• 14 Posts
  • 83 Comments
Joined 1 month ago
Cake day: May 5th, 2026
  • godsammitdam@lemmy.ziptoTechnology@lemmy.world•UK: Under-16s to be banned from social media, Starmer announcesEnglish
    7·
    4 days ago

    It’s a moral panic being co-opted by those in power. (Ironically, many of those in power being predators themselves, especially here in the US where they’re a major political party 🙃)

    Some I can think of off the top of my head:

    • The Patriot Act
    • COINTELPRO
    • The Satanic Panic and resultant legislation
    • The War on Drugs

    Legitimate concern gets amplified to a moral panic and then legislation is quickly put forth but is never tested or thoroughly understood. And given that most legislation today is written by lobbyists…well 🤷‍♂️

    I’m sure stupidity is a part of it, but that might be a bit too convenient. It’s usually some genuine intention that then gets swept up and captured by malicious infrastructure. They know what they’re doing. They’re narcissists, unempathetic, and the most willing to exploit. Capitalism in a nutshell.

    That’s why I’m saying hold the parents and the corporations accountable. Peel back data collection and restrict algorithmic content altogether. Enforce/provide parental education for online technologies and children. Basically, pay attention to your kids, be interested in them and their lives. The infrastructure exists on these social media platforms to restrict and monitor access, as well as it exists at the router level and at the device level as well. It’s the parents who purchase the device and provide internet access. Would we be ok with in home governmental inspections on all of us so that kids can’t have access to a gun or alcohol? No, it’s up to the parent to protect their child from danger. Why is this any different? Why should we all give up our privacy?

  • godsammitdam@lemmy.ziptoTechnology@lemmy.world•UK: Under-16s to be banned from social media, Starmer announcesEnglish
    35·
    4 days ago

    Social media is absolutely addictive and making people unhappy.

    But how do you enforce this without removing anonymity?

    Once again, they’re going the corporate/government friendly route of surveillance. Ban VPNs, age vefification, soon we’ll be required to use biometric checks to access the internet.

    These chucklefucks will do anything other than attempt to solve the problem. Which is more education and help for parents while holding parents and the corporations accountable. But that would cost money rather than having lobbyists and donors fund them even more so 🤷‍♂️

    It all comes back to capitalism.

  • godsammitdam@lemmy.ziptoTechnology@lemmy.world•Louis Rossmann is suing Samsung after firm offers $330 refund for defective SSD while selling the drives on Amazon for $949 — spat over 4TB 990 Pro SSD is headed to courtEnglish
    251·
    7 days ago

    I believe a bit of that we’re seeing is being self-titled as “dark woke” lol. I’d count myself among them. Where, instead of trying to hold decorum and be super duper respectful, if you see or hear someone doing something immoral, you call that shit out and you do it hard. Modern day “punch a Nazi” and not accrue assault charges essentially.

    Not to turn it entirely political, but I see it as the next step based on how politics have evolved. Conservatives would often do and say terrible things themselves, but then they’d tell liberals/centrists “but where’s the tolerant left, where’s you’re decorum, how could you do these terrible things” etc etc and it would work fairly well where establishment dems would shrink back in their holes or they’d “work across the aisle” and produce half measures that barely helped the public, if at all, rather than standing on principle.

    Now, I think you’re seeing a lot more, especially leftists, essentially say fuck that and push back and go on the offensive to knock them down a peg. And given that most conservative talking points are all bluster, they have no real principle or ideology, it falls flat with a more aggressive stance backed up by facts and principle.

    Louis gives off that to me, as many leftists are grounded in principle to do what is right for people and humanity. He’s saying, look, Samsung, you’re a piece of shit and I know you’re a piece of shit to others, and I know that you know others won’t be able to push back against you, you’re taking advantage of them. So fuck you, I’ll stand up for both myself and all the others you’ve been harming. Let’s fucking go.

    People are tired. And we know what is right. And we’re tired of being gaslit and taken advantage of.

    An example of what I’m kind of talking about: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9ZzZCo_JKO4

  • godsammitdam@lemmy.ziptoTechnology@lemmy.world•UK’s Starmer gives Apple, Google 3 months to stop children sending nude imagesEnglish
    2·
    9 days ago

    Fair point, and I’ll concede, but only partially, as it is nit what is being discussed here. Starmer’s proposal isn’t asking for Apple to expand their system, it’s mandating platforms to comply and make it impossible, and the platforms can choose how to do so. On-device detection that never leaves the device is a meaningfully different privacy profile than server-side scanning or breaking E2E encryption. Apple’s Communication Safety feature works roughly as you described and that architecture is less invasive than the worst case scenario. If every implementation were genuinely on-device, opt-in, parent-controlled, and open source verifiable, it would be a different conversation.

    But that’s where my concession stops.

    We can only take a corporation’s word that it’s truly on-device and nothing is retained. The history of that promise is not encouraging. There have been multiple instances across the industry of companies guaranteeing on-device processing only for that data to appear in breach disclosures afterward. Closed, proprietary systems cannot be independently verified. We’re being asked to trust the architecture of companies whose entire business model is built on data extraction.

    There’s also a false positive problem. Google has already implemented similar detection and there are confirmed cases of users having their entire Google accounts permanently locked after photographing their own child in the bath. Emails, photos, Drive, business files, income streams, all gone, with no meaningful appeals process. The harm from a false positive in a system like this isn’t a minor inconvenience, it’s potentially catastrophic and irreversible.

    And then there’s the infrastructure problem. The Patriot Act is, once again, the prime example. You build the architecture for one stated purpose and then it gets legislated into something broader. Age verification is the live example happening right now. It started as self-attestation. That wasn’t sufficient so it became on-device ID verification. That wasn’t sufficient so it became third party trusted providers. Private vendors like Persona and kID. Both of which have had documented breaches after promising on-device verification themselves. This is literally the documented trajectory of every surveillance infrastructure built in the name of protection.

    It’s never a matter of if they legislate it further. It’s when. And who profits from the expanded version.

  • godsammitdam@lemmy.ziptoTechnology@lemmy.world•UK’s Starmer gives Apple, Google 3 months to stop children sending nude imagesEnglish
    1·
    9 days ago

    The lunch analogy is too generic for the complexity here and I think it breaks down entirely given the innate assumption that a parent’s responsibility is only a parent’s responsibility, which isn’t true.

    Should the government provide free school lunches? Absolutely. That requires funding and legislative will. The government has a responsibility (well, theoretically) to protect and serve its people, including children and families. An overlap of responsibility if you will. Free school lunches does not infringe on anyone’s rights and instead betters communities, eases burden on struggling parents, and helps students perform and receive proper nutrition. And should a family or student wish to not receive a school lunch, they are free to opt out and bring their own. It doesn’t require scanning every student’s lunchbox or installing surveillance infrastructure in every kitchen. The intervention is proportionate to the problem.

    Starmer’s proposal isn’t. Preventing nude image sharing at the device level requires either client-side scanning of all communications or breaking end-to-end encryption entirely. That’s mass surveillance infrastructure installed on every phone, affecting every adult, every journalist, every abuse survivor using encrypted messaging, every person who has ever sent a legal private image to another consenting adult. And unlike our lunch analogy, a family or student, nor an unaffiliated person altogether, has little to no option to opt out should they use one of these major platforms/devices. The harm of the intervention is categorically larger than the harm it addresses.

    A better analogy: should a parent leave alcohol or an unsecured firearm accessible to a child? No, and we hold parents accountable for that. We don’t require routine home inspections of every household to verify compliance. The accountability lands on the person who chose to bring the dangerous item into proximity with the child and who controls access to it. The parent pays for the phone. The parent pays for the data plan. The parent hands the child the device. The tools to monitor and restrict that device already exist, provided by the large platforms, on routers, etc, and are largely unused.

    The problem is real. The solution being proposed requires dismantling privacy for everyone to address the failures of some. There are targeted interventions that haven’t been exhausted. Those who stand to benefit are not the children, but the companies able to profit off the data collected and the governments able to invade privacy where there wasn’t said existing infrastructure to do so.

    This is a controlling party (government/private companies) abusing a moral panic which has been common throughout history. Just look at the Patriot Act.