The British government is in a headlong rush to ban under-16s from social media, and restrict the access of under-18s. And in typical form, the EFF is here with a warning about the dangers and futility of such legislation.
The proposed new law will involve an age restriction policed through online ID verification, something which will not be limited to the young, as every British adult will also have to show ID to access large parts of the Internet.
There is little in the way of information about how this unprecedented invasion of privacy will be implemented, however we expect that it will be left to the lax security measures of a range of lowest-bidder third party identity verification services. The resulting database will become a very rich target indeed.
The EFF pull no punches in warning of the harms these measures will bring upon those it seeks to protect. Far from “Giving under-16s their childhood back” as it is being promoted, they warn that it will deprive them of access to community, friends, and distant family, as well as educational content that could be vital for them.
If it works at all. Certainly he more technically minded youth will put their efforts into the world of computer networking. A VPN ban is reportedly in the works, so a whole generation of future software developers and IT specialists will get their start running software to get round this on their Raspberry Pi.
We’ve reported on the EFF’s concerns over UK ID laws before.
Header image: Diliff, CC BY-SA 2.5.
While the UK is bumbling around, the EU is also trying to implement a “secure” online ID check.
https://digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu/en/policies/eudi-regulation
It’s supposed to give the service only the information that is necessary, for example the age of the user and not their name or address to prevent massive scale data mining using the system, but how to prevent companies like Google from harvesting and combining all the information through multiple requests over multiple different services is left unexplained.
It’s perfectly possible to do age verification in a privacy preserving matter, by sharing only one bit (1 bit) of validated info to the requesting party stating i am older than x. It has been done in covid apps, and it’s generically done by the Yivi app. I am looking forward to getting perks because of my old age, and being able to prove that in a PP way ;)
The EU could choose to put pressure on social media to not be so toxic. This is a problem for adults too. But, instead they are hellbent on going the mass survelliance route instead. Why? Ignorance and lobbyists, probably… There is valuable data to be mined here.
The whole thing has never been about the kids, but: What peoples kids do online is the responsibility of their parents. Period. Hard to keep track on, but could be solved by just talking to your kids about all the crap on the internet and why this is toxic/dangerous/bad etc. Maybe unconfortable, but still a parents task. Parenting has gone the same survelliance route instead with apps keeping track of kids whereabouts etc. Kids are being conditioned into thinking its a good thing to be monitored at all time in this way. Just stop, ok.
In the 90s, it was well known that the internet is no safe place, that everything can be an illusion.
It had been mentioned in TV programme for children many times.
In practice, children likely knew better about the dangers than their parents did.
Back then, children in general had better technical proficiency than their parents.
Because they were more into video games, home computers, PCs and telecommunications (cell phones, pagers, e-mail etc).
They were so skilled they could program a VCR, for example. ;)
That’s nice and all but what does that have to do with the UK… which ya know the entire effing story is about ya tosser
Yes, think of the children. Think of the children wandering the streets. Think of the children buying fluorescent candyfloss flavor vapes. Think of the children finding their local friendly drug dealer and supplying them with their favourite chemical cocktail. Think of the children left vulnerable by the state services which absolutely failed to prevent them being abused by those in positions of power. Think of the children failed by an education system which is skewed towards league table results rather than building and developing their creative or critical thinking skills. Think of the children whose parents are so technically illiterate that they gave them unfettered access to the internet at an age where they are so ill-prepared to deal with it. Yes, think of the children.
So past generations did phone phreaking, or crack games for the C64, or poke around until university firewalls let through torrent traffic, or reverse engineer copy protection stuff on CD-ROMs, or break out of the parental control in their cell phones. The new generation will become experts in containers, VPNs and forging online IDs…
Kids (young folx in general) will find ways around stuff. It might be, uuuh, “pre-legal”, though.
The main two points against it are:
– the data of those age verification providers is ripe for taking (there will not be a only minimal amount of data stored)
– the parts of the intarwebs young people will hang out then is probably not really the… nicest… parts (essentially making things even worse)