I’m asking for public policy ideas here. A lot of countries are enacting age verification now. But of course this is a privacy nightmare and is ripe for abuse. At the same time though, I also understand why people are concerned with how kids are using social media. These products are designed to be addictive and are known to cause body image issues and so forth. So what’s the middle ground? How can we protect kids from the harms of social media in a way that respects everyone’s privacy?
Stop. Giving. Them. Phones.
Stop whining. No they don’t need one. NO THEY DON’T.
No.
No they’re not special.
No they’re not too busy. Neither are you.
No iPad either.
Stop. Shut up. No. Phones.
And or old school phones, that can call and text, but not surf the internet. Old smaller flip phones. Because parents will want to be able to communicate because they are worriers in many cases, there is no need for them to use smartphones for this.
I agree, if you limit “phones” to “smart phones and portable computers”. There are reasons to give a kid a small, no internet dumbphone. But yes, don’t give kids unrestricted access to the family PC, and DEFINITELY dont give them their own.
That’s the tack I’m taking. My eldest goes to high school next year and most of his peers are automatically getting a smartphone at that point. He’ll be 13. He can forget it. A dumb phone at a push, for safety. That’s it.
I like “if you want a phone you can buy one”. If the kid’s up to getting and keeping a job long enough to save for a phone and service, good for them, they just proved they should be treated that much more like an adult. If not, then hey. Something to work towards
I had a dumbphone at 14, but back then we just called them phones and I was definitely in the 1% for having it. Wasn’t talking to my parents, bought it and a car to sleep in with drug money. Everyone grows up at a different pace
A dumb phone at a push, for safety.
I think that’s a good compromise.
ban social media metrics and information trading/markets. make it a truly anonymous service like it was in the early 2000s.
if protecting children was the point they would stop corporations from identifying all users and selling their identities/profiles online.
but, protecting the children is NOT the point. the point is control of freedom of speech, or rather who gets to have the freedom of speech.
Most people don’t want social media to be anonymous. They want to be themselves and connect with real people. How exactly is an anonymous tinder supposed to work?
Blind dating
/s
Glory holes
the great thing about the early internet was that you had the choice to expose yourself.
now you don’t even need to be a member to be exposed.
And banning non anonymous social media is supposed to bring the choice back?
ban social media metrics and information trading/markets.
try reading that again.
“make it a truly anonymous service”
Reading what you said?
Kill the engagement algorithm. Your feed should contain a chronological list of posts made by people you subscribe to. In one stroke you could end the doomscroll - not just for kids, but for everybody. Also, infinite scrolling should be banned.
Your feed should contain a chronological list of posts made by people you subscribe to
Should that be the only way the feed should be organised by law?
in my opinion, yes. the point is to make it less addictive- and this will take away some of the ‘fun’ without isolating kids. social media is entertainment that has been branded and marketed as an essential by the people getting rich off it. i find plenty of good things on youtube without ever signing in - i just search for them. if youtube or whoever wants to use its own ad space to promote channels, i think that is probably ok - provided that the choice is not personalized by an algorithm.
How is this even remotely enforceable?
It will destroy curation. It’s an absurd concept.
I think it’s unrealistic also. I think a better solution is simply to ban endless scrolling. Require them to use pages is enforceable, and remove a proven addicting aspect to social media.
The German passport allows services to verify age through you NFC reading your passport on your phone and confirmation of validity through intermediates state service. All they see is a confirmation of age requirement met. No name, no age, no address, no face.
Some other countries have similar systems. It’s already a EU directive to be implemented on a broader European level.
This sounds like a much better strategy than the Australian model of simply scanning your face and using AI to guess your age
How would that work online? How would they confirm it’s your passport, and that it’s a real passport that was really scanned (instead of a browser plugin)?
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EIDAS
- https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personalausweis_(Deutschland)#eID-Funktion
- Register as a service, with justification why you need to be able to read the fields or properties you say you need
- Upon acceptance, aquire a digital permission certificate
- Set up a server, that handles communication with the ID
- For a request, prove you own the permission cert through a challenge sent by the ID document
- ID document proves through a challenge to the server that it is what it is (a set of produced ID documents use the same private and public keys so they are not personally identifiable / associatable to an individual)
- User enters PIN so that this process can proceed
- Open secured connection between server and ID document
- Server can request/challenge age verification, and the ID document answers with “is met”
At least the Wikipedia page is not detailed/technical on step 8, but if you were to attempt to man-in-the-middle, you could not because you can’t fake identifying as a valid ID document, which is ensured by the challenge and private/public key cryptography.
I’ll need to look into it a bit more, but I’m skeptical that this will work in practice:
How can they confirm that I’m the owner of the passport? How do you prevent them from selling the fields they requested, that have been uniquely linked to you? How do you prevent the government from keeping track of all the services you’re using?
The first factor is you physical passport, the second factor is your pin.
I don’t see how an age verification could prevent selling verified age. Once they acquire data they could theoretically sell it, illegally, if they ignore law.
The point is, you can share a small subset of fields without others. No need to share your face or passport number.
I’m not sure about whether the authority knows about the request and response at all. I previously thought so, but this description did not mention it, and it doesn’t seem technically required, if both sides can verify public key/cert validity independently, and then communicate with each other.
Maybe its time for parents to parent their fucking kids…
I think we should reframe the question.
How can we protect adults from the harms of not being able to post meaningless bullshit anonymously to online anonymous strangers we never agree with without sacrificing everyones children’s mental stability?
Maybe put childrens rights before adult rights. Adults had fun and got along fine without social media back before the 2000’s. I refuse to believe that we are no longer capable of that. Especially if it means kids get to to go back to using the internet as a resource for homework and playing outside and using their own imaginations. Adults too.
You can’t, however you frame this issue there’s going to be a sacrifice. We have to all digest this.
The best kind of sacrifice you can make though for the best outcome is to limit your child’s screen-time, AND ALSO YOUR OWN. Spend more time together, practice what you preach, you are also a child being harmed by social media.
The book The Anxious Generation by Jonathan Haidt had a really clever idea. Create a regulation for operating systems that requires that their parental controls include an option that labels a device as belonging to a kid. When that option is toggled, requests will include some sort of header that labels the request as originating from a kid. Then, place onus (probably through some sort of legislation) on web platforms to restrict what content is shown to kids.
consider though - politicians nowadays don’t think. they think so little, in fact, that the last time i checked websites for self harm/sexual assault support or reporting were considered “too adult” for kids to have access to in the UK
if it was about kids’ safety, this wouldn’t have been omitted
Yeah, there’s no doubt in my mind that this tide of “think of the kids” is just a fascist dogwhistle (and one with a double-entendre at that).
You should read the Anxious Generation. It goes into a lot of detail on research showing the damage social media has had on an entire generation. It’s pretty undeniable that something needs to be done to stop/control social media’s influence on children and teens in their crucial development years. There are some people that are definitely using it as a cover for control, but there are plenty of well educated people that see a real problem and are trying to do the best they can to find a solution.
I mentioned it in my original comment! I thoroughly enjoyed it. As an older member of Gen Z, a lot of what’s written there jives with my lived experience and the intuitions I’ve developed around social media. And as a relatively young father, I’m also invested in figuring out how to give my kids the healthiest relationship with the online world possible.
I’m also a strong proponent of digital freedom and privacy. A lot of the age verification technology that’s being rolled is tied to companies like Palantir or organizations like DHS, which seem to have a rather unambiguous interest in neither the freedom nor the privacy (nor really the general wellbeing) of the populace.
I’m of the opinion that any system that could enable or facilitate mass surveillance is not an acceptable solution to the problem of protecting kids online.
The idea I laid out in my original comment was inspired by the idea Jonathan Haidt presents in Chapter 10 (What Governments and Tech Companies Can Do Now), Section 3 (Facilitate Age Verification), 6th paragraph:
There is not, at present, any perfect method of implementing a universal age check. There is no method that could be applied to everyone who comes to a site in a way that is perfectly reliable and raises no privacy or civil liberties objections.[26] But if we drop the need for a universal solution and restrict our focus to helping parents who want the internet to have age gates that apply to their children, then a third approach becomes possible: Parents should have a way of marking their child’s phones, tablets, and laptops as devices belonging to a minor. That mark, which could be written either into the hardware or the software, would act like a sign that tells companies with age restrictions, “This person is underage; do not admit without parental consent.”
You should listen/read Steve Gibson’s podcast episode from Security Now that goes over Zero Knowledge Proofs: https://www.grc.com/sn/sn-1034.htm
It seems like the ideal solution that can be implemented if we take the time to do it right.
Thanks for the read, I learned something today! I worry, though, that even if someone could devise a ZPK for age verification, can end-users actually trust that platforms are using it? Say for example Meta provides a biometric-based ZPK for age. Can we trust that they’re not harvesting our biometric data? In the podcast’s examples, it’s easy for Peggy and Victor to understand that they are using a ZPK system. However, the age verification problem most often arises in arrangements where the prover is using a client app into whose inner workings they have no insight (either because it’s closed source, they’re not technologically literate enough, or who has the time to scrutinize the source code for every program they use) and which is most likely developed by the verifier. So the problem kind of moves upstream: how can you trust that ZPK is actually being used?
That’s why zero trust itself is so important. The only way it can be guaranteed is to have an open standard that is zero trust, so nobody is able to abuse it and the lay person doesn’t have to trust anyone. Not to mention if it is implemented correctly, there is no data to even trust them with, given there was zero knowledge of the end user. It would require a governing body to be competent enough to implement it, but I like to dream big
I like to think I’m a tech savvy parent and the amount of tooth gnashing to setup and maintain child accounts is incredible. I’m convinced the foxes guarding the henhouse are using dark patterns to make parents give up.
Why can’t I just get a notification on my phone saying “Hey, kiddo wants to have screen time. Approve?”
Hell, I’d love a notification saying “Kiddo started watching Mr. Blah.” If I got the notification and I didn’t want them watching that, I could block the video, or creator with a click. WHY ARE WE NOT AT THIS LEVEL OF CONVENIENCE?
A LOT of these concerns would go away if phones/tablets/tv’s had these simple controls. Move those privacy controls into the home and MAKE them so easy a neanderthal could operate them.
If I have to *.newsocialbook.com into my router, you can bet your damn ass that “LiveLaughLoveMom<3” is going to keep demanding that someone else do it for her.
Sounds like an opportunity to create something like that. Any devs around here up for it?
Capitalism. Everything you described costs money to create and maintain and it generates zero (or negative) profit. Most people aren’t going to want to pay for some sort of nanny toolkit.
Don’t get me wrong, I agree with you and it should be like that. Our current systems are not going to bring that about though.
Best solution IMO: Don’t let them use social media. If they really need to communicate, just buy them a SIM and or let them use your phone and SIM to contact them directly.
And if you must let them use social media, set up parental controls on your router. I suggest NextDNS for this. And basically, monitor everything your child watches or interacts and engages with. If they’re using YouTube, check their accounts to see what content they’re consuming.
They *will* get around it. It’s better to actually talk to them
Kids these days have access to the internet way too early. When I wanted to use the internet up until 14 I could either go buy my own computer (with what job lol) or I could use the family computer in the living room. Now 11 year olds are shit posting to 18+ subreddits it’s disgusting. And it’s all the parents fault. No govt regulation will fix this, you have to discipline your kids!
They should revive the “Family Computer” thing in families once again. Way better than handing them their own devices
The answer is that we shouldn’t have most social media to begin with and parents need to actually fucking parent their kid’s usage. Social media is just the television replacement.
It is by nature very different from television. Television is purely entertainment, and is one sided. It’s also only available when you are at home in front of a TV.
Social media is two way, you engage with it directly. You are now comparing yourself to the perceived lives of those around you. For most adults, this is fine. It had proven to have a very negative impact on developing children/teens, especially young girls. Not to mention it is now always with you, always in your pocket. You have access to it 24/7, which is nothing like TV.
TV has been around for a century and has not shown massive negative consequences on mental health. Social media and smart phones has been around for ~15 years and has ruined a generation. It is definitely not just the television replacement
I meant by the television as it’s used to distract/occupy kids so the parents can just not parent. Not that it’s got the same issues as television, it’s just the replacement for keeping kids distracted so people can just not be parents to their crotch spawn.
Some of it can be accomplished by just setting universal demands for how social media works for all users:
- ban targeted advertising
- make it mandatory for companies to ensure algorithms don’t prioritize posts for making users angry, scared or depressed
Stuff like that. These kinds of regulations don’t involve ID checks, and could take care of a big chunk of the problem.
The ban target advertising would definitely be a more realistic solution than banning advertisements in general (which some people are advocating for here). I really am not a fan of ads and would love if they were banned, but I understand that it’s not politically realistic due to what a large role they play in our economy.
It is apparently a movement, but it gets way too little attention: https://www.politico.eu/article/targeted-advertising-tech-privacy/
but I understand that it’s not politically realistic due to what a large role they play in our economy.
Wut.
I should have been more clear. I mean banning advertising in general would not be realistic, so a ban on targeted advertising is a more realistic alternative
This doesn’t solve the problem at the core of social media. The inevitable comparison of fake lives on impressionable children/teens has been shown to cause depression, anxiety, and suicidal ideations. There is nothing that can be done algorithm or advertising wise that would stop that from happening.
So you’re suggesting just outright banning social media?
If you do the 1st one, then most companies likely wouldn’t bother with such algorithms anymore.
I dunno, they will still want people to stick around on their site, so they can see their ads.
I figure a ban of targeted advertisement would look like “The ads are only allowed to change once a day, and everybody during said day sees the same ads”. Whereas currently, each time you load a website, there’s an impromptu auction to sell the ad spots. (Advertisers don’t actually have to pay until you click their ad). So there would be less incentive to keep the user constantly engaged, as it would be enough if the user just visits regularly.
That’s interesting, and maybe better than what I had in mind.
What did you have mind?
Oh, just a ban on the targeting. The companies would still be alllowed to show as many ads, and as many different ads, as they’d want.
Stop using it entirely.
Funny seeing this comment on a social media platform
This isn’t a platform dunce.
Lemmings are so dumb, I love you guys. The fediverse is literally a network of social media platforms, dunce. But hey, let’s pretend you’re right.
Oh no! I said the wrong word! I guess this is a social media network, not a platform, which completely destroys the point of my comment, right? God I wish you people could read
Better parent supervision is the main way to combat these issues.
Companies should also either ban minors completely or allow parents to set up child accounts linked to their account with expansive parental controls that then can be migrated to full adult account once they reach legal age.
I don’t think either will happen because there are so many stupid and lazy parents in America that don’t care what their kids do as long as it’s not bothering them
Agreed 100%. Enable parents, even not tech savvy parents, to parent. Ultimately, if the parent wants their kid to do whatever, they’ll just create an adult account for their kid. Do we really want the government parenting our kids? Sure, it may be an improvement for some, but it’s a slippery slope and could lead to a Brave New World.
Internet has replaced parenting. Kids are just another achievement after spouse and house and two cars.
I cannot emphasize this enough: I do not give a single living fuck what other people’s children do on the Internet.
Good for you. Have a cookie.
Yeah bro, I love sticking my nose in other people’s business as well.
Apparently.
Doesn’t feel so good when it happens to you, huh?
Lol.
Do you have a problem with people sticking their nose in someone else’s business?
