alt Hacker NewsThe same company intentionally driving minors towards this content (despite claiming to care about them) is also lobbying in secrecy for requiring all of us to scan our ID and face in order to use our phones and computers.
Their stated reason? Child safety.
Their actual reason? You can figure that out.
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Meta is like one giant cancer that grew a few small tumors of benign[1] nature, like some of their efforts in open source and open research (React, Llama, etc.).
[1]: I could be wrong thinking those are benign.
Actually. Meta is spending millions to push the age verification requirement off to the app store providers, such as Google and Apple. It's an attempt to shield Meta from liability, transfer it to the app providers.
Of course it's for the protection of the children!
Why else would they want to sneakily add facial recognition to smart glasses?! /s https://www.businessinsider.com/meta-ray-ban-smart-glasses-f...
My guess: to discriminate whether traffic is from a humam or bot to improve ad delivery metrics.
I mean, their telemetry crap is on a lot of apps too. I remember someone DMing me something very niche on Discord, and by chance I opened up Facebook, it gave me ads for that very, very niche thing I have never even looked up on Google, or Facebook, it was like IMMEDIATE. I opened up Facebook by chance, and voila.
The other one was the time I was speaking to my brother in law, who had just paved his driveway, he said "I could have used airport grade tar, but thought it was too much" and we were in front of his Nest security cam is the only thing I can think of, but the very next morning, I'm scrolling through Facebook, and sure enough, someone local is advertising airport grade tar. Why? I didn't google this, I only heard it from them.
There's some serious shenanigans going on with ad companies, and we just seem to handwave it around.
Coincidentally, I remember both experiences very very vividly, because this was the last time I used either platform in any meaningful capacity.
> Their actual reason? You can figure that out.
This is unfalsifiable. Just say what you think it is explicitly.
I get the frustration, but I think it's worth separating two things: failing at moderation vs pushing for stricter identity controls
> is also lobbying in secrecy for requiring all of us to scan our ID and face in order to use our phones and computers.
You’re conflating different things. The OS-level age setting proposals are not the same as scanning IDs and faces.
I’m anti age check legislation, too, but the misinformation is getting so bad that it’s starting to weaken the counter-arguments.
> Their stated reason? Child safety.
> Their actual reason? You can figure that out.
We’re commenting under an article about one $375M lawsuit over child safety and many more on the way. They are obviously being pressured for child safety by over zealous prosecutors. This is why they reversed course and removed end-to-end encryption from Instagram because it was brought up as a threat to child safety.
Also your “you can figure that out” implication doesn’t even make sense. The proposal to move age verification to the OS level would give Meta less information about the user, because the OS, not Meta apps, would be responsible for gating age content. I’m not agreeing with the proposal, but it’s easy to see that it would be more privacy-preserving than having to submit your ID to Meta.
Just remember that these capacities will never be used to exonerate - only crucify.
It is most likely not them but they proxie for the US. Under another administration they would use an NGO to advance the agenda. The goal is to facescan the world.
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To be fair, they're just an evil corporation making lemonade out of lemons. I'm sure they'd be happier pushing porn and nazism to hundreds of millions of underage users, but if certain governments want them to write all that bunk code to verify everyone's ID, they might as well make money off the data.
The actual reason: child safety regulations
They don't care about child safety as long as it doesn't become so bad as to impact their revenue negatively. But they see that governments all over the world push for some kinds of age restrictions, and they know they are a prime target and it is hard for them to push back against that.
The reason they are (not so secretly) lobbying for requiring us to ID ourselves at the device level is that they don't want to be the gatekeepers. They want to make creating an account as effortless as possible and having to prove your age is a barrier that make turn off some people, including adults, and they may instead turn to services that don't require age verification. By moving the age verification in the OS, not only the responsibility shifts to the OS or hardware vendor, but it also removes the disadvantage they have against services that don't require age verification.
For a similar issue, PornHub is currently blocked in France, because they don't want to comply with the law related to age verification. Here is their argument: https://www.aylo.com/newsroom/aylo-suspends-access-to-pornhu...
If you read between the lines, you will see that they have the same stance: "put age verification at the OS level, so that people don't discriminate against us". They know they are not in a position to argue against "child safety" laws, so instead, they lobby for making it worse for everyone instead of just themselves.