Is the better, more acceptable solution to have a person’s government be in charge of identity verification and offer some sort of secured API that sites can use for confirmation?
Dookieman12@piefed.social 3 hours ago
It’s not the desired outcome people are against, it’s the implementation.
I think you’ll have a hard time finding anyone who disagrees with the idea that children shouldn’t be exposed to the full power of the unfiltered internet, and that’s what makes these laws so insidious.
The issue lies in how governments hope to achieve this goal. Current laws propose that users provide the private company hosting the site (Facebook, TikTok, etc.) an image of their government-issued ID and/or other identifying information. The primary concerns are 1) these companies will have even more access to private information about their users, and 2) any security breach of these companies would risk the identities of their millions of users.
Imagine being able to apply for millions of stolen credit cards because of one successful hack. That’s the risk being created.
wesker@lemmy.sdf.org 3 hours ago
GreenBeard@lemmy.ca 2 hours ago
Quite frankly yes. Proof of identity is kind of one of the core roles of government. Handing it off to private corporations is like entrusting a nation’s military to private militias and policing to gangs.
Dookieman12@piefed.social 2 hours ago
Age verification doesn’t have to mean identity verification.
Parents and human moderators solved this problem just fine. Everything changed when every platform wanted to be the first to cut moderation costs by using LLMs instead.
They abandoned a perfectly working system and have been pitching a fit about restarting it because “it costs too much” ever since.
GreenBeard@lemmy.ca 1 hour ago
I’ll grant it’s an automation issue. Age verification is always identity verification when it’s automated. It doesn’t matter how much you try to scrub the data. If it has to be done algorithmically, there’s no possible circumstance where an unaccountable third party should have that data.
Dookieman12@piefed.social 2 hours ago
“Better” and “more acceptable” are very subjective.
If you’re asking me what I think, I think a solution that verifies identity is uncalled for. I think the problem, though real, is also greatly exaggerated and mostly caused by a failure of platforms to moderate (Roblox, for example).
Companies don’t want to moderate their platforms because that costs money. Developers need to add the reporting functionality and paid staff need to review and action the reports. I think this is one reason tech companies are so interested in AI; automated moderation. But, AI still requires compute power, which is still a cost.
If tech companies can claim handing over your ID will solve the problem, they get that sweet private info they want so badly for free, AND they get a cost-free way of claiming their platform is moderated; it’s a double win.
I think requiring platforms to moderate themselves with humans is a very small price to pay in exchange for the broad access to our private data and hundreds of billions of dollars of advertising revenue they enjoy, and a much better, much more acceptable solution.
Onomatopoeia@lemmy.cafe 1 hour ago
Bingo.
it_depends_man@lemmy.world 1 hour ago
No, because it’s a 3 way information exchange.
When you visit a site, you, the site and the government know that you went there.
In cases where the company can exploit that information because it can 100% verify you are a real person that’s bad.
But when the people in government can identify that their political opposition did “bad things” online and exploit that against them, that’s also bad. Also, the people in charge can always fake that if they want to, and if the system exists, because there is little oversight over the currently planned systems.
We’re not talking about “normal and legal behavior”, it needs to be tamper proof and safe against malicious actors inside the system. That’s nearly impossible to do, so the safe option is to not create that system.
GreenBeard@lemmy.ca 1 hour ago
A government that’s that untrustworthy, doesn’t deserve to exist.
DarkCloud@lemmy.world 2 hours ago
Nope, all you have to do is regulate ISPs and Telcos so they don’t sell Internet connections to kids. Make that the offense.
If parents want their kid to have an internet connection, the parents have to buy the kids-only Internet. If that’s the aim, then do that!
Most people are fine with that, most people have their names on their bank accounts and show proof of age when buying a sim card or ISP connection, but don’t want to give it over to EVERY social media site they’re ever going to interact with. This isn’t a TikTok level responsibility, it’s an ISP and Telco/bank card level.
If you want kids to be kids, then parents have to be parents. Don’t wreck the Internet because Timmy is shithead on reddit.
sunsofold@lemmy.zip 2 hours ago
That would be better, but better still would be to find a solution that doesn’t enable surveillance of the uninvolved. Most people trust neither their government nor corporations to not misuse or abuse the power of their data. Certain public key cryptography techniques could be used, but because companies can’t make money from it, it’ll never happen.
schnurrito@discuss.tchncs.de 2 hours ago
Yes, I am.
“Children” being people of what age?
The Internet is a communication system originally intended for military communication; the WWW for exchange of articles and data among scientists and academics. It has evolved, from those roots, to being a collection of nearly all human knowledge, all human endeavors and thoughts. But its intent was never that it would conform to any cultural (or even legal) ideas of what is appropriate for young people to see…
If parents (who are supposed to be experts on their children) believe that their child isn’t yet developmentally ready to be exposed to nearly all human knowledge, endeavors, and thoughts, then they shouldn’t give that child (unsupervised) access to a communication system that contains exactly that. But I personally believe it’s generally good for children, certainly older ones and definitely teenagers, to be exposed to a wide variety of ideas, exactly as can be found on the Internet…
Dookieman12@piefed.social 1 hour ago
That’s up to the parents, not me, you, or the government, or any corporation.
Completely agree that parents, not governments or corporations, should be responsible for policing their kids’ online activity. But that shouldn’t mean Roblox should be able to ignore reports of groomers on their platform just because they buy a shit load of V Bucks (yes, this happens).
Agreed that everything on the internet should be there and is 99% fine. But I think we can also agree that no ten-year-old needs to see Funky Town or One Guy One Jar. Does that mean Motherless or the government needs to involved to make sure that doesn’t happen? I don’t think so.
schnurrito@discuss.tchncs.de 1 hour ago
As for groomers on Roblox, this just sounds like techdirt.com/…/masnicks-impossibility-theorem-con…
I got my first own computer at age 10 and from then on usually browsed the Internet unsupervised.
I remember that for the first few years of doing so, I took age checks very seriously. A website says “this is an adult website, you must be over 18”? I would click cancel. A forum has a checkbox “I agree to the terms and conditions and am at least 13 years old”? Not registering there (a few years later: wait, I can now honestly say yes to this!).
This of course changed when I became a teenager, but I knew what I was getting into at that point. I don’t think this is that atypical…