Age Tagging – The Good, the Bad and the Invasive
Hello everybode!
Today’s vidjablowg is about an idea of mine to ‘age tag’ posts on public forums- viola!
This silly idea got me thinking- it does spark off a lot of interesting thoughts about privacy, age in culture, data protection and internet honesty.
For a start, people can be ludicrously worried about their age. Everyone ‘knows’ there is a world of difference between being 35 and 39, for example. And how about those horny 16-year-olds who will now never be able to get internet action, because they lack the necessary two extra years to be cool. And that’s just in the west – I am not sure what the etiquette exists in other countries around asking peoples age, but I should imagine in some places it is considered tantamount to asking someone, after five minutes of knowing them, if they want to have anal sex with you in a public toilet (there are some situations in which that would be okay, of course, but not many).
Next, honesty- why should people be honest about their age, especially considering the aforementioned cultural sensitivity?
Who’s to say that if someone is willing to be a dickish troll that they won’t deliberately set up their age as 12 to get away with it?
Who’s to say that a would-be child-predator couldn’t make themselves look younger via age tag, as they often pose as children on websites already?
Well the key to this would have to be redundancies. Rather than being a website application it would be a browser application that is linked to public forum accounts on various websites- each time you add an account, the application will check the birth-dates and ages you have entered against one another. If it spot incongruities, a little note will come up next to the age tag on every post saying ‘This age tag may be inaccurate’ or ‘this age tag is conflicted’. You could also have one saying ‘this has been recently altered’ just in case someone is playing silly buggers. That will ring instant alarm bells for anyone looking on…and JUDGING.
Remember the application isn’t there purely for your user’s benefit – its for everybody in internet land.
Also to make it more stable, as I mention in the video, you could link it to your IP address.
The upshot of this is that you would EITHER have to lie everywhere from the very beginning of your internet career OR adopt a policy of complete transparency and honesty, which is much easier.
However this leads us to the point where in order for this to work, it will require a massive amount of information linking from the user, potentially violating their privacy and making it easier for malicious hackers and bots to find their details. Not at all ideal.
Still the internet is already an arena where it is easy to accidentally give your details, or have them appropriated or have programmes fool you into thinking they have them. I get terrified every time a third-party advert appears and tells me, essentially, that it knows where I live (albeit in the form of trying to get me to ‘Meet hot girls near INSERT LOCATION HERE).
Still, difficult as this would be to implement, I still think it might have some merit.
If we are argue with people in real life, we have a right to know who they are and their intellectual level. Of course age isn’t the be-all and end-all of intelligence or indeed education, but it is a fairly reliable indicator. My main reason for suggestion the ‘age tag’, as you see in the vidjablowg, is to help people restrain themselves from beating down on people who may not be their intellectual equal and may benefit far more from advice than from criticism.
We don’t know what the internet is going to be in a few years time, which direction its going…it would be nice to think it will reach a new maturity and have more safeguards against trolls and bullies. Hopefully ‘Internet Etiquette’ class will become mandatory in all schools and we won’t have to worry about the problems an age-tagging application will cause.
Anyway that’s all for now –
Bye!
– Spekti Jim
SpektiJim 