I don't think Google is complaining too much. Especially if it gives them an excuse to collect credit card data (reducing a significant amount of friction when they sell YouTube premium / google drive subscriptions).
I do have a passport that everyone is legally required to have in this country but trying to upload a picture of that was a fucking nightmare so I said fuck it take these numbers you clowns. Now if I can do this I'm sure every kid on the planet can just take their mom's CC so what is the point of this law anyway?
I guess what I'm asking is if this is something Google is doing pro-actively to cover their asses after a general law was passed, or if the Australian government has explicitly contacted Google (alphabet) about this?
You know. To keep kids safe.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2021-11-28/social-media-laws-onl...
And any given voter doesn't have "wants" or "beliefs", just violent mood swings and social performance.
This isn't really even a bug of government's! Government action is very often valuable and necessary. But the incentive structure is such that modeling the gov't as a somewhat-rational entity with well-formed desires is usually not the correct frame to start with, IMO
China is Australia's largest two-way trading partner in goods and services, accounting for nearly one third (31 per cent) of our trade with the world.
https://www.dfat.gov.au/geo/china/china-country-brief
The CCP is evil.
Alternate-universe headline: Google uses monopolistic power to ignore government regulation for profit.
Which do you prefer?
There, I fixed it. I'm getting tired of every headline trying to bash on Google/Facebook/etc. for clicks.
Google is exploiting the requirement for age verification to set up Google accounts for future purchases.
So then, how do you prove that you are in a different country? Easy, right? There are multiple sources of information that can prove your location - GPS, mobile service provider information, IP geo-location, Wifi SSID databases... . But no - none of that is enough. You have to add a local payment method! And coincidentally none of the payment methods other than credit card information works - not even the one provided by mobile service provider. So, you are forced to register your credit card information to prove your location.
Now that your have proved your location and installed the essential apps you need, may be it's time to delete the credit card information. What if you accidentally subscribe to some service you didn't want? After all, you aren't subscribed to any service or bought anything with the newly entered card. So it should be easy to delete it, right? NO! You are not allowed to delete your only registered payment method! [1] Now it's open forever as a payment method for online services or Google pay.
Google's tactics here are sleazy, underhanded and manipulative. And what of the complaints they receive about it? See for yourself - discussion locked and disabled! I don't know at what point their behavior is declared illegal and anti-social.
[1] https://support.google.com/googleplay/thread/10797082?hl=en&...
And? I create a "profile" in my mind of every new human I interact with, and every human I read about or hear about even without interacting with. It's a basic human function.
When I gain a new business client, I create a profile of them too. This might start with a phone number, but over time, expand to include an email address, knowledge about their location, work hours, bank of choice, etc. Most businesses do this and always have.
Consent isn't required for this.
- logging to gmail on a non logged in android ? This logs the entire phone to the accounts
- chrome and online google services account are intertwined
Google should flat out refuse when governments make these requests.
If so, I don't see how it is any more dystopian than the ID requirements that have long been in place for non-internet media. I don't recall anyone calling it dystopian back in the '70s for instance when we had to show ID to rent movies from the "adult" room at the local video rental store.
I find it disingenuous to claim that one of the largest and most powerful companies in the world has no agency in this situation.
Remember how hard Google fought the Australian laws about search engines paying news organizations.
Not to say the Australian government is guilt-free here. There are no good guys here.
Tired of people defending Google at every turn despite them not deserving the benefit of the doubt for many years now.
what will we think of then?
What does this comment even mean? It reads like GPT-1 spent too much time on /r/politics
1/8th of the country takes a different approach to a public health crisis and suddenly every hot take American conservative talks about invading the country. But the federal government uses us as a testing ground for technological authoritarianism for the better part of a decade and it doesn't get reported at all, even within Australia, except for on tech sites and other left-leaning places.
If you, as an American, are worried about authoritarianism within your own country, stamping this steady ramping of it out in other allied western nations should be a key priority. But the only time I've ever heard an American news network even talk about Australia was about the Melbourne lockdowns, with completely incorrect facts everywhere, making an absolute mountain out of a molehill.
Australia is what happens when you sell off your land to the highest bidder, throw your consistution out the window and let the Capitalists take over.
Letting the usefulness of this measure aside, I think there should be other ways to get your age without using your ID, like using a credit card for example. I don't know if there is any way to get the age of a person using the credit card, to be honest, but at least is an identification method with a expiring date and possibilities to cancel in any moment, not a unique number you can't never change in your whole life (at least in most Western countries I know).
This is.. not quite true. Social security numbers are used this way (even if they aren't intended to be such a thing) and passports are essentially a national ID system. My passport is the only valid ID that I have - of course, I live outside the US and have to have the nearest US embassy renew it. (I don't qualify for Norwegian IDs yet, and my immigration card is a supplement to my passport instead of actual ID)
Gone are the days where parents could educate their children on how to behave on the net it seems.
We should not accept slogans such as "For the children", doing that leads to ever more restrictions and control.
I don't have any solution to turn the tide, other than making sure to vote for a party that supports freedom on the net.
One way to do this off the top mf my head would be
HN issues a unique number (say 4096 bit) to you when you create an account
You send that number to your identity provider along with confirming proof of age
The identity provider signs that the number is valid and posts it to a public source
HN downloads a list of 4096 bit numbers posted in the last 5 minutes and confirms the one associated with your account is on the list
HN will know that "Identities-r-us.com" has proven your age, but nothing else
IRU know you had to age approve a site, but there are many sites downloading the lists so they don't know which one
Otherwise it seems a terrible idea.
It'd be great if the law said that it's (very) illegal for the verifying party to share or store any of the PII, including with the government.
Do you think that may be part of the purpose of such a system?
You would have just lost that person for a long time.
https://www.lefigaro.fr/medias/la-video-d-eric-zemmour-restr...
Now it seems they willingly accept being pushed around, succumb to any request to compromise its values in the interest of shareholder value, and willingly collude with authoritarian requests from governments.
It's all so typical, in a way. Whatever shred of idealism I had left for these companies is now completely gone.
1 I buy a device for my child and I set it up and enter his birthday, say he is under 13
2 I buy me a device , setup my account and enter my credit card to use the Store , the OS now is 100% sure I am an adult
3 The browser on our devices knows our ages now
4 13+ , 18+ webpages will mark this in the header , the browser on the child phone knows to not just allow the child to click "I am 18+ old" , the browser on my device would check my settings and say if I am a religious guy I tell the browser not to show the pages to me.
5 if you can't or won't tell your OS or browser your age either send your ID card to all websites or don't go there, big websites will respect local laws so maybe you can have luck with a VPN or some small website that does not care about local laws in a different country.
I suggest this idea as an alternatives to having to send ID card copy to each websites, I am not advocating for UK or Australian laws to be made default everywhere.
Does anyone know how these work on a technical level? Are they actually verifying these IDs with some sort of government API? What's preventing people from just sending fake IDs?
I'm also curious how non-tech giants are going to implement this. It's a big ask for small websites run by single or small groups of people. If they face consequences too, it seems like a win for the social media sites to keep their market positions.
Finally, what's preventing the children from just using non-tech giant sites to get at adult content? If it's literally just for Facebook, Youtube and the like, it'll be about as useless as the "Click here to confirm you're 18+!" verifications since they'll just search elsewhere, on one of the millions of other adult content sites...
Google made a number of moves to head that off, including pumping money into local initiatives and a deal with the local media companies.
Not fighting back hard against the current social conservative government's moves on censorship and cracking down on online rights is consistent with Google's other moves to protect profits and avoid paying media companies for links.
There's an easily visible link to close it without subscribing but fuck it's tone deaf for a site called "reclaim the internet".
Yes, I would like to reclaim the net. From sites such as that one.
Will Google and Facebook support it unless required by law?
This way the problem can be solved without any IDs and credit cards.
Also I don't understand why age verification is needed for Google Play. Isn't adult content already banned there?
