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from the I've-got-a-Bad-Thieling-About-This dept.
Ten days ago, the social chat app Discord announced that it would launch “teen-by-default” settings for its global audience. As part of this update, all new and existing users worldwide will have a teen-appropriate experience, with updated communication settings, restricted access to age-gated spaces, and content filtering that preserves privacy and meaningful connections, the platform said.
This, of course, means that to use Discord the way you are used to, you’ll have to let it scan your face, and the internet wasn’t happy. Many communities quickly announced their move to other platforms. Others, like the security researcher Celeste, who goes by the handle vmfunc, were convinced there would be a workaround.
Together with two other researchers, they set out to look into Persona, the San Francisco-based startup that’s used by Discord for biometric identity verification – and found a Persona frontend exposed to the open internet on a US government authorized server.
More at The Rage
(Score: 4, Insightful) by corey on Saturday February 21, @10:01PM (3 children)
I’ve heard this trope a few times, you must be American with your free speech stuff. Everywhere else, we clearly see there’s a huge problem with kids accessing inappropriate content online. This isn’t a cover for some wacky conspiracy like you assert, it’s literally to help the kids mental health. The method might not be perfect but governments cant tell parents how to parent - and a shitload of them are happy to stick their kid in front of a PC with YouTube open. Age verification is one way to solve a complex problem and might not be perfect. Parental education is another.
Whenever I open YouTube, the random videos show up, there’s always, always, at least one with some awful sexualised looking female and the video is framed as being “epic fails”. It’s clickbait, just trash mind numbing tripe. But then again this is without an account and kids are still allowed to use the platforms, they’re just banned from having an account.
Read up on the work Jonathan Haidt has done. See that there’s a hockey stick curve of teen mental health problems that kicked up once Tik Tok started. There’s a problem that needs fixed and age verification is one solution.
I got two young kids in Australia and I’m bloody glad the govt here has made social media banned for under 16s, gives me and fellow parents a good reason to not let the kids on it (I wouldn’t anyway once they get older). Yeah it’s easily bypassable with VPNs etc but it’s the message that counts. And if 1/3 of the kids don’t stay on social media then there’s less reason for the others to stay on. There’s been lots of kids interviewed here who are glad because they feel pressured to be on it but this gives them a reason to socialise outside of these platforms.
(Score: 3, Informative) by aafcac on Saturday February 21, @10:48PM
It's a cover, and they've been doing that sort of thing since well before there was any particular reason to think there was a mental health issue for kids. You have to also look at the areas in which the policies are being pushed the hardest and amazingly, they're the areas that have tried a bunch of other things to ban adult materials.
Banning kids from social media is probably good, the issue is that there would need to be a method of verifying it that didn't have even worse consequences. What's supposed to happen here is that parents are supposed to be parenting. I completely get that there are a lot practical issues with that, but getting the government a list of people accessing various types of adult content has a very real risk of being abused in the ways that politicians have already been promising.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday February 22, @02:09AM
It's not age verification. it's surveilance and identity verification. Papieren, bitte.
(Score: 2) by DadaDoofy on Sunday February 22, @02:36PM
The problem with "wacky conspiracies" is, they keep coming true. Are you suggesting the researchers, Peter Thiel, Persona Identity, OpenAI, Roblox, Heritage Bank, and Lime are all in on the conspiracy? Are you suggesting the Know Your Customer (KYC) and Anti-Money Laundering (AML) products the researchers found the source code for on a government server aren't real?
As far as the problem "age verification" claims to solve, there is no denying social media can be harmful, and not just to children. However, in a free county, it is the responsibility of parents to raise their children. Centralized one-size-fits-all solutions implemented by an authoritarian government fail to take into account children mature and, if parents are doing it right, become responsible at different ages. There is not some magical switch that flips on a kid's 16th birthday. And no, it's not the message, but the results that count.