The UK Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) has fined Reddit £14.47 million (over $19.5 million) for collecting and using the personal information of children under 13 without adequate safeguards.
Hard to interpret this amount any other way than permission to keep doing the same thing. $20M is like a rounding error for Big Tech.
Really? Reddit is still smaller than the big guys
$2 billions of revenue in 2025.
https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/RDDT/reddit/revenue
Q4 Revenue grew 70% year-over-year to $726 million. 2025 Revenue grew 69% to $2.2 billion. Q4 Net Income $252 million, 35% of revenue. Source
But that’s cool, I’m sure 19 million will teach 'em. I wonder how much they sold that data for.
Yep, it’s essentially “give us some pocket change to stop us really doing something about it”.
data protection law as an excuse to require age verification, have we had that before anywhere?
Shit. We are being tooled to support them identifying every person and connecting it to everthing said or done, and most of us will say good, a fine for reddit, even though this is in service of basically doxxing all of us, not just to reddit themselves, but to the government by extension, the US will get it, russians, israelis, a host of others, criminal groups, hackers, oligarchs and their security contractors, Peter Thiel and is ilk. They will all get this information.
It’s the most unsafe thing possible for kids, all kids, to give the malign forces everything they say and do online, not the least with the computer tools that exist now, creating social scores to be secretly used against us, to determine what jobs we can get, if we get that loan, police treatment, court treatment, business treatment, prices we are charged online and in store on digital price tags connected to facial recognition cameras, down to what results search engines will show us.
We need to organize and defeat these bad faith attempts to surrender our populations to technofascists, and that’s what they are, often dressed up as in here as fighting tech to protect kids.
We won’t know any better collectively unless we organize and act collectively, and that organization is sorely needed in other areas, we need new social media on this fediverse to do that, with controls to make sure government doesn’t bugger it like it’s buggering reddit right now.
A central principle of data protection is data minimization. Forcing any institution to store extra data in order to know whether a user is old enough to consent to data processing is beyond absurd.
It is such a transparent attempt to submit us to an all encompassing surveillance by new spying tools, at least to those of us in reality. The argument that it is to protect children probably gets a good laugh when they are having a drink talking about playing the sheep.
They’ve been using that argument in europe for like decades too. I remember those arguments to argue for more surveillance in the 00’s. Now the technology allows them to do a lot worse with it though, and the population and governments are dumb and corrupted and cynical enough to surrender freedom to technofascists as long as they cut them in on the information and give them some control in doing so, in the case of the government.
Citizens are just dumber, more misguided somehow, I seriously think there is some pollutant that is systematically affecting our judgement, fear, and trust, and inhibiting it. Because past generations wouldn’t have stood for any of this, and they didn’t.
The problem is that our governments aren’t Democratic. Who am I supposed to vote for to stop this? It’s bipartisan. Wealth inequality has gotten so.bad we no longer have any real control over our lives
They’re openly doing this to hurt LGBT kids
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Hey UK government, why did they have all that data in the first place? Could it be the online safety act?
Y’know, it just occured to me, but this push towards child safety opens up another opportunity for Lemmy to grow at the expense of reddit. If reddit puts in age verification, the kids will still need somewhere to go to get answers to stuff like video game questions and random tech support problems. They won’t be able to use major platforms though, they’re going to be effectively banned from those. They can’t be banned from all of our servers though, that’s just impractical. So, they could potentially ask their questions and get answers here if they wanted, assuming we’re good enough at providing answers.
The kids would be the ones answering as well, so that shouldn’t be a problem.
I know a lot of people here come from Reddit, but I’m sure I’m not the only one here who grew up using old school phpBB forums to talk to other kids about random stuff online after school. My favorite forum was not in English and probably had fewer than 100 active members, and its by far the best experience I’ve had online. I didn’t bother much with other public social media before Mastodon.
I think at least some of us are dreaming of recreating that type of safe and fun online space, where it’s possible to create more close-knit (but nevertheless anonymous) communities. Reddit isn’t it, and I agree that it’s not good for children (or anyone) to be on there.
Whether the Fediverse could provide it remains an open question. It certainly comes with huge moderation challenges.
At some point those same authorites are coming for Lemmy and the metaverse generally.
Sure. The problem is we’re too decentralized to make enforcement practical. They can try to come for, say, lemmy.world if they want, that’s totally fine. That won’t get them very far with all of Lemmy though. Too many servers can be housed in places where western law cannot easily reach, and regulating just those servers located in western countries accomplishes very little.
Advantages of being structured differently.
edit for grammar
The pirate bay, many big private trackers, and Anna’s archive are still up despite being felony copyright infringement and directly pissing off fortune 500 companies
We can set it up to be insulated from them though. For one thing, we should have instances with clear rules, an appeals process, and a final decision to be done by a trial of a jury of verified users or the like. To prevent the feds from getting their hooks into the enforcement, and or prevent moderator abuse, which is what drives half of the people to lemmy to begin with.
Idk about setting it up to not have to do age checks, other than setting instances in areas where they are not beholden to the authorities and disguising their own identities as administrators?
