The infamous nanny state.
Boooo
Not wrong. But the payment provider literally already has the age. Just force them to tell the shop whether the potential buyer is an adult or not. The solution is literally legally and technically trivial with basically no privacy impact.
So yeah, this is probably yet another case of not actually being about child safety at all.
Roblox has significant parental control gaps. You can say that parents should just not let their children play Roblox but that really isn’t fair for the child.
To be honest, most platforms should be banned for children because they are all predatory. Anyone who has seen a mobile ad or seen the subscription pricing for most children’s apps would agree. A quality app for children is the exception.
Personally if I were in charge I would hold Google and Apple accountable for the trash advertised on their platforms. It’s not ok.
Roblox is an actively predatory marketplace for parent’s credit details.
Nonsense. There’s plenty of credit cards stolen that don’t belong to the kids’ parents.
If people care so much about their children they should probably focus on actual problems that are threatening their entire futures…
I cared so much about my kids’ futures I didn’t even have any. It was the only way to ensure their happiness and safety.
People will do anything these days to avoid actually parenting.
The audience for this isn’t even really parents of young children, it is mostly grandparents who vote as large blocs and are rather receptive to the ‘save the kids’ message in order to support whatever restrictions on technology they don’t understand anyway.
Maybe you should try parenting???
Also: Little kids aren’t even allowed to use Steam, check the TOS. If parents abandon their responsibilities to their own children, that’s hardly Steam’s fault.
Steam has good parental controls and if you actually parent your children you can notice if it isn’t quite set up correctly.
For anyone that doesn’t know, currently because of stuff like this, people in Australia can’t even access their Steam games that they’ve already bought unless they have a credit card, which I’ve learned most people over there don’t. Valve isn’t allowing the third-party ‘steal your data’ options like face scan and government ID, so Australian folk without a CC are out of luck.
Australians, please fight back against these anti-privacy laws. If these are successful, they’ll come to other countries.
You are completely wrong.
Credit cards are very common here. Also, I don’t have a credit card and I haven’t lost access to any of my steam games.
I’ve played games like Wuthering Waves and VPN’d to America and the game has asked me to verify my age then I’ve disabled the VPN and started the game again and magically it’s not now.
I’ll chime in to say that I’m an Australian and on the flipside I don’t know anyone with an actual credit card (not debit). So yeah you’re also making a sweeping generalisation.
Also none of my debit cards work around the steam requirements, it depends on which bank you’re with.
I don’t know what to tell you, I got my information from an Australian, and everything I’ve seen online confirms this.
I’m an Australian
I don’t know an adult Australian who doesn’t at least have a Visa debit card, which more or less functions as the same.
Many use EFTPOS (and quite frankly our government should move that to a credit payment facility so we can ditch the American ones) but what that Aussie told you is not correct; in fact most of the larger retailers are pushing for cashless transactions.
Thank you for some further explanation.
Regardless of this, I believe these changes should be protested. None of this is ever looking out for children, and I’m sure if stuff like this succeeds over there, it’ll just be a matter of time before we’ve got the same thing in the Americas.
I will say, as is alluded by discussion further on, there is a big lean from many toward Visa debit because it uses existing funds. Most I know who are working and even a few not working maintain credit cards however.
Or BNPL; I actually prefer it because there’s no maintaining credit fees and I can maintain it well enough.
It really depends on which Australia you qualify in. I’m in the B team so credit offerings aren’t something I’m really a part of, aside from BNPL. Many Aussies who ‘own’ homes run most of their lives through credit cards and home loan equity.
I’d wager this person who spoke about it to me is on the younger side - probably early 20s, so some more of this is making sense.
I also believe Steam doesn’t allow Visa Debit - at least, it doesn’t here, so perhaps it’s the same over there.
I believe it does, in fact I can find out for sure because my son is on Steam I believe, and runs Visa debit
I’ll go ask him
Edit: yes he does and yes he adds funds to his Steam account using his Visa debit card
Glad I could help here ay, most of the time I’m fairly useless
Total tangent here… austrailians don’t have credit cards? Tell me more, I am very curious.
Australians absolutely have credit cards. The previous poster seems to be getting their information from a single Aussie.
I couldn’t find numbers specifically for the percentage of people who have at least one card, but the total number of CC accounts indicates that it’s likely that the majority of working adults have one. That being said, credit card usage is low compared to other countries, I suspect because the government made the banks get together and create a universal electronic payment network in the 1980s, and we’ve all been used to paying virtually anywhere with our regular ATM cards, direct from our normal bank accounts, for decades. Credit cards are primarily used for, y’know, credit, and not just everyday transactions.
And for all the talk of the credit card companies, my personal experience with online payment processors has been that they often won’t accept Cirrus or VISA Debit cards, or at least not cards issued outside their own country. So online shopping can be difficult without a credit card.
Side note: I live overseas from where I grew up, and I frequently run into fellow (usually young) immigrants who will confidently tell the locals the most amazing (and untrue) things based on their limited experience with the world.
I just want to be clear, what my post meant to say is that it’s (apparently) not as common to use a credit card like you would in North America (basically a necessity if you want to get a car, apartment house, etc).
This person that I got the information from was very up in arms about this, so I’m not sure why they would lie about this. Again, I looked this up after. You can find posts about people discussing this very issue from a month ago.
My whole point wasn’t even about the credit cards. It’s about the anti-privacy laws.
Credit cards are mostly a US thing. Most other places you just use debit cards.
Credit cards are of course used worldwide but most people don’t own one and those who do use it rarely, since why would you borrow money to pay for something unless it’s an emergency or some big / long term thing (at which point an actual loan is probably better, so again CC not needed).
Debit cards make sense. Though I would expect those to be usable as CCs for the verification part.
I’m not sure the reason, but my guess is that a child can own a debit card, but can’t own a credit card.
At least in my corner of the world, debit cards can be used anywhere online that requires credit cards, but at least some banks disable it by default so you have to enable online payments. 15 -20 years ago it was different and you HAD to have a credit card to buy shit off Amazon or Steam so most kids couldn’t get shit.
I’m not an expert, I’m just being told this from an Australian. They do have credit cards, but it’s not as much a necessity to do things as it is in North America. So, from what I’m told, a lot of adults don’t have one.
Does Australia not have parents?
No, parents don’t parent anywhere anymore. It is the government’s job now.
Sadly I think you are right about the majority of people.
Personally I try my best but it’s exhausting :/
Oh fuck off. You can’t build a foolproof solution and you know it, you’re just asking for more power over our data and I’m so tired of it.
This is being said in a world where parents just give their kids tablets so they can keep quiet/busy. IMO the real danger is kids having “smart” tech at a young age. I almost think it’s borderline child abuse to get them hooked on tech that early on.
I fully concur that the onus is on the parents first, not the platforms.
However I also think that there should be proper tools made available for parents to simplify managing what their kids can access.
No, not the Orwellian surveillance crap most politicians try to push. Those don’t help.
But having a proper parental control system that has pre-made filters and is straightforward to use would get us ahead quite a lot.
About ten years ago I had to be the “parent” for my youngest brother on a number of platforms because our parents speak no English and parental controls were all… only in English.
Just last year I did the same for my nieces. And let me tell you… in ten years there was exactly zero progress made in parental control systems at Google, Microsoft and Apple. No ways to make it easier to control what your kids can access, no improvements in UX, it’s still a hidden, tucked away, third or fourth thought menu.
Maybe start focusing on that instead of trying to use your incompetence to strongarm governments into handing you even more data? Just an idea.
In my age it was the TV.
So not really much changed.We had this discussions decades ago. Edit: BTW I agree with you. And If I think about it, with internet its worse for obvious reasons, predators, uploading personal media, data collection in general, and for the algorithms of social media and sharing platforms. And available at anytime and any place, so you are hooked without oversight. Alright, a lot has changed!Yeah but research shows that even TV isn’t great for young kids. Especially if it isn’t supervised and time limited.
Exactly. This is what has been told for decades since I was a child. But back then most households had only one TV, at most two. Today I think its just worse in every way.
Australia is pathetic when it comes to freedom of speech. The media censorship is outrageous, meanwhile the far right has captured journalism
I was going to argue but actually yeah that’s about right. That’s a real shame.
You have my sympathies. My country is worse, I’m sure.
Does she even know what she is talking about? Steam isn’t allowed to be used and registered by childs (note, “Subscriber” in this context means Steam user account): https://store.steampowered.com/subscriber_agreement/
You may not become a Subscriber if you are under the age of 13. Steam is not intended for children under 13 and Valve will not knowingly collect personal information from children under the age of 13. Additional age restrictions may apply in your country.
Oh it just occurred to me why Minecraft and Roblox aren’t on Steam (besides the 30% price cut). They can’t, because the games allow children to login and play, while this is not allowed in Steam.
FUCKING
SUPERVISE
YOUR OWN
CHILDREN
I gotta be honest, I understand this position. I have a real difficult kid. We’re working on building trust, but it’s a process. The fact of the matter is that he seeks out inappropriate content and he can’t seem to help himself, just too impulsive.
There’s a reason for these behaviors, and like I said, we’re working on it. But in the mean time, we’ve had to completely lock down all technology in the house. And most of it is complete garbage when it comes to parental controls. Stay away from Roku for instance, that device is fucking horrible, just the worst.
Anyway, the thing is, sometimes parental controls are in fact necessary, but as long as they exist, things are fine. Steam for instance has a great system, you can control what aspects of steam a kid has access to, multiplayer functionality, the store, online content, etc. a all that can be switched on or off. And for games you can use their general rating system (which is imperfect) or you can manually whitelist individual games. Finally, you can lock it all behind a simple pin code. Honestly, this is how all such platforms should work, it’s manageable.
I don’t think there’s really any legitimate reason to complain about the systems steam currently has in place.
Roblox on the other hand… That’s a shitshow. We don’t touch Roblox. And it probably shouldn’t be allowed to operate the way it does.
These people are NOT talking about parental control, they are talking about taking control over what children have access to regardless of what specific parents think. If your child were less impulsive, as most children are, you wouldn’t have to be that restrictive - some common sense rules and limits would probably suffice, and these things are important to both build trust and develop responsibility in most children.
But they want to do the same with children online as they did with public spaces starting decades ago - taking away the possibility of experiencing the world on their own terms in adequate environments for those children who are capable of it. They are already taking away their communication channels on a large scale in addition to deanonymizing their citizens on the internet, and now they are still pushing for more.
The parental controls on Steam are absolutely fine, and there’s even the possibility of setting the account into offline mode or needing approval for every single login on the parents phone if they want to. Roblox… is a completely different can of worms, and i would never allow my child a roblox account, because normalizing what is going on there is a very bad idea.
Don’t let yourself get fooled. They want to decide how much you can trust your children, regardless of how good a parent you are or how well behaved you child is.
