The UK Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) has fined Reddit £14.47 million (over $19.5 million) for collecting and using the personal information of children under 13 without adequate safeguards.

  • schnurrito
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    2 days ago

    data protection law as an excuse to require age verification, have we had that before anywhere?

    • hector@lemmy.today
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      2 days ago

      Shit. We are being tooled to support them identifying every person and connecting it to everthing said or done, and most of us will say good, a fine for reddit, even though this is in service of basically doxxing all of us, not just to reddit themselves, but to the government by extension, the US will get it, russians, israelis, a host of others, criminal groups, hackers, oligarchs and their security contractors, Peter Thiel and is ilk. They will all get this information.

      It’s the most unsafe thing possible for kids, all kids, to give the malign forces everything they say and do online, not the least with the computer tools that exist now, creating social scores to be secretly used against us, to determine what jobs we can get, if we get that loan, police treatment, court treatment, business treatment, prices we are charged online and in store on digital price tags connected to facial recognition cameras, down to what results search engines will show us.

      We need to organize and defeat these bad faith attempts to surrender our populations to technofascists, and that’s what they are, often dressed up as in here as fighting tech to protect kids.

      We won’t know any better collectively unless we organize and act collectively, and that organization is sorely needed in other areas, we need new social media on this fediverse to do that, with controls to make sure government doesn’t bugger it like it’s buggering reddit right now.

      • schnurrito
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        2 days ago

        A central principle of data protection is data minimization. Forcing any institution to store extra data in order to know whether a user is old enough to consent to data processing is beyond absurd.

        • hector@lemmy.today
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          It is such a transparent attempt to submit us to an all encompassing surveillance by new spying tools, at least to those of us in reality. The argument that it is to protect children probably gets a good laugh when they are having a drink talking about playing the sheep.

          They’ve been using that argument in europe for like decades too. I remember those arguments to argue for more surveillance in the 00’s. Now the technology allows them to do a lot worse with it though, and the population and governments are dumb and corrupted and cynical enough to surrender freedom to technofascists as long as they cut them in on the information and give them some control in doing so, in the case of the government.

          Citizens are just dumber, more misguided somehow, I seriously think there is some pollutant that is systematically affecting our judgement, fear, and trust, and inhibiting it. Because past generations wouldn’t have stood for any of this, and they didn’t.

          • Fluffy Kitty Cat@slrpnk.net
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            1 day ago

            The problem is that our governments aren’t Democratic. Who am I supposed to vote for to stop this? It’s bipartisan. Wealth inequality has gotten so.bad we no longer have any real control over our lives