Comment on Honest Government Ad | Social Media Ban
Zagorath@aussie.zone 4 days agoThis law doesn’t actually change that, necessarily. It applies to “social media”, and not to “chat” applications. As such, Discord is apparently not included (though I’d argue it really should be, under the letter of the law, because it straddles the line between chat and social, but in my experience it sits mostly on the social side of the line), and apps like What’s App, Messenger, and Signal are definitely exempt. The law also doesn’t actually require deanonymisation. Just reasonable steps to demonstrate they are old enough.
You can see how AZ has chosen to go about complying. Other sites might comply just by looking at the age of an account, or usage patterns (e.g., accounts that have talked about jobs, taxes, and home ownership might be presumed to be older, while accounts that talk about Roblox are assumed under age). Or they might use the identifying options of facial recognition and government ID, but through an intermediary so the site itself never traces your account to your real ID. Indeed, this last option is arguably how it should have been required to be done—using blind signatures or zero-knowledge proofs involving trusted age verifiers—with methods that could identify the person directly being banned.
Mountaineer@aussie.zone 4 days ago
I understand that I’m making a slippery slope argument, a fallacy in itself.
I just don’t trust that the purpose of this legislation is what it says on the tin because it’ll never achieve it’s stated aim, it’ll just teach a whole generation how to break the law.
And having failed, will the government stop?
No, they’ll try to ban VPNs, or something else equally vacuous.
Zagorath@aussie.zone 4 days ago
IMO the actual unstated aim is much simpler: win good PR by saying they’re doing something, while upsetting big tech as little as possible.
Doubtful. It’s being tried by some of the most extreme states in America, but even there it’s unlikely to go very far. It’s just not a practical option. That big tech they’re trying not to upset? They won’t like this. Businesses use VPNs all the time.
Mountaineer@aussie.zone 4 days ago
The Australian government isn’t scared to piss off Big Tech when it suits them.
The ASSISTANCE AND ACCESS ACT 2018 lead to some people I know being given the option of quitting or relocating to somewhere that the Australian government couldn’t do THAT.
It’s certainly an extra factor when deciding to offshore development teams here.
As a “great” man once said:
Zagorath@aussie.zone 4 days ago
I think the concerning problem is…big tech isn’t actually too concerned about that Act. For starters, there was a little misinformation going on about it at the time it was being discussed. This page is useful. A lot of it is wishy-washy apologia that should be ignored, but the section entitled “This law can compel employees to work in secret without the knowledge of their organisation” is specific and valuable. It notes that unlike the information that was going around at the time, the law can not compel specific individual employees to insert backdoors into their employer’s software.
We’ve also seen pretty clearly that big tech has no problem supporting authoritarian governments, as long as it doesn’t directly undermine their bottom line. With a fairly minimal amount of dev time required to comply with this sort of law, it’s not something that’s going to concern them.
But VPNs are necessary for them to get their work done. Businesses of all sizes use them daily.