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Google asks Congress to not ban teens from social media (lemmy.world)

submitted 1 year ago by JunglGeorg@lemmy.world to c/technology@lemmy.world

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https://www.theverge.com/2023/10/16/23919221/google-youtube-child-safety-age-verification-laws-privacy

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[-] MimicJar@lemmy.world 80 points 1 year ago

"...like forcing users to upload copies of their government IDs to access an online service."

"Some states, like Louisiana, have tailored their bills to ban kids from seeing online porn by forcing everyone, including adults, to verify their age before using the site. Google’s proposal does not oppose age verification on porn and gambling sites."

That's terrifying. Signing up for Lemmy would require uploading a government ID. I don't know the solution to this problem, but I'm not confident this proposal is the right one.

[-] squiblet@kbin.social 26 points 1 year ago

If it's from Louisiana, it's probably a bad idea. Except for gumbo.

[-] ShittyBeatlesFCPres@lemmy.world 19 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

I live in Louisiana and we don’t enforce the important laws; we definitely aren’t enforcing that one. I’m not a connoisseur de porn sites but I think Pornhub is the only site that has an ID requirement and they probably just complied so they could file a lawsuit.

Also, I could take a street car to the French Quarter right now for $1.25 and get motorboated for one additional dollar if I wanted. I have no idea what the state legislature thinks passing a porn ID law will accomplish. But rest assured, their laws mean nothing in New Orleans.

[-] artisanrox@kbin.social 8 points 1 year ago

Then it'll be used for targetted application, which is even worse.

[-] Seasoned_Greetings@lemm.ee 2 points 1 year ago

This is what I've been saying. They probably don't care if little Jimmy knows how to skirt the id requirement by using one of the thousands of sites that don't comply with Louisiana's stupid law, but it sure would be a shame if word got out that major democrat nominees uploaded their id to a porn site one day several years ago.

This kind of law is a thin veil of "think of the children" in order to orchestrate future extortion.

[-] Capricorny90210@lemmy.world 14 points 1 year ago

And jambalaya

[-] superguy@lemm.ee 4 points 1 year ago

Who fucking cares about porn?

[-] MimicJar@lemmy.world 7 points 1 year ago

https://youtu.be/j6eFNRKEROw

But also the anonymous Internet is important.

Also, do you think the proposal will actually have the intended effect? Do you think COPPA has been successful? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Children's_Online_Privacy_Protection_Act#Criticisms

Children under the age of 13 absolutely have Facebook accounts. Children of all ages have DEFINITELY seen things that no one should see.

I'm not saying this isn't a topic worth discussing, but further restrictions is not the right answer.

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[-] Granixo@feddit.cl 30 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Ban them, exile them all!

Edit: Ok, i may have been a bit too vague with this comment. So i'll be more specific. ⬇️

Some platforms like Tiktok, Instagram, Snapchat and YouTube have been nothing but harmful to youngsters (from all ages), due to their manipulative algorithm and poor content management.

So i do believe there should be a much more stronger restriction in access to those platforms.

Something like, you can register at 16 with your parent's permission, or something like that.

Now i now that sounds very drastic, but consider this:

1- It has been proven time and time again how social media has done more harm than good to teenagers.

2- I'm only talking about about platforms owned by the big corporations, platforms here on the Fediverse are (from my perspective) much more safer (in the sense that you don't really see harmful content if you don't want to).

[-] H2207@lemmy.world 7 points 1 year ago

I'm a teen and I second this opinion.

[-] EngineerGaming@feddit.nl 3 points 1 year ago

Something like, you can register at 16 with your parent’s permission

Point is - how do you prove the person is of the "right" age noninvasively? Not like the mainstream social media platforms were already friendly to anonymity, but all the methods I can think of are on a whole another level.

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[-] dezmd@lemmy.world 3 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

1- It has been proven time and time again how social media has done more harm than good to teenagers.

2- I’m only talking about about platforms owned by the big corporations, platforms here on the Fediverse are (from my perspective) much more safer (in the sense that you don’t really see harmful content if you don’t want to).

Where has it been proven that its done more harm than good? Have studies been done to actually explore what 'good' it has allowed, or is the litmus test for it only about what harm may have been affected on teenagers? Whats your basis for this claim?
The Fediverse is equally unsafe if you consider your take in an objective manner rather than just play on what you feel moment to moment.
What's your take on 4chan?

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[-] dezmd@lemmy.world 1 points 1 year ago

Why?

[-] Granixo@feddit.cl 9 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Because a vast majority of teenagers misuse/overuse social media (cyber-bullying, social isolation, phone addiction, and so on...)

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[-] Starkstruck@lemmy.world 28 points 1 year ago

"think of the children" is always a poor excuse to strip away citizen freedoms. Usually never actually helps them anyways.

[-] Granixo@feddit.cl 5 points 1 year ago

I would usually agree with this statement, but the truth is that social media does way more harm than good when it comes to teenagers.

[-] Starkstruck@lemmy.world 8 points 1 year ago

Is it really the government's job to police what every teen does on the Internet though? I think that's for the parents to do.

[-] the_q@lemmy.world 3 points 1 year ago

It is the parents job, but what do you do when the parents don't do that job?

[-] Starkstruck@lemmy.world 2 points 1 year ago

There's a lot of things parents should be doing but some don't. That however is a whole different argument.

[-] the_q@lemmy.world 2 points 1 year ago

That's my point. A parent should keep a child out of a fire, right? If they don't, do we as a society let the child burn because it was unlucky enough to have crappy parents?

[-] artisanrox@kbin.social 1 points 1 year ago

I'd be perfectly happy with this answer if the only states proposing this "for the children!" nonsense weren't deep red racist bigot states that want ro police women across state borders.

If red states are doing something I want to do the opposite.

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[-] artisanrox@kbin.social 4 points 1 year ago

Then let parents deal with it. This conservative "for the chillldrun" talking point always ends in cons trying to take us back to 1750.

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[-] ram@bookwormstory.social 14 points 1 year ago

Rambling

I'm not super against the idea of age verification online. I'm against the idea of these companies having my ID. A better (but still very imperfect) solution would be to have the government itself provide a login that would simply send a true/false back to the service you're trying to access.

But even this has problems, beyond just privacy ones. There's many who don't have ID, who can't get ID, and even more who don't have ID that would be recognized in the local jurisdiction (whether it be from a foreign national, or someone in the USA with a Driver's License from New Mexico).

Anyways, the practice of age verification itself I don't have a problem with, but any implementation I can conceive is full of glaring issues that render it impossible without us forfeiting our rights to anonymity and/or surrendering our data to an untrustworthy source and or just being plain unreliable to attempt to use.

[-] Ace0fBlades@lemmy.world 15 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Yeah Louisiana implemented a government portal that does exactly what you claim through the driver's license app. Their database was hacked a little under a year ago with basically all private citizen information stolen.

If you set up a system to use these mechanisms the data WILL BE stolen or mishandled.

[-] zeluko@kbin.social 1 points 1 year ago

We have eID features withiut such big problems.
Simply because the data resides on the card itself and can only be read using a certified terminal.

e.g. A website can get a certificate to establish a secure tunnel between them and your card through e.g. your phone.
Then the certificate only allows getting specific data e.g. if you are over 18 or not.

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[-] tslnox@reddthat.com 10 points 1 year ago

This idea scares me as well. State would have it so much easier to track what adult content you are visiting. Not a fan, even though I personally only do pretty tame stuff.

[-] zeluko@kbin.social 6 points 1 year ago

You dont have e-ID features? Wild..
Just last semester i learned how they are implemented and which protections they have in place to preserve privacy like specific identifiers
So a certain terminal can only get certain information e.g. over 18? yes/no
Our cigarett dispensers use this feature (those without a person to check)

[-] ram@bookwormstory.social 4 points 1 year ago

You have unmanned cigarette sales? What country, if you don't mind my asking?

[-] photonic_sorcerer@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 points 1 year ago

Europe

[-] Granixo@feddit.cl 3 points 1 year ago

Europe is a country? 😳

[-] AzureRT@reddthat.com 4 points 1 year ago

A highschooler from America would most certainly say yes... saw it happen myself before lol

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[-] nuzzlerat@lemmy.world 8 points 1 year ago

I think we need to keep children off the internet but there’s not really a way to do that other than having parents be more responsible. I think public shaming could work wonders in this area

[-] schnurrito@discuss.tchncs.de 16 points 1 year ago

for fuck's sake why does this get upvotes here

For teenage me the Internet was the only escape from the horribleness and stress of my offline life. Probably for many current teenagers too (if you are one of them: trust me, life will get better as an adult). There is no way I will ever support "keeping children off the Internet" and not just because it requires adults too to verify their age, also because it is a bad idea in the first place. Teenagers might not always make great decisions about everything, but this is also true of adults.

[-] nuzzlerat@lemmy.world 2 points 1 year ago

I completely get where you're coming from and this is something I think about a lot. There are so many people I know (myself included) who have benefited as kids from being able to access the internet and find a community, but overall the data I've seen shows a net negative in terms of social outcomes. And to be completely honest I just think that a lot of spaces on the internet suffer from having too many adolescents around.

I don't want to enforce a law or something but I think we just need to be more socially aware of the kinds of spaces that kids have access to

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[-] SnipingNinja@slrpnk.net 1 points 1 year ago

They probably had a privileged childhood, not that I didn't too, but in some things the internet was the only out for me and helped me a lot, so I'll agree with you. I do see their point about the exploitative nature of the current landscape but that's a systemic problem that won't be solved by banning children from accessing the internet

[-] schnurrito@discuss.tchncs.de 1 points 1 year ago

Of course. I spent most of my time then on IRC or on text-based forums. TikTok or Snapchat or whatever today's kids use all the time weren't things, I have literally never had an account on either of them. I think recommendation algorithms are a bad thing and we should try to build platforms that don't have them; this is independent of users' ages though.

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[-] superguy@lemm.ee 6 points 1 year ago

Let their parents do it.

[-] jtk@lemmy.sdf.org 4 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

This is why I vote Democrat. The idiots back shit like this and we shame the shit out of them until they stop because of the obvious overreach, but the "Parental Rights!" "Small Government!" (Louisiana) crowd fucking eats it up and runs with it without any forethought or sense of hypocrisy before it's even an actual law.

[-] Granixo@feddit.cl 4 points 1 year ago

But didin't Google already track your age?

I remember that in 2014 Google erased my first Gmail account because i was -15 and that didin't aligned with their new "policies".

[-] KSPAtlas@sopuli.xyz 7 points 1 year ago

You were negative 15? You were still nutrients in the soil thay made the food your parents ate to make you?

[-] perviouslyiner@lemm.ee 2 points 1 year ago

YouTube in the UK already refuses to show some videos if their data gathering & marketing system didn't know enough about you to guess your age.

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[-] jray4559@lemmy.sdf.org 3 points 1 year ago

As if teenagers would actually go on a service that forces them to upload a government ID.

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this post was submitted on 16 Oct 2023

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