First things first: Meta is a terrible company that has spent years making terrible decisions and being terrible at explaining the challenges of social media trust & safety, all while prioritiz…
So, for the “it’s the parents fault” bit I’ll say this. Parents are the arbiters of Internet access in their homes. If that van with “Free Candy” written on it pulled into their driveway and they didn’t call the police or warn their children not to get in the van, yes I would consider them liable.
The fact is, lots of parents do know their children are using social media like Facebook, Instagram, Tik Tok etc. A lot of parents are my age and younger (the age where we grew up with the internet and social media in its toddler years if not it’s infancy). A lot of us do know the dangers (and are probably addicted ourselves).
What some of us may lack is the knowledge to use parental controls effectively (and at least some of that is because we do dumb shit like using the same password for everything, or not changing default passwords).
But I also think that some of us (looking at you collective shout and other organizations like it) just want to offload our responsibilities onto these companies so we have someone to blame.
And even though I agree that what these companies are doing is wrong (directly targeting minors, deliberately making their platforms addictive, collecting data on minors etc), and I want them held accountable, I also don’t think ID collection is warranted, and I view this as a way to violate privacy and collect data for surveillance purposes which I believe is wrong to do to people who haven’t done anything illegal.
Even if that weren’t the case, these companies also just cannot be trusted to safeguard the PII data they’re wanting to collect. So as far as I’m concerned the ID verification thing is just not going to work.
So, for the “it’s the parents fault” bit I’ll say this. Parents are the arbiters of Internet access in their homes. If that van with “Free Candy” written on it pulled into their driveway and they didn’t call the police or warn their children not to get in the van, yes I would consider them liable.
The fact is, lots of parents do know their children are using social media like Facebook, Instagram, Tik Tok etc. A lot of parents are my age and younger (the age where we grew up with the internet and social media in its toddler years if not it’s infancy). A lot of us do know the dangers (and are probably addicted ourselves).
What some of us may lack is the knowledge to use parental controls effectively (and at least some of that is because we do dumb shit like using the same password for everything, or not changing default passwords).
But I also think that some of us (looking at you collective shout and other organizations like it) just want to offload our responsibilities onto these companies so we have someone to blame.
And even though I agree that what these companies are doing is wrong (directly targeting minors, deliberately making their platforms addictive, collecting data on minors etc), and I want them held accountable, I also don’t think ID collection is warranted, and I view this as a way to violate privacy and collect data for surveillance purposes which I believe is wrong to do to people who haven’t done anything illegal.
Even if that weren’t the case, these companies also just cannot be trusted to safeguard the PII data they’re wanting to collect. So as far as I’m concerned the ID verification thing is just not going to work.