Age Verification & Games
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This strikes me as such an obvious doxxing vector. Pass.
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Does anybody think the KIDS Act being reviewed by the EU Parliament might affect our hobby?
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@MisterBoring It does have specific provisions relating to online games, so it’s a very big maybe.
He/Him. Opinions and views are solely my own unless specifically stated otherwise.
@Faraday said:
Pavel is probably right
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@Pavel There’s also a legal argument that the act would cover MUSHes as a form of social media, which means we could lose a lot of the EU folks in the hobby unless they band together to build their own servers that go through all those meters of red tape.
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I think people are missing the much bigger picture here. This is being pushed by governments and institutions that have already demonstrated just how badly they can fail children when powerful people are involved.
Look at Jeffrey Epstein. American prosecutors gave him an extraordinarily lenient deal and failed to properly inform his victims. Yet we’re now expected to believe that these same institutions are so deeply concerned about protecting children that ordinary people need to surrender their privacy just to access the internet?
I don’t believe protecting children is the only motivation here. I think we’re watching the normalisation of an infrastructure that could enable mass surveillance. And the particularly insidious part is how it’s being sold to the public.
“Protecting children” is practically impossible to argue against without looking suspicious. If you object to handing over your passport or having your face scanned just to use a website then suddenly you’re treated as though you must have something to hide.
It’s an incredibly effective way to shut down legitimate concerns about privacy. Nobody wants children to be exploited. But that doesn’t mean governments should have unrestricted access to everyone’s personal information or that private companies should be trusted to collect it.
You can protect children without treating every adult on the internet like a potential criminal. The responsibility for protecting children should fall primarily on their parents. If you let your child wander unsupervised into dangerous places every morning then you’d rightly be held responsible for neglecting their safety. Why should the internet be any different? If parents knowingly expose their children to serious dangers through negligence then hold them accountable. Prosecute them for criminal neglect where the circumstances justify it. Don’t use irresponsible parenting as an excuse to strip every adult on the internet of their privacy and anonymity.
And frankly I find it disturbing how readily people are accepting the erosion of online anonymity simply because they’ve been told it’s for a good cause.
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I think people are missing the much bigger picture here.
No, most of us know that. We care about it. We also try to avoid talking about politics, it’s like the one rule we have.
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I have protections on my kid’s device. I check it. I’m in the room with her.
She was still able to google sexually explicit material.
The only way to keep kids safe 100% is to keep them off altogether and, in my opinion, will only make them MORE vulnerable when they are older and the behaviors are explicit.
I’m okay with an additional step to help me out as a parent.
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I’m okay with an additional step to help me out as a parent.
I’d be more okay with it if it weren’t implemented so stupidly.
And even then, we have rights to privacy just as strong as your rights to security. It’s an age-old debate between security and liberty, and in the era of rising authoritarianism, it’s hard to simply accept “help me protect the children” as justification, even if that’s a side benefit to the loss of personal liberty.
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I have protections on my kid’s device. I check it. I’m in the room with her.
She was still able to google sexually explicit material.
The only way to keep kids safe 100% is to keep them off altogether and, in my opinion, will only make them MORE vulnerable when they are older and the behaviors are explicit.
I’m okay with an additional step to help me out as a parent.
This might be veering off-topic, but I think I’d be a lot more OK with a minor googling literotica than I would be with them engaging in erotica with adults in a glorified chat server, where exchanging off-game contact details to further discuss the content is common.
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I’d be more okay with it if it weren’t implemented so stupidly.
This. I’m not opposed to the idea of better age-gated protections. As a parent, it is pretty much impossible to guarantee that your teen doesn’t encounter anything shady on the internet. I mean, I suppose you could try to look over their shoulder every time they’re online or ban them completely, but as @junipersky pointed out, that has other problems. In the physical world, that would be the equivalent of never letting them leave the house without you standing right next to them.
There should be a reasonable way to set limits of where they go and who they’re with online just as you do in person. Of course a determined enough kid could circumvent the safeguards, but it’d be nice to at least have them in the first place.
All that said, these laws are so dumb. They’re a privacy nightmare and a whole set of data breaches waiting to happen. They try to block kids out of spaces that could be safe and useful for them, and they’re so easy to circumvent that they do virtually nothing to keep kids out of spaces they shouldn’t be in. Oh and they’re a burden to implement. Aaargh.
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Steam recently began complying with Australian legislop and requiring age verification to view adult materials. Their ID of choice? A credit card. Not a debit card, not an ID card, but a credit card. The Reserve Bank of Australia reports that only 18% of adults under 30 in Australia own a credit card (Livermore et al., 2023, p. 21).
and they’re so easy to circumvent that they do virtually nothing to keep kids out of spaces they shouldn’t be in.
Especially with Firefox and other browsers just straight-up having a VPN button to push, for free (with limits, but c’mon), right there. Even the least technologically interested child will learn that pushing that button gives you access to The Good Stuff.
Livermore, T., Mulqueeney, J., Nguyen, T., & Watson, B. (2023). The evolution of consumer payments in Australia: Results from the 2022 Consumer Payments Survey (Research Discussion Paper No. 2023-08). Reserve Bank of Australia. https://doi.org/10.47688/rdp2023-08
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