I’m actually a child online safety expert and was one of the pioneers in this space with Club Penguin and so I feel uniquely positioned to critique this.
The groomer problem is real but it’s also vastly overstated. The far larger issue we saw at Penguin was suicidality or reports of sexual abuse in the home.
There is no solution for lazy/bad parenting. You can implement all the ID laws you want but if parents are going to just hand kids their phones unlocked, those kids will have access to all the same things the parents have unfettered.
What I found is that these draconian safety laws actually make it harder to be an honest operator of kids apps because on one hand it’s so much legal risk and so much user friction that it simply becomes uninvestible as a business.
Parents will just lie to let their kids use the unfettered internet. For example, I have a friend who works in mobile gaming who has two kids, one above and one below the age limit but separated by just 2 yrs, and the two wanted to play and chat together on Roblox - which is reasonable. To do this, he just verified that his younger kid is old enough for the chat feature when he’s not.
This happens all the time and will happen with these laws to. How far do we want to go with this? Scan the face of the user in real-time to make sure it’s not a kid using the device? We could do that but it feels like a massive unwanted intrusion of privacy.
That’s how you know this law isn’t about kids. COPPA and GDPR-K and so forth already make it illegal to allow chat and other grooming vectors to kids.
What’s really being done here is trying to eliminate online anonymity. And this is a far bigger issue that goes to core speech rights because if you cannot criticize the govt anonymously and if wrong speech is a crime then it becomes easy to identify all the detractors of the govt in power, and ban, fine or jail them for speech crimes.
Starmer has already been doing this and he wants to do it at a much bigger scale. Starmer won’t even acknowledge the problem of actual grooming gangs in Britain’s neighborhoods but he’s worried about online grooming?
No he’s not, and this hypocrisy gives away the game. What he wants is to kill online anonymity so he can enforce censorship of his unpopular policies. No politician should have this power.
I think COVID was a tactical operation to replace 80% of America's human population with "coworkers" (derogatory) who are extremely suggestible, obsessed with following trends, and are utterly enthralled by the dumbest shit imaginable
TELL CONGRESS TO VOTE NO ON KOSA, ASAA, KIDS ACT, SCREEN ACT, COPPA 2.0, SAFER GAMING ACT, AND MANY MANY MORE. TELL THEM TO VOTE NO TO ALL OF THESE THINGS!!!!
Stripping anonymity from the internet would constitute one of the most sweeping rollbacks of civil rights in recent history. It will allow for unprecedented levels of mass surveillance and censorship. Call your congress people TODAY https://t.co/Ikr00eJA7K
It's too early to give up. As you can see, it did not pass by a large margin and opinions are divided. The previous KOSA bill failed to pass the plenary session due to opposition from the Speaker and some members. Please call or email the House of Representatives to strongly oppose this bill and any other age verification laws that could lead to surveillance!!!
representatives↓
House 202-225-3121
Senate 202-224-3121
I currently pay 2 use this platform but if this continues I will be looking 4 web hosting elsewhere . there is no room 4 this kind of censorship in the oldweb space. evil evil evil shit
neocities is engaging in disgusting demonic practices by way of shadow banning and removing websites with no notice / no options 2 appeal for owners. unacceptable. plz read
https://t.co/g12bGWK6CK
https://t.co/MB7i3EObZu
> be nerds
> look into persona (used by discord)
> kyc (know your customer) service
> used for age verification
> search on internet (shodan)
> find weird server
> image 1
> openai-watchlistdb.withpersona
> openai-watchlistdb-testing.withpersona
> lolwtf
> look inside
> supposed to be behind cloudflare to hide ip
> openai messed up
> not behind cloudflare
> real ip shown
> using google cloud
> lookup cert history
> 2023-11-16 created
> 2024-02-28 gets cert
> 2024-03-04 prod goes live
> google stuff
> openai and persona partners
> partner around timeline of certs
> back to searching stuff
> find withpersona-gov
> look inside
> okta (image 2)
> lolwtf
> look inside
> website accidentally leaking stuff
> fedramp-private-backend-api
> look inside
> api .js accidentally exposed
> look inside
> wtf "SARInstructionsCard"
> wtf "app.onyx.withpersona-gov"
> wtf "FINTRAC"
> wtf "PrivatePartnershipProjectNameCodes"
> image 3
> wtf "AsyncSelfie"
> look inside
> openai, persona, send data to us gov
> feds map face to financial records
> map face using AI
> map face to ICE stuff
> api stores data for lots of stuff
> image 4
tl;dr persona kyc and openai are frens, using your selfie for verification and sending to ICE (or USGOV in general), using AI to tie to your financial records. see subsequent post for full write-up. its long and not mobile friendly