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by kmeisthax 56 days ago
Facebook. There's a wave of child endangerment lawsuits incoming and they want to head that off at the pass by having governments shift all that liability over to the OS vendors.
2 comments

Microsoft just force-updated my operating system (despite declining every option and prompt) and the first thing I noticed working differently was it offering, in an OS popup, to "connect" the computer to "Facebook".

These people have root access to all our webcams.

I don't think we can tolerate these entities to continue to exist.

What can we do about it? The major tech firms have nearly all the power here, including quite obviously full capture of government (not just here but other countries as well).
Internet wide coordinated DDOS?

Basically a mass-protest via network packets. Could we argue sending packets to a server is essentially a form of protest protected by speech similar to a public gathering?

In this particular case, you could replace your OS with one where you are actually the owner.
On your tongue: "what exactly can we do?"

On theirs: "Just for the sake of making the numbers work, have you tried putting in 'kill all the poor'?". https://youtu.be/s_4J4uor3JE

I am increasingly coming to recognize proceduralist liberalism as a suicide pact.

How does that help Facebook? They already have plenty of signals to guess their users' age, what would they do with an other one? They are not going to ban children anyway.
It helps them by making it somebody else's responsibility to get it right and thus shields them from liability.
The OS should start labeling everybody as a child by default. Forbid Facebook to show ads and any harming content by default. The OS has little less to lose with this approach than FB.
So it lets them know for sure who is a child. What liability does that shield them from, and how?
FB etc. may argue "device says this user is an adult", even though device may say that only because the parents don't set up separate user accounts e.g. shared family iPad, or because the kids being more tech savvy in the first place like we all were when I myself was a kid.
Every one of these age assurance laws basically says:

1. The OS vendor must provide an age bucket using the minimum amount of data necessary

2. App vendors (i.e. Facebook) must use the OS vendor's age buckets to determine age

The idea is that the next time Facebook gets hit with a child endangerment lawsuit, they can say "Well, we used the age buckets the government told us to, and they said the plaintiff was 18+, so we're not liable".

This, of course, assumes that most social media and Internet regulation will continue being targeted at children only, both because courts are reluctant to enforce 1A on laws that censor children[0] and because the current political class actually benefits from the harms Facebook does to adults. Like, a good chunk of government surveillance is just buying data from Google and Facebook.

[0] The root password to the US constitution is "th1nk0fth3cHIldren!!1" after all