For scenario one, they totally need to delete the data used for age verification after they collect it according to the law (unless another law says they have to keep it) and you can trust every company to follow the law.
For scenario two, that's where the age verification requirements of the law come in.
No, no, no, it's super secure you see, they have this in the law too:
Information collected for the purpose of determining a covered user's age under paragraph (a) of subdivision one of this section shall not be used for any purpose other than age determination and shall be deleted immediately after an attempt to determine a covered user's age, except where necessary for compliance with any applicable provisions of New York state or federal law or regulation.
And they'll totally never be hacked.
From the description of the bill law (bold added):
https://legislation.nysenate.gov/pdf/bills/2023/S7694A
To limit access to addictive feeds, this act will require social media companies to use commercially reasonable methods to determine user age. Regulations by the attorney general will provide guidance, but this flexible standard will be based on the totality of the circumstances, including the size, financial resources, and technical capabilities of a given social media company, and the costs and effectiveness of available age determination techniques for users of a given social media platform. For example, if a social media company is technically and financially capable of effectively determining the age of a user based on its existing data concerning that user, it may be commercially reasonable to present that as an age determination option to users. Although the legislature considered a statutory mandate for companies to respect automated browser or device signals whereby users can inform a covered operator that they are a covered minor, we determined that the attorney general would already have discretion to promulgate such a mandate through its rulemaking authority related to commercially reasonable and technologically feasible age determination methods. The legislature believes that such a mandate can be more effectively considered and tailored through that rulemaking process. Existing New York antidiscrimination laws and the attorney general's regulations will require, regardless, that social media companies provide a range of age verification methods all New Yorkers can use, and will not use age assurance methods that rely solely on biometrics or require government identification that many New Yorkers do not possess.
In other words: sites will have to figure it out and make sure that it's both effective and non-discriminatory, and the safe option would be for sites to treat everyone like children until proven otherwise.
Doesn't necessarily need to be anyone with a lot of money, just a lot of people mass reporting things combined with automated systems.
It's like an automated tipofmytongue but for everything you do on your computer.
I'm not sure I'm surprised at this point any more, just disappointed. All they have to do is just make a stable and secure platform to run apps on. They're going to run out of foot to shoot themselves in sooner or later if they keep this kind of thing up. Too many unforced errors.
It should never have gotten to the external feedback stage because internal feedback should have been sufficient to kill the idea before it even got a name due to it being such a security and privacy risk. The fact that it didn't is worrying from a management perspective.
To be fair to Microsoft, this was a local model too and encrypted (through Bitlocker). I just feel like the only way you could possibly even try to secure it would be to lock the user out of the data with some kind of separate storage and processing because anything the user can do can be done by malware run by the user. Even then, DRM and how it gets cracked has shown us that nothing like that is truly secure against motivated attackers. Since restricting a user's access like that won't happen and might not even be sufficient, it's just way too risky.
Whoops, I mixed them up. It was definitely opt-out before.
Yeah, it sounds like it might actually be a useful feature if it wasn't impossible to do it securely and in a privacy respecting way.
The Microsoft accounts are already required (without resorting to increasingly convoluted methods) and I think the hardware for Hello might be too now for OEM built computers, I'm not sure.
Looking at it most favorably, if they ever want to not be dependent on Google, they need revenue to replace what they get from Google and like it or not much of the money online comes from advertising. If they can find a way to get that money without being totally invasive on privacy, that's still better than their current position.