I think if people knew a lot more about how children are exploited online they would understand more. It does seem extreme, but also it’s scary what happens.
Agreed, the slippery slope argument people like to trot out is old, and the government already knows who is using Facebook.
The problem I see is handing more personally identifiable information over to corporations that are both prone to misusing their power and the potential for hackers to obtain that information.
This will likely end with a push to the mygov ID system once a breach has impacted Australians and resistance is low.
The law in EU specifically says that age verification needs to minimize the amount of information collected and GDPR still applies to this data. If implemented correctly the service will only verify your date of birth. Besides, most Facebook users share way more already. Facebook already knows everyone’s education, finances, relationship status and has 1000 fotos of their face. The idea that sharing your ID number with them changes anything is silly.
Oh cool we solved identity theft then, right? Right? Seriously this is a poorly veiled mechanism to have Internet usage tied to specific identities, the people pushing for it are not even going to be the public faces we see doing the pushing. I also find it really telling that they have weaponised the grief of a mother who lost a child to suicide after sustained online bullying, but are choosing to ignore the fact that youth advocates are outright telling them that loss of online safe spaces and community will be jeopardising the safety of marginalised kids such as the LGBTQI+ community. How many suicides is an acceptable trade off for them?
My own kids will be forced to log out of YouTube, this makes it harder for me to monitor their usage as now it will all be anonymous and as much as I can helicopter around them at home, as the government seeming wants me to do, I won’t be able to see any of the content they are consuming when I am not directly behind them. The current method is so smooth and frictionless that the kids don’t bother with finding workarounds, the new system…
My take, leave the kids logged in with accounts and start holding social media companies accountable for the content they provide. It will be imminently more traceable when this stuff is reported and knowing they could be fined hundreds of thousands of millions of dollars when they fail their subscribers might convince these companies to do better.
Lastly, the government is already seeing alternatives spring up to take over these niches in the ecosystem. The fact that the ban hasn’t even gone into effect yet and the whack-a-mole has already begun really says something. The only way these current laws can be salvaged once this cycle starts will be to institute blanket bans, rather than targeted. When every website with a comment section begins to ask for ID things are going to get messy, at that point OpSec goes out the window.
Apparently the eSafety commissioner can bring fines of up to $850k per user whose data has been mismanaged, but I don’t see that happening. Discord leaked a bunch of details recently and to the best of my knowledge all that was required of them was a pinky promise to try harder.
To expand a little Australian politics has a bad habit of coming up with grandiose solutions to problems that they can push for headlines then worrying about details afterwards. If we had GDPR like privacy and data security laws in place before this it would be better. If we had a clear and understandable reporting system for data breaches, better again. If we had actual education programs to demystify and explain Internet awareness and literacy. If we had control over the scope of data harvesting.
But no we jump straight to the headline, details and workability can come sometime later.
I’m of two minds on this. Will be interesting to see how it plays out.
I think if people knew a lot more about how children are exploited online they would understand more. It does seem extreme, but also it’s scary what happens.
Agreed, the slippery slope argument people like to trot out is old, and the government already knows who is using Facebook.
The problem I see is handing more personally identifiable information over to corporations that are both prone to misusing their power and the potential for hackers to obtain that information.
This will likely end with a push to the mygov ID system once a breach has impacted Australians and resistance is low.
The law in EU specifically says that age verification needs to minimize the amount of information collected and GDPR still applies to this data. If implemented correctly the service will only verify your date of birth. Besides, most Facebook users share way more already. Facebook already knows everyone’s education, finances, relationship status and has 1000 fotos of their face. The idea that sharing your ID number with them changes anything is silly.
Oh cool we solved identity theft then, right? Right? Seriously this is a poorly veiled mechanism to have Internet usage tied to specific identities, the people pushing for it are not even going to be the public faces we see doing the pushing. I also find it really telling that they have weaponised the grief of a mother who lost a child to suicide after sustained online bullying, but are choosing to ignore the fact that youth advocates are outright telling them that loss of online safe spaces and community will be jeopardising the safety of marginalised kids such as the LGBTQI+ community. How many suicides is an acceptable trade off for them?
My own kids will be forced to log out of YouTube, this makes it harder for me to monitor their usage as now it will all be anonymous and as much as I can helicopter around them at home, as the government seeming wants me to do, I won’t be able to see any of the content they are consuming when I am not directly behind them. The current method is so smooth and frictionless that the kids don’t bother with finding workarounds, the new system…
My take, leave the kids logged in with accounts and start holding social media companies accountable for the content they provide. It will be imminently more traceable when this stuff is reported and knowing they could be fined hundreds of thousands of millions of dollars when they fail their subscribers might convince these companies to do better.
Lastly, the government is already seeing alternatives spring up to take over these niches in the ecosystem. The fact that the ban hasn’t even gone into effect yet and the whack-a-mole has already begun really says something. The only way these current laws can be salvaged once this cycle starts will be to institute blanket bans, rather than targeted. When every website with a comment section begins to ask for ID things are going to get messy, at that point OpSec goes out the window.
Apparently the eSafety commissioner can bring fines of up to $850k per user whose data has been mismanaged, but I don’t see that happening. Discord leaked a bunch of details recently and to the best of my knowledge all that was required of them was a pinky promise to try harder.
To expand a little Australian politics has a bad habit of coming up with grandiose solutions to problems that they can push for headlines then worrying about details afterwards. If we had GDPR like privacy and data security laws in place before this it would be better. If we had a clear and understandable reporting system for data breaches, better again. If we had actual education programs to demystify and explain Internet awareness and literacy. If we had control over the scope of data harvesting.
But no we jump straight to the headline, details and workability can come sometime later.