Mastodawn

Erin 💽✨23h ago

Everyone seemingly getting mad about systemd adding a completely optional date of birth field to user records that is, in reality, only ever going to be filled in on the machines of children administered by parents who want such restrictions enforced, perhaps on machines administered by schools, or by people who want their computer to wish them a happy birthday.

Cassandrich 22h ago

@erincandescent "only ever going to be filled in on the machines of children administered by parents who want such restrictions enforced"

You say this as if it's not a huge problem in itself. We should not be building or shipping tools for abusive parents to use to surveil or control their children.

Erin 💽✨22h ago

@dalias abusive parents will surveil and control their children whatever you do. Honestly if some of these parents decide to leave things up to the government (which is on average midly conservative) instead of themselves (which is quite often incredibly conservative) it might even be a net win

Cassandrich 22h ago

@erincandescent That doesn't justify being part to it and essentially forcing distros to ship an abuse-mechanism unless they actively patch it out (thereby having to make a highly charged political statement).

Yes a determined parent with technological know-how can always find a way to put such malware onto their child's machine. We should not be making it an out-of-the-box feature of "Linux".

Erin 💽✨22h ago

@dalias A date of birth field in a user information record is an abuse mechanism?

RE: https://social.treehouse.systems/@mgorny/116274748222570834

@erincandescent Combined with other things, yes. See for example:

Cassandrich 22h ago

@erincandescent Right now, there is no standard place for a DOB field to be stored or for applications to know how to access that information or use it to enforce rules blocking access to information.

By creating standard places to store it and standard APIs to access it, you setup the infrastructure needed for these abuses to be something available out-of-the-box rather than requiring a ton of custom hackery by the abuser to setup.

Erin 💽✨22h ago

@dalias i’m not sure what your actual argument is here.

Is it

“We shouldn’t provide parental controls because instead of using them responsibly to give children access to developmentally appropriate things they’ll abuse them to restrict what they can see”, or
“We shouldn’t provide parental controls because instead it should be the responsibility of those same abusive parents to watch over what their children are doing”, or
“We shouldn’t provide a system level age restrictions API because the parent might provide an accurate age to the relatively trustworthy computer (which will inevitably result in them providing it to relatively untrustwothy apps instead)”, or
“There is absolutley nothing harmful to children available on the internet and we should just provide them 100% unrestricted unmonitored access without age gates of any kind”?

Emma needs ☕️ and paying work 22h ago

@erincandescent @dalias 4) Parental controls don't protect kids, bans on advertising, tracking, and conversion therapy do.

Erin 💽✨21h ago

@emma @dalias hey i’m all for these things but also think maybe we should do things to stop young children from accidentally wandering into pornography (especially but not limited to, to use an example, things like CNC scenes absent the context to understand things like pre-negotiated consent) or violent movies

Emma needs ☕️ and paying work 21h ago

@erincandescent @dalias that's fine, but don't make it easier for evangelicals to murder people along the way.

btw, when you say CNC I assume you don't mean computer numerical control, unless you want to block access to all of the precision machining content on YouTube.

Erin 💽✨21h ago

@emma @dalias By CNC I mean consentual non consent.

Emma needs ☕️ and paying work 21h ago

@erincandescent @dalias we can't have nice things... I guess, everything has to have a double meaning for horny fic writers.

Cassandrich 21h ago

@erincandescent @emma Nobody "accidentally wanders into pornography". That's an excuse.

If you're really worried about this, you mandate that porn sites have a splash page that says "this is a porn site. what you're about to see is sexually explicit. do you want to continue?"

Children who are not actually looking for porn are going to hit the back button stat.

Octavia Con Amore

pink_moon_and_stars

Succubard's Library 18h ago

@dalias @lispi314 @erincandescent @emma thinking back, I discovered explicit porn arguing maybe 13 or 14 years old, but the things that haunt me the most even now are never sexual imagery, but rather, gore

Cassandrich 21h ago

@erincandescent None of the above.

My position is not that there is nothing harmful on the internet, but that for both fundamental reasons and reasons of political capture by people who wish harm to any children who are not straight cis neurotypical, any attempt to gate access to information will both block critically important non-harmful things and fail to block the most harmful things.

I could go into my views on how parents should deal with these truths, but I don't believe that "how else are we supposed to PrOtEcT tHe ChIlDrEn??????" is relevant.

Protecting children is not on the table here.

Doing harm to children and harm to people who need to be anonymous are what's on the table.

@erincandescent @dalias

Parental controls imply giving a parent control over what the child sees. This goes in the direction of taking that control away and giving it to the law and whoever runs the service a young fellow is interacting with.

Erin 💽✨21h ago

@robryk @dalias One of the things I see being discussed on the xdg-desktop-portal pull request is that the Age Verification service will provide the minimum viable API required to comply with the California/Coloradan/etc law, and that an entirely separate API would allow queries around specific content descriptors which would allow a much more capable decision system.

(In fact you could imagine such an API providing a way for you to configure for yourself that you don’t want to see certain things or that they should be hidden by default)

Cassandrich 21h ago

@robryk @erincandescent No, the direction we've always had is that *nobody has control* except someone who's hovering over them.

Government - pushed by industry, who wants to shed legal liability for the harms they are encouraging and amplifying on their platforms - is attempting to force us to participate in building a system of parental controls that's always there.

On top of that being bad enough in itself, it's a requirement they could change into "governmental controls" whenever they like.

Erin 💽✨21h ago

@dalias @robryk Can you tell me which industry is pushing for social media bans for under (insert jurisdiction dependent age here)s? Because it surely can’t be the social media industry which stands only to lose users from this and I can’t see anyone else who is at all affected by this

Cassandrich 21h ago

@erincandescent @robryk Seriously? You think this agenda just popped up worldwide all the sudden without someone funding it all? 🙄

The receipts purporting to pin it on Facebook haven't been verified yet, but I thought it was widely understood that they're doing this to avoid blanket bans, hoping instead of herd underage users onto reduced-harm versions of their platforms while keeping all the maximal-harm stuff in place for adult users.

Erin 💽✨21h ago

@dalias @robryk This popped up all of a sudden? It’s been building slowly for years now. It’s a long term political trend if you read the news.

I don’t think social media bans will actually do anything useful. I also think that it’s hard to think of any regulation that would mitigate the real harms here and not just open a different can of worms.

I mean, except for maybe legislating the abolition of Meta Platforms Inc and all associated companies.

Adrian Chadd <verified.png>21h ago

@erincandescent @dalias @robryk It's likely less of "we really care about age info" and more "we care about liability and we want biometric data as it's just generally useful"

combined with

"the us government in this particular instance isn't supposed to collect this data and share it widely between departments /but it can buy it from third parties just fine/" kind of silliness

(disclaimer: I work at FB. I have no idea of what's actually going on internally here.)

princess pancake

@[email protected] @dalias I think it is only a positive iff used by the hands-off kind of parents

LEdoian 21h ago

@dalias @erincandescent The thing I am worried about is when the first bit of software tries to use that API, even when I am located outside of the demanded age restrictions. And it does not really matter if that software is a web browser to provide fingerprinting, a media player to verify that I am not playing an R-rated movie or Steam to collect statistics.

I don't believe/trust this stays opt-in and if I don't provide anything, (1) nothing will complain and (2) nothing will use even the negative information against my will. I don't believe in adding an API that is supposed to not be used based on where I am geographically located.

(And I don't trust an API that emerged as a result of this geopolitical climate.)

I don't want such an API existing on my device, even if “the API itself is harmless” and the harm may come from “just” from the applications that utilise it.

Erin 💽✨21h ago

@ledoian @dalias it’s Linux, you’re root, you can just change the code to simply lie or do whatever you want, you have that capability.

Unless someone legislates that you can no longer actually control your own computer (and yes, people are trying to do that), or systems are legislated to collect some kind of proof but that’s a completely different legislative problem

Cassandrich 21h ago

@erincandescent @ledoian Why are you so invested in defending the people doing stuff that the rest of us are telling you is an aggression against us?

LEdoian 21h ago

@erincandescent @dalias Yes. Yes, I have that capability. But I imagine my use of the computer differently than patching random software so it has no access to an API that does not benefit me in any way.

AstroBoat 10h ago

@dalias @erincandescent It should be the other way around: softwares should indicates the age limit for a content, and the system controlled by parents should decide whether the application can be run or the content can be viewed by children.

Erin 💽✨10h ago

@loptimist @dalias this is broadly how the portal works; you ask about a range and the API returns bounds on the user’s age based upon applicable laws (where the bound can be “unknown”/“not applicable” and probably should be outside of California/Colorado).

Yes, maybe “Can the user see a film rated (mpaa:r, usk:15+violence, bbfc:15+violence, …)” would be a better API and this is being discussed but unfortunately that is not the API California and Colorado are mandating operating systems to supply (the mandated API must return to an application that the user falls into one of a handful of enumerated age ranges and no more)

What they are aiming for with the age verification portal is precise minimal compliance with the law in a way that can trivially support similar laws elsewhere that e.g. differ in enumerated age ranges.

AstroBoat 10h ago

@erincandescent @dalias

Where is that API located ? On the OS or within apps or websites ?

If the API is provided by the OS, it means that third-party software would be able to collect age ranges, which is unacceptable in my opinion.

That’s why I suggested that applications and content providers should provide a way for the OS to retrieve age ratings, and then let parents make decisions using parental control tools.

If that's not compliant with Californian law, then perhaps the law is flawed, as it does not adequately guarantee privacy.

Cassandrich 10h ago

@loptimist @erincandescent How about neither.