Of teen social media protection and ironies
Exploring the ironies of the Social Media Protection Act and my journey to De-Google my life.
Welcome to my newsletter. Stay up to date with all my latest writings and ramblings.
It’s been a big week coming back to work, getting sick, catching up with everything, returning to work again, and catching up with everything again.
It’s been a big week and I’ve packed a lot into today’s edition. Feel free to ignore and skip whatever doesn’t grab you.
In this newsletter:
I explore the Social Media Protection Act and its ironies
I give an update on my project to De-Google my life
I start a new regular section called: Kicking Around the Net where I compile some interesting articles, videos, podcasts. Whatever got my attention and is worth sharing.
I share my Photo of the Day.
And off we go…
The Teen Social Media Act and the ironies at play
I won’t go through all the dangers and horrible content that the internet makes easily available and social media makes so easy to share. We all know that the internet and social media have caused a lot of harm - particularly, on children and young adults.
Something had to be done and I do welcome some action to restrict the worst content and platforms to children and young teens. But, like all things, it all hinges on how the restrictions are implemented. The devil’s in the details, as they say.
The Australian government says their Social Media Child Protection Act is about protecting children under 16 from social media harms (and that’s fair enough) but there are some ironies at work.
I want to focus on two ironies that stand out to me.
1. Protecting Children While Mining Their Data
They want to protect children under 16 by banning them from social media. At the same time, our children's data is being fed to Google and multiple other EdTech platforms and parents have no choice. If your kid is at a primary or secondary school, they will use multiple apps and platforms. Schools demand that parents sign a permission for their kids to be added to all these platforms.
What other option is there? A parent could say no, but schools rely so heavily on all these EdTech platforms that the child's education will be severely impacted.
And it's not just that parents are forced to agree to using those platforms but that they have no control whatsoever over what data gets shared/collected and how to manage that data.
For example, my son's primary school used multiple platforms including Class Dojo, which a must read article by Simon Elvery and Teresa Tan on ABC News identified as one of the biggest offenders with their terms of service and privacy amounting to 40,000 words of legal gibberish. The whole article is a must read.
Who knows what data, information and media (including photos and videos?) was collected during his primary school years? How long do they store all that data and information? What happens to the photos and videos?
Then, when my son moved to our local public secondary college, once again, we were made to sign a permission form for multiple platforms including the Google Suite. I can't focus on all of them, but let's focus on Google as an example. This is a company that profits from collecting information and data mining. In fact, it's their whole business model!
Just this year, “a US federal court has told Google to pay $425m (£316.3m) for breaching users' privacy by collecting data from millions of users even after they had turned off a tracking feature in their Google accounts.” And Google has also implemented fingerprinting tracking, which not that long ago in 2019, Google themselves had denounced and described as an unfair practice.
Considering their business model, the fact that they dropped the 'don't be evil' motto and their horrendous track record when it comes to privacy. With the added news that schools in the U.S. are implementing AI surveillance of students at schools, and the fact that Google is pushing their AI into their suite, including Chrome, how can parents not be worried?
Granted, schools in Australia, to my knowledge, are not implementing AI surveillance of students yet. But we all know that a lot of the worst ideas from the U.S. get imported eventually and we all know that EdTech companies will definitely push for this new 'product to monitor and protect children' to be implemented in Australian schools.
Also, we all know that the more data that is collected the higher the chances are that the data will be leaked or hacked. We have seen lots of failures in the last few years, lots of leaks and hacks that have exposed data. In fact, the very latest troubling data breach has just happened with Discord. As Joseph Cox reports on 404 Media, identity documents and selfies uploaded for the ID and age verification process, email addresses, phone numbers, approximately where the user lives and much more were all accessed in the hack.
This should be a wake up call!
Meanwhile, in Australia, the eSafety Commissioner Julie Inman Grant marches ahead with the implementation of the ban insisting this week that there are “no significant technological barriers.” But a great number of experts in the field have serious privacy concerns.
John Pane, chair of Electronic Frontiers Australia, who was in the advisory board, resigned in August warning that if the Social Media Child Protection Act goes ahead the data of millions of Australians, including biometric data will be given to the social media platforms, with the excuse of age verification. He went further to say that the way the policy was being sold to the public was misleading and he added that some platforms were already building “a surveillance-level response to the entire user population.”
This whole article in The Age by David Swan has more.
So... they say that a social media ban is necessary for under 16, to protect children. At the same time, they want us to sign our children's data away to these companies with all the risks that entails. I'm sorry, but it doesn't compute.
Thankfully, it’s not all doom and gloom and there are some positive signs. As reported by Cam Wilson on Crikey, the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner (OAIC) published the regulatory guidance for the social media ban Friday morning and Privacy commissioner Carly Kind also had some sound warnings for the tech platforms.
Let’s hope that the tech platforms abide by these rules. And let’s hope this is not a fool’s hope.
2. A Ban Is Not Protection
A ban doesn't protect anyone, doesn't fix anything. It doesn’t force social media platforms to act on the most horrendous content and practices and build more user friendly and flexible restriction and protection tools. It doesn’t force the platforms to amend their predatory data collecting ways and to improve their privacy policies.
In the UK, where age verification restrictions have been implemented recently, allegedly to prevent children from accessing porn and extreme violence (again, fair enough), multiple problems have arisen. Now, lots of other services are starting to ask for age verification. You want to play video games? Age verification. You want to listen to music on Spotify? Age verification. You want to post something on social media? Age verification.
But, age verification requirements and a ban don't stop access. They simply teach people to use other forms of access. The use of VPNs in the UK went through the roof after the implementation of age verification requirements. And, of course, teens have been organising themselves and sharing tips on how to circumvent age verification requirements, how to trick platforms to thinking their parents are managing the account and how to use VPNs.
We all want a safer internet. We all want to stop children from accessing harmful content. Me too. But the way it has been implemented in the UK, with third party age verification businesses where you upload a copy of your ID, or use biometrics to verify the age is a privacy nightmare. And, as mentioned above, having all that ID data collected also creates the perfect honeypot for attacks.
We still don’t know all the details of how the Australian government will implement age verification (even though it all starts December 10, which is in less than 60 days) but I fear, like John Pane, that the Australian government hasn’t really thought about all the problems this may cause.
Then, there’s the issue that when something is banned, humans are more attracted to it and always find ways around it. What happened in Spain when, under Franco's dictatorship, certain books, movies and music were banned? People brought them in secretly and sold them in the black market or, even better, shared them around.
What happened when drinking alcohol was banned in the U.S.? The black market exploded. Cheap and nasty alcohol was sold and consumed in secret establishments run outside the law. Crime organisations thrived.
I'll say it again, a ban does not protect anyone. In fact, it usually creates an environment where people will seek what is banned and they will do it through legal or illegal means. Whatever is required. And by doing so, they are exposed to more unsafe avenues.
Age verification mandates also impact the smaller platforms harder while they entrench the power of the big ones. This is what happened recently in the U.S. when age verification became law in various states. As Molly Buckley writes for the Electronic Frontier Foundation:
Lawmakers often sell age-verification mandates as a silver bullet for Big Tech’s harms, but in practice, these laws do nothing to rein in the tech giants. Instead, they end up crushing smaller platforms that can’t absorb the exorbitant costs. Now that Mississippi’s mandate has gone into effect, the reality is clear: age verification laws entrench Big Tech’s dominance, while pushing smaller communities like Bluesky and Dreamwidth offline altogether.
Instead, as Stanford Professor of Communication and founder of Social Media Lab Jeff Hancock suggests, it would be so much better to acknowledge that not all social media and all children and teenagers are the same. To empower parents with new guidelines, and controls that give parents and users choice. And, of course, education, not only at schools but at home too, so when young people start using social media they know its positives but also its risks and pitfalls.
This is the approach we took at home. We’ve never banned our son from using YouTube and any other social media. Instead, we have been quite open about how we use them, with all the good and all the bad.
Being obsessed with music and films, he started using YouTube without an account and with us. When he was 12, we created a Google account for him so that he could save videos and create playlists. We made sure we went through the privacy settings together and we also made sure that he understood we know his password and that we expect him to use it responsibly.
He has been fantastic. He has used it responsibly and he has, thankfully, shown no interest in other social media.
Would we be worried if he wanted to start a social media account? Yes. Somewhat. We’d prefer for him not to but, at the same, we’re very confident that he’d make sensible choices and, most importantly, that he would be quite open with us. That’s the most important thing because, eventually, at some point he would make a mistake, would see something disturbing or find himself in an uncomfortable situation and we know that he would talk to us.
We’ll see how the Australian government’s Social Media Child Protection Act looks like and how it’s implemented but I’m afraid the age and ID verification rollout will create opportunities for companies to profit from age verification services and will be fraught with privacy risks.
Will it do more harm than good? We’ll see. Hopefully not. But the concerns are serious.
DE-GOOGLING MY LIFE PROJECT
This will take time but I’m making progress on my personal project to de-Google my life by the end of the year. I have not used Google’s search engine for about a year now and I have deleted Google Chrome from my laptop.
DuckDuckGo is my browser and search engine of choice for both my laptop and phone for now but I’m also trialling Brave. We’ll see how I go with that.
I have put a final post on my Blogger announcing the end of the blog and a new beginning. Which is this newsletter. I created the blog sometime in 2004 or 2005. I wanted a simple and straightforward blog. It’s gone through many iteration across the years and Blogger served me well for all that time but it was time to move on.
I’m enjoying using Buttondown, but I will probably migrate the blog to a website. That still requires some thinking and planning.
And finally, I have started tackling the move away from Gmail, Google Drive and Google Docs. This will be the trickiest part of the whole move. For starters, I have created a new email on Proton Mail. I like it so far and it feels great to be on an email platform that cares about my privacy and safety. I’m still using both Gmail and Protonmail, but I can see myself phasing out my Gmail in the coming months.
Google Drive and Google Docs have been incredibly useful for some projects. Particularly group projects. This one, will be the trickiest to tackle and I haven’t started yet, but I will start looking for a collaborative platform that is more privacy/safety conscious, that doesn’t harvest my data and has no AI features. We’ll see if such a thing exists.
KICKING AROUND THE NET
University libraries around the world are having problems sending and getting their books back due to Trump’s tariffs, Emanuel Maiberg reports for 404 Media.
The ABC’s The Philosopher’s Zone’s latest episode discusses Australian Indigenous literature, how it’s flourishing and how comfortably it sits within the traditional university structure.
The UK defunded and closed a large number of public libraries in the last 15 years or so but, now, concerned by declining reading rates has a plan to have a library in every primary school by 2029.
Tajja Isen has published a comprehensive and excellent piece on The Walrus exploring the publishing industry, their horrendous business practices, how it is a lot like gambling and how it affects authors. It’s a nightmare.
Let’s Talk About AI Art by The Oatmeal. A great online comic exploring comics, AI and art.
Both Marvel editor in chief C.B. Cebulski and DC Chief Creative Officer Jim Lee have spoken against the use of AI in comics at New York Comic Con. Jim Lee’s keynote speech was particularly interesting and has some beautiful words. Really worth a read!
Snapchat has announced plans to make users pay for their ‘memories,’ which has caused shockwaves. I suspect there will be a big migration away from the service but some people will feel trapped and will start to pay. This will be a wait and see for other platforms(Instagram, TikTok, etc.) who may be tempted to do the same.
A new U.S. startup called Reflect Orbital wants to launch thousands of satellites with mirrors to reflect sunlight at night. Human folly will never cease to amaze me. Just because you can do something, it doesn’t mean that you should. This is something that tech companies have never learned.
Here’s an interesting article outlining how today’s AI hype and race has strong parallels with the devastating technology boom and bust of a century ago. Maybe we should learn from the mistakes of the past?
“Kids these days, they’re always on their phones!” We hear people say. But are they? Do they want to be? Or do they want more human, accessible, in person services? Madelayne(25) attended the 2025 Youth Voice Summit and her words are really worth a read.
https://youtu.be/7gCbK1f0Zjc?si=axSEyD9N-9NhTuuXAnd, finally, an excellent video from Dr Gilbz who explains how AI and tech is being used to improve weather forecasts and climate research. And this is a great use of AI, a hybrid AI-physics model.
PHOTO OF THE DAY
This is a photo I took in 2001. One of the very first photos I took when I came to live in Australia. As I settled into a new country in the other side of the world, the walks and sunsets of at Elwood were a good friend. But the best friend was the ocean, the sea. One thing I knew before I landed was that wherever I would settle to live, it had to be close enough for me to walk to the foreshore, for me to be able to feel the sea breeze. That’s something that connects my previous home with Melbourne. The sea has always been there for me. A constant friend.
PS: I will aim for this newsletter to be posted weekly on Sunday. But I make no promises. Life does throw curve balls all the time.
That’s it from me for now. Let me know your thoughts, I look forward to hearing from you here or on BlueSky.