A ten year old was already barred from using this social media. Generally you have to be over the age of 13 to engage with these social media platforms.
But the big take away here is that instead of these platforms making their product not-addictive and generally safer, they will use this as an opportunity to force legislation that allows them more access to everyone’s personal information (and invades everyone’s privacy) because the law says they have to to enforce age verification to "protect children’. And since that data is their main product that they sell outright or sell access to for ad aggregation, and because they have proven to be incredibly bad as anonymizing and safeguarding that information, this is literally worse for everyone, especially children who’s data is valuable because they don’t have bad credit or other marks on their identities yet and that means their identities (if stolen and used for illegal activities) can detrimentally effect them for the rest of their lifetime.
That’s what you’re advocating for when you agree with this kind of government overreach. The companies have this worked out. When your identity is stolen they give you some credit monitoring and go on operating as if nothing happened. Maybe (and that maybe is doing Atlas levels of heavy lifting here) they end up in a class action lawsuit and the people affected get $12.
I have seen literally no ID verification law that combats this or addresses it in any way. And that’s before we get to governments using this to surveil the general populace.
Let’s take that at face value. There are portions of the internet that children absolutely shouldn’t have access to and that varies depending on age. But since this is about social media, let’s be realistic here. If it’s ‘bad’ for everyone regardless of age it should in theory just be banned outright? Or is this subjective. Is the fediverse better than Facebook and Instagram for the average teen?
How age verification should be implemented and how it is being "implemented’’ are two very different things and the main take away there is thus far it has been implemented by people with no technical knowledge of how such a thing should be implemented, and who have a vested interest in using any such framework for surveillance of the general population, and since we cannot trust them to do one without the other there should be a third option. What’s the third option? I have suggestions but people generally don’t like them.
The fact is I would challenge the people of Lemmy to show me where this has been implemented thus far that they do address privacy concerns. I have yet to see a government entity the world over who has done this properly.
People here do try to address them and brainstorm them here all the time and there are many suggestions but the fact is none of those ideas are being used because the entities implementing them are not doing it for the reasons they say they are and the suggestions directly impact their ability to use such apparatus for their true purpose.
Why is that law unenforceable and what makes this law particularly more enforceable?
I am aware that it doesn’t have to, but I am also aware that so far it has generally done that, either by providing that information to a third party for verification or by requiring the use of biometric data to do the same. For the same reason I don’t want my or my kids ID being uploaded to a cloud service for verification, I also don’t want my or my child’s face scans being sent to entities that will face no repercussions when they fail to safeguard that information. Doesn’t matter if that third party is a government service or not.
They do though either because they are unaware of what such measures actually entail and think that it sounds good so it must be good, or because they are willing to sacrifice their privacy for the sake of the children possibly because they believe there’s no other way. I didn’t make a statement in favor of such measures without looking into it but lots of people do.
I don’t think most social media companies failed so much as they did exactly what they set out to do. They want their products to be addictive and bad for you because they can keep you in that loop using their products if they do and that means they can profit off all the information they already collect about you. And they want to start their users as early and young as possible because that maximizes their ability to gather information and sell ad space.
But further, why is it that laws prohibiting access to social media for those 13 and under are routinely ignored? If they already can’t enforce the law they have, what makes this law more enforceable?
Why don’t they develope and enforce laws about parental control use? Why not limit the access parents are allowed to give their children to the internet?
Why not educate people as a whole on internet use, parental controls, and social media literacy/ social media data collection?
Why not use anonymized tokens instead of ID verification or facial recognition/biometric data collection?
This isn’t me saying that governments shouldn’t make laws to regulate social media or protect their people, including their children. It’s me noting that they are going about it the way they are because they have an ulterior motive that cannot be achieved without invasive data collection that violates privacy.