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- cross-posted to:
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What do you guys think about this? I think its a big positive.
Edit: After reading about this on hacker news, I get why they do it. Its to make people upload identification documents, to get them prepped to authenticate for using the internet. Now the world makes sense again. I was wondering why they would do something positive. But now I get it.
It’s actually explicitly not going to do that. The social media companies are the only ones with any legal burden here. That’s the intent, and you don’t need to go into cooker nonsense to justify it. It’s no different from how a harm reductionist approach to drugs involves targeting dealers, not people buying for personal use.
As a European ‘cooker’ was new to me, but I found https://cookerpedia.org/wiki/Cooker which is probably it.
I hope you’re right that it’s nonsense but it’s way too obvious that this law ain’t gonna achieve its stated aim and has huge negative drawbacks for me to dismiss concerns so readily. Governments and oligarchs around the world seem mad keen on getting everyone’s ID and biometrics with broad consent, including the exceptions to most privacy laws, and they usually seem to tie ID laws to “won’t somebody think of the children” pleas.
As others point out, the big media companies don’t have to change their algos to stop harming children or adults. Just gather their ID and whatever lies about age.
Absolutely. See my much longer comment elsewhere in the thread for all the real problems with this bill. We don’t need conspiracy theories. Hanlon’s razor very much applies here. It’s incompetence, not malice.
However, I think we can look at the worst part of this Bill—the nature of its passage through Parliament—for a clue as to its underlying purpose. It passed in just a week, right before Christmas last year, but didn’t actually come into effect until yesterday. The goal was good PR. I suspect not rattling cages with the big social media companies was part of it too. They wanted to look like they were doing something to protect kids, and hopefully win the election off the back of it (not that they needed much help with that, with how incompetent the LNP were), but they didn’t want to put up the fight that would be necessary to force the social media companies into actually making their algorithms less harmful…to children and adults. It’s lazy, it’s cowardly, it won’t work. But it’s not a secret ploy to spy on you.