shaicolemanMeta Platforms: Lobbying, dark money, and the App Store Accountability Act
https://old.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/1rshc1f/i_traced_2_b...
https://github.com/upper-up/meta-lobbying-and-other-findings
I know most of this affects only the US, but I'm wondering where this will go in the EU if the Age Verification Tech goes ahead in America. There's been lots of efforts to increase surveillance disguised as protection for kids in the EU and UK.
The Swiss implementation of eID may be hint that governments may/will take the responsibility to implement and maintain the tech, but the multiple intrusions and lobbying by Palantir and friends in the EU gives me the ick.
The Swiss eID is open source[1] and it's usage will be limited. Any type of age verification for online service would need go to a vote and would probably loose. "Eigenverantwortung", it is the parents job to look after the kids, not the state.
You can't just push responsibility for the kids to the parents, where is the world going? This is madness.
The next thing you are going to claim kids from young age shouldn't have fully unlocked smart phones, shouldn't install any app and so on. Where is the end of this? Are you telling me parents should spend more time with kids, heck even be their role models although it is much harder compared to just giving up on them and let the glorious internet and various fashionate toxic tribes raise them? Blasphemy!!!
It really isn't as simple as "Just be a better parent". To use my nephews as an example, my sisters take good care to make sure there's no device usage at home. They've got dumb phones, my sisters don't use their smartphones around the kids either unless it's to take a call, TV/screen time is extremely limited (1h on Saturdays). The older one (12) has an iPhone with parental controls on and tuned to the max, no Youtube or anything like that, and I (the techie in the family) made sure to set it up so it's not easy to circumvent the blocks either.
Y'know what happens instead? Their friends have unfettered access to smartphones, so my nephews see all the idiotic brainrotting shit on youtube shorts anyways. If not at home, they'll see all the crap we're blocking at school from their friends anyways. Hell, they could just go to the library and access the free public computers there if they wanted to! So my sisters who are responsible and do everything correctly, still suffer, and like any reasonable parent don't want to go to the extreme of locking their children up in cages and not letting them outside of the house.
There's a reason we don't legislate alcohol and tobacco sales to the same tune of "Just police your kids 24/7 and keep them under lock and key", we instead realize that we can't (or, shouldn't) supervise kids 24/7 day in and day out, and have society-wide rules that forces everyone to not sell booze to anyone underage.
Similarly, one of your nephews has a friend with parents that don’t lock their liquor cabinet, which means despite all the laws not allowing sales of alcohol to minors, they still have access to it.
I think what your sisters are doing is fine—they’re sending a signal to their kids that this stuff isn’t “good” and though they’ll undoubtedly encounter it in the world, they’re now going to be inherently biased a certain way. And that’s kinda the best you can hope for.
> Similarly, one of your nephews has a friend with parents that don’t lock their liquor cabinet, which means despite all the laws not allowing sales of alcohol to minors, they still have access to it.
Funnily enough that's how I ended up getting drunk the first time, a friend stole some liquor from their parent's liquor cabinet :p We both ended up in a lot of trouble over it, him more than me obviously.
But that's sort of the point as well, if they go down that route then it's easier to catch them and it's easier to punish them for their actions. It's also much more obvious that what they're doing is the wrong thing because it involves a lot of sneaking around, deception and even stealing from your own parents. It makes kids less willing to do it in the first place (unless you're a dumbass like my friend and I).
With something like a smartphone, your parents might not let you have one but every single other kid around you has one, so at that point it only becomes an arbitrary rule that your parents imposed on you, and not a wider rule that everyone has to adhere to. If we treated smartphones for children similarly to how we treat alcohol or tobacco, the parents would have a much easier time enforcing these rules.
> ...they’re now going to be inherently biased a certain way
Or they could go the complete opposite way as well. I mean it's the most common trope/facet of being a kid, that stage of rebellion against your parents and their rules. You still have that with things like alcohol and tobacco of course, but at that point it becomes rebellion against society et al which is a bigger deal and harder hurdle to get over than rebelling against your parents and their rules.