Age verification tech companies are lobbying heavily for governments to legally require their services. The proposed "solutions" are about funneling money into the hands of other tech companies and shady groups, while violating user privacy.

If anything, we should be banning the collection of any age related information to access social media and more mature content. We need companies to respect privacy, rather than legislation even more privacy violations.

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SecretDreams 4 hours ago | parent [-]

If anything, we should be preventing young people from being exposed to the version of the internet that currently exists until the tech companies that made it this way offer a solution. I am all ears if you have an alternative that big tech can implement to ensure this is the case while they are given the task of cleaning up the mess they've made?

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trinsic2 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Bro the internet was made by everyday people. Corporations just imposed there shit on top of it. Im all for the corporate part going away, but I think its better if we make social media corporations transparent so we can target how they are operating those services. Age gating users is not the answer

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SecretDreams 3 hours ago | parent [-]

I've been on the internet for more than 20 years. It got a lot worse in the last 10. Individuals maybe shaped it in the early days, but the disastrous mess we have today is from the monetization and ensuing garbage that was pushed onto the world by some very profitable tech companies.

Undo the damage or otherwise come up with a way to shield kids from it. I won't let my own kids anywhere near the open web the way it is today. It's poison for young minds and needs to be fixed or gated off. Like alcohol at this point.

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trinsic2 3 hours ago | parent [-]

The last line in my statement answers your question. If you leave it up to government to try and regulate a medium you are asking for trouble. Its like telling a news source what they can and cant release news wise because a portion of the population (kids) are harmed by the information.

I understand where you are coming from but age gating is not the answer for a communication medium.

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SecretDreams 3 hours ago | parent [-]

I'm asking you for the alternative. Every day this continues on is literally ruining lives before they start. Like lead in water, time is of the essence. So what is the alternative to fix it?

	▲	trinsic2 12 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		Support candidates that will put anti-trust first and end citizen united. Both of these issue make holding companies accountable for the harm that is being caused by lack of transparency impossible. The problem is corruption and corporations not being accountable to the people. When those problems get resolved. These issues will become less problematic.

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fuzzfactor 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

>If you are working on a product, or ever did work on a product, that made the internet worse rather than better, you have a shared responsibility to right that wrong.

This is how the "predatory debt" involved has built up, and grown exponentially until now, and the only thing Facebook considers as a solution would be to pay it down using other peoples' resources instead of their own.

No one else has matching leverage and the dollar figure would be many billions if not a full trillion or more, which is about what it's worth, and who else could afford that except Facebook?

So it has to come from the collective subtraction of everyone's complete privacy. Just to amount to something comparable.

Add that up and it shows you how valuable privacy really is and what it's worth in dollar figures.

Yes, do the math, privacy is worth more than Facebok no matter what, it always was and always will be.

You can't have both, so big tech should jettison Meta. Who else could afford it?

A more non-existential solution would be for Meta to fully fund a completely anonymous internet to replace the one that they soiled from the beginning, and let them keep the (anti-)social-media exclusive network separate.

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SecretDreams 3 hours ago | parent [-]

I'm with you.

	▲	fuzzfactor 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		This is what I thought when Facebook first came out; It was going to be like MySpace where most people were expected to remain anonymous like the internet had always been, and only those who actually wanted to be identifiable could reveal as much information as they personally wanted to. But no, Facebook wanted everybody's personally identifiable information as table stakes, not only those who really wanted to promote themselves or gain personal recognition. There was no other way to sign up. I thought people would be too smart for that. But Facebook was "free" to use, and learned a lot from it's first major gamescourge, Zynga. Naturally I've been waiting for it to stand the test of time, and it does look like it has been a complete failure when it comes to being worthwhile. Facebook started out with enshittification as a business model but the next major escalation came when people had to have an "account" before they could even browse the site any more. People who had actually enjoyed it were somewhat pressured to join just so they could continue following those who were promotional. Linkedin did this too and made it no longer worth visiting either. So much for supporting the members who were intended to be promoted. You can only imagine my shock years ago when I found out Facebook was a billion-dollar company. Things like this were never even supposed to be worth money.