GTA Online has been one of the biggest venues of popularity of the whole franchise, and today it seems that Australia caught wind of this and decided to rule it as a sort of social media. While this is true, it keeps putting into question the outreach that governments have when it comes to moderating the things we can do and what we can see. Some might say this is done to protect kids, but firstly, kids shouldn’t be playing Grand Theft Auto, its an 18+ game, and second, with laws being passed that rewrite the handling of data, explicitly stating now they can store data about kids, are kids really safe?
GTA Online gets Age Verified
GTA Online has always been one of the most popular online hubs for gaming if we put Roblox aside, which means that there’s a ton of people playing, adults and kids that shouldn’t be there specifically. All of this remains a problem of parents not even wanting to parent their own children, and despite being a ton of security locks in Steam accounts and console accounts, they don’t even investigate how to set them up. Things are getting out of hand in the current gaming and internet landscape thanks to this rules being imposed.
Thankfully I have my own means to remain private, but many unwillingly think that they have no choice other than upload their faces online to be processed. With the current crisis of deepfakes and AI slop, nobody is safe in the internet and in the real world, it makes you an easy target of doxxing and other nefarious practices no matter how well your data is secured. We live in complex times, and there’s no real association that attempts to secure our personal information online, let alone scrub it away. Trust and quality of spaces like GTA Online or even the internet itself keeps eroding as we speak and don’t fight back.
