[HN Gopher] EFF Launches Age Verification Hub as Resource Agains...
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EFF Launches Age Verification Hub as Resource Against Misguided
Laws
Author : iamnothere
Score : 67 points
Date : 2025-12-10 20:35 UTC (2 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.eff.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.eff.org)
| mikece wrote:
| Any time law-makers claim that a law is meant to protect children
| you can guarantee that the safety of children had almost nothing
| to do with it. This is all a push to normalize digital ID (to
| protect the children!); once normalized it will become
| _mandatory_.
| no_wizard wrote:
| I always ask myself _who wins_ with these laws (well, any law
| really). so far, the only winner seems to be the government and
| data collectors. It seems these laws are intended to collect
| leverage in the long run.
| guilamu wrote:
| Well, you just answered brilliantly to your own question. You
| nailed it.
| owisd wrote:
| You think car seats and childproof bottle caps are a conspiracy
| as well?
| dvh wrote:
| This gives me Leisure Suit Larry flashbacks
| blitzar wrote:
| Ken sent me
| kingforaday wrote:
| LSL4 was my favorite.
| giancarlostoro wrote:
| Not to mention people lose accounts because someone reported them
| as underage, and now they don't want to fully dox themselves over
| this. Who can blame them considering discord's own support ticket
| system was hacked which included people who had to validate their
| age.
| bobajeff wrote:
| I wonder what the psychological effect of having little or no
| privacy would do to people. Are we all going to be paranoid
| schizophrenics? How would a world of paranoid schizophrenics
| work? How insane are world events going to be from that point on?
| pyuser583 wrote:
| You think you have privacy?
|
| At best, you go back and forth between no privacy, a heavily
| condition privacy. At best.
|
| Let's take privacy back, but that's a big process.
|
| If you haven't internalized surveillance, start working on it!
| rlpb wrote:
| I'd be OK with an "I am a child" header mandated by law to be
| respected by service providers (eg. "adult sites" must not permit
| a client setting the header to proceed). On the client side,
| mandate that consumer devices that might reasonably be expected
| to be used by children (every smartphone, tablet, smart TV, etc)
| have parental controls that set the header. Leave it to parents
| to set the controls. Perhaps even hold parents culpable for not
| doing so, as a minimum supervision requirement, just as one may
| hold parents culpable for neglecting their children in other
| ways.
|
| Forcing providers to divine the age of the user, or requiring an
| adult's identity to verify that they are not a child, is
| backwards, for all the reasons pointed out. But that's not the
| only way to "protect the children". Relying on a very minimal
| level of parental supervision of device use should be fine; we
| already expect far more than that in non-technology areas.
| ProjectArcturis wrote:
| I'm not sure that making parents legally culpable for their
| kids being smart enough to download a new browser is LESS
| government intrusion.
| e40 wrote:
| It could be added at the router? The child's computer could
| be identified and this header added, in a MITM situation...
| but, maybe that would be easy to defeat, by replacing the
| cert on the client? Not my area of expertise... really just
| asking...
| hypeatei wrote:
| Okay, so the HTTP header idea seems like it would have two
| issues:
|
| 1) Given that it just says you're a "child", how does that work
| across jurisdictions where the adult age may not be 18?
|
| 2) It seems like it could be abused by fingerprinters, ad
| services, and even hostile websites that want to show
| inappropriate content to children.
| phantasmish wrote:
| > 1) Given that it just says you're a "child", how does that
| work across jurisdictions where the adult age may not be 18?
|
| It's a client-side flag saying "treat this request as coming
| from a child (whatever that means to you)". I don't follow
| what the jurisdiction concern is.
|
| [EDIT] Oooooh you mean if a child is legally 18 where the
| server is, but 16 where the client is. But the header could
| be un-set for a 5-year-old, too, so I don't think that much
| matters. The idea would be to empower parents to set a policy
| that flags requests from their kids as coming from a child.
| If they fail to do that, I suppose that'd be on them.
| hypeatei wrote:
| The concern is that websites have no way to tell the actual
| age in this scenario so you'd be potentially
| inconveniencing and/or blocking legitimate users (according
| to the server jurisdiction's rules)
|
| It doesn't seem sufficient, and would probably lead to age
| verification laws anyway.
| bena wrote:
| I am a Russian proxy site, I make requests for you without the
| header. I serve you the content because I don't care about
| following American laws.
|
| Alternatively, just use an older browser that doesn't serve the
| header.
|
| If anything, you'd want the reverse. A header that serves as a
| disclaimer saying "I'm an adult, you can serve me anything" and
| then the host would only serve if the browser sends that
| header. And you'd have to turn it on through the
| settings/parental controls.
|
| Now, this doesn't handle the proxy situation. You could still
| have a proxy site that served the request with the header for
| you, but there's not much you can do about that regardless.
| pembrook wrote:
| > _Perhaps even hold parents culpable for not doing so, as a
| minimum supervision requirement_
|
| Even the idea of prosecuting parents for allowing their child
| to access 'information,' no matter what that information is,
| just sounds like asking for 1984-style insanity.
|
| A good rule of thumb when creating laws: imagine someone with
| opposite political views from yours applying said law at their
| discretion (because it will happen at some point!).
|
| Another good question to ask yourself: is this really a severe
| enough problem that government needs to apply authoritarian
| control via its monopoly on violence to try to solve? Or is it
| just something I'm abstractly worried about because some
| pseudo-intellectuals are doing media tours to try to sell books
| by inciting moral panic?
|
| As with every generation who is constantly worried about what
| "kids these days" are up to, it's highly highly likely the kids
| will be fine.
|
| The worrying is a good instinct, but when it becomes an
| irrational media hysteria (the phase we're in for the
| millennial generation who've had kids and are becoming their
| parents), it creates perverse incentives and leads to dumb
| outcomes.
|
| The truth is the young are more adaptable than the old. It's
| the adults we need to worry about.
| alkindiffie wrote:
| Would be great if EFF also sets up a phone verification hub.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45989890
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