https://willbrownsberger.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/Gile...
The reason all of these improvised ID check systems require you to do things like submit a video of you moving your face around (which has its own problems) is because they want to get closer to proving that the ID you submit is actually the ID of the person holding the phone, not just some ID (or zero knowledge proof) you copied from the internet.
For liquor for example I don't think the govt actually specifies that you shall check ID they specify that you shall not sell to minors.
Yeah, by outsourcing it to some shady company that sells all your private info to the lowest bidder. See Discord for example.
This article addresses the technological flaws in age verification, then says “but even if there were, broad restrictions on social media will inevitably limit access to lawful speech, and valuable online communities, and arts and culture.”
If the EFF care about freedom above all else (a reasonable position) muddying the waters with half-baked age verification isn’t perfect arguments is just sloppy.
Why does the freedom matter above all else? That’s what voters need to be convinced of.
Really they should just torch the lot.
Is there a UK version of the EFF that fights in the courts against this lunacy or does it not quite work the same in the UK as it does in the US.
The government looks likely to introduce the ban as regulation through secondary legislation (https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c9824zvpz9po).
That is open to judicial review.
If primary legislation was instead passed, that's a lot harder to challenge - Parliament makes the law, so whatever Parliament said applies.
Politics is very different in the UK than in the US, especially when the governing party has such a large majority.
The banning of under-16s from social media has widespread support across the parties in Parliament.
The technical incoherence doesn’t matter. What matters is being able to say “you can’t use Snapchat” and then they say “my friend xxx uses it” you can say “xxx’s parent are delinquent”
This isn’t about blocking as much as setting societal expectations.
It's a toxic trap which will do absolutely nothing good for and to its users.
Keep the kids away from it, doesn't take an Einstein reincarnate to realize that.
According to the UK government, YouTube is a social media site.
When will politicians understand how and why the internet was build?
These platforms are the digital equivalent of heroin if heroin always came with either nazi or bolshevik propaganda.
They are entirely focused on the axe they rightfully have to grind the whole age verification debacle they are not seeing the bigger picture.
The major social media companies are undermining the foundations of our societies for ad revenue and giggles.
Keeping teens out is a huge step in the right direction.
Cmon, if you’re trying to make the case for how essential social media is for children under the age of 16, please find some better examples. As if there are no other sources of educational content online than YouTube and anyone who has left Facebook knows the last two points are simply not true. This is so weak from the EFF.
How in the world did kids ever survive before social media? Miracle of god keeping them sane every second of their miserable deprived lives. Seriously, this is such a bad argument for something that is a return to a previous known good state versus being a new state. No proof provided that social media makes any of these better versus either pre social media approaches or modern alternatives.
Terrible article.
but snark aside, society needs to have a big conversation (meaning political) about what is good and what is bad about what should really be understood as the 'connectivity revolution' of the last 10-20 years.
EFF are way off base here - this isn't "free as in free speech" but "free as in giant corporations are free to fuck people up the arse".
There is nothing stopping people reposting stuff on platforms without social media elements and with proper curation and publisher responsibilities.
Most big YouTubers would love this to happen I’m sure.
Big, popular channels do push their viewers to alternative platforms like Patreon because of Youtube's censorship guidelines and arbitrary demonetization, but a lot of valuable content is on smaller channels where the owners may not have the wherewithal to transfer all of their content, much less their audience.
This conveniently sidesteps the identity/privacy arguments, makes it much easier to enforce, and would present an even greater net benefit. There is no benefit to algorithmic social media at all, and everyone would be better off without it.
Parents are much better at knowing their own kid's age than corporations are. Teens keep fooling the age verification (pointing the camera at a video game character, using fake ID, even drawing beards on their face with a pen). But they aren't going to fool their own mother, and they don't need to trust ID verification startup with photographs of everbody's teenage kids to do it.
The government is, frankly, just better at deciding what's good for most children than their parents when it comes to matters of health. That's a controversial statement, but truthfully most parents are just not educated enough or strict enough to decide where the boundaries should be on their children's health.
That's irrelevant because social media regulation is a collective action problem. No individual parent can restrict their kids access to social media without ostracizing it, it only makes sense if all parents together get their kids off these platforms.
It's always the tech illiterates cheering on the surveillance.
I think we have been stuck in this way of life so long we can't imagine an alternative.
What you’re saying is functionally equivalent to “just deal with it,” since ultimately people will choose to have their privacy violated over the lifelong Sisyphean task of trying to avoid all of that. That doesn’t mean people don’t care about privacy, it’s just the current equilibrium in our broken system.
> I think we have been stuck in this way of life so long we can't imagine an alternative.
I agree.
Yes, and the wishes of all parents together != the wishes of the UK government which has its own agenda at play in which to weaponize this public outrage for their own benefit(mass surveillance and mass censorship).
The UK government doesn't actually want what's best for all the children of all the parents, otherwise it wouldn't have allowed and even enabled the rape gangs and sweep the issue under the rug in a massive coverup.
This legislation has widespread support among British parents across the political spectrum[1]
"As YouGov has shown previously, such a policy would be widely popular with the general public. In our latest survey, looking more specifically at the views of parents, we find that 77% of those with children under the age of 18 would support a ban, compared to only 14% who are opposed.[...] Likewise, 76% of parents think the government needs to kick up their activity on this issue, although a much lower rate of 43% think they need to be doing “much more”."
I don't even have any idea what the last paragraph, other than being some generic twitter rant has to do with the topic of the thread
[1]https://yougov.com/en-gb/articles/54969-eight-in-ten-parents...