These are fines on the platforms (twitter, facebook, youtube, etc) for possibly not having strong enough methods to stop children from accessing the site.
These are fines on the platforms (twitter, facebook, youtube, etc) for possibly not having strong enough methods to stop children from accessing the site.
The way I’ve seen proposed is something like having liquor stores (gas stations) stock age verification cards. You go buy one there (where they check your ID) and then use the age verification...
The way I’ve seen proposed is something like having liquor stores (gas stations) stock age verification cards. You go buy one there (where they check your ID) and then use the age verification code on the card when you go somewhere. Still maintaining anonymity.
However - I know this isn’t the way they’ll do it cause you’re right it’s a charge to deanonymize the internet. 😢
Yup, thank you for mentioning that! Canada Post has a similar system where, for a fee, they can verify someone without their every needing to hand over an ID to Discord/Facebook/etc. -- this sort...
Yup, thank you for mentioning that! Canada Post has a similar system where, for a fee, they can verify someone without their every needing to hand over an ID to Discord/Facebook/etc. -- this sort of stuff should have been put into law as a requirement, instead of allowing an unlimited number of third parties store sensitive personally identifiable information.
The social media companies already largely know who you are. And they are logging and fingerprinting your browser and IP every time. Unless you have impeccable op sec, you are not anonymous on the...
The social media companies already largely know who you are. And they are logging and fingerprinting your browser and IP every time. Unless you have impeccable op sec, you are not anonymous on the internet.
That doesn't mean that we should have to hand over our whole identity to every site. Make the ones who want our info have to work for it (and get some things wrong!) and hand nothing over to the...
That doesn't mean that we should have to hand over our whole identity to every site. Make the ones who want our info have to work for it (and get some things wrong!) and hand nothing over to the ones that need nothing.
I have two sets of accounts I use. One is publicly tied to my real world identity in a few places; those accounts will eventually tie to my forge as a small business. The other set of accounts only has my real identity tied to them in the settings, if that. I am aware that browser fingerprinting and pattern analysis will probably connect the two sets, but that doesn't mean that I can't try to protect myself on various platforms.
You don't have to hand over your whole identity. I'm not sure how you'd even do that. My identity isn't my passport or my credit card or my National Insurance number or anything discrete like...
You don't have to hand over your whole identity. I'm not sure how you'd even do that. My identity isn't my passport or my credit card or my National Insurance number or anything discrete like that, it's a complex and ever-shifting arrangement of thoughts and opinions and preferences. All you have to do is prove your age. Having done so in several cases since the UK "omg won't somebody think of the children" adult content age-gate going up, that proof doesn't have to even include your name.
Sure, Meta et al would probably prefer your entire identity but if you've been using their services any amount of time they already know tonnes of stuff about you anyway.
I respectfully disagree, we're talking about data security and state or corporate surveillance, not a philosophical seminar. To a data broker, an advertising network, or a hacker with malice...
I respectfully disagree, we're talking about data security and state or corporate surveillance, not a philosophical seminar.
To a data broker, an advertising network, or a hacker with malice intent, your identity isn't your evershifting arrangement of thoughts but rather a real and concrete dataset (credit card, your facial geometry, or government ID) used to track and deanonymize you.
Me minimizing that isn't me protecting my soul rather me protecting my concrete data from leaking.
I dunno, I think it's relevant. What identity is matters when you're talking about identity! What you're talking about is my advertising profile, not my identity. That's boring. It's not me. I...
I dunno, I think it's relevant. What identity is matters when you're talking about identity! What you're talking about is my advertising profile, not my identity. That's boring. It's not me. I don't care about that. Anyone is welcome to it. You can't steal something from me that I didn't create, don't own and don't care about.
I don't have a government ID and my credit card has so much fraud prevention and security baked into it that it's sometimes hard for me to spend money. Neither of which I have needed to prove my age so far anyway.
Both of you can be right at the same time. Identity is your behavior as much as it is your critical personal details. Slow legislators and the spread of new tech mean that we've given up for...
Both of you can be right at the same time. Identity is your behavior as much as it is your critical personal details.
Slow legislators and the spread of new tech mean that we've given up for former while bad legislation mean people using social may have to give up the latter.
Like a slow moving train we've stood on the tracks waiting to hit us, it's completely wild to me that we've let cool toys get the best of us.
My comment was a response to the argument implicit in their reply. Saying "they already have your data" is just the buildup to saying "so why try anyway". This is the exact attitude that has...
My comment was a response to the argument implicit in their reply. Saying "they already have your data" is just the buildup to saying "so why try anyway". This is the exact attitude that has slowly eroded privacy rights as people give away more information since some of it is out there already. It's defeatist and ignores the fact that as living human beings, we are constantly generating new data points (as you pointed out) and those can be restricted if we actually try.
Right now, I don't see the US taking any of the approaches that would minimize the information being shared. Encouraging people that those are even feasible is the first step for us right now.
Someone with the first batch is going to be able to impersonate you on loans and maybe withdraw from your bank account. That's why people care.
My identity isn't my passport or my credit card or my National Insurance number or anything discrete like that, it's a complex and ever-shifting arrangement of thoughts and opinions and preferences
Someone with the first batch is going to be able to impersonate you on loans and maybe withdraw from your bank account. That's why people care.
If you have my passport that doesn't give you any kind of access to my bank account. Nor would my NI number. Or, really, my actual bank account details. My bank account has 2FA, pattern based...
If you have my passport that doesn't give you any kind of access to my bank account. Nor would my NI number. Or, really, my actual bank account details. My bank account has 2FA, pattern based fraud detection and, purely for security purposes of course, is almost empty.
More seriously that's exactly why we have banks be responsible for fraud, not consumers. If I turn up and pretend to be you and borrow money, you're not liable for that. That is the bank's fault. That's why consumer protection laws matter, because data isn't secure and won't ever be.
You seem to be assuming people will go in through normal means. Identity fraud often has synergies with social engineering attacks. "Oh yes I'm mat, yeah I forgot my password, here's my passport,...
If you have my passport that doesn't give you any kind of access to my bank account.
You seem to be assuming people will go in through normal means. Identity fraud often has synergies with social engineering attacks. "Oh yes I'm mat, yeah I forgot my password, here's my passport, yeah I can answer the security questions..." and so on.
Just because you personally have proper 2FA setup doesn't mean the vast majority of people do, or that banks even ALLOW proper 2FA(since an email/SMS recovery is SO common and easy to bypass) because they know their customers will lock themselves out.
As for banks being liable, sure. Enjoy the 6-10 months of not having your money while you escalate and deal with investigations. About the only time fraud is easy for the consumer is credit card fraud, and only then because of unique circumstances around it.
I didn't set up anything, my bank did. Non-optionally. Every one of it's 24 million customers have 2FA on their accounts. Not SMS based, it's through their secure app. They even use it for...
Just because you personally have proper 2FA setup doesn't mean the vast majority of people do
I didn't set up anything, my bank did. Non-optionally. Every one of it's 24 million customers have 2FA on their accounts. Not SMS based, it's through their secure app. They even use it for authentication on phone calls. It's pretty hard to ring up and pretend to be me (or ring me and pretend to be my bank), even if you have my passport - not that I've written my password, memorable name and security number down in my passport anyway but I guess in theory someone might have done that. Going into a branch might be a little easier but I suspect merely having a customer under sixty turn up in person would ring some alarm bells.
Enjoy the 6-10 months of not having your money while you escalate and deal with investigations.
Last time I was a victim of fraud - via dodgy Direct Debits, not credit card - it took one phone call and the money was back in my account within 24 hours. Then it happened again the next month and.. same. Then I left that bank because they had terrible security protocols. My current bank is better, a couple of times I've got a message from them saying they stopped a suspicious payment before it even left my account.
When the banks are made the ones at fault for letting fraud happen, turns out it was pretty simple to prevent a lot of fraud - they just had to spend a bit of money on making their systems better, and it was cheaper to do that than pay out for customer's lost money. Scams are not so easy to deal with but they are a slightly different beast.
Given that the relevant concerns to this legislation are a) leakage of fiscally or socially important personal information in security breaches and b) government prosecution of groups based on...
Given that the relevant concerns to this legislation are a) leakage of fiscally or socially important personal information in security breaches and b) government prosecution of groups based on internet activity, it's safe to say that ID cards and credit cards are exactly the kind of thing people should want to protect.
I’ve never been particularly careful about my identity with Facebook/Meta services, so I’m sure they know exactly who I am. But with all the information they have about me, a malicious actor can’t...
I’ve never been particularly careful about my identity with Facebook/Meta services, so I’m sure they know exactly who I am. But with all the information they have about me, a malicious actor can’t take out a credit card under my name and rack up bills or debt under my identity.
About a decade ago, I was briefly a customer of Optus (an Australian telecom company) but moved on after a while. Many years after I left them for another provider, Optus announced a breach, not just of account information, but of ID information that they had stored for many years longer than they were legally allowed (not required, allowed).
If someone has my personal information, sure there is still a risk of nefarious goings-on. But as soon as they have the kinds of ID or documentation required to open a bank account, or get a credit card, or apply for loans, then this is suddenly a much larger risk. I don’t even see them in the same ballpark, the damage is on a whole other level.
I’ve already gone through the process of having my drivers licence replaced and putting a credit freeze on my name, and I think I got relatively lucky. I don’t want anyone else to have to go through what I went through, and I don’t want to go through it myself again in future, so I’ll never be uploading my ID to any service unless I genuinely believe that they can’t run the service without it, and that they will spend more time and effort on cybersecurity than my bank does.
I think this is a bit silly, because it makes tech companies sound like three-letter agencies. They only care about your data insofar as it is monetizable to them, which means their privacy...
I think this is a bit silly, because it makes tech companies sound like three-letter agencies. They only care about your data insofar as it is monetizable to them, which means their privacy invasion is reckless and incidental. It's a means, not an end.
I know this distinction may seem pointless, since the end result is still an invasion of your privacy, but it's really not. There's carelessness in the latter, and that reduces the efficacy of data collection. It also means that even if they have the data, they frequently have no idea what to do with it. Shit, they might not even know they have it at all.
Depending on how you use it, social media might have a lot of data about you. This is easier to defeat than you'd think – yes, including the fingerprinting – and it is absolutely possible to use it whilst still being anonymous. It requires extra legwork, but it's possible.
Additional to that, you can still be unanonymous on Instagram and anonymous elsewhere. Also being age-verified internally at a platform doesn't mean I'm not still anonymous on the public facing...
Additional to that, you can still be unanonymous on Instagram and anonymous elsewhere.
Also being age-verified internally at a platform doesn't mean I'm not still anonymous on the public facing side of it.
To be honest, a bit of unanonymity might be a good thing for social media. Harder to be a propaganda bot when you have to prove who you are to have an account. If the networks cared about such things, of course.
This is by far the worst justification. Nation states aren't going to be slowed down in the slightest. They're the kind of entity that can just walk into a business or gov agency and say "we have...
To be honest, a bit of unanonymity might be a good thing for social media. Harder to be a propaganda bot when you have to prove who you are to have an account. If the networks cared about such things, of course.
This is by far the worst justification. Nation states aren't going to be slowed down in the slightest. They're the kind of entity that can just walk into a business or gov agency and say "we have 400 new humans as of today, here's their info, make it happen".
I didn't mention nation states for that very reason. States are not the only groups running bots all over social media. The dumb fuck far-right political activists are significantly active as...
I didn't mention nation states for that very reason. States are not the only groups running bots all over social media. The dumb fuck far-right political activists are significantly active as well, at least in the UK, and they are not as smart nor as well resourced as the Russians or Americans or whoever.
I think a reasonable approach would be to identify devices rather than people. That is, there should be an easy way for a website to check whether the device used to access the website is...
I think a reasonable approach would be to identify devices rather than people. That is, there should be an easy way for a website to check whether the device used to access the website is child-locked. Then it’s up to parents to make sure that the devices they let their children use have child locking turned on. Also, vendors shouldn’t sell devices to kids that aren’t child-locked.
This is unlikely to work against determined teenagers, but it would help to change the culture so that most children don’t usually have access to websites that don’t allow child-locked devices.
There are reasonable middle grounds. The only thing you want to know is the person accessing the computer an adult, so the only thing you need is an "adult user" key which is linked to a local pw...
There are reasonable middle grounds. The only thing you want to know is the person accessing the computer an adult, so the only thing you need is an "adult user" key which is linked to a local pw and passed to the site.
Can you get around this? Sure? Do kids already get around LOTS of things designed to stop them from doing stuff? Yes. This is still a better step in the right direction instead of "no one knows anything but you clicked yes" vs "store every single persons ID forever".
All forms of ID check for decades have been "glance and go", with maybe tracking that "yes you checked an ID and said it was 18 plus" but nothing more. That's all we need digitally. Not storing the entire ID.
Genuinely what's with everybody all of a sudden implementing age verification? In several different countries at once? It seems like nobody had an issue with it for decades and all of a sudden in...
Genuinely what's with everybody all of a sudden implementing age verification? In several different countries at once? It seems like nobody had an issue with it for decades and all of a sudden in a span of what, one year, if that, there are age restriction laws popping up everywhere?
Centralization of the internet caused it. With most users congregating onto a few platforms, there's only about 10 or fewer companies that governments need to target in order to reach the vast...
Centralization of the internet caused it. With most users congregating onto a few platforms, there's only about 10 or fewer companies that governments need to target in order to reach the vast majority of users. Large tech companies are also very unpopular, causing people who would normally be against government surveillance to stay quiet for fear of looking like they're defending tech companies.
I've never heard of anyone trying to do this and failing because it was too decentralized. The only thing I can consider to be remotely as a topic of such discussion is porn, but we aren't even...
Centralization of the internet caused it. With most users congregating onto a few platforms, there's only about 10 or fewer companies that governments need to target in order to reach the vast majority of users.
I've never heard of anyone trying to do this and failing because it was too decentralized. The only thing I can consider to be remotely as a topic of such discussion is porn, but we aren't even talking about that.
Large tech companies are also very unpopular
What? Everyone and their mother buys iphones, uses google, facebook, orders from Amazon, ubers around, booking.coms, etc. I don't believe for a second this is a major thing outside of largely online (ironically) "tech billionaires are literally satan" type of populism.
I'm a parent of a young kid in Australia, tech companies are very on the nose in my off-line circles, very roughly on a spectrum of good to bad from Apple to X. The opinion that social media is...
I don't believe for a second this is a major thing outside of largely online (ironically) "tech billionaires are literally satan" type of populism.
I'm a parent of a young kid in Australia, tech companies are very on the nose in my off-line circles, very roughly on a spectrum of good to bad from Apple to X. The opinion that social media is bad for children and that the companies running it are predatory is near universal. The willingness of adults to get off social media themselves is ironically small but definitely growing. I'm an inner city lefty, so assume a pinch of salt and all, but it goes way beyond those too online.
Oh, the disdain for all of those is real and palpable. But what are you gonna do? Be late to work instead of getting a rideshare? Not interact with the local clubs that only post news on one of...
Oh, the disdain for all of those is real and palpable.
But what are you gonna do? Be late to work instead of getting a rideshare?
Not interact with the local clubs that only post news on one of the big social media platforms?
Not have a smartphone? Spend an hour driving around instead of just having Amazon deliver?
It's a feeling of helplessness and lack of genuine alternative. If it wasn't Amazon, it'd be Walmart.
I mean, I am an outlier living in a city with competently run public transit, but mostly yes? Twitter or Instagram-exclusive means it's not for me. I've done both, drive around and look, and...
I mean, I am an outlier living in a city with competently run public transit, but mostly yes? Twitter or Instagram-exclusive means it's not for me. I've done both, drive around and look, and just... call the business. I'll look up directions before I leave, remember addresses, and just generally live like it's 2006, [modified, 4G-enabled] BlackBerry and all. Biggest change is the mobile web has gotten (mostly) better.
The only flaw is how much harder it made dating, but I'll burn that bridge if I'm ever looking again - and I'm sure living in the small town of Red Deer, AB (at the time) didn't help
Those are all completely reasonable alternatives to me and I find it strange that they aren’t to others. I don’t know how old you personally are but weren’t you around when those things weren’t...
Those are all completely reasonable alternatives to me and I find it strange that they aren’t to others. I don’t know how old you personally are but weren’t you around when those things weren’t normalized?
Here in the US and many other rich countries dealing with these tech companies, it’s pretty normal to drive so rideshare wouldn’t help. In places where driving is less common in lieu of public transit employers seem generally more lenient to clock in times when there is an issue with it.
If you are trying to join a club where people are unable and unwilling to communicate with you, it sounds like you are trying to join a shitty club. Communicating with people is the entire point of joining a club and being unwilling to do anything but a Facebook post seems like the opposite of caring and inclusiveness, especially in an era where these companies are distrusted.
Yes, go around and actually shop for things you need. They may not have super niche or uncommon things but those things you can usually get from alternative online retailers. Online shopping for groceries in particular seems to be really stupid because you are paying extra for a service in which you will get people who don’t care about picking a quality choice for fresh foods, and it still requires you to be available to take delivery to deal with refrigeration anyways so you need to have availability for a longer and less predictable amount of time.
I completely understand that you and others feel helpless but I have two things to say about that. Number one is that it’s a learned feeling. You don’t have to be dependent on these services if you don’t want to.
But perhaps more importantly we should be aware of how dependence on these companies and services are forcing society at large to be dependent on them. Employers in particular are almost universally guilty of forcing workers to work harder and longer, and to contribute more of themselves, often citing these app services as acceptable things to help preserve the time and energy that they are skimming from you bit by bit. If you are feeling helpless, this type of phenomena is likely the true culprit.
I agree with everything else in your comment, but just want to push back against this bit: I feel like this argument seems to be focussing on urgency, or otherwise assuming I have nothing else to...
I agree with everything else in your comment, but just want to push back against this bit:
and it still requires you to be available to take delivery to deal with refrigeration anyways so you need to have availability for a longer and less predictable amount of time.
I feel like this argument seems to be focussing on urgency, or otherwise assuming I have nothing else to do with my time while waiting.
Lets say it takes me 45 minutes to drive to the shops, grab what I need, and drive home. Or I could pick a delivery window of 90 minutes and have it all delivered. For the first example, those 45 minutes are all accounted for and spent. Maybe I can gain a little by combining other errands so I’m driving once instead of multiple trips, but that doesn’t change much about my time. Alternatively, if I’m at home for the 90 minute delivery window, I can spend 80 of those minutes on anything else — maybe tidying the living room, or cleaning the kitchen, or folding my laundry, or reading a book, or playing video games that I can pause at a moment’s notice.
To me, this feels like the dishwasher argument I’ve seen — it takes me 15 minutes to do a load of dishes by hand, but it takes the machine most of an hour! That’s true, but also I can be doing other things while the dishwasher runs. Handwashing is only considered if it’s urgent (I need that saucepan clean right now to cook dinner) because the dishwasher gains a huge advantage in parallelising the task that I would have to do linearly.
To be clear, I mostly agree wirh you. This was more in the abstract 'I hate it but it is what it is' mentality you see everywhere. 'Club' was also shorthand for ' government announcements' or 'all...
To be clear, I mostly agree wirh you. This was more in the abstract 'I hate it but it is what it is' mentality you see everywhere.
'Club' was also shorthand for ' government announcements' or 'all the local businesses.'
Most newer small businesses I've come across don't have websites, they have a few handles.
And, as with Walmart's rise, we collectively feel powerless, in part because Amazon is often dramatically cheaper.
A post went around a while back that alleged that Meta is behind most of this, seemingly with receipts (see below). The motive for them being that they 1) aren't the target of some of the bills...
A post went around a while back that alleged that Meta is behind most of this, seemingly with receipts (see below). The motive for them being that they 1) aren't the target of some of the bills (e.g. the California operating system one), 2) benefit from regulations that smaller sites can't afford as easily, and 3) get an excuse to collect more data.
That said, I'm not sure if the "research" was well verified, and it looks like AI was used pretty significantly in it. So it's possible it's all wrong. Still, for those interested, here's where it got posted on Tildes.
Countries were nervous that it would cause a lot of problems, nobody wanted to be the first to introduce age controls. Once one country showed that it wouldn’t cause (too many) issues or brick the...
Countries were nervous that it would cause a lot of problems, nobody wanted to be the first to introduce age controls. Once one country showed that it wouldn’t cause (too many) issues or brick the internet, it pierced the veil.
There's a constant tension between control and freedom, and the current zeitgeist is one where most politicians don't understand modern technology but understand damage is being done to society,...
There's a constant tension between control and freedom, and the current zeitgeist is one where most politicians don't understand modern technology but understand damage is being done to society, and are flailing at any levers they have to try and reduce that damage.
There's also a growing authoritarianism in many countries which ties into this as people increasingly see their life and wellbeing as out of their control and elect people they see as having the power to control it.
They see the damage done by social media over the past 10 years and rightfully want to do something about it, but their efforts lack depth because the regulations being drafted are done as a reaction. Reducing people's freedom to access them will address some of the public's concerns, however it lacks nuance and don't actually address the core issue of how these platforms cause problems.
One of the key problems is that accountability for issues has been largely abdicated to the black box of the algorithm, making traditional regulation of companies difficult, and the law simply hasn't kept up.
In my opinion, we need a radically new method of forcing companies to act in a way that promotes public good. One example of this, which I heard from Yanis Varoufakis, would be to rebuild social ownership of assets and have a mechanism whereby the public has a say in how those assets get used.
Then maybe they should have listened to those of us whom have been screaming about this for 25+ years and not the CEO who says that them being unregulated is 'good for growth.' Literally every...
don't understand modern technology but understand damage is being done to society
Then maybe they should have listened to those of us whom have been screaming about this for 25+ years and not the CEO who says that them being unregulated is 'good for growth.'
Literally every step down this path we've had a giant surge of warnings from people who did understand, and they were promptly ignored because it was inconvenient.
Yep. I've experienced this first-hand emailing my representative about this exact topic given it's related to my profession, trying my best to educate them about the nuances of this issue, but...
Yep. I've experienced this first-hand emailing my representative about this exact topic given it's related to my profession, trying my best to educate them about the nuances of this issue, but they're just not receptive to it.
Heritage Foundation wants it for Project 2025, and they have their claws in various world governments, and Meta wants it because it's onerous for their competitors and also makes it easier to...
Heritage Foundation wants it for Project 2025, and they have their claws in various world governments, and Meta wants it because it's onerous for their competitors and also makes it easier to connect dots with browsing activities elsewhere. Meta has spent billions on global lobbying for this.
End goals are identifying political opposition and LGBT people for retribution in the long term. Short term is a backdoor porn ban, followed by framing anything LGBT as pornography (you can already see that in action with the book bannings).
Social media has been a topic of discussion for years because of issues around addiction, misinformation and polarisation. It seems to have hit a breaking point when the widespread complaints...
Social media has been a topic of discussion for years because of issues around addiction, misinformation and polarisation. It seems to have hit a breaking point when the widespread complaints about alarming cognitive delays in young schoolchildren hit the mainstream. Whether rightly or wrongly, this is being blamed on social media.
Personally I think this approach will obviously fail and is obviously just the least impactful thing a government could do while appearing to be doing something. And a privacy nightmare as well.
These are fines on the platforms (twitter, facebook, youtube, etc) for possibly not having strong enough methods to stop children from accessing the site.
The only way to stop children getting on social media platforms is to ID everyone, killing anonymity on the net
The way I’ve seen proposed is something like having liquor stores (gas stations) stock age verification cards. You go buy one there (where they check your ID) and then use the age verification code on the card when you go somewhere. Still maintaining anonymity.
However - I know this isn’t the way they’ll do it cause you’re right it’s a charge to deanonymize the internet. 😢
Yup, thank you for mentioning that! Canada Post has a similar system where, for a fee, they can verify someone without their every needing to hand over an ID to Discord/Facebook/etc. -- this sort of stuff should have been put into law as a requirement, instead of allowing an unlimited number of third parties store sensitive personally identifiable information.
The social media companies already largely know who you are. And they are logging and fingerprinting your browser and IP every time. Unless you have impeccable op sec, you are not anonymous on the internet.
That doesn't mean that we should have to hand over our whole identity to every site. Make the ones who want our info have to work for it (and get some things wrong!) and hand nothing over to the ones that need nothing.
I have two sets of accounts I use. One is publicly tied to my real world identity in a few places; those accounts will eventually tie to my forge as a small business. The other set of accounts only has my real identity tied to them in the settings, if that. I am aware that browser fingerprinting and pattern analysis will probably connect the two sets, but that doesn't mean that I can't try to protect myself on various platforms.
You don't have to hand over your whole identity. I'm not sure how you'd even do that. My identity isn't my passport or my credit card or my National Insurance number or anything discrete like that, it's a complex and ever-shifting arrangement of thoughts and opinions and preferences. All you have to do is prove your age. Having done so in several cases since the UK "omg won't somebody think of the children" adult content age-gate going up, that proof doesn't have to even include your name.
Sure, Meta et al would probably prefer your entire identity but if you've been using their services any amount of time they already know tonnes of stuff about you anyway.
I respectfully disagree, we're talking about data security and state or corporate surveillance, not a philosophical seminar.
To a data broker, an advertising network, or a hacker with malice intent, your identity isn't your evershifting arrangement of thoughts but rather a real and concrete dataset (credit card, your facial geometry, or government ID) used to track and deanonymize you.
Me minimizing that isn't me protecting my soul rather me protecting my concrete data from leaking.
I dunno, I think it's relevant. What identity is matters when you're talking about identity! What you're talking about is my advertising profile, not my identity. That's boring. It's not me. I don't care about that. Anyone is welcome to it. You can't steal something from me that I didn't create, don't own and don't care about.
I don't have a government ID and my credit card has so much fraud prevention and security baked into it that it's sometimes hard for me to spend money. Neither of which I have needed to prove my age so far anyway.
Both of you can be right at the same time. Identity is your behavior as much as it is your critical personal details.
Slow legislators and the spread of new tech mean that we've given up for former while bad legislation mean people using social may have to give up the latter.
Like a slow moving train we've stood on the tracks waiting to hit us, it's completely wild to me that we've let cool toys get the best of us.
My comment was a response to the argument implicit in their reply. Saying "they already have your data" is just the buildup to saying "so why try anyway". This is the exact attitude that has slowly eroded privacy rights as people give away more information since some of it is out there already. It's defeatist and ignores the fact that as living human beings, we are constantly generating new data points (as you pointed out) and those can be restricted if we actually try.
Right now, I don't see the US taking any of the approaches that would minimize the information being shared. Encouraging people that those are even feasible is the first step for us right now.
Someone with the first batch is going to be able to impersonate you on loans and maybe withdraw from your bank account. That's why people care.
If you have my passport that doesn't give you any kind of access to my bank account. Nor would my NI number. Or, really, my actual bank account details. My bank account has 2FA, pattern based fraud detection and, purely for security purposes of course, is almost empty.
More seriously that's exactly why we have banks be responsible for fraud, not consumers. If I turn up and pretend to be you and borrow money, you're not liable for that. That is the bank's fault. That's why consumer protection laws matter, because data isn't secure and won't ever be.
You seem to be assuming people will go in through normal means. Identity fraud often has synergies with social engineering attacks. "Oh yes I'm mat, yeah I forgot my password, here's my passport, yeah I can answer the security questions..." and so on.
Just because you personally have proper 2FA setup doesn't mean the vast majority of people do, or that banks even ALLOW proper 2FA(since an email/SMS recovery is SO common and easy to bypass) because they know their customers will lock themselves out.
As for banks being liable, sure. Enjoy the 6-10 months of not having your money while you escalate and deal with investigations. About the only time fraud is easy for the consumer is credit card fraud, and only then because of unique circumstances around it.
I didn't set up anything, my bank did. Non-optionally. Every one of it's 24 million customers have 2FA on their accounts. Not SMS based, it's through their secure app. They even use it for authentication on phone calls. It's pretty hard to ring up and pretend to be me (or ring me and pretend to be my bank), even if you have my passport - not that I've written my password, memorable name and security number down in my passport anyway but I guess in theory someone might have done that. Going into a branch might be a little easier but I suspect merely having a customer under sixty turn up in person would ring some alarm bells.
Last time I was a victim of fraud - via dodgy Direct Debits, not credit card - it took one phone call and the money was back in my account within 24 hours. Then it happened again the next month and.. same. Then I left that bank because they had terrible security protocols. My current bank is better, a couple of times I've got a message from them saying they stopped a suspicious payment before it even left my account.
When the banks are made the ones at fault for letting fraud happen, turns out it was pretty simple to prevent a lot of fraud - they just had to spend a bit of money on making their systems better, and it was cheaper to do that than pay out for customer's lost money. Scams are not so easy to deal with but they are a slightly different beast.
Given that the relevant concerns to this legislation are a) leakage of fiscally or socially important personal information in security breaches and b) government prosecution of groups based on internet activity, it's safe to say that ID cards and credit cards are exactly the kind of thing people should want to protect.
I’ve never been particularly careful about my identity with Facebook/Meta services, so I’m sure they know exactly who I am. But with all the information they have about me, a malicious actor can’t take out a credit card under my name and rack up bills or debt under my identity.
About a decade ago, I was briefly a customer of Optus (an Australian telecom company) but moved on after a while. Many years after I left them for another provider, Optus announced a breach, not just of account information, but of ID information that they had stored for many years longer than they were legally allowed (not required, allowed).
If someone has my personal information, sure there is still a risk of nefarious goings-on. But as soon as they have the kinds of ID or documentation required to open a bank account, or get a credit card, or apply for loans, then this is suddenly a much larger risk. I don’t even see them in the same ballpark, the damage is on a whole other level.
I’ve already gone through the process of having my drivers licence replaced and putting a credit freeze on my name, and I think I got relatively lucky. I don’t want anyone else to have to go through what I went through, and I don’t want to go through it myself again in future, so I’ll never be uploading my ID to any service unless I genuinely believe that they can’t run the service without it, and that they will spend more time and effort on cybersecurity than my bank does.
I think this is a bit silly, because it makes tech companies sound like three-letter agencies. They only care about your data insofar as it is monetizable to them, which means their privacy invasion is reckless and incidental. It's a means, not an end.
I know this distinction may seem pointless, since the end result is still an invasion of your privacy, but it's really not. There's carelessness in the latter, and that reduces the efficacy of data collection. It also means that even if they have the data, they frequently have no idea what to do with it. Shit, they might not even know they have it at all.
Depending on how you use it, social media might have a lot of data about you. This is easier to defeat than you'd think – yes, including the fingerprinting – and it is absolutely possible to use it whilst still being anonymous. It requires extra legwork, but it's possible.
Additional to that, you can still be unanonymous on Instagram and anonymous elsewhere.
Also being age-verified internally at a platform doesn't mean I'm not still anonymous on the public facing side of it.
To be honest, a bit of unanonymity might be a good thing for social media. Harder to be a propaganda bot when you have to prove who you are to have an account. If the networks cared about such things, of course.
Nation states will undoubtedly find a way around this. They can make identities, sell them, do whatever...
Of course. There's always a way around. But (a) it makes it harder work and (b) not all misinformation/propaganda is spread by nation states.
This is by far the worst justification. Nation states aren't going to be slowed down in the slightest. They're the kind of entity that can just walk into a business or gov agency and say "we have 400 new humans as of today, here's their info, make it happen".
I didn't mention nation states for that very reason. States are not the only groups running bots all over social media. The dumb fuck far-right political activists are significantly active as well, at least in the UK, and they are not as smart nor as well resourced as the Russians or Americans or whoever.
I think a reasonable approach would be to identify devices rather than people. That is, there should be an easy way for a website to check whether the device used to access the website is child-locked. Then it’s up to parents to make sure that the devices they let their children use have child locking turned on. Also, vendors shouldn’t sell devices to kids that aren’t child-locked.
This is unlikely to work against determined teenagers, but it would help to change the culture so that most children don’t usually have access to websites that don’t allow child-locked devices.
There are reasonable middle grounds. The only thing you want to know is the person accessing the computer an adult, so the only thing you need is an "adult user" key which is linked to a local pw and passed to the site.
Can you get around this? Sure? Do kids already get around LOTS of things designed to stop them from doing stuff? Yes. This is still a better step in the right direction instead of "no one knows anything but you clicked yes" vs "store every single persons ID forever".
All forms of ID check for decades have been "glance and go", with maybe tracking that "yes you checked an ID and said it was 18 plus" but nothing more. That's all we need digitally. Not storing the entire ID.
Genuinely what's with everybody all of a sudden implementing age verification? In several different countries at once? It seems like nobody had an issue with it for decades and all of a sudden in a span of what, one year, if that, there are age restriction laws popping up everywhere?
Centralization of the internet caused it. With most users congregating onto a few platforms, there's only about 10 or fewer companies that governments need to target in order to reach the vast majority of users. Large tech companies are also very unpopular, causing people who would normally be against government surveillance to stay quiet for fear of looking like they're defending tech companies.
I've never heard of anyone trying to do this and failing because it was too decentralized. The only thing I can consider to be remotely as a topic of such discussion is porn, but we aren't even talking about that.
What? Everyone and their mother buys iphones, uses google, facebook, orders from Amazon, ubers around, booking.coms, etc. I don't believe for a second this is a major thing outside of largely online (ironically) "tech billionaires are literally satan" type of populism.
I'm a parent of a young kid in Australia, tech companies are very on the nose in my off-line circles, very roughly on a spectrum of good to bad from Apple to X. The opinion that social media is bad for children and that the companies running it are predatory is near universal. The willingness of adults to get off social media themselves is ironically small but definitely growing. I'm an inner city lefty, so assume a pinch of salt and all, but it goes way beyond those too online.
Oh, the disdain for all of those is real and palpable.
But what are you gonna do? Be late to work instead of getting a rideshare?
Not interact with the local clubs that only post news on one of the big social media platforms?
Not have a smartphone? Spend an hour driving around instead of just having Amazon deliver?
It's a feeling of helplessness and lack of genuine alternative. If it wasn't Amazon, it'd be Walmart.
I mean, I am an outlier living in a city with competently run public transit, but mostly yes? Twitter or Instagram-exclusive means it's not for me. I've done both, drive around and look, and just... call the business. I'll look up directions before I leave, remember addresses, and just generally live like it's 2006, [modified, 4G-enabled] BlackBerry and all. Biggest change is the mobile web has gotten (mostly) better.
The only flaw is how much harder it made dating, but I'll burn that bridge if I'm ever looking again - and I'm sure living in the small town of Red Deer, AB (at the time) didn't help
Those are all completely reasonable alternatives to me and I find it strange that they aren’t to others. I don’t know how old you personally are but weren’t you around when those things weren’t normalized?
Here in the US and many other rich countries dealing with these tech companies, it’s pretty normal to drive so rideshare wouldn’t help. In places where driving is less common in lieu of public transit employers seem generally more lenient to clock in times when there is an issue with it.
If you are trying to join a club where people are unable and unwilling to communicate with you, it sounds like you are trying to join a shitty club. Communicating with people is the entire point of joining a club and being unwilling to do anything but a Facebook post seems like the opposite of caring and inclusiveness, especially in an era where these companies are distrusted.
Yes, go around and actually shop for things you need. They may not have super niche or uncommon things but those things you can usually get from alternative online retailers. Online shopping for groceries in particular seems to be really stupid because you are paying extra for a service in which you will get people who don’t care about picking a quality choice for fresh foods, and it still requires you to be available to take delivery to deal with refrigeration anyways so you need to have availability for a longer and less predictable amount of time.
I completely understand that you and others feel helpless but I have two things to say about that. Number one is that it’s a learned feeling. You don’t have to be dependent on these services if you don’t want to.
But perhaps more importantly we should be aware of how dependence on these companies and services are forcing society at large to be dependent on them. Employers in particular are almost universally guilty of forcing workers to work harder and longer, and to contribute more of themselves, often citing these app services as acceptable things to help preserve the time and energy that they are skimming from you bit by bit. If you are feeling helpless, this type of phenomena is likely the true culprit.
I agree with everything else in your comment, but just want to push back against this bit:
I feel like this argument seems to be focussing on urgency, or otherwise assuming I have nothing else to do with my time while waiting.
Lets say it takes me 45 minutes to drive to the shops, grab what I need, and drive home. Or I could pick a delivery window of 90 minutes and have it all delivered. For the first example, those 45 minutes are all accounted for and spent. Maybe I can gain a little by combining other errands so I’m driving once instead of multiple trips, but that doesn’t change much about my time. Alternatively, if I’m at home for the 90 minute delivery window, I can spend 80 of those minutes on anything else — maybe tidying the living room, or cleaning the kitchen, or folding my laundry, or reading a book, or playing video games that I can pause at a moment’s notice.
To me, this feels like the dishwasher argument I’ve seen — it takes me 15 minutes to do a load of dishes by hand, but it takes the machine most of an hour! That’s true, but also I can be doing other things while the dishwasher runs. Handwashing is only considered if it’s urgent (I need that saucepan clean right now to cook dinner) because the dishwasher gains a huge advantage in parallelising the task that I would have to do linearly.
To be clear, I mostly agree wirh you. This was more in the abstract 'I hate it but it is what it is' mentality you see everywhere.
'Club' was also shorthand for ' government announcements' or 'all the local businesses.'
Most newer small businesses I've come across don't have websites, they have a few handles.
And, as with Walmart's rise, we collectively feel powerless, in part because Amazon is often dramatically cheaper.
A post went around a while back that alleged that Meta is behind most of this, seemingly with receipts (see below). The motive for them being that they 1) aren't the target of some of the bills (e.g. the California operating system one), 2) benefit from regulations that smaller sites can't afford as easily, and 3) get an excuse to collect more data.
That said, I'm not sure if the "research" was well verified, and it looks like AI was used pretty significantly in it. So it's possible it's all wrong. Still, for those interested, here's where it got posted on Tildes.
Countries were nervous that it would cause a lot of problems, nobody wanted to be the first to introduce age controls. Once one country showed that it wouldn’t cause (too many) issues or brick the internet, it pierced the veil.
There's a constant tension between control and freedom, and the current zeitgeist is one where most politicians don't understand modern technology but understand damage is being done to society, and are flailing at any levers they have to try and reduce that damage.
There's also a growing authoritarianism in many countries which ties into this as people increasingly see their life and wellbeing as out of their control and elect people they see as having the power to control it.
They see the damage done by social media over the past 10 years and rightfully want to do something about it, but their efforts lack depth because the regulations being drafted are done as a reaction. Reducing people's freedom to access them will address some of the public's concerns, however it lacks nuance and don't actually address the core issue of how these platforms cause problems.
One of the key problems is that accountability for issues has been largely abdicated to the black box of the algorithm, making traditional regulation of companies difficult, and the law simply hasn't kept up.
In my opinion, we need a radically new method of forcing companies to act in a way that promotes public good. One example of this, which I heard from Yanis Varoufakis, would be to rebuild social ownership of assets and have a mechanism whereby the public has a say in how those assets get used.
These two videos have been very valuable to me in understanding our current situation, Cahal Moran also has an excellent book called "Why we're getting poorer". They're both very long but there's no filler
Everything was already AI - Unlearning Economics
The petrodollar is cracking - Yanis Varoufakis and Richard Wolff Skip to 3 minutes in.
Then maybe they should have listened to those of us whom have been screaming about this for 25+ years and not the CEO who says that them being unregulated is 'good for growth.'
Literally every step down this path we've had a giant surge of warnings from people who did understand, and they were promptly ignored because it was inconvenient.
Yep. I've experienced this first-hand emailing my representative about this exact topic given it's related to my profession, trying my best to educate them about the nuances of this issue, but they're just not receptive to it.
Heritage Foundation wants it for Project 2025, and they have their claws in various world governments, and Meta wants it because it's onerous for their competitors and also makes it easier to connect dots with browsing activities elsewhere. Meta has spent billions on global lobbying for this.
End goals are identifying political opposition and LGBT people for retribution in the long term. Short term is a backdoor porn ban, followed by framing anything LGBT as pornography (you can already see that in action with the book bannings).
Social media has been a topic of discussion for years because of issues around addiction, misinformation and polarisation. It seems to have hit a breaking point when the widespread complaints about alarming cognitive delays in young schoolchildren hit the mainstream. Whether rightly or wrongly, this is being blamed on social media.
Personally I think this approach will obviously fail and is obviously just the least impactful thing a government could do while appearing to be doing something. And a privacy nightmare as well.
I don't understand how the government thought this was going to work. Everyone I've spoken to knew kids would find a way to circumvent it immediately.