I’m asking for public policy ideas here. A lot of countries are enacting age verification now. But of course this is a privacy nightmare and is ripe for abuse. At the same time though, I also understand why people are concerned with how kids are using social media. These products are designed to be addictive and are known to cause body image issues and so forth. So what’s the middle ground? How can we protect kids from the harms of social media in a way that respects everyone’s privacy?

  • Bazoogle@lemmy.world
    1·
    1 day ago

    You should read the Anxious Generation. It goes into a lot of detail on research showing the damage social media has had on an entire generation. It’s pretty undeniable that something needs to be done to stop/control social media’s influence on children and teens in their crucial development years. There are some people that are definitely using it as a cover for control, but there are plenty of well educated people that see a real problem and are trying to do the best they can to find a solution.

    • epicshepich@programming.dev
      1·
      1 day ago

      I mentioned it in my original comment! I thoroughly enjoyed it. As an older member of Gen Z, a lot of what’s written there jives with my lived experience and the intuitions I’ve developed around social media. And as a relatively young father, I’m also invested in figuring out how to give my kids the healthiest relationship with the online world possible.

      I’m also a strong proponent of digital freedom and privacy. A lot of the age verification technology that’s being rolled is tied to companies like Palantir or organizations like DHS, which seem to have a rather unambiguous interest in neither the freedom nor the privacy (nor really the general wellbeing) of the populace.

      I’m of the opinion that any system that could enable or facilitate mass surveillance is not an acceptable solution to the problem of protecting kids online.

      The idea I laid out in my original comment was inspired by the idea Jonathan Haidt presents in Chapter 10 (What Governments and Tech Companies Can Do Now), Section 3 (Facilitate Age Verification), 6th paragraph:

      There is not, at present, any perfect method of implementing a universal age check. There is no method that could be applied to everyone who comes to a site in a way that is perfectly reliable and raises no privacy or civil liberties objections.[26] But if we drop the need for a universal solution and restrict our focus to helping parents who want the internet to have age gates that apply to their children, then a third approach becomes possible: Parents should have a way of marking their child’s phones, tablets, and laptops as devices belonging to a minor. That mark, which could be written either into the hardware or the software, would act like a sign that tells companies with age restrictions, “This person is underage; do not admit without parental consent.”

        • epicshepich@programming.dev
          1·
          5 hours ago

          Thanks for the read, I learned something today! I worry, though, that even if someone could devise a ZPK for age verification, can end-users actually trust that platforms are using it? Say for example Meta provides a biometric-based ZPK for age. Can we trust that they’re not harvesting our biometric data? In the podcast’s examples, it’s easy for Peggy and Victor to understand that they are using a ZPK system. However, the age verification problem most often arises in arrangements where the prover is using a client app into whose inner workings they have no insight (either because it’s closed source, they’re not technologically literate enough, or who has the time to scrutinize the source code for every program they use) and which is most likely developed by the verifier. So the problem kind of moves upstream: how can you trust that ZPK is actually being used?