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 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.
Oh thank god we can protect the human traffickers’ right to make a profit off abused women from slums 😍 I was so worried
That’s obvious.
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?
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.)
That is a completely different premise. A) putting “Catholic church” and “protect children” in the same sentence is already a bold move B) if I place my child in the boy scouts I do have some expectations on them to protect the child, correct. But that’s not the all or nothing situation you mentioned in your example
My point is the same as with DNS Blocking: It is proposed under the umbrella of “think about the kids”, but it doesn’t work for what they propose it and it is a first step in creating the base of a censorship infrastructure. The govements (and by that I mean all of them not just the US) should hold the platform’s accountable for shit they mess up now and don’t accept “Sorry we can’t do that at scale” as an answer. Google and meta should act much harder on reports by the community. interestingly, they CAN act fast and hard for copyright stuff or other things which would reduce their earnings. As long as the governments won’t act based on existing measures, I can’t take any new ones serious
(3rd option: don’t accept the premise)
So you are going with: Deny the problem of child sexual predators exists at all.
There will always be sites that don’t care and won’t comply with any OS level restrictions in the first place. You will never solve this.
Also, in the USA - there’s no suggestions floating around for a 16 or under age ban on accessing social media, moreover, I’m not sure if that specifically is even constitutional.
And I’ll support strong laws that hold those sites accountable for negligence. I’m really struggling to see why this is so controversial.
Do not accept the premise of assholes.
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.
Perhaps we could update our software licenses to include “no implied babysitting”.
Yes it is. It absolutely is. If you provide a service, you should responsible for the safety of that service, especially if you are providing and advertising that service to kids.
You are misleading yourself.
Consider a vehicle. We understand that there is a threshold of age and responsibility to operating a vehicle safely, but we don’t hold the vehicle manufacturer responsible for driver error if the driver is under the age of licensing.
You are suggesting that an os maker can be held responsible for user decisions, which is both unenforceable and legally unsound.
Correct. Right now the OS maker is not responsible. That exactly why Meta is pushing so hard to change the laws to make them responsible.
Your analogy is a good analogy. In your car analogy, today, no one blames the car manufacturer for a drunk driver, but we do blame bars and bar tenders. In many states, bars have to be licensed and if the bar tender allows some one to get drunk and drive home the bar and the bar tender can be held liable. This situation would be like if bars got together to lobby state and national governments to make it so that the car manufacturers had to install breathalyzers in every car so that the bars could reduce their liability and responsibility.
I don’t think you’ve thought this analogy through, or else you haven’t had much experience with bars. Drinking establishments have a duty to “cut off” intoxication, but that ends at the door.
The us military has a history of being very interested in recruits from tweens and teens online. And obviously the us military isn’t alone in this.
If what you are suggesting is true, that “it’s all OK because protect the kids”, it would be fairly awkward to explain this practice.
I didn’t understand your disagreement. Yes just like a bar shouldn’t be responsible for a person that gets plastered drunk after they leave, Facebook shouldn’t be responsible for the actions of a predator that goes to a porn website to lure kids. Just like the Catholic Church shouldn’t be responsible for a public school teacher that rapes her students at school. The only times any of these organizations are responsible is when the abuses happen while using their services.
I don’t get why this is controversial.
I can’t speak for the military’s recruiting practices. Yes, I fully agree that the military’s recruitment practices are very predatory, and should be reigned in. Politically, I personally think “enlistment” shouldn’t be an option at all. It should be random draft. Every year the military should tell Congress how many new recuits they need, and Congress should approve a draft of 18 year olds for that many new recuits. The draft should be random, with no deferments or other ways out of service other than health reasons as determined by a military physician. (But that’s way off topic.)
At its core, neither an operating system nor a browser is a service. They are effectively data that the users are serving to themselves. There are certainly some operating systems and browsers that contain the ability to connect a service as a plugin or (I would say) maliciously include a connection to a service by default such as targeted advertising, but those services are neither the OS nor the browser.
Right. That’s why Facebook is trying to get the laws changed so that it’s the OS that is responsible.
There is a big conspiracy behind this, it’s just not a shadowy-government one.
I don’t know if you meant to, but you completely ignored the point. Your comment directly quoted @Dirk@lemmy.ml and edited out “OS” and “browser”. You then began talking about how “services” have an obligation.
EDIT: I jumbled usernames. My bad.
Right, I was making the point that just like the Boy Scouts and the Catholic Church can’t just shrug off their responsibility, online orgs don’t get a free pass either.
But if these laws are passed, then they will get a free pass, and just point at the OS maker as the problem. Be mad about that and I’m on your side.