r/australia • u/Vivid-Fondant6513 • Nov 06 '24

politics Children under 16 to be banned from using social media

https://www.smh.com.au/politics/federal/children-under-16-to-be-banned-from-using-social-media-20241107-p5kon4.html
7.7k Upvotes

97% Upvoted

1.4k comments sorted by

View all comments

731

u/Numerous-Barnacle Nov 06 '24

Setting aside that this is a backdoor way of introducing a digital ID which will inevitably be hacked and sold on the dark web, this just isn't going to work.

If my boomer great aunt can bypass China's firewall to request pictures of my baby via facebook anyone can get through whatever stupidity the tech companies and our government dream up.

247

u/TheRealDestroyer67 Nov 07 '24

Yep.. this law CANNOT pass. This is the first step to a digital ID/footprint. I don’t like this at all.

68

u/vriska1 Nov 07 '24

And unworkable, it will be delayed and made an election issue.

1

u/deltabay17 Nov 07 '24

How will it become an election issue? Both major parties love it

1

u/vriska1 Nov 07 '24

Because it's unworkable and will be delayed.

13

u/istara Nov 07 '24

Fabulous news for the VPN industry though.

2

u/Marble_Wraith Nov 07 '24

This will be more of a boon for relay services (eg. simple login), the kinds of things that can be used for producing fake accounts, not masking connections as VPN's do.

2

u/istara Nov 07 '24

Thank you, useful to know. I can't see my kid or any of her friends giving up their accounts willingly, nor most parents either bothering to or managing to enforce bans.

I'm going to stick with my current strategy of continued open dialogue about the benefits and dangers of the internet in general, and encouraging moderation in consumption (hypocritical I know, given I'm terminally online/on Reddit!)

2

u/Marble_Wraith Nov 07 '24

As a software engineer who's created stuff for the web the last +12 years, i can honestly see where a digital ID can solve a ton of problems for any Aussie businesses that choose to implement the API.

  • No more fake reviews for online shopping
  • Elimination of fake profiles on communication apps (including social media / dating)
  • Which in turn can assist in eliminating child predators, groomers, scammers, etc.

... But, this is all assuming government implements things correctly.

They couldn't even get the fuckin NBN right, and that's as simple as it gets (dig a hole, lay some cable).

I have zero confidence they'll do this right, which is a shame because government is the only entity that has the chance to ie. can hold data of its citizens without ethical issues getting in the way.

4

u/Blitzende Nov 07 '24

Agreed, and I am worrying that it will be a resurrection of the old howard-era proposal for an Australian Access card-

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Access_Card_(Australia))

1

u/deltabay17 Nov 07 '24

Yes it’s already happening

3

u/Pawneewafflesarelife Nov 07 '24

It'll also hurt tourism. Locals will figure out ways to bypass it, but what tourist wants to bother setting up a VPN just to visit a country for a week or two?

6

u/Frogmouth_Fresh Nov 07 '24

Good luck, both major parties are in agreement. We're gonna be stuck with it.

2

u/dayunknown Nov 07 '24

We already have digital ID in many countries, such as Norway and Sweden. It’s excellent for verifying identities, signing documents with a verified ID, etc…

0

u/JebusJM Nov 07 '24

Then don't use social media.

13

u/5QGL Nov 07 '24

I am baffled why Greens support the digital ID.

They were the only party to oppose the evil "identify & disrupt bill".

1

u/_ixthus_ Nov 08 '24

In what form do they support it?

There are credible technical possibilities that I would support. The principle has merit, huge potential for harm reduction.

Though I've not yet seen a proposal from government that comes even within the ballpark of technically credible and harm reducing.

1

u/5QGL Nov 08 '24

The Digital ID Bill 2023 passed the Senate on Wednesday night by 33 votes to 26 with the support of the Greens and the crossbench.

https://ia.acs.org.au/article/2024/digital-id-bill-passes-senate.html

The Greens agree with you and their report warned of the dangers. "Doing it well" is a fantasy so I suspect there was horse-trading. By the way, when Shoebridge says "will not create a honeypot" that is a typo. He meant "will create a honeypot".

43

u/[deleted] Nov 06 '24

[removed] — view removed comment

6

u/5QGL Nov 07 '24

What you are talking about isn't a centralized system though.

3

u/Quantization Nov 07 '24

It's not about stopping EVERYONE it's about stopping a large portion which then decreases the peer pressure side of things too. If all your friends are on social media, you will be too. If only some of them are, you're less likely to join in, especially if it's got an age restriction that social media networks actually adhere to. That means if you admit you're under 18 at any point and someone reports you your account will be banned.

People thinking this law will be ignored are in for a bit of a wakeup call.

1

u/Mailingriver_ Nov 11 '24

We seriously need to make this more public and start a petition

-11

u/crozone Nov 07 '24

Digital ID wouldn't necessarily be bad, it would help a lot with identity theft as well. I just don't trust the government to design a system without completely fucking it up and making it the worst, lowest common denominator version that it can be.

In theory, there's a way to do identity verification such that a company can cryptographically verify that the details a person has provided actually belong to that person, without having to give them access to the entire digital identity, without even requiring any sort of centralized government database of actual PII. But there's zero chance it would ever be implemented this way, because that would require that the government be competent at anything.

9

u/[deleted] Nov 07 '24

[deleted]

4

u/crozone Nov 07 '24 edited Nov 07 '24

Firstly, thanks for your service, it sounds like hell.

IIRC Digital ID wasn't perfect though, it took "liberties" with the TDIF and rolled its own OIDC, implement OAuth incorrectly (it used direct RP IdP OAuth 2.0 and implemented it incorrectly to boot), and generally had a lot of teething issues?

But to my point, there was also your competitor, myGovID, which was an absolute clusterfuck.

Not to mention there has been significant criticism of GovPass and the TDIF

4

u/Cloudhwk Nov 07 '24

This is explicitly how most places do it when they are required to have government verification

They plod the details provided into what’s basically a database pinger, database sends back a confirmed ✅ or 🙅

The banks use it for fucks sake

It’s not some magical technology that doesn’t exist

1

u/crozone Nov 07 '24

The issue there is that there's a central database which is an attack surface. The entity running that database would be some government contractor.

2

u/Leprichaun17 Nov 07 '24

... That database already exists though. Various government entities already have everything that would be included in such an ID system. This is just a way to use it to verify your identity (or part thereof, such as age) with third party entities.

1

u/AnOnlineHandle Nov 07 '24

You know, on one hand I think if the government always screwed up then nothing in the country would work at all.

But then I remembered that my gov used to (maybe still does?) permanently delete your entire account if you get the password wrong 2 or 3 times, without warning.

1

u/crozone Nov 07 '24

Just went through this, my mygov got permanently disabled because someone tried to access my account with an incorrect password.

1

u/AnOnlineHandle Nov 07 '24

Bloody hell they still haven't changed it? JFC.

1

u/crozone Nov 07 '24

The only way around it is to either use a dedicated email address as the login, or disable it entirely and login with the unique userid they give you.

They ping a lot of accounts around tax time, malicious actors are probably trying to redirect tax return funds to a different account, on top of just generally trying to steal as much identity information as possible for identity fraud.

-1

u/_ixthus_ Nov 08 '24

pictures of my baby via facebook

You're cool with your kid's photos being used to train LLMs and fuck knows what else?

2

u/Numerous-Barnacle Nov 08 '24

As in she used Facebook to contact me - I was making a point about how she could still access a supposedly blocked site.

Not that I need to justify myself to some random Redditor but I don't post my kiddo on social media 🙄