10 ms·

Zuckerberg's "fix" for child safety could end anonymous internet access for all

72 points by aestetix 7mo ago

bediger4000 7mo ago
That would certainly benefit Zuck and a lot of the other oligarchs.
- aestetix 7mo ago
  Yes, it feels like another round of the same old tired "force everyone to use legal names online to save the children" that has been pushed continuously since the Internet driver's license of the 90s. It will not save any children. It will destroy privacy, destroy free speech, and give lots of money to whatever corporation wins the bid for supplying the tech. And of course, when that corporation gets hacked and all the personally identifiable information is put on the dark web, nobody will be held accountable.
  - starkeeper 7mo ago
    It will make children visible targets and be more exploitable.
    - irishcoffee 7mo ago
      Blizzard, the video game company, moved their forums from character name to legal name. I think it lasted a week or two before a ton of people got doxxed and they reverted. Curiously, people doxx themselves. That is like the entire business model of plaintir, collect all the information people volunteer about themselves and others publicly, for free, to anyone that cares to look. We seem to be at the bit where people liked having their cake and eating it too, until they had to pay for it. This is the part where the bill comes due. And that is fucking _nothing_ compared to the massive, eye-watering amount of information people fucking pay to give away to an LLM company. sama must laugh himself to sleep every night.
      - GauntletWizard 7mo ago
        I have no problem supplying my real name online - it's trivially attached to this account via my resume, and I use this account name all over. I also have several other account names, some disposable and some not. There are plenty of reasons to be anonymous online. There's plenty of reasons not to be. I kind of wish that the government would launch a series of public political debate forums that required real ID, not that I think they would actually be valuable places for debate, but the technical challenges would be worthwhile to solve and the ability to publicly register debate positions would be incredibly useful for nailing politicians down. The problem comes when the government tries to regulate one form or another, because strongly authenticated, pseudonymous, and anonymous forums all have their place in debate, and there's reasons for both public and private entities to host all three.
        irishcoffee 7mo ago
        > I have no problem supplying my real name online - it's trivially attached to this account via my resume, and I use this account name all over. I also have several other account names, some disposable and some not. You’re aware and made a choice, that’s good. Most people are not aware and have not elected to make this choice. This is a heavily-conversed topic on this and many other sites.
- Kiboneu 7mo ago
  Yup, including Altman who has been betting on this (and anti-bot measures) for 7 years with his biometric authentication cryptocurrency startup.
- expedition32 7mo ago
  I don't think he cares either way. He knows that the government is going to crackdown on social media because the voters are tired of anarcho libertarian tech bro dipshits. So he can either go down with the ship or bend with the wind. And Zuckerberg always knows how the wind blows.
jmclnx 7mo ago
>Could End Anonymous Internet Access I doubt that, but with people using Cell Phone Apps and sites like Facebook/Twitter, people are giving up their anonymity on purpose. You can still be anonymous if you want to. And as for verification at the OS level, good luck with that.
- beej71 7mo ago
  It would be exceptionally easy to pass a law requiring verification at the OS level. Politicians are technical morons.
techblueberry 7mo ago
I find it relatively strange that over the past 30-40 years, we went from a world where most everything was intermediated by parents, and “adult” media was relatively well gatekept to this online Wild West where it seems almost any attempt to gatekeep is seen as a freedom violation. Maybe this is why we need protocols over platforms? But like, kids shouldn’t be able to sign a ToS until they’re 18. I have little sympathy for anything that limits people’s access to these biggest platforms. I’m also largely cynical to the idea that anyone’s doing any free speeching on meta or Twitter in the first place. If counter culture gets driven back to IRC, or gasp meatspace, then all the better.
- iamnothere 7mo ago
  When I was a kid, most families that had a computer kept it in a common area. Same with the TV, for that matter. Some families did not. Mine did not! But that was a decision that was up to individual families. I don’t see why these decisions should be up to anyone but individual families. Period. If your kids are mature enough for unsupervised computer use, or if you don’t see it as a problem, that’s up to you as a parent. Same as if you feel comfortable taking your kids skeet shooting or rock climbing.
  - bubblewand 7mo ago
    Attempting to manage this as a parent is hellish. I can't speak for other parents, but some standards for parental controls—the presence of which and adherence to might be enforced by law, if need be, and need probably would be since none of this is stuff vendors couldn't have figured out on their own long ago if they cared to—we could leverage would be goddamn nice and is all I'd really want. Especially as devices get more locked-down and it becomes hard to control stuff at the network level if you don't have root on the devices themselves, like... man, it's such a time-suck, and I'm 100% sure I'd be having to choose between "I guess we just don't have the Internet in this house" and "fuck it, I give up, go stumble on gore videos I guess" if I weren't a lot better at this stuff than the median parent. I feel for them, this stuff is entirely hopeless for 'em. Like, my kids have Chromebooks from school. They pretty much have to bring them home. So now I have this extra physical item I can't administrate that I must police at night if I don't want them to stay up all night on trash-tier web games or something. So I'll block the devices at the network level at night, right? Easy fix! Nope, the fucking things rotate MAC addresses as an anti-tracking measure I guess. We have zero need for that feature (the number of times they're gonna use the things outside school and home over their whole school careers is going to be very small) but I'm not admin on those devices, so, stuck with it. So there's an extra hurdle to making that happen. Repeat some other incredible frustration for every single thing. Oh look, AppleTV has a simple rating interface so I can at least make sure nothing too bad can get through if I mess something up. Great. Oh except almost nothing on the device except Apple's own software respects the setting, at all, just ignores it. You have to go dick around with every single service on there to lock them down, then hope it sticks through updates and other nonsense. Awesome, great feature that's actually totally useless because nobody cares about the users. Sigh. Your options are go full-luddite, give up and leave them to the Internet gods, or take on this load of work and stress that our parents did not have.
nickphx 7mo ago
sounds like a potential use for generative AI.. they can "validate" and "verify" the "biometrics" of the output from this-person-does-not-exist[.]com
Am4TIfIsER0ppos 7mo ago
Ban cell phones. The internet must again become something you sit down to use. It'd fix the child problem and many problems for adults. It is not something that should be following you around all day.
- Razengan 7mo ago
  Just asteroid the planet and hope we get shit right the next time around.
SpicyLemonZest 7mo ago
I don't understand what position this article is trying to stake out. How is it Zuckerberg's fault that a California court called him into a courtroom demanding to know why he didn't stop children from using his platform? It seems like the author recognizes that he agrees with Meta on all the substantive questions here, but feels obligated to jump through hoops to avoid taking a pro-corporate position that Meta is right and the plaintiff is wrong.
- themafia 7mo ago
  > a California court called him into a courtroom To you and I it's made to appear that these things happen without warning. I assure you that's not at all how these things actually occur. If this truly caught out Meta by surprise then they should fire their CEO for general incompetence.
- throwawayffffas 7mo ago
  Zuckerberg tries to avoid liability by passing the back to OS vendors. Article writer thinks that would be bad. Hence it's all the plaintiffs fault.
  - SpicyLemonZest 7mo ago
    I don't think that's an accurate characterization of Zuckerberg's testimony. His primary argument for avoiding liability is one the article writer explicitly agrees with: the science of "social media addiction" is highly contested, and it's not clear that it's real nor that the plaintiff had it if it is real. Nor is "passing the buck" a fair characterization of the article author's criticism; he clearly does not think that Apple or Meta should be in the business of age verification.
    - throwawayffffas 7mo ago
      Addiction is a red herring in the context of this article. The thing that is a problem for the author is age verification on devices. Facebook supposedly does not allow users under 13, but does nothing to enforce that rule. Instead of coming up with a way to enforce their own rule, Zuckerberg comes up with the idea of apple and google doing it for them because "they are in a better position". That is Zuckerbergs idea. That's the idea the author objects with, but instead of putting the blame on Meta for trying to pass of enforcement of their own rules to the devices. The author inexplicably puts the blame on the plaintiff for merely starting the conversation. Whether the plaintiff is wrong or right is not important. The issue is that when meta was told you should really enforce your own rules they said actually we would rather apple and google were forced to do it. It's about externalities meta is trying to move the cost of age verification to Apple and Google to the detriment of everyones privacy, and the author is for some reason upset with some 20 year old girl for rocking the boat, instead of the trillion dollar company that does want to enforce their own terms of use.
themafia 7mo ago
Why would we turn to the person who created the problem for a solution to it?
throwaway87543 7mo ago
Authentication & Authorization is a OS feature. But instead of the OS collecting everyone's age, just give parents the ability to verify their child's phone is in child lockdown mode. Then the phone narc's to the website: "the user is under age". Not "the user was born on Feb 29 2001." We can rely on parenting to ensure a child doesn't have a non child mode phone. Enable parents, not control everyone.
- inigyou 7mo ago
  OS vendors don't want to add this feature, though. That could be because they make their money from a percentage of IAPs and ads. And when they are mandated, like in Brazil, we HN commenters hate that even more, because apparently in Brazil it's illegal to sell a phone without locked bootloader, or an OS that can run software from outside of an app store, because the user might install an OS or an app that doesn't comply with the child-lock law.
  - charcircuit 7mo ago
    FOSS doesn't mean that you get a right to break the law. Just because software patents exists in a society, that doesn't mean that FOSS does not.
  - stephen_g 7mo ago
    Well yes, they are actual real risks - a badly thought out law can literally make it illegal for a device to allow an adult to, say, unlock a device's bootloader to install open source software (EDIT: this example was in my comment before the OP edited theirs to add it there as well), because the device vendor can't guarantee that it will comply any more. I don't think anybody is actually opposed to parental controls being mandated to ship in commercial operating systems, as long as it doesn't restrict the freedoms of adults to completely disable them or to install software that removes them or doesn't have them. The problem is when these features are forced on adults and restrict devices or computers 'just in case'.
  - michaelt 7mo ago
    IMHO a better approach would be two-layered tagging to indicate traffic from children. Firstly traffic can be tagged by ISPs/cell phone companies, at the bill payer's behest (whose name and age has already been verified). Secondly, smartphone OSes can tag traffic at the behest of parental controls (which already exist).
inigyou 7mo ago
[flagged]
- tzs 7mo ago
  There is very little publicly known about them. All the bylines appear to be pseudonyms used almost exclusively for posts there. No contact information other than email addresses at their domain. They don't release any information about what funding sources they have, if any, other than donations and merchandise sales. In this article [1] about X being ordered to obey the DSA requirements to make election data available to researchers they go on at great length about the importance of knowing who is funding the organizations asking for the data. Maybe they should set an example and disclose their own funding. Also in that article they suggest X is being singled out for enforcement, ignoring that the the other platforms covered by DSA are at least partially responding to requests for data under DSA. That kind of biased framing is common in many of their articles. I've never seen any reporting by them where I could not find the same thing covered with less bias from a source that is much more transparent over who funds and controls them. [1] https://reclaimthenet.org/berlin-court-orders-x-to-share-hungary-election-data-under-dsa https://reclaimthenet.org/berlin-court-orders-x-to-share-hun...
gweinberg 7mo ago
Had to wade through a lot of text to find out that apparently Zuckerberg and OP both apparently think the internet is something you access through phones.
- fennecbutt 7mo ago
  Tbf the majority of per individual Internet use is on a phone. Countries other than America exist...plenty of Asian countries where having a phone is far far more common than a laptop let alone a desktop.
- IAmBroom 7mo ago
  Talk to someone under 30. Show them this cool "phone" app on their cellphones.
deleted 7mo ago
[deleted]
charcircuit 7mo ago
It seems a stretch to me that an operating system having an isAdult() function would end anonymous internet access. Plenty of apps want to avoid showing NSFW content to children and having an API that lets them easily do so has a lot of value. Parental controls must be trivial for an app to implement if we want it to be widespread.
deleted 7mo ago
[deleted]
0xbadcafebee 7mo ago
I find it amazing that we continue to let parents ruin society with their overprotective bullshit. They should be parenting, not passing the buck. This isn't the first time overprotective parents have caused problems for everyone else. The US drug war (and the mass incarceration of poor and black people) was started mostly by organizations of parents who thought marijuana was going to kill their kids. The movie rating system introduced censorship into movies which limited artistic freedom. Game rating systems limited what games could be sold on store shelves, so most games had to be carefully censored and had limited story lines and content. Ratings on music forced major retailers to drop any music which had an 'explicit' label, making it harder for artists with 'adult' lyrics to get exposure or earn a living. Book bans are largely organized by parents' groups, a significant number of the books they want banned being LGBTQ+ books, so kids aren't exposed to the fact that homosexuality is normal. And of course you can't possibly have an app in a monopolistic App Store that has any kind of adult content; heaven forbid an actual adult wants to use an adult app. Parents and 'Child Safety' are toxic af and we shouldn't put up with it.
- computerthings 7mo ago
  [dead]
phendrenad2 7mo ago
Just make child phones. And make a parallel internet run and curated by, I dunno, the UN child safety task force or something. We're playing this dangerous game of "oops we almost destroyed the world in a hellish authoritarian dystopia" because we can't figure this simple thing out.
dom96 7mo ago
Child safety is just the tip of the iceberg. We need to secure ourselves by implementing human verification and there are ways to do this without sacrificing anonymity[1]. 1 - https://blog.picheta.me/post/the-future-of-social-media-is-human/ https://blog.picheta.me/post/the-future-of-social-media-is-h...
joshcsimmons 7mo ago
This was the intent all along people.
1vuio0pswjnm7 7mo ago
Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp are not "the internet" Anything that hurts Meta's business is arguably a potential step toward more "anonymous" internet access. Anything that helps to stop the process of indoctrination of future generations into and the normalisation of what Meta does is a step toward more anonymous internet access as it allows expectations of privacy to rise to previous levels Companies like Meta have worked to systematically destroy anonymous internet use. Anonymity directly conflicts with Meta's "business model" of data collection, surveillance and serving users up as ad targets Meta and "anonymous internet access" are mutually exclusive. Meta doesn't collect data about and show ads to "anonymous" internet users. It forces users to create "accounts" and "sign in" with clients that run surveillance-related code on the users' computers without the user's input. It builds profiles of internet users (ad targets), even ones that do not use Facebook, Instagram or WhatsApp, e.g., through the use of tracking pixels on the open web Apple's and Google's operating systems also try to profile users. The companies encourage users to create "accounts" and "sign in". The operating systems intentionally provide a purpose-built machanism to target users with ads. If used as encouraged by the compaanies, these operating systems are incompatible with "anonymous internet access". The user is not anonymous to the companies, and the companies invite advertisers to use the computer user's internet bandwidth to deliver ads It was not always like this; I owned Apple computers when there was no such thing as an Apple "account" and Apple's computers did not attempt to automatically "phone home" when powered on. Expectations of "anonymous" internet access amongst new internet users have greatly diminished thanks to Meta, Google and Apple
kkfx 7mo ago
Which is the very target. Forcing full tractability of anyone for better conformism at the dominus will.

72 points by aestetix 7mo ago

bediger4000 7mo ago

That would certainly benefit Zuck and a lot of the other oligarchs.

aestetix 7mo ago
Yes, it feels like another round of the same old tired "force everyone to use legal names online to save the children" that has been pushed continuously since the Internet driver's license of the 90s. It will not save any children. It will destroy privacy, destroy free speech, and give lots of money to whatever corporation wins the bid for supplying the tech. And of course, when that corporation gets hacked and all the personally identifiable information is put on the dark web, nobody will be held accountable.
- starkeeper 7mo ago
  It will make children visible targets and be more exploitable.
  - irishcoffee 7mo ago
    Blizzard, the video game company, moved their forums from character name to legal name. I think it lasted a week or two before a ton of people got doxxed and they reverted. Curiously, people doxx themselves. That is like the entire business model of plaintir, collect all the information people volunteer about themselves and others publicly, for free, to anyone that cares to look. We seem to be at the bit where people liked having their cake and eating it too, until they had to pay for it. This is the part where the bill comes due. And that is fucking _nothing_ compared to the massive, eye-watering amount of information people fucking pay to give away to an LLM company. sama must laugh himself to sleep every night.
    - GauntletWizard 7mo ago
      I have no problem supplying my real name online - it's trivially attached to this account via my resume, and I use this account name all over. I also have several other account names, some disposable and some not. There are plenty of reasons to be anonymous online. There's plenty of reasons not to be. I kind of wish that the government would launch a series of public political debate forums that required real ID, not that I think they would actually be valuable places for debate, but the technical challenges would be worthwhile to solve and the ability to publicly register debate positions would be incredibly useful for nailing politicians down. The problem comes when the government tries to regulate one form or another, because strongly authenticated, pseudonymous, and anonymous forums all have their place in debate, and there's reasons for both public and private entities to host all three.
      - irishcoffee 7mo ago
        > I have no problem supplying my real name online - it's trivially attached to this account via my resume, and I use this account name all over. I also have several other account names, some disposable and some not. You’re aware and made a choice, that’s good. Most people are not aware and have not elected to make this choice. This is a heavily-conversed topic on this and many other sites.
Kiboneu 7mo ago
Yup, including Altman who has been betting on this (and anti-bot measures) for 7 years with his biometric authentication cryptocurrency startup.
expedition32 7mo ago
I don't think he cares either way. He knows that the government is going to crackdown on social media because the voters are tired of anarcho libertarian tech bro dipshits. So he can either go down with the ship or bend with the wind. And Zuckerberg always knows how the wind blows.

jmclnx 7mo ago

>Could End Anonymous Internet Access I doubt that, but with people using Cell Phone Apps and sites like Facebook/Twitter, people are giving up their anonymity on purpose. You can still be anonymous if you want to. And as for verification at the OS level, good luck with that.

beej71 7mo ago
It would be exceptionally easy to pass a law requiring verification at the OS level. Politicians are technical morons.

techblueberry 7mo ago

I find it relatively strange that over the past 30-40 years, we went from a world where most everything was intermediated by parents, and “adult” media was relatively well gatekept to this online Wild West where it seems almost any attempt to gatekeep is seen as a freedom violation. Maybe this is why we need protocols over platforms? But like, kids shouldn’t be able to sign a ToS until they’re 18. I have little sympathy for anything that limits people’s access to these biggest platforms. I’m also largely cynical to the idea that anyone’s doing any free speeching on meta or Twitter in the first place. If counter culture gets driven back to IRC, or gasp meatspace, then all the better.

iamnothere 7mo ago
When I was a kid, most families that had a computer kept it in a common area. Same with the TV, for that matter. Some families did not. Mine did not! But that was a decision that was up to individual families. I don’t see why these decisions should be up to anyone but individual families. Period. If your kids are mature enough for unsupervised computer use, or if you don’t see it as a problem, that’s up to you as a parent. Same as if you feel comfortable taking your kids skeet shooting or rock climbing.
- bubblewand 7mo ago
  Attempting to manage this as a parent is hellish. I can't speak for other parents, but some standards for parental controls—the presence of which and adherence to might be enforced by law, if need be, and need probably would be since none of this is stuff vendors couldn't have figured out on their own long ago if they cared to—we could leverage would be goddamn nice and is all I'd really want. Especially as devices get more locked-down and it becomes hard to control stuff at the network level if you don't have root on the devices themselves, like... man, it's such a time-suck, and I'm 100% sure I'd be having to choose between "I guess we just don't have the Internet in this house" and "fuck it, I give up, go stumble on gore videos I guess" if I weren't a lot better at this stuff than the median parent. I feel for them, this stuff is entirely hopeless for 'em. Like, my kids have Chromebooks from school. They pretty much have to bring them home. So now I have this extra physical item I can't administrate that I must police at night if I don't want them to stay up all night on trash-tier web games or something. So I'll block the devices at the network level at night, right? Easy fix! Nope, the fucking things rotate MAC addresses as an anti-tracking measure I guess. We have zero need for that feature (the number of times they're gonna use the things outside school and home over their whole school careers is going to be very small) but I'm not admin on those devices, so, stuck with it. So there's an extra hurdle to making that happen. Repeat some other incredible frustration for every single thing. Oh look, AppleTV has a simple rating interface so I can at least make sure nothing too bad can get through if I mess something up. Great. Oh except almost nothing on the device except Apple's own software respects the setting, at all, just ignores it. You have to go dick around with every single service on there to lock them down, then hope it sticks through updates and other nonsense. Awesome, great feature that's actually totally useless because nobody cares about the users. Sigh. Your options are go full-luddite, give up and leave them to the Internet gods, or take on this load of work and stress that our parents did not have.

nickphx 7mo ago

sounds like a potential use for generative AI.. they can "validate" and "verify" the "biometrics" of the output from this-person-does-not-exist[.]com

Am4TIfIsER0ppos 7mo ago

Ban cell phones. The internet must again become something you sit down to use. It'd fix the child problem and many problems for adults. It is not something that should be following you around all day.

Razengan 7mo ago
Just asteroid the planet and hope we get shit right the next time around.

SpicyLemonZest 7mo ago

I don't understand what position this article is trying to stake out. How is it Zuckerberg's fault that a California court called him into a courtroom demanding to know why he didn't stop children from using his platform? It seems like the author recognizes that he agrees with Meta on all the substantive questions here, but feels obligated to jump through hoops to avoid taking a pro-corporate position that Meta is right and the plaintiff is wrong.

themafia 7mo ago
> a California court called him into a courtroom To you and I it's made to appear that these things happen without warning. I assure you that's not at all how these things actually occur. If this truly caught out Meta by surprise then they should fire their CEO for general incompetence.
throwawayffffas 7mo ago
Zuckerberg tries to avoid liability by passing the back to OS vendors. Article writer thinks that would be bad. Hence it's all the plaintiffs fault.
- SpicyLemonZest 7mo ago
  I don't think that's an accurate characterization of Zuckerberg's testimony. His primary argument for avoiding liability is one the article writer explicitly agrees with: the science of "social media addiction" is highly contested, and it's not clear that it's real nor that the plaintiff had it if it is real. Nor is "passing the buck" a fair characterization of the article author's criticism; he clearly does not think that Apple or Meta should be in the business of age verification.
  - throwawayffffas 7mo ago
    Addiction is a red herring in the context of this article. The thing that is a problem for the author is age verification on devices. Facebook supposedly does not allow users under 13, but does nothing to enforce that rule. Instead of coming up with a way to enforce their own rule, Zuckerberg comes up with the idea of apple and google doing it for them because "they are in a better position". That is Zuckerbergs idea. That's the idea the author objects with, but instead of putting the blame on Meta for trying to pass of enforcement of their own rules to the devices. The author inexplicably puts the blame on the plaintiff for merely starting the conversation. Whether the plaintiff is wrong or right is not important. The issue is that when meta was told you should really enforce your own rules they said actually we would rather apple and google were forced to do it. It's about externalities meta is trying to move the cost of age verification to Apple and Google to the detriment of everyones privacy, and the author is for some reason upset with some 20 year old girl for rocking the boat, instead of the trillion dollar company that does want to enforce their own terms of use.

themafia 7mo ago

Why would we turn to the person who created the problem for a solution to it?

throwaway87543 7mo ago

Authentication & Authorization is a OS feature. But instead of the OS collecting everyone's age, just give parents the ability to verify their child's phone is in child lockdown mode. Then the phone narc's to the website: "the user is under age". Not "the user was born on Feb 29 2001." We can rely on parenting to ensure a child doesn't have a non child mode phone. Enable parents, not control everyone.

inigyou 7mo ago
OS vendors don't want to add this feature, though. That could be because they make their money from a percentage of IAPs and ads. And when they are mandated, like in Brazil, we HN commenters hate that even more, because apparently in Brazil it's illegal to sell a phone without locked bootloader, or an OS that can run software from outside of an app store, because the user might install an OS or an app that doesn't comply with the child-lock law.
- charcircuit 7mo ago
  FOSS doesn't mean that you get a right to break the law. Just because software patents exists in a society, that doesn't mean that FOSS does not.
- stephen_g 7mo ago
  Well yes, they are actual real risks - a badly thought out law can literally make it illegal for a device to allow an adult to, say, unlock a device's bootloader to install open source software (EDIT: this example was in my comment before the OP edited theirs to add it there as well), because the device vendor can't guarantee that it will comply any more. I don't think anybody is actually opposed to parental controls being mandated to ship in commercial operating systems, as long as it doesn't restrict the freedoms of adults to completely disable them or to install software that removes them or doesn't have them. The problem is when these features are forced on adults and restrict devices or computers 'just in case'.
- michaelt 7mo ago
  IMHO a better approach would be two-layered tagging to indicate traffic from children. Firstly traffic can be tagged by ISPs/cell phone companies, at the bill payer's behest (whose name and age has already been verified). Secondly, smartphone OSes can tag traffic at the behest of parental controls (which already exist).

inigyou 7mo ago

[flagged]

tzs 7mo ago
There is very little publicly known about them. All the bylines appear to be pseudonyms used almost exclusively for posts there. No contact information other than email addresses at their domain. They don't release any information about what funding sources they have, if any, other than donations and merchandise sales. In this article [1] about X being ordered to obey the DSA requirements to make election data available to researchers they go on at great length about the importance of knowing who is funding the organizations asking for the data. Maybe they should set an example and disclose their own funding. Also in that article they suggest X is being singled out for enforcement, ignoring that the the other platforms covered by DSA are at least partially responding to requests for data under DSA. That kind of biased framing is common in many of their articles. I've never seen any reporting by them where I could not find the same thing covered with less bias from a source that is much more transparent over who funds and controls them. [1] https://reclaimthenet.org/berlin-court-orders-x-to-share-hungary-election-data-under-dsa https://reclaimthenet.org/berlin-court-orders-x-to-share-hun...

gweinberg 7mo ago

Had to wade through a lot of text to find out that apparently Zuckerberg and OP both apparently think the internet is something you access through phones.

fennecbutt 7mo ago
Tbf the majority of per individual Internet use is on a phone. Countries other than America exist...plenty of Asian countries where having a phone is far far more common than a laptop let alone a desktop.
IAmBroom 7mo ago
Talk to someone under 30. Show them this cool "phone" app on their cellphones.

deleted 7mo ago

[deleted]

charcircuit 7mo ago

It seems a stretch to me that an operating system having an isAdult() function would end anonymous internet access. Plenty of apps want to avoid showing NSFW content to children and having an API that lets them easily do so has a lot of value. Parental controls must be trivial for an app to implement if we want it to be widespread.

deleted 7mo ago

[deleted]

0xbadcafebee 7mo ago

I find it amazing that we continue to let parents ruin society with their overprotective bullshit. They should be parenting, not passing the buck. This isn't the first time overprotective parents have caused problems for everyone else. The US drug war (and the mass incarceration of poor and black people) was started mostly by organizations of parents who thought marijuana was going to kill their kids. The movie rating system introduced censorship into movies which limited artistic freedom. Game rating systems limited what games could be sold on store shelves, so most games had to be carefully censored and had limited story lines and content. Ratings on music forced major retailers to drop any music which had an 'explicit' label, making it harder for artists with 'adult' lyrics to get exposure or earn a living. Book bans are largely organized by parents' groups, a significant number of the books they want banned being LGBTQ+ books, so kids aren't exposed to the fact that homosexuality is normal. And of course you can't possibly have an app in a monopolistic App Store that has any kind of adult content; heaven forbid an actual adult wants to use an adult app. Parents and 'Child Safety' are toxic af and we shouldn't put up with it.

computerthings 7mo ago
[dead]

phendrenad2 7mo ago

Just make child phones. And make a parallel internet run and curated by, I dunno, the UN child safety task force or something. We're playing this dangerous game of "oops we almost destroyed the world in a hellish authoritarian dystopia" because we can't figure this simple thing out.

dom96 7mo ago

Child safety is just the tip of the iceberg. We need to secure ourselves by implementing human verification and there are ways to do this without sacrificing anonymity[1]. 1 - https://blog.picheta.me/post/the-future-of-social-media-is-human/ https://blog.picheta.me/post/the-future-of-social-media-is-h...

joshcsimmons 7mo ago

This was the intent all along people.

1vuio0pswjnm7 7mo ago

Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp are not "the internet" Anything that hurts Meta's business is arguably a potential step toward more "anonymous" internet access. Anything that helps to stop the process of indoctrination of future generations into and the normalisation of what Meta does is a step toward more anonymous internet access as it allows expectations of privacy to rise to previous levels Companies like Meta have worked to systematically destroy anonymous internet use. Anonymity directly conflicts with Meta's "business model" of data collection, surveillance and serving users up as ad targets Meta and "anonymous internet access" are mutually exclusive. Meta doesn't collect data about and show ads to "anonymous" internet users. It forces users to create "accounts" and "sign in" with clients that run surveillance-related code on the users' computers without the user's input. It builds profiles of internet users (ad targets), even ones that do not use Facebook, Instagram or WhatsApp, e.g., through the use of tracking pixels on the open web Apple's and Google's operating systems also try to profile users. The companies encourage users to create "accounts" and "sign in". The operating systems intentionally provide a purpose-built machanism to target users with ads. If used as encouraged by the compaanies, these operating systems are incompatible with "anonymous internet access". The user is not anonymous to the companies, and the companies invite advertisers to use the computer user's internet bandwidth to deliver ads It was not always like this; I owned Apple computers when there was no such thing as an Apple "account" and Apple's computers did not attempt to automatically "phone home" when powered on. Expectations of "anonymous" internet access amongst new internet users have greatly diminished thanks to Meta, Google and Apple

kkfx 7mo ago

Which is the very target. Forcing full tractability of anyone for better conformism at the dominus will.