
Dating apps face questions over age checks after report exposes child abuse - Mimino123
https://techcrunch.com/2019/02/11/dating-apps-face-questions-over-age-checks-after-report-exposes-child-abuse/
======
thosakwe
One question - where the heck are these kids' parents? I think most people on
dating apps are under the impression that other users are of legal age.

If your child is searching for _adult_ partners, complete strangers, over the
Internet, you as a parent have a lot to answer for.

That being said, none of that justifies what happened to the minors mentioned
in the article. Ultimately, there are a lot of bad people out there. It would
be great for children to not be exposed to such people.

But I think the necessary change is parental supervision, _not_ government
intervention.

~~~
klodolph
How is this different from, for example, requiring age verification to
purchase alcohol? Or are you also opposed to that?

I think we understand that parents are not in complete control over their
children, and in the interest of harm reduction, we don't give parents the
entire burden of keeping their children safe but spread parts of it out among
the community. This doesn't seem like a particularly burdensome request, here.
Some parents are terrible parents, some kids are complete terrors, sometimes
there are circumstances outside your control. Parents are not gods.

~~~
towelr34dy
Did you read the article?

It clearly states that tinder and grinder already monitor for minors. They
state that they spend, and I'm guessing this wouldn't be an exaggeration given
their volume, millions of dollars on this effort.

What lawmakers want is ID required.

This is an extremely burdensome requirement. To have every new user of any
online platform have to verify photo ID against a webcam is... very onerous.
And even then whats to stop a kid from using his parents confirmed account?

Alcohol is a transaction for a substance that is deadly and purchased in
public. Comparing it to creating an online profile in the privacy of your home
is a big stretch. It would be more like creating an account with... I don't
know, maybe buying a can of figs off amazon.

Can a child buy a can of figs without ID? Not easily, but he could. Could he
hurt himself with it? Yes. Should we require ID for this: I'd say not.

The article seems to not mention any of the age verification things the kids
forged and their parents computer. But don't worry, if it was convenient for
the powers that be, they would have framed this as: "Evil kids get into
banking system by HACKING."

Funny how I'm sure they won't be asking Amazon to verify ID everytime a
purchase is made. I mean, plenty of kids have ordered down right dangerous
things this way, probably even caused a death.

The worst part of the authoritarian inclined who use the 'what about the
children?' argument is that many times they ironically make it less safe for
children since the solutions aren't particularly well thought through (see
drinking age in the US) - all while making it worse for the rest of us.

The thing about the outrage crowd is they point to a problem with while
implicitly saying 'anyone who doesn't support 'the solution' is in favor of
the problem'. I'm not in favor of the problem. I'm in favor of fixing the
problem IF it can be fixed in a cost effective way. Many people can't accept
that there aren't widespread easy and simple solutions to giant complex social
problems. Accepting that this behavior is an emergent quality from our
individual actions and pruning one's own actions is very hard. Most people shy
from this and look for externalizations.

~~~
klodolph
> Did you read the article?

That's an inappropriate response. Don't respond that way in the future.

> What lawmakers want is ID required.

Yes, like for alcohol.

> This is an extremely burdensome requirement. To have every new user of any
> online platform have to verify photo ID against a webcam is... very onerous.

New regulations are regularly called "extremely burdensome". I would say that
alcohol regulations are extremely burdensome in most parts of the country
where I live (USA). This is why I used alcohol as a comparison point. The
government regulates how many alcohol licenses are given, sometimes operates
liquor stores themselves, conducts enforcement operations including "sting"
type operations with underage informers. The hours and days when alcohol can
be sold are regulated and in most places, minors are not allowed to serve
alcohol or work the register for alcohol sales. In some states, most types of
alcohol can only legally be sold in state-licensed liquor stores. In NY, for
example, each liquor store must be owned and operated by an individual living
within a certain physical radius of the store's location.

The question here is about weighing the burden against harm reduction.

> And even then whats to stop a kid from using his parents confirmed account?

Condoms aren't 100% effective. Why should laws be 100% effective?

> The worst part of the authoritarian inclined who use the 'what about the
> children?' argument is that many times they ironically make it less safe for
> children since the solutions aren't particularly well thought through (see
> drinking age in the US) - all while making it worse for the rest of us.

The effects of raising the drinking age in the US have been well-studied, and
provide a wealth of data because laws were passed at a state-level and at
different times. From a harm-reduction versus cost perspective, I am in favor
of the 21 year drinking age in the US. Based on the studies.

> The thing about the outrage crowd is they point to a problem with while
> implicitly saying 'anyone who doesn't support 'the solution' is in favor of
> the problem'. I'm not in favor of the problem. I'm in favor of fixing the
> problem IF it can be fixed in a cost effective way.

I think you might be directing your comment at some kind of nebulous
"authoritarian" or "outrage crowd" and I'm not a part of that, so if that's
the case, I'd appreciate it if, when you respond to my comment, you respond to
the content of the comment itself and not some third party.

You seem to believe that the burden to verify age is too onerous for online
dating apps. I think that we should require age verification for dating
services across the board, and it should be up to the online apps to compete
with offline dating services on equal footing.

If it turns out that the reason why online dating services succeed is only
because they don't have to bear the cost of age verification, then I'd be
shocked.

~~~
towelr34dy
Actually, asking if you read the article was me being kind in my assumptions.

Alcohol is responsible 88,000 deaths per year.

You are literally comparing something with 0-10 deaths per year (if that) to
almost 100,000 deaths per year. That type of grotesquely disproportionate
comparison is part of 'outrage' culture. It's something I dislike and have no
trouble calling people out on.

Not a single cost/benefit analysis. No consideration of the cost, just a wave
of the hand (they will bear it). No discussion even of what type of age
verification should be or any pros and cons.

The fact that tinder has revolutionized sexuality for a generation is... or
made dating safer for women... or made dating safer for LGBT in places where
it can be dangerous to date as an LGBT... better bury that in bureaucracy.

No care about privacy.

Doesn't matter if over regulation just pushes people to less regulated
platforms like online classifieds, maybe hosted in a non-us country.

If you don't seem to consider the consequences of laws, or even the fact that
the logic you use is based on grotesquely unbalanced comparisons, I see little
possibility for dialectics.

~~~
klodolph
> Actually, asking if you read the article was me being kind in my
> assumptions.

Your assumption here appears to be that anyone who disagrees with you must be
misinformed.

> You are literally comparing something with 0-10 deaths per year (if that) to
> almost 100,000 deaths per year. That type of grotesquely disproportionate
> comparison is part of 'outrage' culture. It's something I dislike and have
> no trouble calling people out on.

Please respond to content, not to your own emotional responses (likes and
dislikes). Being offended is not an argument for or against anything.

Harm comes in different forms, and we are going compare harm prevention
strategies even though some strategies try to prevent liver disease and death
(age verification for alcohol) and others try to harm prevention strategies
for child sexual abuse (age verification for dating apps). It is appropriate
and normal to compare different things.

> Not a single cost/benefit analysis. No consideration of the cost, just a
> wave of the hand (they will bear it). No discussion even of what type of age
> verification should be or any pros and cons.

Yes, I would also like to see a cost/benefit analysis. On this, we agree.

> If you don't seem to consider the consequences of laws, or even the fact
> that the logic you use is based on grotesquely unbalanced comparisons, I see
> little possibility for dialectics.

You have come up with a great many explanations for how I am somehow an
inferior person, but this is inappropriate behavior and you should in the
future respond to content unless someone is acting inappropriately.

~~~
towelr34dy
Nope, I don't think anyone who disagrees with me didn't read the article.

The thing is, logical people when they read about 3 deaths per year don't
propose applying the same social burden as to avoid 100,000.

You ask questions, but don't answer. How about addressing the fact that a
comparison of something that costs 88,000 lives to 3/year is grossly out of
line? How about you write out exactly what you propose instead of innuendos?
Maybe include pros and cons without any hand waving? You know, dealing with
those details you seem to support.

Using reason means understanding 3 < 88,000. It's not opinion. That's logic.

I didn't say you were inferior. I said you were emotive and didn't use reason:
if you can't handle such a call out, then you might not have a place in a
serious discussion. We've all been there; having taken unreasonable stances.
Whether you choose to stay there is your choice.

How about addressing privacy concerns for LGBT?

How about you answering questions on margin of error improvement based on the
proposed changes? After all, you are the one proposing new things; the burden
to prove your new solutions good is on you. Not that you have shown any desire
of understanding this burden of proof thing. Asking for changes WHILE
requesting others prove your numbers... it shows such a lack of understanding
of how dialectics work. Reverse burden of proof isn't opinion, again, that is
fact; you are wanting a change that you are asking others to prove/disprove.

Your opinion on inappropriate behavior is, as you used to put my perspective
down, just that, your opinion. Last, you telling me what to do is... laughably
authoritarian.

------
mLuby
Error: variable "the platform" was used before it was defined (heavily
implying she was on a dating site, not Instagram as was the case).

> Last month the BBC reported on the death of a 14-year-old schoolgirl who
> killed herself in 2017 after being exposed to self-harm imagery on the
> platform.

~~~
buckminster
It's just bad writing. That case was Instagram.

------
g45y45
and the scope creep for the bad Online Identification begins. First it was no
porn, then it was no dating. Soon it will be no rw to access to UK internet
without age+ID. Disconnect the UK before the damage spreads!

~~~
purple_ducks
> no rw to access to UK internet without age+ID

Fantastic. Everything attributable to a public pseudonym privately tied to a
real person.

This sounds exactly how it should be.

If somebody tries to subvert the law, they can easily be arrested and tried in
a court of law.

~~~
mschuster91
This is utterly damaging to democracy - a real democracy needs anonymity to
survive. Removing anonymity will lead to people limiting for example posting
critical opinions of the government or a political party.

The reason is simple: even if you trust the _current_ government to not abuse
all the tasty meta-data, who says the next government, led by the party you
vocally criticized on the Internet, will look away?

Just look at China, or what Turkey is doing, or even what US border checks
asking for your social media logins are doing _right now_.

------
Abishek_Muthian
We were running a chat app network dating platform. User profiles were from
chat apps & majority of the users were from Facebook Messenger, many in asian
countries especially women from Philippines used their child photograph as
their profile picture.

After I realised the issue, we integrated Amazon Rekognition API to detect age
range < 18 & block the profiles who had a child's picture on their user
profile. The issue is that Rekognition isn't perfect & we lost several users
because of this integration & false positives, yet we continued to use it till
the end for moderation. We were processing >200,000 profile pictures each
month for this.

------
mc32
There is the danger that if these services don’t nip this in the bud, it’ll
become a social problem akin to enjo-Kosai in Japan, which not only lends
itself to exploitation of minors but also encourages needless conspicuous
consumerism.

For the most part, aside from using someone else’s credit information, these
businesses have information on age and with facial recognition should be able
to flag most falsified accounts.

------
turc1656
The solution seems relatively straightforward to me, but maybe I'm missing
something. If you want to engage on a platform designed explicitly for adults
doing adult things, you give them your driver's license number or non-driver's
ID number. They can instantaneously verify that with the government
electronically and determine the age of the person associated with that
license number.

To further prevent problems - like kids taking their parent's ID and then
changing the name and age - dating sites could bind the age of the site
profile to the license provided. So if junior uses his old man's ID, he's
going to show as 45, not 18, and he won't be able to change it. That has the
additional benefit of stopping a lot of the lies related to age on dating
sites.

Lastly, they could also bind the first name only to the profile, hide the last
name from other users, and allow a nickname or preferred handle to be
displayed. So you can't upload a license for John Doe, age 30, and then say in
your profile that your preferred name is Tony and you look 15. This would be a
red flag to anyone. But makes perfect sense for Robert who likes to be called
Bob, or William who goes by Bill, and actually look their age.

~~~
icebraining
I see a few problems with this proposal:

1- There are still strong taboos against certain kinds of relationships; being
forced to tie one's dating preferences and behaviors to a governmental ID
seems dangerous.

2- Should companies get automatic access to one's name and age based solely on
the ID number? Seems like a violation of privacy.

3- Mandating that for apps served over Google Play or the App Store is not
hard; what about dating webapps served from other jurisdictions?

Finally: will it really work? Looking 15 is already a red flag, because no
minor is supposed to be there, yet they are.

~~~
turc1656
1\. Yeah, you wouldn't want to roll this out to places like Egypt or Iran, for
sure. And I usually am very pro-privacy, but since people either pay the
companies that run these apps/sites/services or they use it for free but have
it directly linked to their phone, google, etc., in reality these companies
already have their true identities - or at least enough of it that if asked by
any government entity they could produce it even if they didn't have the
actual ID number of the government issued document. Isn't this how people buy
alcohol online, though? I've never done it, but I recall someone telling me
they had to upload their driver's license to the site they were buying from
for age verification. So this seems to already be occurring elsewhere and I
don't think anyone has complained about it.

2\. Not sure I agree this is a violation of privacy since a) you would be
providing them this exact same information when building your new profile upon
account creation and b) you would agree to its collection as part of the
signup process thereby waiving any privacy right you may or may not have in
this regard. It would also be considered something a reasonable person would
expect the third party to be given when supplying that identification number.
For example, I assume that when I provided my information to my insurance
company when applying for a personal disability policy that they checked
everything on those documents for accuracy (name, age, address, etc.).

3\. I was assuming this was legislation and would therefore apply to all
services of this nature as long as they operate in the country/state where the
legislation is effective.

4\. 15 year olds are able to exist on these platforms in part because some 18
year olds look very young while others look much older. So someone can be 18
or 20 and look 15-16.

------
justtopost
Will this end up another misguided "think of the children" measure that will
just make more consentual adult sex illegal? Or will it be accepted with open
arms by dating sites who want all your PII to sell? ('anonymised' of course)
(CoughmatchCough)

Am I just jaded or does this seem to be the way things are going?

~~~
paulgb
You're not just jaded. "Trafficking" has become a vehicle for the religious
right to shut down anything they don't like, from robot brothels [1] to, in
this case, hookup apps. And nobody is _for_ trafficking, so politicians from
across the spectrum tend to go along with it.

It's been this way since at least the Mann Act, which was ostensibly about
trafficking but used to crack down on interracial relationships (notably by
Jack Johnson, who recently got a posthumous pardon)

"Remember when some tea company added "blockchain" to its name and stock
prices soared? "Trafficking" is the equivalent word in the policy / non-profit
world." \-- Alex Frell Levy [2]

[1] [https://amp.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/sep/30/houston-
robo...](https://amp.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/sep/30/houston-robot-
brothel-plan-halted)

[2] [https://t.co/HaNQ2H7kFX](https://t.co/HaNQ2H7kFX)

~~~
derefr
> And nobody is _for_ trafficking

Nobody in first-world countries, you mean. In third-world countries, a lot of
what gets categorized as “human trafficking” is just self-motivated border-
crossing by career prostitutes.

You know how you might find a fellow working in America who is from, say,
Bangladesh, and is here for the jobs that pay 100x as much as jobs in
Bangladesh do, so he can send money home to his family? Well, in the hotbed
countries of “human trafficking”, many of the women involved are just people
who did exactly the same thing, moving from countries like Cambodia (“human
trafficking source countries”) to countries like Thailand (“human trafficking
destination countries”) because they know there’s far more of a market of sex
tourists there with higher expectations of average prices. And her family back
home? Thinks exactly the same of her as the family of the Bangladeshi man
working in America does. “She’s providing for us; we’re proud of her.”

The annoying thing is that “human trafficking” was established to go after
what is, at its core, a real and horrifying crime—the combination of
kidnapping and slavery that mafias tend to consider the highest-margin way to
operate brothels, factories, etc. If someone isn’t themselves doing the
kidnapping, or operating the brothel, but is just, say, driving the kidnapped
people around, we didn’t have a crime to charge them with and had to let them
go, until we invented “human trafficking.” It was essentially a gang-busting
crime, a way to put pressure on ground-level members to get them to give up
their higher-ups. But now, basically everything related to the original intent
seems to fall under the aegis of that crime†, and its scope has grown to the
point that we’ve forgotten why we invented it.

† Probably because of motivated reasoning of statisticians working for the
trafficking-related nonprofits. Sort of like the motivated reasoning of
statisticians working for cigarette or sugary-cereal companies.

------
gregoriol
The apps are tools, it's up to the humans to do or not do stuff.

In these cases, how are children getting in first? Where are the parents of
these children??

Then, it's not the apps that create abuse, but the users on the other side.
There could be a set of rules that the apps should make users agree with, and
remind from time to time, like be kind, don't get angry if it doesn't work
out, report strange behaviors/underage profiles/illegal stuff if you happen to
detect one, ...

Is it that complicated to be adults in 2019?

~~~
purple_ducks
> The apps are tools, it's up to the humans to do or not do stuff.

"Guns don't mass murder people, humans do"

In the real world, if I saw a child go on dates with a grown adult, I'd alert
the police and have the man arrested, then I'd do my damndest to have the
restaurant shut down for facilitating the grooming of minors.

And most importantly, _in the real world_, we all have visibility of this and
society as a whole acts in disgust and would (legal or otherwise) punish the
offenders and people who facilitated and accommodated this.

> There could be a set of rules that the apps should make users agree with

A pinky promise maybe...

~~~
hackinthebochs
>then I'd do my damndest to have the restaurant shut down for facilitating the
grooming of minors.

You lost me there. This is an entirely unreasonable burden.

~~~
purple_ducks
You don't think an establishment has a legal duty to report child grooming
that occurs on their premises?

I used the word 'dates' (plural) - a re-occurring thing, not a one off event.

~~~
scottlocklin
I'll bite, how is a restaurant supposed to figure out which groups of people
are "child groomers" as opposed to something more pedestrian and normal like
"parents?"

~~~
purple_ducks
You've never once seen something and felt something was a bit off?

You're never able to read a person?

You don't think people working in a restaurant can't put 2 & 2 together and
come up with 4 more times than not?

So, you see a person come in with different children repeatedly and act above
& beyond affectionate to them. Inappropriate caressing/touching?

You don't think that's gonna set off alarm bells in the staffs' heads?

~~~
scottlocklin
So, we're gonna rely on the psychic powers of witch hunting cretins who work
in food service; what could possibly go wrong?

I don't know what planet you live on where we need to deputize the country's
wait staff to catch child molestors who meet their victims on match dot com
and bring them to restaurants, but I don't want to live on that planet.

