all [age verification methods] have privacy implications. There was big concern with providing government ID. But there are digital identity providers...
In this case, she's predictably offloading responsibility to a 3rd party provider. I will guess the official is minimally aware that leaks are nearly inevitable (partially due to lax laws) and all of that ID data will be leaked eventually. Probably by a 3rd party to the 3rd party.
Why deceive the reporter and readers on privacy? Because addressing privacy is hard. It takes time, effort, integrity and thoughtfulness.
Because every Gov is loaded with depts that exploit privacy failings to their own advantage.
Because elections are funded by lobbyists that use our data against us.
Add those up and there is so much pushback against respecting privacy - you could launch a spacecraft with it.
> amendments [...] bolster privacy protections. Platforms would not be allowed to compel users to provide government-issued identity documents including passports or driver's licenses, nor could they demand digital identification through a government system.
So I guess facial recognition it is. Or my personal guess, a government data feed on birth dates.
Any other solution is too stupid to discuss -- I would be stunned if it's possible to use facial recognition to differentiate a 15 y/o from a 16 y/o in anything approaching a reliable way.
This leaves a lot of room for bad acting. The data collector need not compel. They can have 3 methods available but have 2 be a hot mess of unreliability.
FacRec has unreliability baked in - increasingly so, the further from white ones skin is.
At the minimimum it will be
Everything on a Gov ID
All info demanded during the original collection process + demands that get added v2, v3 ...
All possible metadata
Data from other sources, added downstream to make it more valuable to govs/corps
16 and 17 yo
Under 16 because many will try
Everyone elseThe government can build a service to verify ones identity and age and social media apps don't have to save IDs.
The whole privacy shit is just weaseling out of responsibility.
Because the reality of course is, if you absolutely had to determine how old someone is...you'd ask for their ID. That's how pubs do it, and someone somewhere has had the galaxy-brain idea of going "well, sometimes bouncers just know so like, can't a computer do that?" without really thinking through the constraints of the problem (or that an absolute ton of underage people still get through).
EDIT: It's worth adding - ID cards don't work for this either. The most obvious thing to do is just photoshop the ID you send whoever. But that of course creates a real problem for the "protecting the kids" people. Modern AI would let you run a client-side web-app which would fake an ID for you, but legally the issue with fake ID is that it's considered "forging official documents" which is a crime on the part of the person doing it not the person being fooled by it.
Which in turn means that your "protect the kids" policy is actually a "prosecute the kids policy" if you setup a situation where a bunch of people are pretty likely to think (without knowing the ramifications) that they should just send a fake ID image.
> “I think the genesis of this movement has been Jonathan Haidt, author of the book The Anxious Generation, and he even admits some of the research is mixed. And it's true that it is not necessarily causal.”
https://www.techdirt.com/tag/jonathan-haidt/
JH is the poster child for SM->Youth MH alarmism. His flawed premise have directed society down a wrong road.
The better question is what counts as social media? Is HN social media that under 16yo Australians need to be kept away from?
So I guess it's aimed at sites that are supposed to cause these problems?
We can extend that thought further than just HN. The reporter (surprisingly!) brings up something we've known for a while but has been slow getting traction. That the relation between noted harms and SM is far from clear.
There really is not a super clear causal link between greater use of social media and upticks in anxiety and depression among teens.
Regarding youth mental health, there are strong causal competitors (to SM) that aren't well examined. Like the elimination of free roaming areas (from sq mi to sq ft), attacks on child independence (false stranger danger messaging) and car culture + trespassing culture (traded endless walkable areas for narrow death zones).
I argue that since mid-1900s, we've eradicated most of what kids needed to learn complex problem solving, develop ambition and earn self-esteem.
If I wanted to erode youth mental health, I'd do exactly what we've done. I'd get rid of irreplaceable environments where youth experienced critical growth.
Not to mention just using a VPN or something.
Depends on what 'work' means.
Pre-internet Australia had pretty strong media censorship.
I view this a quiet attempt to disentangle Australia from any foreign company that isn't willing to jump through longer-term censorship hoops.
> The founder of an encrypted messaging app who left Australia for Switzerland after police unexpectedly visited an employee’s home says he had left because of Australia’s “hostile” stance against developers building privacy-focused apps…
> Linton also pointed to the expected arrival of age assurance for social media, as well as a new code coming into effect in December on cloud and encrypted messaging providers from the eSafety commissioner, as other evidence of the hostile environment for privacy-focused apps.
https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2024/nov/05/sessi...
The issue here (as always) is a parenting one. If you are supervising your children (as is your responsibility) then these issues can't happen. I hear from people all the time that supervision is unrealistic and not feasible, from the same people who have 12+ hours of screen time reports on their phones...
No government policy or technical solution will cover for people being shitty, disconnected parents.
Every class has a classmate, or sibling or friend of a classmate who would have the skills, and you only need one such kid for a few hundred people.
> The issue here (as always) is a parenting one. If you are supervising your children (as is your responsibility) then these issues can't happen.
I would say teens shouldn't be supervised to this extent and pushback against such tight supervision is natural and IMO justified.
The purpose of these laws is to make it illegal for adults to encourage those behaviours.
They had no idea when it was passed, and this article confirms the same because "there's been promising research you do it by <thing>".
Social media will block Australian users of all ages. Australian users were really not that valuable anyway, and this just isn’t worth the trouble.
I looked into who was pushing for this law; a personality on a Murdoch owned radio station, along with Murdoch's News corp, a TV advertising company owner, and Jonathan Haidt as mentioned in the article, who is an anti-woke anti-academia hack https://3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2024/07/why-academics-...
Feels weird and gross to me that legacy media / advertising companies are crying over kids's mental health when they've been targeting teenagers with impossible standards and negatively influencing their self image for decades.
My personal conspiracy theory is that it was done to avoid scrutiny of advertising practices. A few months before academics started publishing findings on how problematic social media ads are; unhealthy foods, gambling, alcohol, and just plain scams. https://www.admscentre.org.au/adobservatory/
With 'kids' removed from social media, advertisers can better get away with less savoury stuff.
Roll out Matt Damon to talk about the potential of it!
Ooh! Ooh! I know this one!
It won't.
There are a couple of ways I see it going.
1) Let's just say there are 300 days left before the ban takes effect. Option 1 is that in 298 days, after every tech person in the world telling them how stupid and ineffective the idea is, and when the dumb populace realises "wait now everybody is going to have to verify their id to use social media?", the law gets repealed. This will happen quietly and without any media circus, because Australia has no independent media, OR:
2) The ban goes into effect. On the same day, teens abandon social media en-masse. Nobody knows where they've gone. Weirdly, these events correlate with a spike in VPN subscriptions encrypted traffic to decentralised services.
I'm hoping for the second one - a more security aware next-generation would be a good thing.
...But there are digital identity providers, like one called Yoti, that can estimate someone's age using facial recognition technology.
But we do want to make sure there is not discrimination, or bias, and some of these technologies are less accurate depending on the kind of face being scanned. I met with an age assurance provider last week in Washington, D.C., who is using an AI-based system that looks at hand movements and has a 99% success rate.
She may not be lying. She may just be a big enough fucking idiot to believe the AV industry's lies.
But my guess is that they're both knowingly lying.
“The laws of mathematics are very commendable, but the only law that applies in Australia is the law of Australia”
What's preventing the parents to do the account creation verification for the kids, and then kids just taking over the account? (Unless there's constant re-verification daily, which no apps do)
The only thing is that the ban gives parents some way to say "no" but given enough nagging...
Or, you know, they can find someone a few years elder, just like when buying booze and cigarettes.
They can already say no. You know how? "No."
I think the concept of autonomy we teach to children has a lot of positives, but combined with an entire generation who want to be friends with - not parents to - their kids, it's causing a lot of problems.
You are the adult. If the kid says they want a phone, you can say no. If they want social media, you can say no. You can take away their things as punishment. You are a parent and you have a responsibility to sometimes be an arsehole when you don't want to be, for their sake.
Yes, there are consequnces to choices you make for your kids - from food to where you live to the role model you present to if they have social media. I highly doubt most normal parents have sat down and done a cost/benefit to their kids having access to this crap.