Mastodawn

This week on my #podcast, I read my recent @medium column, "How To Make a Child-Safe #TikTok: Have you tried not spying on kids?" The column was inspired by one of the most bizarre exchanges during the Congressional grilling of TokTok CEO #ShouChew:

https://doctorow.medium.com/how-to-make-a-child-safe-tiktok-be08fbf94b0d

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/17/have-you-tried-not-spying/#coppa

1/

How To Make a Child-Safe TikTok - Cory Doctorow - Medium

Have you tried not spying on kids?. “How To Make a Child-Safe TikTok” is published by Cory Doctorow.

Medium

Cory Doctorow Apr 17, 2023

If you heard anything about that hearing, it was likely this. Rep #BuddyCarter, #Republican of #Georgia, demanded to know whether Tiktok used "the phone’s camera to determine whether the content that elicits a pupil dilation should be amplified by the algorithm?"

https://www.c-span.org/video/?526609-1/tiktok-ceo-testifies-house-energy-commerce-committee-hearing

Chew replied, "We do not collect body, face or voice data to identify our users. We do not." Carter pressed him, asking "How do you determine what age they are then?"

2/

TikTok CEO Testifies at House Energy and Commerce Committee Hearing

Members of the House Energy and Commerce Committee grilled TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew on his social media company's relationship with the Chinese government, with particular focus on the app's data security practices and algorithms as well as its potential harm to children. The CEO pushed back against criticism that TikTok is under control of the Chinese government, though admitted that the Chinese Communist Party has the ability to manipulate data. TikTok's parent company is ByteDance, a Chinese-based company. Moreover, Mr. Chew promoted "Project Texas," TikTok's proposed plan to give the U.S. more oversight of its data and algorithms.

C-SPAN.org

Cory Doctorow Apr 17, 2023

Chew said, "We rely on age-gating as our key age assurance." Carter assumed tuckercarlsonian expression of perplexity and asked for more information. Chew explained: "It’s when you ask the user what age they are." Carter was clearly baffled by this.

Chew added, "this is a real challenge for our industry because privacy versus age assurance is a really big problem." Carter interrupted him: "you keep talking about the industry, we’re talking about TikTok here."

3/

Cory Doctorow Apr 17, 2023

This was a remarkable exchange, even by the standards of Congressional hearings on technology, a genre that includes "a series of tubes," "Senator, we run ads," and "Will you commit to ending finsta?"

Chew was completely and terribly correct, of course. The way that the entire industry complies with #COPPA - the law that prohibits data-gathering on under-13s without parental consent - is by asking every used to tick a box that says "I am over 13."

4/

Cory Doctorow Apr 17, 2023

This is such an inadequate and laughable figleaf that the Congressdunderhead from Georgia can (possibly) be forgiven for assuming that "age verification" involved some kind of digital phrenology by way of facial scanning.

But beyond being yet another entry in the annals Congressional Pig-Ignorance On Tech, the exchange reveals a massive blind-spot about the entire business of kids' privacy, and the legislative intention of COPPA, a law passed in 1998.

5/

Cory Doctorow Apr 17, 2023

That was before the age of ubiquitous commercial internet surveillance - but not before people understood that this would be an important subject.

One thing to note here is how *rare* COPPA is. The US has very near to *zero* federal privacy laws. There's the Electronic Communications Privacy Act of 1986, which is about as up-to-date as you might imagine given that it was passed in 1986.

6/

Cory Doctorow Apr 17, 2023

Then there's the Video Privacy Protection Act of 1988, which bans video-store clerks from revealing which porn you (or more to the point, Members of Congress) have rented.

And then there's COPPA, which requires parental consent for data-gathering on pre-teens. And that's basically...it.

7/

Cory Doctorow Apr 17, 2023

COPPA's got a checkered legislative history; a lot of the "parental consent" language is about ensuring that kids can't get access reproductive health information and services, but as with any contentious piece of lawmaking, COPPA passed due to a coalition with different priorities, and part of that coalition just wanted to make sure that companies weren't spying on kids.

8/

Cory Doctorow Apr 17, 2023

Because - as both Buddy Carter and Shou Chew - can attest, it's really hard to get parental consent at scale. Like, how do you even know if you're talking to a kid's parent or guardian if you're not allowed to gather information on that kid? And how do you know if you're talking to a kid or an adult when you gather *any* information, on *any* user?

9/

Cory Doctorow Apr 17, 2023

Even if facial recognition technology had been widespread in 1986, I think we can all agree that Congress's intent wasn't to "protect kids' privacy" by subjecting every child who used a computer to an invasive biometric scan. How could you comply with COPPA, then?

Well, one possibility is to *never* spy on users.

OK, not *never*. But only in very special circumstances - situations in which users would be willing to go through a reasonably thorough identification procedure.

10/

Cory Doctorow Apr 17, 2023

There are some situations in which it would be relatively straightforward to do this for parental consent, too: schools, pediatricians and libraries typically encounter children at the same time as their parents or guardians.

And for the rest of it, companies could just *not spy*.

11/

Cory Doctorow Apr 17, 2023

The truly bizarre thing is how bizarre this suggestion comes across. It is beyond the imagination of both Buddy Carter and Shou Chew that Tiktok could comply with COPPA by not gathering any user-data. After all COPPA, doesn't prohibit providing web access to under-13s without parental consent - it prohibits spying on under-13s.

It's not just Congressdunderheads and Tiktok CEOs who treat "don't spy on under-13s" as a synonym for "don't let under-13s use this service."

12/

Cory Doctorow Apr 17, 2023

Every tech product designer and every general counsel at every tech company treats these two propositions as equivalent, because they are literally incapable of imagining a surveillance-free online service.

Which is funny, given *another* part of the Congressional interview. Chew says, "The only face data that you’ll get, that we collect is when you use the filters that put, say, sunglasses on your face, we need to know where your eyes are."

13/

Cory Doctorow Apr 17, 2023

Carter interrupts him to say, "Why do you need to know where the eyes are if you’re not seeing if they’re dilated?" (my god this guy is horny for pupils).

Chew finishes, "and the data is *stored locally on your local device and deleted after the use*, if you use it for facial" (emphasis mine).

14/

Cory Doctorow Apr 17, 2023

The Tiktok app could store the list of accounts you follow *on your device* and send requests to the Tiktok servers for their updates, and the servers could fulfill those requests without logging them. Your device could analyze the videos you interact with and ask the Tiktok servers for suggestions based on those criteria - again, without Tiktok logging your info.

15/

Cory Doctorow Apr 17, 2023

There's no millennial prophet who came down off a mountain with two stone tablets circa 2002 and intoned, "Nerds of the world, thou shalt stop rotating thine logfiles, and lo! Thou shalt mine them for actionable market intelligence." There is nothing intrinsic to the idea of letting people talk to each other, or search the web, or look at videos, that requires surveillance.

16/

Cory Doctorow Apr 17, 2023

The surveillance is a choice, which necessitated hundreds of billions of dollars in capital expenditures, and which should have been understood as illegal under COPPA.

But COPPA hasn't been meaningfully enforced for a quarter of a century. That's because the ad-tech industry mobilizes some of the hundreds of billions of dollars it gains through spying to block privacy law enforcement and the passage of any new privacy laws.

17/

Cory Doctorow Apr 17, 2023

David Cohen, CEO of the surveillance lobby group IEA, told his members, "Extremists are winning the battle for hearts and minds in Washington, D.C., and beyond. We cannot let that happen."

His co-conspirators at the anti-privacy lobbying group Privacy For America (yes, really) told Congress that commercial surveillance saves every American $30,000/year - in other words, they value the data they steal from you every year at $30,000:

https://www.privacyforamerica.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/02/Privacy-for-America-Letter-in-Support-of-Preemptive-Comprehensive-Privacy-Legislation.pdf

18/

Cory Doctorow Apr 17, 2023

But as @Julia points out, this figure is as absurd as the name "Privacy for America." The number is pure fiction:

https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1815663116#abstract

It doesn't matter how much the data caught in the ad-tech industry's nonconsensual harvest is worth - all that matters is that it produces the surplus needed to keep privacy law enforcement and expansion at bay.

19/

Cory Doctorow Apr 17, 2023

Tiktok shouldn't spy on our kids. Neither should anyone else. America doesn't need a law banning Tiktok, it's needs a law banning Tiktok's surveillance - as well as the surveillance of all its rivals:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/03/30/tik-tok-tow/#good-politics-for-electoral-victories

20/

Pluralistic: We should ban TikTok(‘s surveillance) (30 Mar 2023) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow

Cory Doctorow Apr 17, 2023

Because the Chinese state doesn't need Tiktok to spy on Americans. In the freewheeling, unregulated privacy "marketplace," all that data is for sale - Chinese spies can just plunk down their credit-cards next to everyone else who buys our data and mobilizes it to compromise us, market to us, and stalk us.

21/

HeroOfDermwood Apr 17, 2023

@pluralistic @medium I think this meme format is perfect for this discussion.