Do we know who is funding this? is this one of these things where Meta doesn't want the responsibility for this, so they are pushing to have the OS have the responsibility or something like that?
It may be Meta, but the investigation you linked to is entirely hallucinated by LLMs: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47659552 (tboteproject and the "Reddit researcher" are the same person).
They also added this page since I posted that comment: https://web.archive.org/web/20260411112604/https://tboteproj... where they claim their website is "under surveillance" because it got a few thousand requests from Google Cloud et al, mostly vulnerability scanners. This really shows how low their standards are.
Facebook. There's a wave of child endangerment lawsuits incoming and they want to head that off at the pass by having governments shift all that liability over to the OS vendors.
So this bill creates a commission to ensure that the information cannot be stolen or breached from operating systems, but says nothing about how the applications querying this information must protect or leverage it. I basically requires that any application get to know a user's birthday, as long as it's "necessary". What a fucking joke! I'm so sick and tired of this bullshit.
Edit: Oh, and the commission gets to make up the rules on how ages should be verified. So, prepare for a whole other level of PII leakage that isn't even captured by the text of the bill.
I have a kid. All I want is the ability to put a "there's a baby driving" bumper sticker on their devices. And to have pornhub et al steer around them.
I'd suggest that this is actually a pretty common desire from parents. We don't want to collect your IDs. We don't want to install spyware in your webcams. We do want a way to signal there's a kid driving a device.
This article is long on hyperbole and short on facts. I gave up about six paragraphs in, being far more informed about what the author feared about this legislation than its actual content.
Sure, if it would mandate ID harvesting, I'm against it. If it requires biometric verification, no. But if we can just have a way to put bright orange vests on devices that require special treatment... That doesn't feel invasive to me.
I'd prefer to cut all the "think of the children!" charlatans off at the pass. Your kid got traumatized by some crazy hyper porn? Why the heck didn't you flag their device?
We still have to provide a way for people that don’t have (smart) phones, but I would absolutely implement asking the phone instead of a 3rd party when available.
We don’t gain anything from asking a 3rd party. In fact it costs money per request.
All this fake good intent to prevent another TikTok which was the only media which transmited the reality on the ground during the Gaza genocide. And its aftermath in the youth mind and in the University campuses.
Fascists and industrialists have to take control, again, of the minds.
(See oligarchy's appetite for social and media companies)
The breathless fearmongering over an age field on account set up is just completely over-the-top. This is probably the least bad out of all possible ways to implement age checking. The benefit of this is that it can short-circuit support for more onerous age verification. The writing has been on the wall for some time now: the era of completely unrestricted internet is coming to an end. The question is how awful will the new normal be? Legislation like this is a win all around, a complete nothingburger. We should be celebrating it, not fighting it tooth and nail.
The tech crowds utter derangement over this minor mandate is truly a sight to behold.
Well, perhaps your mental model of the actual objections to it are incomplete. There are a few problems and I'm curious what you have to say about them. First, "The benefit of this is that it can short-circuit support for more onerous age verification". Do you think that it "can" or that it "will"? Big difference. It could also go the other way, right? Opening the door to a more onerous version? Why do you think that isn't worth considering? Secondly, "This is probably the least bad out of all possible ways to implement age checking". What about parental controls that exist already? Someone seriously tried to tell me last time that parental controls "suck", but that's irrelevant, they don't have to suck, and in fact anything can suck. That's just happenstance. So, assuming parental controls were correctly implemented, why do you think this is "least bad" including parental controls? Thirdly, this "age verification" doesn't actually verify anything, because underage people can just choose "adult" anyway. What do you have to say to that? In that case, parental controls actually give you more power, and make this new age check completely obsolete. Thoughts? Lastly, maybe you're not from the USA, but we have a concept of "free speech" which includes the idea that people cannot be "compelled" to certain speech. If people were required to add a "sign here to confirm you're an adult" in every romance novel, that would be fine right? It's also a nothingburger, right? But then, you've compelled people to put something in every published book. Actually, that's a bad analogy. We should say that ALL BOOKS require this signature field on the first page. After all, we don't know what kinds of expletives and horrible things people might have written in the margins of the book (assuming it's being sold second-hand). That would be okay with you, right? Nothingburger? But it compels people to write something, and that's a door most legal scholars know not to open.
> The writing has been on the wall for some time now: the era of completely unrestricted internet is coming to an end.
And books..? And the newspaper? What if a child reads about a horrible murder in the newspaper that keeps them up at night? What if the government outlaws books and newspapers because they can contain bad things? We'd better add a "adult/ not adult" checkbox to the first page to "short-circuit support for more onerous age verification".
23 comments:
Do we know who is funding this? is this one of these things where Meta doesn't want the responsibility for this, so they are pushing to have the OS have the responsibility or something like that?
It is literally just Meta. https://www.gadgetreview.com/reddit-user-uncovers-who-is-beh... https://old.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/1rshc1f/i_traced_2_b... https://tboteproject.com/
It may be Meta, but the investigation you linked to is entirely hallucinated by LLMs: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47659552 (tboteproject and the "Reddit researcher" are the same person).
They also added this page since I posted that comment: https://web.archive.org/web/20260411112604/https://tboteproj... where they claim their website is "under surveillance" because it got a few thousand requests from Google Cloud et al, mostly vulnerability scanners. This really shows how low their standards are.
Meta. Specifically to undercut Apple.
How does this undercut apple? This entrenches apple's position as a provider of "verified" devices.
Facebook. There's a wave of child endangerment lawsuits incoming and they want to head that off at the pass by having governments shift all that liability over to the OS vendors.
Apple, Google, Meta and Microsoft. Maybe with a push from 3 letter agencies, because it makes their life easier.
People lend phones or computers to kids. The age associated with the user account means absolutely nothing.
And there obviously gonna be market for "verified" devices. Not like there is anything at all that could stop people of any ages looking at porn.
So this bill creates a commission to ensure that the information cannot be stolen or breached from operating systems, but says nothing about how the applications querying this information must protect or leverage it. I basically requires that any application get to know a user's birthday, as long as it's "necessary". What a fucking joke! I'm so sick and tired of this bullshit.
Direct link to the bill: https://docs.reclaimthenet.org/parents-decide-act-os-age-ver...
Edit: Oh, and the commission gets to make up the rules on how ages should be verified. So, prepare for a whole other level of PII leakage that isn't even captured by the text of the bill.
I have a kid. All I want is the ability to put a "there's a baby driving" bumper sticker on their devices. And to have pornhub et al steer around them.
I'd suggest that this is actually a pretty common desire from parents. We don't want to collect your IDs. We don't want to install spyware in your webcams. We do want a way to signal there's a kid driving a device.
This article is long on hyperbole and short on facts. I gave up about six paragraphs in, being far more informed about what the author feared about this legislation than its actual content.
Sure, if it would mandate ID harvesting, I'm against it. If it requires biometric verification, no. But if we can just have a way to put bright orange vests on devices that require special treatment... That doesn't feel invasive to me.
I'd prefer to cut all the "think of the children!" charlatans off at the pass. Your kid got traumatized by some crazy hyper porn? Why the heck didn't you flag their device?
The problem is with government mandates.
Apple and Google already ship OSes with comprehensive APIs and parental controls. There's not even any porn on the iOS App Store by policy.
Creating liability for random OS and app developers is absurd, and foreign porn websites aren't going to comply with this anyway.
Tim Apple argued it was a violation of their engineers and managers free speech to make them engineer back doors
Wonder if they will stand up against this on the same grounds
https://www.apple.com/customer-letter/
Discussion on the bill source: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47772203
So, who's gearing up to sue the FTC for a declaratory judgment that this is unconstitutional?
That means porn sites won't require me to independently verify my age right? Right?
We still have to provide a way for people that don’t have (smart) phones, but I would absolutely implement asking the phone instead of a 3rd party when available.
We don’t gain anything from asking a 3rd party. In fact it costs money per request.
All this fake good intent to prevent another TikTok which was the only media which transmited the reality on the ground during the Gaza genocide. And its aftermath in the youth mind and in the University campuses. Fascists and industrialists have to take control, again, of the minds. (See oligarchy's appetite for social and media companies)
Writing like this is frankly so exhausting. I don’t think anyone not already in the choir could make it through.
Some people really need shit spelled out to them. This does a great job of doing that in a small package.
The breathless fearmongering over an age field on account set up is just completely over-the-top. This is probably the least bad out of all possible ways to implement age checking. The benefit of this is that it can short-circuit support for more onerous age verification. The writing has been on the wall for some time now: the era of completely unrestricted internet is coming to an end. The question is how awful will the new normal be? Legislation like this is a win all around, a complete nothingburger. We should be celebrating it, not fighting it tooth and nail.
The tech crowds utter derangement over this minor mandate is truly a sight to behold.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anticipatory_obedience
Well, perhaps your mental model of the actual objections to it are incomplete. There are a few problems and I'm curious what you have to say about them. First, "The benefit of this is that it can short-circuit support for more onerous age verification". Do you think that it "can" or that it "will"? Big difference. It could also go the other way, right? Opening the door to a more onerous version? Why do you think that isn't worth considering? Secondly, "This is probably the least bad out of all possible ways to implement age checking". What about parental controls that exist already? Someone seriously tried to tell me last time that parental controls "suck", but that's irrelevant, they don't have to suck, and in fact anything can suck. That's just happenstance. So, assuming parental controls were correctly implemented, why do you think this is "least bad" including parental controls? Thirdly, this "age verification" doesn't actually verify anything, because underage people can just choose "adult" anyway. What do you have to say to that? In that case, parental controls actually give you more power, and make this new age check completely obsolete. Thoughts? Lastly, maybe you're not from the USA, but we have a concept of "free speech" which includes the idea that people cannot be "compelled" to certain speech. If people were required to add a "sign here to confirm you're an adult" in every romance novel, that would be fine right? It's also a nothingburger, right? But then, you've compelled people to put something in every published book. Actually, that's a bad analogy. We should say that ALL BOOKS require this signature field on the first page. After all, we don't know what kinds of expletives and horrible things people might have written in the margins of the book (assuming it's being sold second-hand). That would be okay with you, right? Nothingburger? But it compels people to write something, and that's a door most legal scholars know not to open.
> The writing has been on the wall for some time now: the era of completely unrestricted internet is coming to an end.
And books..? And the newspaper? What if a child reads about a horrible murder in the newspaper that keeps them up at night? What if the government outlaws books and newspapers because they can contain bad things? We'd better add a "adult/ not adult" checkbox to the first page to "short-circuit support for more onerous age verification".