Adult privacy will be compromised.
Goal achieved. “Think of the children” is subterfuge.
Comment on Reddit users in the UK must now upload selfies to access NSFW subreddits
ToastedRavioli@midwest.social 7 hours agoThe solution to all of this “think of the children” stuff is that devices owned/used by children should have to be registered as a child’s device, which would enable certain content blockers.
Forcing adults to verify their identity, rather than simply activating some broad based restrictions on devices being purchased for child use, is a waste of time. Kids will still find workarounds. Adult privacy will be compromised.
Its also an easily enforceable policy to require registration of children’s devices. You can hold the parents to compliance. You can hold the carriers to compliance. Its truly the simplest way to keep kids from accessing porn without having to mess with adult use of the internet whatsoever
iii@mander.xyz 4 hours ago
anarchiddy@lemmy.dbzer0.com 6 hours ago
I don’t think this is a good idea…
This is even more invasive - it would mean all the traffic and activity in every device would be traceable to a registration. Whereas now they might have a pretty good lock on individual device ids, they’d then have an actual registry of devices and owners to verify it against
SippyCup@feddit.nl 5 hours ago
A simple toggle, secured with a password would do it. Child’s device Y/N. If no, proceed. Your browser or whatever app you’re using would only need to see that one setting, and it’s not much different than your browser looking at any number of settings on your device.
Shit with TWO toggles, the other being “is this child under the age of 13?” You could even force sites like YouTube actually to comply with federal law about targeting minors with advertising.
But. These laws aren’t actually about protecting children, they’re about establishing a real identity for every person online.
anarchiddy@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 hours ago
A simple toggle, secured with a password would do it.
Yea, that’s the thing - I don’t think it would ‘do’ it for legislators. Like you mentioned - it’s not really about protecting children, but also the only way to enforce a law like this would be to log or register devices to specific people or children. This would essentially just shift the point of verification from the individual website to the point of sale of the phone or tablet. Verifying the age is the part that necessitates identification - the only thing a hardware-locked strategy does is centralizes that verification to a governing body instead of individual websites, but it still associates individuals with specific devices.
I get why this might seem preferable, but the problem of online privacy still persists.
aceshigh@lemmy.world 6 hours ago
The arguments that I’ve seen against that is that the problem is the hardware. The child can figure out/find a hack to circumvent the restrictions. A determined 11/12 year old could do it. They’re the ones who still need restriction.
atrielienz@lemmy.world 5 hours ago
So what you’re telling me is you don’t think an 11/13/14 yo could use an LLM to age up a selfie to gain access to subreddits they shouldn’t be accessing (legally or morally). But you do think that same age group of children is going to gain root access to a device in order to flash some software to circumvent a device specific toggle limiting their device by hard coding it as a child’s device.
aceshigh@lemmy.world 4 hours ago
Tbh I’m surprised they’re not asking for government issued id along with the selfie.
atrielienz@lemmy.world 4 hours ago
I’m gonna be honest here. I don’t think it would be that difficult for a kid to get both from their parent.
squaresinger@lemmy.world 6 hours ago
That’s kinda the case right now already, but the problem is that adult-only sites don’t work with that currently.
So the right solution would be to mandate that e.g. all sites are required to return a header with an age recommendation or something similar, so that a device set to child-mode then can block all these sites. And if a site doesn’t set the header, it will also get blocked on child-mode devices
Wouldn’t be too hard to do, and accidental overblocking would only occur on child-mode devices, so there’s not much of a loss there.
Legislation could then be focussed on mandating that these headers aren’t falsely set (e.g. a porn site setting the header to child-friendly).
iii@mander.xyz 4 hours ago
Allow listing sounds like the better solution. Ie the device had a list of remotes approved by the parents.
That way there’s no need to police every website in the world in perpetuity.
squaresinger@lemmy.world 3 hours ago
Listing already exists, but in practice it’s quite impractical, mainly because it’s either not granular enough or too granular.
If the listing feature allows me to allow/deny on a domain basis, then allowing Wikipedia for example would mean that I’d also allow all the non-child-friendly content on there too. Like the literal full-length porn videos or the photographies of genital torture that are on there. And if I block all of Wikipedia, I also block all of the hundreds of thousands of informative and totally child-acceptable pages on there.
If, on the other hand, I allow/deny on a per-page basis, then using the internet becomes nigh unmanageable, because each click of my kid requires me to allow/deny the next page. It’s not that often when using the internet that you access the same exact url every day without clicking to sub-pages.
A header would solve that issue. That way I could e.g. allow all Wikipedia articles that are rated for ages 6 and that’s ok. The rating should of course be like for movies, so that it doesn’t mean that a child would understand the articles, but that there’s nothing child-endangering in there like the videos and images (and accompanying texts) mentioned above.
iii@mander.xyz 2 hours ago
Or just block wikipedia and use one of the many encyclopedia websites designed for kids instead (1), (2). This has the benefit of having your goals met, without making the world a worse place for everyone else.