Down Goes Another

Adding onto the dog pile, the United Kingdom has just announced today that they will be banning all social media platforms for those who are under 16 years of age. This comes after many other countries, such as Australia and France, came up with that same idea. There are problems with this, though, and that's what we will get into.

What social media platforms will be banned?

Coming from the UK government themselves, they "plan to use the same model for a social media ban as Australia. Their model included platforms like Instagram, YouTube, TikTok, Snapchat, Facebook and X." Interestingly enough, they did claim that they will not be banning chat platforms such as WhatsApp and Signal. The big idea for these laws is that children are unsafe talking to strangers, but these two apps allow you to do exactly that while even having the added benefit of End To End Encryption (E2EE). It's rather confusing, in my opinion, because this just gives a direct avenue to do the exact same thing as they were doing before.

Why is this a problem for privacy?

I love making these questions. You already know if you've been online in the past two years. Peq42 states on their blog that companies such as Roblox, DoorDash, Discord, and many others are using services that detect the biometric data of their customers to estimate their age. This is used to grant their customers access to certain parts of their service that lower ages aren't supposed to have access to according to their governments. The problem with this is that you're giving them your face. When submitting this information to these companies, you're not just giving them your biometric data; you're also giving them the username that you signed up with, your IP address giving them your coarse location, the cookies you currently hold onto, and other identifiers that can be used to track you. With all of this, companies can know exactly who you are and what you're doing on the internet at any time of the day. Companies such as Persona, one of the largest companies selling facial recognition, is backed by Peter Thiel, the chairman of Palantir. Alex Karp, Palantir's co-founder and CEO, is famously quoted by the Financial Times saying he "love[s] the idea of getting a drone and having light fentanyl-laced urine spraying on analysts that tried to screw us." Newsflash, he's not a great guy. As far as I know, we would rather not have bad guys know exactly who we are, what we do, how we think, and who we talk to.