‘We found robust, appropriate and secure data handling practices’
Note they didn’t say they didn’t find any slack, inappropriate and insecure data handling practices?
It’s a case of only being as good as the weakest link. It will be a matter of time before they are hacked and the data stolen
Nath@aussie.zone 4 weeks ago
I’m stuck on one (“Age assurance can be done”). My oldest is turning 14 in a couple of months. It’s a weird age: I think several of them could fool an AI that they’re over 18 (they’d fail instantly as soon as they spoke to an actual person), while half of them look the same as they did five years ago. I have a little faith in AI as being a reliable way to tell age.
Personally, I have always looked a lot younger than my age. It sucked when I was a teenager/early 20’s, but it has been awesome for the last couple of decades. I don’t know that I’d have passed an AI check at 20. I certainly failed human checks: I was routinely ID’d everywhere I went until I was about 30.
Then point four goes and says:
Translation: this really is not simple at all and we shouldn’t have opened the report saying it was doable straight-up.
It sounds like they’re expecting the emergence of an age verification industry here. They list a pile of companies already who appear prepared to step into that role. You somehow identify to companyX that you are over 18, they provide you with some form of token and you can then use that token to be allowed to make accounts on sites. It’s not clear who funds companyX’s operations, however.
I’m not reading all 160-odd pages of this tonight, it’s advisory at best. I’m still totally stuck on how you’d stop a 14 year old from installing an off-the-shelf Lemmy container into his/her homelab and started using it. And that assumes the report is right and do have a perfect way to verify everyone.
shirro@aussie.zone 4 weeks ago
Things rarely proceed to the extremes as they get harder and more pushback the further you go. But the logical extension of wanting access to all public communications and verification of everyone’s online identity is that access to general computation has to be outlawed. Access to a programmable general purpose computer trivially defeats any restrictions you place on commercial services.
We do need to think about how for profit companies forgo their social responsibility and mess with people’s heads in pursuit of profits and if that should be regulated and how. But there are clearly some creepy people online, who might be funded, but aren’t necessarily motivated solely by profit but by ideology who will find ways to target people whatever the government does. Kids need to be prepared to live in that world and be very skeptical and it just isn’t happening. Today’s kids are just as fucking stupid as we were and they can’t afford to be.
The government have leapt straight to regulation, in my opinion likely pushed by some players in the tech industry and possibly five eyes without fully educating themselves. Potentially they are going to do more harm than good. I suspect a lot of kids are going to drift to less regulated and more extreme alternatives and we save a few kids from Tik Tok memes at the expense of more neo-nazi Christchurch shooters.
No1@aussie.zone 4 weeks ago
Shhhhhhhh!
That’s what I was thinking ot doing!
Zagorath@aussie.zone 4 weeks ago
Here’s another thought about age checks. What if I just point to my Reddit account, now over 12 years old, and say “do you really think I was less than 4 when I created this?” And that’s a good enough age verification for everywhere else to go “yeah, checks out.”
Sure, that’s giving up a little privacy by linking my Lemmy account with my Reddit account…but I chose the same username for a reason.