Did you notice the other day that when I was agreeing with a sentiment Massachusetts’ Maura Healey expressed, I was careful to specify I wasn’t automatically supporting her on anything else? Well… good thing I did.

Massachusetts. has a problem, according to Healey: those damn kids are spending too much time on their damn phones. And she thinks she has a solution.

The state legislature is working on banning phones from schools, so kids will be forced to be cruel to each other face to face like in the good ol’ days, but Healey thinks that isn’t quite enough. Therefore she proposes that…

• social media companies must ban kids “during typical school hours” and from 10 PM to 7 AM nightly
• and also must limit kids’ social-media usage to two hours a day (with nagging about being on too long and rotting their brains starting after one hour)
• no, not two hours per platform, the companies must collude with each other to build a unified user profile for every child
• and they must assume everyone’s a child unless the user proves otherwise by uploading ID
• but they, the companies that make much of their money by data mining, must pinky swear not to use their collection of IDs and their massive unified data silo for anything other than enforcing the laws of Massachusetts.

When asked how feasible this all is, she assumed the social media companies all have a unified user profile of their customers already (THEY’RE COMPETITORS, YOU FOOL) and, for the rest, just expects them to figure out how to comply.

 

Why this concerns me:

Not only do I sometimes worry about bad ideas in general, because they spread, and not only am I specifically increasingly worried about the threat of verificosis enabling even more mass surveillance and forcing some people off the Net…

…but I might be one of those people. Commercial-grade mobile geolocation can generally tell I’m in New England, but no better, and when I tested it this evening, bestbuy.com thought my “nearest store” was in Marlborough, Mass.

So there’s a non-zero chance that if this pigeonshit becomes law, some other brainless algo will mistake me for being in Massachusetts and lock down my accounts at 10 PM because it “thinks” I have to go to school in the morning. And the unlocking process would require me to opt in to even more mass surveillance and data mining, to consent to my name, home address, and BMV photo being linked to all my social-media activity and then inevitably leaked to every malefactor in the world.

In summary, this idea and its proponents are cordially invited to take a relaxing, leisurely stroll into the fucking sea.