Identity Theft in a KIDS World — Everett Dutton's Blog
Everett Dutton's Blog<br>Consulting
They’ve got your driver’s license on record, remember? Can you prove it wasn’t you who made that post? Where were your thumbs on April 14th at 2:04am?
CREEPS
I believe you can both hate the game and the player, but in this case, I almost can’t hate the players because they played so well. I really do have to commend the craftiness of both the lobbyists and the politicians and intelligence state actors who put this together. Let me explain.
The KIDS act does not require apps and platforms to scan your driver’s license or your face, but they’re going to have to do this if they don’t want to get their pants sued off. The new standard is that the platforms “knew or should have known” that someone who used their platform was a child or a teenager. That is an insanely low bar, so platforms are going to have to get IDs and face scans uploaded to prove someone is an adult, and then assume anyone who isn’t a “verified adult” is a kid and gate them out of their website.
Before we get any further, shout-out to Senators Ron Wyden (D), Rand Paul (R), and Mike Lee (R) for voting against the Senate version of this, and shout-out to most of the Democrats for not voting for this in the House. Also, come on Massie (R, on his way out after extensive lobbying). Be brave and don’t abstain … I can’t figure out yet why 93/100 Senators (bipartisanship, yay!) voted for this in the Senate, but the Democrats in the House opposed this (so this was passed in the house almost exclusively by Republicans, or Democrats in tough races coming up). There were differences between the two versions, but broadly speaking they still required an internet where platforms and apps need to scan government IDs (the bills do not say this, but it’s the only way to comply with the law).
By the way, for the rest of this post, I’m going to refer to the KIDS act as the CREEPS act: Congress Really Enjoys Enabling Pervs and Spies.
It’s all money either way
Many big tech companies, such as Facebook, Google, Snapchat, TikTok, Twitter, Roblox, Epic, OpenAI, or Anthropic (all either social media sites, or entrypoints to information, or games), have come under fire in one way or another for enabling shitty behavior towards kids (e.g. bullying eachother) and/or directly harming kids (e.g. loot box gambling addiction, encouraging suicide, general dopamine addiction, etc.). As any good big company does, the first thing you want to do is get the liability off of you. No one wants to pay a big law suit. This is very different from not wanting to do the underlying activity because it is immoral, by the way. Morals got nothin’ to do with it. For-profit companies are legally obligated to act in the best interest of the shareholders. Let’s go through their options.
When deciding whether or not to do something immoral, the company (which is controlled by people who make money when the company makes money) must consider the following outcomes:
The Company Needs to Pay a Fine<br>Someone Else Needs to Pay a Fine
The Company Increases Revenue<br>Could go well, could go really poorly, depending on the ratio of revenues to fines.<br>Literally perfection. Do this all day long.
The Company Does Not Increase Revenue<br>Absolutely not. You’re fired. Horrible idea.<br>Probably a bad idea, unless you can do damage to a competitor with the fines.
The CREEPS act is interesting because either outcome lands squarely in the “The Company Increases Revenue” row of the above table. If the act does not pass, Big Tech can continue getting kids addicted to gambling, shitty dopamine-draining content, extreme porn, eating disorders, and all of the other things they do in the pursuit of more engagement, consumption, and the forming of minds of future adults (read: future consumers and voters). If the act does pass, the companies can now perfectly track every adult, who you are, your interests, your worries, your political leanings, your friends, family, location, and more because your government ID is tied to your accounts.
Pervs and spies: the danger
Pervs and spies. What? Yes, that is who benefits the most from this. Well, the Big Tech companies will continue to make insane profits regardless - my proof for that statement is: they’ve BEEN making insane profits for years, and Meta (Facebook, Instagram) wouldn’t have lobbied so hard for this sort of law if they thought it would cause them to lose money. Thus it’s good either way. But for pervs (people who want to flirt with kids, perhaps traffic them, share or request sexual material, etc.), this is literally shooting fish in a barrel. Because the internet will be bifurcated into “kids spaces” and “adults spaces”, guess what your local perv will do? Not verify their identity! Thus, the...