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Comment by OhioMan2943 | Hacker News Reader

I'm pretty aware of how inept our government is at these policies, and their surveillance state tendencies (eg undisclosed facial recognition testing at flinder street station). But at this point i think a malicious australian government is less of a threat to the public and our way of life and emotional prosperity than social media.

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The Australian Government has been hacked repeatedly, including the time Centrelink was hacked and they didn't even know they had been infiltrated (and attempted to cover it up).

Not to mention their KYC regulations led to the Optus disaster, by forcing telecoms to store PII longer than necessary.

Your position is that everyone in Australia should have their PII exposed because parental responsibility belongs with the state, as parents shouldn't be trusted to parent. It is an absolute CERTAINTY that the ID mandate will be mismanaged and be a security catastrophe.

Don't forget Australian Parliament House was hacked as well.

But this time it'll be different, right? Your position is especially egregious because it is a global ID mandate (and it'll be totally ineffective as a 10 year old can figure out a VPN).

My point is that social media is an active threat to society that is doing vast magnitudes of harm right now, where as authoritarian creep is also a great threat, but it isn't currently eroding our self of self and the sanctity of the individual, and deliberately de-training us to be reactionary animals with no regard for emotional intimacy or others, and nosediving our quality of public discourse. I'm worried of a world where people raised on social media their entire lives that teaches them to think a certain way win their careers through what are increasingly popularity contests in the 21stc, run our institutions and have their hand on our metaphorical red buttons. I don't think our society will have the discipline or the patience or maturity to stay out of unnecessary conflicts or make decisions that are in our long term interests if we keep social media as a formative part of peoples youth.

ID's can be reissued like we saw with optus and while there's a lot of pain and misfortune from insecurity of assets etc we can reverse that, mostly. You can't reverse the childhood of an entire guinea pig generation once you find out that social media mentally broke them. Obviously, assets and security aren't a concern at my age so my perspective might be a little different.

If you have anything about a global ID mandate i'd be interested, because it definitely hasn't been publicised in the media, though that doesn't always count for much.

I have a lot of conflicting views on this, but I think overall we are better off addressing the threat from social media right now.

You might view the current generation of younger people with the notion of at least a warm childhood like your own, and regular life milestones and rite of passages behind whatever struggle they're currently facing as slightly older people. That's increasingly not the case.

ID issues are causing real and active harm, right now. The authoritarian creep has led in part to the current homeless crisis. Vulnerable people have been burnt by KYC requirements (what happens when you don't even have a birth certificate anymore?), and burnt again with the inevitable data breaches when poorly implemented (Optus), and then burnt again due to the country's financial class differences.

ID helps to lock a certain class of people out of government services. That group is generally the disenfranchised, the mentally unwell, the disabled, and the kind of people that always get screwed over. The people those services were set up to help - because helping them is actually cheaper than just letting them cause chaos and then die. Unfortunately, post-setup, that cost is ignored for brownie points with various audiences.

You can't reissue IDs for people when you cancel the only ones that they have.

You can't save a generation, when their entire childhood is spent being attacked on the street because their parents dared to create them.

/me clutches pearls but if we don’t do this, a teenage boy might see boobies on the internet

While I vehemently disagree with Australia's proposed solution to this problem, this is very reductive and handwaving away very real problems.

ASIO?

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2013-05-27/asio-blueprints-stole...

So your entire argument for supporting U16 ban is that despite knowing that:

- it will put every Australian's PII in the hands of people who have a bad track record on security - de anonymize the internet as we know it - make it easy for a foreign actor to break in (remember if there is a backdoor, it will be exploited) - increase the state's surveillance capabilities on their own citizens

All of this to do what exactly? Save democracy? Save the children? Can you prove that if we do that the outcome would be better than if we did nothing?

Do you have anything tangible in terms of proofs as to what outcome will be achieved?

My take is you don't because if you did, we would not be having this conversation.

My hope is that maybe people will stop viewing life from such a productised and artificial lens that's so far removed from the natural human experience.

Yeah, that is what I thought.

I think you are trolling and your response is just a bunch of word salad without much meaning.

You agree with the ban because you agree with the ban because you think the ban is good. There seem to be no critical analysis as to why this is good besides some supposed good intentions.

You've been making so many weirdly heated blanket assumptions about me as a person in this thread.

If you have a different opinion at least try and be civil.

you are hoping wrong then, tiktok block will only exacerbates this.

Coincidence: in portuguese tolo means fool

> Coincidence: in portuguese tolo means fool

The swipe in your response was totally unnecessary.

naivety isn’t evil but it’s highly damaging

In what world does blocking the most popular social media app directly lead to more usage of social media?

Tiktok being not from the US has differently tuned algorithms. That’s why it’s being banned. Now you have the right to be brainwashed only by US-approved algorithms. Don’t be a fool, tolo.

> undisclosed facial recognition testing at flinder street station

I hadn't heard about that particular intrusion. Got a link?

Can't find it right now but auspol has been using clearview and saying they weren't

https://www.abc.net.au/news/science/2020-04-14/clearview-ai-...

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