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The Internet and the courts: One step forward, one step back
Two recent US decisions just happened related to the Internet, one I think is good and the other, not so much.
First up, we have Cox v. Sony, decided by SCOTUS. Sony sued Cox (an ISP) for alleged contributory copyright infringement merely for providing Internet services to people who infringed their copyrights. The jury found in favor of Sony, and ruled that Cox had in fact contributed to copyright infringement just by providing Internet access. If not overturned, this would have been a troubling precedent to set since the liability for copyright infringement would have expanded massively, forcing ISPs to clamp down even more on their users, potentially leading to (even more) mass surveillance.
Thankfully, SCOTUS reversed the lower courts and found in favor of Cox, ruling that a service provider is only liable for contributory copyright infringement if the service induced or was specifically tailored for such infringement. Since Cox did not do either in any way, it is not liable.
Second, a Los Angeles jury found Meta and Youtube liable for the plaintiff's social media addiction that developed during her childhood. Her lawyers said that design features like infinite feeds, autoplay, and notifications were a substantial factor in causing her harm, while the defendants pointed to her turbulent home life and that none of her therapists identified social media as the cause of her mental health. And I also would sooner find her parents more responsible for letting her be on screens all day than the social media platforms themselves.
Regardless, a decision like this one is sure to accelerate the trend of requiring "age verification" (doxing yourself) to use anything on the Internet. The laws and courts are increasingly taking the position that the optimal number of minors on the Internet is zero. After all, everyone keeps getting sued for having underage users, but no one's getting sued for the inevitable data breaches that will happen when there's databases of people's dox floating around. If you don't want to lose tons of money in lawsuits, forcing people to dox themselves seems like the safer bet.
California has introduced age verification for all operating systems, and yes, this includes all Linux distributions, and yes, some of them are actually going to implement it. Brazil has also passed an age verification law. Apple has already implemented age verification, at least in the UK. I'm not aware of a jurisdiction that has taken a clear and unambiguous stance that doxing yourself to use the Internet is a horribly massive invasion of privacy, only jurisdictions that haven't taken a pro-doxing stance yet. Sure, some age verification laws, like Louisiana's, will get struck down for being unconstitutional, but like gun control laws, these cases will take months to work their way through the courts, and they will probably slightly tweak their laws to be juuuust different enough that any cases challenging it will have to start from scratch every single time.
It used to be that society expected parents to watch their children and monitor their Internet usage. But by and large, parents seem to have abdicated that responsibility, and as a consequence, the responsibility has shifted to the government, who have shifted it to Internet platforms, who have now shifted it to the entire rest of society, diminishing everyone's freedom in the name of protecting children. I think the biggest and cruelest irony is that, like gun control, none of this effort will do anything to actually protect children.
This is a position that if you told me I would've adopted 15 years ago, I'd have called you crazy. But I've increasingly come over to that side of the aisle.
Growing up in a family that always worked closely in infosec, I was always much closer than the average person to understanding the ways in which your life can be negatively impacted by tech. Over the years I've become much more taken up with the thinking of people like Michael Bazzell and some of his prescriptions for minimizing your digital footprint. I was never one of those privacy absolutist types, but I've never bought in completely to the appeal of things like social media. People I know 'always' send me Instagram feeds, YouTube videos and all the digital eye candy horseshit all the time. "Hey cousin, watch this!," "Hey dude, check this out...," "Hey man, look here and tell me what you think...;" and I always skip right over it and never view it. I don't like this kind of social voyeurism into everyone else's lives, it always seemed to play to people's vanity and negative impulses and empowered creeps to invade the cracks in the lives of others to fill their own selfish exploits.
I think you can agree that people overshare on the Internet while also being against the mass surveillance necessary to ensure the number of minors on the Internet is zero.
Part of the problem is that "massive amount that people overshare," people are trained into thinking is "normal."
Exactly. It's like the, "hey wiretap, can you give me a recipe for pancakes?" meme or, more spicily, Eric Cartman walking around bitching about the surveillance state whilst taking all of his calls on speakerphone.
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