it is technically very much possible, although not in the current state of most governments, to implement this well, i.e. privacy-respecting (see below).
I think in general most things regarding this issue ought to be possible to do, we just gotta get a bit creative with it. I will try, and please point out any flaws you (to any reader) see:
Government service which gives out a yes or no for being aged over 18 or not, and maybe one for 16/13 or wherever the other line gets drawn. No name, no ID number, sure as hell no image/video of the ID gets transmitted, uploaded, let alone stored anywhere.
Start by making it per-app, then. Or have the OS enforce it via some screen-time mechanism already in place (which in turn complicates it for kids with e.g. phone + tablet, meaning at some point some people smarter than me will have to come up with a better mechanism, which I’m sure is feasible.
In an ideal world, the above age verification mechanism would be anonymous (to the providing authority) to use and verifiably doesn’t log which citizen used it where. I know that is unlikely, but if we want to make things better, we gotta start somewhere. Besides, I consider this effectively a thought experiment due to the likelihood of such legislation coming, so let’s treat it as a creative exercise…
(At least for the initial implementation phase) don’t get philosophical, use app store categories for this. Or screen time categories. Or start simple with an explicit set of like 4-5 obvious, clear-cut social platforms which don’t have messaging as the primary purpose. That’d already help. Since we’re not trying to implement aforementioned full ban, we don’t face all the same issues those lawmakers did/do.
The effects of reduced self-esteem, online bullying or other “algorithmic feed” effects on kids and teens are well-documented. I’ve said it on here before under different topics too, but it’s time to do something about it because it sure as hell cannot be left to a handful of tech companies to dictate the next generations’ addictions. This goes for the status quo on misinformation/fake news too, but I think that’s a related, yet separate can of worms.
Where there is a will, there is a way to do it (that also doesn’t completely suck). I just think there is no political will to begin with, at least as of today’s majority of people. Probably because most don’t even know about the issues, much less care a lot.
The aforementioned late edit;
I guess what I really wanted to bring across with my post, originally, wasn’t a discussion of the (important to discuss!) technicalities involved in setting a law like this up in a reasonable way, but rather: who would be against screen time limitations, if that were the only consideration in place and implementing it was easy, safe, and issue-free? And why? Since most of the argument since then has revolved around the “how,” I feel that the real issue – at least here – isn’t the thing this idea is actually about, but rather in what way to bring it into existence. Which is important nonetheless, but not what I meant with “who could argue against screen time limits being a thing.”
Please explain how you prevent identity fraud in a way which requires no personally identifying information. Mother's maiden name? Historical addresses? I feel like you might be oversimplifying the challenges here.
I’m not the person you responded to, but I can imagine one that’s going to require some setup, but isn’t insurmountable.
Starting from the fact that already, there’s a way to verify identity with some acceptable level of false positives and/or false negatives — consider a teenager who wants to open their first bank account under their own name. There’s some burden of proof required to verify they are who they say they are. This involves some amount of information being passed between organisations with privacy laws protecting against misuse. Society already accepts that this isn’t flawless, but it’s considered good enough.
Now imagine this same burden of identity being required to verify you are who you say you are, to link your identity to some government identity app on your phone. For example, my banking app has recently switched from using a password login to only allowing login via biometrics. If I lose my phone, or uninstall and reinstall the app, or I want to do the biometric version of “reset my password” then I have to go through the original authentication process to link my biometrics to my account again. Most (all?) smartphones that can be used for social media also have some version of biometrics built in, so the govt ID app can use the same.
This hypothetical government authentication app would have the same burden of biometrics to open the app, and the same authentication requirements to set up your account in the first place. I’m not trying to reinvent the wheel here, just build off existing infrastructure that society already trusts for identification and security.
The way this app would work is that when you open your social media app, it asks for an “age key” in the same way that many apps require 2FA. You’d then log into your govt ID app, get a single-use key, then give that to the social media app. The social media app then checks with the govt service for whether or not that key is valid, and the govt app would respond with something like “this person is allowed X more minutes today” or “this person is now older than the limited age, grant their account full access for the rest of their life” depending on the details.
This way, the social media app still adheres to the limits without ever seeing actual private identifying info at any stage, and this system should only ever get in the way of adults once per account, and then that account is flagged as unrestricted.
I’m not going to try and claim this system is perfect or has no workarounds, but I think if it’s good enough for a bank to open a credit card against your name, it should be good enough for social media verification.
I’m writing this late in the afternoon after a very busy day at work, so if I’m not making sense or there’s something I’ve missed or you’ve spotted a flaw in my idea, please let me know. I’d love to keep exploring this idea, and challenging the stuff I’ve missed helps me reinforce my ideas to be more robust for the future.
Congratulations on passing the system design portion of the interview! I broadly like the 2FA approach with biometrics although I think it'd have to support PINs/passwords as well for accessibility reasons.
Here are the problems I see: what's to stop me from using another person's codes? Is there something that uniquely ties my codes to my account on the site? I think that'd be possible with some cryptography, but I'd be worried about how traceable those codes are. Could websites start sharing them as cross-site user profiles for ad data?
I'm ignoring all the international issues we haven't discussed because global standards always end up a mess.
That’s a good point that I hadn’t considered, but again that seems to be within the acceptable requirements of other secure authentication that’s already in place.
I could imagine the government side could do that when it receives the request from the social media site — if the government ID starts off receiving requests linked to the account @Minori and later starts receiving requests linked to the account @ThrowdoBaggins, it could throw up an error or at least a soft flag. If some social media account always sends requests from @ThrowdoBaggins then that means the person who first created the social media account and the govt ID are likely the same person, or that they’re actually pretty good at identity theft.
On the other hand that could be a deliberate feature — maybe on the govt side, you could have one ID flagged as “parent/guardian” for another ID, and therefore the parent account could grant an override for the child account to give extra access or something.
I think as long as most of the trust is happening on the govt side, there shouldn’t be significantly more risk than anything else that requires identify verification.
I agree, any implementation is going to be messy, but while it’s not easy or convenient, people do move overseas and start a new life (bank account, credit, drivers licences etc) so it’s not insurmountable.
Also I just wanted to finish with a thank you for engaging with my comment and providing genuine critique. I appreciate it.
It's also worth considering what happens to foreigners living in a given country even with such a government ID system. Germany actually already has an online government ID login system that's similar to what you suggest (though it's only used for things related to various government offices, not anything like social media). It works with government IDs and some residence permits -- but there are a lot of foreigners for whom it doesn't work even without thinking about tourists. I lived here legally for three months before getting my first residence permit (which wasn't the right kind for that digital login anyway), for instance.
Do you live someplace that doesn’t have national ID? Genuine question.
I’ll link to previous discussion on here which greatly shaped my own opinions on the topic (I thought it impossible prior to that comment, too). TL;DR it is not only very much possible, but has been done so in e.g. Sweden with BankID for years now.
Admittedly, the above example is not quite the same principle as what I described earlier, but again… This was supposed to be a “what if” scenario that required open source government code bases first (for the independent verification of “as few data retained as possible”). The takeaway is that this is definitely possible to implement, so even if it may not be feasible currently, I believe we should consider working towards it.
I didn’t really intend for this to result in a realistic, practical, step-by-step guide with no further changes needed, I hope it didn’t come off as such.
The US doesn't have a national ID which can be publicly shared without opening yourself up to identity fraud. u/ThrowdoBaggins walked through a functioning implementation.
I'm generally opposed to the government trying to limit screen time or age restrict the internet though.
Perhaps ironically, given my other wall-of-text comments, I think I agree with you here. I’m not a fan of it, but given the provable harms, I’m not sure what other options there are.
For comparison, I also think cigarettes and alcohol are harmful, and while I wouldn’t want an outright ban, I think taxes and regulations to mitigate their harms or disincentivise their consumption tend to make the world better off than the freedoms (that would come from lack of regulation) would grant
Good comparison, imo. History has proven e.g. prohibition to be… bad, but increasing prices on alcohol and nicotine definitely works.
So it would seem our core issue here, in comparison to the other addiction examples society has deemed undesirable, might be that a “free” (unpaid) online service cannot – especially for minors – be meaningfully taxed?
We could outlaw ad-based models which incentivize infinite scrolling and encourage more premium services instead, but I'm not sure how popular that would be.