The Kids Online "Safety" Act Will Be A Privacy Nightmare

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Responsibilty should be on parents/caregivers in my opinion.

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It’s plainly obvious to me that this has nothing to do with protecting children, but everything with controlling what information people have access to, identifying people who have accessed what the government considers ā€œbad informationā€, and consequently, controlling what people think and do.

Anonymous internet is a threat to tyranny.

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100% but fear sells

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THINK OF THE CHILDREN!!!111111111111

honka_animated-128px-16

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Verging conversation slightly…but it’s very scary how much targeted ads (already) appear from not only online activities (social media, or simple browsing), but I’m having friends report that simply conversation that is held ā€˜in front’ of their cell phones (and has never touched online otherwise), is being used to target ad them.
The latest example was those (and I do) using the big G as their cell service. Given this…there is no privacy (seems at least). Do we need aluminum foil faraday cages to converse privately anymore?
Falling back in total alignment with the original topic, privacy of online activities seem less important than spoken conversation. I’ll admit I want both to be private.

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Yes and no. Keep in mind that most of the time people, who make or propose these kind of laws, have no idea about the internet. Sometimes people give governments too much credit when it comes to being controlling. Often it’s just people having no clue about what they are doing or what problems will be created. Some people who support these proposals think they are doing the right thing, most have no clue and some have ulterior motives.

While the outcome is still shitty and problematic, it’s always a bit over the top to consider everyone involved as being evil and a supporter of tyranny. For me it’s a bit too extreme of an argument to make.

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For some of those involved, the argument of cluelessness may apply, but those who (want to) initiate such things know very well what they are doing!

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As they say, the path to hell is paved in good intentions.

Lots and lots of terrible things have occurred while trying to do what we thought was the best thing. I’m always inherently skeptical of casualties of anything. And this one has many possible poor outcomes and few good.

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Yea that’s what /me as a parent I do teach to my kids…
And no matter what anyone is doing it is on the care-takers to power the minds of children to grow up with the tools at hand to be able to craft life :wink:

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Yes, most of those who pass these laws usually don’t have a clue about anything. They are only the puppets of the corporations and do what they are told. If they don’t, they are quickly out of the picture. But they have a big clue about how to maintain their power and the existing conditions.

We are experiencing this very clearly in Germany right now … :nauseated_face:

It sounds like the sort of thing GO-OGLE would suggest the government do, while also providing the verification system.

Part of the issue here is that liberal democracies don’t appreciate civil liberties and don’t understand the potential consequences of their erosion. Tyrants are problems that other countries, which have a different set of values to us, deal with.

Case on point: A few years ago, a woman in Ireland was prosecuted for possession of child sexual abuse imagery - because she had received an image depicting child abuse on WhatsApp. She deleted the message, and blocked the phone number it was sent from - but the picture was still stored on another part of her telephone. People were shocked and confused by this, but the fact is that possession of images depicting child sexual abuse is a simple possession offence - and no allowance is made for a situation where a person unwittingly and unintentionally comes into possession of it. In this case, the Irish police force seized her mobile phone while executing a search warrant on her housemate for a completely unrelated matter, which had no bearing on her.

This case was treated as an unfortunate but necessary cost of protecting children, but it’s easy to imagine a not-so-nice government planting child sex abuse imagery on the devices of opposition politicians to destroy their credibility and justify arresting them. The fact that nobody thought that something like this could happen, or were worried about it, is a sign that we take civil liberties for granted. Now I don’t see our current government doing that, largely because Ireland is lucky to have a strong tradition of democracy and the rule of law - but such things don’t necessarily last forever.

It will take about 20 years for full consequences of censoring the information children see online becomes apparent. My gut feeling is that it will be pretty poor at stopping teenagers from accessing pornography, but will be extremely effective at denying them access to political discourse which big tech companies consider controversial.

This law is only necessary because parents are not trusted to control what their children access online. This a fair assessment of many parents, but only because IT skills are not taught well in schools (or not at all in some cases). When I have kids that are old enough to use a mobile phone/computer, I am going to make sure that the device and network are locked down so they cannot access pornographic material until they are old enough to understand what that is. It won’t be a perfect solution, but will be more effective than government tyrany.

As for cyber bullying, and other issues allegedly caused by social media, I will do my best to make sure that they feel comfortable talking to me when they are upset. Kids need to learn to develop resilience - it’s the number one thing that is lacking in any generation born since the mid 1980s. You don’t develop resilience by protecting your kids from any danger, but by having their back when they need it.

/end of rant

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that one or a linux phone. Unfortunately. Ironically typing this on an iphone.

The responsibility should be on those people who host the websites to make sure that the content is policed, and that guidelines, rules and laws are followed so that we can have a safe Internet for kids. Social media is the scourge of the World and the Internet. They are mainly the biggest problem. They should all be held accountable for the content and what happens on their platforms. End of story!

I have my misgivings about this, because it’s not clear what ā€œsocial mediaā€ is. Are we including a website like EndeavourOS Forum? What about a creative writing forum hosted by a high school kid?

I think social media companies should be held responsible for their deliberate actions. If they want to use their control over their platform to amplify hate speech and divisive content, they should be held accountable for that. However, expecting them to actively moderate content is dangerous IMO. While Meta or Twitter probably have the resources to moderate/filter content quite effectively, any company that wants to compete with them would be held to the same standard - thus creating a barrier to competition.

I’m quite happy for websites to decide their own moderation policies, and sites that want to turn themselves into cesspits like 4Chan can do so. This is a basic freedom of speech issue IMO.

No! I think we all know what the social media platforms are.

We both know what they are, but how do you define that in law and how sure can you be that a court will agree with our interpretation? You could try and limit it to a company with $X amount of turnover, where ā€œXā€ is a really big number. However, inflation could mean that $X is a very small number in 5-10 years time. You could limit it to companies that have X number of employees, but companies could get around that by relying on third party contractors and automation.

I mean the poor woman who was convicted for possession of child sexual abuse imagery almost certainly supported the aims of the law that saw her convicted of paedophilia. However, the way the law was drafted completely screwed her over. This is what happens when you try to legislate for a situation that is always changing and evolving - the law ends up having unintended harmful outcomes.

We do? A forum is social and I access it on media, why would this not be? The problem with so many things is it either needs to be unanimously agreed upon, or defined and then agreed to.

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