2mo ago

Parliament delivers a performance piece of legislative 'enshittification' that raises more questions than answers

www.abc.net.au Parliament delivers a performance piece of legislative 'enshittification' that raises more questions than answers

Yesterday, parliament heard that the major parties will come together and pass a law banning teenagers from social media, after a period of careful thought roughly commensurate with that of a 15-year-old making a Black Friday impulse buy at Shein.com.

Annabel Crabb's analysis of parliamentary goings on this week.

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I'm glad they have put the onus of social media platforms, however I think there is no feasible way to make this work short of requiring 100 points of ID be provided to your social media account to prove age. As much as I'd like to share that information with every platform I think I'll pass.
Further to this, how do you police that on something like the fediverse? Is @Aussie.zone going to shut down because the onus of checking IDs too much for a small social media provider? What about IRC?
I assume there is going to be a series of marches consisting of a million angry children and their parents protesting the loss of Minecraft and Roblox ..
- Further to this, how do you police that on something like the fediverse? Is @Aussie.zone going to shut down because the onus of checking IDs too much for a small social media provider?
  I'm worried about this. I see no protections other than the minister's discretion for small social media being liable for civil penalties of $9million. Thats the kind of money that freezes the social media market in place, allowing only the very largest to be involved.
  This is of course if the fediverse admins are unable to implement reasonable steps for age verification.
  I'm not technical, so i'll be interested to know peoples thoughts on the implementation, and maintenance of age verification?
  
  @Gorgritchumiekilla @Lodespawn Doesn't sound too big a technological challenge (think along the lines of when you sign into a website using Google or Facebook as your ID provider). But puts more hassle on site admins. And, more importantly, how are users going to know if a site is actually doing authentication or just gathering their ID data? Then there's the question of what sites they will try and include in the ban. Meta etc is a given, but Lucy's Australian Knitting forum? iMessage? Signal? Mastodon instances?
  Then there's the concern that all of a sudden Govt have a link between all of our online nicknames etc and our actual names. That's a massive issue in my eyes and they'll need to clarify if that's going to happen.
  In the end my son could, and probably will, just rent a private server in Singapore for a couple of dollars a month and VPN through that. I expect he'll set his mates up on it too. So instead of some kind of visibility of what he's doing on the home network, I'll have none.
  And we'll be paying handsomely for this whole exercise.
  I, like a lot of parents I'm sure, am actually in favour of not letting kids into those places. But I can't, yet, see how it can be done.
  
  For better or worse, I would trust our incompetent Public Servants with my personal information than a Private US American Business.
  They already have my Financial Tax and Medical information and as long as the ATO and Medicare don’t get privatised it is (as) safe (as it can be).
  No one wants an Australia Card, but if the alternative is to have the Private sector collate this information (and onsell it to the cheapest bidders), I will reluctantly accept an Australia Card.
  
  The definition of a site that would be affected is in the online safety act. Your son's singaporean Minecraft server would definitely be included and if he had a beef with one of his friends they could report him and he could be fined 30,000 penalty units or $3,300,000.
  
  He could however get around it if he charged his friends $0.0001 per Mb of data transferred between them and the server (business interactions) or made sure that every chat post included an ad and all polygons were skinned in ads (see section 63C(1) and 63C(3) of the act amendment)
  
  @Lodespawn tbh, i suspect they will all just open a shared Google Doc and chat in that.
  
  That is excellent
  
  @Lodespawn I had a read of that definition in its current form and it's ridiculously broad.
  For Singapore I meant a VPN server hosted there. So he could connect to that and then off to mydangerousbombmakingforum.com without Albo checking he's 16.
  
  Oh yeah sorry I see that now
  
  doing authentication or just gathering their ID data
  So i did read last week when i's going through the explanatory notes that sites would have to explicitly state and gain permission for the specific use of the data proposed.
  I didn't have time to read into that bit much, but it seemed like it might be setting a higher bar than the 'check and forget' boxes around now. So i'm cautiously hopeful this part of the amendment could be quietly good.
  
  @Gorgritchumiekilla @Lodespawn I'm envisaging them leveraging the single-sign-on type stuff they do for MyGov. But do you trust them, and the social site, to handle and appropriately, securely anonymise the Personally Identifiable Information in the transaction? And of course, that means that now under 16s need to have MyGov IDs. The idea of online nicknames etc being linked to actual persons should be a concern. Australia Card anyone?
  Of course they may have a completely different approach to it. I mean, every school age child already has a Student Number. That could be a data point for them. Who knows.
  
  The way I see it it would be a struggle for big social media sites to implement. I think they are more likely to shimmy on out of here.
  
  It would give legal power to the Commercial Social Media platforms to collect more private information about us, which would they can then use for their own commercial purposes.
  They will lose the 0-16 y/o demographic, but they aren’t a directly profitable market anyway.
  The 16 year old demographic will be much more profitable, because they wouldn’t have been conditioned to deal with the predatory behaviour of commercial Social Media platforms.
  
  I remember reading an article once that claimed that 12 year old girls had some of the most buying power in western societies due to their influence on their fathers decision making. It suggested that there were whole ad campaigns focused on their demographic for a huge range of things that you wouldn't normally associate with 12 year old girls (eg cars).
  The legislation does appear to include requirements for handling of personal data acquired to confirm age of users.
- IANAL but I believe the new laws are unenforceable.
  I think it is safe for aus.social and aussie.zone to ignore the requirements, but maintain a campaign to get the new laws revoked.
  As you said, there are bigger fish needing to fight these laws and will cop the worse of the legal backlash. That said, Minecraft servers are typically independently owned and run. It would be upto the individual server admins to regulate. Roblox would be liable though…
  
  63D outlines the requirement:
  A provider of an age-restricted social media platform must take reasonable steps to prevent age-restricted users having accounts with the age-restricted social media platform.
  There isn't really a definition of what reasonable steps are but that looks like it's on the commissioner to define them under section 27 of the act. A platform is a service that basically allows interaction between users and a service "includes a website" (does that include gaming servers?) so Lemmy sites would most certainly fit the bill. It really depends how onerous these reasonable steps are as to whether Lemmy sites will be able to implement them.
  Not sure how the act implementers plan to deal with servers hosted in other countries. Will they block them? If not then this is mostly a paper tiger, but also an impediment to further development of Australia based platforms.
- I'm sure it will simply result in a yes/no dialogue box asking "are you over 16?"
- The legislation seems to exclude everything for business purposes, if a child is selling skins on Roblox are they then entitled to an account?
  It also excludes advertising, if all a user's interactions are being sold by the provider to advertisers and that being their primary business model, does that mean the account is off the hook?
  On another note I love the definition for 'material' in the existing act .. shows a rock solid understanding of the internet.
  
  Can't see where they state the definition for 'material', what does it say?
  
  Hahaha it's in the original act and it's hilarious.
  material means material:
  (a) whether in the form of text; or
  (b) whether in the form of data; or
  c) whether in the form of speech, music or other sounds; or
  (d) whether in the form of visual images (moving or otherwise); or
  (e) whether in any other form; or
  (f) whether in any combination of forms.
  
  Pretty impregnable net the legislative writers have cast there.

34 comments