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Posted by stubish 1 day ago

Australians to face age checks from search engines(ia.acs.org.au)
134 points | 243 commentspage 2
shirro 1 day ago|
This looks like a voluntary industry code of conduct made by US companies Microsoft, Google etc. I am not aware of any legislation that would require this in Australia. If the commissioner thinks the industry codes are insufficient she might advise the government that a legislative approach is required but she is not an Australian politician and was not elected by anyone here.

The eSafety commissioner is an American born ex-Microsoft, Adobe and Twitter employee who was appointed by the previous conservative government. I wouldn't be so sure her values are representative of the so-called Australian nanny state or the Australian Labor Party.

Sevrene 1 day ago||
I’m an Australian who values privacy and civil liberties more than most I meet.

While I yearn for the more authentic and sincere days of the internet I grew up on, I recognize very quickly by visiting x or facebook how much it isn’t that, and hasn’t been for a long time.

I think this bill is a good thing and I support it.

SturgeonsLaw 1 day ago||
I’m an Australian who values privacy and civil liberties more than most I meet, and that's why I think this bill is horrible, is full of unintended consequences, and will be worked around by kids who care to do it.
florkbork 1 day ago||
https://parlinfo.aph.gov.au/parlInfo/search/display/display....

Read the bill. Gov ID collection is just as much a violation as failing to take any action

hilbert42 1 day ago|||
"I’m an Australian who values privacy and civil liberties more than most I meet."

Same here. Early on, if I found a site interesting I'd often follow its links to other sites and so on down into places that the Establishment would deem unacceptable but I'd not worry too much about it.

Nowadays, I just assume authorities of all types are hovering over every mouse click I make. Not only is this horrible but it also robbs one of one's autonomy.

It won't be long before we're handing info that was once commonplace in textbooks around in secret.

fc417fc802 1 day ago|||
Aren't privacy and civil liberties fundamentally at odds with centralized government issued ID checks? How can you claim to value the former while supporting a plan to require the latter?

In the days before electronics were endemic, physically checking a photo ID didn't run afoul of that as long as the person checking didn't record the serial number. But that's no longer the world we live in.

marcus_holmes 1 day ago|||
I don't understand why you think this bill and that phenomenon (the fact that Xitter or Facebook aren't like the old days of the internet) are connected, can you explain why you think this, please?
veeti 1 day ago|||
Evidently the bar for valuing such things is set very low in Australia.
g-b-r 1 day ago|||
This is the account's first message here in two years
frollogaston 1 day ago|||
The AI-based version of this looks fine, the ID checks are odd though
theshackleford 1 day ago|||
>I think this bill is a good thing and I support it.

Uhuh.

>I’m an Australian who values privacy and civil liberties more than most I meet.

No you're not.

Nasrudith 1 day ago||
Are you sure you value privacy and civil liberties then if you fall for "Think of the Children" bollocks instead of wanting to throw politicians down wells to protect children from living in a dystopia?
eidorb 1 day ago||
Minor’s accounts must also revoke “sign out” functionality in case they see some titties.
HKH2 1 day ago||
> However, users who are not logged in should also expect “default blurring of images of online pornography and high-impact violence material detected in search results”.
SoftTalker 1 day ago||
To be fair, most of the concern is about stuff that's far more hard-core than "titties"
bn-l 1 day ago||
> Age assurance methods can include age verification systems, which use government documents or ID; age estimation systems, which typically use biometrics; and age inference systems, which use data about online activity or accounts to infer age.

Oh how convenient.

ggm 1 day ago||
Homomorphic encryption and third parties. No need for government eyes to know axiomatically which 100pts ID verified which login, nor website or search engine to know who the real person is.

Most legislation aims to create the offence of misleading, not actually stamp out 100% of offenders. Kids who get round this will make liabilities for themselves and their parents.

yakshaving_jgt 1 day ago||
As an Australian citizen, this further reinforces my position that the greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world that Australia is a laidback country full of easygoing people.

It isn’t. For as long as I can remember it’s been wildly authoritarian, and it seems Australians harbour a fetish for the rules that would make even the average German blush.

Hopefully times have changed (though I don’t think they have), but about 20 years ago, standard fare on the road was to provide essentially no driver training, and then aggressively enforce draconian traffic rules. New drivers can’t drive at night. New drivers have to abide by lower speed limits than other drivers. Police stop traffic for random breathalyser tests. “Double demerit” days…

This seems like more of the same. Forget trying to educate the population about the dangers of free access to information (which they will encounter anyway). Just go full Orwell! What could go wrong!

azov 1 day ago||
I wonder if technical complexity of implementing online age checks is about the same as implementing a robust direct democracy system - one where people can vote down bad laws instead of outsourcing those decisions wholesale to politicians they don’t even like?..
ggm 1 day ago|
I predict Lower.

Unrelated, but why I don't agree:

The systems which permit voting down stupid laws also permit voting down good laws. This is very "be careful what you wish for" and reductive to "the voter is always right even when they want stupid things" interpretation of democracy.

E.g. Swiss cantons opposing votes for women inside the last 2 decades.

azov 1 day ago|||
Well, direct democracy already exists in various forms (e.g., referendums, propositions on California ballots, etc.). Sometimes bad decisions are made, but I wouldn’t call it a total disaster. Can it be improved through technical means? How much improvement would it take for it to be better than the status quo?
_Algernon_ 1 day ago|||
They don't have to be always right, just be right more often than a representative democracy.
jauntywundrkind 1 day ago||
What an awful sad fall for us all, from such lofty heights of possibility for technology, to a seemingly endless age of both humans being exploited and mechanized by technology and governments doing only the saddest most important useless clutching of pearls fear responses that do nothing to coax the world towards better.

Apologies. I'm already pretty morose over the USA Supreme Court allowing age verification, which although claiming to target porn seems so likely to cudgel any "adult" or sexual material at all.

Until recently the Declaration of Independence of Cyberspace has held pretty true. The online world has seen various regulations but mostly it's been taxes and businesses affected, and here we see a turn where humanity is now denied access by their governments, where we are no longer allowed to connect or to share, not without flashing our government verified id. It's such a sad lowering of the world, to such absolutely loser politicians doing such bitter pathetic anti governance for such low reasons. They impinge on the fundamental dignity & respect inherent on mankind here, in these intrusions into how we may think and connect.

Links for recent Texas age verification: https://www.wired.com/story/us-supreme-court-porn-age-verifi... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44397799

aucisson_masque 1 day ago||
> Search engines will not be required to implement age assurance measures for users who are not logged in to their services, according to the new rules.

…

protocolture 1 day ago|
Stupid bipartisan authoritarian bs, so basically a normal day for the australian government.
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