To expand a little Australian politics has a bad habit of coming up with grandiose solutions to problems that they can push for headlines then worrying about details afterwards. If we had GDPR like privacy and data security laws in place before this it would be better. If we had a clear and understandable reporting system for data breaches, better again. If we had actual education programs to demystify and explain Internet awareness and literacy. If we had control over the scope of data harvesting.

But no we jump straight to the headline, details and workability can come sometime later.

Oh cool we solved identity theft then, right? Right? Seriously this is a poorly veiled mechanism to have Internet usage tied to specific identities, the people pushing for it are not even going to be the public faces we see doing the pushing. I also find it really telling that they have weaponised the grief of a mother who lost a child to suicide after sustained online bullying, but are choosing to ignore the fact that youth advocates are outright telling them that loss of online safe spaces and community will be jeopardising the safety of marginalised kids such as the LGBTQI+ community. How many suicides is an acceptable trade off for them?

My own kids will be forced to log out of YouTube, this makes it harder for me to monitor their usage as now it will all be anonymous and as much as I can helicopter around them at home, as the government seeming wants me to do, I won’t be able to see any of the content they are consuming when I am not directly behind them. The current method is so smooth and frictionless that the kids don’t bother with finding workarounds, the new system…

My take, leave the kids logged in with accounts and start holding social media companies accountable for the content they provide. It will be imminently more traceable when this stuff is reported and knowing they could be fined hundreds of thousands of millions of dollars when they fail their subscribers might convince these companies to do better.

Lastly, the government is already seeing alternatives spring up to take over these niches in the ecosystem. The fact that the ban hasn’t even gone into effect yet and the whack-a-mole has already begun really says something. The only way these current laws can be salvaged once this cycle starts will be to institute blanket bans, rather than targeted. When every website with a comment section begins to ask for ID things are going to get messy, at that point OpSec goes out the window.

Apparently the eSafety commissioner can bring fines of up to $850k per user whose data has been mismanaged, but I don’t see that happening. Discord leaked a bunch of details recently and to the best of my knowledge all that was required of them was a pinky promise to try harder.

Over here in Australia the government is being told that the equivalent that we are having foisted on us lacks key supporting measures (like an equivalent of GDPR, actual hard and fast laws to penalise the misuse or failure to adequately secure citizens data, etc).

In spite of this and genuine commentary from children’s advocacy groups saying the legislation is not fit for purpose it is being steamrolled through because “won’t somebody think of the children”.

It does make me wonder how many children are going to be cut off from their support networks and escape routes that this might harm, potentially fatally. How much blood of Australia’s youth is our government willing to have on its hands so that our intelligence community (and we are part of five eyes so it doesn’t stay on our shores) can have a shiny new toy?

Now simply provide ID to every website or app that has any social interaction component, after all the only way to protect our children is to submit to a massive invasion of privacy.

What do you mean this runs the risk of hurting marginalised and or abused children who lose an avenue to seek help and guidance to escape or ameliorate their situation?

Stop understanding nuance and prepare for the line our intelligence community wants you to swallow instead.

In all seriousness if social media is too corrosive for young people maybe its time it was banned entirely, the reason for these half measures has little to do with children and their safety and everything to do with removing all privacy and anonymity from online activities.

I think pretty solidly this is being driven by business and intelligence communities, our police and spy agencies have been trying to get around encryption and online anonymity for years. They desperately want to be able to tie every bit of data that moves around the internet to an individual without getting the courts involved, and bear in mind since Australia is a Five Eyes nation not all of that pressure is onshore. It is getting the limpest push back from these big tech companies though because how much more valuable is your advertising profile if they can associate it with tour government ID, or birth certificate, or confirmed validated biometric data.

I know of a Telco that had to pay to move a family to a different state after they provided their address to a man who posed a credible risk to their lives. They had to buy this family a new house, pay movers, and buy then a new car. The telco preempted the court on this so it wouldn’t become a national story in the media and they could minimise the eventual fine they faced.

That one incident 2 decades ago cost more than half a million dollars to fix, uprooted a family and caused unknown amounts of trauma. Do we seriously think Twitter will take a similar incident as seriously? Google? Facebook? But I guarantee they will slurp up every bit of data they can.

When I called my federal representative about the laws and the miles wide holes in Australian privacy laws and more particularly who would be responsible for covering the costs associated with helping citizens recover in the cases of rampant identity theft these laws are going enable, I got assurances that the eSafety Commissioner would be able to hold large tech companies to account. I pointed out that if Meta was to suffer a breach that exposed the details of say a thousand Australians I could see them ponying up the fine, just cost of doing business, if the details of 2 million Australians got leaked then with potential fines stretching into the billions why would they even fight it, so much simpler to cut Australia off like a gangrenous limb. I was assured that the eSafety commissioner would be monitoring these large companies to ensure their data security was up to standard, I laughed. I was told that our parliament may be looking in to strengthening data protection laws and was promised an email with details about this (3 weeks ago with not even a message to say sorry for the delay). I was thoroughly disgusted, this I’ll thought out plan to scrape as much data as Australians can be tricked into handing over is going to result in massive costs to the tax payer before too long. Discord has already leaked data related to age verification and Australia hasn’t even got its law started yet.

I really think we need remove a lot of the protections from Politicians: “You want to spy on the Australian public at the behest of a shadowy cabal of Intelligence Community wonks? Ok we can do that, but you are personally liable for it when it goes wrong, you will be personally paying all the costs associated with the following scenarios we are categorically stating will occur if you proceed with this nonsense. If you do not have sufficient money to cover these costs all of your assets will be sold and you will become an indentured servant of the Australian public until your debt is cleared.”

I got an interesting response when I told the guy at the MPs office that I would shutdown or abandon any app, website or service that demanded my ID. There is no service online which is worth providing a drivers license or sufficient photos to create a reasonable reproduction of my face.

Oh no had you not heard, in most denominations of Christianity the way you lived your life doesn’t mean a thing, it’s the instant of your death that matters. If the church is to believed there is no act too heinous, no person too far gone for redemption. This is why there are instances of murderers taking the lives of victims who fail one of the arbitrary standards the church requires people meet to be eligible to be saved, then repenting on their deathbed.

I’m going to level with you, I didn’t get far on your linked YouTube video, I couldn’t listen to that self congratulatory tone for too long. As a religious leader he could be out there calling for holy crusade against the worst excesses of the republican party. He is choosing the path of appeasement instead, historically this has only gone well when used to navigate relations with fascist, I can’t imagine this ending differently.

The problem with these control schemes is they were instigated as a way to exert control over the masses and then had hundreds of years of being tweaked to overcome the most obvious revealing mistakes, as they have this collection of stolen plot points and retroactive continuity the whole thing becomes unwieldy.

Give the Warhammer 40k community a few more hundred years and see what kind of mess you wind up with, I doubt it will be more incoherent than Christianity but it might be approaching.

I always love hearing that I am an Atheist so I can rape and or murder people. Thankfully Penn Jillette’s response to that statement gets them every time, “I do rape all I want. And the amount I want is zero. And I do murder all I want, and the amount I want is zero.” I always enjoy then asking how many people they are not raping and murdering solely because a book (or their imaginary friend if I am feeling spiteful) tells them not to.

No silly you need to upload your drivers license to some shady 3rd party age verification service to protect 16 year olds from accidentally using dating sites.

They even pinky promised to not store your data in some vibe coded system that will leak it all the first time a hacker so much as scans for api end points.

Now stop asking questions and grant front camera permissions so our AI that is maybe 75% accurate cab guess your age.

Seems to me that Romania should just let everyone know that they are receptive to the idea but will need some funding towards the cost of improving the speed and efficiency of their court system.

Start the bidding at an even billion USD. Let Trump try to Art of the Deal™ that one past the american populace. Should be some interesting mental gymnastics to try to explain why he is valuing Tate at 500 million times higher than any rational person would.

I honestly feel like every country that has anything that Trump wants needs to start figuring out the most unreasonable price tags they can.

And of course Donald Trump is as immovable as granite and unwaveringly loyal to his friends & allies.

There is no chance of him having a spat with the Aberdeenshire council about rubbish collection for his golf club and responding with a 50% tariff…

Or for that matter of being directed to do it by his owners with even less justification…