There are these crazy things called “parental controls”. You’ve probably never heard of them, but they’re on nearly every single personal computing device. OR, and hear me out. You could just buy a dumb phone for your kids until they’re sixteen, and if they want to take pictures, buy them an inexpensive digital camera. It would be cheaper overall than buying them an iPhone. But no, that’s probably too difficult for you, so everyone else has to give even more of their personal information if they want to use Facebook Marketplace or whatever.
Not really, though it depends on what kind of controls you’re trying to add/use. Samsung has its own version that operates more or less the same way. You still need to have a Samsung account. So it’s that or use a third party app, or use the parental controls from your mobile provider. There may be other ways but this is what I know and what I use
Buy a dumb phone and make them feel ostracized from everyone else lol. Spoken like someone who isn’t gen Z.
Let’s say you do use a dumb phone. What about everyone else? Others have to make a lot of concessions in order to communicate with you in a group project for example.Best case scenario the group does its communication over social media and calls you directly. You’re going to miss out a lot on communication.
There’s also some aspect of “followers = clout”. Basically what I’m trying to say is expecting your child to be OK taking a dumb phone to school while seeing everyone else with one may have a dramatic effect.
One, I’m not interested in making sure their coolest middle schooler. Well-Dressed and able to express their style through clothes, their bookbag etc. Two, I don’t really want them in a bunch of group chats yapping constantly. Yes, they will miss out on a lot of communication but they don’t need to be in constant 24/7 contact with anyone in elementary school and middle school. And finally, when I see them behaving maturely I may consider getting them a smartphone earlier. But if not they’ll just be waiting until they turn 15. If they want to get on TikTok they can open up the app on the family room TV and they can be the same with YouTube.
I’m not going to go through every single scenario parenting in the digital age, but I have to be aware and I have to monitor. And over time the amount of monitoring I do will have to be reduced based on the maturity that they’re showing but also out of respect for their autonomy.
But you know what’s great about everything I said, you don’t have to do any of that. You can give your kid the smartphone and let them get on FB messenger at 7 years old for all I care. And you know why I don’t care? Because that’s your decision and you can deal with the consequences or benefits of that parenting style.
Though I’ll be honest, I’m not certain what point you’re trying to make here. Are you saying you want the ban so you can give your child a smartphone without thinking about how they’re using it? Or are you saying no ban and iPhones for preteens?
Look, I’ve raised 4 kids. I run OPNsense with filters. I’ve enabled parental controls all on their mobile phone connections. My kids were and will be the last that got a smart phone in their year. I’m an active member of smartphone free childhood in the UK; I’ve engaged with U.K. members of Parliament on the topic. I’ve worked for tech giants whose sole purpose it is to create “habits” ie addiction in amongst children. Regardless I’m not talking about just my kids, I work in education and engage with multiple schools on the topic.
You come back to me when you’ve taken kids through the landscape they exist in today. What’s more, it is possible to verify age online in a way that doesn’t enable governments to see what sites you visit (not that they can’t already get that your ISP); of course I’m against government oversight of everyone’s internet habits. But both can be achieved; anonymity and age verification is possible.
It sounds like a pretty one sided view you’ve got there and maybe, just maybe, it could do with some nuance.
Im not sure what youre arguing here? its possible to control access well as a parent, but so much easier if the state force everyone on the internet to provide id in order to prevent teenagers talking to eavh other?
You yourself csn target what you think is harmful but a law will hit everything and everyone, and like i implied in the driveby about roblox still might not actually block something you find unacceptable.
This is just the wrong approach to achieve the goal.
Youre on lemmy! This is like the one place people will decry facebook, x, reddit, insta etc. But what your arguing for will end up with them as the only services that can navigate existing legally, and children will still work around blocks because they simply dont care about consequences for lying about their age.
Our democracy regulates a lot of things that it (we) believe to be harmful to children: Cigarettes, gambling (also online), pornography, violence in media, alcohol etc etc.
Who said that there can’t be regulations? The argument that we’re making here is that a ban that requires users to give out more information to companies that have a horrible track record in protecting user information is a bad form of regulation. I for one would be extremely happy if there were tighter and more severe penalties for advertising to children. Removing the profit incentive for any of these companies to have children on the platform at all.
Legally requiring human review for things like YouTube Kids (which nobody should be using anyway, especially when the PBS kids exists) and having a harsh penalty if an Elsa gate scenario happens again, like it ever stopped but still.
There’s nothing in the EU age verification structure that requires you to hand more information to the places where you need to verify your age. In fact the system expressly prevents it. Similarly in the ZKP architecture, it it not legal, nor possible, for the age verification service to know where you log in.
Maybe I’ve misunderstood your comment and so I say this in great respect; but if you don’t understand the technical details about the system the EU has defined, you may be basing your resistance on wrong assumptions.
Right, and while I understand what you’re saying. The article is talking about the French legislature trying to introduce a social media ban, not a blanket ban by EU. That would be a different topic. Now I may just be a simple American, but it is my understanding that Nations within the union still have a sovereign right to create their own laws and set their own agendas. Now if you’re saying that the French president and French Parliament do not have the legal authority to go through with an Australian style age verification ban, then that’s good news.
Regardless, as stated in the article, the French president is calling on Parliament to start debating a ban, and in this discussion, I think most people, but specifically myself are speaking broadly about what those bands look like in the rest of the world. At the point I am making is that we don’t need to regulate people, we need to regulate the companies. Evaluate and find ways to remove the profit incentive to have minors on these platforms. Personally, I think that might include things like harsher penalties for advertising to children as well as severe penalties and fines when a minors information is stolen in a data breach.
The article is talking about banning social media under a particular age. This is enabled by the new Digital Service Act, and specifically the Age Verification Blueprint within the European Digital Identity Wallet. The same discussion is happening all across the EU exactly because the EU now has shared standards defined for how age verification will work online.
So while it’s true that counties can enact their own laws, like a US state can, they do so within a framework of European supranational regulation and they definitely cannot (easily) make national laws that circumvent EU directives. Well, they can, but the punishments and the hassle is severe.
But very specifically these discussions are popping up all over the EU because suddenly the EU is actually putting in place the machinery that allows it to happen. So yes, it’s a French discussion, but one borne of and fed by the European-wide framework discussion.
Because the line between “social media” and “talking to other people” is so blurry as to not exist.
Also, and more importantly, the power of these companies is so great in effect youll only enforce that facebook etc. are the only ways of talking to each other that can exist legally and entrench the very problem you want to solve.
No im not arguing its hard to define, im arguing that youll have to ban children from whats app. Private minecraft servers (even ones owned and run by the kids) too. If you dont do this you leave a space for the tech giants to bring the targeted ads and then youll have to ban kids from each space as they move in.
Any communication channel will fall to this if you take the approach of banning children from them one by one instead of stopping this behaviour by the tech giants entirely by legislating against targeted advertising directly.
These services are just as toxic to adults.
There is no such thing as anonymous data. It has been proven all data can be linked to you. The only data that is anonymous is the one they don’t collect.
the only way to have privacy-preserving age checks is when there’s a variable on the phone that stores whether the user is old enough. and gives that data forward to apps/websites trying to do age checks.
that variable can only be changed if you’re the rightful owner of the device, i.e. if you paid for it and have a code that’s on the purchase bill or sth. and children wouldn’t have access to that.
This wouldn’t work and be moot because phones and other devices are purchased by parents and guardians not children.
If you are saying the code should be changed by parents to access social media with default off. It would be difficult for most people due to low levels of tech literacy
I agree that for the system to be anonymous the state has to live up to its commitment to anonymity. Have you read the EU’s regulation about this? In there is exactly a commitment that age verification has to be anonymous.
But, let’s take a reality check here:
For the vast majority of the population, their ISP already collects every single website they visit.
if the state wants to know what you’ve searched for and where you’ve been online, they already have that data stored. They can only access it legally with a court order.
Yes you can circumvent this logging (to some extent) through VPN - just like you can circumvent the requirement to verify your age with a VPN. But the vast majority don’t.
What’s more, it is possible to verify age online in a way that doesn’t enable governments to see what sites you visit
Would you upload your ID to Lemmy? Because that’s what the “age verification” requires you to do.
Maybe you’d rather upload a video of your face from many different angles, which is absolutely never going to be used for nefarious purposes, pinky promise.
Without Karens like you, we wouldn’t have shit like the OSA. That’s why there are so many angry replies.
Now you have to pay for a VPN to have free access to the internet in the UK, many UK hosted sites had to shut down or block the UK wholly for UK users.
The DKTB is a personal app. It is therefore assumed, that the User will not share it with other people, and that only the User can access and control their personal DKTB. Ultimately, this means that all attestations in a DKTB are expected to pertain to and only be presented by the same User. This is enforced by requiring the user to authenticate using biometry or PIN-code when using the app and only allowing the DKTB application to be installed on one device per user.
(from the PDF)
This is a false assumption: PIN codes can be bypassed by sharing them with others. Devices can be faked unless using hardware attestation, which prohibits any modifications to the device which may be undertaken by those interested in rooting or installing a custom OS.
Users can initially acquire a DKTB on their smartphone or tablet via Google Play or the Apple App store.
(from the PDF)
This method requires the use of a vanilla, unmodified device, effectively prohibiting modifications to devices that one might wish to alter.
It may theoretically be a false assumption but in practice it’s really not. The MitID identification and signing framework of Denmark, and many other similar systems across the EU, is based entirely on “the device is personal, access to it is limited and the secure enclaves within them are trustworthy”.
You are correct that this framework is not designed for anyone who wishes to root their device or install a custom OS. In other words, it cuts out 0.00000000001% of the population. The colour of the app has a bigger impact than “oh no! We can’t support rooted devices”.
There’s no such thing as anonymous age verification, you can browse the web freely without creating an account. Age verification removes that anonymity. I don’t really care about the EU age verification shit, we already have that in Germany, porn websites of course ignore that law because nobody would use their site if they had to verify everyones age. They just removed all .de domains.
What the fuck are you talking about? They want your damn photo ID of course they know who you are. Truth just wanna silence young people because they don’t like genocide
I’m talking about French age verification, which is a national example of the EU’s ZKP age verification system, and which the article is about.
To the instance that issues the ZKP tokens you of course have to prove who you are. Once you have the ZKP age verification tokens and actually use them to prove your age, those tokens are negotiated solely between your device and the asking entity.
Have you actually read the EU’s required structure for this?
There are these crazy things called “parental controls”. You’ve probably never heard of them, but they’re on nearly every single personal computing device. OR, and hear me out. You could just buy a dumb phone for your kids until they’re sixteen, and if they want to take pictures, buy them an inexpensive digital camera. It would be cheaper overall than buying them an iPhone. But no, that’s probably too difficult for you, so everyone else has to give even more of their personal information if they want to use Facebook Marketplace or whatever.
It would be nice if there was an actual article discussing how the parental controls on android phones actually work.
Add & manage supervision on a current Google Account - Pixel Phone Help https://share.google/j9ZOyQbpZTh0rnRRs
can i do that without google?
i would very much not want to use google
Not really, though it depends on what kind of controls you’re trying to add/use. Samsung has its own version that operates more or less the same way. You still need to have a Samsung account. So it’s that or use a third party app, or use the parental controls from your mobile provider. There may be other ways but this is what I know and what I use
Buy a dumb phone and make them feel ostracized from everyone else lol. Spoken like someone who isn’t gen Z.
Let’s say you do use a dumb phone. What about everyone else? Others have to make a lot of concessions in order to communicate with you in a group project for example.Best case scenario the group does its communication over social media and calls you directly. You’re going to miss out a lot on communication.
There’s also some aspect of “followers = clout”. Basically what I’m trying to say is expecting your child to be OK taking a dumb phone to school while seeing everyone else with one may have a dramatic effect.
One, I’m not interested in making sure their coolest middle schooler. Well-Dressed and able to express their style through clothes, their bookbag etc. Two, I don’t really want them in a bunch of group chats yapping constantly. Yes, they will miss out on a lot of communication but they don’t need to be in constant 24/7 contact with anyone in elementary school and middle school. And finally, when I see them behaving maturely I may consider getting them a smartphone earlier. But if not they’ll just be waiting until they turn 15. If they want to get on TikTok they can open up the app on the family room TV and they can be the same with YouTube.
I’m not going to go through every single scenario parenting in the digital age, but I have to be aware and I have to monitor. And over time the amount of monitoring I do will have to be reduced based on the maturity that they’re showing but also out of respect for their autonomy.
But you know what’s great about everything I said, you don’t have to do any of that. You can give your kid the smartphone and let them get on FB messenger at 7 years old for all I care. And you know why I don’t care? Because that’s your decision and you can deal with the consequences or benefits of that parenting style.
Though I’ll be honest, I’m not certain what point you’re trying to make here. Are you saying you want the ban so you can give your child a smartphone without thinking about how they’re using it? Or are you saying no ban and iPhones for preteens?
Yeah … I was the kid that knew how to bypass those and “helped” other kids out in that regard.
Then hold the creators of the parental locks accountable. Why am i loosing rights?
Because they want a parent on autopilot.
Lol. Yes it’s that simple.
Look, I’ve raised 4 kids. I run OPNsense with filters. I’ve enabled parental controls all on their mobile phone connections. My kids were and will be the last that got a smart phone in their year. I’m an active member of smartphone free childhood in the UK; I’ve engaged with U.K. members of Parliament on the topic. I’ve worked for tech giants whose sole purpose it is to create “habits” ie addiction in amongst children. Regardless I’m not talking about just my kids, I work in education and engage with multiple schools on the topic.
You come back to me when you’ve taken kids through the landscape they exist in today. What’s more, it is possible to verify age online in a way that doesn’t enable governments to see what sites you visit (not that they can’t already get that your ISP); of course I’m against government oversight of everyone’s internet habits. But both can be achieved; anonymity and age verification is possible.
It sounds like a pretty one sided view you’ve got there and maybe, just maybe, it could do with some nuance.
Im not sure what youre arguing here? its possible to control access well as a parent, but so much easier if the state force everyone on the internet to provide id in order to prevent teenagers talking to eavh other?
You yourself csn target what you think is harmful but a law will hit everything and everyone, and like i implied in the driveby about roblox still might not actually block something you find unacceptable.
This is just the wrong approach to achieve the goal.
Youre on lemmy! This is like the one place people will decry facebook, x, reddit, insta etc. But what your arguing for will end up with them as the only services that can navigate existing legally, and children will still work around blocks because they simply dont care about consequences for lying about their age.
Our democracy regulates a lot of things that it (we) believe to be harmful to children: Cigarettes, gambling (also online), pornography, violence in media, alcohol etc etc.
Why is social media any different?
Who said that there can’t be regulations? The argument that we’re making here is that a ban that requires users to give out more information to companies that have a horrible track record in protecting user information is a bad form of regulation. I for one would be extremely happy if there were tighter and more severe penalties for advertising to children. Removing the profit incentive for any of these companies to have children on the platform at all.
Legally requiring human review for things like YouTube Kids (which nobody should be using anyway, especially when the PBS kids exists) and having a harsh penalty if an Elsa gate scenario happens again, like it ever stopped but still.
There’s nothing in the EU age verification structure that requires you to hand more information to the places where you need to verify your age. In fact the system expressly prevents it. Similarly in the ZKP architecture, it it not legal, nor possible, for the age verification service to know where you log in.
Maybe I’ve misunderstood your comment and so I say this in great respect; but if you don’t understand the technical details about the system the EU has defined, you may be basing your resistance on wrong assumptions.
Right, and while I understand what you’re saying. The article is talking about the French legislature trying to introduce a social media ban, not a blanket ban by EU. That would be a different topic. Now I may just be a simple American, but it is my understanding that Nations within the union still have a sovereign right to create their own laws and set their own agendas. Now if you’re saying that the French president and French Parliament do not have the legal authority to go through with an Australian style age verification ban, then that’s good news.
Regardless, as stated in the article, the French president is calling on Parliament to start debating a ban, and in this discussion, I think most people, but specifically myself are speaking broadly about what those bands look like in the rest of the world. At the point I am making is that we don’t need to regulate people, we need to regulate the companies. Evaluate and find ways to remove the profit incentive to have minors on these platforms. Personally, I think that might include things like harsher penalties for advertising to children as well as severe penalties and fines when a minors information is stolen in a data breach.
The article is talking about banning social media under a particular age. This is enabled by the new Digital Service Act, and specifically the Age Verification Blueprint within the European Digital Identity Wallet. The same discussion is happening all across the EU exactly because the EU now has shared standards defined for how age verification will work online.
So while it’s true that counties can enact their own laws, like a US state can, they do so within a framework of European supranational regulation and they definitely cannot (easily) make national laws that circumvent EU directives. Well, they can, but the punishments and the hassle is severe.
But very specifically these discussions are popping up all over the EU because suddenly the EU is actually putting in place the machinery that allows it to happen. So yes, it’s a French discussion, but one borne of and fed by the European-wide framework discussion.
Because the line between “social media” and “talking to other people” is so blurry as to not exist.
Also, and more importantly, the power of these companies is so great in effect youll only enforce that facebook etc. are the only ways of talking to each other that can exist legally and entrench the very problem you want to solve.
For example, is whats app social media?
Defining what is and what isn’t something is exactly what law has to do every single time it gets defined. I’m sure we can work this one out too.
The size of the tech giants cannot be the reason to not attempt regulation. If anything, it’s exactly the reason to regulate.
No im not arguing its hard to define, im arguing that youll have to ban children from whats app. Private minecraft servers (even ones owned and run by the kids) too. If you dont do this you leave a space for the tech giants to bring the targeted ads and then youll have to ban kids from each space as they move in.
Any communication channel will fall to this if you take the approach of banning children from them one by one instead of stopping this behaviour by the tech giants entirely by legislating against targeted advertising directly. These services are just as toxic to adults.
Ah I see what you mean.
I suspect the EU will regulate in the same way it’s done other enforcement; if you are above a certain size, different requirements apply to you.
There is no such thing as anonymous data. It has been proven all data can be linked to you. The only data that is anonymous is the one they don’t collect.
the only way to have privacy-preserving age checks is when there’s a variable on the phone that stores whether the user is old enough. and gives that data forward to apps/websites trying to do age checks.
that variable can only be changed if you’re the rightful owner of the device, i.e. if you paid for it and have a code that’s on the purchase bill or sth. and children wouldn’t have access to that.
This wouldn’t work and be moot because phones and other devices are purchased by parents and guardians not children.
If you are saying the code should be changed by parents to access social media with default off. It would be difficult for most people due to low levels of tech literacy
then they should hand out access tokens at the supermarket (need to be 18+ or 16+ whatever the age limit will be)
I agree that for the system to be anonymous the state has to live up to its commitment to anonymity. Have you read the EU’s regulation about this? In there is exactly a commitment that age verification has to be anonymous.
But, let’s take a reality check here:
Yes you can circumvent this logging (to some extent) through VPN - just like you can circumvent the requirement to verify your age with a VPN. But the vast majority don’t.
Would you upload your ID to Lemmy? Because that’s what the “age verification” requires you to do. Maybe you’d rather upload a video of your face from many different angles, which is absolutely never going to be used for nefarious purposes, pinky promise.
Without Karens like you, we wouldn’t have shit like the OSA. That’s why there are so many angry replies. Now you have to pay for a VPN to have free access to the internet in the UK, many UK hosted sites had to shut down or block the UK wholly for UK users.
Once again, have you read the EU proposal? We are, after all, talking about France here, not the UK.
The UK, no longer part of the EU, of course have gone much softer and enabled non-anonymous verification. I am of course deeply against this.
What I AM talking about is the ZKP method mandated by the EU, which is anonymous.
I’ll ignore your name calling; not very conducive to a debate.
No ZKP system can work because someone can generate hundreds of tokens and hand them out to whoever wants one.
Only the entity that owns the private key can generate signed tokens. You can read about the Danish solution, which is the first and most developed implementation of the EU’s requirements for anonymity: https://digst.dk/media/5gybwsaq/implementing-age-verification-with-danish-digital-identity-wallet-dktb-09.pdf
This is a false assumption: PIN codes can be bypassed by sharing them with others. Devices can be faked unless using hardware attestation, which prohibits any modifications to the device which may be undertaken by those interested in rooting or installing a custom OS.
This method requires the use of a vanilla, unmodified device, effectively prohibiting modifications to devices that one might wish to alter.
It may theoretically be a false assumption but in practice it’s really not. The MitID identification and signing framework of Denmark, and many other similar systems across the EU, is based entirely on “the device is personal, access to it is limited and the secure enclaves within them are trustworthy”.
You are correct that this framework is not designed for anyone who wishes to root their device or install a custom OS. In other words, it cuts out 0.00000000001% of the population. The colour of the app has a bigger impact than “oh no! We can’t support rooted devices”.
There’s no such thing as anonymous age verification, you can browse the web freely without creating an account. Age verification removes that anonymity. I don’t really care about the EU age verification shit, we already have that in Germany, porn websites of course ignore that law because nobody would use their site if they had to verify everyones age. They just removed all .de domains.
Yeah that person sucks ass. I won’t tolerate that shit
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What the fuck are you talking about? They want your damn photo ID of course they know who you are. Truth just wanna silence young people because they don’t like genocide
What are YOU talking about?
I’m talking about French age verification, which is a national example of the EU’s ZKP age verification system, and which the article is about.
To the instance that issues the ZKP tokens you of course have to prove who you are. Once you have the ZKP age verification tokens and actually use them to prove your age, those tokens are negotiated solely between your device and the asking entity.
Have you actually read the EU’s required structure for this?