Okay you are ready to take a stand for freedom!
You are going to use an OS that isn’t going to bend the knee and comply with age verification laws. I solute you, comrade!
Here are the likely consequences of your choice:
The Feds aren’t coming after you. You aren’t going to be out on a watch list.
What will likely happen is that if you try to log into your Facebook account you will get a message that says “Your Operating System is not currently supported. Your user experience will be limited to Groups labeled “Everyone”.”
That’s basically it. Your personal user experience will be limited to “kid friendly” areas of the Internet. (Same with apps and games.)
That’s the real driver of these laws. Facebook and other app producers know that the days where they can just shrug off child predators using their products is coming to and end. Regardless of your opinion on age verification is as a solution, child predators are a real world problem and it’s not just the parents fault. The platforms have some responsibility too.
Which is exactly what Facebook and the others specifically don’t want -responsibility for their own platforms. That’s why they are pushing for these laws that off load their responsibility onto the OS makers. Then they can just say “Oh, we don’t have any responsibility for this child being abused in our platform. We asked the OS what the user’s age was and the OS reported 18+. What else could we have done?”
So, that’s the consequence if you choose to use an OS that refuses to comply. You’ll just be relegated to the kid friendly version of website, games, and applications.
(On the other hand, if your OS chooses to falsely report to a website or an app an age for a child that is abused, then the OS should also be held responsible. But at that point you can go ahead and blame the parents too for letting their child use an OS that isn’t safe for them to use.)
I diagree. Look at Privacy Policies and ToS. They are extremely invasive. Basically they say more or less “we will do whatever we want”. Why? Because no one reads them or cares, and they want to CYA in any and all situations. Now picture you want to navigate to a website, but the website creator is afraid that, one way or another, some adult content may find it’s way their website, so what do they do? Age-gate it. And now they’ve shirked any responsibility for such content. Every god damn website, the entire internet, will be age-gated. Not just Facebook and Reddit. Children and privacy-concerned adults will not be able to access the internet. And no one will care. That’s where we’re headed.
I’m not sure what you are disagreeing with. That’s generally what I said. If you use a non-compliant OS, your experience will be “age-gated”.
Though I don’t think they will completely block access entirely. Collecting data on kids is extremely valuable to these companies, because kids grow up to be consumers. They will happily continue to let you in, but you won’t be able to go to the 18+ areas.
That’s basically it. Your personal user experience will be limited to “kid friendly” areas of the Internet.
I’m disagreeing with this. I’m saying there will be no “kid-friendly” areas of the internet, outside of areas that are explicitly for children.
I don’t understand. There will still be porn sites for people.
The way it will work is that when you tell your browser to go to a porn site, the site will ask your Bowser for your verified age. Your browser will then ask your OS for your verified age. Your OS will respond “18+” to your browser. Your browser will tell the porn site “the OS says 18+”. Then the porn site will say “Cool, here’s the porn.” That’s it.
If you use a non-compliant OS, then your browser will say to the porn site “I asked the OS and the OS says ‘null’.” Then the porn site will say, “Well sorry. Then your OS isn’t supported. Come back when you are using a supported OS.”
That’s it.
The browsers sooner or later will always respond “18+” and do not ask the OS.
… And if a kid using that browser was abused because the browser lied to the website about the users’ age, then the browser’s creators should bare some consequences for lying to the website that otherwise would have put up protections. Right?
Ever heard of parents? It’s not the job of the OS or the browserto monitor and control a kids internet access.
In most jurisdictions you need to be an adult to legally get an Internet access.
So people using the Internet are either adults or under the supervision of adults.
No, absoluetly not. Because the whole thing is notnto protect the children, but to gather more data.
Do you also believe that the Boy Scouts and the Catholic Church also have no responsibility to protect kids, because doing to would similarly require collecting data on people?
(I would disagree with you if you said yes, but I’ll respect your position for being consistent.)
Collecting data on kids is extremely valuable to these companies, because kids grow up to be consumers.
This is not true. From an adtech perspective, child user data is virtually worthless. Because COPPA exists, most demand platforms (including those outside COPPA jurisdiction) simply will not issue any bid for that type of traffic. To try to bypass this, sketchy publisher groups will try to issue a regs.coppa=0 in their bid requests with the justification of “we couldn’t determine that info”. COPPA is largely self-reporting based if you didn’t know.
Outside of that, what you are describing is called the Chilling Effect. It is were legitimate activities on a site are restricted out of fear that they may break a vaguely worded law. This is a genuine concern and one that federated services had when Lemmy first started to take off. Instance owners were faced with the possibility that without CSAM detection processes in place that they could be held liable for that material being present on their instance.
I don’t think that COPPA says that companies can’t collect data on kids l at all. Just that there are limitations on how they can use that data while the kids are still kids. When the kids grow up then the previously collected data is fair game. (Why the do you think Facebook, YouTube, Amazon, etc. are so willing to invest in “for Kids” products?)
And, we’ll probably disagree on this, but I generally think that people and companies that provide a service are responsible for that service. That includes the Boy Scouts, the Catholic Church, and Lemmy hosts. And everyone in between. (Including parents, but the responsibility is no only on them alone.)
Right now? Nothing. Down the road, life in prison for terrorism. I’d suggest moving away from that jurisdiction
If their goal is to find an excuse to declare you a terrorist then there are much easier ways to do that that are already available to them. This really isn’t an efficient way to do that.
And, as best as I’m aware, no age verification laws anywhere threaten any consequences for the user. The consequences are only for the OS makers.
(Granted, the California law, at least, could be read to say that it’s the entity installing the OS to confirm ages, not necessarily the OS maker. So for most Linux distros that would shift the user age verification responsibility completely to the user installing the OS, but I’m not sure how that would work out in courts or whether websites and applications would recognize that. It will probably never actually be an issue that is adjudicated.)
Yet
This entire post is the frog sitting in their comfortable pot of water saying “This is fine, nothing to worry about!”
Exactly. I’m super surprised how many people are just kind of OK with all of this.
“It’s just a date, you can lie, don’t worry”
“It’s just your ID, if you’re over 18, don’t worry.”
“They’re only looking for criminals, if you’re not a criminal, don’t worry”
“They’re only looking for people who don’t act like them, look like them, believe the things they believe, vote the way they do, speak the way they do, so as long as you match them exactly, don’t worry”
My biggest frustration with the community is not that people don’t like the proposed solution but that
- There is so much flat denial that there is actually a major online child predator problem, and/or
- No one should be held responsible to fix it, and/or
- no one is offering alternative solutions.
I’m really not upset with individual users here. I understand that you are removed from the problem and don’t understand it. I really don’t blame you personally. I have had training on youth protection and it’s not an easy problem, and just throwing the parents under the bus isn’t fair. When it comes to child predators, they are often just as much the victims as the kids are. (Yes, I mean that.)
I’m upset with the EFF. They don’t have an excuse for their ignorance. They’ve been taught the problem many times and just refuse to acknowledge it. (Red flag if there ever was one, if you ask me.) If they didn’t like the verification rules then they need to start proposing alternative solutions (which they don’t have).
