Australia is banning social media for kids under 16.
The world-first law aims to reduce the risks children face online, but critics fear it may not work.
These could include government IDs, face or voice recognition, or so-called "age inference", which analyses online behaviour and interactions to estimate a person's age.
Surely this won't be used by the government to monitor internet usage!
Australia already has metadata tracking. This law is poorly implemented by a bunch of old fools who don't understand how the internet works. All it will achieve is training a generation to subvert the government's nonsense better.
Not really.
This law draws a line in the sand indicating societal expectations.
It empowers parents to set and maintain appropriate boundaries without being influenced by what other parents allow their kids to do. Its a lot easier to maintain a "no social media" rule if other parents are doing the same.
Also I dont really have any faith at all in the young teenagers of today being able to circumvent anything. Sure. A few will... but certainly not most or even a significant portion.
If you cant install it from the app store then its out of reach.
Meta, which owns Facebook, Instagram and Threads, began closing teen accounts from 4 December. It said anyone mistakenly kicked off could use government ID or provide a video selfie to prove their age.
Snapchat has said users can use bank accounts, photo ID or selfies for verification.
In other words, Australia just enforced "internet by passort", right? Very useful if the goal is build a surveillance state. Besides the fact that is required from platforms to store these IDs and in case of any data breach hakers will get not only email addresses, but emails + id.
Also looks as a very cool feature for platforms themselves: match of users data between different systems becomes much easier: no more expensive and complex digital fingerprinting, just direct match by ID.
There's evidently a concerted international effort to end anonymity and privacy on the internet, disguised as protecting children. It would be worrying at any time, but it's particularly alarming when authoritarian fascism is also on the rise pretty much everywhere. ID verification (sold as age verification) is a major step towards making it impossible for political dissidents and victimized groups to organize resistance or read uncensored information without being put on a list, to find, support and defend each other, or to travel freely.
This is the thing I'm most afraid of. It's why I've been moving everything to self hosting and de-googling.
I think it may be time for the public to create their own P2P mesh networks that are "disconnected" from the main internet.
Also as a self-hoster I wonder how this would effect smaller individuals that run their own blogs and websites. How would a small random person be forced to put up a ID verification on their website that they might be running on a small POS laptop?
Spot on. I would add that these activities are also related to a global effort seeking to isolate the individual, separating each of us from community and place.
Corporate Internet sucks anyway. I'm fine with ending anonymity in it.
Wild seeing so many nations amassing the tools of surveillance fascism, and repression to little backlash because the leaders aren't as outright fascist as some other countries. This will end poorly.
Thank god. They should ban it for those over 16 too
Why not provide parents with routers instead that have easy to set parental controls?
This feels very similar to someone coming into my home and telling me how to raise my own kids.
The government could also create its own curated list of websites that are considered "kid friendly" at different age gaps and have it made available within a routers parental control menu to be turned on/for deviced marked as being used by ones child on your home network.
Also at the same time it's not about protecting children, it's about controlling the general population with the guise of protecting the children. It's like getting searched when walking in and walking out of a store.
Imo we need locked down "child" devices. Any other solution is crazy police state shit.
I know it's not perfect and everyone here is losing their mind, but getting kids off of social media until they're more adultish is good parenting.
Right, so shouldn't parents be responsible for that and not the government?
There was a good interview in Rolling Stone with Carl Newman of the band The New Pornographers. Last year the band's drummer was arrested and later convicted of sexually pestering children and CSAM possession. (Yes the name is an unfortunate coincidence but was their name for many years before this drummer was a member, and it refers to something else).
Carl talked about how devastated the band is by all of this, and a family member who works in the court system gave him some advice, talking about how pedophiles are always looking for an opportunity, and how you really should not have anything about your children online because they WILL use it no matter how innocent, and how you should watch your kids incredibly carefully online, that it's not just kids from vulnerable families getting trafficked.
I see that it feels intrusive, but I myself read a lot of judicial decisions online, and the pedophile ones are always HORRIFIC. Just because there isn't a physical victim doesn't make it better. One case the police were notified by an ISP about a guy and they went to his house and found a child sized sex doll in his home. One thing leads to another. A lot of the testimony by men who have not committed physical crimes talk about how they were depressed and just began going into more extremes of porn, and just ended up beginning to watch CSAM as an extension of this. They would get phallometric testing which would show they are sexually oriented to children so this isn't always true, but the easy access to literally anything via the Internet sure isn't helping anything.
I'm gonna make a prediction before reading the article: either there isn't an actual plan for how to do this, or it's actually a plan to surveil adults
Woah hey look I was right
The government says firms must take "reasonable steps" to keep kids off their platforms, and should use multiple age assurance technologies.
These could include government IDs, face or voice recognition, or so-called "age inference", which analyses online behaviour and interactions to estimate a person's age.
Platforms cannot rely on users self-certifying or parents vouching for their children.
Meta, which owns Facebook, Instagram and Threads, began closing teen accounts from 4 December. It said anyone mistakenly kicked off could use government ID or provide a video selfie to prove their age.
Snapchat has said users can use bank accounts, photo ID or selfies for verification.
I'm of two minds on this. Will be interesting to see how it plays out.
Agreed, the slippery slope argument people like to trot out is old, and the government already knows who is using Facebook.
The problem I see is handing more personally identifiable information over to corporations that are both prone to misusing their power and the potential for hackers to obtain that information.
This will likely end with a push to the mygov ID system once a breach has impacted Australians and resistance is low.
The law in EU specifically says that age verification needs to minimize the amount of information collected and GDPR still applies to this data. If implemented correctly the service will only verify your date of birth. Besides, most Facebook users share way more already. Facebook already knows everyone's education, finances, relationship status and has 1000 fotos of their face. The idea that sharing your ID number with them changes anything is silly.
I think if people knew a lot more about how children are exploited online they would understand more. It does seem extreme, but also it's scary what happens.