deliriousdreams

The main issue with it is using it to further surveillance state ID laws for social media. Meta didn’t do “enough to protect children”, but the real story here is that they knew full well exactly what their algorithms and platforms were doing and embraced it because keeping kids (and adults) depressed and unhappy left them in a position to make boatloads of money off them.

The other issue I have with it is how little they have to pay per infraction.

In plenty of places (in the US) it’s the exact same companies doing both. Mack Towing is a pretty good example. The police where I live use them to tow vehicles that are illegally parked or considered abandoned. Those places charge a fee ($400 per day) to the person who owns the vehicle and the fee must be paid before the vehicle will be returned to the customer. They really don’t only deal in cash (although I can understand why they might not take credit card payments in this eventuality because of the risk of a chargeback).

What do you mean they’re cash only? I’ve paid by card (credit card even) to have my car towed when it just died while sitting in traffic, and again when I needed to move a tool box. What in the world?

Thanks.

Have you read the whistle blower’s book? Or even just the exerpts from it that have been floating around for ages?

I’m curious, because it’s clear to me that the C-Suit c-suite at Meta and companies like it absolutely do employ some really shitty people, but at the same time, that doesn’t mean you can paint the janitor with the same brush as the lean in woman who made her personal assistant but lingerie and model it in her home for her. Or tried to force another woman to cuddle with her while she was pregnant.

So what I’m saying is, I don’t agree with the sentiment that everyone who works there is a power mad executive intent on algorithmic domination of the internet, and for at least some of the programmers in question a job is a job.

I will say that is different if they know what’s going on and have the proper ability to make the decision to fight against such a thing.

But I question where your line of complicity starts and ends here.

I guess I’m also pointing out that part of what makes meta properties particularly attractive to pedophiles is the same thing that makes it attractive to other online criminals and it’s the encryption.

I think this might ignore something else video image generation is good for which is propaganda.

Fake or highly edited video of strikes in Iran, random video circulating online proporting that the Netanyahu hand videos, and random videos of Israeli strikes on Palestine (which I assume are to discredit actual video of the atrocities happening there), have been going viral for awhile now.

Advertising is probably one of the few industries that can use image generation and video generation via AI LLM in a way that would actually cut costs but the downside is people are increasingly militantly against ads and they are against AI generated content including ads, so this isn’t likely to become the reality any time soon.

If the McDonald’s ad and others like it had been better vetted for AI uncanny valley aspects and hallucinations that cause trucks to transform into short bus versions of themselves mid ad spot etc, the public might not have paid attention at all.

And lots of those same advertising firms are using AI to their benefit behind the scenes to purchase ad space. But using AI in ads in a public facing way is a dream out of reach for them for now because they bungled it so bad.

Are you suggesting that we should be able to criminally prosecute people who build end to end encryption software and tools? Or algorithms that find people you may know? Because that seems to be key to the Meta lawsuit as far as they are involved. That and the fact that Meta deliberately mislead the public about the safety of the website for kids. Because social media as it exists today isn’t really safe for children and a best the people responsible for that are the executives who made the decision to lie accountable.

But your average programmer isn’t designing tools for the purpose of making kids less safe. They aren’t designing tools for the purpose of being addictive. And they aren’t designing tools for predators. They happen to have designed tools used by predators because of the flaws in the design and the fact that their executives found those flaws to be advantageous to their bottom line so they played them up. Leaned in if you will.

It was literally part of the leak in 2021 that they had discovered that their algorithm had certain effects and the C-Suit literally went about making sure they could use that for monetary gain to keep people on the site and scrolling. Not just young users, but users of all ages.

The main thing is that it’s really easy to social engineer on a social media website where people are encouraged to give out all kinds of information that can be used against them in social engineering attacks. That, combined with the addiction fostered there and the encrypted chat methods owned by Meta and used by quite a bit of the world en masse is what created this situation.

Drive less. After doing a run on gas stations at any sign of a shortage. We have seen this before. At least twice in my lifetime.

I just want to point out one thing.

It’s pretty difficult to on one hand be like “we should all adopt electric cars” and on the other hand also be “against the state or private entities tracking the citizenry”. If you don’t know that all the new cars including the new electric vehicles are spying on their occupants you haven’t been paying attention.

On top of that a lot of Americans are realizing they can’t afford a vehicle at all. The subsidies for buying a new electric vehicle have gone up in smoke. So people who already can’t afford a vehicle aren’t gonna be able to buy an EV without the tax credits.

Combine the two problems and you’re just not going to get the results you want.

You might be able to sell me on a dumb electric vehicle. No manufacturer is selling that in the US, and even if they did try, the safety features required by law make it basically an impossibility.

Adam, I know things are a bit shit lately. But um… You good?

This is kind of a naive take.

NY has submitted legislative bill proposals on making age verification checks mandatory at the OS level, restriction of access to social media without Age Verification, and other such proposals and new infrastructure like their Mobile ID, all point to a push for age verification. They also are pushing legislation for things like outlawing 3D printing. In conjunction with their push to say the Valve lawsuit is about child gambling rather than gambling full stop (including child gambling as a way to get people to go along with it, because gambling is illegal for adults too in NY), is extremely telling.

This isn’t happening in a vacuum. I’m pretty sure Valve wouldn’t have made this statement about what the NYAG’s office request if they couldn’t back it up with documentation. Especially in light of them being sued. I’m sure they will absolutely bring said documentation with them to court.

I’d bet good money that the AG’s office absolutely did ask for that and Valve refused and that’s why they are being sued.

Things may have changed but you used to be able to make complaints about a business regardless of whether they were a member. The main problem is that those complaints wouldn’t be public because the BBB wouldn’t post a profile for non-member businesses.

That may have changed because of legal pressure. I don’t know what their requirements for making a business a member are and I wonder if you could have registered the business and then made your complaint and walked away. If you can do that, that’s even more problematic but I don’t know that for sure. My parents and grandparents always swore by The BBB. But my experience with it is exactly that it’s basically a mob protection racket.

Yeah. a lot of people don’t mention it and I had no frame of reference but I kept seeing comments that sort of alluded to that. I tried to Google it but with the current news cycle that information is buried and I couldn’t find a source. And of course I don’t play those games so I just didn’t know.

Still, thanks again.

Not sure that this is going to go well for the people suing. Like. The cost of games has been stagnant/hasn’t risen with inflation for so long that the new pricing (which to me subjectively is alegregious), isn’t really lawfully suspect?

They basically have a glorified mob protection racket going.

Consumers make complaints about a business. That business then receives rating on their site. This rating puts that business on a list (either a list of businesses already paying them, or a list of businesses to extort for money in exchange for a better rating).

The businesses that are already paying them get a phone call or an email etc about how their rating has dipped and they can raise it by doing X or paying X. The businesses not already paying them only get the second offer. Pay X and we will raise your rating.

The rating has no legal standing. It doesn’t mean anything except in the court of public opinion.

Came here to say this. The BBB is not the good guy in this scenario. It’s basically extortion.

Yeah I was missing the key detail that you need to pay to open the loot boxes which gives them a base monetary value as the starting point and does essentially equate to pay for the contents inside. That combined with them also running a market for trades and sales of the item is very synonymous with the pachinko machine setup and I do agree that this is gambling.

Thank you for taking the time to explain. I haven’t played any of Valve’s games that have loot boxes so I didn’t understand how it was different from loot boxes in Destiny or Battlefield.

This explains quite a lot. I’ve only ever played a couple of games that have loot boxes (Destiny and Overwatch and like Battlefield) and you don’t pay to open those.

I think I was missing that key detail which is you’re paying to open the loot boxes and that’s the “wager”.

If the loot boxes were free to collect and open then they wouldn’t have a starting value.

After that, assigning a value based on rarity for resale of the items would be on the players, not on Valve.

But now I agree that that is problematic even if I don’t agree with the way the NYAG is going about trying to fix it.

I especially object to the save the children angle as none of the games are rated E or even rated for children.

Someone else in the thread brought up how kids can get around this with a gift card, but I question why they’d need a gift card to buy free games. Sounds to me like that’s a case of parents not doing parenting.

Even if you used the gift card to pay to open the loot boxes, that seems like a problem with the parents too. I don’t know why it’s any more acceptable to sue Valve over this than it is to legislate who can buy gift cards. Like technically the parents own the gift card in the same way we don’t let kids have legal ownership of anything else.

A literally solution would be preventing the purchase of gift cards by minors or preventing gift cards from being used to buy anything not rated for everyone. Or not rated for kids.

I’ll put it another way, kids aren’t allowed to buy x-rated content. But you absolutely can use a gift card to purchase x-rated media from x-rated sites. It’s one of the things being proposed by several people in the wake of age verification stuff. So by the same logic a child could do that.

I’m trying to understand what’s different. If you don’t want to explain again here, that’s fine but can you link me to your other comments or something.

I haven’t played Dota or TF2. I don’t know how the loot boxes work and I’m trying to understand.

Yeah I’m confused by this too.

“According to New York law gambling occurs when a person wagers something of value on a contest or game of chance or some other thing outside of their control, and that a sum will be paid or something of value returned based upon a particular outcome set by the wager. This definition is broad. It includes everything from fantasy sports, cockfighting, dice, car racing for titles, and betting on sports.”

So to be clear, doesn’t there have to be a wager involved of some value in exchange for the loot boxes to take place before it reaches the threshold for gambling?

I haven’t played any of the games in the suit, so I don’t know how their loot boxes work, but I kind of assumed you just got them by random chance from playing. Can you buy loot boxes?

Edit:

I think I was missing that key detail which is you’re paying to open the loot boxes and that’s the “wager”.

If the loot boxes were free to collect and open then they wouldn’t have a starting value.