I wish there were actual consequences that matter for this type of appalling greedy behavior.
I’m not trying to imply that Meta isn’t in the wrong here…but for real, where are the parents?
Like…we’re nearly at the point now where parents of kids under 13 really can’t claim ignorance. My kid is in elementary school and I was chatting with other parents at the bus stop the other day as to how amazing it is that Pokemon is still around and reminiscing of Pogs and Slammers.
I had AIM and ICQ and IRC in middle school. Phpbb2 and vBulletin in high school. Livejournal, MySpace, and Facebook came shortly after. Hell, my reddit account is old enough to drive, let alone sign up for Facebook.
Parents of preteens today, IMO, have to hold at least some of the blame. We are first-generation internet immigrants, and our kids are native-born.
I share this sentiment and whole heartedly agree. Parents of the current generation need to take steps to make sure their kids are browsing safely and understand the consequences if they don’t. Also this comment makes me feel old lol.
Okay there’s a story to all of this. In 1983 when Ronald Reagan saw Wargames he was so terrified he readily signed the CFAA which made it super illegal (like 25 years in prison – same as murder one in some states) to do hacker stuff.
Until, very recently, hacker stuff banned by the CFAA included violating the TOS of websites and social media platforms.
So if you lied about your age to make a Snapchat account, you could be in serious trouble… if a prosecutor wanted to ruin the life of a ten-year-old girl. Most prosecutors don’t want to ruin the lives of ten-year-old girls.
In fact, we Americans typically commit three felonies a day, a large number of which are violations of the CFAA. They’re convenient to the DoJ if you’re an enemy of the state, or some official has interest in your land or your spouse, or it wants to dispose of your population demographic.
Recently a judge admitted no-one reads TOS disclosures anyway, and disobeying one shouldn’t count as a crime. At the same time, if you’re a hactivist or a whistle-blower you can expect no mercy from the courts. Better to flee to Russia.
That said, there was no way Zuckerberg was going to snitch on kids who wanted to social media about on his turf, and it’s not his fault they’re disclosing all their vitals while pretending to be a grown up.
The moral of the story is when laws serve scared presidents and big corporations instead of the public, the internet routes around it like damage, and kids get caught up in the mix.
Since we won’t even give our kids medical care and school lunches, I say the US and states care less about children as they do the bad look when children get visibly hurt or killed, so the mess is way bigger than the CFAA and kids roaming the darkweb.
That was a fun read with some interesting facts I never knew… But I think you put some weird spins into it.
Like I don’t think Americans are commiting 3 felonies a day, and I’d really be curious about the explanation of that.
And I dont think lying about your age is applicable to the CFAA without some wild lawyering to consider it impersonating someone else to gain unauthorized access to protected data.
But maybe I suck at understanding legal writing
https://www.justice.gov/jm/jm-9-48000-computer-fraud
Thus, embellishing an online dating profile contrary to the terms of service of the dating website; creating fictional accounts on hiring, housing, or rental websites; or using a pseudonym on a social networking site that prohibits them, might all violate a user’s contract with the owner of the protected computer, but the Department will not take the position that a mere contractual violation caused the user’s previous authorization to be automatically withdrawn and that the user was from that point onward acting in violation of the CFAA
I think this is a decent defense of CFAA not worrying about lying about age
My source is a lot of reading on Techdirt, and their source is the explanation in Three Felonies A Day: How the Feds Target the Innocent by Harvey Silverglate, but please, if you have doubts, I encourage you to dive deep.
Eh I would rather have had a discussion, summary or explanation than read a 400 page book for a random interesting claim
Here’s the book if anyone’s curious
https://www.amazon.com/Three-Felonies-Day-Target-Innocent/dp/1594035229
I couldn’t find any Techdirt articles with substance in the claim, but I’m not going to listen to podcasts so maybe thats where any details of the claim are hidden
An internal company chart… showed how Meta tracked the percentage of 11- and 12-year-olds who used Instagram daily
Well that’s damning and ought to lead to penalties. On the other hand,
“complaints from the girl’s mother stating her daughter was 12”… Meta representatives “couldn’t tell for sure the user was underage”
People make false reports about social media content and accounts all the time. I could mail the admins of sopuli.xyz and tell them that I’m @misk@sopuli.xyz’s mother and they’re too young to be using Lemmy. Said admins should ignore me like the crazy person I am unless I can prove it.
I could mail the admins of sopuli.xyz and tell them that I’m @misk@sopuli.xyz’s mother and they’re too young to be using Lemmy. Said admins should ignore me like the crazy person I am unless I can prove it.
When in doubt, the default should be asking for proof. You can’t sell alcohol to a kid and then say you didn’t check for ID because it’s too much of a hassle.
That gives us a world where people can’t use social media anonymously, which has problematic implications for privacy and free expression for those whose governments do not guarantee that right.
It does not absolve Meta from not doing due diligence. They have means to make an effort at it and plenty money to hire some experts. Kids under 13 upload their photos to FB publically and would likely be spotted as at least underage in normal conversation if Meta rep reached out to them. They could require reports to come from verified users and disregard reports from users with bad track record.
There’s still a difference between only the provider having your identity vs your identity being public (which is something Facebook’s real name policy mandates).
Given the frequency of user data leaks pretty much everywhere, nah, practically no difference there.
For age verification specifically, they are supposed to just set a “verified” flag in their database and remove the rest of the data within some amount of time (not more than a month I think).
I wouldn’t trust some random nobody to do this, but big companies should have processes that comply with privacy laws.
In a physical business yes but in the internet anyone can fake anything.
What’s the proposed consequence in the court ruling?
a warning that they better stop or else they may receive a strongly worded letter
3 of those and they may receive a citation
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