I do worry where this is going as more countries do this kind of shit.
Comment on As of December 10th, You need to be sixteen to use Aussie.Zone
Nath@aussie.zone 22 hours agoThis is the first round of verification. There will be more than one. At some point I’ll resort to sending direct messages to stragglers.
The law is vague about our requirements. It’s vague on lots of things.
We need to proactively ban users who identify themselves as children. We don’t have to immediately ban every unverified account, but at some point we’re going to need to have some sort of record of age verification for active users.
Waste of everyone’s time? Yep.
Korhaka@sopuli.xyz 12 hours ago
Nath@aussie.zone 6 hours ago
On that front, we’re a little fortunate. One of the whitepapers I saw on the legislation essentially spruiked a whole industry poised to offer sites ‘age verification services’. By getting in ahead of all that and verifying our users using methods our own users themselves define, we’re avoiding that noise.
And the users have been wonderful. I’ve always loved the support of this crowd and they haven’t let us down on this matter, either. By simply leaving it with you all to go ahead and define your own verification means, you’ve come up with loads of unique stuff that I would never have thought of. And by keeping it all funnelled to DMs the way we have, no AI is going to learn anything from you.
If we are singled out to demonstrate that we took reasonable steps, I’d love to present the evidence that we have complied with the legislation. They can’t complain that our methods fail to meet some standard, as they haven’t provided a standard. I honestly believe I could go all the way to court with the messages that you’ve sent in as “any reasonable person would believe this was sent by someone over sixteen”. If that turns into some sort of thing that goes ‘ok, you need to do x to verify ages in future’, we’ve beaten all such changes by being grandfathered in on our own system.
Eagle@aussie.zone 4 hours ago
I’d love for you to share the de-identified messages. We’re a clever bunch here and I’d love to see how we all responded.
Nath@aussie.zone 4 hours ago
Maybe a few of them and after a bit. I can’t think of any examples so far of two people doing the same thing, but I also don’t want to take dozens of means off the table for future respondents. One user already shared his genius method, and I suppose that method is still available for others to use. 😆
18107@aussie.zone 12 hours ago
I don’t envy your position.
I’m certain that this new law has nothing to do with protecting children, and only exists to provide a way for AI companies to start making money.
Gorgritch_umie_killa@aussie.zone 7 hours ago
Na, its to pop a cultural crisis balloon the media was blowing up last year.
There will be some tangential benefits, i think the no alcohol before 18 is a good analogy, the only problem is there can be some benefits to social media, whereas theres not a really an upside to alcohol.
But largely its due to talk-back wankers, and the Government not wanting a distracting fake cultural crisis. Commercial media in this country suck large round ones.
Anyway, thats my view.