It’s so funny to me how badly people want this to be some nefarious governmental conspiracy. Listen, the government already has much better tools to track you online. Your computer has, on a hardware level, sent unique identifiers to ISPs and websites since Pentium IIIs. This age requirement thing isn’t a government conspiracy to track you, they already track you.
It is a *corporate *conspiracy. It’s Meta and other major websites, games, and applications companies that want to off load their liability. Meta and Alphabet just lost major lawsuits for their negligence in protecting kids on their own websites. There is a liability dam about to break for these companies and schools and other advocacy groups start their own lawsuits. That’s what this is about. That’s the real conspiracy.
They also want a reliable way to differentiate between chatbots and real users, because advertising isn’t very effective on chatbots.
But also, one benefit of ID laws for the government is that it makes court proceedings much faster and cheaper. Sure, they’re tracking everyone online, but a lot of that information is locked behind procedure. By just requiring ID to log in they can sidestep the procedures, because they can just ask corporations nicely for ID information and they’ll eagerly comply.
I didn’t know about that. Maybe that’s plays into it too. But I’m generally a “simpler answer is more likely the most correct” type of guy.
In this case the simple answer is that Meta and others just had their “Tobacco Lawsuits” moment in court and liability floodgates are any to open wide, and they are pushing these laws to divert their liability onto someone else.
“Corporations want a way to verify the humanity of users” is a simple answer.
“Governments want a way to easily prosecute users” is also a simple answer.
I don’t see why it can’t be all of these things. There is actually a more complicated answer that I didn’t bring up, which is that smaller websites will have a hard time complying with ID laws, which gives preferential treatment to large websites. That locks out potential competition, hinders smaller projects like lemmy or mastodon, and helps secure the current social media monopolies.
That one might just be a useful side effect, rather than the intentional outcome.
It’s so funny to me how badly people want this to be some nefarious governmental conspiracy. Listen, the government already has much better tools to track you online. Your computer has, on a hardware level, sent unique identifiers to ISPs and websites since Pentium IIIs. This age requirement thing isn’t a government conspiracy to track you, they already track you.
It is a *corporate *conspiracy. It’s Meta and other major websites, games, and applications companies that want to off load their liability. Meta and Alphabet just lost major lawsuits for their negligence in protecting kids on their own websites. There is a liability dam about to break for these companies and schools and other advocacy groups start their own lawsuits. That’s what this is about. That’s the real conspiracy.
They also want a reliable way to differentiate between chatbots and real users, because advertising isn’t very effective on chatbots.
But also, one benefit of ID laws for the government is that it makes court proceedings much faster and cheaper. Sure, they’re tracking everyone online, but a lot of that information is locked behind procedure. By just requiring ID to log in they can sidestep the procedures, because they can just ask corporations nicely for ID information and they’ll eagerly comply.
I didn’t know about that. Maybe that’s plays into it too. But I’m generally a “simpler answer is more likely the most correct” type of guy.
In this case the simple answer is that Meta and others just had their “Tobacco Lawsuits” moment in court and liability floodgates are any to open wide, and they are pushing these laws to divert their liability onto someone else.
“Corporations want a way to verify the humanity of users” is a simple answer.
“Governments want a way to easily prosecute users” is also a simple answer.
I don’t see why it can’t be all of these things. There is actually a more complicated answer that I didn’t bring up, which is that smaller websites will have a hard time complying with ID laws, which gives preferential treatment to large websites. That locks out potential competition, hinders smaller projects like lemmy or mastodon, and helps secure the current social media monopolies.
That one might just be a useful side effect, rather than the intentional outcome.