A lot of issues require holding two ideas in your head at once. Age verification chips away at privacy and internet freedom. It likely also reduces harm to some/many/whatever children, even if it’s imperfect and won’t stop everyone. The interesting question is where the right trade off sits. People often end up arguing only one side.
Massively downplaying it to say "chips away" this takes a sledgehammer to the core of internet privacy. In all cases in the world where this has been done before like China or Russia, freedom is also lost shortly after. Of course people only argue one side, the stakes are losing internet privacy and freedom in the entire world if the west also succumbs to these authoritarian policies. It isn't the government's job to prevent your child from getting access to a phone/ipad, that's your job as a parent.
I think you’re proving my point a little. You’re treating the costs as obvious and enormous, while treating any potential benefits as essentially zero.
Revolutions have been fought over the freedom to act without constant surveillance. The obviousness and enormity of a need for privacy is well established.
We have to accept that there are policies with obvious and enormous downsides and essentially zero upsides, because they exist and get tried from time to time.
Eastof (and the article) are providing an argument that this is one of those times. A pretty reasonable one too, I forget the implementation details of the UK scheme but in Australia and most of Europe the authoritarian bent of the people implementing these age restriction bans is concerning - it looks like they're setting up a general purposes minority targeting systems. I'm not sure how they're going to justify that and I don't recall seeing anyone make a reasonable argument to justify it yet beyond "We can and we're going to. Trust us and think of the children".
Your argument seems to be that the issue is more nuanced than anyone else is saying, which is cool and all but then it sits with you to identify what the nuances you want to talk about are. Pointing out that someone else has identified different tradeoffs than you have is something of a given since that is the case with almost any pairing of people.
It’s possible to verify age without disclosing identity. The German national ID (smartcard) allows this, but I’m not aware of any online service making use of the feature. I suppose it’s used offline by cigarette vending machines though.
>China or Russia, freedom is also lost shortly after.
This may come as a shock but neither China or Russia had their first encounter with losses of individual freedom in the 1990s. This is what the OP is talking about, this is the kind of shibboleth of online libertarianism that has little to do with real world policy outcomes. You'll find many similar laws concerning child safety in Norway that you find in China, different political systems and cultures can value the same things, even implement similar laws, without converging on the same political system.
In most countries on earth protecting children is a collective job, not a parents private business. A functioning and safe social fabric is a condition for successful families.
Just worth mentioning one data point. In the US 50% of young men (aged 18-49) now participate in online betting or gambling, likely as a consequence of the saturation of ads on social media and gaming platforms. Good luck with your parental responsibility when an entire country operates like this.
I mean, you're cutting off the qualifier with your selected quote. They are clearly talking about online freedom:
> this takes a sledgehammer to the core of internet privacy. In all cases in the world where this has been done before like China or Russia, freedom is also lost shortly after.
Russia's first online censorship was for truly abhorrent things. It moved on to become a ban on things the government didn't like. The book "The Red Web" does an excellent job detailing how this downward slide took place. It wasn't overnight, but it was a constant effort by those in power to erode privacy and freedom, and the first step was putting in place a basic censorship apparatus.
>It wasn't overnight, but it was a constant effort by those in power to erode privacy and freedom
yes because Russia is a dictatorship. These recent age limits on social media have had broad public support and are widely supported by parents. Not having your kid grow up on a combination of porn, gambling and body dysphoria and their data exfiltrated by a US mega-corporation isn't the dawn of internet censorship. What about the privacy of children and the ability to grow up outside of the morass of commercial surveillance platforms?
Having your kids grow up free from that crap doesn't make you China, it makes you ca 1990s Denmark. Japan and China both have strict gun control laws, but Japan's a democracy. People are free to live by different values than Americans, just screaming red scares isn't going to convince anyone.
> Having your kids grow up free from that crap doesn't make you China
Who said that it does? I think you're kind of missing the point here, and it seems rather intentional to be honest.
> their data exfiltrated by a US mega-corporation isn't the dawn of internet censorship
Instead, all adults must submit their PII to those same "US mega-corporations" to verify that they are adults. You realize that the social media companies absolutely love this, right? They support this.
What internet privacy? Look at the sites this is being enforced on and tell me with a straight face you have privacy accessing those. Even for sites like X i'd argue truly anonymous users are horrible to have. Users should be accountable for what they say online in common public spaces. You want free speech and anonymity go to those spaces not facebook and X.
I don't think facebook needs some kind of age verification scheme at all. They are already fully aware of how old their users are. The kids post photos and messages every birthday. They use these platforms talk with their school friends. The platforms know who the children are. They already target them with ads and algorithmic manipulations accordingly. They don't need our biometric data to know that we're adults, they just want it anyway and this is their excuse.
Platforms can't know what the false positive and false negative rates are simply from cases where a user is thought to be a minor and proves otherwise. Even if the law were written better, for example to say that 95% accuracy is acceptable, platforms would still have to verify id from at least a random sampling of thought-to-be-adult users, which doesn't help you if you're one of the ones randomly selected.
We need some kind of verification system that gives no extra information about users to the platforms, but I don't know if there's a true ZK way; it might require government involvement. I think that's fine. Govts could certainly run an age-verification system, give a signed yes or no token back to the user, with some permanently applied jitter per person so that platforms can't use cookies from returning users to figure out their birthday. As long as the government program has strict oversight to ensure it's not saving information about who's visiting what sites, it seems fine, or at least vastly better than entrusting photos of IDs to private 3rd parties.
"Meta, which owns Facebook, Instagram and Threads, began closing teen accounts from 4 December last year. It said anyone mistakenly kicked off could use government ID or provide a video selfie to prove their age."
So the bulk is done as you say but they still need* an age verification system for when they over-stepped.
* need here is because of the way the laws were written AFAIK.
We have a solution for that: parental controls. The new feature is that parental controls are enabled by default and cannot be disabled without the phone manufacturer's consent. The upcoming feature is that this also applies to non-adult sites like Facebook and YouTube. It's nothing less than the end of the free, open, and anonymous internet.
TL;DR don't make everyone prove they're an adult (and thus who they are). Put the kids into the daycare if that's what you want the law to be.
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Don't let the kids wander Las Vegas / the adult section of town (the Internet) unsupervised?
Or even better:
Have any website that's intended for children make a Legal Claim that they are rated Child Safe / Friendly so they fall under Advertising Law coverage and/or soliciting a minor.
Then have user agents (browsers) used by children configured to limit them to those places. Or even pay for a special VPN that limits access to those places.
> It likely also reduces harm to some/many/whatever children,
While increasing harm to many others. Nobody ever wants to mention that part. It is not a clear "child safety" win. Personally I think it's probably a significant net loss.
counterexample, the government could quickly institute a law stating that individuals knowingly allowing children to access tik tok must pay a fine. instead, government has teamed up with big business ... ostensibly to save the kids, however these actions conveniently benefit government and business alike (because ad tech can now seperate AI from human activity, and police/three letter orgs are granted automated citizen tracking). big fan of collectively considering contrasting ideas man but yeah i dont see how its ever going to be in the common mans best interests for the public and private sectors to team up.
Wouldn't a lot of the harm to adults and children be reduced if those companies went back to non-algorithmic feeds? No stupid discoveries based on searches, web history, fingerprints, or friends's interest. Just plain popularity and time sequence like they used to do before they went all aggro about finding ways to get you to consume the most inane, insipid and or crass and degueulasse shit they can to get more eyeballs and time on their services. Ban that --even in the best of cases, why continue to subject adults to that deluge?
A point I don’t often see made is: the argument that “the parents need to parent” is unintentionally classist.
Wealthier people who can afford to have one parent stay home or have babysitters or nannies who will actually supervise the kid can do a much better job monitoring and redirecting than when both parents work long hours and have no money.
So poorer kids are going to spend more time scrolling brain rot, which may lead to worse academic performance and concentration problems. They’re also more likely to get sucked into any number of garbage social media propagated cults, wacko ideologies, and dumb fads.
They cost money or take many hours of time. Many families have neither.
For the record I’m not a fan of the way this stuff is being pushed. At the same time, I feel like a lot of people are totally out of touch on a lot of the reasons why some people support this.
> They cost money or take many hours of time. Many families have neither.
The time can be amortized. Parental controls don't have to be set up in one sitting. Take the phone away for 2-3 weeks (during summer break if there is one), spend 20 minutes (almost) every day adding parental controls, and give the phone back after everything has been set up. Allowlist websites and password-block app downloads. Child needs the phone on weekdays? Instead add parental controls once or twice a week, across 4-6 weeks.
The parents are already shelling out for a smartphone (because dumb phones are getting harder to buy, because peer pressure, because advertising, because some schools assign smartphone-based tasks, but nevertheless). The money aspect of elitism is a sunk cost. The next obstacle is the technical literacy aspect of elitism. What the parents need is the knowledge to use parental controls and the understanding that parental usage of parental controls should be almost not optional. I know most parents won't seek all of that knowledge on their own because lack of knowledge begets lack of enthusiasm, so this is where the government should be stepping in. (Also, the government should mandate that all stock Android/iOS devices have parental control features without necessarily mandating that the manufacturers or sellers turn those controls on before sale.) Have schools send emails and snail mails with big bold scary letters in English and Spanish: This Will Affect Your Child's Grades. Please Put Parental Controls On Your Child's Devices. Come To Our PTA Meetings About Parental Controls And Watch The Recordings If You Can't Attend.
It also ignores social pressure entirely. If everyone in your class is on some social network and your parents parent and you aren't then you are socially outcast from a major part of your peer socialisation.
If only 50% of parents enforce the rules suddenly half your class isn't there and it doesn't become such a big deal to be missing out and it's less appealing for the kids who are allowed still.
I'd prefer it to be voluntarily organised like https://www.waituntil8th.org/ but even a bad solution is going to have a major improvement on society even if social media is less private due to the ID issue. It's not like you don't share everything with these companies anyhow. I'm pretty confident that if you are a regular user of any large social network today they could identify you 100% of the time already even without your ID.
I'll take that over everyone being forced to accept the same, standardized, government-mandated "cults, wacko ideologies, and dumb fads", thanks!
Government makes everyone poorer through their terrible policies -> parents need to work more to stay above water -> nanny state must grow to take care of kids -> terrible government policies entrench. Nope, don't want it
OP here. So I've also been running a survey about how developers are feeling about AI (added a link to the post) and 60% of respondents said that using AI actively makes them more tired. Most also report being more productive with AI. One would think these two things combined make up for initiatives for shorter work weeks and the like, but from what I've seen, at least for now, the opposite seems to be happening.
P.S. Sample size is currently small but I've also gathered a fair amount of qualitative data to indicate both of these things. Of course measuring productivity is also far from a science.
Shorter work weeks don't mean less work though. Not from the point of view of management, at least. It just means that 5 days are now compressed to 4, probably making the problem much worse and burn out much more likely.
In my experience, this is what ended up happening.
When you work for someone, you’re selling hours of time. Reducing days means you’re selling fewer hours. That has always been possible but they’ll probably want to pay less.
I outsource a bunch of things in life. Different things at different stages of life. Some of those things I have outsourced I don’t dislike doing myself. But often it comes down to freeing up time and, to some extent, keeping money flowing back to people in my community.
I think a key goal of senior management at any big company in the last 6 months is to make rank and file fungible or obsolete. It’s one big experiment. There are precedents like the Industrial Revolution. Things get worse for the workers for a generation or so.
I've worked at Amazon since 2018 and they've always talked about the software engineers being fungible during my tenure there. Technically everyone is supposed to be able to do everything, but in practice it's a huge headache if you want to hire for a more specialized role. They started creating some, like Frontend Engineer and Embedded Systems Engineer, but in practice these are still extremely broad
> There are precedents like the Industrial Revolution. Things get worse for the workers for a generation or so.
And things only got better post-Industrial Revolution when labor organized and forced the issue.
There's no guarantee that will work again if labor has reduced leverage due to AI reducing their value.
I think in one way or another this all works itself out, but I'm not convinced it won't be a very painful (and possibly violent) transition to whatever comes next.
Also nobody talks enough about the fact that workforce is effectively cut out from the means of productions. Even with the capital at hand blackwell cabinets are all sold out, contracted to the big providers.
There are paralles to the industrial revolution, but it seems the working class is cut out from being able to deny labor in exchange for better conditions.
I am also increasingly worried by the potential for violence here. This is a social experiment that is harming the daily lives of millions of people in very obvious ways already. The environmental costs for the data centres are not insignificant. The economic damage from allowing AI to have so much funny money when it doesn't make much real money to justify it could be disastrous on a generational scale. Governments aren't making any serious attempt to regulate and if anything are drinking the Kool-Aid. We might be on a path that literally collapses the established Western capitalist order within a generation but historically societal change of that scale usually has a body count and I have no idea what comes afterwards.
The actual Industrial Revolution labor wars happened because workers were being maimed, killed, and disposed of with zero legal recourse. The Ludlow Massacre in 1914 ended with the Colorado National Guard machine-gunning a tent colony and burning women and children alive. The Battle of Blair Mountain in 1921 had the United States Army bombing American coal miners from biplanes. Pinkertons routinely shot organizers. The Triangle Shirtwaist Fire killed 146 garment workers because management locked the exit doors to prevent unauthorized breaks. Coal miners were paid in company scrip redeemable only at company stores in towns the company also owned and policed. Black workers attempting to organize in the South were lynched. Children were maimed in textile mills.
A software engineer getting four months severance after a layoff exists in a different universe from this so no. There is no precedent. Don't you dare talk about the industrial revolution because its not even in the parking lot of the ballpark.
You should look past the screen and see what's going on. War is not the same; violence against humanity is not the same.
You're right, it's not in the ballpark. It's at the gates. The game isn't on simply because they poisoned the opponent in the duggout.
It's time. It needs to stop now while the body count is low. This isn't about some dev getting severence. They've taken away the street sweeper position and are watching us eat each other.
I'm curious how much you have tuned your CLAUDE.md file. You can get very specific and direct about what your expectations/desires are. You can also have another agent do a critical review with your expectations/desires and feed that back.
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