Comment on Online age-verification tools spread across U.S. for child safety, but adults are being surveilled
Lfrith@lemmy.ca 19 hours agoJust starting it at the ISP level than a site by site basis handing over info for every site seems better to me. Its already a utility to begin with where people have to give their info, address, and payment method when they sign up. Its already a verification system to begin with.
Let households themselves decide if they want parental lock or not, and ISPs already offer parental block.
And I dont care about the social media justifications for verification anymore. You, me, and many other people accessed the Internet at a young age and turned out fine.
This hysteria of parents not wanting to take responsibility for raising and monitoring their own kids and demanding the government remove everything seems like boomers back in the day wanting games banned.
Kraiden@piefed.social 19 hours ago
Ok, lets start from an age verification POV: What you’re suggesting is at the account level. If YOU want to access social media, then everyone in your household gets access to is as well. Even if YOU decide you don’t want it, nothing stops your kid from connecting to your neighbours wifi, or going to their friends house, or even public library/cafe wifi. It will not address the core issue.
On the flip side, you’ve now given your ISP permission to decide what information you are allowed to see. Sure they may block porn, and social media, but hey, maybe “kids” shouldn’t be allowed to access information on LGBT issues, or political ideologies, or “upsetting” news about unrest at home or abroad. If YOU want to access that information, well that’s ok, we’ll just add you, along with the address of service, and all your contact information to our “whitelist”
Believe me, it’s the wrong approach
Actually there’s mountains of evidence to the contrary here. It’s pretty widely accepted now that social media is not a place for children.
In an ideal world, you’re right, parents would be responsible for protecting their kids, but we’re not in anything remotely like an ideal world. You could say the same about anything. It’s the parents responsibility to prevent underage drinking or smoking too, yet we still do what we can to restrict those at the point of sale, rather than just shrugging and going “Not my problem”
Lfrith@lemmy.ca 18 hours ago
People will find a way around verification. I definitely would when I was little. To have a perfect system you’d need an authoritarian approach of complete surveillance.
You either accept that system isn’t perfect or push for complete surveillance.
You seem willing to risk what will turn out to be surveillance in hopes of a perfect verification system. While I’m more skeptical and not trusting of those in charge that trying to protect people is even the goal.
Maybe it’s the difference between how much someone trusts their government and corporations.
Kraiden@piefed.social 18 hours ago
Sure, but that’s true regardless of implementation. Your Great Firewall approach is by far the easiest to circumvent, and comes with by far the biggest drawbacks. Even worse than handing a face scan and a copy of your ID to every website that asks.
Who said anything about perfect? The system is NOT perfect. What it IS though, is private, and better than the alternatives.
Says who? It doesn’t have to be that black and white. “Don’t let perfect be the enemy of good” as the saying goes. You don’t have to accept your privacy being violated, AND you don’t have to just roll over, give up, and let kids access anything they want.
No. My whole point is that the privacy/anonymity and age verification are NOT mutually exclusive. You CAN have both.
Your idea LITERALLY lets those in charge decide what information you get access to, so maybe you should be a little more skeptical.
I trust neither. That’s why I like the system I’m describing. It puts ME in charge of MY data, and gives me controll over who gets to use it, and exactly what they’re allowed to do with it
Lfrith@lemmy.ca 17 hours ago
My idea is already in place. When you log into your ISP to pay bills or manage your plan you can already toggle on or off parental control. Its just changing it so its enabled by default since so many parents seem clueless it even exists.
Turn it off and its just the way it already is now.
Your new additional system puts trust that those who wrote the system will not end up exposing which tokens were used for your accounts by your ID that is linked to it. Either because the program was written for the government or corporations to do so, or eventually incompetence leading to exploit that exposes it.
Only proposal I’ve liked is being able to buy tokens at a store without any ID being logged and buying new ones when it expires. Like the mullvad VPN gift cards.