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As usual, the problem with this is that it assumes a way to perfectly identify somebody on the internet, which in turns mean a way to perfectly identify, in rea

As usual, the problem with this is that it assumes a way to perfectly identify somebody on the internet, which in turns mean a way to perfectly identify, in real time, somebody carrying permanently a tracking device with GPS, microphone and camera. It's crazy that all the things we considered the worst of dystopia in the 80's, thinking nobody would be stupid enough to do, and that those societies in SF books were only distant fictions, are things we are actively seeking now. Things like "Find my" and "air tags" are already beloved my millions, people use it to track loved ones and they swear by it. Even very intelligent, educated people. There is such a cognitive dissonance between people swearing the last election meant a likely dictatorship and the same people setting up a tech rope around their necks in case a dictatorship does happen. My now-dead Jewish grandfather met my grandmother during the French occupation because she was making fake papers. He would be horrified if he knew what we are doing right now with our data. My German ex was born in East Germany, 11 years before the fall of the Berlin Wall. She thinks people are mad to believe that tracking is not going to be abused. What the hell is going on?

scotty79 2y ago
A knife can be stuff of nightmares or a very useful tool (even with constant threat of abuse and accidental harm). Location tracking is just another knife.
- anilakar 2y ago
  Exactly. You don't allow people to carry knives in public because it does more harm than good.
  - scotty79 2y ago
    Some places don't. Some do. In Poland news about ban on knife carrying was April fool's joke. In UK it's a serious law with serious punishments. In UK people who'd carry a knife with malicious intent just moved to carrying caustic chemicals. It's often not specific tech that's a problem, but the culture and incentives for its misuse. Although reasonable restrictions on all technologies aren't inherently bad. Restrictions imposed pre-emptively just because nightmare scenarios are easy to imagine and captivating are not great.
- ekianjo 2y ago
  > just another knife Not in the hand of a government that has a monopoly on violence. Most governments in the world dont have your best interests in mind and being tracked 24/7 is a bad deal to get.
  - scotty79 2y ago
    People say "monopoly on violence" as if it's a bad thing. As if the opposite of that is no violence at all. But the opposite is commonality of violence which was the case before government became strong enough to enforce monopoly on violence and still is the case in places where the government is weak enough to lose the monopoly. Monopoly on violence is the most significant cultural development that allowed incredible wealth and societal development. Currently we are in the age of commonality of surveillance. If this turns out to be harmful enough we might as well move towards monopoly on surveillance and it might be an improvement. Personally I think it won't be necessary. I'm sure of one thing. Surveillance won't go away because it's a useful technological tool.
- BiteCode_dev 2y ago
  Yes, but: - You don't have full control over the knife. In fact it's not about your use of the knife. - The people in control of the knife have a poor track record at caring about you, and belong to a category that history has proven we should not trust. - Every time you use the knife, you sign a blank contract giving full authorization to future non-specified knife usage to people you don't know nor do you know their motive. And you trust none of those people, for an indefinite length of time, will abuse it. - Cumulative use of the knife can accumulate stabs that may be delt to you and all your love ones one day all at once. - Use of knife can be automated and scale at the level of all countries. - Most people are not knowledgeable about the knife, don't know much about it, and it's invisible to them.
  - scotty79 2y ago
    > You don't have full control over the knife. In fact it's not about your use of the knife. There are many knives in your relative proximity all the time. Some of them are used for your benefit, other are used for other's benefit, every one have potential to be abused against you by evil actor. > The people in control of the knife have a poor track record at caring about you, and belong to a category that history has proven we should not trust. Scrutiny should be proportional severity of harm times the frequency of harm. > Every time you use the knife, you sign a blank contract giving full authorization to future non-specified knife usage to people you don't know nor do you know their motive. And you trust none of those people, for an indefinite length of time, will abuse it. Everytime you enter restaurant or even leave your house you are giving full authorization to people around you who posses knives to use those knives for non-specified purposes. You can only hope they are reasonable and won't cause you harm. > Cumulative use of the knife can accumulate stabs that may be delt to you and all your love ones one day all at once Knives don't need to accumulate anything. One misapplication can end your life literally > Use of knife can be automated and scale at the level of all countries. There are many machines that are basically bunch of fast moving knives. It's on you to not be where they are. Their operators are bound to take precautions proportional to harm times the frequency of harm. > Most people are not knowledgeable about the knife, don't know much about it, and it's invisible to them You usually can't really tell how many knives are around you and most are hidden at most times.
hackernoops 2y ago
"What the hell is going on?" "...way to perfectly identify somebody on the internet..."
rgbswan 2y ago
not enough good/grand/noble characters in software engineering, management, leadership and so on. nature-nurture x game-theory anxiety/thrill VS. consciousness & planetary/colony-wide awareness; and I'm not talking about some esoteric spirituality or whatever the fuck. we are always in a natural balance, established by those who do and those who don't. all of us compartmentalise. and good/noble/grand people in law are rare and entirely absent in politics. TV & the radio made a lot of destructive behaviours look cool (all that finboy shit) and so did feel-good literature like Siddharta. and then there's the myth of "hard decisions" that can only be made by certain kinds of characters. young ppl are easy to bend towards hierarchies that reward certain kinds of behaviour and convictions. makes em feel proud. and in the end we are all just doin our job ^^
extrememacaroni 2y ago
God was a dream of good government.
GoblinSlayer 2y ago
They surf on smartphones anyway, so it's enough to identify the device itself. Luckily the devices are already authenticated and identified, for your safety.
dredmorbius 2y ago
SocMed / AdTech cos. can already ID and target users with precision. Knowing someone's pregnant before their family does, per the canonical example from 2012.[1] Impose an insanely steep tax (say, 10,000%) on all ads revenue tied to underage individuals. Now it's possible to pursue the Al Capone prosecution: tax fraud. SocMed cos. will avoid anyone underage like the plauge. ________________________________ Notes: 1. "How Target Figured Out A Teen Girl Was Pregnant Before Her Father Did" <https://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2012/02/16/how-target-figured-out-a-teen-girl-was-pregnant-before-her-father-did/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2012/02/16/how-targ...>, discussed on HN at the time: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3601354 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3601354> (17 Feb 2012).
- ben_w 2y ago
  Given my experience with ads today is that they frequently get my gender, language, nationality, and country of residence wrong (and in mutually incompatible ways), I suspect that the famous pregnancy story was dumb luck rather than a reflection of quality. But yes, the Al Capone solution seems like it would work.
  - xuki 2y ago
    They don’t have to be right all the time, just enough to make ROI positive.
    - mulmen 2y ago
      I realize this is the prevailing wisdom but it is short sighted and simplistic because it ignores opportunity cost.
      - dredmorbius 2y ago
        Could you expand on that?
        mulmen 2y ago
emsign 2y ago
Isn't a smartphone exactly designed to track and surveil individuals on the internet. I only see legal limitations here, and the costs.
- amelius 2y ago
  Yeah but the ones controlling the tech are the ones who win if teenagers can access the social media.
taylorius 2y ago
They figured out that if they get a load of hot girls, and cool goofy guys to entice people, and don't mention the spying part - it works a lot better than a bunch of government goons in badly fitting suits telling you to betray your friends and neighbours, or else.
tiew9Vii 2y ago
> As usual, the problem with this is that it assumes a way to perfectly identify somebody on the internet, which in turns mean a way to perfectly identify, in real time, somebody carrying permanently a tracking device with GPS, microphone and camera. It's Australia, who often rank very low for a western country on human rights. https://www.amnesty.org/en/location/asia-and-the-pacific/south-east-asia-and-the-pacific/australia/report-australia/ https://www.amnesty.org/en/location/asia-and-the-pacific/sou... Secret trials https://www.hrlc.org.au/news/2023/4/19/secret-trials-have-no-place-in-modern-australia-witness-js-sentencing-finally-revealed https://www.hrlc.org.au/news/2023/4/19/secret-trials-have-no... Secret laws https://www.theguardian.com/law/2023/mar/28/more-than-800-secrecy-laws-keeping-australian-government-information-from-the-public-paper-shows https://www.theguardian.com/law/2023/mar/28/more-than-800-se... Secret ministries https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2022/aug/19/scott-morrisons-secret-ministries-were-they-legal-and-what-happens-next https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2022/aug/19/scott... Secret backdoors https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2018/12/new_australian_.html https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2018/12/new_australia... Introducing Digital ID system that may be enabler for this https://www.oaic.gov.au/digital-id https://www.oaic.gov.au/digital-id While trying to introduce laws to weaken encryption an ex Australia prime minister famously said: > "The laws of mathematics are very commendable, but the only law that applies in Australia is the law of Australia" Malcolm Turnbull. What's crazy the west look at places such as China as dystopian with the great firewall etc, it appears China was just ahead of the game. Australia is probably the easiest place to introduce a system to block social media, a experimentation ground for five eyes. Easy to push things through, protesting isn't an Australian pass time, not that big of a country, not that small of a country.
- boffinAudio 2y ago
  Australia has been a petri dish for the testing of totalitarian-authoritarian policies and populist dogma since its inception as a nation. Never forget that the Western worlds first, most successful racist genocide occurred in Australia, and the same racist reasoning that allowed it to maintain White Australia policies into the 80's are still being used to justify the slaughter of innocent human beings all over the world. When the USA wants something dirty done, in yet another illegal war, Australia is ready with hat in hand, willful and subservient, to commit yet more crimes against humanity and get away with it. Australia is where the apparatus designed, with intent, to massively violate the human rights of over a billion human beings currently operates, at insane scales, every second of the day. Australians are fine with it. (Disclaimer: White Stolen Generation Australian.)
CJefferson 2y ago
The government, and big tech companies, don’t need air tags or “find me” to track almost everyone, they have a mobile phone constantly chatting with local towers. I don’t understand what is dystopian about knowing where I left my keys, and seeing how my wife’s commute home is doing without phoning her while she is driving, assuming we always both have mobile phones.
- afro88 2y ago
  The dystopian bit is the corporation having this data, not you. And having this data for all users. Pretty much everyone has a mobile phone.
  - ilkke 2y ago
    Isn't this the point they were trying to make? The corporations already have that data, it comes with the platform. The bit where you can use some of it for own purposes is not really the offending part.
    - afro88 2y ago
      It's offending because it's complicit with the dystopian mass surveillance. Encouraging of it even. "I can find my keys when I lose them, so it's fine that a single corporation knows where billions of people are and what they are doing"
  - throw_pm23 2y ago
    No, I think you having the data is also creepy. I wouldn't want my wife to follow all my steps, and neither would she.
    - deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
    - JKCalhoun 2y ago
      Our family (my daughters, wife) has had Find My paired on our phones since, well 2010 when it was introduced. We like it. I remember watching my sister and her husband calling each other frequently with, "How far are you away from home?" and just kind of scratched my head. (I think I have sinced talked them into enabling Find My.) When my wife or I want to call a daughter we can see immediately if they are at work or at home... things like that are nice. There's also an indescribable sweetness to just looking longingly in on a daughter who is far away and wondering how her day is going. Empty nest blues? (Or maybe Miner at the Dial-A-View.)
the5avage 2y ago
> worst of dystopia in the 80's Huxley's "Brave New World" was published 1932
simion314 2y ago
And there is a super obvious solution to this,assuming children can't buy phones then the parents should setup the account for the children and enter the birthdate. Now the OS the browser int eh phones know if the user is an adult in that country, or whatever age level needed. If say an adult is incapable to setup a phone/tablet, then a person at the store would help them set the initial part but skip the login with Google/Apple etc. No idea why this was not tried and then see if it fails.
- BiteCode_dev 2y ago
  Just because there is no solution to a rat infestation doesn't mean you should burn the house with the people in it.
  - simion314 2y ago
    >Just because there is no solution to a rat infestation doesn't mean you should burn the house with the people in it. reply What? you mean asking the parent to enter a date of birth before giftin the child a phone and setting it in child mode is like burning things? Did you really relied to me? Then explain Seems to me a better idea then government IDs or sending your ID to Facebook. I could guess why Google did nlot add this feature to Android , they want the money from ads, and maybe Apple wants Google to bhave money to share with them.
    - TeMPOraL 2y ago
      > What? you mean asking the parent to enter a date of birth before giftin the child a phone and setting it in child mode is like burning things? How do you want to enforce it? Everyone who grew up as Internet started knows that everyone is over 18 on the Internet. Or did you, as a kid, ever put your real birth date on a form asking for it for purposes of age-walling you? And if not voluntary, then... it's either companies asking for government-issued IDs on a case-by-case basis, or a larger system, perhaps legally mandated, that forces you to tie your government-issued ID into it so age information is automatically propagated in the background.
lm28469 2y ago
> It's crazy that all the things we considered the worst of dystopia in the 80's, thinking nobody would be stupid enough to do, and that those societies in SF books were only distant fictions, are things we are actively seeking now 8 years old doom scrolling tiktok is a dystopia we are experiencing right now, pick your flavor
- tacocataco 2y ago
  I pick social media being regulated into becoming healthy for everyone so it doesn't have to be banned for teenagers.
- Nasrudith 2y ago
  Goddamn, dystopia as a word has reached a new level of dilution.
dmwilcox 2y ago
It seems like we don't need a technical solution for this and making one would be dystopian as you point out. Why not just (a) make it illegal so the parents and tech companies see it that way and (b) put some fines on the responsible adult parties if violations are found? Sure enforcement would be spotty and loose, but tickets for parents and fines for tech companies would go a long way to establish the cultural change without the need for "verification"
- djtango 2y ago
  Yeah - exactly. If companies are motivated and parents are motivated to prevent it and schools have the cover to also police it, then social media usage probably won't hit critical mass for kids and they won't feel FOMO to get it. "it's illegal" is usually a decent enough hard stop to most kids for "why can't I have it" Should just age-restrict smartphones altogether imo lol. Entire generations survived without mobile phones and it would remove entire issues around addictive mobile games, social media abuse, attention/focus issues
  - johnisgood 2y ago
    I would not know English nor how to code were it for age-restricted access to computers.
    - Baljhin 2y ago
      Yes you would: you'ld learn <pick-a-language> just like people have for centuries - in school, and you'ld learn how to code just like millions have for decades - in school or library computer rooms, or with an age-restricted computer that your family would provide.
- victorbjorklund 2y ago
  what prison time should a 15 year old get if they sign up to Instagram claiming to be 16?
  - 2y ago
cassepipe 2y ago
Have you read this book ? : https://www.fnac.com/a12617239/Sarah-Kaminsky-Adolfo-Kaminsky-une-vie-de-faussaire https://www.fnac.com/a12617239/Sarah-Kaminsky-Adolfo-Kaminsk...
Etheryte 2y ago
I agree with everything you said. Leaving the morale and ideology aside for a moment though and looking at the technical side, couldn't this, at least in theory, also be implemented in a way that's not so dystopian? Everyone has a SIM card, whether physical or digital, and also a cell plan. If you make carriers mark all underage customers and then have the SIM forward that boolean value to the phone and nothing more, could you in theory still implement something like this without any further breach of privacy? Of course, as with any system there's workarounds, but as a baseline this would work, no?
- TeMPOraL 2y ago
  Maybe things have changed since I was a kid, and I'm not up to date as my kids are too young to operate cell phones, but - does anyone actually buys a plan for an underage person? I'd think it's usually an adult parent/caregiver who buys another SIM card under their own name and just gives it to the kid; the carrier shouldn't have a way of knowing which phone/SIM card belongs to an underage person.
  - Etheryte 2y ago
    Functionally yes, the plan is in the parent's name. But at least where I'm from, you already have plans that are geared at kids, e.g. they have limits on how big their bill can be so they don't blow it up, certain services are turned off for them such as pay-per-minute calls, and so forth. Perhaps to put a different way, the carriers might not have this info right now, but it would be straightforward to implement this limit this way. Any other approach that I can think of would be both more technical work and also a bigger breach of privacy.
- michaelt 2y ago
  > couldn't this, at least in theory, also be implemented in a way that's not so dystopian? It depends on the assumptions you're willing to make. Imagine if Australia introduces a block that works really well, and preserves privacy, but you can bypass it by using a VPN, or by rooting your phone. Would that be good enough, because only 1% of kids will figure out those bypasses? Or will the knowledge spread like wildfire until 90% of kids are using VPNs or rooting their phones? If you assume such bypasses would spread like wildfire, Australia would also need to block all VPNs or make every phone impossible to root. Tough to do that in a way that isn't dystopian.
ForHackernews 2y ago
No, the tracking is irrelevant. The important point is to establish a shared cultural norm. In the US, children under 13 are usually forbidden from having online accounts. Do some kids lie? For sure, but the sites will try to ban those accounts. In practice, this legislation would be very positive because it would establish the expectation that young teens _are not on social media_. This only works if it's national legislation: No kid will feel left out because his/her friends are on SnapGramTok. They are all banned. They can be mad at the unfair government/adults together.
- scotty79 2y ago
  Is GitHub social media? How about stack overflow? What is social media exactly? This would need to be ban on specific blocklisted companies and services which might be a good thing because alternatives might arise that could try to do their best to not end up on the blocklist.
rob74 2y ago
Now that you mention it, the would-be dictator that was just elected in the US is allied with both the stereotypical hand-wringing think-about-the-children people (religious groups) as well as with Elon Musk, owner of a major social media platform and future "efficiency czar". Talk about cognitive dissonance...
TeMPOraL 2y ago
> It's crazy that all the things we considered the worst of dystopia in the 80's, thinking nobody would be stupid enough to do, and that those societies in SF books were only distant fictions, are things we are actively seeking now. > What the hell is going on? Because they weren't all that dystopian? Maybe people had the good sense of being able to see the amazing aspects of those future technologies even when the authors tried to paint them darkly? Or maybe we rightly all realized - even if just at subconscious, emotional level - that those fictional dystopias are thin, simplistic narrative devices, and "no one would be stupid enough to" actually implement them? What we didn't predict was adtech. For all the anti-corporate fiction that was part of, or adjacent to, science fiction of that era, the western culture is still obsessed with self-made people, glorifying entrepreneurship, making money. Well, turns out there's hardly a difference between small businesses and large corporations. The incentives are the same regardless of size; sole proprietorships and multinationals aren't some sworn enemies, they're just different size of the same thing. What we didn't realize - and many still don't - is that, while no one may be stupid enough to implement the techno-dystopia outright, many will happily do whatever it takes, no matter how unscrupulous and underhanded, to secure their income. We didn't realize that glorifying "business sharks" means creating an entrepreneurship culture where customers are resources to be exploited, not human beings. Iterate on it enough, and we get to techno-dystopia indirectly, with no stupid steps made on the way - just plenty of exploitative ones. Perhaps the memory of the first 3/4 of the 20th century has us put too much focus on the governments, and blind to private interests. A particular pet peeve of mine, for example: > My German ex was born in East Germany, 11 years before the fall of the Berlin Wall. She thinks people are mad to believe that tracking is not going to be abused. Yes, and at least some people who think alike also like to bring up Nazis pulling census records to make their purges more efficient. But frankly, I don't think this is a good argument against censuses, or contact tracing. It's not the census that put minorities in concentration camps, it's the Nazis. They wouldn't have stopped if that data didn't exist, they'd find some other proxy or just do it systematically, like they did elsewhere. A better argument is to perhaps not collect data you don't need. A census without religious affiliation would be less useful to Nazis and the like, and it's questionable how useful having this information was for the purposes it was collected. But my ultimate point is, when your government turns evil, you're screwed anyway. We need to try and prevent it from going bad in the first place. It may indeed involve fighting against badly justified surveillance overreach, but trying to take away tools that an okay-ish government uses for good, only because they'll be used for bad things when the government turns evil, is just self-destructive behavior. I mean, you could argue that teaching a person how to grow strength and keep a healthy body, how to read, write, plan, think, negotiate, convince, are all bad because what if that person becomes a criminal or a dictator? Yes, it would be much better if murderers and tyrants didn't know how to use a knife or a gun, or how to talk people into helping them. But we consider that risk to be worth it because of all the good it brings to everyone else, continuously. And yeah, we're all so focused on the idea of governments going full-Nazi again, that we've ignored the gradual overreach of private interests, which at this point not only actively screws with our everyday lives all the time (hello advertising industry), but also undermines our governments too. Even worse, all the "dual-use" tech and data private interests have, that okay-ish governments would love to access but have good sense to refrain themselves, sits there gift-wrapped for any evil government willing to reach for it. We ended up choosing the worst option of all: all the downsides of tech being abused by private interests now and evil governments in the future, with none of the upsides of okay governments using it for good today. So perhaps we should concentrate less on things like AirTags being potentially deadly in hands of the next Stalin, and focus more on fighting private and public attempts at abusing them early, while maximizing the benefits society can get from such technologies. Or, in short, let's pay less attention to how some tech could be abused in principle, and more attention to people who are trying to abuse others.
amarcheschi 2y ago
In italy we have a digital ID (spid) that's actually managed by third parties authorized by government and you can use it to log in on some services, I think this way it would work
- willvarfar 2y ago
  Sweden has had a "BankID" system since 2003. It's run by the bank branch organisation. It works really well. Almost everybody has it.
- brokenmachine 2y ago
  Australia has myGovID https://www.mygovid.gov.au/ https://www.mygovid.gov.au/ Although I think it's only for government sites. I believe it could probably be used to verify only age in a privacy-respecting fashion. But let's be real. We all know this isn't about protecting children, because it never is.
semi-extrinsic 2y ago
> As usual, the problem with this is that it assumes a way to perfectly identify somebody on the internet Nope, it does not require this. What you can do is to construct a zero-knowledge proof of the age of the smartphone user. You can do this based on the certificate that is provisioned in modern electronic passports. The proof construction can choose to ignore expiry date, so the government can offer to issue expired passports with blank photos for the instances of people who should not have functioning passports. Then you need the social media sites to agree on a common auth mechanism that uses the zero-knowledge proof, and if the same proof gets used on multiple devices, you log out the previously used device. So even if a parent lets their kid use the parent's passport to generate the proof on the kids phone, every time the kid uses this proof, the parent gets logged out of Facebook and all other social media apps. Then no parents are going to let the kids use their ID, because of the negative impact to themselves. And you have no more means of tracking than already exists today. This also offers interesting possibilities for a startup! In the EU today, there are essentially zero legal ways for a 12-year-old to have a group chat with their friends, apart from RCS and iMessage, which then divides the friend group into two halves. Imagine then a chat app aimed specifically at group conversations for teens, where every user has a verified age. This type of app is something parents will pay good money for.
- LegionMammal978 2y ago
  > Then you need the social media sites to agree on a common auth mechanism that uses the zero-knowledge proof, and if the same proof gets used on multiple devices, you log out the previously used device. > So even if a parent lets their kid use the parent's passport to generate the proof on the kids phone, every time the kid uses this proof, the parent gets logged out of Facebook and all other social media apps. Doesn't this automatically give the "common auth mechanism" perfect knowledge of all the parent's social media accounts, whether under a real name or a pseudonym? That sounds like an additional means of tracking. Also, what if the parent legitimately has multiple devices that they use for social media (e.g., a phone and a laptop)? You might say, "log them out if it's used simultaneously from multiple devices", but then you're tracking all social-media usage everywhere in realtime.
- BeFlatXIII 2y ago
whiplash451 2y ago
> As usual, the problem with this is that it assumes a way to perfectly identify somebody on the internet It does not require this, and in fact the solution may be almost entirely outside of the technology realm. Simply making it illegal would be enough to: 1. Deter a lot of people from enabling social media on the smartphone of their kids 2. Enable a lot of parents to tell their kids that what they are doing is illegal 3. Force BigTech to implement whatever solution fits best to control the age of the user before install. The onus to respect the law is on them.
- xnorswap 2y ago
  Exactly, if cigarettes were currently available at any age, and it was proposed to be limited to 18+, you'd get people in here decrying the law, saying it's completely unworkable to prevent absolutely every under age person ever from consuming tobacco, and therefore we shouldn't limit it at all. It's a very technical misunderstanding of how law works, or the effects law have on society. Legality isn't technicality. Something being physically possible doesn't "break" the law, and breaking a law doesn't render that law useless.
  - sekai 2y ago
    Apples to oranges. Piracy would be a good comparison to this law. We all know how that turned out.
    - BiteCode_dev 2y ago
      Or CP. Also we have to consider that gov spying programs are developed everywhere in the world, and the fact CP has been used as an excuse to pass questionable bills again and again. What's even crazier is that we have to even argue this is a problem. And that intelligent people are arguing that this is all OK. People that read history books, saw PRISM and Snowden, heard about cops abusing their system already, etc.
    - whiplash451 2y ago
      Piracy is also apples to oranges. There aren’t big tech companies running piracy services. You could put them under the rule of law if they did.
jancsika 2y ago
Sounds like you are advocating for a much different law: one that bans (or at least makes prohibitively expensive) the kind of data mining/tracking that social media companies currently rely on for their business models. Am I correct in this assumption?
tacocataco 2y ago
My personal theory is that powerful people didn't want people to be digitally free. It might make them think about fighting for freedoms offline as well.
_1tem 2y ago
Typical hacker misconception regarding the law. You don't need to implement perfect tracking to enforce a law. Make it illegal and then let BigTech use their AI algorithms to detect and block minor accounts. Parents will also play a major part.
sourcepluck 2y ago
It really is almost hilariously formulaic. I mean, it'd be hilarious if it didn't have such disastrous consequences. The slide to dystopia which is described or implied by countless fictional books is, in fact, really easy to pull off. It's death by a thousand socially convenient compromises. I remember when a significant portion of people thought carrying phones around was creepy, or that spending your life looking at screens was antisocial, and these things were actively proclaimed. Contrary to popularly repeated historical revisionist tropes, lots of people had to be cajoled and prodded and pressured into the "digital revolution". Surely others remember that? And now we're at a stage now where if you don't have something like whatsapp or facebook or instagram or whatever, depending on the culture and the age group, there's a real chance that you'll be socially confronted, and even belittled in some circumstances.

scotty79 2y ago

A knife can be stuff of nightmares or a very useful tool (even with constant threat of abuse and accidental harm). Location tracking is just another knife.

anilakar 2y ago
Exactly. You don't allow people to carry knives in public because it does more harm than good.
- scotty79 2y ago
  Some places don't. Some do. In Poland news about ban on knife carrying was April fool's joke. In UK it's a serious law with serious punishments. In UK people who'd carry a knife with malicious intent just moved to carrying caustic chemicals. It's often not specific tech that's a problem, but the culture and incentives for its misuse. Although reasonable restrictions on all technologies aren't inherently bad. Restrictions imposed pre-emptively just because nightmare scenarios are easy to imagine and captivating are not great.
ekianjo 2y ago
> just another knife Not in the hand of a government that has a monopoly on violence. Most governments in the world dont have your best interests in mind and being tracked 24/7 is a bad deal to get.
- scotty79 2y ago
  People say "monopoly on violence" as if it's a bad thing. As if the opposite of that is no violence at all. But the opposite is commonality of violence which was the case before government became strong enough to enforce monopoly on violence and still is the case in places where the government is weak enough to lose the monopoly. Monopoly on violence is the most significant cultural development that allowed incredible wealth and societal development. Currently we are in the age of commonality of surveillance. If this turns out to be harmful enough we might as well move towards monopoly on surveillance and it might be an improvement. Personally I think it won't be necessary. I'm sure of one thing. Surveillance won't go away because it's a useful technological tool.
BiteCode_dev 2y ago
Yes, but: - You don't have full control over the knife. In fact it's not about your use of the knife. - The people in control of the knife have a poor track record at caring about you, and belong to a category that history has proven we should not trust. - Every time you use the knife, you sign a blank contract giving full authorization to future non-specified knife usage to people you don't know nor do you know their motive. And you trust none of those people, for an indefinite length of time, will abuse it. - Cumulative use of the knife can accumulate stabs that may be delt to you and all your love ones one day all at once. - Use of knife can be automated and scale at the level of all countries. - Most people are not knowledgeable about the knife, don't know much about it, and it's invisible to them.
- scotty79 2y ago
  > You don't have full control over the knife. In fact it's not about your use of the knife. There are many knives in your relative proximity all the time. Some of them are used for your benefit, other are used for other's benefit, every one have potential to be abused against you by evil actor. > The people in control of the knife have a poor track record at caring about you, and belong to a category that history has proven we should not trust. Scrutiny should be proportional severity of harm times the frequency of harm. > Every time you use the knife, you sign a blank contract giving full authorization to future non-specified knife usage to people you don't know nor do you know their motive. And you trust none of those people, for an indefinite length of time, will abuse it. Everytime you enter restaurant or even leave your house you are giving full authorization to people around you who posses knives to use those knives for non-specified purposes. You can only hope they are reasonable and won't cause you harm. > Cumulative use of the knife can accumulate stabs that may be delt to you and all your love ones one day all at once Knives don't need to accumulate anything. One misapplication can end your life literally > Use of knife can be automated and scale at the level of all countries. There are many machines that are basically bunch of fast moving knives. It's on you to not be where they are. Their operators are bound to take precautions proportional to harm times the frequency of harm. > Most people are not knowledgeable about the knife, don't know much about it, and it's invisible to them You usually can't really tell how many knives are around you and most are hidden at most times.

hackernoops 2y ago

"What the hell is going on?" "...way to perfectly identify somebody on the internet..."

rgbswan 2y ago

not enough good/grand/noble characters in software engineering, management, leadership and so on. nature-nurture x game-theory anxiety/thrill VS. consciousness & planetary/colony-wide awareness; and I'm not talking about some esoteric spirituality or whatever the fuck. we are always in a natural balance, established by those who do and those who don't. all of us compartmentalise. and good/noble/grand people in law are rare and entirely absent in politics. TV & the radio made a lot of destructive behaviours look cool (all that finboy shit) and so did feel-good literature like Siddharta. and then there's the myth of "hard decisions" that can only be made by certain kinds of characters. young ppl are easy to bend towards hierarchies that reward certain kinds of behaviour and convictions. makes em feel proud. and in the end we are all just doin our job ^^

extrememacaroni 2y ago

God was a dream of good government.

GoblinSlayer 2y ago

They surf on smartphones anyway, so it's enough to identify the device itself. Luckily the devices are already authenticated and identified, for your safety.

dredmorbius 2y ago

SocMed / AdTech cos. can already ID and target users with precision. Knowing someone's pregnant before their family does, per the canonical example from 2012.[1] Impose an insanely steep tax (say, 10,000%) on all ads revenue tied to underage individuals. Now it's possible to pursue the Al Capone prosecution: tax fraud. SocMed cos. will avoid anyone underage like the plauge. ________________________________ Notes: 1. "How Target Figured Out A Teen Girl Was Pregnant Before Her Father Did" <https://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2012/02/16/how-target-figured-out-a-teen-girl-was-pregnant-before-her-father-did/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2012/02/16/how-targ...>, discussed on HN at the time: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3601354 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3601354> (17 Feb 2012).

ben_w 2y ago
Given my experience with ads today is that they frequently get my gender, language, nationality, and country of residence wrong (and in mutually incompatible ways), I suspect that the famous pregnancy story was dumb luck rather than a reflection of quality. But yes, the Al Capone solution seems like it would work.
- xuki 2y ago
  They don’t have to be right all the time, just enough to make ROI positive.
  - mulmen 2y ago
    I realize this is the prevailing wisdom but it is short sighted and simplistic because it ignores opportunity cost.
    - dredmorbius 2y ago
      Could you expand on that?
      - mulmen 2y ago

emsign 2y ago

Isn't a smartphone exactly designed to track and surveil individuals on the internet. I only see legal limitations here, and the costs.

amelius 2y ago
Yeah but the ones controlling the tech are the ones who win if teenagers can access the social media.

taylorius 2y ago

They figured out that if they get a load of hot girls, and cool goofy guys to entice people, and don't mention the spying part - it works a lot better than a bunch of government goons in badly fitting suits telling you to betray your friends and neighbours, or else.

tiew9Vii 2y ago

> As usual, the problem with this is that it assumes a way to perfectly identify somebody on the internet, which in turns mean a way to perfectly identify, in real time, somebody carrying permanently a tracking device with GPS, microphone and camera. It's Australia, who often rank very low for a western country on human rights. https://www.amnesty.org/en/location/asia-and-the-pacific/south-east-asia-and-the-pacific/australia/report-australia/ https://www.amnesty.org/en/location/asia-and-the-pacific/sou... Secret trials https://www.hrlc.org.au/news/2023/4/19/secret-trials-have-no-place-in-modern-australia-witness-js-sentencing-finally-revealed https://www.hrlc.org.au/news/2023/4/19/secret-trials-have-no... Secret laws https://www.theguardian.com/law/2023/mar/28/more-than-800-secrecy-laws-keeping-australian-government-information-from-the-public-paper-shows https://www.theguardian.com/law/2023/mar/28/more-than-800-se... Secret ministries https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2022/aug/19/scott-morrisons-secret-ministries-were-they-legal-and-what-happens-next https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2022/aug/19/scott... Secret backdoors https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2018/12/new_australian_.html https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2018/12/new_australia... Introducing Digital ID system that may be enabler for this https://www.oaic.gov.au/digital-id https://www.oaic.gov.au/digital-id While trying to introduce laws to weaken encryption an ex Australia prime minister famously said: > "The laws of mathematics are very commendable, but the only law that applies in Australia is the law of Australia" Malcolm Turnbull. What's crazy the west look at places such as China as dystopian with the great firewall etc, it appears China was just ahead of the game. Australia is probably the easiest place to introduce a system to block social media, a experimentation ground for five eyes. Easy to push things through, protesting isn't an Australian pass time, not that big of a country, not that small of a country.

boffinAudio 2y ago
Australia has been a petri dish for the testing of totalitarian-authoritarian policies and populist dogma since its inception as a nation. Never forget that the Western worlds first, most successful racist genocide occurred in Australia, and the same racist reasoning that allowed it to maintain White Australia policies into the 80's are still being used to justify the slaughter of innocent human beings all over the world. When the USA wants something dirty done, in yet another illegal war, Australia is ready with hat in hand, willful and subservient, to commit yet more crimes against humanity and get away with it. Australia is where the apparatus designed, with intent, to massively violate the human rights of over a billion human beings currently operates, at insane scales, every second of the day. Australians are fine with it. (Disclaimer: White Stolen Generation Australian.)

CJefferson 2y ago

The government, and big tech companies, don’t need air tags or “find me” to track almost everyone, they have a mobile phone constantly chatting with local towers. I don’t understand what is dystopian about knowing where I left my keys, and seeing how my wife’s commute home is doing without phoning her while she is driving, assuming we always both have mobile phones.

afro88 2y ago
The dystopian bit is the corporation having this data, not you. And having this data for all users. Pretty much everyone has a mobile phone.
- ilkke 2y ago
  Isn't this the point they were trying to make? The corporations already have that data, it comes with the platform. The bit where you can use some of it for own purposes is not really the offending part.
  - afro88 2y ago
    It's offending because it's complicit with the dystopian mass surveillance. Encouraging of it even. "I can find my keys when I lose them, so it's fine that a single corporation knows where billions of people are and what they are doing"
- throw_pm23 2y ago
  No, I think you having the data is also creepy. I wouldn't want my wife to follow all my steps, and neither would she.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  - JKCalhoun 2y ago
    Our family (my daughters, wife) has had Find My paired on our phones since, well 2010 when it was introduced. We like it. I remember watching my sister and her husband calling each other frequently with, "How far are you away from home?" and just kind of scratched my head. (I think I have sinced talked them into enabling Find My.) When my wife or I want to call a daughter we can see immediately if they are at work or at home... things like that are nice. There's also an indescribable sweetness to just looking longingly in on a daughter who is far away and wondering how her day is going. Empty nest blues? (Or maybe Miner at the Dial-A-View.)

the5avage 2y ago

> worst of dystopia in the 80's Huxley's "Brave New World" was published 1932

simion314 2y ago

And there is a super obvious solution to this,assuming children can't buy phones then the parents should setup the account for the children and enter the birthdate. Now the OS the browser int eh phones know if the user is an adult in that country, or whatever age level needed. If say an adult is incapable to setup a phone/tablet, then a person at the store would help them set the initial part but skip the login with Google/Apple etc. No idea why this was not tried and then see if it fails.

BiteCode_dev 2y ago
Just because there is no solution to a rat infestation doesn't mean you should burn the house with the people in it.
- simion314 2y ago
  >Just because there is no solution to a rat infestation doesn't mean you should burn the house with the people in it. reply What? you mean asking the parent to enter a date of birth before giftin the child a phone and setting it in child mode is like burning things? Did you really relied to me? Then explain Seems to me a better idea then government IDs or sending your ID to Facebook. I could guess why Google did nlot add this feature to Android , they want the money from ads, and maybe Apple wants Google to bhave money to share with them.
  - TeMPOraL 2y ago
    > What? you mean asking the parent to enter a date of birth before giftin the child a phone and setting it in child mode is like burning things? How do you want to enforce it? Everyone who grew up as Internet started knows that everyone is over 18 on the Internet. Or did you, as a kid, ever put your real birth date on a form asking for it for purposes of age-walling you? And if not voluntary, then... it's either companies asking for government-issued IDs on a case-by-case basis, or a larger system, perhaps legally mandated, that forces you to tie your government-issued ID into it so age information is automatically propagated in the background.

lm28469 2y ago

tacocataco 2y ago
I pick social media being regulated into becoming healthy for everyone so it doesn't have to be banned for teenagers.
Nasrudith 2y ago
Goddamn, dystopia as a word has reached a new level of dilution.

dmwilcox 2y ago

It seems like we don't need a technical solution for this and making one would be dystopian as you point out. Why not just (a) make it illegal so the parents and tech companies see it that way and (b) put some fines on the responsible adult parties if violations are found? Sure enforcement would be spotty and loose, but tickets for parents and fines for tech companies would go a long way to establish the cultural change without the need for "verification"

djtango 2y ago
Yeah - exactly. If companies are motivated and parents are motivated to prevent it and schools have the cover to also police it, then social media usage probably won't hit critical mass for kids and they won't feel FOMO to get it. "it's illegal" is usually a decent enough hard stop to most kids for "why can't I have it" Should just age-restrict smartphones altogether imo lol. Entire generations survived without mobile phones and it would remove entire issues around addictive mobile games, social media abuse, attention/focus issues
- johnisgood 2y ago
  I would not know English nor how to code were it for age-restricted access to computers.
  - Baljhin 2y ago
    Yes you would: you'ld learn <pick-a-language> just like people have for centuries - in school, and you'ld learn how to code just like millions have for decades - in school or library computer rooms, or with an age-restricted computer that your family would provide.
victorbjorklund 2y ago
what prison time should a 15 year old get if they sign up to Instagram claiming to be 16?
- 2y ago

cassepipe 2y ago

Have you read this book ? : https://www.fnac.com/a12617239/Sarah-Kaminsky-Adolfo-Kaminsky-une-vie-de-faussaire https://www.fnac.com/a12617239/Sarah-Kaminsky-Adolfo-Kaminsk...

Etheryte 2y ago

I agree with everything you said. Leaving the morale and ideology aside for a moment though and looking at the technical side, couldn't this, at least in theory, also be implemented in a way that's not so dystopian? Everyone has a SIM card, whether physical or digital, and also a cell plan. If you make carriers mark all underage customers and then have the SIM forward that boolean value to the phone and nothing more, could you in theory still implement something like this without any further breach of privacy? Of course, as with any system there's workarounds, but as a baseline this would work, no?

TeMPOraL 2y ago
Maybe things have changed since I was a kid, and I'm not up to date as my kids are too young to operate cell phones, but - does anyone actually buys a plan for an underage person? I'd think it's usually an adult parent/caregiver who buys another SIM card under their own name and just gives it to the kid; the carrier shouldn't have a way of knowing which phone/SIM card belongs to an underage person.
- Etheryte 2y ago
  Functionally yes, the plan is in the parent's name. But at least where I'm from, you already have plans that are geared at kids, e.g. they have limits on how big their bill can be so they don't blow it up, certain services are turned off for them such as pay-per-minute calls, and so forth. Perhaps to put a different way, the carriers might not have this info right now, but it would be straightforward to implement this limit this way. Any other approach that I can think of would be both more technical work and also a bigger breach of privacy.
michaelt 2y ago
> couldn't this, at least in theory, also be implemented in a way that's not so dystopian? It depends on the assumptions you're willing to make. Imagine if Australia introduces a block that works really well, and preserves privacy, but you can bypass it by using a VPN, or by rooting your phone. Would that be good enough, because only 1% of kids will figure out those bypasses? Or will the knowledge spread like wildfire until 90% of kids are using VPNs or rooting their phones? If you assume such bypasses would spread like wildfire, Australia would also need to block all VPNs or make every phone impossible to root. Tough to do that in a way that isn't dystopian.

ForHackernews 2y ago

No, the tracking is irrelevant. The important point is to establish a shared cultural norm. In the US, children under 13 are usually forbidden from having online accounts. Do some kids lie? For sure, but the sites will try to ban those accounts. In practice, this legislation would be very positive because it would establish the expectation that young teens _are not on social media_. This only works if it's national legislation: No kid will feel left out because his/her friends are on SnapGramTok. They are all banned. They can be mad at the unfair government/adults together.

scotty79 2y ago
Is GitHub social media? How about stack overflow? What is social media exactly? This would need to be ban on specific blocklisted companies and services which might be a good thing because alternatives might arise that could try to do their best to not end up on the blocklist.

rob74 2y ago

Now that you mention it, the would-be dictator that was just elected in the US is allied with both the stereotypical hand-wringing think-about-the-children people (religious groups) as well as with Elon Musk, owner of a major social media platform and future "efficiency czar". Talk about cognitive dissonance...

TeMPOraL 2y ago

> It's crazy that all the things we considered the worst of dystopia in the 80's, thinking nobody would be stupid enough to do, and that those societies in SF books were only distant fictions, are things we are actively seeking now. > What the hell is going on? Because they weren't all that dystopian? Maybe people had the good sense of being able to see the amazing aspects of those future technologies even when the authors tried to paint them darkly? Or maybe we rightly all realized - even if just at subconscious, emotional level - that those fictional dystopias are thin, simplistic narrative devices, and "no one would be stupid enough to" actually implement them? What we didn't predict was adtech. For all the anti-corporate fiction that was part of, or adjacent to, science fiction of that era, the western culture is still obsessed with self-made people, glorifying entrepreneurship, making money. Well, turns out there's hardly a difference between small businesses and large corporations. The incentives are the same regardless of size; sole proprietorships and multinationals aren't some sworn enemies, they're just different size of the same thing. What we didn't realize - and many still don't - is that, while no one may be stupid enough to implement the techno-dystopia outright, many will happily do whatever it takes, no matter how unscrupulous and underhanded, to secure their income. We didn't realize that glorifying "business sharks" means creating an entrepreneurship culture where customers are resources to be exploited, not human beings. Iterate on it enough, and we get to techno-dystopia indirectly, with no stupid steps made on the way - just plenty of exploitative ones. Perhaps the memory of the first 3/4 of the 20th century has us put too much focus on the governments, and blind to private interests. A particular pet peeve of mine, for example: > My German ex was born in East Germany, 11 years before the fall of the Berlin Wall. She thinks people are mad to believe that tracking is not going to be abused. Yes, and at least some people who think alike also like to bring up Nazis pulling census records to make their purges more efficient. But frankly, I don't think this is a good argument against censuses, or contact tracing. It's not the census that put minorities in concentration camps, it's the Nazis. They wouldn't have stopped if that data didn't exist, they'd find some other proxy or just do it systematically, like they did elsewhere. A better argument is to perhaps not collect data you don't need. A census without religious affiliation would be less useful to Nazis and the like, and it's questionable how useful having this information was for the purposes it was collected. But my ultimate point is, when your government turns evil, you're screwed anyway. We need to try and prevent it from going bad in the first place. It may indeed involve fighting against badly justified surveillance overreach, but trying to take away tools that an okay-ish government uses for good, only because they'll be used for bad things when the government turns evil, is just self-destructive behavior. I mean, you could argue that teaching a person how to grow strength and keep a healthy body, how to read, write, plan, think, negotiate, convince, are all bad because what if that person becomes a criminal or a dictator? Yes, it would be much better if murderers and tyrants didn't know how to use a knife or a gun, or how to talk people into helping them. But we consider that risk to be worth it because of all the good it brings to everyone else, continuously. And yeah, we're all so focused on the idea of governments going full-Nazi again, that we've ignored the gradual overreach of private interests, which at this point not only actively screws with our everyday lives all the time (hello advertising industry), but also undermines our governments too. Even worse, all the "dual-use" tech and data private interests have, that okay-ish governments would love to access but have good sense to refrain themselves, sits there gift-wrapped for any evil government willing to reach for it. We ended up choosing the worst option of all: all the downsides of tech being abused by private interests now and evil governments in the future, with none of the upsides of okay governments using it for good today. So perhaps we should concentrate less on things like AirTags being potentially deadly in hands of the next Stalin, and focus more on fighting private and public attempts at abusing them early, while maximizing the benefits society can get from such technologies. Or, in short, let's pay less attention to how some tech could be abused in principle, and more attention to people who are trying to abuse others.

amarcheschi 2y ago

In italy we have a digital ID (spid) that's actually managed by third parties authorized by government and you can use it to log in on some services, I think this way it would work

willvarfar 2y ago
Sweden has had a "BankID" system since 2003. It's run by the bank branch organisation. It works really well. Almost everybody has it.
brokenmachine 2y ago
Australia has myGovID https://www.mygovid.gov.au/ https://www.mygovid.gov.au/ Although I think it's only for government sites. I believe it could probably be used to verify only age in a privacy-respecting fashion. But let's be real. We all know this isn't about protecting children, because it never is.

semi-extrinsic 2y ago

> As usual, the problem with this is that it assumes a way to perfectly identify somebody on the internet Nope, it does not require this. What you can do is to construct a zero-knowledge proof of the age of the smartphone user. You can do this based on the certificate that is provisioned in modern electronic passports. The proof construction can choose to ignore expiry date, so the government can offer to issue expired passports with blank photos for the instances of people who should not have functioning passports. Then you need the social media sites to agree on a common auth mechanism that uses the zero-knowledge proof, and if the same proof gets used on multiple devices, you log out the previously used device. So even if a parent lets their kid use the parent's passport to generate the proof on the kids phone, every time the kid uses this proof, the parent gets logged out of Facebook and all other social media apps. Then no parents are going to let the kids use their ID, because of the negative impact to themselves. And you have no more means of tracking than already exists today. This also offers interesting possibilities for a startup! In the EU today, there are essentially zero legal ways for a 12-year-old to have a group chat with their friends, apart from RCS and iMessage, which then divides the friend group into two halves. Imagine then a chat app aimed specifically at group conversations for teens, where every user has a verified age. This type of app is something parents will pay good money for.

LegionMammal978 2y ago
> Then you need the social media sites to agree on a common auth mechanism that uses the zero-knowledge proof, and if the same proof gets used on multiple devices, you log out the previously used device. > So even if a parent lets their kid use the parent's passport to generate the proof on the kids phone, every time the kid uses this proof, the parent gets logged out of Facebook and all other social media apps. Doesn't this automatically give the "common auth mechanism" perfect knowledge of all the parent's social media accounts, whether under a real name or a pseudonym? That sounds like an additional means of tracking. Also, what if the parent legitimately has multiple devices that they use for social media (e.g., a phone and a laptop)? You might say, "log them out if it's used simultaneously from multiple devices", but then you're tracking all social-media usage everywhere in realtime.
BeFlatXIII 2y ago

whiplash451 2y ago

> As usual, the problem with this is that it assumes a way to perfectly identify somebody on the internet It does not require this, and in fact the solution may be almost entirely outside of the technology realm. Simply making it illegal would be enough to: 1. Deter a lot of people from enabling social media on the smartphone of their kids 2. Enable a lot of parents to tell their kids that what they are doing is illegal 3. Force BigTech to implement whatever solution fits best to control the age of the user before install. The onus to respect the law is on them.

xnorswap 2y ago
Exactly, if cigarettes were currently available at any age, and it was proposed to be limited to 18+, you'd get people in here decrying the law, saying it's completely unworkable to prevent absolutely every under age person ever from consuming tobacco, and therefore we shouldn't limit it at all. It's a very technical misunderstanding of how law works, or the effects law have on society. Legality isn't technicality. Something being physically possible doesn't "break" the law, and breaking a law doesn't render that law useless.
- sekai 2y ago
  Apples to oranges. Piracy would be a good comparison to this law. We all know how that turned out.
  - BiteCode_dev 2y ago
    Or CP. Also we have to consider that gov spying programs are developed everywhere in the world, and the fact CP has been used as an excuse to pass questionable bills again and again. What's even crazier is that we have to even argue this is a problem. And that intelligent people are arguing that this is all OK. People that read history books, saw PRISM and Snowden, heard about cops abusing their system already, etc.
  - whiplash451 2y ago
    Piracy is also apples to oranges. There aren’t big tech companies running piracy services. You could put them under the rule of law if they did.

jancsika 2y ago

Sounds like you are advocating for a much different law: one that bans (or at least makes prohibitively expensive) the kind of data mining/tracking that social media companies currently rely on for their business models. Am I correct in this assumption?

tacocataco 2y ago

My personal theory is that powerful people didn't want people to be digitally free. It might make them think about fighting for freedoms offline as well.

_1tem 2y ago

Typical hacker misconception regarding the law. You don't need to implement perfect tracking to enforce a law. Make it illegal and then let BigTech use their AI algorithms to detect and block minor accounts. Parents will also play a major part.

sourcepluck 2y ago

It really is almost hilariously formulaic. I mean, it'd be hilarious if it didn't have such disastrous consequences. The slide to dystopia which is described or implied by countless fictional books is, in fact, really easy to pull off. It's death by a thousand socially convenient compromises. I remember when a significant portion of people thought carrying phones around was creepy, or that spending your life looking at screens was antisocial, and these things were actively proclaimed. Contrary to popularly repeated historical revisionist tropes, lots of people had to be cajoled and prodded and pressured into the "digital revolution". Surely others remember that? And now we're at a stage now where if you don't have something like whatsapp or facebook or instagram or whatever, depending on the culture and the age group, there's a real chance that you'll be socially confronted, and even belittled in some circumstances.