It sure seems like the average person doesn't care that children use Facebook and similar online services. Why should we give more power to state regulators when the public doesn't even want the regulation in the first place?
The public doesn't pass laws though, our elected representatives do. Without diving down the rabbit hole of how well our current system manages to select for representatives that actually align with voters' views, there isn't a direct link between laws and public sentiment.
Parents purposely allowing children to use these services is a much more clear indicator of sentiment, and as mentioned in the article users don't seem to mind allowing their children to use Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, etc.
Why should we even consider putting any kind of limitations around what private companies do with the personal data of people too young to consent in any meaningful way isn’t a compelling argument.
Idelaly we wouldn't have to put limits on companies from the state level at all, users should decide not to use a service if they don't approve of how their data is used.
Given that we're no way close to this and the power imbalance is already huge, we should be regulating how every person's data is used regardless of age.
What is required to address the problem is not “oversight” in the abstract, but some form of government ID and age verification in order to use online services. Mark me down as one parent who prefers the situation we have now to the more dystopian one that would create.
So I'm wondering why we don't use AI to determine the likely age of a user from the photos they upload. Obviously there will be false-positives but then you can just ask them to upload a picture of their state ID/drivers license.
(I don't participate in social media, beyond HN...)
To me this would seem like a great idea. A couple hundred thousand folks who look 13 but are legally 26 who jump through some extra hoops, but several million children who cannot create a Facebook account.
Yeah, I also thought there is someone who doesn't know what social media is all about :)
Why not suggest folks get some token from the state and use that for identifying them exactly. And also, using clear names would help as one Always can Google up the name and make sure the other end doesn't pretend
Social media was ruined a long time ago. Even here it's a disparate, incomplete conversation. I commented knowing the response I'd get from HN about false positives with AI determining user age.
Time to sue Facebook for the market value of every underage user, and the continuing harm of having a public presence from that age forward. Every job lost, every lost opportunity.
I think if you use someone's photo for Facebook, they're likely to already be on the site.
You could also have the AI look at the photos that are uploaded over time and if they look very different from the person who supposedly created the account...and comments from others are not questioning why these are a different person.
Right now they don't have people vetting. Throw AI at it for non-perfect but better results. As long as it's not a gov site I'm okay with this. Got off Facebook in 2005 when the first of my relatives became racists.
Any site that isn't my bank (or related), asking for my ID is just going to lose me as a user or if I have to use it, just encourage me to create several accounts to frequently rotate between.
As a minor I'd have had even more time to bother with something tedious like that.
You can use makeup and let the AI think whatever age you are aiming for. It's not perfectly predictable but I haven't found any age AI that doesn't rank me from underage to old depending on what I aim for.
My guess is videos would work much better. But photos definitely don't yet.
My understanding is currently they do not vet user age. How could they? There are a few billion users. Even among different ethnicities people look younger or older depending on the society they group in. However, I was looking at this from a "confidence score" perspective. If it's an open secret that employees do nothing, throw AI at it to flat likely-to-be-underage users. Then throw what portion of employees you can at that effort, rather than vetting ~2 billion users.
Or we could treat people like human beings and get rid of this idea that only children are harmed by social media and the constant bombardment of advertisers and “influencers”.
Of course there are. One can't handle Internet. It handles you.
When I was in the age of preteen/teen I got everything I wanted. Everything. Sure, today isn't very different from the past. If some teenager pricks want to use meta, watch Netflix or do some nasty chat & greet chat roulette - they're just do it. We need to teach them how to handle that dickheads they may see and the do's and don'ts. this should be without tabooing.
Since so many have said..
The youths will be the doom for us.
Nowadays, the young ones learn less and less, know less than ever.. true true.. but also they use different tools as you and the tools are much better at what you do :) so actually we're accelerating.
doesn't seem like an apt comparison because a lot of religious advocacy groups behind those laws are explicitly stating that they see it as a means to criminalize sex work, payment providers refusing to serve sex workers, and so on.
Minors under 13 can't legally sign away personal information without a guardian, they're just violating COPPA which has been in power since before Facebook existed.
If someone was genuine about protecting data that is certainly much more sound both legally and it terms of its effectiveness than what these porn laws are. Just an excuse to hound a particular profession by interest groups.
Case in point, it pretty much has only stopped Pornhub from operating, which ironically had better data security and probably took content moderation more seriously than the thousand malware infested pages a search away. But it makes sense of course if the actual goal was to cause economic damage to the industry.
Work you can be compelled to do, if offered a similar income to a previous employer, under penalty of losing state unemployment benefits should only apply to types of "real work" of which "sex work" is not a member.
Or do you think all women on unemployment should lose their benefits if they turn down sex work? Call me puritanical on this topic, I support sex workers but can't get on board with state-sponsored rape.
Whatever happened to the Internet where the person on the other end could be a dog? Why is this surprising to anyone and why do so many people even care about changing it?
I really would hate to use this stuff if there were mandatory ID verifications all the time, and I think it would take something away from the experience too.
WhatsApp has an age limit of 13, but pretty much every kid gets an account when they are old enough to read and write. It's the de-facto way of communication, so parents just lie about the age knowingly.
That combined with the fact that it's impossible for a 3rd party to report an underaged user ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I don't understand how a company is supposed to combat this. It's just accepting reality that "there will be underage users on our site anyway, and there isn't anything we can do about that, because they will lie". On a case-by-case basis if you find out someone is underage you have to terminate their account, but by and large you just have to accept that these people exist.
Many of my online accounts were first registered when I was underage. I'm not eager to let them know that, of course.
Whole lot of people are not understanding the point.
Of course there are kids on the internet. And on Facebook. That's what the article (and lawsuit) are saying. And of course Meta knows it.
That is exactly why Meta needs to stop their psychologically manipulative and harmful practices. Identifying who is a kid is not working well enough. Preventing kids from accessing services and being manipulated and harmed is not working well enough.
Kids will access these websites, and when they do, it isn't a fair fight. They're taking their developing brains and going up against billion dollar algorithms designed by armies of professional psychologists to manipulate them to maximize "engagement". And unsurprisingly, this is having negative effects.
Facebook cannot claim they don't know this - everyone knows this. They need to change how they treat everyone, if they can't exclude kids. Kids are killing themselves because of Facebook. We need to stop this manipulation across the board.
> They're taking their developing brains and going up against billion dollar algorithms designed by armies of professional psychologists
You WISH they were developed by professional psychologists. They were mostly designed by undergraduate-trained programmers and UX "researchers" who took 2 semesters of basic psychology and learned what the word "heuristic" means and ran with it wholesale. I can tell you first-hand as a psychology PhD I'm basically unhireable for those positions because in training for my actual degree I didn't get the programming skills they require.
This is better handled by the phone and app store. Expecting every app and website to figure out a user's age makes this more complicated than necessary.
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[ 5.0 ms ] story [ 128 ms ] threadIt has nothing to do with Meta.
Literally everyone can figure out that if a website asks for your age or birthday, what you can put in whatever you want.
Whether or not those laws do what they're intended to do is another question, but to say the public 'doesn't care', is a baseless assumption to make.
Parents purposely allowing children to use these services is a much more clear indicator of sentiment, and as mentioned in the article users don't seem to mind allowing their children to use Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, etc.
Given that we're no way close to this and the power imbalance is already huge, we should be regulating how every person's data is used regardless of age.
(I don't participate in social media, beyond HN...)
To me this would seem like a great idea. A couple hundred thousand folks who look 13 but are legally 26 who jump through some extra hoops, but several million children who cannot create a Facebook account.
The risk to reward seems awesome.
Why not suggest folks get some token from the state and use that for identifying them exactly. And also, using clear names would help as one Always can Google up the name and make sure the other end doesn't pretend
Time to sue Facebook for the market value of every underage user, and the continuing harm of having a public presence from that age forward. Every job lost, every lost opportunity.
...and everyone uploading pictures of their kids would have to keep their drivers license handy.
I think if you use someone's photo for Facebook, they're likely to already be on the site.
You could also have the AI look at the photos that are uploaded over time and if they look very different from the person who supposedly created the account...and comments from others are not questioning why these are a different person.
Right now they don't have people vetting. Throw AI at it for non-perfect but better results. As long as it's not a gov site I'm okay with this. Got off Facebook in 2005 when the first of my relatives became racists.
As a minor I'd have had even more time to bother with something tedious like that.
My guess is videos would work much better. But photos definitely don't yet.
There's nothing secret about this open secret.
When I was in the age of preteen/teen I got everything I wanted. Everything. Sure, today isn't very different from the past. If some teenager pricks want to use meta, watch Netflix or do some nasty chat & greet chat roulette - they're just do it. We need to teach them how to handle that dickheads they may see and the do's and don'ts. this should be without tabooing.
Since so many have said.. The youths will be the doom for us.
Nowadays, the young ones learn less and less, know less than ever.. true true.. but also they use different tools as you and the tools are much better at what you do :) so actually we're accelerating.
Minors under 13 can't legally sign away personal information without a guardian, they're just violating COPPA which has been in power since before Facebook existed.
Case in point, it pretty much has only stopped Pornhub from operating, which ironically had better data security and probably took content moderation more seriously than the thousand malware infested pages a search away. But it makes sense of course if the actual goal was to cause economic damage to the industry.
Or do you think all women on unemployment should lose their benefits if they turn down sex work? Call me puritanical on this topic, I support sex workers but can't get on board with state-sponsored rape.
I really would hate to use this stuff if there were mandatory ID verifications all the time, and I think it would take something away from the experience too.
But I partly agree. I prefer talking with anonymous dogs on the internet too and would hate for that to disappear.
Because multiple laws could punish them for tracking kids, so they think "anyone could be a kid" threatens their business model.
These technologies like surveillance, facebook, phones, ect are all imposing separately..
When you fuse those technologies together, you can track and clamp down on and own men like a farmer owns cattle.
The next 'freedom' will likely be using tech to force people out of apathy, pushing them up and off the ground floor with electronic provocation.
Facebook is the antithesis of the internet and should never have existed.
I understand why it is the way it is but honestly it makes me uncomfortable with the large social media sites.
"Socialization" turns into human farming a bit too quickly.
That combined with the fact that it's impossible for a 3rd party to report an underaged user ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Many of my online accounts were first registered when I was underage. I'm not eager to let them know that, of course.
Of course there are kids on the internet. And on Facebook. That's what the article (and lawsuit) are saying. And of course Meta knows it.
That is exactly why Meta needs to stop their psychologically manipulative and harmful practices. Identifying who is a kid is not working well enough. Preventing kids from accessing services and being manipulated and harmed is not working well enough.
Kids will access these websites, and when they do, it isn't a fair fight. They're taking their developing brains and going up against billion dollar algorithms designed by armies of professional psychologists to manipulate them to maximize "engagement". And unsurprisingly, this is having negative effects.
Facebook cannot claim they don't know this - everyone knows this. They need to change how they treat everyone, if they can't exclude kids. Kids are killing themselves because of Facebook. We need to stop this manipulation across the board.
You WISH they were developed by professional psychologists. They were mostly designed by undergraduate-trained programmers and UX "researchers" who took 2 semesters of basic psychology and learned what the word "heuristic" means and ran with it wholesale. I can tell you first-hand as a psychology PhD I'm basically unhireable for those positions because in training for my actual degree I didn't get the programming skills they require.