> I'm not saying no E2E messaging apps should exist, but maybe it doesn't need to for minors in social media apps. However, an alternative could be allowing the sharing of the encryption key with a parent so that there is the ability for someone to monitor messages.
The problem with that idea, that you are implying E2E should require age verification. Everyone should have access to secure end to end encryption.
If browsers are going to send flags, they should only send a flag if its a minor. Otherwise is another point of tracking data that can be used for fingerprinting.
If you send a flag ever, then absence of a flag is also fingerprinting surface.
If you imagine a world where you have a header, Accepts-Adult-Content, which takes a boolean value: you essentially have three possibilities: ?0, ?1, and absent.
How useful of a tracking signal those three options provide depends on what else is being sent —
For example, if someone is stuffing a huge amount of fingerprinting data into the User-Agent string, then this header probably doesn’t actually change anything of the posture.
As another example, if you’re in a regular browser with much of the UA string frozen, and ignoring all other headers for now, then it depends on how likely the users with that UA string to have each option: if all users of that browser always send ?0 (if they indicate themselves to be a minor) or ?1 (if they indicate themselves to be an adult or decline to indicate anything), then a request with that UA and it absent is significantly more noteworthy — because the browser wouldn’t send it — and more likely to be meaningful fingerprinting surface.
That said, adding any of this as passive fingerprinting surface seems like an idea unlikely to be worthwhile.
If you want even a weak signal, it would be much better to require user interaction for it.
The problem with mandatory developer registration, is that it gives Google and Governments the ability to veto apps.
It would not be unsurprising for a government to tell Google they must block any VPN apps from being installed on devices, and Google using the developer requirements to carry out the ban.
It's worse than that. Google will be able to track who's using a particular app because it has to be installed the official way. This means for example that anyone who has installed an ICE Tracking app will be reported to the government and perhaps added to a terrorist list.
No you can still install APKs offline but they have to be signed (likely enforced by Google Play Services). Not to mention you can still install unisgned APKs like before with adb. Which doesn't make this any better of course.
No judgement whatsoever, but for almost everyone they too will think, no big deal you only install software through stores right? Nothing changes for them, in fact they can't conceive of an alternative anymore.
How can you judge if Google's plan is a good one? Add up the harms caused by the new rules and weigh that against the reduction in harm and see where the balance is?
I have a hard time believing the net outcome for the overall Android community would be negative.
Age verification is fundamentally harmful and is an attack on user privacy. Age verification is being heavily lobbied for by tech companies that are hoping to get rich off of violating your privacy.
Anonymous age verification is fundamentally impossible. It is especially a bad idea for adult content, as a person's perfectly legal sexual beliefs and fantasies can permanently destroy their lives if that information got out. Parental controls are the only ethical, secure, and privacy protecting way forward here.
You are begging the question. If age verification is required, it's not 'perfectly legal' to access weird porn without going through age verification.
There is no right, or even a debate about whether there should be a right, to consume digital streams of other people engaging in sexual acts in total anonymity without proving age. In fact being able to do this at all is something that didn't exist until about 25 years ago, before that you had to drive down to a video store and rent a DVD or tape. At that video store you would have to show an ID to get an account, and there would be a permanent record at the store of what you have rented.
I get that people want to watch people engage in acts that they themselves find embarrassing and shameful. I don't agree that this is healthy, but if it's legal then I have no standing to complain much. However, it's not legal to provide videos of hardcore sex to children, which you are insisting is necessary to allow adults to consume videos of hardcore sex acts in perfect anonymity, which wasn't even a thing that was possible until very recently. Your argument is just stupid and absurd on its face.
Its more like age verification corporations, identity verification corporations, the child "safety" organizations that were lobbying for Chat Control versus individuals who want to protect their privacy.
I bet that the Chat Control lobbyist groups are involved to some degree, as they tried to require age verification in Chat Control before it was shot down. They probably haven't given up after that defeat.
You are missing the profit driven angle. Age verification companies and their lobbyists are pouring massive amounts of resources into lobbying for mandatory age verification. And the reason why can be pretty simple. They get richer of off violating people's privacy, especially when those privacy violations are legally required.
Age verification tech companies are lobbying heavily for governments to legally require their services. The proposed "solutions" are about funneling money into the hands of other tech companies and shady groups, while violating user privacy.
If anything, we should be banning the collection of any age related information to access social media and more mature content. We need companies to respect privacy, rather than legislation even more privacy violations.
If anything, we should be preventing young people from being exposed to the version of the internet that currently exists until the tech companies that made it this way offer a solution. I am all ears if you have an alternative that big tech can implement to ensure this is the case while they are given the task of cleaning up the mess they've made?
>If you are working on a product, or ever did work on a product, that made the internet worse rather than better, you have a shared responsibility to right that wrong.
This is how the "predatory debt" involved has built up, and grown exponentially until now, and the only thing Facebook considers as a solution would be to pay it down using other peoples' resources instead of their own.
No one else has matching leverage and the dollar figure would be many billions if not a full trillion or more, which is about what it's worth, and who else could afford that except Facebook?
So it has to come from the collective subtraction of everyone's complete privacy. Just to amount to something comparable.
Add that up and it shows you how valuable privacy really is and what it's worth in dollar figures.
Yes, do the math, privacy is worth more than Facebok no matter what, it always was and always will be.
You can't have both, so big tech should jettison Meta. Who else could afford it?
A more non-existential solution would be for Meta to fully fund a completely anonymous internet to replace the one that they soiled from the beginning, and let them keep the (anti-)social-media exclusive network separate.
This is what I thought when Facebook first came out;
It was going to be like MySpace where most people were expected to remain anonymous like the internet had always been, and only those who actually wanted to be identifiable could reveal as much information as they personally wanted to.
But no, Facebook wanted everybody's personally identifiable information as table stakes, not only those who really wanted to promote themselves or gain personal recognition.
There was no other way to sign up.
I thought people would be too smart for that. But Facebook was "free" to use, and learned a lot from it's first major gamescourge, Zynga.
Naturally I've been waiting for it to stand the test of time, and it does look like it has been a complete failure when it comes to being worthwhile.
Facebook started out with enshittification as a business model but the next major escalation came when people had to have an "account" before they could even browse the site any more.
People who had actually enjoyed it were somewhat pressured to join just so they could continue following those who were promotional. Linkedin did this too and made it no longer worth visiting either. So much for supporting the members who were intended to be promoted.
You can only imagine my shock years ago when I found out Facebook was a billion-dollar company.
Things like this were never even supposed to be worth money.
Bro the internet was made by everyday people. Corporations just imposed there shit on top of it. Im all for the corporate part going away, but I think its better if we make social media corporations transparent so we can target how they are operating those services. Age gating users is not the answer
I've been on the internet for more than 20 years. It got a lot worse in the last 10. Individuals maybe shaped it in the early days, but the disastrous mess we have today is from the monetization and ensuing garbage that was pushed onto the world by some very profitable tech companies.
Undo the damage or otherwise come up with a way to shield kids from it. I won't let my own kids anywhere near the open web the way it is today. It's poison for young minds and needs to be fixed or gated off. Like alcohol at this point.
It comes from a combination of things that always existed getting online and the monetization of the attention economy. Influence operations (both corporate and governmental) are the source of most of the problems. Bots, influencers pushing propaganda, etc. I suspect you are actually a bot but others might read this so...
The biggest changes to the Internet over the last few years are usually in the political spaces. There are a few other things but mostly its political. Those other things always existed but now they are online. But this isn't the fault of the communications medium, its the ills of society leaking into online spaces. If we banned those things online, you still as a parent have to worry about them happening IRL. Its better to talk to your kids about these dangers honestly and it always has been. Its always been easier to just prevent your children from being exposed to those dangers but that usually backfires later on. Banning unpopular political discourse to do that has never been the answer to these issues. But in this case, banning discourse is the goal and children are just the excuse. As proof of this, the same government pushing this only instituted a real drinking age in the last 10 years, in a country known for making liquor.
> I suspect you are actually a bot but others might read this so...
I'm floored lol. What gives you this impression?
The worst part of this inflammatory nonsense is that, sadly, I'm probably the only person that will read your full comment. And I fundamentally disagree with your thesis of attributing this to "politics". Social media and its effects were poisonous long before "politics" were so prominent. You could see it even during early Obama times. The simple infinite scroll and forcing individuals to so regularly compare themselves to each other was already awful long before "politics".
The last line in my statement answers your question. If you leave it up to government to try and regulate a medium you are asking for trouble. Its like telling a news source what they can and cant release news wise because a portion of the population (kids) are harmed by the information.
I understand where you are coming from but age gating is not the answer for a communication medium.
I'm asking you for the alternative. Every day this continues on is literally ruining lives before they start. Like lead in water, time is of the essence. So what is the alternative to fix it?
Support candidates that will put anti-trust first and end citizen united. Both of these issue make holding companies accountable for the harm that is being caused by lack of transparency impossible. The problem is corruption and corporations not being accountable to the people. When those problems get resolved. These issues will become less problematic.
I love the vision. Might take a decade or more to play out. We don't want a list generation in the interim, so what do we do asap to get it under control?
We don't. The problems are created by corporate greed, they are only solved by dealing with that. Making the internet less free as I said, isn't the answer, and there is no way to fix this in the short term without making the corruption worse.
Respectfully, I disagree and find your proposed solution, akin to "keep letting young people have their lives ruined", unsatisfactory. Which is probably why we're in this mess.
Its been my experience that our lives, whether they are ruined or not, are up to us. Making someone else responsibility only prolongs the problem. You either see that, or you don't. It's pretty clear at this point that corruption and greed is the problem and the fact that we cant see our way forward to being responsible adults is the part that is going to cause humanities downfall. When everything come crashing down, the people that will be left are the people that are taking responsibility for the problem and not making it someone else's.
> Its been my experience that our lives, whether they are ruined or not, are up to us.
This maybe applies to adults. It does not to children that cannot yet fend for themselves. You are basically throwing them to the wolves. This can be your choice, but it won't be mine.
We are not throwing them to the wolves. Our complacency created this problem and now kids are being affected by our actions and inactions. IMHO the best we can do as parents is try to protect them in a world gone mad. Appealing to governments and corporations that created this problem in the first place (with our acquiescence) is going to make the problem worse because we have evil people behind the scenes using this information against our wishes.
The problem with that idea, that you are implying E2E should require age verification. Everyone should have access to secure end to end encryption.