15 ms·

Dating apps face questions over age checks after report exposes child abuse

36 points by Mimino123 8y ago

justtopost 8y ago
Will this end up another misguided "think of the children" measure that will just make more consentual adult sex illegal? Or will it be accepted with open arms by dating sites who want all your PII to sell? ('anonymised' of course) (CoughmatchCough) Am I just jaded or does this seem to be the way things are going?
- smt88 8y ago
  > Will this end up another misguided "think of the children" measure that will just make more consentual adult sex illegal? What do you mean by “another”? When has regulating sex with children had the effect of making consensual adult sex illegal?
  - kayfox 8y ago
    The UK has been pushing making adults register (with their ISP) to be able to access porn. Because of the children.
    - detaro 8y ago
      Which is not an answer to the question the parent asked.
    - smt88 8y ago
      1) Pushing? But it hasn't happened, right? 2) Porn isn't always consensual or between adults. This comment seemingly has nothing to do with what I asked.
- paulgb 8y ago
  You're not just jaded. "Trafficking" has become a vehicle for the religious right to shut down anything they don't like, from robot brothels [1] to, in this case, hookup apps. And nobody is for trafficking, so politicians from across the spectrum tend to go along with it. It's been this way since at least the Mann Act, which was ostensibly about trafficking but used to crack down on interracial relationships (notably by Jack Johnson, who recently got a posthumous pardon) "Remember when some tea company added "blockchain" to its name and stock prices soared? "Trafficking" is the equivalent word in the policy / non-profit world." -- Alex Frell Levy [2] [1] https://amp.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/sep/30/houston-robot-brothel-plan-halted https://amp.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/sep/30/houston-robo... [2] https://t.co/HaNQ2H7kFX https://t.co/HaNQ2H7kFX
  - derefr 8y ago
    > And nobody is for trafficking Nobody in first-world countries, you mean. In third-world countries, a lot of what gets categorized as “human trafficking” is just self-motivated border-crossing by career prostitutes. You know how you might find a fellow working in America who is from, say, Bangladesh, and is here for the jobs that pay 100x as much as jobs in Bangladesh do, so he can send money home to his family? Well, in the hotbed countries of “human trafficking”, many of the women involved are just people who did exactly the same thing, moving from countries like Cambodia (“human trafficking source countries”) to countries like Thailand (“human trafficking destination countries”) because they know there’s far more of a market of sex tourists there with higher expectations of average prices. And her family back home? Thinks exactly the same of her as the family of the Bangladeshi man working in America does. “She’s providing for us; we’re proud of her.” The annoying thing is that “human trafficking” was established to go after what is, at its core, a real and horrifying crime—the combination of kidnapping and slavery that mafias tend to consider the highest-margin way to operate brothels, factories, etc. If someone isn’t themselves doing the kidnapping, or operating the brothel, but is just, say, driving the kidnapped people around, we didn’t have a crime to charge them with and had to let them go, until we invented “human trafficking.” It was essentially a gang-busting crime, a way to put pressure on ground-level members to get them to give up their higher-ups. But now, basically everything related to the original intent seems to fall under the aegis of that crime†, and its scope has grown to the point that we’ve forgotten why we invented it. † Probably because of motivated reasoning of statisticians working for the trafficking-related nonprofits. Sort of like the motivated reasoning of statisticians working for cigarette or sugary-cereal companies.
- xfitm3 8y ago
  Im really glad to see this comment. It is absolutely a “think of the children” measure. ID isn’t required for most things online and that’s a good thing.
mc32 8y ago
There is the danger that if these services don’t nip this in the bud, it’ll become a social problem akin to enjo-Kosai in Japan, which not only lends itself to exploitation of minors but also encourages needless conspicuous consumerism. For the most part, aside from using someone else’s credit information, these businesses have information on age and with facial recognition should be able to flag most falsified accounts.
gregoriol 8y ago
The apps are tools, it's up to the humans to do or not do stuff. In these cases, how are children getting in first? Where are the parents of these children?? Then, it's not the apps that create abuse, but the users on the other side. There could be a set of rules that the apps should make users agree with, and remind from time to time, like be kind, don't get angry if it doesn't work out, report strange behaviors/underage profiles/illegal stuff if you happen to detect one, ... Is it that complicated to be adults in 2019?
- lmkg 8y ago
  > The apps are tools, it's up to the humans to do or not do stuff. Technology changes what it's possible for humans to do or not do (or more often, make it qualitatively more/less feasible). Tool-makers should not take it as axiomatic that they have no responsibility or involvement for the ways that their tools impact other people's lives.
- kayfox 8y ago
  I imagine that teenagers will figure out how to get around the age checks, and then it will escalate.
- klodolph 8y ago
  > Is it that complicated to be adults in 2019? The people in question are very literally not adults.
- purple_ducks 8y ago
  > The apps are tools, it's up to the humans to do or not do stuff. "Guns don't mass murder people, humans do" In the real world, if I saw a child go on dates with a grown adult, I'd alert the police and have the man arrested, then I'd do my damndest to have the restaurant shut down for facilitating the grooming of minors. And most importantly, _in the real world_, we all have visibility of this and society as a whole acts in disgust and would (legal or otherwise) punish the offenders and people who facilitated and accommodated this. > There could be a set of rules that the apps should make users agree with A pinky promise maybe...
g45y45 8y ago
and the scope creep for the bad Online Identification begins. First it was no porn, then it was no dating. Soon it will be no rw to access to UK internet without age+ID. Disconnect the UK before the damage spreads!
- Chazprime 8y ago
  Right, and once we let the gays marry, soon we'll have people marrying farm animals!
  - Ours90 8y ago
    And this is related to the whole discussion how?
    - fabianhjr 8y ago
      He is alluding that the comment he replied to is using a slippery slope fallacy. https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Slippery_slope https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Slippery_slope
      - Ours90 8y ago
        I didn't catch the sarcasm there. Now it makes sense but the parallel he drawn was, in my opinion, still unsuitable.
        ownagefool 8y ago
        Actually, it's pretty on point if you get the culture and political references for the UK. One would suspect, without looking, that the OP is British.
    - Chazprime 8y ago
      It was just a comment on usage of the slippery-slope fallacy here. Sarcastic, yes...but I felt the original comment borders on fear-mongering.
thosakwe 8y ago
One question - where the heck are these kids' parents? I think most people on dating apps are under the impression that other users are of legal age. If your child is searching for adult partners, complete strangers, over the Internet, you as a parent have a lot to answer for. That being said, none of that justifies what happened to the minors mentioned in the article. Ultimately, there are a lot of bad people out there. It would be great for children to not be exposed to such people. But I think the necessary change is parental supervision, not government intervention.
- klodolph 8y ago
  How is this different from, for example, requiring age verification to purchase alcohol? Or are you also opposed to that? I think we understand that parents are not in complete control over their children, and in the interest of harm reduction, we don't give parents the entire burden of keeping their children safe but spread parts of it out among the community. This doesn't seem like a particularly burdensome request, here. Some parents are terrible parents, some kids are complete terrors, sometimes there are circumstances outside your control. Parents are not gods.
  - towelr34dy 8y ago
    Did you read the article? It clearly states that tinder and grinder already monitor for minors. They state that they spend, and I'm guessing this wouldn't be an exaggeration given their volume, millions of dollars on this effort. What lawmakers want is ID required. This is an extremely burdensome requirement. To have every new user of any online platform have to verify photo ID against a webcam is... very onerous. And even then whats to stop a kid from using his parents confirmed account? Alcohol is a transaction for a substance that is deadly and purchased in public. Comparing it to creating an online profile in the privacy of your home is a big stretch. It would be more like creating an account with... I don't know, maybe buying a can of figs off amazon. Can a child buy a can of figs without ID? Not easily, but he could. Could he hurt himself with it? Yes. Should we require ID for this: I'd say not. The article seems to not mention any of the age verification things the kids forged and their parents computer. But don't worry, if it was convenient for the powers that be, they would have framed this as: "Evil kids get into banking system by HACKING." Funny how I'm sure they won't be asking Amazon to verify ID everytime a purchase is made. I mean, plenty of kids have ordered down right dangerous things this way, probably even caused a death. The worst part of the authoritarian inclined who use the 'what about the children?' argument is that many times they ironically make it less safe for children since the solutions aren't particularly well thought through (see drinking age in the US) - all while making it worse for the rest of us. The thing about the outrage crowd is they point to a problem with while implicitly saying 'anyone who doesn't support 'the solution' is in favor of the problem'. I'm not in favor of the problem. I'm in favor of fixing the problem IF it can be fixed in a cost effective way. Many people can't accept that there aren't widespread easy and simple solutions to giant complex social problems. Accepting that this behavior is an emergent quality from our individual actions and pruning one's own actions is very hard. Most people shy from this and look for externalizations.
mLuby 8y ago
Error: variable "the platform" was used before it was defined (heavily implying she was on a dating site, not Instagram as was the case). > Last month the BBC reported on the death of a 14-year-old schoolgirl who killed herself in 2017 after being exposed to self-harm imagery on the platform.
- buckminster 8y ago
  It's just bad writing. That case was Instagram.
Abishek_Muthian 8y ago
We were running a chat app network dating platform. User profiles were from chat apps & majority of the users were from Facebook Messenger, many in asian countries especially women from Philippines used their child photograph as their profile picture. After I realised the issue, we integrated Amazon Rekognition API to detect age range < 18 & block the profiles who had a child's picture on their user profile. The issue is that Rekognition isn't perfect & we lost several users because of this integration & false positives, yet we continued to use it till the end for moderation. We were processing >200,000 profile pictures each month for this.
turc1656 8y ago
The solution seems relatively straightforward to me, but maybe I'm missing something. If you want to engage on a platform designed explicitly for adults doing adult things, you give them your driver's license number or non-driver's ID number. They can instantaneously verify that with the government electronically and determine the age of the person associated with that license number. To further prevent problems - like kids taking their parent's ID and then changing the name and age - dating sites could bind the age of the site profile to the license provided. So if junior uses his old man's ID, he's going to show as 45, not 18, and he won't be able to change it. That has the additional benefit of stopping a lot of the lies related to age on dating sites. Lastly, they could also bind the first name only to the profile, hide the last name from other users, and allow a nickname or preferred handle to be displayed. So you can't upload a license for John Doe, age 30, and then say in your profile that your preferred name is Tony and you look 15. This would be a red flag to anyone. But makes perfect sense for Robert who likes to be called Bob, or William who goes by Bill, and actually look their age.
- lapnitnelav 8y ago
  I'd rather have those kinds of platforms use some sort of unique hash of your ID than trust those muppets (remember Tinder's GPS coordinates leaking?) with anything too serious.
- icebraining 8y ago
  I see a few problems with this proposal: 1- There are still strong taboos against certain kinds of relationships; being forced to tie one's dating preferences and behaviors to a governmental ID seems dangerous. 2- Should companies get automatic access to one's name and age based solely on the ID number? Seems like a violation of privacy. 3- Mandating that for apps served over Google Play or the App Store is not hard; what about dating webapps served from other jurisdictions? Finally: will it really work? Looking 15 is already a red flag, because no minor is supposed to be there, yet they are.
  - turc1656 8y ago
    1. Yeah, you wouldn't want to roll this out to places like Egypt or Iran, for sure. And I usually am very pro-privacy, but since people either pay the companies that run these apps/sites/services or they use it for free but have it directly linked to their phone, google, etc., in reality these companies already have their true identities - or at least enough of it that if asked by any government entity they could produce it even if they didn't have the actual ID number of the government issued document. Isn't this how people buy alcohol online, though? I've never done it, but I recall someone telling me they had to upload their driver's license to the site they were buying from for age verification. So this seems to already be occurring elsewhere and I don't think anyone has complained about it. 2. Not sure I agree this is a violation of privacy since a) you would be providing them this exact same information when building your new profile upon account creation and b) you would agree to its collection as part of the signup process thereby waiving any privacy right you may or may not have in this regard. It would also be considered something a reasonable person would expect the third party to be given when supplying that identification number. For example, I assume that when I provided my information to my insurance company when applying for a personal disability policy that they checked everything on those documents for accuracy (name, age, address, etc.). 3. I was assuming this was legislation and would therefore apply to all services of this nature as long as they operate in the country/state where the legislation is effective. 4. 15 year olds are able to exist on these platforms in part because some 18 year olds look very young while others look much older. So someone can be 18 or 20 and look 15-16.

36 points by Mimino123 8y ago

Will this end up another misguided "think of the children" measure that will just make more consentual adult sex illegal? Or will it be accepted with open arms by dating sites who want all your PII to sell? ('anonymised' of course) (CoughmatchCough) Am I just jaded or does this seem to be the way things are going?

smt88 8y ago
> Will this end up another misguided "think of the children" measure that will just make more consentual adult sex illegal? What do you mean by “another”? When has regulating sex with children had the effect of making consensual adult sex illegal?
- kayfox 8y ago
  The UK has been pushing making adults register (with their ISP) to be able to access porn. Because of the children.
  - detaro 8y ago
    Which is not an answer to the question the parent asked.
  - smt88 8y ago
    1) Pushing? But it hasn't happened, right? 2) Porn isn't always consensual or between adults. This comment seemingly has nothing to do with what I asked.
paulgb 8y ago
You're not just jaded. "Trafficking" has become a vehicle for the religious right to shut down anything they don't like, from robot brothels [1] to, in this case, hookup apps. And nobody is for trafficking, so politicians from across the spectrum tend to go along with it. It's been this way since at least the Mann Act, which was ostensibly about trafficking but used to crack down on interracial relationships (notably by Jack Johnson, who recently got a posthumous pardon) "Remember when some tea company added "blockchain" to its name and stock prices soared? "Trafficking" is the equivalent word in the policy / non-profit world." -- Alex Frell Levy [2] [1] https://amp.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/sep/30/houston-robot-brothel-plan-halted https://amp.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/sep/30/houston-robo... [2] https://t.co/HaNQ2H7kFX https://t.co/HaNQ2H7kFX
- derefr 8y ago
  > And nobody is for trafficking Nobody in first-world countries, you mean. In third-world countries, a lot of what gets categorized as “human trafficking” is just self-motivated border-crossing by career prostitutes. You know how you might find a fellow working in America who is from, say, Bangladesh, and is here for the jobs that pay 100x as much as jobs in Bangladesh do, so he can send money home to his family? Well, in the hotbed countries of “human trafficking”, many of the women involved are just people who did exactly the same thing, moving from countries like Cambodia (“human trafficking source countries”) to countries like Thailand (“human trafficking destination countries”) because they know there’s far more of a market of sex tourists there with higher expectations of average prices. And her family back home? Thinks exactly the same of her as the family of the Bangladeshi man working in America does. “She’s providing for us; we’re proud of her.” The annoying thing is that “human trafficking” was established to go after what is, at its core, a real and horrifying crime—the combination of kidnapping and slavery that mafias tend to consider the highest-margin way to operate brothels, factories, etc. If someone isn’t themselves doing the kidnapping, or operating the brothel, but is just, say, driving the kidnapped people around, we didn’t have a crime to charge them with and had to let them go, until we invented “human trafficking.” It was essentially a gang-busting crime, a way to put pressure on ground-level members to get them to give up their higher-ups. But now, basically everything related to the original intent seems to fall under the aegis of that crime†, and its scope has grown to the point that we’ve forgotten why we invented it. † Probably because of motivated reasoning of statisticians working for the trafficking-related nonprofits. Sort of like the motivated reasoning of statisticians working for cigarette or sugary-cereal companies.
xfitm3 8y ago
Im really glad to see this comment. It is absolutely a “think of the children” measure. ID isn’t required for most things online and that’s a good thing.

mc32 8y ago

There is the danger that if these services don’t nip this in the bud, it’ll become a social problem akin to enjo-Kosai in Japan, which not only lends itself to exploitation of minors but also encourages needless conspicuous consumerism. For the most part, aside from using someone else’s credit information, these businesses have information on age and with facial recognition should be able to flag most falsified accounts.

gregoriol 8y ago

The apps are tools, it's up to the humans to do or not do stuff. In these cases, how are children getting in first? Where are the parents of these children?? Then, it's not the apps that create abuse, but the users on the other side. There could be a set of rules that the apps should make users agree with, and remind from time to time, like be kind, don't get angry if it doesn't work out, report strange behaviors/underage profiles/illegal stuff if you happen to detect one, ... Is it that complicated to be adults in 2019?

lmkg 8y ago
> The apps are tools, it's up to the humans to do or not do stuff. Technology changes what it's possible for humans to do or not do (or more often, make it qualitatively more/less feasible). Tool-makers should not take it as axiomatic that they have no responsibility or involvement for the ways that their tools impact other people's lives.
kayfox 8y ago
I imagine that teenagers will figure out how to get around the age checks, and then it will escalate.
klodolph 8y ago
> Is it that complicated to be adults in 2019? The people in question are very literally not adults.
purple_ducks 8y ago
> The apps are tools, it's up to the humans to do or not do stuff. "Guns don't mass murder people, humans do" In the real world, if I saw a child go on dates with a grown adult, I'd alert the police and have the man arrested, then I'd do my damndest to have the restaurant shut down for facilitating the grooming of minors. And most importantly, _in the real world_, we all have visibility of this and society as a whole acts in disgust and would (legal or otherwise) punish the offenders and people who facilitated and accommodated this. > There could be a set of rules that the apps should make users agree with A pinky promise maybe...

g45y45 8y ago

and the scope creep for the bad Online Identification begins. First it was no porn, then it was no dating. Soon it will be no rw to access to UK internet without age+ID. Disconnect the UK before the damage spreads!

Chazprime 8y ago
Right, and once we let the gays marry, soon we'll have people marrying farm animals!
- Ours90 8y ago
  And this is related to the whole discussion how?
  - fabianhjr 8y ago
    He is alluding that the comment he replied to is using a slippery slope fallacy. https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Slippery_slope https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Slippery_slope
    - Ours90 8y ago
      I didn't catch the sarcasm there. Now it makes sense but the parallel he drawn was, in my opinion, still unsuitable.
      - ownagefool 8y ago
        Actually, it's pretty on point if you get the culture and political references for the UK. One would suspect, without looking, that the OP is British.
  - Chazprime 8y ago
    It was just a comment on usage of the slippery-slope fallacy here. Sarcastic, yes...but I felt the original comment borders on fear-mongering.

thosakwe 8y ago

One question - where the heck are these kids' parents? I think most people on dating apps are under the impression that other users are of legal age. If your child is searching for adult partners, complete strangers, over the Internet, you as a parent have a lot to answer for. That being said, none of that justifies what happened to the minors mentioned in the article. Ultimately, there are a lot of bad people out there. It would be great for children to not be exposed to such people. But I think the necessary change is parental supervision, not government intervention.

klodolph 8y ago
How is this different from, for example, requiring age verification to purchase alcohol? Or are you also opposed to that? I think we understand that parents are not in complete control over their children, and in the interest of harm reduction, we don't give parents the entire burden of keeping their children safe but spread parts of it out among the community. This doesn't seem like a particularly burdensome request, here. Some parents are terrible parents, some kids are complete terrors, sometimes there are circumstances outside your control. Parents are not gods.
- towelr34dy 8y ago
  Did you read the article? It clearly states that tinder and grinder already monitor for minors. They state that they spend, and I'm guessing this wouldn't be an exaggeration given their volume, millions of dollars on this effort. What lawmakers want is ID required. This is an extremely burdensome requirement. To have every new user of any online platform have to verify photo ID against a webcam is... very onerous. And even then whats to stop a kid from using his parents confirmed account? Alcohol is a transaction for a substance that is deadly and purchased in public. Comparing it to creating an online profile in the privacy of your home is a big stretch. It would be more like creating an account with... I don't know, maybe buying a can of figs off amazon. Can a child buy a can of figs without ID? Not easily, but he could. Could he hurt himself with it? Yes. Should we require ID for this: I'd say not. The article seems to not mention any of the age verification things the kids forged and their parents computer. But don't worry, if it was convenient for the powers that be, they would have framed this as: "Evil kids get into banking system by HACKING." Funny how I'm sure they won't be asking Amazon to verify ID everytime a purchase is made. I mean, plenty of kids have ordered down right dangerous things this way, probably even caused a death. The worst part of the authoritarian inclined who use the 'what about the children?' argument is that many times they ironically make it less safe for children since the solutions aren't particularly well thought through (see drinking age in the US) - all while making it worse for the rest of us. The thing about the outrage crowd is they point to a problem with while implicitly saying 'anyone who doesn't support 'the solution' is in favor of the problem'. I'm not in favor of the problem. I'm in favor of fixing the problem IF it can be fixed in a cost effective way. Many people can't accept that there aren't widespread easy and simple solutions to giant complex social problems. Accepting that this behavior is an emergent quality from our individual actions and pruning one's own actions is very hard. Most people shy from this and look for externalizations.

mLuby 8y ago

Error: variable "the platform" was used before it was defined (heavily implying she was on a dating site, not Instagram as was the case). > Last month the BBC reported on the death of a 14-year-old schoolgirl who killed herself in 2017 after being exposed to self-harm imagery on the platform.

buckminster 8y ago
It's just bad writing. That case was Instagram.

Abishek_Muthian 8y ago

We were running a chat app network dating platform. User profiles were from chat apps & majority of the users were from Facebook Messenger, many in asian countries especially women from Philippines used their child photograph as their profile picture. After I realised the issue, we integrated Amazon Rekognition API to detect age range < 18 & block the profiles who had a child's picture on their user profile. The issue is that Rekognition isn't perfect & we lost several users because of this integration & false positives, yet we continued to use it till the end for moderation. We were processing >200,000 profile pictures each month for this.

turc1656 8y ago

The solution seems relatively straightforward to me, but maybe I'm missing something. If you want to engage on a platform designed explicitly for adults doing adult things, you give them your driver's license number or non-driver's ID number. They can instantaneously verify that with the government electronically and determine the age of the person associated with that license number. To further prevent problems - like kids taking their parent's ID and then changing the name and age - dating sites could bind the age of the site profile to the license provided. So if junior uses his old man's ID, he's going to show as 45, not 18, and he won't be able to change it. That has the additional benefit of stopping a lot of the lies related to age on dating sites. Lastly, they could also bind the first name only to the profile, hide the last name from other users, and allow a nickname or preferred handle to be displayed. So you can't upload a license for John Doe, age 30, and then say in your profile that your preferred name is Tony and you look 15. This would be a red flag to anyone. But makes perfect sense for Robert who likes to be called Bob, or William who goes by Bill, and actually look their age.

lapnitnelav 8y ago
I'd rather have those kinds of platforms use some sort of unique hash of your ID than trust those muppets (remember Tinder's GPS coordinates leaking?) with anything too serious.
icebraining 8y ago
I see a few problems with this proposal: 1- There are still strong taboos against certain kinds of relationships; being forced to tie one's dating preferences and behaviors to a governmental ID seems dangerous. 2- Should companies get automatic access to one's name and age based solely on the ID number? Seems like a violation of privacy. 3- Mandating that for apps served over Google Play or the App Store is not hard; what about dating webapps served from other jurisdictions? Finally: will it really work? Looking 15 is already a red flag, because no minor is supposed to be there, yet they are.
- turc1656 8y ago
  1. Yeah, you wouldn't want to roll this out to places like Egypt or Iran, for sure. And I usually am very pro-privacy, but since people either pay the companies that run these apps/sites/services or they use it for free but have it directly linked to their phone, google, etc., in reality these companies already have their true identities - or at least enough of it that if asked by any government entity they could produce it even if they didn't have the actual ID number of the government issued document. Isn't this how people buy alcohol online, though? I've never done it, but I recall someone telling me they had to upload their driver's license to the site they were buying from for age verification. So this seems to already be occurring elsewhere and I don't think anyone has complained about it. 2. Not sure I agree this is a violation of privacy since a) you would be providing them this exact same information when building your new profile upon account creation and b) you would agree to its collection as part of the signup process thereby waiving any privacy right you may or may not have in this regard. It would also be considered something a reasonable person would expect the third party to be given when supplying that identification number. For example, I assume that when I provided my information to my insurance company when applying for a personal disability policy that they checked everything on those documents for accuracy (name, age, address, etc.). 3. I was assuming this was legislation and would therefore apply to all services of this nature as long as they operate in the country/state where the legislation is effective. 4. 15 year olds are able to exist on these platforms in part because some 18 year olds look very young while others look much older. So someone can be 18 or 20 and look 15-16.