8 ms·

Every single Australian's ID will have to be verified (in order to confirm their age). Depending on the degree of cooperation (/coercion) the Australian govern

by nomilk 2y ago

Every single Australian's ID will have to be verified (in order to confirm their age). Depending on the degree of cooperation (/coercion) the Australian government has with social media companies, the Aus Govt will be able to access citizen social media data with relative ease. So no more pseudo anonymous accounts (or, at least, they'll be made more difficult, especially for non-technical folk). Reminds of the 'chilling effect' of measures of bygone decades. My personal hunch is legacy media is largely driving this, due to them seeing the writing on the wall and knowing 'social media' is their biggest threat. If young people get their information from sites like bluesky, twitter, podcasts and reddit, they may never watch a mainstream news program or read an online newspaper. Bad for business. This measure is a great way of eradicating some competition.

pmarreck 2y ago
I would like to see some evidence before I buy this conspiracy theory. If anything, I feel like legacy media is too lazy and entrenched to even consider this
- nomilk 2y ago
  Legacy media are indeed lazy and stupid, but all that's stopping them is the Australian parliament, who are lazier and stupider.
- teitoklien 2y ago
  So lazy that they successfully lobbied governments to ruin their relation with big tech companies like facebook, google etc To give newspapers 100s of millions of free money just for the “privilege” of linking to their article, a “link tax”. They are lazy about reporting news without a bias, but they are perfectly active when it comes to lobbying.
  - pmarreck 2y ago
    I would be happy to see any links to evidence of this
    - yosame 2y ago
      Proof: https://www.accc.gov.au/by-industry/digital-platforms-and-services/news-media-bargaining-code/news-media-bargaining-code https://www.accc.gov.au/by-industry/digital-platforms-and-se... It's called the news media bargaining code. Technically speaking, the law isn't enforced since Google/Meta chose to voluntarily pay the link tax, rather than be put on the list that would force them to pay. But, at the end of the day it's the same effect.
  - brokenmachine 2y ago
    Don't forget the best part, they will also get fined for not linking!! Brilliant!! The incorruptible free market of Australia in all its glory.
afavour 2y ago
> My personal hunch is legacy media is largely driving this The level of conspiracy theory about the “mainstream media” feels out of control at times. Legacy media’s control over the population is already gone (as you stated), with what leverage would they be forcing this? Occam’s Razor: voters are genuinely concerned about the effect social media is having on kids. As a parent I hear about these concerns a lot. That is what is driving this, no matter how badly thought out the implementation is.
- MarcoZavala 2y ago
  [dead]
- nomilk 2y ago
  Australia doesn't (yet) have a thriving podcast and 'new media' landscape as the US recently discovered it had. Many Australians get their news from one of two large companies (News Corp and Nine Entertainment). Those companies therefore still have massive influence over electorates and therefore over politicians. From the 2 minute mark in this video explains some of the scheming that had been going on: https://twitter.com/ABCmediawatch/status/1860995847418474952 https://twitter.com/ABCmediawatch/status/1860995847418474952
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  - arresin 2y ago
    Watched video. The case is basically open and shut. This is why this ban came out of nowhere and why they hustled and sweated to get this of all things done in record time (for Australia). Have to say, it is kind of genius of the legacy media and kind of chilling to see the naked face corruption like this.
- squigz 2y ago
  One thing I don't understand: if you and other parents are so concerned about this... why let your children use those sites?
grecy 2y ago
> My personal hunch is legacy media is largely driving this, due to them seeing the writing on the wall and knowing 'social media' is their biggest threat For anyone that thinks this is tin foil hat stuff, remember the Australian government passed a law that Facebook and Google MUST pay Rupert Murdoch money everytime someone clicks a link on one of those sites to a Rupert Murdoch owned media company (basically all of them). Yes, really. It only applies to Google and Facebook, and money must be paid to only Rupert Murdoch. Utterly lost the plot.
- yieldcrv 2y ago
  Goals
  - Loughla 2y ago
    Seriously though. While I don't like him even slightly, Murdoch is legit a business genius. Imagine being powerful enough that you can bend an entire country to your will. That's amazing. Sociopathic probably, but amazing nonetheless.
    - yieldcrv 2y ago
      Just a reminder that you can do this on municipal and state levels with relative ease And in microstates too A random municipality in the US may have more commerce or highly valued property to tax than many countries, and they draw less attention than big municipalities A mayor or board decision from a 200 person town in Los Angeles County, for example, may never garner any challenge or news by being next to Los Angeles City which takes all local and national press time
    - Smoosh 2y ago
      I used to think that Zuckerberg was going to do the same with Facebook. But it seems like he was too focussed on the ad revenue and making the metaverse happen. And now Musk has come along and stolen the kingmaker role.
pimterry 2y ago
> Every single Australian's ID will have to be verified (in order to confirm their age). > > Depending on the degree of cooperation (/coercion) the Australian government has with social media companies, the Aus Govt will be able to access citizen social media data with relative ease. So no more pseudo anonymous accounts (or, at least, they'll be made more difficult, especially for non-technical folk). This isn't a given. It is quite possible to build a reasonably anonymous system to verify age at signup. As a simplified model: the government creates a website where with your government id/login, they will give you an age-verification-valid-for-5-minutes token - basically just "holder is 16+" signed with their signature & the current time. Websites request a new valid token at signup. End result is that government only knows you're _maybe_ doing _something_ 16+, and the website doesn't know who you are, just that you're old enough (this is clearly improveable, it's just a basic example). Whether anything like this will be implemented is a hard question of course. The current alternatives I've seen seem to be a fully privatised version of this, where a private company has a video call where you hold up your ID - that eliminates the government, but seems like a whole bunch of privacy concerns in itself too (not to mention being wildly inefficient & probably not very reliable).
- formerly_proven 2y ago
  This is one of the main motivating examples for attribute-based credentials, which provably only reveal the selected attribute to verifiers.
- blackoil 2y ago
  Why not lock device/accounts as minor and put onus on school and parents to ensure devices are appropriately tagged? At least for pre-teens I strongly think it shall work.
  - watwut 2y ago
    Because it will take about 1 month till there is some service the parents will want the kids to use that wont be available on such device (a kids show, a kids game, a page necessary for homework). So, they will have strong motivation to not label them as such.
kylecazar 2y ago
Bad for business, and arguably, the world.
mickeyfrac 2y ago
How many under 16s read newspapers or watch news anyway? All you need to do is look up the mental health stats since the iPhone release to see why parents are massively concerned. There has never been a time when an alert parent didn’t have a fair idea of what info a kid was exposed to. This is why going to university is such an awakening. Now the parents basically need a background in infosec to stop their kids accessing hardcore porn, violence and other mind bending content. That only works in your household. Do you stop play dates? Single your kids out as weird by banning all device use? Societal norms do not move at the speed of technology, so regulation needs to be applied unless there’s another alternative.
- arresin 2y ago
  I think that’s the cover story (because I agree it’s extremely valid).
- nomilk 2y ago
  > stop their kids accessing hardcore porn, violence and other mind bending content. Such sites are not among the social media sites required to verify Australian's ID/ages, which hints that protecting kids is merely a pretence.
  - beardedwizard 2y ago
    [flagged]
    - nomilk 2y ago
      > Are you suggesting porn, violence, and other mind bending content is not present on social media? If protecting kids from porn is the objective, the most obvious thing to do would be to require age verification for porn sites, not some other random websites that happen to have occasional porn. Ironically, kids will now have to visit much more hardcore sites (4chan etc - ones without age verification) if they want to socialise online. The effects will be similar to banning alcohol, it doesn't decrease demand, just pushes it elsewhere creating worse problems along the way. See: perverse incentives https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perverse_incentive#Examples_of_perverse_incentives https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perverse_incentive#Examples_of...
bix6 2y ago
It doesn’t say that? “Social media companies also won't be able to force users to provide government identification, including the Digital ID, to assess their age.”
- yosame 2y ago
  Because they won't be forced to provide identification directly, they'll be forced to provide an age verification token that's linked to government identification. It's the same end result (a way to link your identity to the sites you use), but with extra steps. And honestly with the government's track record when it comes to privacy and technology, I don't think they deserve the benefit of the doubt.
  - brokenmachine 2y ago
    It actually doesn't say that. It says: (a) the provider provides alternative means (not involving the material and services mentioned in paragraphs (1)(a) and (b)) for an individual to assure the provider that the individual is not an age-restricted user; and (b) those means are reasonable in the circumstances. https://parlinfo.aph.gov.au/parlInfo/download/legislation/bills/r7284_aspassed/toc_pdf/24150b01.pdf;fileType=application%2Fpdf https://parlinfo.aph.gov.au/parlInfo/download/legislation/bi... - page 8 So it doesn't actually provide an alternative, just says the nerds need to magic one up.
whiplash451 2y ago
Why would you have to jump to the conclusion that identity verification is required to implement this law? The simple existence of this law: - Requires social media companies to implement rules to prevent <16 to sign up/sign in -- the onus is on them to find the solution, not on the gvt - Enables parents to tell their <16 kids that social media is illegal - Will likely drive a number of <16 kids to sign out (not all of them of course, but a bunch) BigTech has been slapped in the face enough in EU to take this kind of law seriously. It baffles me that they've gained so much power in the collective consciousness that any law that restricts their usage would have to be implemented by someone else.
_fat_santa 2y ago
> My personal hunch is legacy media is largely driving this, due to them seeing the writing on the wall and knowing 'social media' is their biggest threat. If young people get their information from sites like bluesky, twitter, podcasts and reddit, they may never watch a mainstream news program or read an online newspaper. Bad for business. This measure is a great way of eradicating some competition. I wonder, I often see legacy media companies complain about how "new age" media (podcasts, social media, etc) is taking over. Social media has been prominent for at least a decade now and so have Podcasts. Why have so few legacy media companies looked at the writing on the wall and invest in the "new age" media instead of complaining about how it's eating at their business. I would say NYT is one of the only media org's I've seen execute on this. EDIT: I thought about my question a bit more and my answer for why they haven't is a "new age" media org would look very different from a traditional media org. But that just brings me back to: THEY HAD OVER A DECADE TO ADJUST.
- bryan_w 2y ago
  Rupert Murdock probably literally thinks the Internet is a fad and that the ad money will come back Any Day Now (TM). They saw the Napster/Metallica saga play out 20 years ago and thought that would never happen to their form of media
ruthmarx 2y ago
Australians with dual citizenship have an out at least.
- worthless-trash 2y ago
  I very much doubt this.
sprice 2y ago
> the Aus Govt will be able to access citizen social media data with relative ease. So no more pseudo anonymous accounts This isn't necessarily true. It came as a surprise to me, but many "Government Digital ID" systems use Verifiable Credentials[1][2] and Decentralized Identifiers[3]. I live in BC, Canada. I have installed the BC Wallet app[4] which is open source code[5]. With the BC Wallet app, I can create an account using my BC drivers license. Then I can interact with any third-party app that uses the BC Wallet as an authentication system. If the only thing this app wants to do is confirm my age, it can ask me to reveal my age. I reveal my age (the only piece of data I am choosing to reveal), and the app now knows and can trust (as long as it trusts the BC Wallet) that this is my age. And the BC Wallet app servers/government never know when I am using the BC Wallet app. Turns out the future may not be as dystopian as we once thought it may be. EDIT: I see now from the article the following: > Social media companies also won't be able to force users to provide government identification, including the Digital ID, to assess their age. What could have been privacy preserving seems like it won't be. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Verifiable_credentials https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Verifiable_credentials [2] https://www.w3.org/TR/vc-overview/ https://www.w3.org/TR/vc-overview/ [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decentralized_identifier https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decentralized_identifier [4] https://digital.gov.bc.ca/digital-trust/digital-credentials/bc-wallet/ https://digital.gov.bc.ca/digital-trust/digital-credentials/... [5] https://github.com/bcgov/bc-wallet-mobile https://github.com/bcgov/bc-wallet-mobile
- idunnoman1222 2y ago
  Proving identity is a hard problem. What’s to stop a kid from grabbing his father’s drivers license and setting up this wallet because eg his father is never going to do it Secondarily what’s to stop an 18-year-old having hundreds of tiktok accounts and selling them for a dollar to whatever kid wants at is high school every social media site is going to have to implement Australia’s 2fa system?
  - interactivecode 2y ago
    aside from limitations like, you can only setup 1 app, or things like 2f authentication. Usually things like this are stopped by laws and enforcement causing consequences. I'm pretty sure that sort of thing would be considered identity theft. same thing as stealing their father's drivers license and opening bank accounts in their name. There are physical barriers and there are barriers that are enforced manually. Same with speeding. you are not allowed to drive faster than 60. even though your car can drive faster, laws in combination with police, traffic cams and speed traps will make sure it's enforced.
CatWChainsaw 2y ago
So you think that legacy media is behind this because if they could just get that pesky social media banned, those kids would shell out their allowance money to The Economist or The Washington Post? Do you know what Overwatch is? Minecraft? League of Legends? Or maybe, just maybe, social media sites will be all too happy to gobble up the sweet sweet DATA available from an ID requirement. In the US, this would give social media access to your full name, DOB, address, height/weight/any medical restrictions, and organ donor status, which social media giants will package with all the other stuff they know about you and sell insights to any advertiser or government that flashes cash.
jb1991 2y ago
This has nothing to do with legacy media, that's not a threat for this age group. This has everything to do with the mental damage inflicted by social media on developing minds, many of which end in suicide.
- pas 2y ago
  That but also privacy too. The damage is real, yes, but the negative effect on privacy will also be. (And the Aus gov is extremely far from any kind of principled actor in this to trust them with this experiment. Though I'm very curious of the results now that the experiment is underway anyway...) Also, of course, quite ironic how everyone is worried about kids' mental health, while brain rot of the voting age population of "the West" had been ongoing for decades. And now the eggs of neopopulism have hatched. (One more unfortunate but quite interesting experiment.)
grecy 2y ago
> Every single Australian's ID will have to be verified Keep in mind all Australians got those IDs from the government in the first place...
ppp999 2y ago
Australia was already fucked more than the U.S. before that regarding Police state status... But all world states are walking toward this
Cthulhu_ 2y ago
I don't think you need to express any hunches when some sleuthing will reveal the interest/lobby groups, organizations, and politicians and their connections etc that pushed or advocated for this legislation. That said, your legacy media hunch also doesn't make any sense because this writing on the wall and social media being a threat has been a thing for over twenty years now; they have fully embraced and integrated social media, and have filed lawsuits to get money from them: [0] says Rupert Murdoch's News Corp will get paid by Facebook for News Corp content, specifically in australia but this goes / went on everywhere. [0] https://www.theguardian.com/media/2021/mar/16/rupert-murdochs-news-corp-strikes-deal-as-facebook-agrees-to-pay-for-australian-content https://www.theguardian.com/media/2021/mar/16/rupert-murdoch...
vindigrams 2y ago
[dead]

by nomilk 2y ago

pmarreck 2y ago

I would like to see some evidence before I buy this conspiracy theory. If anything, I feel like legacy media is too lazy and entrenched to even consider this

nomilk 2y ago
Legacy media are indeed lazy and stupid, but all that's stopping them is the Australian parliament, who are lazier and stupider.
teitoklien 2y ago
So lazy that they successfully lobbied governments to ruin their relation with big tech companies like facebook, google etc To give newspapers 100s of millions of free money just for the “privilege” of linking to their article, a “link tax”. They are lazy about reporting news without a bias, but they are perfectly active when it comes to lobbying.
- pmarreck 2y ago
  I would be happy to see any links to evidence of this
  - yosame 2y ago
    Proof: https://www.accc.gov.au/by-industry/digital-platforms-and-services/news-media-bargaining-code/news-media-bargaining-code https://www.accc.gov.au/by-industry/digital-platforms-and-se... It's called the news media bargaining code. Technically speaking, the law isn't enforced since Google/Meta chose to voluntarily pay the link tax, rather than be put on the list that would force them to pay. But, at the end of the day it's the same effect.
- brokenmachine 2y ago
  Don't forget the best part, they will also get fined for not linking!! Brilliant!! The incorruptible free market of Australia in all its glory.

afavour 2y ago

> My personal hunch is legacy media is largely driving this The level of conspiracy theory about the “mainstream media” feels out of control at times. Legacy media’s control over the population is already gone (as you stated), with what leverage would they be forcing this? Occam’s Razor: voters are genuinely concerned about the effect social media is having on kids. As a parent I hear about these concerns a lot. That is what is driving this, no matter how badly thought out the implementation is.

MarcoZavala 2y ago
[dead]
nomilk 2y ago
Australia doesn't (yet) have a thriving podcast and 'new media' landscape as the US recently discovered it had. Many Australians get their news from one of two large companies (News Corp and Nine Entertainment). Those companies therefore still have massive influence over electorates and therefore over politicians. From the 2 minute mark in this video explains some of the scheming that had been going on: https://twitter.com/ABCmediawatch/status/1860995847418474952 https://twitter.com/ABCmediawatch/status/1860995847418474952
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- arresin 2y ago
  Watched video. The case is basically open and shut. This is why this ban came out of nowhere and why they hustled and sweated to get this of all things done in record time (for Australia). Have to say, it is kind of genius of the legacy media and kind of chilling to see the naked face corruption like this.
squigz 2y ago
One thing I don't understand: if you and other parents are so concerned about this... why let your children use those sites?

grecy 2y ago

> My personal hunch is legacy media is largely driving this, due to them seeing the writing on the wall and knowing 'social media' is their biggest threat For anyone that thinks this is tin foil hat stuff, remember the Australian government passed a law that Facebook and Google MUST pay Rupert Murdoch money everytime someone clicks a link on one of those sites to a Rupert Murdoch owned media company (basically all of them). Yes, really. It only applies to Google and Facebook, and money must be paid to only Rupert Murdoch. Utterly lost the plot.

yieldcrv 2y ago
Goals
- Loughla 2y ago
  Seriously though. While I don't like him even slightly, Murdoch is legit a business genius. Imagine being powerful enough that you can bend an entire country to your will. That's amazing. Sociopathic probably, but amazing nonetheless.
  - yieldcrv 2y ago
    Just a reminder that you can do this on municipal and state levels with relative ease And in microstates too A random municipality in the US may have more commerce or highly valued property to tax than many countries, and they draw less attention than big municipalities A mayor or board decision from a 200 person town in Los Angeles County, for example, may never garner any challenge or news by being next to Los Angeles City which takes all local and national press time
  - Smoosh 2y ago
    I used to think that Zuckerberg was going to do the same with Facebook. But it seems like he was too focussed on the ad revenue and making the metaverse happen. And now Musk has come along and stolen the kingmaker role.

pimterry 2y ago

> Every single Australian's ID will have to be verified (in order to confirm their age). > > Depending on the degree of cooperation (/coercion) the Australian government has with social media companies, the Aus Govt will be able to access citizen social media data with relative ease. So no more pseudo anonymous accounts (or, at least, they'll be made more difficult, especially for non-technical folk). This isn't a given. It is quite possible to build a reasonably anonymous system to verify age at signup. As a simplified model: the government creates a website where with your government id/login, they will give you an age-verification-valid-for-5-minutes token - basically just "holder is 16+" signed with their signature & the current time. Websites request a new valid token at signup. End result is that government only knows you're _maybe_ doing _something_ 16+, and the website doesn't know who you are, just that you're old enough (this is clearly improveable, it's just a basic example). Whether anything like this will be implemented is a hard question of course. The current alternatives I've seen seem to be a fully privatised version of this, where a private company has a video call where you hold up your ID - that eliminates the government, but seems like a whole bunch of privacy concerns in itself too (not to mention being wildly inefficient & probably not very reliable).

formerly_proven 2y ago
This is one of the main motivating examples for attribute-based credentials, which provably only reveal the selected attribute to verifiers.
blackoil 2y ago
Why not lock device/accounts as minor and put onus on school and parents to ensure devices are appropriately tagged? At least for pre-teens I strongly think it shall work.
- watwut 2y ago
  Because it will take about 1 month till there is some service the parents will want the kids to use that wont be available on such device (a kids show, a kids game, a page necessary for homework). So, they will have strong motivation to not label them as such.

kylecazar 2y ago

Bad for business, and arguably, the world.

mickeyfrac 2y ago

How many under 16s read newspapers or watch news anyway? All you need to do is look up the mental health stats since the iPhone release to see why parents are massively concerned. There has never been a time when an alert parent didn’t have a fair idea of what info a kid was exposed to. This is why going to university is such an awakening. Now the parents basically need a background in infosec to stop their kids accessing hardcore porn, violence and other mind bending content. That only works in your household. Do you stop play dates? Single your kids out as weird by banning all device use? Societal norms do not move at the speed of technology, so regulation needs to be applied unless there’s another alternative.

arresin 2y ago
I think that’s the cover story (because I agree it’s extremely valid).
nomilk 2y ago
> stop their kids accessing hardcore porn, violence and other mind bending content. Such sites are not among the social media sites required to verify Australian's ID/ages, which hints that protecting kids is merely a pretence.
- beardedwizard 2y ago
  [flagged]
  - nomilk 2y ago
    > Are you suggesting porn, violence, and other mind bending content is not present on social media? If protecting kids from porn is the objective, the most obvious thing to do would be to require age verification for porn sites, not some other random websites that happen to have occasional porn. Ironically, kids will now have to visit much more hardcore sites (4chan etc - ones without age verification) if they want to socialise online. The effects will be similar to banning alcohol, it doesn't decrease demand, just pushes it elsewhere creating worse problems along the way. See: perverse incentives https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perverse_incentive#Examples_of_perverse_incentives https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perverse_incentive#Examples_of...

bix6 2y ago

It doesn’t say that? “Social media companies also won't be able to force users to provide government identification, including the Digital ID, to assess their age.”

yosame 2y ago
Because they won't be forced to provide identification directly, they'll be forced to provide an age verification token that's linked to government identification. It's the same end result (a way to link your identity to the sites you use), but with extra steps. And honestly with the government's track record when it comes to privacy and technology, I don't think they deserve the benefit of the doubt.
- brokenmachine 2y ago
  It actually doesn't say that. It says: (a) the provider provides alternative means (not involving the material and services mentioned in paragraphs (1)(a) and (b)) for an individual to assure the provider that the individual is not an age-restricted user; and (b) those means are reasonable in the circumstances. https://parlinfo.aph.gov.au/parlInfo/download/legislation/bills/r7284_aspassed/toc_pdf/24150b01.pdf;fileType=application%2Fpdf https://parlinfo.aph.gov.au/parlInfo/download/legislation/bi... - page 8 So it doesn't actually provide an alternative, just says the nerds need to magic one up.

whiplash451 2y ago

Why would you have to jump to the conclusion that identity verification is required to implement this law? The simple existence of this law: - Requires social media companies to implement rules to prevent <16 to sign up/sign in -- the onus is on them to find the solution, not on the gvt - Enables parents to tell their <16 kids that social media is illegal - Will likely drive a number of <16 kids to sign out (not all of them of course, but a bunch) BigTech has been slapped in the face enough in EU to take this kind of law seriously. It baffles me that they've gained so much power in the collective consciousness that any law that restricts their usage would have to be implemented by someone else.

_fat_santa 2y ago

> My personal hunch is legacy media is largely driving this, due to them seeing the writing on the wall and knowing 'social media' is their biggest threat. If young people get their information from sites like bluesky, twitter, podcasts and reddit, they may never watch a mainstream news program or read an online newspaper. Bad for business. This measure is a great way of eradicating some competition. I wonder, I often see legacy media companies complain about how "new age" media (podcasts, social media, etc) is taking over. Social media has been prominent for at least a decade now and so have Podcasts. Why have so few legacy media companies looked at the writing on the wall and invest in the "new age" media instead of complaining about how it's eating at their business. I would say NYT is one of the only media org's I've seen execute on this. EDIT: I thought about my question a bit more and my answer for why they haven't is a "new age" media org would look very different from a traditional media org. But that just brings me back to: THEY HAD OVER A DECADE TO ADJUST.

bryan_w 2y ago
Rupert Murdock probably literally thinks the Internet is a fad and that the ad money will come back Any Day Now (TM). They saw the Napster/Metallica saga play out 20 years ago and thought that would never happen to their form of media

ruthmarx 2y ago

Australians with dual citizenship have an out at least.

worthless-trash 2y ago
I very much doubt this.

sprice 2y ago

> the Aus Govt will be able to access citizen social media data with relative ease. So no more pseudo anonymous accounts This isn't necessarily true. It came as a surprise to me, but many "Government Digital ID" systems use Verifiable Credentials[1][2] and Decentralized Identifiers[3]. I live in BC, Canada. I have installed the BC Wallet app[4] which is open source code[5]. With the BC Wallet app, I can create an account using my BC drivers license. Then I can interact with any third-party app that uses the BC Wallet as an authentication system. If the only thing this app wants to do is confirm my age, it can ask me to reveal my age. I reveal my age (the only piece of data I am choosing to reveal), and the app now knows and can trust (as long as it trusts the BC Wallet) that this is my age. And the BC Wallet app servers/government never know when I am using the BC Wallet app. Turns out the future may not be as dystopian as we once thought it may be. EDIT: I see now from the article the following: > Social media companies also won't be able to force users to provide government identification, including the Digital ID, to assess their age. What could have been privacy preserving seems like it won't be. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Verifiable_credentials https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Verifiable_credentials [2] https://www.w3.org/TR/vc-overview/ https://www.w3.org/TR/vc-overview/ [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decentralized_identifier https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decentralized_identifier [4] https://digital.gov.bc.ca/digital-trust/digital-credentials/bc-wallet/ https://digital.gov.bc.ca/digital-trust/digital-credentials/... [5] https://github.com/bcgov/bc-wallet-mobile https://github.com/bcgov/bc-wallet-mobile

idunnoman1222 2y ago
Proving identity is a hard problem. What’s to stop a kid from grabbing his father’s drivers license and setting up this wallet because eg his father is never going to do it Secondarily what’s to stop an 18-year-old having hundreds of tiktok accounts and selling them for a dollar to whatever kid wants at is high school every social media site is going to have to implement Australia’s 2fa system?
- interactivecode 2y ago
  aside from limitations like, you can only setup 1 app, or things like 2f authentication. Usually things like this are stopped by laws and enforcement causing consequences. I'm pretty sure that sort of thing would be considered identity theft. same thing as stealing their father's drivers license and opening bank accounts in their name. There are physical barriers and there are barriers that are enforced manually. Same with speeding. you are not allowed to drive faster than 60. even though your car can drive faster, laws in combination with police, traffic cams and speed traps will make sure it's enforced.

CatWChainsaw 2y ago

So you think that legacy media is behind this because if they could just get that pesky social media banned, those kids would shell out their allowance money to The Economist or The Washington Post? Do you know what Overwatch is? Minecraft? League of Legends? Or maybe, just maybe, social media sites will be all too happy to gobble up the sweet sweet DATA available from an ID requirement. In the US, this would give social media access to your full name, DOB, address, height/weight/any medical restrictions, and organ donor status, which social media giants will package with all the other stuff they know about you and sell insights to any advertiser or government that flashes cash.

jb1991 2y ago

This has nothing to do with legacy media, that's not a threat for this age group. This has everything to do with the mental damage inflicted by social media on developing minds, many of which end in suicide.

pas 2y ago
That but also privacy too. The damage is real, yes, but the negative effect on privacy will also be. (And the Aus gov is extremely far from any kind of principled actor in this to trust them with this experiment. Though I'm very curious of the results now that the experiment is underway anyway...) Also, of course, quite ironic how everyone is worried about kids' mental health, while brain rot of the voting age population of "the West" had been ongoing for decades. And now the eggs of neopopulism have hatched. (One more unfortunate but quite interesting experiment.)

grecy 2y ago

> Every single Australian's ID will have to be verified Keep in mind all Australians got those IDs from the government in the first place...

ppp999 2y ago

Australia was already fucked more than the U.S. before that regarding Police state status... But all world states are walking toward this

Cthulhu_ 2y ago

I don't think you need to express any hunches when some sleuthing will reveal the interest/lobby groups, organizations, and politicians and their connections etc that pushed or advocated for this legislation. That said, your legacy media hunch also doesn't make any sense because this writing on the wall and social media being a threat has been a thing for over twenty years now; they have fully embraced and integrated social media, and have filed lawsuits to get money from them: [0] says Rupert Murdoch's News Corp will get paid by Facebook for News Corp content, specifically in australia but this goes / went on everywhere. [0] https://www.theguardian.com/media/2021/mar/16/rupert-murdochs-news-corp-strikes-deal-as-facebook-agrees-to-pay-for-australian-content https://www.theguardian.com/media/2021/mar/16/rupert-murdoch...

vindigrams 2y ago

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