California Governor signs child privacy law requiring online age checks California Governor Gavin Newsom on Thursday signed AB 2273, legislation designed to protect children's online privacy by demanding information from everyone. The California Age-Appropriate Design Code Act (AB 2273) was modeled after the UK's age-appropriate design code. Approved last month by the State Senate, and previously …
But I don't want to prove that I'm not a child. One of my Google identities shows me as being 15 years old. There are a lot of protections I have being underage. Also not receiving solicitations for all sorts of things for which I am not legally capable of entering into a contract for.
To prove you aren't a child you have to prove your identity.
to prove your identity you have to identify yourself.
If you are required to identify yourself you lose your anonymity.
Anonymous Speech is Free Speech.
There is a constitutional Right to Free Speech in USA.
Hence such age checks are Unconstitutional.
The only way to prove you aren't a child is to prove you are an adult.
With all due respect, from what I see how a large chunk of the population is behaving I'd say a lot of their adults would find that a challenge, including their former, twice impeached orange president.
"Just for my education - is it ever allowed to change the US constitution so that it does good things for citizens or did the founding fathers insert a clause somewhere that means things can only ever get worse?"
Yes, the Constitution can be changed, and it has been many times. No, there is no such clause.
However, "Good things" and "worse" are subjective.
Here's a link to the Wiki article on the subject. Make up your own mind.
However, "Good things" and "worse" are subjective.
True, though I'd have serious concerns about anyone who wanted to argue against the Bill of Rights (OK, so the 2nd is controversial), the 13th, 14th, 15th, 19th, or 24th. The others are more (reasonably) debatable.
That said, I'm curious how OP's question is relevant to a story about a California law.
> That said, I'm curious how OP's question is relevant to a story about a California law.
It is relevant because of all the comments that this law goes against the Constitution, and similar discussions about other US State laws.
If you have two things that are in conflict, to completely understand how that conflict can be settled you need to know how *either* side could be changed, if at all. With an indication of how easy it is: the US Constitution could be changed, it just doesn't happen often. So it appears to be that a good way to attack any old State law is to convince enough (or just the right set of) people that "it is unconstitutional" 'cos this one probably won't be the one to trigger a new Amendment.
To give a full answer to a Confused Brit, it would probably be good to expand your response from the trivial (amendments happen) to the more applicable "interpretations shift": that is, the practical effects of changing your minds about what the Constitution actually means instead of just changing the actual wording to make it clear what it means in today's terms!
Of course, all of the above is just from the pov of yet another Confused Brit who - obviously - isn't steeped day to day in the US Constitution and all the ways it is used in US politics, as I'm just trying to answer your question "how OP's question is relevant to a story about a California law?". So any misconceptions you find here just indicate where it would be useful for you to expand upon your answer to help our understanding.
"Just for my education - is it ever allowed to change the US constitution"
Yes, the US Constitution can be changed and it was anticipated that it would be as times change. The Constitution itself was the low hanging fruit and agreed upon straight off. The "Bill of Rights" is the first set of additions and there have been a bunch of amendments both good and bad since. For example, an amendment banning alcohol didn't do so well and was repealed through another amendment. The process was made rather hard so it wouldn't be used without lots of thought, debate and broad agreement.
It doesn't read like consumer restrictions to me. Websites aren't required to register you in order for you to see certain content; they need to make sure you are an adult in order to track you. I'm not getting the downside for consumers. It does restrict website operators...from doing things that most of us would like to see stopped.
"As a father of four, I'm familiar with the real issues our children are experiencing online"
Why are you allowing your children to view the unwashed underbelly of Civilization without Adult Supervision, Gavin? Do you let 'em wander around in South Sac or The Tenderloin without an escort, too? Sounds like you might be an unfit parent ... And trust me, your kids will find a way around the nanny-state blocks. They always do. Hell, YOU did! Do you really think your kids are stupider than you were at that age?
Expect this to be stopped by a judge before O-beerthirty this time tomorrow.
Major, major privacy issues. Probably unconstitutional.
Step 1. Make a hi-res photo of Dad's driving license, both sides (he has to sleep some time).
Step 2. Take an analog photo of Dad's face. (These are much-higher res than most digicam outputs.)
Step 3. Print Dad's face at 1:1 scale onto matte photo paper and develop it.
Step 4. "Sign up" using the copied credentials. Hold the photo of Dad's face up to the webcam when needed.
Step 5. View pr0n!
criminals in prison have nothing but time and come up with ways to escape and to milk the system.
Children who are TREATED like prisoners (in a way) should be expected to act the SAME WAY towards any kind of unreasonable "authority". They will use their creativity to "circumvent" because it is FUN.
I mean seriously, if it's just about online pr0n, it'd be like your average [pre-]teenage boy getting access to Dad's Playboy magazines.
Governor "Nuisance" and other hyper-control-freak evil manipulative "for the children" politicians should just go away, and leave the PARENTING up to the PARENTS.
"Step 4. "Sign up" using the copied credentials. Hold the photo of Dad's face up to the webcam when needed.
"
My laptop has a camera with a piece of tape across it, but my desktops don't have any camera or microphone at all. My phone has a piece of cello tape on the screen side camera so it will still work as a light sensor and for making pRon with that vasolined lens look.
@jake I think you are missing the real intent behind "As a father of four, I'm familiar with the real issues our children are experiencing online", which is votes.
It's a great soundbite, it connects across party lines, showing him to be a family man sharing the same concerns as everyone else. Sure to be a good little vote catcher when election time come around.
I read that soundbite as this.
"As a politician, I'm willing to exploit my four children for votes"
It's a trust thing. Did you ever find a men's mag in a hedgerow? What did you do with it? Or did your mate have one hidden in a barn/outbuilding? Etc. The point being it's not really an issue, kids have been running across "adult" stuff since time immemorial, and nothing is going to stop it. A smart parent acknowledges this fact and does his/her best to establish a trusting, communicative relationship with their kid(s) that'll last into, through and past puberty.
If you try to ignore it, it will not go away. If you try to sweep it under the rug, the natural curiosity of the child will have that rug pulled up faster than you can blink. Dangerous, forbidden fruit is always the sweetest. Make it normal and unimportant, and said kid will usually become bored with the very concept quite quickly. Basic animal training, innit.
Were you not a child once? Shirley you must already know all this.
My Dad caught me reading Marx (Karl, not Groucho) when I was about 12. Instead of getting grumpy about it (this was the peak of the cold war era, people were touchy about such things), he recommended that I get a translation of Mein Kampf, Lenin's works and the newly published English translation of Quotations of Chairman Mao (if they had a copy) next time I was at the Stanford Library. So I did. And discovered these "dangerous" writings were boring, incredibly daft, quite silly in places, and certainly not worth banning. That phase went away in a week or two.
Later, I found a scanned copy of The Anarchist's Cookbook squirreled away on a Berkeley FTP site. I printed it out, and Dad and I had great fun finding all the flaws in it ...
Rules and regulations aren’t there for the good and perfect. If no one broke the speed limit then we wouldn’t need limits and enforcement. As it is there are lots of people who don’t give a toss for the safety of other people on the road or/and overestimate their abilities, so we need speed limits and enforcement and the limits need to be based on the abilities and judgement of the poorest, oldest drivers, not the best. There are lots of vulnerable people out there - parents and kids - and a decent society would look to protect them first and foremost instead of believing that the alleged rights of the privileged are more important.
The fact that you consider having to identify yourself as a "punishment" speaks volumes about your sense of entitlement. I sincerely hope that you and yours never find yourself on the receiving end of the nastiness that your approach to society and community engenders for people who haven't been as lucky as you.
Go through the post you replied to. Which of those things would you want to restrict? Marx? Mao? Maybe the recipes for explosives? Which things do you want removed because there are imperfect people you want to protect from them? The logical one is the explosives, except anyone sufficiently motivated will be taught in chemistry class how explosions start and can figure out the rest from there. The complex part of bombs isn't the boom part.
The points mentioned are suggestions on how you can handle those things if you want to. You can also do nothing. If you want something banned or restricted, you'll have to explain why it's dangerous enough that the restrictions have to apply to everyone, and that's often a high bar. The world's full of dangerous things that you're allowed to do, and we don't restrict them all on the basis that someone may choose to put themselves into danger. A large part of parenting is explaining to children that things are dangerous and how to avoid them or obtain goals more safely.
"Simple. The kid(s) are not banned from accessing anything they want to access. However, I am the owner/operator of the ISP. I have access to the logs, and they know it."
A friend of mine did the same thing but had a daughter that was getting better and better at circumventing his efforts. I remember one time when he had to get all of his laughing done before scolding her when was was banned from going online as a punishment and did a really elegant hack. He was no dummy and owned a software business that he operated from a building on his property. On one hand, he was very proud of his daughter's skills, but on the other........ He was tired of getting schooled, but she did have a lot more time than he did to work on it.
Which is to say this is another bit of election year grandstanding, carefully timed to play to the mid-term news cycle, and delayed to take effect until after the next presidential election, which Newsom hopes to run in. So he is buying support from the likes of Google and Facebook by giving them some "think of the children" cover for forcing every user submit real ID info or be barred from access to most services.
This is terrible at almost every level, won't fix most of the core issues(Kids parent sign them up for the stuff they dont fake on their own. And every "age verification service" that has ever operated in the us has been a total scam. Sadly, I expect that big fish will fight to keep the worst parts of it alive even if it's gutted in the courts. We still have the patriot act, SOSTA, etc. etc. etc.
It matters more that they do not serve California citizens in order to avoid compliance. So their developers will implement GeoIP libraries. Then it will be realised that Californians could use VPN to jump the GeoIP fence. Or they could travel and actually be at an address outside California but still require the protectioin of the law. Then to comply/avoid penalties, citizenship and age will have to be verified for all.
There are so many ways to backfire.
The solution has been presented. Do not slurp data from anybody without consent and then they have to prove they can legally give consent. aka Opt-in
"So their developers will implement GeoIP libraries. Then it will be realised that Californians could use VPN to jump the GeoIP fence. Or they could travel and actually be at an address outside California but still require the protectioin of the law."
That sort of situation has already applied with respect to GDPR since it came into force in May 2018.
Anyone using GeoIP determination to decide whether someone is inside or outside the EU to decide whether to harvest their personal data is still at risk of breaking the GDPR - the GDPR doesn't say it applies only to anyone you *think* is in the EU, it applies to anyone "in the Union".
The same applies to determining inside/outside EU from IP address blocks - a EU-based ISP could have recently bought a IPv4 from another non-EU-based company to use for their service where the WHOIS records haven't yet been updated to show it's now used within the EU.
Unfortunately I'm not aware of any GDPR complaint having being raised to date regarding such GeoIP or IP address block location misidentifications.
Yeah, but that may be hard to do. I would think MS, Amazon, and many of the major multi-sited hosting/cloud providers have datacenters in California, so would have to kowtow to this crap law in some way. Hopefully some Very Bright People will speak up soon and show California, via the Federal courts, how they've overstepped their authority in a major way.
Lets see who is the lead name on AB 2273. Why its our old friend Buffy Wicks. Who never saw a union / left-wing loony PAC she did not like. She's their woman in the Assembly. Quite a busy little "fund raiser" she is.
For those unfamiliar with how politics works in Sacramento this bill was paid for by lobbyists. Now 3/4'ths of the Bills introduced have serious lobby money behind them, the rest are the usual rag tag of ill thought out verbiage. But a quick look at the wording of the bill tells me that it was delivered pretty much in that final form by an outside drafting team. Bills drafted by those who actually know what they are doing read very differently. Even a casual glance shows evidence that the drafters of the Bill are not familiar with the state constitutional gotcha in Bills like these. So unlikely to survive its first challenge in court very long. Given the drafting process and the first rate Assembly support staff available to help the people who drafted the Bill dont care its basically DOA. Or did not know and were never told. It was passed to make a "statement".
Now if you were a really good lobbyist for the "social-media" Evil Corps this is exactly the sort of bill you would want passed precisely because it will be eviscerated in the courts. A great way to poison the well for any future genuine attempts at state regulation. But the only time those guys go anywhere near Sacramento is on their way to ski at Tahoe. Much nicer, and much more lucrative, to lobby in DC.
So just another junk Bill passed to as a payoff to deep pocket left-wing loony PAC lobbyists. In other words, business as usual.
Welcome to Sacramento...
This is the product of a British nutcase, Beeban Tania Kidron, Baroness Kidron, OBE.
According to Wikipedia:
<Self-Serving-Drivel>
Kidron is the Founder and Chair of 5Rights Foundation, an organisation she established in 2013 to promote the rights of children online. At the launch she described it as a civil society initiative that aims to make the digital world a more transparent and empowering place for children and young people. 5Rights signatories include Unicef, the NSPCC and Barclays bank. Starting out as the iRights campaign, in 2018 it was formally registered as a charity formally constituted as The 5Rights Foundation.
5 Rights Foundation states that its mission is to build the digital world children and young people deserve. It develops policy, regulation and innovative approaches to digital issues on behalf of children and young people, working with an interdisciplinary network of experts. 5Rights has pioneered a range of international policies and programmes, such as; developing Child Online Protection Policy for the Government of Rwanda;[30] contributing to the creation of a General Comment (codicil) on the digital world, to the Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC); and working in partnership with IEEE Standards to create Universal Standards for Children and for Digital Services and Products.
</Self-Serving-Drivel>
So there you have it: it's for the chilluns, and if you disagree with their Good Works, you're probably a pedophile and should turn yoursself in to the police immediately.
Conspicuous by its absence in the bill Gav signed is anything to protect people who aren't chilluns.
he Age-Appropriate Design Code (AADC) Act forbids online service providers that offer service to children from using the personal information of children in a way that's detrimental, from gathering, selling, or storing a child's geo-location, from profiling by default, and from soliciting children to provide their information. It also requires privacy policies and related terms be accessible and enforced.
Well! As a grown-ass man, I want protection from all that stuff, too! Perhaps I need to have an online persona as a California-residing child, so I, too, can be spared from all that shit.
Of course, I'll need to maintain an "adult" persona also, so I can have access to El Reg, and pr0n...
I already don't use sites that demand information like this, so it may just expand the number of sites I don't use. There's no such thing as a site I can live without. Earlier this year a message board I used for close to 30 years failed when the site admins decided to brick the server with an "upgrade" and I don't even remember the site's web address anymore. If I can go without a site that I visited over 10,000 times without missing it, I can certainly go without one I never visited before.
This sort of thing isn't the responsibility of any government. It's the job of parents to oversee what their kids are getting up to and to put safeguards in place. I do see that many parents accept no responsibility in the upbringing of their kids and just hand them an unlimited mobile or put a computer in their room with an unmonitored internet connection. It's a problem, but it's not a government problem.
> This sort of thing isn't the responsibility of any government
So just to be clear to those of us who are confused by all this, just which part of the following is the bit you object to?
"The Age-Appropriate Design Code (AADC) Act forbids online service providers that offer service to children from using the personal information of children in a way that's detrimental, from gathering, selling, or storing a child's geo-location, from profiling by default, and from soliciting children to provide their information. It also requires privacy policies and related terms be accessible and enforced."
"So just to be clear to those of us who are confused by all this, just which part of the following is the bit you object to?"
I agree to the sentiment. The welfare of children does need looking after. It's the implementation that will be the problem. How do they turn the lovely concept into practice while at the same time not wind up surveilling all of the adults in the state unconstitutionally? That mechanism should have been worked out first rather than the wording of the proposed law.
This is the same as the US FAA passing a regulation that requires drones to report their position when flying in real time by sometime in 2023 yet having no idea how it will be done. Until that's worked out, manufacturers can't build the functionality in, the new models can't be tested and a whole bunch of older drones will essentially be landfill.
Yes, of course, why bother fighting anything, far too tiring.
But there is no need to get the government involved, they'll only farm the ID system out to a commercial contractor. You can save on tax spending by just going straight to the real source of global IDs: simply change your forum name to your Facebook ID.
"But there is no need to get the government involved,"
True. There's no sense bringing the government in. Remember, the government can send the jackboots with guns to shoot your dog and drag you to the gulag. Amazon, Microsoft, Facebook, Google, etc, can't do that (yet). The less the government knows, the better we all are.
How will this site make the determination that I am not 17 yrs 11months and 28 days old and not the so more adult 18yrs, 0 months and 1 day? Content on this site is pointed toward those that have suffered a few slings and arrows of time and might even be mature. Some interesting innuendos have been made here so is this site going make me prove that I once worked with Fortran, that I'm located in Taxiforna, or that I take a cynical look at government procrustean help.
The State can go and create a universal telephone number to be assigned at birth and tattooed on the inside upper lip of the neonatal. For those reading this it will be your current smart phone number and for the remainder during the mandatory vaccination check the tattoo will be affixed. With this number any stray found can easily be identified and returned to the proper location. THINK! No more lost children - paradise . The numbers will then stored by Dept of Public Health guarded by minimum wage clerk-typist. At point you should start hearing the sound of Schiller as interpreted by Beethoven and to improve the child's security let us add a biometric, retina, footprint, bite marks plus a time-location analysis to catch multiple log ins.
What about sites that have Benny Hill or the Pythons? Both have raised the ire of the humorless or the targeted. I know we'll be safe knowing that our learning is properly digested before the spoon feeding.
"The State can go and create a universal telephone number to be assigned at birth and tattooed on the inside upper lip of the neonatal."
I expect it will be more like a QR code and it will be tattoo'd on one or more defined places of the body while there will be a legal requirement that all clothing have a cut-out or transparent window so the code(s) is visible at all times. You'll know the VIP's and elected officials by the fact their clothes don't have those windows in them.
The only way this can work is if you have a third-party age verification of some form (it would be too much work for every web site to do it individually).
So expect Google and FB to demand identity verification and see lots more "sign in with google/FB/etc" log in pages, and the mountain of data slurping that will come with it.
Sounds like a lot of websites will be off my browsing list shortly...
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