California’s law, as written, contributes vastly to privacy and free speech. It is a fundamentally fair and democratic law, which additionally acts as a safeguard against fascism.
Point 1: Age-Verification is coming, whether you like it or not. Multiple states are pursuing such laws. Approaches adopted by Discord and others include techniques such as AI facial scanning with severe privacy concerns. California’s law will set the standard for an 100% robust solution that completely eliminates any pretense that facial scanning, uploading copies of identifying documents to every web service you use, etc. are necessary to implement age validation. This standard explicitly leaks the least possible amount of information about you as humanly possible to achieve this goal. This legislation preempts further attempts to invade user privacy to “protect the children”, by creating an actually effective and pragmatic privacy-preserving age verification scheme, which will undercut any future laws using “protect the children” as an excuse for privacy violations.
Point 2: Good legal standards are beneficial to everyone. Many complain this helps Meta, etc. This helps everyone creating websites, including federated social media like Lemmy. If there is a concern federating with epstein.ml, at least one less concern is threat of legal repercussions potentially affecting large parts of the community-run open internet. This law reduces the burden significantly, avoiding the need to adopt (paid, proprietary) age verification services. This standard absolutely obliterates such commercial offerings in favor of a non-commercial common standard. It even goes so far as to forbid third-party sharing of this data (e.g. for tracking and advertising) and collection of additional information beyond what is necessary to implement the law.
Point 3: You already leak more information that your age bracket through regular web browsing - IP determines approximate location, your cookies tell a whole bunch more, and sophisticated ad trackers have a whole profile on you. In terms of Shannon’s information theory, this new law is leaking less than 3 bits of information about you. Unless you are in the 0.1% of people deliberately avoiding such pervasive tracking, major corporations tracking you online already know your age bracket to fairly high accuracy (but not to sufficient standard to satisfy legal obligations).
Point 4: Fighting fascism has preventative and active measures. Making fascist-resistant technology is an important part of that. This technology has zero potential for fascist abuse. In fact, it undercuts the existence of other tech solutions crafted by your friends at Meta and the NSA. Ensuring quick, near-universal adoption of this standard will solidify an explicitly fascist-resistant piece of technology as a defacto standard.
Point 5: The harm this law aims to address is grave and real. For the 99% of the population who aren’t compiling their own kernels, the ability to “age-lock” a child account to prevent young children from accessing doomscroll brainrot on Instagram is an amazing and valuable feature. Lack of such protections is a compelling enough concern that it has time and time again had enough popular support for sway legislators to take up the issue. The principled “linux source code is free-speech, and no government mandates can compel changes” stance is quite divorced from reality. Are crypto-exchange founders likewise free to implement whatever fraudulent schemes they like, as their source code is their speech to freely dictate? People are sick of strangers shoving content down their children’s throats. In a democratic society, when the wise and ever-just “free market” fails to solve a pressing issue or exacerbates it beyond recognition, it is fair for the state to step in and solve it striking a fair balance, not trampling on anyone’s rights.
Point 6: “Slippery slope” does not apply here - maybe focus more of your attention on ICE, which appears to be slippery when it comes to constitutional rights like due process and privacy and equal protection. We should be proclaiming this law as a paragon, in the way it codifies a clear line beyond which privacy invasions are unjustified. It is a work of legal genius, and society and all of you will come to appreciate how prescient it really is next time an actual bullshit law to “protect children” comes to the table. This law itself is precendent-setting, but in a way that is quite favorable to both privacy and free-speech rights long-term.
The above considerations are not made lightly. I am someone who has put considerable thought into extricating corporate control of communication media, who cares deeply about the ecosystem which can support humanity or drive us into deadly peril and destruction. I honestly thought I would see more nuanced discussion here, but it seems I am alone as of this moment in my perspective.
I don’t know how you can convince yourself that the Powers That Be is so powerful that it can just ram age verification through, but weak enough to be stopped in its tracks right afterwards by this lesser implementation by this one state. I guess you must imagine it working like the bear circle in spongebob lol.
FED SIMP. 2.8y old account on .world, low comments one post.
Totally someone alt.
Go back to your other account, trash
No. Full stop NO.
It’s my computer and my family. Stop trying to justify yet more tracking us in our own homes and on our own devices. Get fucked.
Americans seems to think they are the center of the world and should enforce their view on the rest under the covert of fight against terrorism and child protection, while beeing a big cause of the rise in terrorism and having Epstein’s best friend as president. Hilarious.
I used to get very upset by this, but I’ve taken great solace in seeing how their power and influence are waning.
I thought you were trying to make a serious point, until the end when you refer to politicians as geniuses, really weak bait man. Just in case you are actually serious though, this whole writeup ignores the elephant in the room, which is that i have to identify myself to use MY PERSONAL computer. It’s like having to identify yourself to use your own toilet to take a shit. It’s beyond ridiculous and should never be humored in the first place.
Sounds like you’re using a bad OS to me 😂
You damn well what i meant
Your entire premise is wrong, because these laws have nothing to do with protecting citizens, they’re made to protect Meta from accountability and fines.
Reasoning around a false premise doesn’t make any sense, unless you’re trying to gaslight people.
I am curious why Meta is Pushing age verification? And why are they the one proposing the non facial/legal document method? I thought they wanted more data.
Age verification will definitely give Meta more data, even without a government ID, because noone today can precisely profile everyone into age for target ads or other purposes.
What it also does is shifting responsibility for what Meta does on their platforms to someone else, so they can avoid fines.
Bad people can have incentives which incidentally align with the the broader public interest.
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Meta, Google, Netlfix etc. all supported net neutrality since they benefit from it.
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Meta, Google and Microsoft all opposed laws permitting NSA bulk data collection.
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Google, Elon Musk, Apple, and our overlord Larry Ellison all opposed encryption backdoors.
In this case, Meta benefits financially from having a uniform legal landscape. That is, they don’t want to have to pay lawyers go fight cases in Florida because a 12 year old saw a video of a drag performance, nor pay a bunch of people to do content moderation. They don’t want the headache of being content police, they just want to make money selling ads.
Kid yourself not, Meta still wants your real-world identity. But they already get that by scanning your photo album in the background, capturing location data, facial-scanning your photos, etc. But it benefits them to not have to argue under 50 different states’ laws they didn’t knowingly or negligentlly facilitate endangering children.
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Strong-arming a measure across several states in a federation, and across many countries across the globe, doesn’t make the measure democratic.
Also if any countries go through a “Brazilfication”, might I suggest to check what happens whenever a big leak happens in Brazil?
About a good legal standard, doesn’t most of the world have one already? Something like “presumption of innocence”, instead of “presumption of guilt”, I think?
About already leaking information, please enlighten me how facilitating and standardizing it helps in any when. Also the more bloated an entity, the state included, is, the more enticing it is for attackers, which also brings the next point…
To my knowledge, fascism went by the motto “all within the state, nothing out of the state, all for the state”, which would also be what fascia (strip) from partido fascista alludes to. And with that in mind, surveillance was used to supress dissidence, which also happened in Germany around the same time, and that Orwell warned about communism in 1984. Creating a state-run surveillance network bodes very badly, if you ask me.
And still about fascism, I’m always suspicious when it’s mentioned in a discussion as it’s often used to label and demonize those the speaker disagrees with.
And surprised that the “think about the children” argument used by modern regimes with similar practices only appeared as down as point 5.
Also please enlighten me also how slipery slope doesn’t apply, as the paragraph about it doesn’t seem to touch in the hows.
And about the last paragraph, it sounds awfully like an “appeal to autority” argument.
If I must find a positive side of this whole situation, is that it’s giving such a big exposure to this ongoing privacy issue that even those that applauded, quietly benefitted and/or pretended it wasn’t real need to shift their positions, giving more space for those who push against the issue.
I’m also not on board with “coming if you like it or not.” I’d like to draft a letter that everyone can send to our representatives. Maybe I could post and get some feedback from the community.
Politicians often have social accounts, so people could pressure through those as well (POLITELY, I may add). If you know a given politician is more pro-privacy, ask to give more attention to the given laws, and to build more support among the other representatives. And if the given politician is somewhere betwenn anti-privacy and apathetic to it, argument against the law, and maybe remind of the possibility of recalls if California allows (iirc they do though) depending on how the representative is representing the people or not.
I’m sorry, but no.
Age validation is surveillance under the guise of “protecting the children”, which it spectacularly fails at for more reasons than I can count.
- Everyone has to validate their age, which creates a whole infrastructure that require documents that “prove” your age.
- A verified “under age” user will be added to a database by unscrupulous players, creating a honeypot for predators.
- Age verification isn’t universal, isn’t uniform and regardless of the jurisdiction in which it’s implemented, won’t actually prevent content from being procured from sources outside that jurisdiction.
- One source of objectionable content is another’s entertainment, legally so, given that laws are made in isolation from each other across borders.
- The result of such legislation is the effective censorship of content that some lawmaker finds objectionable, which will cause more harm than good.
- Operating System level age verification on open source platforms will spectacularly fail since they’re published outside the jurisdiction.
So … no.
Age validation is surveillance under the guise of “protecting the children”, which it spectacularly fails at for more reasons than I can count.
< 3 bits of information is not meaningful surveillance.
- Everyone has to validate their age, which creates a whole infrastructure that require documents that “prove” your age.
No, they don’t. That’s the whole point. Self-attested age at account creation is sufficient. Requests for ID docs for age verification are OUTLAWED by this law.
- A verified “under age” user will be added to a database by unscrupulous players, creating a honeypot for predators.
They can do that today. Also, you are misusing the term “honeypot”.
- Age verification isn’t universal, isn’t uniform and regardless of the jurisdiction in which it’s implemented, won’t actually prevent content from being procured from sources outside that jurisdiction.
It will be once California’s law goes into effect. California’s laws have historically set de facto national standards, e.g. on car emissions standards.
- One source of objectionable content is another’s entertainment, legally so, given that laws are made in isolation from each other across borders.
And fortunately, this law allows “objectionable content” to be shown to any user above 18. Online spaces for adults need not impose any objectionable content restrictions. A space where strangers can share videos with kids? Then there can be objectionable content restrictions. Now we have a nice clear line, saying 18+ spaces have no legal obligation to address objectionable content. That’s great!
- The result of such legislation is the effective censorship of content that some lawmaker finds objectionable, which will cause more harm than good.
It supports censorship only for children. Are you a child? If not, then your speech is not censored, and the speech of your fellow adults is likewise uncensored.
- Operating System level age verification on open source platforms will spectacularly fail since they’re published outside the jurisdiction.
Are defi cryptocurrencies outside the jurisdiction of the SEC?
You do understand that California is not the centre of the universe, that states within the United States of America don’t agree on how to conduct voting, let alone agree on laws and finally, that there are 8.3 billion people on this planet, 96% of whom don’t live in, or are subject to laws made in the USA.
California is not the center of the universe, but in the US, a fair amount of companies have to tailor their practices to accommodate California law, because A) it’s so weird a lot of the time, and B) California is huge and rich, so there’s a lot of business to be had. It just makes sense to accommodate the outlier. What happens in California has knock-on effects for the rest of the country, and occasionally the rest of the world; case in point, the recent systemd debacle. It’s not certain that they added the age thing in response to the California law specifically, but it was certainly a factor.
3 bits of information is not meaningful surveillance.
By the way, as I said in my other comment, I don’t think your maths is correct. 3 bit is huge!
If you extend an browser fingerprint from an extimated 18.1 bits of information by 3 bit, to 21.1 bits: You’d catch 2^21.1 − 2^18.1 = roughly 2 million people. That means out of all the citizens in a state like Nebraska or Idaho, they can tell it’s you. That’s the scale of 3 (additional) bits, if my maths is correct.
I’m gonna go out on a limb here and guess that OPs favourite flavour is boot.
Only if it’s vegan leather.
“Slippery slope” does not apply here
Most definitely applies here. Who determines what is not appropriate for children? Today it’s sex, drugs and rock’n’roll. Tomorrow it could be helpful information related to LGBTQ+++ subjects. And so on.
Computer systems have had parental controls forever already. They are the once that should be used. Not to implement another expansion of surveillance.
About 20 years ago it was terrorism. Now it’s “think of the children” as terrorism went out of fashion as a reason to implement fascist surveillance state.
Well… There’s just a lot of misinformation out there regarding this. First of all, it doesn’t do age-verification. What it tries to do is age attestation. It’s supposed to mandate parental controls in operating systems. It specifically does not verify anyone’s age.
But it’s poorly written. Contains contradictions. Some phrasings don’t ever work, like how this is supposed to be done by software, but then the developer shouldn’t make their software request the signal, but they themselves need to request the signal?! How is that even supposed to work? Ultimately we need law to be consistent and this law reads to me like it was written by someone who doesn’t know how computers work. And that would be my issue with it.
But I think some of your points are moot as well. If you want universal legislation (2). Why do a bazillion different state bills? That’s the opposite of it. And (3) doesn’t make sense either, we can’t just give up privacy/freedom since other random things set precedent. We can use it to strike some balance, yes. But the 3 bits don’t work like that. They don’t apply to the total. They come on top! Every additional bit holds a lot of meaning and will be the thing that homes it in from a potential group of thousands of people, to exactly you. In privacy, every single bit of information is very, very important and valuable. In the realm of browser fingerprinting, an additional 3 bits of linearily independent information would rat you out in a group of roughly 2 million people! That’s more than some states/countries have citizens. (This isn’t 3 bits of independent information, though.)
California sets emissions standards for cars, which US manufacturers then follow everywhere, because their market is so huge, it is most cost-effective to build for their standards, which are the toughest. What Cali does tends to spread.
Thats not quite right. Sure Cali sets the emissions standards in the US for cars because they are the strictest, but it’s not because cali is big. Manufacturers don’t want to have to build and track multiple versions of vehicles for different states. Thats a huge pain. So they pick the strictest one and go with it because then it works everywhere.
Similarly they added day time running lights for all their North American cars because Canada wanted it. There was no law against it, so they again made one version of the car for the entire NA market and don’t have to care where the car ends up.
In this case, if some other state decides to enact more stringent regulations about age verification, they will meet that one, no matter the size, because it will mean they only have to follow one standard for the whole area. Dealing with a specific state’s laws over another is a pain so if one standard can take care of all of them it saves lots of time and money to just support the most restrictive one.
The harm this law aims to address is grave and real. For the 99% of the population who aren’t compiling their own kernels, the ability to “age-lock” a child account to prevent young children from accessing doomscroll brainrot on Instagram is an amazing and valuable feature.
I disagree even with this premise. I reject the idea that it’s legitimate to want to keep young people from seeing, watching, reading things that they actively want to see/watch/read simply because we have a vague idea that “it’s not good for them”.
My parents too unfortunately agreed with your idea, and I remember being a (teenaged) minor and worried that my parents might find out too much about what I’ve been reading and doing on the Internet and punish me for it, I don’t wish that on anyone who happened to be born after me. I hereby resolve that if I ever have children, they will not have to worry about this. I think it is a very good thing that modern technology makes it somewhat harder for parents to oppress their children in such a manner.
But there’s nothing inherently wrong with OS developers implementing such a feature if that is what their customers want. There’s a lot wrong with the government mandating it.
The principled “linux source code is free-speech, and no government mandates can compel changes” stance is quite divorced from reality.
No, it’s an exactly correct legal analysis; at least morally, and should be legally.
Are crypto-exchange founders likewise free to implement whatever fraudulent schemes they like, as their source code is their speech to freely dictate?
I’m not sure what scenario you have in mind. Distributing software (even software that can be used for illegal activities) is free speech. Running and using software isn’t (automatically) speech, it’s an action that can be declared to be criminal. Anyone can use Thunderbird to send phishing emails, but it would be absurd to prosecute the developers of Thunderbird for that.
I agree with the idea that a user account with an age field is less bad than actual (biometric or ID-based) age verification.
The rest of your post is so full of meaningless buzzwords that it’s impossible to write anything coherent about it.
Point 1 is assumptive, but not necessarily wrong. Social media companies have deep pockets, and these laws help them deflect responsibility for child abuse that occurs on their platforms.
Point 2 is well argued, but i’m not convinced it applies here. California could have the least harmful version of such a law, but it does not follow that those laws would be adopted more generally over something more harmful. Texas, New York, Illinois, and Florida are also very influential in the US as far as lawmaking goes
Point 3 is kind of a red herring fallacy.
Point 4 isn’t really argued at all. I don’t see how this fights fascism or how California’s law is explicitly immune from fascist abuse.
Point 5 is one that i can’t argue with due to lack of information. I acknowledge that abuse is happening every day on platforms like Roblox and Discord, but i’m not convinced that those platforms will actually have less abuse as a result of this law
Point 6 is addressing a fallacy. baseline shifting is a contextual phenomenon, and whether it applies here has little to do with the subject being discussed
Point 2 and 3: If I already “leak” (should be: get my activities monitored and collected btw), then surely the most beneficial legal standard for the people (if one meant it as a safeguard again fascism) would be a ban on collecting any private information without explicit, affermative, expiring and unprompted consent?
This technology has zero potential for fascist abuse.
This is not “technology”, this is a law being enforced on technology. All laws can get used by politicians to push their ideologies, there isn’t a single regulation that can’t be used to push some agenda.
Point 5
There are already tools that allow parents to limit their childrens autonomy. It is the responsibility of the parent to make sure their child is safe, if somebody can’t guarantee that, they shouldn’t be one.
Agree. We are posting in a nuance-free zone. Gotta go, I can only hold my breath at this many downvotes for so long, I just swam down to add my upvote.
