The Online Safety Act: Are children safer online?
www.internetmatters.org
This report explores parents' and children's views on the Online Safety Act, including what's working so far (and what isn't).
  • Yggstyle@lemmy.worldEnglish
    43·
    15 days ago

    As someone who spent my formative days figuring out how to bypass early digital locks my school was putting in place to “protect us” … The system loses this game. Every time. You are taking kids with nothing but time, no apparent drawbacks, and everything to gain… And placing them against “good enough” implemented by people who could give two shits about it.

    This will continue to lose until they twist the knobs too tight and hit false positive central… And oops now the populace hates it. Control for thee is fine until its for me.

    Tale as old as technology itself.

    • thermal_shock@lemmy.worldEnglish
      6·
      14 days ago

      Mine was simple, but great. IE was hidden/removed in our typing class, maybe 5th grade. I guessed you could type a www.domain.tld in Word and when you pressed space, got a clickable URL that was still tied to IE. I knew about the URL, but learned it would still open with IE hidden. 🤣🤣

      • prole@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
        2·
        14 days ago

        I used to go to the “about Microsoft Works” pop up under the “help” drop down in Works (yes I’m old), and then click a URL on there that would open up a functioning IE window.

        We used to get up to so much shenanigans in high school computer classes… I remember playing Unreal Tournament over LAN with like half the class without the teacher knowing

        • Ledivin@lemmy.worldEnglish
          1·
          14 days ago

          It was Quake for us 😅 I’m not even that old, it’s just the only game that was small enough to store on the shared network without being discovered

    • MimicJar@lemmy.worldEnglish
      3·
      15 days ago

      Even with false positives it won’t change anything. It’s just a small group of people. It’s worth it to “save the children”. If “the system” rejects you, then you must be at fault. Maybe we can even sell a “Super ID Check”. Just a one time $200 fee and then the system will leave you alone. (For 3 years, then pay the fee again, but renewal is even faster this time.)

      • Yggstyle@lemmy.worldEnglish
        5·
        15 days ago

        I’m not saying its going to happen quickly… But filtering in many forms has been tried in the past and they all died similarly. Some vocal group gets inconvenienced by it and then, under scrutiny, the blemishes get paraded out and the project dies a slow ugly death.

        The actual reason for the push right now is meta (among others) just want to wash their hands of the responsibility… And that aligns with some tech bros wanting to hoover up peoples ids and resell that info. The whole thing will sour once there’s a significant leak that ties risk into that bottom line and nobody will want to carry it.

  • IninewCrow@lemmy.caEnglish
    401·
    15 days ago

    How about instead of trying every complicated stupid way to regulate users and especially children … you regulate and control companies and corporations instead.

    • SynonymousStoat@lemmy.worldEnglish
      14·
      15 days ago

      Or, ya know, make parents take responsibility for their own children and monitor what they are doing online. If you don’t want your kids seeing or participating in things online then don’t give them unfettered access to smart phones and computers!

      • vortic@lemmy.worldEnglish
        6·
        15 days ago

        I kind fo agree and kind of don’t. I agree in that parents should take accountability for their children. That said, social media has been shown to be addictive and kids are frequently ahead of their parents technologically. One thing that could help is an education campaign that teaches parents how to effectively monitor their kid’s online activity. Parents need some help figuring out what tools to use and how to use them I think.

      • knatschus@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
        2·
        15 days ago

        Combine both and demand parental controls for devices and services. The isp is paid for by an adult that’s the only age check websites should need. Parents should have easily accessible tools to mark a os or browser as used by a minor.

    • muffedtrims@lemmy.worldEnglish
      2·
      15 days ago

      And who’s payroll campaign donations are the politicians that are pushing these policy coming from?

  • DreamlandLividity@lemmy.worldEnglish
    331·
    14 days ago

    People act as if it was a bug and not a feature. This was intended. After people sufficiently make fun of the current solution that everyone knows how easily it is broken, the next step is requiring both ID and face scan and comparing photo on ID with face scan. Congrats, privacy is removed completely. Every poster is now tied with real life identity.

  • melsaskca@lemmy.caEnglish
    22·
    14 days ago

    We should get all of our advice from little kids. They have not yet been bound by knowing what is or isn’t possible. The meek shall inherit the earth.

    • UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.worldEnglish
      51·
      14 days ago

      We should get all of our advice from little kids.

      These articles tend to lean on click-baity “One Neat Trick” headlines, while disguising the more practical hit-or-miss reality of facial recognition software. Sometimes you can outsmart the computer. Sometimes it just fouls the system and fails out. Sometimes the system works exactly as intended.

      Little kids experiment around the edges of a system until they get bored or frustrated. In the aggregate, they can be very clever just through the number of permutations they try. Individually, your 12-year-old isn’t going to Hack The Internet reliably.

  • FlashMobOfOne@lemmy.worldEnglish
    121·
    15 days ago

    Today in: “Just let the parents parent.”

    It’s good to see a reminder that depending on the majority of parents to act in absence of real, tangible regulation is doomed to be a failure.

  • violentfart@lemmy.worldEnglish
    7·
    15 days ago

    Is it legal to “verify” my age to be a minor? Would less of my information be collected?

    …not that any of it is accurate anyway.

  • OddMinus1@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    7·
    14 days ago

    Oh no. All that’s left now that the age veifications are bypassed are the extensive public surveillance. Better leave that running.

  • wuffah@lemmy.worldEnglish
    6·
    15 days ago

    We want your children to be safer online so we forced them to self-identify with biometric data? Isn’t that part of what caused this in the first place?

    Privacy, security, and regulation is the answer here, not more surveillance capitalism. But that’s anathema to the business models of every social media company so instead we get this ham-fisted attempt at jamming the square peg of “digital advertising surveillance” into the round hole of “protecting children”. The mechanical action damages everything involved.

    This system is specifically and very effectively designed to monitor, analyze, addict, and sell people, and this “solution” just ends up being more engineering to that end. Asking it to selectively age-gate content is like inventing a global network for information transfer and then becoming outraged when it’s used for file sharing. Copy is an intrinsic operation of digital data, and exploitation is an intrinsic operation of social media. We’re asking it to do the opposite of what it’s created to do.

    Parents should be in charge of filtering content for their children, and the government should be in charge of using the collective power of the people to regulate companies that exploit them instead of serving them. Asking social media companies to do it is backing the wolf truck up to the chicken coop while the guy hired to protect the chickens tells you “The wolves will protect the chickens from other predators!”