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Government The Internet

Senate Panel Advances Bill To Childproof the Internet (theverge.com) 80

Posted by BeauHD from the well-intentioned-but-controversial dept.
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: Congress is closer than ever to passing a pair of bills to childproof the internet after lawmakers voted to send them to the floor Thursday. The bills -- the Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA) and COPPA 2.0 -- were approved by the Senate Commerce Committee Thursday by a unanimous voice vote. Both pieces of legislation aim to address an ongoing mental health crisis amongst young people that some lawmakers blame social media for intensifying. But critics of the bills have long argued that they have the potential to cause more harm than good, like forcing social media platforms to collect more user information to properly enforce Congress' rules.

KOSA is supposed to establish a new legal standard for the Federal Trade Commission and state attorneys general, allowing them to police companies that fail to prevent kids from seeing harmful content on their platforms. The authors of the bills, Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) and Richard Blumenthal (D-CT), have said the bill keeps kids from seeing content that glamorizes eating disorders, suicidal thoughts, substance abuse, and gambling. It would also ban kids 13 and under from using social media and require companies to acquire parental consent before allowing children under 17 to use their platforms. At Thursday's markup, Blackburn proposed an amendment to remedy some of the concerns raised by digital rights groups, mainly language requiring platforms to verify the age of their users. Lawmakers approved those changes along with the bill, but the groups fear that platforms would still need to collect more data on all users to live up to the bill's other rules. [...] The other bill lawmakers approved, COPPA 2.0, raises the age of protection under the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act from 13 to 16 years of age, along with similar age-gating restrictions. It also bans platforms from targeting ads to kids. "When it comes to determining the best way to help kids and teens use the internet, parents and guardians should be making those decisions, not the government," Carl Szabo, NetChoice vice president and general counsel, said. "Rather than violating free speech rights and handing parenting over to bureaucrats, we should empower law enforcement with the resources necessary to do its job to arrest and convict bad actors committing online crimes against children."
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Senate Panel Advances Bill To Childproof the Internet More

Senate Panel Advances Bill To Childproof the Internet

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  • Seems to me you would need to ID everyone. (Score:4, Insightful)

    by oldgraybeard ( 2939809 ) on Thursday July 27, 2023 @05:35PM (#63719710)
    At all times. So the government would know everything about everybody. All you would need to do then is ban encryption.

    • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

      by taustin ( 171655 )

      What's your point? Do you honestly believe there's any other goal? Or that there ever has been?

    • They can create a digital system of verification; which should be done by government that prohibits tracking. It can be done... sure a big brother corrupt government will not be trustworthy to run it but then you have bigger problems than them tracking young people for their age. What we can't do is trust any corporation to do this; especially, when there are no consequences for them when they imagine new abuses of their power; or even just repeat known crimes for that matter.

      Good luck getting much practi

      • Re:Seems to me you would need to ID everyone. (Score:5, Interesting)

        by WindBourne ( 631190 ) on Friday July 28, 2023 @03:21AM (#63720798) Journal

        But it should involve photo IDs with 2D barcodes that show the photo and are signed by the state as valid and within an age range.

        Absolutely NOT. That is the WHOLE PROBLEM RIGHT NOW. We are required to use our pix of front/backs of photo IDs, combined with LOTS of personal information that makes it easy for somebody to steal.

        The solution is a packet of X.509 Digital Certificates passed out by governments. Estonia currently does this [e-estonia.com] America should be doing this with enhanced drivers license, military ID, Passports, etc.; Basically all IDs that use REAL ID for vetting. The packet should contain different DC with different levels of information:
        Name; Name/Birthday; Name/Addr;Name/Addr/Birthday; Name and full info.
        Sites should ONLY seak the minimal level needed. e.g. For porn, Name/Birthday should work. For social media, Name/Addr. For dealing with businesses, any of the last 3; for dealing with government, the last one (full info).

        • Re:Seems to me you would need to ID everyone. (Score:4, Insightful)

          by AmiMoJo ( 196126 ) on Friday July 28, 2023 @05:00AM (#63720908) Homepage Journal

          Why would a porn site need your name? Just birthday should be enough.

          • Actually, that is a damn good point. and a good idea.
            However, I believe that DCs need our names since it has to be matched against a vetted server. Maybe I am wrong.

            • Re: (Score:3)

              by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

              What would the minimum needed be? The stated goal is to prevent minors accessing adult content on the internet.

              A simple certificate that is only given out by the government to adults would suffice for age verification. No need to send it to the porn site, the site can just use public key crypto to verify that you have one. That way the certificate can't be fingerprinted for tracking.

              • A simple certificate that is only given out by the government to adults would suffice for age verification. No need to send it to the porn site, the site can just use public key crypto to verify that you have one. That way the certificate can't be fingerprinted for tracking.

                I don't understand. How is it possible to perform PKI operations without revealing your public key?

                Does everyone get the same group key and a zero knowledge system checks for possession? Do you go to the government and keep asking them to mint unique nondescript keys every time you want to visit a porn site? Can you describe the technical modalities that enable PKI verification without fingerprinting?

                • Re: (Score:3)

                  by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

                  There are a few ways of doing it. One option is to withhold part of the signature in such a way that the signature can be verified as valid, but not differentiated from many other signatures: https://eprint.iacr.org/2009/3... [iacr.org]

                  The Monero crypto currency uses an interesting method. They take a ring signature, where by members of a ring can sign using the ring's signature, but it is not possible for anyone to determine which ring member did the signing. They create a new ring for each transaction, with random m

          • Re: (Score:1)

            by Anonymous Coward
            They don't even need the birthday. A certification that the user is old enough should be all that is needed. That single bit should be all the website gets to know, and the mechanism should not provide a means to track the user.
        • It amazes me how far we have to go because younger generations of parents going to simply just give up parenting their kid. So because of poor parenting, civilized adults have to identify themselves to do a google search? What?
        • and it's awful. Estonia shouldn't be our benchmark for freedom & privacy.

          Taking out the personal information is pointless. With the amount of tracking this makes possible they'll have that information back from another source in a couple of miliseconds. The problem is we're giving up the right to speak anonymously. That's a huge privacy and free speech blow.

          And thanks to Dobbs it's probably constitutional. At least according to this court. The right wingers celebrating their victory over abortio

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by eriks ( 31863 )

      ...All you would need to do then is ban encryption.

      That's what the "The STOP CSAM Act" would do. Not sure if it did any good, but I've written to my rep in congress about it already.

  • "The InterNet" exists in other countries outside of US jurisdiction.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Ksevio ( 865461 )

      That's not really relevant to them. They can pass laws that would cause problems for plenty of websites or have ways to block those from other countries that don't comply just as we see GDPR regulations affecting US websites

    • This Isn't about child safety (Score:5, Insightful)

      by rsilvergun ( 571051 ) on Thursday July 27, 2023 @07:13PM (#63719916)
      This is about you being forced to put your contact information on file with every single internet company you interact with and about being perfectly trackable by those companies. It's the complete destruction of anonymity for anyone on the internet except the worst kind of trolls willing to use fake IDs. Think of the state actors who interfere in elections those kind of people. But you and me completely lose the ability to be anonymous on the internet and the Free speech protections that come with it.

      Funny how I haven't heard of peep about this from any of the Free speech warriors.
      • I agree with you. It's really not possible to stay anonymous on the internet these days. It's really sad how all the companies steal your data and track you. But if you want the children to be safe, there's no other way than not giving them the access to internet from the young age.
        • Well, it's much easier to stay as anon as possible if you don't use social media.

          For little stuff outside of that I used throw away email addresses and fake names, etc.

    • This is such a lazy response. I mean if anything, they got the idea *from* other countries. GDPR is a thing. China, Russia, Korea, all go much further than this.

      Also, what is with the quotes around "InterNet" who even said that?

      • Re: (Score:3)

        by Luckyo ( 1726890 )

        They don't. COPPA actually was THE thing that deleted a large portion of content from social networks, and effectively removed a lot of content creators permanently because they "might be seen as" things that COPPA bans.

        GDPR targets a completely different thing, privacy. It doesn't require deletion of certain types of content. It just requires not harvesting certain kind of data. And if you think Great Firewall of China is a good thing, then may you live long enough to actually have to deal with Maoists in

        • No one said China's firewall is a good thing. Just that it exists. And the US knows about it. Same for GDPR, I didn't say it was first, I said it is a thing, and the US knows about it. The effects of laws like this aren't some unknown thing they're doing in a vacuum for "the InterNet".

          You don't seem to be responding to what anyone said so much as vomiting out the essay you had prepared.

    • Yeah, its not like other nations are also crafting their own set of laws for such issues.
  • It is a well-known adage that good intentions do not guarantee good results.

    Yes, any attempt to put an age limit on internet use means that everybody who uses the internet will have to show ID.

    and it may be all well and good to try to restrict viewing of pages that "glamorize" eating disorders, suicidal thoughts, substance abuse, and gambling, but this will require a censorship board to determine what is being "glamorized", and in the real world this also results in censoring work to help people deal with

    • What does glamorize even mean? To different people that meaning would be vastly different. If someone makes a youtube video talking about cars who is anorexic, would that be glamozing annorexia? I'm not even sure if we can determine, without a doctor's report, who on the internet has annorexia or just is insanely thin. This is the biggest hunk of junk I've ever seen, riddled with holes so big you could send jupiter through it. This is so sad, and bad, but this is what misinformation censonship evetually lea

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by gweihir ( 88907 )

      True. But by now I no longer think that the intentions are good in any way. These are authoritarian scum that want to get everybody under their control, nothing less.

    • They do not have good intentions, unless the goal of building a comprehensive surveillance state qualifies. I don't think it does.

  • I'd prefer to idiot proof the internet by deleting all social media apps immediately.

    • I'd prefer to delete the government at this point.

      • I think we should delete the idiots.

        • Since I'm not aware of anyone in our government that is not an idiot, I'm glad you agree with me :)

        • I talked with my lawyer, he says that the law is against it and for some reason calls that "murder".

          He's also not really a big fan of that since these people are a very reliable source of income for him.

          • I want to be VERY clear, I am not advocating murder in any way. Our system is broken and it needs to be fixed, we're going to likely face a decision between an idiot and brain dead (both near 50% in polls, WTF) for head of our government.

            • Trust me, I'm watching the development in this field very closely, in case something should change at some point. There are quite a few people whose life mostly hinges on them not being worth a second of jail time.

              And your arguments sure make a compelling case for changing this particular little tidbit in our law for the greater good...

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Ksevio ( 865461 )

      Wow so edgy!

      Guess you better get started by deleting your slashdot bookmark

    • The problem with making things foolproof is that fools are so ingenious.
      -Groucho Marx

      • Just because you can't reach it doesn't mean you can't get near it or that you shouldn't try.

        You can't claim to give a shit about general mental health and then promote every kind of rotten bullshit disinfo/conspiracy/propaganda like it's just 'normal'.

        -"Hey Boss! The people are about to tear the world apart since they can no longer discern reality from fiction. What should we do?"

        -"Ah fuck. Just feed them the alien shtick again. They love that one. I'll be in my bunker getting vaxed."

        -"Winning. Hail Xenu!"

  • require companies to acquire parental consent before allowing children under 17 to use their platforms.

    And... how will companies know those are the kid's parent(s)? Guess parents will have to provide their IDs too -- even if they don't have accounts. Guess *everyone* who wants an account will have to provide their ID -- to prove they're over 17. No thanks.

    Perhaps everyone can just use the fake ID Eleanor Shellstrop (Kristen Bell) used in The Good Place [wikipedia.org]:

    Diana Tremaine
    123 Whatever Street
    Canada City, Canada

    Which always worked like a charm 'cause, "Arizona bouncers are the best."

  • Or rather no Internet for children that have parents that do no prepare them for it. That would be the only thing that works. Everything else will only do huge damage.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by esev ( 77914 )

      I often wonder about this. If we don't teach our children about the dangers of the internet, aren't we just doing them a disservice that'll cause them harm later when they reach the age to have unrestricted access?

      Is that the reason the age is being bumped from 13 to 16; are 14 year-olds struggling because they were never taught this?

      I've had conversations with my kids (12 & 13) about how everything on the internet is permanent; assume your school teachers/principal/future employer will see mean things

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by gweihir ( 88907 )

        That is the only thing that works. "Protecting" children only serves to make them unprepared. Angsty parents that try to shield their children from the real world are basically child abusers, because they set their children up for running into things later that the children then often cannot deal with. And there is no avoiding running into those things unless the children become monks and nuns of the hermit type.

  • We just found out that the federal government was pressuring facebook to censor speech, and we know they were doing the same with twitter. The very last thing we should be doing is giving them another avenue of control because they will abuse it.

  • Better than being on the internet I guess.

  • If Reddit, TikTok and Twitter existed in 1996 the way they do today, we'd never have gotten S230. They would have been roundly denounced by the whole spectrum as disgustingly irresponsible corporate citizens for a lot of what they allow, let alone push through algorithms.

    These regulations are now coming mainly because a few major social media platforms have essentially wiped their asses with the intent of S230 and have profited off of a lot of harmful content.

  • Rather than expecting every web site to gather personal information that proves your age, maybe we could have a user-agent field?

  • I police my kids when they're online. There are some online services I want my kids to be able to use. Service providers have suspended their accounts a couple of times due to their age. It's frustrating to need to add my personal info (age/credit card) to their accounts so they can use what I want them to use.

    Example: We have a domain used to host our family email. It's hosted with Google Workspace. Google has terminated an account, on my domain, due to age restrictions.

  • They're not childproofing the internet (Score:5, Insightful)

    by rsilvergun ( 571051 ) on Thursday July 27, 2023 @07:11PM (#63719908)
    They're mandating that you provide your identity to every website you interact with thereby eliminating all an anonymity on the internet. That won't stop the trolls of course they'll just send fake IDs but it will chill legitimate-free speech.

    I'm extremely disappointed the editor is here posted a favorable headline for this absolutely horrifically terrible law.

    Also where the hell are the libertarians? This is Exactly the kind of thing they should be freaking out about. And I don't just mean the ones who registered for the party but just people in general that go on about freedom. I haven't heard Elon Musk say a peep about this...

    • Re:They're not childproofing the internet (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Brain-Fu ( 1274756 ) on Thursday July 27, 2023 @10:42PM (#63720342) Homepage Journal

      Everyone is too busy bickering about trans people, woke movies, abortion rights, conspiracy theories, climate change, and government scandals to have time to bicker over this as well. Its a very effective strategy for increasing governmental power: keep people going back and forth on emotionally-charged issues while slipping really terrible laws right under their noses.

      • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

        by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

        Thing is, abortion rights, climate change, and trans rights are not trivial issues. While you personally may find this proposal more of an issue, for people who are affected by them they are urgent, life and death problems.

    • The role of protecting free speech used to fall to groups like the ACLU in previous generations. Now they've gotten aboard the "censorship is GREAT" train, so nobody with a strong voice is left to defend free speech, online or anywhere else. I'd rather not have Elon be the champion for...well, anything.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by mjwx ( 966435 )

      Also where the hell are the libertarians? This is Exactly the kind of thing they should be freaking out about. And I don't just mean the ones who registered for the party but just people in general that go on about freedom. I haven't heard Elon Musk say a peep about this...

      Erm... Libertarians were always about "rights for me, I don't care about thee". They were never about stopping any form of injustice, let alone attempts at systematic injustice, only ensuring that they and they alone could do whatever they wanted. Ironically the side that opposed injustice was the bleeding heart "left", who have been utterly demonised.

    • Also where the hell are the libertarians? This is Exactly the kind of thing they should be freaking out about.

      The Libertarians are encouraging Congress to pass this. Just as sometimes you have to let the child touch the hot stove when they just will not accept 'no' as an answer, same too here. Congress will absolutely NOT stop trying to make the USA a dystopia. Fine. Let them.

      Tired of playing this fucking game. The only problem is that when everything is burning, they will look at us and say, "Why didn't you stop us? You knew it would destroy the country. It is YOUR fault." and so it will begin again.

      TL;DR, the peo

  • wasn't there a politician not long ago saying minorities weren't smart enough to get an ID to vote therefore voter ID was racist? What are they trying to do, kick black people off the internet?

  • Kids shouldn't be allowed to decide what they are going to consume for every meal. There's a good reason for that. Why shouldn't the same go for what they consume online?

    Alcohol is regulated, food is regulated, movies are regulated. Why not social media, aka digital fentanyl?

    I don't know that these Senate bills are the solution. But something is needed [theguardian.com]. I would prefer something like a parental app that has to approve access to a certain category of sites or topics and approve more than an allotted amount of

    • Re:Parents need help (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Opportunist ( 166417 ) on Thursday July 27, 2023 @07:31PM (#63719964)

      That's for the parents to decide, not for the state.

      In other words, raise your kids and don't shove that burden onto me.

    • Re:Parents need help (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Voyager529 ( 1363959 ) <voyager529@yahoo. c o m> on Thursday July 27, 2023 @08:56PM (#63720154)

      Alcohol is regulated, food is regulated, movies are regulated. Why not social media, aka digital fentanyl?

      Because defining a 'social network' enough for the law to apply gets extremely difficult, extremely quickly.

      If a class uses the school's Google Workspace solution to make a shared Google Doc where they type comments to each other, is it suddenly a 'social network', making the school liable for any cyber bullying that happens on the Google Doc?

      If I spin up my own Rocketchat server and let my friends access it such that I know the users personally, have I started a 'social network' putting me under regulation? How about my blog? Are the BBSes or IRC or Usenet under those regulations, all of which are still nominally active yet fundamentally have no sorting algorithms or means of verifying anyone? Is Youtube a social network such that they'd have to account-wall all the available content, or do they get to skirt that by removing the comment and DM sections and turning into YouNetflix?

      Alcohol is regulated at point-of-sale. There is no point-of-sale on the internet. Food is regulated at the production level, but there's nothing stopping an eight year old from buying 1,000 containers of ice cream if they have the money to do so. Movies are again regulated at point-of-sale. ...But let's take it your way and assume that websites now need to have some means of verifying accounts belong to people who are the age of majority. In each of the cases where verification happens at the counter, it's possible to remain fairly anonymous because ID checking is visual. It isn't (usually) recorded in a database forever, with that database being cross-checked, resold, data mined, and resold again, ad infinitum. And while there's some sort of a case to be made that privacy is dead, essentially legislating away its existence is no solution, either.

      Even if you're totally okay with this, believing that the federal government will be effective in legislating a solution that doesn't give Zuck enough loopholes to make the law toothless or so onerous as to cause issues with open source communication software...one core concern of total identity on the internet is that it effectively kills off the fourth amendment for all practical purposes as well. There's no need for a search warrant if the people holding the data can be compelled to hand it over when asked, and it's that much more difficult to refuse if the identity of the person is conclusively known.

      Of course, any sort of bill of this nature is going to have a 'for the children' angle to it...but think of it this way: any legislation which expresses intent to enable the government to take on a portion of the role of parenting is a piece of legislation which is likely to have insidious implications.

      • Because defining a 'social network' enough for the law to apply gets extremely difficult, extremely quickly.

        How about something along the lines like this (for a start):

        If an internet service gathers information about their users and uses said information to feed an algorithm to decide content to provide to users.

        Something along those lines, but better thought out and with appropriate legalese....

        Basically make it free for the USER to subscribe to what they want to follow, etc...but if the company is dec

        • > If an internet service gathers information about their users and uses said information to feed an algorithm to decide content to provide to users.

          Displaying any content to a user is "feeding an algorithm" even if that algorithm is dumb such as "display in chronological order" or "display all posts in order provided by database query"

          All websites that provide inter-user communication must "gather information about their users and use said information" -- I must gather a user-id to determine if a user is

  • How about we just make parents responsible for their children, instead of getting government involved?

  • In the 1990s, Congress passed a law called the CDA, which would have done a great job at stopping child predation and protecting children. It was a perfectly reasonable law, but the crazies managed to get it struck down in court, and SCOTUS overturned it.

    Hopefully we can get this passed. If one child is saved, no amount of regulation is too much.

  • How old am I? How would you know? How could you know? I could be 17, or 71. Iâ(TM)m neither of those but thereâ(TM)s no way to tell from what I type here⦠The only way would be to require ID. And how does that work online, when you could either use someone elseâ(TM)s ID, or a fake one. I can understand why some people would like this, to protect their children from things theyâ(TM)d rather their children not seeâ¦but this ainâ(TM)t gonna work.
  • just as we don't let minors drink, use recreational pharmaceuticals, handle firearms, and drive, they should not be on the Internet. if a phone is given to a minor, it's functionality should be limited to that of a dumb phone
  • Fixed that for you. But we need to card everyone so we know who they are and if they are harboring any wrong thoughts. Social credit is coming to America and we gots to be ready.

  • Social media should be so hard to use that only the most dedicated go on. Everybody else is blocked off until they send a scan of their ID, have it verified by the government, and provide a credit card.

  • Not interested. Call me if they can make the Internet catproof.

  • ... keeps kids from seeing content ...

    We must stop children seeing breasts. But illegal child-sized rifles, Church-driven gay-shaming and Tucker Carlson are okay.

    ... eating disorders, suicidal thoughts, substance abuse, and gambling.

    Unfortunately, saving children from cyber-bullying also means isolating them from their online friends. Maybe that says much about the child. It also says the parents aren't going to make hard decisions.

    • Unfortunately, saving children from cyber-bullying also means isolating them from their online friends.

      Perhaps we move children back to having real friends in physical "meatspace"...rather than "online friends".

      That seemed to work out MUCH better in the not too distant past.

  • I ain't providing no stinking ID information to any website; that stuff belongs in the real world, IMO! Gotten pretty good since 1997 at making stuff up so as to protect myself, and my little collection of bullshit-blockers (i.e. ArseBook blocker) continues to expand.

  • First, it is impossible to make the Internet childproof. They can make as many regulations as they want but if an adult can find it on the Internet, a child can too.

    So what is the real purpose here or is it simply misguided legislation?

    • This comes back around every so often, and it inevitably goes away when they remember or are reminded why it won't work.

      • To Whom It May Concern

        The post you have just read, or about to reply to is by Rick Schumann. Also known as Racist Rick and Pedo Rick. The users is suspected child groomer and possible pedophile. These conclusions were reached after a series of posts made that defended the inclusion of sexually inappropriate books in elementary and middle school libraries. The books in question, at this level, could only be used to by child molesters to groom future children for sexual activities.

        When given multiple

  • 'Net nanny' is far from a new idea, and every time it comes around, we go through the whole rigamorale again of WHY it won't work, how it can be abused, and so on, and so forth.
    You want your kids to not see certain things on the Internet? Fucking pay attention to what they're doing, set down rules, expect them to be followed, and follow up on all that regularly, stop expecting the government to raise your kids.

    • To Whom It May Concern

      The post you have just read, or about to reply to is by Rick Schumann. Also known as Racist Rick and Pedo Rick. The users is suspected child groomer and possible pedophile. These conclusions were reached after a series of posts made that defended the inclusion of sexually inappropriate books in elementary and middle school libraries. The books in question, at this level, could only be used to by child molesters to groom future children for sexual activities.

      When given multiple

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