Erin 💽✨1d 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.
Show threadCassandrich1d 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.

Show threadErin 💽✨1d 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
Show threadCassandrich1d 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".

Show threadErin 💽✨1d ago
@dalias A date of birth field in a user information record is an abuse mechanism?
Show threadCassandrich1d ago

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

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

Show threadCassandrich1d 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.

Show threadErin 💽✨1d 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”?
Show threadrobryk1d ago
@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.
Show threadCassandrich1d 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.

Show threadErin 💽✨1d 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
Show threadCassandrich

@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.

Mar 23 at 1:06amWeb
Show threadErin 💽✨1d 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.

Show threadAdrian Chadd <verified.png>1d 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.)