Lawyer sues tech company

But we asked for the birthday

Lawyer points to law text

Company fined

I'm well old enough to satisfy these checks and I also do this. If I'm feeling productive, I'll pick a random date.

We should make a bet how long it will take before the ID databases get leaked.

Identification would need to be handled by a 3rd party to even remotely work. Then they pass on the "yes they're over 16" tick to the social media platform, with no actual identity details.

Edit: and likewise, Identity company have no details about the social media account name or anything. Just a token transfer of sorts.

Tech company's probably already have enough info to know a person age without requiring an id. They could even use ai for something actually useful

Yeah I agree with you on this. It'll protect them from the being de-clothed using AI as well. I understand wanting to share moments with your family because kids grow up fast but sharing it with these companies as an intermediary is not a good idea. Sadly I don't have a solution for them aside from setting up a decentralized social network like Pixelfed or Frendica but that requires skill and patience.

I DGAF about your kids.

Preach!

One of the craziest wtf moment of my life resulted from an oversharing parent.

At a hot summer day a few years back someone posted a picture of them barbequing in their backyard to our company's "off topic" teams chat. Nothing unusual. I was over at a friends place so I send back a picture of us sitting in lawnchairs having a beer. In comes the third colleague, first time father with a roughly 1.5 year old at the time. So he posts a picture of his kid running around in his backyard. Completly naked, full frontanl nudity.

It took me a minute to recollect and I messaged him to please take down the picture. I know he didn't mean any harm and was just sharing his hot-summer-weekend expirence ... and he did realise his blunder and took it down. But wtf mate?

After that I immediately googled how to clear my teams' app image cache ...

Okay, that is fucking awesome. LOL.

That is both hilarious and a brilliant solution.

"being angry about inaction on climate change" hahaha

In my country they talked about this. And they thought of a different approach.

The government were to emit anonymous digital certificates after validate your identity. And then the websites were only required to validate these anonymous digital certificates.

Or even it was talk that the government could put a certificate validation in front of the affected ip.

So the bussiness won't have your ip. Only a verification by the government that you are indeed over certain age.

Any stonger, and they wander into China "Great Firewall" territory.

Lets not make every country into an authoritarian shithole.

I wonder if Facebook and other apps will add/push education elements in order to become exempt.

I doubt it, and if they do, they'll classify a whole bunch of nonsense as educational content in order to do so, e.g. religious content as science.

Huh, I thought all kids immediately say they were born in 1969

The law does not require users to upload government IDs as part of the verification process.

No, it merely requires the sites to provide an alternative, such as face scanning using a mobile phone unlock. Using a computer ? Then you'll have hand over your ID.

The law also explicitly gives sites the right to onsell private information if its outlined in the terms of agrrement.

People should lie about as much as possible to most companies they interact with online anyway (obviously don't lie to your bank, or doctor, or whatever). Do always, without fail, lie randomly about your age, gender, address (if it's not relevant) or anything else that's not actually needed to provide the service.

It's a good thing we wiped out covid and will never need students to use Zoom again!

Oh, wait

That would require us paying one parent enough to cover the other parent being a child care expert. But nobody gets to profit off of that so fuck society, everybody works, and nobody gets community goods except the wealthy.

This isn't even delegating. It's more of an equivalent of stuffing your fingers into your ear holes and going "nanananan CAN'T HEAR YOU"

Parents should be Parenting?

If they haven't been parenting what have they been doing for the last 40 years?

And if thwy have been parenting how's that workout for us so far?

There's been no age ban on social media since the internet was founded but there's record mental health crisis on young people.

Yeah! Parents should totally be allowed to give their car keys to their 14 year old to go out and drive drunk if they feel their kid can handle it.

It is easier to enforce access than to enforce ethical algorithm. Sadly, it is not perfect, but it is better than allowing it.

I mean, yeah. But also, this isn't really any different from kids not being allowed to drink alcohol before a specific age, movies and video games having age minima, etc etc.

And I would surmise the same reasoning applies: On average, someone so young has neither the mental development nor the life experience to be able to judge well what they are doing with their own information and how to judge/process the information they get shown.

Of course, this should happen in conjunction with actual education, like I at least had for alcohol and stuff. But it's an entirely normal thing if it happens as part of a multi-step process (and I am not australian enough to judge how well those things work out in australia in general).

100% agree. I think it's a good space for libraries to enter too. Internet literacy, media literacy and critical thinking skills are sorely needed to be taught today.

As if those drug literacy courses helped anyone. We were taught about it aged 12 or something, when nobody really had a clue what drugs are. Around the age where it matters, it was all but forgotten.

thats a lot of work for the government dude, let them take the easy path

i don't think the always thrown around "more education" is an effective answer to everything

you can educate kids up and down about the harms of smoking- if smoking is advertised as cool in popular media, there are cigarettes with colorful and fruity flavors, and it's easy for the kids to obtain then they will inevitably smoke cigarettes. everybody has known smoking causes cancer for a half century know.

if you don't want kids smoking, then you must act with force to restrict something. whether it's the restriction on subliminal advertising, the ban on colorful cigarettes, or prohibition of selling to underage smokers- you need some sort of ban.

i firmly believe in the near future we will view social media as we know it similar to how we see smoking. addictive little dopamine hits that will over time change the structure of your brain. we look back at the 50s and think it was crazy how they smoked cigarettes on airplanes, drank whiskey at work, and everyone bathed in lead and asbestos. they're going to look back at our time period and see us similarly

so if I were to say "should kids be using social media?" I wholeheartedly believe they should not be using it until their brains are developed. much like I don't think kids should be smoking cigarettes, drinking alcohol, or smoking weed

but the ultimate question is- what are the potential harms of a government ban and are those potential harms worth it?

that's where I am conflicted. a minor not being able to buy cigarettes is something that I don't really think hurts society very much.

but a ban on a minor accessing certain online spaces.. how do you accomplish that? well, you will need to track people's identities online somehow. this is the part where I think maybe the harms of kids using social media is not worth giving the government power to monitor and regulate social media websites.

I've said this before, and I'll keep saying it, we need better terms than "social media." Tumblr, Reddit, and Lemmy I don't think should be in the same group as Facebook, Twitter, etc. Social media that uses your real life information should be separate from basically forums that use an online persona.

I don't know what this legislation says, but I agree with you. It should be limited to restricting the "personal social media," not glorified internet forums.

I think that the chances of a kid from a broken home finding an exploiter online is much more likely than that kid finding a helpful, supportive community.

This ban does nothing.

Anything that does not force ID verification is useless.

Anything that does verify ID would mean that adults also have to upload their IDs to the website.

What will happen is either this becomes another toothless joke. Or the government say "okay this isn't working, lets implement ID checks", and when that law passes Lemmy Instance Admins would be required to verify ID of any user from an Australia IP.

Y'all want that to happen?

So what hapoens if other countries start catching on and also pass such law?

Eventually the all internet accounts would be tied to IDs. Anonymity is dead.

This is good support for their mental health and development.

This is good pseudo-science.

Strange that the adults don't want those benefits for themselves also.

I don't know how they are going to do over there.

Here the plan for the same goal is force any social media company to request a digital certificate when entering, or directly overtaking the ip of the social media and force a certificate check to let the user through. This certificates would be expedited by the government to people over certain age.

The haven't implemented yet, as they were going to start using the system to ban porn for minors and got a lot of backslash.

It's technologically doable, some kid will always find a way to enter but vast majority will not (next to a bunch of adults that will stop using them because they cannot be bothered with the same system). Moral considerations aside.

Then it seems there is something other to fix in society than making sure facebook knows anything about that kid.

The Zuckerbergers of the world aren't the ones to trust with that.

I always wear a condom when I log into Facebook, so I should be safe

I know right. I used to be a kid who bypassed school firewalls and restrictions all the time. This is going to make no difference.

I work with tech security and once a corporate blog post I wrote got from 1,000 monthly views to 100k because kids were looking up proxy tool guides and it was for Roblox lmao

This law is incredibly illiterate

While specific platforms haven’t been named in the law, the rules are expected to apply to the likes of Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, and TikTok, per the Prime Minister. Sites used for education, including YouTube, would be exempt, as are messaging apps like WhatsApp.

Most kids are not going to pay a subscription for a VPN, I don't think that would be as big of an issue as you think.

Just because it isn't perfect it doesn't mean it's useless.

Just because there is no way to stop 100% of all crime it doesn't mean taking measures to reduce crime is futile.

There is a lot more to this than just blocking the site. It will also change social norms. Right now, if a 14 year old as social media, nobody bats an eye; but with the 16 year requirement, through all the sudden, parents aren't too comfortable with letting their 14 year old have social media. So not only will they need to find some free VPN totally not spyware to use (and even know that that exists and how to use), they will also have to hide it from their parents, as it is no longer socially acceptable for 14 year olds to have social media.

And before you say "Kids can easily get a free VPN and hide it." Never underestimate tech illiteracy.

Us right now are on a service that's totally going to follow this law. /s

Like what?

Often the things that seem mundane actually aren't

Like vaping is just tobacco 2.0.. and we don't need everyone to have easy access to guns (especially not kids). Networks like Facebook are so unmoderated at the moment they should be held to account.

Asbestos and engineered stone? Enough said

And that's mainly everything I can think of that's banned that I can think of...

why would parents need a justification to parent?

Yeah, there are adults (in both my generation and the previous one) who have fewer critical thinking skills than today's teens and young adults. This feels like a band-aid solution to avoid actually fixing the problems of (1) not teaching critical thinking and logic and (2) the toxic content, misinformation and disinformation on these platforms (I recognise the second one is much harder whilst trying to preserve security and privacy as well).

The older generations always think the younger generations are lazy and lesser. They don't believe they can parent because they know how shit they were at parenting. So they are voting to take away parental rights and give those rights to the government. And then say they are pro small government.

You know in the eyes of government, Lemmy is also social media.

People should be allowed to do as they please. I think, however, people should be presented with all the potential risks in very clear language if they're going to, in the same way a pack of cigarettes has a warning, access to social media should present similar disclaimers.

So even in perfect scenario where this ban "works" it would still have zero intended effect as teens can consume all of that rubbish but not talk back and can jolly continue any harm on "allowed apps" like wtf is even this supposed to do lmao

Wait what? The NDP supports this?!??

"This website is age restricted. Click 'Ok' to confirm your age."

Like that ever worked for porn.

"Oh, no! I'm not old enough for this site. I better not proceed."

I'd assume the law would include federated social media. And while that wouldn't prevent underage Australians to sign up with instances hosted elsewhere, it will impose restrictions on local ones, thus hurting the federation effort.

The damage to children’s lives done by social media is catastrophic.

I strongly disagree.

Social media is terrible for mental health especially for the youth. Phones and tablets help in some areas like motor control development but also hurt other places like attention deficiencies and critical thinking, and very rarely does it lead to a kid learning how technology works (that's usually from the computer nerds, aka kids who want a computer, doesn't happen even close to the same rate as smart phones.

Smart phones make people dumb. That's my opinion. But the above are scientifically backed.