Hello,
I'm Mervi Eskelinen!
An artist, nerd and sorcerer, dedicated to make world softer and better for everyone, and to get you to make more art. Make art, change the world!
Control, not protection
Social media has been around for a short life time. Internet much longer. The attempts at control started early on, and they never really worked.
In early 2000s there were attempts to protect children from the scares of Internet by automatically blocking access to certain websites. Some of the results were rather hilarious: I remember rumours of the websites of munincipality of Pornainen here in Finland getting caught in parental controls due to the name of the place. Nasty!
All spam and scam filtering tends to create false positives. They don't really work, since eventually the spammers and scammers always get around them. This same applies to age verifications. The regular people will be blocked from accessing apps and websites, and become exposed to more scams. Meanwhile the actual bad guys will keep doing harm.
This current rise of banning underage people from using social media and applying age verification is another wave of attempt at control. It doesn't really protect anyone and only creates more problems.
Recently Discord announced new teen safety features, including starting to use a face scan based age verification system. Safety researchers then did some checks on Persona, the age verification system in question, and found some great concerns (to put it mildly). Not only the system turned out to be making significant mistakes in age verification it also can check stuff like your financial data. It also exposes more of your data to potential hacking.
These measures aren't applied to really make things better for anyone. Just like taking off your shoes at airports isn't that much about stopping those who really want to cause harm, but to make it seem something is done. All smoke and mirrors.
It's not about your safety, it's about controlling you.
This is a reader supported blog without paywalls and advertisement. If you appreciate my work and want to help me rewild the internet, please consider becoming a free or paid patron today. I can't do this without the support of readers like you. So if you can to contribute financially, I would really appreciate your help.
