[HN Gopher] The Age Verification Trap: Verifying age undermines ...
___________________________________________________________________
The Age Verification Trap: Verifying age undermines everyone's data
protection
Author : oldnetguy
Score : 1076 points
Date : 2026-02-23 14:22 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (spectrum.ieee.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (spectrum.ieee.org)
| RockRobotRock wrote:
| Here is an example of the problem with inference-based
| verification:
|
| https://streamable.com/3tgc14
| ck2 wrote:
| if you are paying for internet access you have to be over 18, no?
|
| and if you have internet access without paying, that means
| someone else is legally responsible for your access
|
| "problem solved" ?
| malfist wrote:
| Famously children can only access internet from wifi paid for
| by their parents.
|
| I'm not for these draconian age verification nonsense, but this
| isn't a valid argument.
| bondarchuk wrote:
| It is a valid alternative avenue towards a legal
| implementation of "child safeguarding" IMO. Someone pays for
| the internet, that person is responsible for what minors do
| on their connection. If they have trouble doing that we can
| use normal societal mechanisms like idk social services,
| education, and government messaging.
|
| This is the way it works with e.g. alcohol and cigarettes,
| most places. Famously kids can just get a beer from a random
| fridge and chug it, but someone 16/18/21+ will be responsible
| and everyone seems mostly fine with this.
| nazgulsenpai wrote:
| If protecting children were the actual intended outcome,
| this would have been the logical way to do it. Since it
| isn't what they're actually doing, instead using personally
| identifiable information to establish your age, we can only
| assume it's an attempt to deanonymize the internet.
| alt227 wrote:
| This will never work.
|
| I regularly talk to other parents at the school gates who
| have no idea that permissions on mobiles even exist, let
| alone that they can choose what they let each app have
| access to.
|
| The general public people just dont care.
| bondarchuk wrote:
| Yes, it's hard work to build a society where people
| behave responsibly and in their best interests. But I'd
| prefer we actually put in the effort rather than go for
| the easy authoritarian option out of basically laziness
| and contempt for your fellow man.
|
| (fwiw I regularly talk to parents who are quite aware of
| various parental controls and use them effectively,
| combined with talking to their kids and just general good
| parenting practices)
| moritonal wrote:
| This is the answer. If you provide internet access to someone,
| you're responsible for it. It's a generally established law
| from a Torrenting PoV, so isn't it equally applicable to
| downloading content unsuitable for children. Sure it'll destroy
| offering free wifi, but that always was tricky from a legal PoV
| around responsibilities.
| daveoc64 wrote:
| > if you are paying for internet access you have to be over 18,
| no?
|
| No, that's not the case.
| john_strinlai wrote:
| every contract by every ISP i have ever signed has required
| me to be over the age of 18 to enter the contract.
| daveoc64 wrote:
| In many countries, it's possible to get a prepaid SIM with
| data access - without any ID or age requirement whatsoever.
| john_strinlai wrote:
| ah, fair, but with an easy enough fix. make data-enabled
| SIM cards be 18+ (or whatever age). show ID to the store
| clerk at purchase time, just like if you were buying
| smokes/alcohol.
| bennyp101 wrote:
| And then how does public wifi work? Stand outside a
| Weatherspoons, or just walk down a highstreet with free
| internet, back to square one
| john_strinlai wrote:
| seems dead simple to me: if you host public wifi, you are
| responsible for the people that use it. easy!
|
| just like you _already are_ responsible for what happens
| on your free public network (torrenting, hacking, CSAM,
| etc.) in most jurisdictions
|
| (for what its worth, i think age verification is dumb.
| but it looks like we're getting it one way or the other)
| gpderetta wrote:
| Ideally the law would require websites (and apps) to provide
| some signed age requirement token to the client (plus possibly
| classification) instead of the reverse. Similarly OS and web
| clients should be required to provide locked down modes where
| the maxium age and/or classification could be selected. As a
| parent I would the be able to setup my child device however I
| wish without loss of privacy.
|
| Is it bypassable by a sufficiently determined child? Yes, but
| so it is the current age verification nonsense.
| sidewndr46 wrote:
| unless your kid never goes to public school that isn't true
| zobzu wrote:
| or goes outside at all. free wifi is everywhere
| alt227 wrote:
| Free wifi generally is everywhere, however it is often
| heavily filtered and firewalled to stop being doing things
| the internet owner wouldnt approve of.
| edgyquant wrote:
| Everything is a trade off in the world. I think that people who
| are anti-id ignore this but for me personally it's harder and
| harder to accept the trade offs of an internet without id. AI has
| only accelerated this, I don't want to live in a world where the
| average person unknowingly interacts with bots more than other
| individuals and where black market actors can sway public opinion
| with armies of bots.
|
| I think most people are aligned here, and that an internet
| without identification is inevitable whether we like it or not.
| zenbowman wrote:
| 100% correct. At this point the harms to children from social
| media use are very well documented.
|
| Like everything else in society, there are tradeoffs here, I'm
| much more concerned with the damage done to children's
| developing brains than I am to violations of data privacy, so
| I'm okay with age verification, however draconian it may be.
| meowface wrote:
| We need to destroy privacy and anonymity online for the noble
| goal of the government banning teenagers from looking at
| Twitter and Instagram?
|
| If it's a concern, parents can prevent or limit their
| children's use. If all this were being done to prevent
| consistent successful terrorist attacks in the US with tens
| of thousands of annual casualties, I'd say okay maybe there
| is an unavoidable trade-off that must be made here, but this
| is so absurd.
| edgyquant wrote:
| It isn't just about teenagers though I think I outlined
| that? We need to make sure people online are real people
| and yes we should prevent kids from being exposed to
| algorithms designed to addict then.
| meowface wrote:
| Adults are nearly as susceptible to such addiction. If
| this is the goal then the actual legislation should be to
| prohibit social media companies from doing it to anyone.
| (I think this would be government overreach and a
| possible first amendment violation, though. I say this as
| a center-left person who deeply hates what Musk has done
| to Twitter. I would even describe myself as an anti-free
| speech person; I just respect the nation's laws and the
| principle that the state should not be able to imprison
| you just for speech.)
| logifail wrote:
| > At this point the harms to children from social media use
| are very well documented
|
| Our middle child (aged 12) has an Android phone, but it has
| Family Link on it.
|
| Nominally he gets 60 mins of phone time per day, but he
| rarely even comes close to that, according to Family Link he
| used it for a total of 17 minutes yesterday. One comes to the
| conclusion that with no social media apps, the phone just
| isn't that attractive.
|
| He seems to spend most of his spare time reading or playing
| sports...
| zobzu wrote:
| most kids dont have parents who care to that degree.
| logifail wrote:
| As part of the unofficial bargain in which we limit
| screen time I get to spend a big chunk of my spare time
| driving him (and his siblings) to and from various sports
| fixtures.
|
| Just one of the many joys of parenting :)
| edgyquant wrote:
| I commend this but I always try to think about the
| arguments for something like cigarettes. People didn't buy
| the argument that parents need to be preventing their kids
| from smoking
| modo_mario wrote:
| Do you genuinely believe the major tech companies and gov
| reps actually want to close their addiction revenue taps?
| spwa4 wrote:
| ID verification doesn't protect against that. Why not? Because
| there are a _lot_ of people that will trade their ID for a
| small amount of money, or log someone /something in. IDs are
| for sale, like everyone who was ever a high school student
| knows for "some" reason.
|
| Plus what you're asking would require international id
| verification for everyone, which would first mostly make those
| IDs a lot cheaper. But there's a second negative effect. The
| organizations issuing those IDs, governments, are the ones
| making the bot armies. Just try to discuss anything about
| Russia, or how bad some specific decision of the Chinese CCP
| is. Or, if you're so inclined: think about how having this in
| the US would mean Trump would be authorizing bot armies.
|
| This exists within China, by the way, and I guarantee you: it
| did not result in honest online discussion about goods,
| services or politics. Anonymity is required.
| Levitz wrote:
| Astroturfing was already a thing.
|
| Identification fixes nothing here, you log with your account,
| plug in the AI.
|
| The problems with social media have nothing to do with ID and
| everything to do with godawful incentives, the argument seems
| to be that it's a large price to pay but that it's worth it.
| Worth it for what? The end result is absolutely terrible either
| way
| iamnothere wrote:
| Astroturfing will still be a thing after ID. What, you think
| the government is going to go after their own bot armies?
| edgyquant wrote:
| I think it would be a lot more difficult for anyone to do
| and it isn't like people will be using government platforms
| at least not in the west
| Levitz wrote:
| >I think it would be a lot more difficult for anyone to
| do
|
| Why? Like, what makes you think that?
| fyredge wrote:
| Because of ID tracking? Say you have attach your
| government approved ID to use social media. It is now
| trivial to check how many accounts you have made and how
| much you have posted. You certainly can't be posting
| faster than the fastest typist in the world. And if
| you're mostly just copy pasting, is the quality of the
| posts actually worth engaging with?
|
| While I am not against internet ID, there is a case to be
| made for social media for the harms they are causing.
| amiga386 wrote:
| Let's say the government issues hundreds of thousands of
| IDs to people who don't exist and uses them to verify
| bots (or room full of paid humans) that post pro-
| government messages all day, at "normal" rates that a
| human posts.
|
| It's amazing how there is a _much_ larger crowd, of
| completely real people, who approve of the government,
| than those nasty dissenters. We know they 're real people
| because we trust the government vouching for its own IDs.
|
| And because of the real ID policy, the government can
| also ask the social media company for the ID used by
| opposed posters, and find out where they live and "visit"
| them, maybe "warn" them.
|
| Hooray for democracy!
| RockRobotRock wrote:
| (Disclaimer: American perspective)
|
| Why don't we have PKI built in to our birth certificates and
| drivers licenses? Why hasn't a group of engineers and experts
| formed a consortium to try and solve this problem in the least
| draconian and most privacy friendly way possible?
| zobzu wrote:
| newer passports and driver licenses do.
| amiga386 wrote:
| You're not thinking more than one step ahead. If you let a
| third party define who "has ID", "is human", etc. you give that
| third party control over you. You already gave control of your
| attention away to the sites who host the UGC, now you also give
| away control of your sense of reality.
|
| At any point they can tell a real human what they can and can't
| say, and if they go against their masters, their "real human"
| status is revoked, because you trust the platform and not the
| person.
|
| If we want to go full conspiritard, we could accuse those of
| wanting to control speech to be the financial backers of those
| flooding social media with AI slop:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-gGLvg0n-uY -- this fictional
| video thematically marries Metal Gear Solid 2's plot with
| current events: "perfect AI speech, audio and video synthesis
| will drown out reality [...] That is when we will present our
| solution: mandatory digital identity verification for all
| humans at all times"
| edgyquant wrote:
| I am though. In the world I live in I already have to give
| power over myself to corporations and a government, I don't
| buy this as an argument for continuing to let internet
| companies skirt existing laws.
| amiga386 wrote:
| I don't know what to say. You _will_ live in a world
| "where the average person unknowingly interacts with bots
| more than other individuals and where black market actors
| can sway public opinion with armies of bots", _even more
| so_ after you and I and everyone on the planet are
| compelled to provide our identity at all times.
|
| The various government actions trying to force "robust" age
| verification on the internet are being woefully naive in
| trusting _other_ internet companies and letting them skirt
| existing laws _on data protection_.
|
| That's not even mentioning other factions whose real goal
| is in shutting down legal speech that doesn't meet their
| Christian agenda:
| https://theintercept.com/2024/08/16/project-2025-russ-
| vought...
|
| You are being a useful idiot, sorry. Your weakness is what
| politicians exploit when they say "think of the children",
| you fail to see the amoral power-grabs hiding beneath their
| professed sentiment.
|
| I don't want you encouraging people to demand _my_ identity
| because you trust "authorities" taking _yours_
| egorfine wrote:
| 1) ID checks will not close the trade off. Real IDs are easily
| available on the market. Thus criminals will used them no
| problem. It's the law-abiding privacy-minded people (like me)
| who would be hurt the most.
|
| 2) Your point is valid. I too want to know whether I am
| engaging with a bot or a person. This is impossible now and it
| will be impossible once ID check becomes ubiquitous.
|
| 3) I will be happy to see (or not) a blue checkmark by the
| profile name. Just like in Twitter. That's enough.
| modo_mario wrote:
| > I think that people who are anti-id ignore this
|
| No we do not.
|
| >I don't want to live in a world where the average person
| unknowingly interacts with bots more than other individuals and
| where black market actors can sway public opinion with armies
| of bots.
|
| That is not the argument for identification on many places on
| the internet. It's not even the argument that the gov reps
| pushing it typically make. And why would it be. The companies
| that go along with all this don't want to get rid of all bots
| and public opinion campaigns. They make money off of many of
| those.
| kristopolous wrote:
| No the argument is bad actors will reliably find a way to
| bypass these systems at an industrial scale while you'll
| instead snag honest people instead.
|
| Look at the facebook real name policy.
| fyredge wrote:
| This sounds a lot like the pro-gun rhetoric of bogging down
| the "good" gun owners but not doing enough to the "bad" gun
| owners.
| kristopolous wrote:
| It's not really the same. The good guy/bad guy gun rhetoric
| has deeply racist roots.
|
| But beyond that we can look at places similar things have
| been rolled out.
|
| Facebook has a real name policy and is overflowing with
| fraudsters and ai slop
|
| Although I can't figure out how to sign up for a second
| telegram account with their phone number restriction that
| hasn't stopped multiple scammers hitting me up every day on
| the service.
|
| On YouTube, their demographics has ladies in their 30s
| watching nursery rhyme videos by the millions because
| mothers give their children their phone.
|
| On social media, scammers tend to take over the accounts of
| dead people because the deceased don't update their
| passwords after a data breach. Your ID card policy, however
| strict, isn't going to stop the most common attack vector
|
| So I don't know what you're trying to solve with id checks:
| parents hand their logged in devices to their children,
| scammers raid the accounts of the verified dead, existing
| systems clearly aren't working and strictly enforcing
| ineffective security theater isn't going to change this
|
| I'm all for empathizing with the concerns but doing
| something that doesn't work isn't a solution
| notTooFarGone wrote:
| >Some observers present privacy-preserving age proofs involving a
| third party, such as the government, as a solution, but they
| inherit the same structural flaw: many users who are legally old
| enough to use a platform do not have government ID.
|
| So there is absolutely no way to change that and give out IDs
| from the age of 14? You can already get an ID for children in
| Germany https://www.germany.info/us-de/service/reisepass-und-
| persona...
|
| This is a problem that has to be solved by the government and not
| by private tech companies.
|
| This is a lazy cop out to say "we have tried nothing and we are
| all out of ideas"
| logifail wrote:
| > This is a problem [..]
|
| (This is a genuine question) please could you describe the
| underlying problem that age verification is attempting to
| solve?
| crazypyro wrote:
| I don't think that's what the original comment was discussing
| at all...
|
| If governments want to require private companies to verify
| ages, those same governments need to provide accessible ways
| for their citizens to get verification documents, starting
| from the same age that is required.
| notTooFarGone wrote:
| Not my point in the comment but my personal opinion:
|
| To regulate access to addicting material. This is done in the
| physical world - why should digital be lawless when it
| applies to the same human behaviors?
|
| I've been addicted to a lot of digital media parts in harmful
| ways and I had the luck and support to grow out of most of
| it. A lot of people are not that lucky.
| meowface wrote:
| What problem? I don't think internet websites and apps actually
| need to know the face, age, or name of their users if their
| users don't want to provide that information. With exceptions
| for things like gambling websites.
| infotainment wrote:
| Why should gambling be the exception? One could argue other
| app-based vices are just as bad, if not worse.
| meowface wrote:
| Crippling debt from unwise impulsive gambling by a teenager
| is probably worse than whatever occurs from a teenager
| scrolling Twitter all day.
|
| The latter may not be great, but eating potato chips all
| day also probably isn't, and I don't think the government
| should outlaw minors eating potato chips. Plus it's
| variable: some get positive, educational, pro-social,
| productive outcomes from social media and some don't.
| Gambling is always bad in the limit.
|
| A simple rule could probably be that if a website can make
| you lose over $200 of real money, it should probably
| require age verification. I don't see why other things
| should.
| swiftcoder wrote:
| > Crippling debt from unwise impulsive gambling by a
| teenager is probably worse than whatever occurs from a
| teenager scrolling Twitter all day.
|
| The cynic in me says that's not why governments want
| identity confirmation for gambling websites. It's so you
| can't dodge the taxman
| meowface wrote:
| That's true. It's probably at least 50% the latter. And I
| don't really blame them.
| zenbowman wrote:
| Exactly right. Also, better to be overly restrictive here given
| the well documented harms of social media on young minds. If
| the law stipulates that you must be 15 to obtain social media
| access, and most people don't get their IDs until 18, then most
| people will stay off social media for another three years: no
| big deal.
| Aerroon wrote:
| It costs money. Getting an ID here costs about 5% of minimum
| wage if you order it online + travel (you still have to travel
| there for the photos and pickup). It costs even more if you
| apply in person.
|
| You could buy 19 gallons of milk for that money (80 liters).
| notTooFarGone wrote:
| So do you buy an ID every month or can we depreciate that
| over 15 years?
| account42 wrote:
| Not unless you are offering to front everyone that money
| for no interest.
| Seattle3503 wrote:
| Providing every citizen an ID every X years at no cost
| does seem like good policy.
| Aerroon wrote:
| You have to get a new one every 5 years.
| pixl97 wrote:
| Really more so than money is the amount of time. Sitting at
| the DMV for half a day, and that is with an appointment,
| really sucks.
| iamnothere wrote:
| The problem is not that we aren't doing age verification, it's
| that a group of authoritarians are trying to force mandatory
| implementation of age verification (and concomitant removal of
| anonymity). That's the problem.
| Noaidi wrote:
| Anonymity is a myth. I am sure by now an LLM can figure out
| who you are and where you live by your HN posts alone.
| iamnothere wrote:
| Do it then
| Seattle3503 wrote:
| It seems like the solution is to provide an age verification
| mechanism with robust privacy protections. That way when we
| offer a solution that works for all of their states concerns,
| if they disagree with the privacy preserving approach we
| force them to say outright "I want to keep a record of every
| website you visit."
| summm wrote:
| Unfortunately not. They will use even the most privacy
| preserving protocol to push remote attestation of end
| devices. Which in itself is a stepping stone making their
| next steps much easier.
| fabian2k wrote:
| I'm not convinced age restrictions like this are a good idea.
| But yeah, the non-availability of IDs in the US is a self-
| inflicted problem.
|
| Another example where this plays a role are voter registration
| and ID requirements for voting in the US. It is entirely
| bizarre to me how these discussions just accept it as a law of
| nature that it's expensive and a lot of effort to get an ID.
| This is something that could be changed.
| pixl97 wrote:
| You may underestimate the levels of classism and racism in
| the US. Go on and bring up a conversation about it and you'll
| eventually get someone talking about how that would be
| socialism and we can't do that.
| bdangubic wrote:
| When one of the only two political parties does not want
| everyone to vote (cause they'd lose every election) you get
| what we got...
| triceratops wrote:
| I strongly oppose any form of "age verification" involving
| uploading your ID. That's just asking for a data breach.
|
| There are options that don't involve any ID uploads whatsoever.
| fabian2k wrote:
| That's not what this user was talking about.
|
| For example, with a German ID you can provide proof that you
| are older than 18 without giving up any identifying
| information. I mean, nobody uses this system at the moment,
| but it does exist and it works.
| triceratops wrote:
| Does the German ID system know what you are trying to
| access? Based on the requestor.
| co_king_5 wrote:
| > So there is absolutely no way to change that and give out IDs
| from the age of 14?
|
| If that happened in the US, Republicans would then:
|
| 1. Insist that non-white children carry ID at all times
|
| 2. Operationalize DHS and ICE to deport non-white children to
| foreign concentration camps.
| CrzyLngPwd wrote:
| It's just another way to surveil the population and won't cause
| any real problems for anyone who can work around it.
| cess11 wrote:
| My main takeaway from this is that politicians seem to have given
| up on making "social media" less harmful by regulating it, and
| instead focus on gatekeeping access, with the added perk of
| supplying security services and ad tyrants with yet another data
| pump.
| infotainment wrote:
| Device based attestation seems like the way to go largely; it
| doesn't _solve_ the problem, but it 's _good enough_ that it
| would cover most cases.
| alt227 wrote:
| Not really. It just pushes the responsibility onto parents, who
| already have no idea how security works or what their kids are
| doing on their phones.
| condiment wrote:
| We are missing accessible cryptographic infrastructure for human
| identity verification.
|
| For age verification specifically, the only information that
| services need proof of is that the users age is above a certain
| threshold. i.e. that the user is 14 years or older. But in order
| to make this determination, we see services asking for government
| ID (which many 14-year-olds do not have), or for invasive face
| scans. These methods provide far more data than necessary.
|
| What the service needs to "prove" in this case is three things:
|
| 1. that the user meets the age predicate
|
| 2. that the identity used to meet the age predicate is validated
| by some authority
|
| 3. that the identity is not being reused across many accounts
|
| All the technologies exist for this, we just haven't put them
| together usefully. Zero knowledge proofs, like Groth16 or STARKs
| allow for statements about data to be validated externally
| without revealing the data itself. These are difficult for
| engineers to use, let alone consumers. Big opportunity for
| someone to build an authority here.
| egorfine wrote:
| You are missing the point.
|
| They don't care whether you are 14 or not. They want your
| biometrics and identification. "Think of the children" is just
| a pretense.
| yladiz wrote:
| In general, any government already has your information, and
| it's naive to think that they don't; if you pay taxes, have
| ever had a passport, etc. they already have all identifying
| information that they could need. For services, or for the
| government knowing what you do (which services you visit),
| then a zero-knowledge proof would work in this case.
| IanCal wrote:
| The companies don't, and th government already has your
| government id.
| john_strinlai wrote:
| > _We are missing accessible cryptographic infrastructure for
| human identity verification._
|
| like most proposed solutions, this just seems overcomplicated.
| we don't need "accessible cryptographic infrastructure for
| human identity". society has had age-restricted products
| forever. just piggy-back on that infrastructure.
|
| 1) government makes a database of valid "over 18" unique
| identifiers (UUIDs)
|
| 2) government provides tokens with a unique identifier on it to
| various stores that already sell age-restricted products (e.g.
| gas stations, liquor stores)
|
| 3) people buy a token from the store, only having to show their
| ID to the store clerk that they already show their ID to for
| smokes (no peter thiel required)
|
| 4) website accepts the token and queries the government
| database and sees "yep, over 18"
|
| easy. all the laws are in place already. all the infrastructure
| is in place. no need for fancy zero-knowledge proofs or on-
| device whatevers.
| IanCal wrote:
| What you're describing is infrastructure that doesn't
| necessarily exist right now for use online, and has all the
| privacy problems described. Why should I have to share more
| than required?
| john_strinlai wrote:
| it has none of the privacy problems described, and 95% of
| the infrastructure exists right now (have you ever
| purchased smokes or alcohol?)
|
| to go on tiktok, you enter a UUID once onto your account,
| and thats it. the only person that sees your id card is the
| store clerk that glances at the birth date and says "yep,
| over 18" when you are buying the "age token" or whatever
| you want to call it. no copies of your id are made, it cant
| be hacked, theres no electronics involved at all. its just
| like buying smokes. theres no tie between your id and the
| "age token" UUID you received.
|
| theres no fanciness to it, either. itd be dead simple, low-
| tech, cheap to implement, quick to roll out. all of the
| enforcement laws already exist.
|
| > _Why should I have to share more than required?_
|
| you shouldnt. having to prove age to use the internet is
| super dumb. but thats the way the winds are blowing
| apparently. if im gonna have to prove my age to use the
| internet, id much rather show my id to the same guy i buy
| smokes from (and already show my id to) than upload my id
| to a bunch of random services.
| simoncion wrote:
| The problem with this scheme is that it's exactly as
| protective as requiring someone to tick a "I'm of legal
| age" tickbox in the software they wish to access. Anyone
| who is of legal age can buy UUIDs and pass them around to
| folks who are not.
|
| Having said that, I think having an "I'm of legal age"
| tickbox goes quite far enough.
|
| For the ultra-controlling, setting up a "kid's account"
| using the tools already provided in mainstream OS's
| [0][1] is a fine option.
|
| [0] <https://www.microsoft.com/en-
| us/microsoft-365/family-safety>
|
| [1] <https://support.apple.com/guide/mac-help/set-up-
| content-and-...>
| john_strinlai wrote:
| > _The problem with this scheme is that it 's exactly as
| protective as requiring someone to tick a "I'm of legal
| age" tickbox in the software they wish to access._
|
| no, it is exactly as protective as the protections for
| purchasing alcohol or buying smokes or other controlled
| substances/products.
|
| buying smokes/alcohol when underage is obviously harder
| than "click this box". (did you ever try to buy
| smokes/alcohol when underage? you cant just go up to the
| clerk at the store when you are 14 and say "trust me bro,
| im 18/19/21".)
|
| > _Anyone who is of legal age can buy UUIDs and pass them
| around to folks who are not._
|
| same for smoking and alcohol. i could go to the store
| right now and buy smokes, then hand them to my 10 year
| old.
|
| we have laws _already in place_ to punish selling smokes
| /alcohol to underagers, and laws for consuming
| smokes/alcohol when underage. we can apply those laws to
| your internet-age-token.
|
| most people seem fine with the current trade-off for
| smokes/alcohol. i see no reason why tiktok needs to be
| treated as more dangerous than either.
|
| > _Having said that, I think having an "I'm of legal age"
| tickbox goes quite far enough._
|
| i agree with this and everything you said afterwards. id
| rather not have any of it.
| simoncion wrote:
| > no, it is exactly as protective as the protections for
| purchasing alcohol or buying smokes...
|
| Right. That's exactly as protective as that tickbox. [0]
| As I mentioned, any of-age person can distribute those
| UUIDs to people who are not of-age. Unlike with the
| proposed ID-collection-and-retention schemes (that are
| authoritarian's wet dreams) the vendor of the UUID is not
| responsible for ensuring that that UUID is not later used
| by someone who is not of-age.
|
| If you were to -say- make alcohol vendors liable for the
| actions of of-age people who pass on alcohol to not-of-
| age people, then you'd see _serious_ attempts to control
| distribution.
|
| [0] Don't forget the existence of preexisting parental
| controls in every major OS. IME, this is a hurdle that's
| at least as difficult to surmount as the ID check done in
| non-chain convenience stores.
| john_strinlai wrote:
| > _Right. That 's exactly as protective as that tickbox.
| [0] _
|
| no, it isn't, for reasons already mentioned but i will
| say it again for clarity:
|
| - a 14 year old can click "im of age" on a checkbox.
|
| - a 14 year old cannot go into a gas station and buy
| smokes. they will be declined.
|
| > _As I mentioned, any of-age person can distribute those
| UUIDs to people who are not of-age._
|
| again... same with smokes and alcohol! but we are okay
| with how smokes and alcohol are regulated right now.
|
| tiktok is not worse than a bottle of vodka. we are okay
| with how vodka is regulated. tiktok does not need even
| more strict age-verification than vodka.
|
| it is not perfect, but it is _absolutely_ more stringent
| than a checkbox. if you still doubt me, please send one
| of your 12-14 year old family members to buy a pack of
| smokes or a bottle of vodka at the nearest store. i will
| wait for your report.
| simoncion wrote:
| Your hypothetical 14-year-old needs to first be able to
| bypass the parental controls that come with every modern
| OS. You keep ignoring that.
|
| (Also, like, did you ever go to college? Live in a dorm
| or apartment with underage students? It was _super_
| common for of-age people to buy and distribute booze to
| substantially underage students. _Everyone_ knew it was
| happening all the damn time.)
|
| > they are obviously not liable if i buy something
| legitimately, go home, and feed it to my kid. in that
| case, i am liable...
|
| And if you changed up the rules to make _them_ liable,
| you 'd see _serious_ attempts at controlling
| distribution.
|
| What has been the state of the art in parental controls
| for quite some time is like the current regulatory regime
| for booze and tobacco. The single thing that needs to
| change to make it exactly the same would be to make it
| substantially illegal for US-based publishers to _not_
| tag the porn /violence/etc that they publish with age-
| restriction tags. [0]
|
| What's being proposed and is currently implemented by
| several big-name sites is even _more_ invasive.
|
| > we are okay with how smokes and alcohol works right
| now.
|
| _I 'm_ not. Either booze and tobacco need to be made
| into Schedule I substances, or their regulation needs to
| become _much_ more lax. But I recognize that my opinion
| on the topic is considered to be somewhat out-of-the-
| ordinary.
|
| [0] This might already _be_ the law of the land right
| now. I haven 't bothered to check.
| john_strinlai wrote:
| > _Your hypothetical 14-year-old needs to first be able
| to bypass the parental controls that come with every
| modern OS. You keep ignoring that._
|
| because they dont matter. parental controls exist today
| but have been deemed ineffective for the age verification
| conversation, for whatever stupid reason. so we are stuck
| trying to figure something else out. do i wish we could
| just use the existing basic parental controls instead of
| whatever the hell we are going to end up with? obviously!
|
| the easiest "something else" is to piggy-back on existing
| age-restriction regulations (i.e. smokes, alcohol,
| gambling) because they have _broad_ (obviously not
| ubiquitous, but _broad_ ) support. we have decades of
| experience with them.
|
| and, to that end, you create a little token and you show
| your id to the store clerk to buy it. the "protect the
| children" people are satisfied (its the same process
| everything else age-restricted!), and i dont need to send
| my id to a peter thiel company. it preserves privacy, it
| re-uses existing laws, it re-uses existing
| infrastructure, etc.
| simoncion wrote:
| > ...but have been deemed ineffective for the age
| verification conversation, for whatever stupid reason.
|
| Consider that such arguments (just like the arguments of
| Prohibitionists that resulted in the rise to power of
| Organized Crime) are made in a varied combination of
| ignorance and bad faith, and that we should loudly reject
| them in the strongest possible terms.
|
| To be clear, I'm asserting that the claim that
| preexisting parental controls are insufficient is an
| argument made in ignorance and bad faith, not your
| assertion that the argument is being made.
| john_strinlai wrote:
| > _Consider that such arguments [...] we should loudly
| reject them in the strongest possible terms._
|
| me and you can yell into the void all we want. and i will
| continue to do so!
|
| but, age verification is already here. so while i
| continue to yell about how stupid it is, i am _also_
| going to propose options that i feel like are _less bad_
| than what is being actively rolled out _right now_.
| simoncion wrote:
| > ...i am also going to propose options that i feel like
| are less bad than what is being actively rolled out right
| now.
|
| As I mentioned, what you propose is _exactly_ as useful
| and protective as what we have now. What we have now has
| been roundly rejected by the authoritarians pushing this
| expansion of power and influence. Your time and energy
| are better spent resisting the expansion, rather than
| suggesting alternatives that those authoritarians will
| _never_ accept (and tacitly accepting their premise in
| the process).
| john_strinlai wrote:
| > _As I mentioned, what you propose is exactly as useful
| and protective as what we have now._
|
| i disagree, for reasons i have already said and for other
| reasons i havent yet.
|
| but it is clear that we wont end up agreeing, so no need
| for us to keep going.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| A 21-year-old in a dorm buying booze for a 19 year old
| dorm-mate is a bit different from doing the same for a 14
| year old.
| simoncion wrote:
| What about a 17 year old? 16? Many folks who go to
| college are younger than people seem to realize... and
| teenagers of all ages often like to party.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| It's very rare to run into anyone under 18 living in a
| college dorm. There are a few 17 year olds, even fewer
| younger than that. Sure there are high schoolers taking
| classes, but as full-time residential students? Not many.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| I mostly agree but unless these UUID age tokens are of
| limited life, it's more like buying the kid an unlimited
| amount of vodka and cigarettes with one action. If the
| tokens were good for one use, or a short time period, it
| would be more workable.
| john_strinlai wrote:
| sure, make them good for like 1 year or 3 months or
| something.
|
| or make them good for 1 month, but sold in 12-packs.
| simoncion wrote:
| > or make them good for 1 month, but sold in 12-packs.
|
| ...if these tokens are as protective as you claim they
| are, why would it be important for them to expire?
|
| Would you also advocate for the token issued by
| authoritarians' preferred "send a video of yourself [0]
| and/or your government-issued photo ID [1] to some random
| third-party for-profit company" check to frequently
| expire? If not, what's up with the discrepancy?
|
| [0] Or of someone physically near you who is of-age
|
| [1] See [0]
| john_strinlai wrote:
| you seem really eager to catch me in some sort of "aha
| gotcha!" scenario so that you can... what? feel good
| about winning a hackernews argument? you are trying to
| argue with someone who largely shares the exact same
| views as you. the only difference between us is that im
| offering up alternatives and you are hoping that if you
| yell loud enough that everyone will forget about age
| verification.
|
| age verification is already being rolled out. so we can
| either suck it up and try advocate for less shitty
| versions, or we can bicker amongst ourselves while
| id/video-based age verification continues to be
| implemented everywhere.
|
| > _...if these tokens are as protective as you claim they
| are, why would it be important for them to expire?_
|
| read above for the conversation that occurred.
|
| > _Would you also advocate for the token issued by
| authoritarians ' preferred "send a video of yourself [0]
| and/or your government-issued photo ID [1] to some random
| third-party for-profit company" check to frequently
| expire? If not, what's up with the discrepancy?_
|
| a) no, obviously not, because i dont advocate for video
| or id-based age verification.
|
| b) i know that you know this, and are just pretending to
| be ignorant for some weird ass reason: various age
| verification implementations have different risks and
| benefits.
|
| for some implementations, users are forced to give up
| significant amounts of privacy in favor of increased
| accuracy. other implementations give up less privacy, at
| the risk of reduced accuracy. look at discords
| implementation for a recent example (it was easier to
| spoof the client-side verification than the server-side
| id-based one. more privacy, less accuracy). this type of
| balancing act is not new. we do the same balancing act
| with alcohol, smoking, gambling, healthcare, security,
| development, etc.
|
| so, when looking at potential mitigations for less-
| accurate methods, while maintaining the same level of
| privacy, a sensible option is to make the UUIDs time-
| bound which will limit the time an illicit token is
| valid. this makes much less sense for id/video-based
| verification, because they have higher accuracy than my
| version (paid for by giving up your privacy).
|
| ---------
|
| something you said earlier: "Your time and energy are
| better spent resisting the expansion,".
|
| so, go do that. find the people that are really pushing
| for age verification, and argue with them. instead of
| replying to me, use that time to call your state
| representative or something. im not your opponent here.
| if it were up to me, we wouldnt have age verification in
| the first place. you already _know_ that my stance is
| anti-age verification!
|
| my proposal is not perfect. i dont like age verification.
| you can have the karma from this argument, its cool, you
| can "win". what more do you want me to say?
| IanCal wrote:
| Sorry I'd misunderstood I thought you were describing
| infrastructure that already exists and making a
| comparison to just using your ID.
| mothballed wrote:
| The government will want some way to uncover who bought the
| token. They'll probably require the store to record the ID
| and pretend like since it's a private entity doing it, that
| it isn't a 4A violation. Then as soon as the token is used
| for something illegal they'll follow the chain of custody of
| the token and find out who bought it.
|
| No matter what the actual mechanism is, I guarantee they will
| insist on something like that.
| john_strinlai wrote:
| if the goal is to "protect children", or just generally
| make parts of the internet age-gated, my proposal is 100%
| fine.
|
| if the goal is "surveil everyone using the internet", yes,
| very obviously my proposal would not be selected, and you
| will have to upload your id to various 3rd-party id
| verifiers.
| mothballed wrote:
| I think something like your proposal actually sounds the
| most logical. I just think they will bolt on chain of
| custody tracking to it, while promising it will only be
| used for finding "terrorists" or something.
| procflora wrote:
| Yes, while I was reading the article I couldn't help but
| think about notaries public. Seems like something like
| that would be government's go-to for this if they weren't
| quite so overfed on tech industry contributions that lead
| them down the path of AI solutions.
|
| I'm not sure that's the right answer here, but I think it
| ticks a lot boxes for the state.
| Seattle3503 wrote:
| The nice thing about something bolted on like that is
| that it is not an essential feature of the core design
| and has no bearing on the original goal. It can be
| removed or reformed. The same isn't true of the
| approaches we are heading towards now.
| mothballed wrote:
| Even if the problem is perfectly solved to anonymize the ID
| linked to the age, you still have the issue that you need an ID
| to exercise your first amendment right. 1A applies to all
| people, not just citizens, and it's considered racist in a
| large part of the US to force someone to possess an ID to prove
| you are a citizen (to vote) let alone a person (who is >=
| 18y/o) w/ 1A rights.
| JanisErdmanis wrote:
| A significant obstacle to adoption is that cryptographic
| research aims for a perfect system that overshadows simpler,
| less private approaches. For instance, it does not seem that
| one should really need unlinkability across sessions. If that's
| the case, a simple range proof for a commitment encoding the
| birth year is sufficient to prove eligibility for age, where
| the commitment is static and signed by a trusted third party to
| actually encode the correct year.
| condiment wrote:
| I agree. I've been researching a lot of this tech lately as a
| part of a C2PA / content authenticity project and it's clear
| that the math are outrunning practicality in a lot of cases.
|
| As it is we're seeing companies capture IDs and face scans
| and it's incredibly invasive relative to the need - "prove
| your birth year is in range". Getting hung up on unlinkable
| sessions is missing the forest for the trees.
|
| At this point I think the challenge has less to do with the
| crypto primitives and more to do with building infrastructure
| that hides 100% of the complexity of identity validation from
| users. My state already has a gov't ID that can be added to
| an apple wallet. Extending that to support proofs about
| identity without requiring users to unmask huge amounts of
| personal information would be valuable in its own right.
| zarzavat wrote:
| https://xkcd.com/538/
|
| Your crypto nerd dream is vulnerable to the fact that someone
| under 18 can just ask someone over 18 to make an account for
| them. All age verification is broken in this way.
|
| There is a similar problem for people using apps like Ubereats
| to work illegally by buying an account from someone else.
| However much verification you put in, you don't know who is
| pressing the buttons on the screen unless you make the process
| very invasive.
| condiment wrote:
| You seem to have missed requirement #3 -> tracking and
| identifying reuse.
|
| An 18-year-old creating an account for a 12-year-old is a
| legal issue, not a service provider issue. How does a gas
| station keep a 21-year-old from buying beer for a bunch of
| high school students? Generally they don't, because that's
| the cops' job. But if they have knowledge that the 21-yo is
| buying booze for children, they deny custom to the 21-yo.
| This is simple.
| zarzavat wrote:
| > How does a gas station keep a 21-year-old from buying
| beer for a bunch of high school students?
|
| They don't? Teenagers can easily get their hands on
| alcohol... you just need to know the right person at school
| who has a cool older brother. If their older brother is
| really cool they can get weed too!
|
| The police absolutely do not have the time to investigate
| the crime of making a discord account for someone.
| DeathArrow wrote:
| I wonder how much time we have before being asked to enter the
| government issued ID in a card reader so websites can read age
| and biometric data from the chip.
| bondarchuk wrote:
| It's kind of weird to me how every article on this topic here has
| people rushing to comment within a couple minutes with some
| generic "yes I too support ID checks for internet use!". Has the
| vibe really shifted so much among tech-literate people?
| yogurt-male wrote:
| Could be astroturfing
| iamnothere wrote:
| Although there is some organic support, there is a lot of
| coordinated astroturfing. It's apparent if you watch the
| discussions across platforms, there are obvious shared talking
| points that come in waves.
|
| Governments (and a few companies) really want this.
| paulryanrogers wrote:
| > Governments (and a few companies) really want this.
|
| The cynic in me fears they don't want a privacy-preserving
| solution, which blinds them to 'who'. Because that would
| satisfy parents worried about their kids and many privacy
| conscious folks.
|
| Rather, they want a blank check to blackmail or imprison only
| their opponents.
| mcmcmc wrote:
| That's not cynicism, it's reality.
| phendrenad2 wrote:
| I think Larry (not, not that Larry, the other one) spilled
| the beans in 2024:
|
| "Citizens will be on their best behavior, because we're
| constantly recording and reporting everything that is going
| on" - Larry Ellison
|
| (I seem to recall from the context of the quote, he isn't
| saying this is the future he wants, but it's a future he's
| not particularly opposed to)
|
| But the real threat is "accidental" database leaks from
| private websites. Let's say you live in a state where
| abortion isn't legal, and you sign up for a web forum where
| people discuss getting out-of-state abortions. As soon as
| that website is required to collect real names (which it
| will be), it becomes unusable, because nobody can risk
| getting doxxed.
| hellojesus wrote:
| Maybe the US gov needs more tor users and is therefore
| doing this to drive more traffic to the onion network.
| throw__away7391 wrote:
| This is not a cynical take, it is blindingly obvious. Right
| now, governments around the world are watching, salivating
| over what is effectively remote control over the literal
| thoughts of and total surveillance over their entire
| population. They are itching insatiably to get control over
| these systems.
| klsdjfdlkfjsd wrote:
| In my state, I caught a circuit court judge shilling on a
| certain well known "social media" site for the
| establishment of a lottery in our state. He framed it as
| a "We the People vs the corrupt politicians" issue--with
| him being firmly on the side of We the People of course.
|
| When I challenged him on his rhetoric, my comment
| INSTANTLY disappeared. I thought maybe it was a fluke, so
| I tried again, and the next comment insta-disappeared
| also.
|
| Soon thereafter I was locked out of the account and asked
| to provide a "selfie" to confirm my identity. (I
| declined.)
| anjel wrote:
| Add to this that more and more sites and services are
| hostile to VPN connections and obfuscated email address for
| account registration. Worse still is that for existing
| accounts introducing ID req'ts, the next step in these
| changes is your prior anonymous activity could easily
| become a retro-liablit.y
| cyanydeez wrote:
| "A few"?
|
| "Real" user verification is a wet dream to googlr, meta, etc.
| Its both a ad inflation and a competive roadblock.
|
| The benefits are real: teens are being preyed upon and
| socially maligned. State actors and businesses alike are
| responsible.
|
| The technology is not there nor are governments coordinating
| appropiate digital concerns. Unsurprising because no one
| trusts gov, but then implicitly trust business?
|
| Yeah, so obviously, its implementation that will just move
| around harms.
| delusional wrote:
| > there is a lot of coordinated astroturfing. It's apparent
| if you watch the discussions across platforms, there are
| obvious shared talking points that come in waves.
|
| Is that really evidence of astroturfing? If we're in the
| middle of an ongoing political debate, it doesn't seem that
| far fetched for me that people reach similar conclusions.
| What you're hearing then isn't "astro-turfing" but one
| coalition, of potentially many.
|
| I often hear people terrified that the government will have a
| say on what they view online, while being just fine with
| google doing the same. You can agree or disagree with my
| assesment, but the point is that hearing that point a bunch
| doesn't mean it's google astroturfing. It just means there's
| an ideology out there that thinks it's different (and more
| opressive seemingly) when governments do it. It means all
| those people have a similar opinion, probably from reading
| the same blogs.
| zug_zug wrote:
| Well the hard thing about astroturfing is that only the
| people running the platform have the hard data to prove it
| beyond any reasonable doubt.
|
| But I don't think we need 99.99% confidence -- isn't even
| acknowledged that 30% of twitter is bots or something? I
| think it's safe to conclude there's astroturfing on any
| significant political issue.
|
| Also as far as documented cases, there were documented
| cases of astroturfing around fracking [1], or pesticides
| [2]
|
| 1.
| https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/2057047320969435
| 2. https://www.corywatson.com/blog/monsanto-downplay-
| roundup-ri...
| iamnothere wrote:
| An ex friend of mine was once involved in some thing
| where they got paid to astroturf for Monsanto. Despite
| living in the city, they suddenly developed deeply
| informed opinions about glyphosate and how important it
| is for agriculture, and they would share these opinions
| aggressively in online discussions along with pro-
| Monsanto articles. It was disturbing to watch because the
| behavior was completely uncharacteristic (and seemingly
| in conflict with their core beliefs). One day they quit
| doing it just as suddenly.
|
| This was before the heyday of influencer culture, so I
| can only imagine how sophisticated things are nowadays.
| It's not always bots.
|
| I recommend the book _Trust Me, I'm Lying_ for a deep but
| somewhat dated look at the online influence industry.
| zug_zug wrote:
| That's fascinating. I'd love to read an account from
| somebody who's been through that pipeline about how it
| worked.
| klsdjfdlkfjsd wrote:
| > it doesn't seem that far fetched for me that people reach
| similar conclusions.
|
| How do you suppose it is that millions of people, separated
| by vast geographic distances, somehow all reach similar
| conclusions all at once?
|
| Related: How do you suppose it is that out of 350-700+
| million people (depending on whose numbers you believe),
| there's always only two "choices" and both of them suck?
| fyredge wrote:
| In the same way that they came up with the idea of divine
| being(s) in the image of man that rule nature.
|
| In the same way that patriarchy rose amongst them all.
|
| In the same way that a shared currency was deemed
| necessary.
|
| Escpecially in matters of governance, there is something
| to be said about how humans like to organise themselves.
| No country has truly escaped capitalism so far.
| klsdjfdlkfjsd wrote:
| You noticed the facts, but completely failed to
| understand how the facts came to be.
|
| > In the same way that they came up with the idea of
| divine being(s) in the image of man that rule nature.
|
| Thanks to the diligent efforts of the Priesthood, of
| course, who never cease in their 'education' of humanity
| as to the 'truth.'
|
| Before the world came under centralized control of the
| Priesthood, there were many tribes of 'Nephelim'--or no-
| faith-God-people. (ne-phe-el-im.)
|
| (Nope, it has nothing to do with aliens. Guess who is
| telling that lie also?)
|
| > In the same way that patriarchy rose amongst them all.
|
| Not among my ancestors the Cherokee. They were a
| matriarchy. They were wiped out (genocided) by foreigners
| who were controlled by a paternal Priesthood.
|
| In our own history, we were once ruled by such a
| priesthood. They were called the Nicotani, or Ani-Kutani.
| They grew insolent and arrogant and eventually crossed
| the line when one of them raped a man's wife. They were
| subsequently exterminated, to the last man.
|
| > In the same way that a shared currency was deemed
| necessary.
|
| By whom? Who made that decision for you? Is it you who is
| deciding to get rid of cash and make everything digital
| too, so that you can be even more easily tracked,
| controlled, monitored...enslaved?
|
| > Escpecially in matters of governance, there is
| something to be said about how humans like to organise
| themselves.
|
| That's just the thing. It's not _you_ organizing
| _yourself_.
| nostrebored wrote:
| > It's apparent if you watch the discussions across
| platforms, there are obvious shared talking points that come
| in waves
|
| This is true of basically any issue discussed on the
| internet. Saying it must be astroturfing is reductive
| EarlKing wrote:
| More than a few companies. Nothing would allow advertisers to
| justify raising ad rates quite like being able to point out
| that their users are real rather than bots.
| bilbo0s wrote:
| I think we should be careful of writing off this sea change
| as simple professional influence campaigns. That kind of
| thinking is just what got Trump to the Whitehouse, and is
| currently getting the immigrants rounded up.
|
| Things that didn't seem likely to have broad support
| previously, now are seen as acceptable. In the 90's no one
| could envision rounding up immigrants. No one could envision
| uploading an ID card to use ICQ. No one could envision the
| concept of DE-naturalization or getting rid of birthright
| citizenship.
|
| Today, in the US for instance, there are entire new
| generations of people alive. And many, many people who were
| alive in the 90's are gone. Well these new people very much
| _can_ envision these things. And they seem to have stocked
| the Supreme Court to make all these kinds of things a
| reality.
|
| All because the rest of us keep dismissing all of this as
| just harmless extreme positions that no one in society
| _really_ supports. We have to start fighting things like this
| with more than, "It's not real."
| ReptileMan wrote:
| >In the 90's no one could envision rounding up immigrants.
|
| Both Clinton and Obama deported way more people than Trump.
| co_king_5 wrote:
| > Both Clinton and Obama deported way more people than
| Trump.
|
| You are correct. Further, I suggest that Democrats and
| Democrat-controlled media cultivate a delusional
| worldview which allows their supporters to ignore the
| right-wing brutality consistently and continually imposed
| by Democrat leaders.
|
| How do you feel about the second Trump admin's
| nationwide, made-for-TV DHS/ICE siege?
| ReptileMan wrote:
| Ineffective. Too much noise, too little removals.
| co_king_5 wrote:
| Do you think Trump's first term was a failure because he
| didn't deport as many people as Obama?
| ReptileMan wrote:
| Trump's first term was a total failure for many reasons.
| He didn't implement nothing of his agenda successfully.
| klsdjfdlkfjsd wrote:
| If one feels anything about it at all, it's a sign
| they're taking the Made-for-TV movie seriously.
|
| Never take TV seriously.
|
| The key mistake is even watching it in the first place.
|
| "If you don't read the newspaper, you're uninformed. If
| you do read the newspaper, you're misinformed." - Mark
| Twain
| co_king_5 wrote:
| > "If you don't read the newspaper, you're uninformed. If
| you do read the newspaper, you're misinformed." - Mark
| Twain
|
| I love the quote, thanks for sharing.
| klsdjfdlkfjsd wrote:
| Here is a more extended quote from Jefferson on the same
| subject:
|
| "To your request of my opinion of the manner in which a
| newspaper should be conducted, so as to be most useful, I
| should answer, 'by restraining it to true facts and sound
| principles only.' Yet I fear such a paper would find few
| subscribers.
|
| It is a melancholy truth, that a suppression of the press
| could not more completely deprive the nation of its
| benefits, than is done by its abandoned prostitution to
| falsehood. Nothing can now be believed which is seen in a
| newspaper. Truth itself becomes suspicious by being put
| into that polluted vehicle. The real extent of this state
| of misinformation is known only to those who are in
| situations to confront facts within their knowledge with
| the lies of the day.
|
| I really look with commiseration over the great body of
| my fellow citizens, who, reading newspapers, live and die
| in the belief that they have known something of what has
| been passing in the world in their time; whereas the
| accounts they have read in newspapers are just as true a
| history of any other period of the world as of the
| present, except that the real names of the day are
| affixed to their fables.
|
| General facts may indeed be collected from them, such as
| that Europe is now at war, that Bonaparte has been a
| successful warrior, that he has subjected a great portion
| of Europe to his will, etc., etc.; but no details can be
| relied on.
|
| I will add, that the man who never looks into a newspaper
| is better informed than he who reads them; inasmuch as he
| who knows nothing is nearer to truth than he whose mind
| is filled with falsehoods and errors. He who reads
| nothing will still learn the great facts, and the details
| are all false."
|
| - Thomas Jefferson
| bilbo0s wrote:
| Obama wasn't around in the 90's.
|
| And Clinton only deported 2 million across his entire 8
| years in office. With a laser focus on convicted
| criminals as part of a war on drugs. (Now the efficacy of
| the old "War on Drugs" can be argued, but the numbers
| can't. We have the records.)
|
| I think you're conflating the number of "returns",
| defined in the 90's as people who were not allowed to
| enter at the border; and "deportations", defined in the
| 90's as people who were _in_ the US, and then we put on a
| plane back out of the US. IE - "Returns" were people who
| showed up at the border, sea port, airport or border
| checkpoint; asked to get in, and we said no. Basically,
| the nice people.
|
| What you mean is that Clinton simply didn't let anyone
| _into_ the country. This is true. (Again, we have the
| records. Clinton refused entry to the US more than any
| president in US history.) He didn 't, however, round up
| immigrants living in the US on this scale and deport them
| like we're seeing today. People would never have allowed
| for that.
|
| To put numbers on it, Trump is on year 5, and has already
| processed more formal removal orders than Clinton did by
| year 8. Not only that, voluntary removals were near non-
| existent under Clinton in the 90's. Today, for just this
| year alone, they sit at around 1.5 million.
| iamnothere wrote:
| You don't think the current admin uses influence campaigns?
| They are called "influence" campaigns for a reason; they
| are intended to shape both beliefs and behaviors.
|
| Things that have broad support now may have that support
| primarily because of longstanding influence campaigns.
|
| Both the widespread growth in smoking, and its later drop
| in popularity, are often credited to determined influence
| campaigns. You are not immune to propaganda!
| reliabilityguy wrote:
| > there is a lot of coordinated astroturfing.
|
| Interesting. Are you saying all the concerns raised by the
| proponents of ID verification are invalid and meritless? For
| example,
|
| 1. Foreign influence campaigns
|
| 2. Domestic influence campaigns
|
| 3. Filtering age-appropriate content
|
| I'm sure there are many other points with various degree of
| validity.
| hellojesus wrote:
| If you drive out everyone with identity filters, those
| folks will naturally flock to sites run in nations without
| the same controls. I don't think you really solve anything
| except to push traffic elsewhere.
|
| Instead it would be more appropriate to let sites pass
| headers, such as "we have adult content", thst you could
| filter on the network or client side. It's still voluntary,
| of course. Anyone will just visit sites that don't have the
| checks if necessary.
| simoncion wrote:
| > Interesting. Are you saying all the concerns raised by
| the proponents of ID verification are invalid and
| meritless?
|
| In the US, #1 and #2 are invalid and meritless. Wholly and
| without reservation. One of the huge reasons for the First
| Amendment is to ensure that people are able to counter lies
| uttered in the public sphere with truth.
|
| #3 is handled by parental controls that have existed in
| mainstream OSs for quite some time now. [0][1][2] However,
| those preexisting parental controls don't justify
| additional expansion of the power and influence of
| authoritarians, so here we are.
|
| [0] <https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/family-
| safety>
|
| [1] <https://support.apple.com/guide/mac-help/set-up-
| content-and-...>
|
| [2]
| <https://support.google.com/android/answer/16766047?hl=en-
| rw>
| reliabilityguy wrote:
| > In the US, #1 and #2 are invalid and meritless. Wholly
| and without reservation. One of the huge reasons for the
| First Amendment is to ensure that people are able to
| counter lies uttered in the public sphere with truth.
|
| How does digital ID prevents you from speaking out? For
| example, 2nd amendment requires a lot of hoops in some
| jurisdictions, which were deemed constitutional, and not
| violating 2nd amendment. Same with the 1st amendment. You
| can argue that with digital IDs there will be less
| privacy and anonymity than before, but it's a different
| story.
|
| Moreover, influence campaigns are not about truth or
| lies, but about making the public loose face on the
| institutions. A good example of it today is Russia, where
| the public does not believe that democratic elections are
| possible at all, in principle.
|
| > #3 is handled by parental controls that have existed in
| mainstream OSs for quite some time now.
|
| It is not handled perfectly at all, and easily bypassed.
| To pretend that information access on the internet can be
| regulated through parental controls is ridiculous.
| simoncion wrote:
| > How does digital ID prevents you from speaking out?
|
| What? In the US, arguments #1 and #2 are entirely invalid
| and meritless. As I mentioned: One of the
| huge reasons for the First Amendment is to ensure that
| people are able to counter lies uttered in the public
| sphere with truth.
|
| You address lies with _truth_. I don 't see what
| requiring videos of your face and photo ID has to do with
| this.
|
| > A good example of it today is Russia, where...
|
| We're talking about the US. Many other governments (and
| governed people) do not agree that freedom of speech is
| important or even desirable.
|
| > It is not handled perfectly at all, and easily
| bypassed.
|
| For quite some time now it has been handled at least as
| well as these new schemes that authoritarians (and those
| that profit from their actions) are strong-arming
| companies into preemptively complying with.
|
| > Moreover, influence campaigns are not about truth or
| lies, but about making the public loose face on the
| institutions.
|
| If the institution that's being _actually_ damaged by
| losing face [0] is (or is intimately associated with) one
| that has spent the last many decades normalizing the
| replacement of cogent political discussion with Twitter-
| grade zingers and ragebait, and is now finding it
| difficult to engage in cogent discussion then, well, they
| 've made the bed they're now forced to lie in. The way
| out of that bed is sustained, good faith, cogent
| discussion, rather than building dossiers and the
| automated infrastructure for information restriction.
|
| But, in truth, most of the folks pushing these systems
| aren't interested in cogent discussion and are arguing
| for them in some combination of ignorance and bad faith.
|
| [0] As is often the case in matters like this, I expect
| the claimed damage is far, far greater than the actual
| damage.
| embedding-shape wrote:
| > It's apparent if you watch the discussions across
| platforms, there are obvious shared talking points that come
| in waves.
|
| How do you know what is "shared talking points" vs "humans
| learning arguments from others" and simply echoing those?
| Unless you work at one of the social media platforms, isn't
| it short of impossible to know what exactly you're looking
| at?
| iamnothere wrote:
| It could be, and you're right that I can't prove anything
| beyond a doubt. But there is an entire industry built
| around professionally manipulating public opinion for
| money, and the groups most interested in deanonymizing the
| internet are well resourced. Simple inductive reasoning
| will tell you that a portion of the support is likely
| astroturfed.
| parineum wrote:
| > there are obvious shared talking points that come in waves.
|
| Groups of people who wake up at the same time of the day
| often have a tendency to be from a similar place, hold
| similar values and consume similar media.
|
| Just because a bunch of people came to the same conclusion
| and have had their opinions coalesce around some common
| ideas, doesn't mean it's astroturfing. There's a noticeable
| difference between the opinions of HN USA and HN EU as the
| timezones shift.
| dang wrote:
| What are some links to HN comments that you (or anyone else)
| feel is "coordinated astroturfing"?
|
| The site guidelines ask users to send those to us at
| hn@ycombinator.com rather than post about it in the threads,
| but we always look into such cases when people send them.
|
| It almost invariably turns out to simply be that the
| community is divided on a topic, and this is usually
| demonstrable even from the public data (such as comment
| histories). However, we're not welded to that position--if
| the data change, we can too.
| pessimizer wrote:
| > What are some links to HN comments that you (or anyone
| else) feel is "coordinated astroturfing"?
|
| I don't think that there is any definitive way to prevent
| or detect this anymore. The number of personnel dedicated
| to online manipulation has grown too much, and the
| technology has advanced too far.
|
| These are now discussions that states and oligarchs have
| interests in, not Juicero or smart skillet astroturfing.
| And this remains a forum that people use to indicate elite
| support for their arguments.
| dang wrote:
| There's never been a definitive way and yes, the bar is
| probably rising.
|
| All is not lost, though: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRang
| e=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
| iamnothere wrote:
| Thanks for replying. I will make an effort to compile a
| list when I see it in the future. I've observed several
| cases where green names (and a few longstanding accounts)
| all made the same point, posted in the same time frame,
| with language matching what I would see on Reddit and X. It
| could just be organic but it was very suspicious.
|
| I do think that HN does a better job than most at
| containing this (thanks for your hard work).
| pixl97 wrote:
| I mean there has always been some part of the tech literate
| people that were like that, they were just less likely to post
| about it on forums. Heck after the eternal September it wasn't
| uncommon for 'jokes' about requiring a license to use the
| internet.
| illumanaughty wrote:
| There's a high chance the government is attempting to influence
| public opinion by using botted comments, which is easier than
| ever to pull off.
| co_king_5 wrote:
| This is what the LLMs are actually good for.
| muyuu wrote:
| it's a solid business model actually
| co_king_5 wrote:
| I'm inclined to agree.
|
| I also think the FUD they've succeeded in creating around
| the use of LLMs for code generation (there's a portion of
| the management class that seems to genuinely believe that
| Claude Code is AGI) is the greatest marketing operation
| of our lifetimes.
| ep103 wrote:
| Yeah, I've been saying for years that LLMs are a technology
| that basically unlock three major new technologies:
|
| 1. Automatic shaping of online community discussions
| (social media, bots, etc)
|
| 2. Automatic datamining, manipulating and reacting to all
| digitally communicated conversations (think dropping calls
| or MITM manipulation of conversations between organizers of
| a rival poltical party in swing districts proir to an
| election, etc. CointelPro as a service)
|
| 3. Giving users a new UI (speech) with which they can
| communicate with computer applications
| delusional wrote:
| Unless you live in North Korea, no there is not. This is pure
| conspiracy theory.
| jpfromlondon wrote:
| well at least your screen name is accurate, which is more
| than can be said of your comment.
| swolios wrote:
| Seems like these articles and the subsequent top replies
| saying
|
| "use a token from the device so the ID never leaves, this is
| way better right!"
|
| This is the true objective. They actually want DEVICE based
| ID.
|
| I want LESS things that are tied to me financially and
| legally to be stolen when(not if) these services and my
| device are compromised.
| EmbarrassedHelp wrote:
| If you dig into the CEO of the The Age Verification Providers
| Association (AVPA), he has spent years going out of his way
| to spam pro-age verification propaganda across random sites
| like Techdirt and Michael Geist's blog.
|
| Its not unreasonable to assume that he would seek to automate
| his bullshit.
|
| See here for some examples:
|
| https://www.techdirt.com/2022/08/26/who-would-benefit-
| from-c...
|
| https://www.michaelgeist.ca/2025/10/senate-bill-would-
| grant-...
| MaKey wrote:
| This is what I was wondering too. It doesn't seem genuine. Most
| people in tech I know will strongly oppose ID checks for
| internet use, rightfully so.
| worldsayshi wrote:
| I think that not doing partial-identity checks invite bot
| noise into conversations. We could have id checks that only
| check exactly what needs to be checked. Are you human? Are
| you an adult? And then nothing else is known.
| MaKey wrote:
| Identity checks do not prevent bot noise. They just
| increase the difficulty for bot operators a bit (steal /
| buy identities or verified accounts). Added bonus for them:
| Their bot comments now appear more authentic.
| meowface wrote:
| It's very odd. I see it everywhere I go.
|
| I think a lot of the younger generation supports it, actually.
| They didn't really grow up with a culture of internet anonymity
| and some degree of privacy.
| heliumtera wrote:
| The audience shifted from tech-literate to the opposite.
| badgersnake wrote:
| Too may in tech for the money that's for sure. No
| fundamentals, just drilled leetcode.
| bgro wrote:
| It's bots pushing another false narrative. You'll notice this
| in anything around politics or intelligence the past 10+ years,
| with big booms around 2016 and 2024 "for some reason"
| luke727 wrote:
| No. There are significant numbers of real people who
| genuinely support this type of thing. Dismissing it as "bots"
| or a "false narrative" leads to complacency that allows this
| stuff to pass unchallenged.
| vaylian wrote:
| The problem is: The people who typically support this type
| of thing are either technically illiterate and they support
| it, because it sounds good. Or they are promoting these
| laws because they actually want more surveillance and
| control. It's not about protecting children.
|
| I still haven't read any truly compelling argument, why
| this type of surveillance is actually effective and
| proportionate.
| forgotaccount3 wrote:
| As a tech-literate person, I'm not 100% against the concept of
| ID if only because I think people will be more reasonable if
| they weren't anonymous.
|
| This conflicts with my concerns about government crackdowns and
| the importance of anonymity when discussing topics that cover
| people who have a monopoly on violence and a tendency to use
| it.
|
| So it's not entirely a black/white discussion to me.
| 2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote:
| That's what I believe as well. Anons have turned the internet
| into an unsafe cesspit. It's the opposite of a "town square."
| finghin wrote:
| Internet anonymity is FAR from something new.
| rogerrogerr wrote:
| The problem is this is only true for values of "reasonable"
| that are "unlikely to be viewed in a negative light by my
| government, job, or family; either now or at any time in the
| future". The chilling effect is insane. There was a time in
| living memory when saying "women should be able to vote" was
| not a popular thing.
|
| I mean, this is _literally the only thing needed_ for the
| Trump admin to tie real names to people criticizing
| $whatever. Does anyone want that? Replace "Trump" with
| "Biden", "AOC", "Newsom", etc. if they're the ones you
| disagree with.
| co_king_5 wrote:
| > Replace "Trump" with "Biden", "AOC", "Newsom", etc. if
| they're the ones you disagree with.
|
| Stop trying to reason with fascists.
|
| Everyone in the world knows that the Democrats you named
| are too ideologically aligned with right-wing hatred to
| ever leverage the repressive power of the state apparatus
| in the same way Republicans do.
| mikkupikku wrote:
| Obama carried on where Bush left off. I think Biden was
| at least marginally better, at the very least I admire
| him for ripping off the Afghanistan bandaid, but the
| amount of effort he put onto rolling back executive
| overreach was minimum if anything.
| rogerrogerr wrote:
| You're saying that Biden, AOC, and Newsom are
| "ideologically aligned with right-wing hatred"? This is
| not something I've ever heard a human being say. Almost
| afraid to ask, but where's that coming from?
| co_king_5 wrote:
| Why did AOC stop calling them "concentration camps" when
| Biden took office?
| armchairhacker wrote:
| I think _opt-in_ ID is great. Services like Discord can
| require ID because they are private services*. Furthermore, I
| think that in the future, a majority of people will stay on
| services with some form of verification, because the
| anonymous internet is noisy and scary.
|
| The underlying internet should remain anonymous. People
| should remain able to communicate anonymously with consenting
| parties, send private DMs and create private group chats, and
| create their own service with their own form of identity
| verification.
|
| * All big services are unlikely to require ID without laws,
| because any that does not will get refugees, or if all big
| services collaborate, a new service will get all refugees.
| triceratops wrote:
| > I think people will be more reasonable if they weren't
| anonymous.
|
| I've seen people post appalling shit on fuckin LinkedIn under
| their own names.
|
| Strong moderation keeps Internet spaces from devolving into
| cesspools. People themselves have no shame.
| subscribed wrote:
| Same. Also on Facebook and Nextdoor (with real names and
| addresses).
|
| Real name moderator is a fallacy.
| PaulKeeble wrote:
| Both Google and Facebook have enforced real identity and its
| not improved the state of peoples comments at all. I don't
| think anonymity particular changes what many people are
| willing to say or how they say it, people are just the
| creature you see and anonymity simple protects them it
| doesn't change their behaviour all that much.
| otterley wrote:
| When you're young, the overwhelming and irrepressible desire to
| overcome society's proscriptions to satisfy your intellectual
| and sexual curiosity is natural and understandable. The open
| Internet made that easier than ever, and I enjoyed that freedom
| when I was younger--though I can't say it was totally harmless.
|
| When you're older and have children--especially preteens and
| teenagers--you want those barriers up, because you've seen just
| how fucked up some children can get after overexposure to
| unhealthy materials and people who want to exploit or harm
| them.
|
| It's a matter of perspective and experience. As adults age,
| their natural curiosity evolves into a desire to protect their
| children from harm.
| miroljub wrote:
| So you basically want to prevent your children from doing
| what you did at their age?
|
| And you don't mind that freedoms of all of us would be
| restricted as a result?
|
| And then, we keep blaming boomers for those restrictions.
| co_king_5 wrote:
| > And you don't mind that freedoms of all of us would be
| restricted as a result?
|
| Usually the people who say things like that really just
| want to restrict everyone's freedoms. Everything else is
| just bluster.
| otterley wrote:
| Freedom to do what, exactly? You realize that the extreme
| opposite of laws and restrictions meant to maintain a
| working social order is anarchy, right?
| co_king_5 wrote:
| > Freedom to do what, exactly?
|
| You may be failing to comprehend the concept of
| "freedom".
| otterley wrote:
| Please, O wise one, explain "freedom" to the political
| scientist and lawyer you're talking to. Let me get my
| popcorn first.
| co_king_5 wrote:
| I am so sorry. I didn't realize you had a *political
| science* degree.
|
| I'll get my simpleminded ass out of here leave this
| discussion to the scientists.
| otterley wrote:
| Alternatively, you could provide a substantive and
| respectful argument instead of a snipe, as you should
| have done in the first place.
| co_king_5 wrote:
| I'm sorry but I don't think I have the proper training to
| debate someone so far outside of my intellectual weight
| class.
| miroljub wrote:
| > Please, O wise one, explain "freedom" to the political
| scientist and lawyer you're talking to. Let me get my
| popcorn first.
|
| If you think only "political scientists and lawyers" have
| to decide what a freedom is, you have quite a
| totalitarian mindset.
|
| If you have some arguments, pray tell. "I'm the smartest
| guy here" is not an argument. It's just something an NPC
| would say when they run out of arguments.
|
| PS: This is not ad hominem. It's a dismissal of your
| claim of authority.
| otterley wrote:
| I'm afraid you missed the point of my reply. You have to
| assume here that the people you're arguing with may, in
| fact, be as smart as, or even more knowledgeable than you
| regarding certain subjects; and that dismissive replies
| like "You may be failing to comprehend the concept of
| 'freedom'" put you way out of line and at risk of having
| your ass handed to you. Come armed with substance, not
| snipes.
| miroljub wrote:
| Where I said that?
| otterley wrote:
| You didn't say that; the person I was responding to did.
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47123782
| mothballed wrote:
| There's 190,000 pages of CFR that are essentially bound
| as law, almost entirely written and maintained by
| unelected bureaucrats.
|
| They've been deciding what "freedom" is for a long time
| (even deciding what constitutional rights are, on
| occasion, see ATF bureaucrats constantly publishing and
| changing rules re-deciding what constitutional restraints
| they think there are on the 2A).
|
| Of course, these "scientist and lawyers" know they have
| this power, and are so seeped in it, they occasionally
| forget when they step out of the ivory tower that the
| plebs (and indeed, the foundational ideals USA was built
| on written by those such as Locke) usually either
| disagree with it or aren't aware that much of the USA
| functions under "credentialism/technocrat makes right"
| and the scientist and the lawyer as the arbiter of
| freedom.
|
| This feels like one of those moments when the technocrats
| forget that they've shed the thin facade they hide
| behind.
| otterley wrote:
| No political thread would be complete without a Second
| Amendment absolutist joining the conversation in order to
| derail it. They're joining sooner than ever!
| mothballed wrote:
| The opposite of something like Bastiat's ideal of the law
| is something more like the law of tyranny or law of the
| plunderer. Anarchy I place somewhere closer to the middle
| -- better than the law of a tyrant because at least under
| anarchy the law of the tyrant isn't legitimized even if
| it still might be enforced by might.
| otterley wrote:
| Yes, in exactly the same way that my dad would want me to
| only use SawStop table saws so that I don't lose a finger
| like he did.
|
| As for "freedoms," you're not free to vote or drink alcohol
| below a certain age. And before the internet, minors
| couldn't purchase pornography, either. Some people perceive
| this change as a return to normal, not an egregious
| destruction of freedom.
| mitthrowaway2 wrote:
| SawStop table saws still suffer from kickback like other
| table saws, which is arguably much more dangerous than
| losing a finger and can even cause lethal injury. The
| SawStop mechanism might provide an illusion of safety
| that results in users being less careful with their work.
|
| I think the solution we really need is age verification
| for table saws. Of course, it goes without saying that
| the saw should also monitor the user's cuts to make sure
| they're connected with the right national suppliers who
| can supply material to meet their needs, and to ensure
| that you aren't using the saw to cut any inappropriate
| materials from unregistered sources.
| otterley wrote:
| Ah, yes, the old "safety mechanism doesn't protect
| against all dangers, therefore it has no value" argument.
| Right.
|
| The door is over there. Take the baby out with the
| bathwater as you leave. -->
| miroljub wrote:
| > As for "freedoms," you're not free to vote or drink
| alcohol below a certain age. And before the internet,
| minors couldn't purchase pornography, either. Some people
| perceive this change as a return to normal, not an
| egregious destruction of freedom.
|
| I am not talking about pornography or alcohol at all.
|
| I hope you are aware that requiring an ID to surf the
| internet leads to total censoring and self-censoring of
| the complete internet. There goes your privacy,
| anonymity, and right to free speech.
|
| If your country's regime really wanted to address
| pornography or alcohol, I'm pretty sure they would be
| able to shut it down without requiring everyone's
| identity. The issue is, they are just using these topics
| to manipulate people, and you are failing to that trap.
| otterley wrote:
| > requiring an ID to surf the internet
|
| Who's proposing this? I don't want to argue over a straw
| man.
| miroljub wrote:
| Age verification === require an ID
| otterley wrote:
| Right. I meant the "to surf the internet" part. Who's
| proposing this, exactly? No government is mentioned in
| the article that is doing or considering this.
|
| They _are_ talking about it in the context of "high
| risk" services and social media, but not the Internet as
| such.
| phoronixrly wrote:
| > When you're older and have children--especially preteens
| and teenagers--you want those barriers up, because you've
| seen just how fucked up some children can get after
| overexposure to unhealthy materials.
|
| You mean that you shirk your responsibility to teach your
| child how to protect themself on the Internet, and instead
| trust the faceless corp to limit their access at the cost of
| everyone's privacy? How does this make sense...
| otterley wrote:
| If a business demands you reveal your identity as a
| condition of use, and you would rather maintain your
| anonymity, you can choose not to use that business. It's
| not like these companies are providing essential services
| necessary for life.
|
| Heck, you can't even obtain housing -- which _is_ an
| essential service -- without having to provide identity in
| most cases.
| 2duct wrote:
| Some people would argue though that if the friend group
| is on Facebook/Discord or whatever, and they aren't going
| to move off to cater to the person rejecting those
| services, then those services are at least essential to
| maintaining those social ties. They decided that giving
| up their data was a tradeoff worth it.
|
| What remains to be seen is if the outcome of teenagers
| becoming social pariahs is really worse than the
| alternatives.
| otterley wrote:
| If not joining social media with friends has been
| seriously detrimental to teens by making them social
| pariahs, I'm sure we'd have heard plenty of horror
| stories by now, as these services have been around for
| over 20 years. Compare against the horror stories we
| _have_ heard about those who have gone down the dark
| roads social media has opened to them that ended in
| tragedy.
| gertlex wrote:
| They may be looking at the societal level and saying: "I
| can attempt to teach my kids best practices, but I've
| learned I sure can't rely on my peers to do the same with
| their kids...", then feeling like the outcome of that, if
| left as-is, is societal decline... and then believing that
| something needs to be done beyond the individual level.
| subscribed wrote:
| The only thing this is going to achieve is to bar unverified
| users form the vaguely reputable and mainstream places into
| the small, completely unregulated spaces, sites and networks.
|
| I presume you prefer hard requirement of IDs.
|
| I'm saying this will make kids go to i2p, tor, to the obscure
| fora in countries not giving a f* about western laws.
|
| As a parent to the teens and teens, THIS makes me concerned.
| The best vpns are very hard to detect (I know, I try it
| myself).
| otterley wrote:
| > I'm saying this will make kids go to i2p, tor, to the
| obscure fora in countries not giving a f* about western
| laws.
|
| Some will, but most won't. Similarly, most kids who are
| dissuaded from buying alcohol because they don't have ID
| are not going to break the law to get it, or switch to hard
| drugs as an alternative.
|
| You can't let perfect be the enemy of better.
| jraby3 wrote:
| I used to be so against this but after the never ending cat and
| mouse game with my kids (especially my son) I don't think the
| tech crowd really appreciates how frustrating it is and how
| many different screens there are.
|
| Tons of data also showing higher suicide rates, depression
| rates, eating disorders etc. so it's not as if there is no good
| side to this.
| modo_mario wrote:
| You are the one handing them those screens.
| cataphract wrote:
| If they are so intent on disobeying what makes you they won't
| just use a VPN or ask someone older to login for them (or any
| other workaround, depending on the technology)?
| zer00eyz wrote:
| > Tons of data also showing higher suicide rates
|
| Here is the data:
|
| https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/66/wr/mm6630a6.htm
|
| and the more recent data:
|
| https://afsp.org/suicide-statistics/
|
| I was a child of the 90's, where the numbers were higher,
| where we had peak PMRC.
|
| > depression rates
|
| Have these changed? Or have we changed the criteria for what
| qualifies as "depression"? We keep changing how we collect
| data, and then dont renormalized when that collection skews
| the stats. This is another case of it, honestly.
|
| > eating disorders
|
| Any sort of accurate data collection here is a recent
| development:
|
| https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7575017/
|
| > never ending cat and mouse game with my kids (especially my
| son)
|
| Having lived this with my own, I get it. Kids are gonna be
| kids, and they are going to break the rules and push limits.
| When I think back to the things I did as a kid at their age,
| they are candidly doing MUCH better than I, or my peer group
| was. Drug use, Drinking, ( https://usafacts.org/articles/is-
| teen-drug-and-alcohol-use-d... ) teen pregnancy are all down
| ( https://www.congress.gov/crs-product/R45184 )
| voidUpdate wrote:
| I think the tech crowd appreciates how hard it is to lock
| down access to tech, since they were the kids bypassing the
| restrictions
| 2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote:
| Its weird how all these 1,000 IQ innovators suddenly can't
| figure it out.
|
| I dont think they want to figure it out. They think the
| internet should be stagnant unchanging and eternal as it
| currently exists because it makes the most money. If you
| disagree you're either a normie, bot, or need to parent harder
| or something. There is nothing you can do don't dare try to
| change it.
| coffeefirst wrote:
| There's some nuance here.
|
| Realizing that much of the internet is totally toxic to
| children now and should have a means of keeping them out is
| distinct from agreeing to upload ID to everything.
|
| A better implementation would be to have a device/login level
| parental control setting that passed age restriction signals
| via browsers and App Stores. This is both a simpler design and
| privacy friendly.
| mcmcmc wrote:
| I like this take. Ultimately the only people responsible for
| what kids consume are the parents. It's on them to control
| their kids' internet access, the government has no place in
| it. If you want to punish someone for a child being exposed
| to inappropriate content, punish the negligence of the
| parents.
| fluoridation wrote:
| It doesn't sound simple. Now there needs to be some kind of
| pipeline that can route a new kind of information from the OS
| (perhaps from a physical device) to the process, through the
| network, to the remote process. Every part of the system
| needs to be updated in order to support this new
| functionality.
| csunbird wrote:
| and is it easier to implement id checks for each online
| account that people have, had, and will ever have in the
| future?
|
| parents need to start parenting by taking responsibility on
| what their kids are doing, and government should start
| governing with regulations on ad tech, addictive social
| media platforms, instead of using easily hackable platforms
| for de anonymization, which in turn enable mass identity
| theft.
| fluoridation wrote:
| >and is it easier to implement id checks for each online
| account that people have, had, and will ever have in the
| future?
|
| No, I think both ideas are bad.
| bigfishrunning wrote:
| It's not simple, but it's also not new. mTLS has allowed
| for mutual authentication on the web for years. If a
| central authority was signing keys for adults, none of the
| protocol that we currently use would need to change
| (although servers would need to be configured to check
| signatures)
| fruitworks wrote:
| now?
| grvdrm wrote:
| I've thought the same.
|
| At least here in US: Google/Apple device controls allow app
| to request whether user meets age requirements. Not the
| actual age, just that the age is within the acceptable range.
| If so, let through, if not, can't proceed through door.
|
| I know I am oversimplifying.
|
| But I like this approach vs. uploading an ID to TikTok.
| Lesser of many evils?
| subscribed wrote:
| This also means the only operating systems allowing access to
| the internet will be these with the immense surveillance and
| ad-infested.
| coffeefirst wrote:
| Not at all. You require websites to respect the signal of
| its set just like GPC. If there's no signal it fails open.
| And if a kid installs Linux and sets the signal themselves,
| well, who cares, they can also sneak into R rated movies.
| It's enough friction to kill the ubiquity.
| tlogan wrote:
| The industry clearly prefers a system in which using the
| internet requires full identification. There are many powerful
| interests that support this model:
|
| - Governments benefit from easier monitoring and enforcement.
|
| - The advertising industry prefers verified identities for
| better targeting.
|
| - Social media companies gain more reliable data and
| engagement.
|
| - Online shopping companies can reduce fraud and increase
| tracking.
|
| - Many SaaS companies would also welcome stronger identity
| verification.
|
| In short, anonymity is not very profitable, and governments
| often favor identification because it increases oversight and
| control.
|
| Of course, this leads to political debate. Some point out that
| voting often does not require ID, while accessing online
| services does. The usual argument is that voting is a
| constitutional right. However, one could argue that access to
| the internet has become a fundamental part of modern life as
| well. It may not be explicitly written into the Constitution,
| but in practice it functions as an essential right in today's
| society.
| klsdjfdlkfjsd wrote:
| When anonymity is outlawed, then only outlaws will be
| anonymous.
| EmbarrassedHelp wrote:
| You are missing the age/ID verification tech companies, who
| profit from violating privacy here. They have a strong
| incentive to try and convince/trick governments into legally
| requiring their services.
| giancarlostoro wrote:
| I don't support ID for internet use, only for adult content
| specifically. There's things on Discord that would shock you to
| your core if you saw some of it, I don't think children should
| be blindly exposed to any of it. Specifically porn. Tumblr
| almost got kicked out of the app store over porn, they went the
| route of banning it and killing what to me felt like a dying
| social media platform as things stood.
|
| Do you think strip clubs and bars should stop IDing people at
| the door? I don't. Why should porn sites be any different?
| cjs_ac wrote:
| The difference is that at the strip club, you show your ID to
| the bouncer, who makes sure its valid and that the photo
| matches your face, and then forgets all about it. Online,
| that data is stored forever.
|
| The principle of online ID checks is completely sound; the
| implementation is not.
| delusional wrote:
| The implementation is sound. Instead of getting an ID, the
| bouncer gets a serial number from you, he calls his
| government contact who tells him you are of age. The serial
| number is meaningless to him.
|
| This would be impractical in meatspace, but works perfectly
| fine on the internet.
| Gracana wrote:
| Where is it implemented that way?
| delusional wrote:
| In the proposal from the European Union, and in the
| implementation in Denmark.
| Gracana wrote:
| Huh, interesting. Do you know if the government sees the
| identity of the company and the person being verified?
|
| [edit] I did a little reading and it sounds like the
| company does not query the government with your ID. You
| get the cryptographic ID from the government, and present
| it to a company who is able to verify its validity
| directly. My source is mostly this:
| https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2025/04/age-verification-
| europ...
| delusional wrote:
| If you're technically inclined I suggest you look at the
| Technical documentation for the implementation we're
| rolling out in denmark (It's in english):
| https://digst.dk/media/5gybwsaq/implementing-age-
| verificatio...
| fluoridation wrote:
| You're proposing that every porn site on the planet pings
| a user's government's API to see if they're adult or not?
| In other words, that any random site is able to contact
| hundreds of APIs.
| 9dev wrote:
| Absolutely, yes. They don't ping to see that _you_ are of
| age, but that the random challenge generated by your ID
| checks out.
| debugnik wrote:
| Where in your metaphor are the club next door using
| Persona instead of that implementation, and the EU's
| reference implementation requiring a Google Play
| integrity check to acquire a serial number in the first
| place?
| subscribed wrote:
| Instead of checking your ID, the bouncer sends you over
| to the shady broker, who takes a video of your face,
| photograph of your ID, checks you in the various
| databases (who knows, maybe you've been a bad boy
| previously), and only then gives you the permission slip
| to enter the club.
|
| The data stays with them[1].
|
| I think you grossly underplay the current practices.
|
| [1] there's no hard, irrefutable proof companies like
| Persona (intimately connected with known law abusers, ie
| US government) keep their promises or obey the law.
| ibejoeb wrote:
| That's pretty much over, too. PatronScan and others collect
| and share data as a first-class feature, e.g., to broadly
| 86 people.
|
| https://www.sacbee.com/food-drink/article231580393.html
| EmbarrassedHelp wrote:
| Until sex, sexuality, and sexual fantasies no longer have any
| potential stigma associated with them, any sort of
| verification to view mature content is unacceptable.
|
| That sort information can permanently destroy peoples lives.
| deadbabe wrote:
| Better to let a hundred people's "privacy" be violated than to
| let another child be radicalized or abused or misled by online
| predation.
| co_king_5 wrote:
| > "privacy"
|
| Why did you put "privacy" in scare quotes?
| deadbabe wrote:
| The information being collected isn't inherently private.
| Usage patterns, facial analysis, stylometry, etc.
|
| there is a lot you can do to determine a person's age
| without ever having to see a formal ID.
| baal80spam wrote:
| I don't subscribe to this. I value my privacy more.
| co_king_5 wrote:
| > Better to let a hundred Black men be hanged than to let
| another White woman be radicalized or abused or misled by
| their predation.
|
| This is how you sound to me.
| hibikir wrote:
| We have a Scylla vs Charybdis situation, where lack of ID leads
| to an internet of bots, while on the other end we get a
| dystopia where everything anyone has ever said about any topic
| is available to a not-so-liberal government. Back in the day,
| it was very clear that the second problem was far worse than
| the first. I still think it is, but I sure see arguments for
| how improved tooling, and more value in manipulating sentiment,
| makes the first one quite a bit worse than it was in, say,
| 1998.
| co_king_5 wrote:
| > Back in the day, it was very clear that the second problem
| was far worse than the first.
|
| This is still the case. The difference now is that the
| astroturfed bot accounts are pushing for fascism (I.E., the
| second problem).
| hhh wrote:
| A lot of people are unhappy with the state of the Internet and
| the safety of people of all ages on it. I believe we should be
| focusing on building a way to authenticate as a human of a
| nation without providing any more information, and try to raise
| the bar for astroturfing to be identity theft.
| blablabla123 wrote:
| I think it's quite embarrassing that the WWW exists since more
| than 3 decades and still there's no mechanism for privacy
| friendly approval for adults apart from sending over the whole
| ID. Of course this is a huge failure of governments but
| probably also of W3C which rather suggests the 100,000th
| JavaScript API. Especially in times of ubiquitous SSO, passkeys
| etc. The even bigger problem is that the average person needs
| accounts at dozens if not hundreds of services for "normal"
| Internet usage.
|
| That being said, this is a 1 bit information, adult in current
| legislation yes/no.
| beambot wrote:
| SSO and passkeys don't solve adult verification. I don't see
| how this problem is embarrassing for the www - it's a hard
| problem in a socially permissible way (eg privacy) that can
| successfully span cultures and governments. If you feel
| otherwise, then solutions welcome!
| akersten wrote:
| > and still there's no mechanism for privacy friendly
| approval for adults apart from sending over the whole ID. Of
| course this is a huge failure of governments but probably
| also of W3C
|
| I consider it a huge success of the Internet architects that
| we were able to create a protocol and online culture
| resilient for over 3 decades to this legacy meatspace
| nonsense.
|
| > That being said, this is a 1 bit information, adult in
| current legislation yes/no.
|
| If that's all it would take to satisfy legislatures forever,
| and the implementation was left up to the browser (`return
| 1`) I'd be all for it. Unfortunately the political interests
| here want way more than that.
| intended wrote:
| The vibe has shifted quite a bit among the general populace,
| not just in tech.
|
| The short version is that voters want government to bring tech
| to heel.
|
| From what I see, people are tired of tech, social media, and
| enshittified apps. AI hype, talk of the singularity, and fears
| about job loss have pushed things well past grim.
|
| Recent social media bans indicate how far voter tolerance for
| control and regulation has shifted.
|
| This is problematic because government is also looking for
| reasons to do so. Partly because big tech is simply dominant,
| and partly because governments are trending toward
| authoritarianism.
|
| The solution would have been research that helped create
| targeted and effective policy. Unfortunately, tech (especially
| social media) is naturally hostile to research that may paint
| its work as unhealthy or harmful.
|
| Tech firms are burned by exposes, user apathy, and a desire to
| keep getting paid.
|
| The lack of open research and access to data blocks the
| creation of knowledge and empirical evidence, which are the
| cornerstones of nuanced, narrowly tailored policy.
|
| The only things left on the table are blunt instruments, such
| as age verification.
| observationist wrote:
| It's inauthentic at best. The four horsemen of the infocaplypse
| are drugs, pedos, terrorists, and money laundering - they trot
| out the same old tired "protect the children!" arguments every
| year, and every year it's never, ever about protecting
| children, it's about increasing control of speech and stamping
| out politics, ideology, and culture they disapprove of. For a
| recent example, check out the UK's once thriving small forum
| culture, the innumerable hobby websites, collections of
| esoteric trivia, small sites that simply could not bear the
| onerous requirements imposed by the tinpot tyrants and
| bureaucrats and the OSA.
|
| It's _never_ fucking safety, or protecting children, or
| preventing fraud, or preventing terrorism, or preventing drugs
| or money laundering or gang activities. It 's always, 100% of
| the time, inevitably, without exception, a tool used by petty
| bureaucrats and power hungry politicians to exert power and
| control over the citizens they are supposed to represent.
|
| They might use it on a couple of token examples for propaganda
| purposes, but if you look throughout the world where laws like
| this are implemented, authoritarian countries and western
| "democracies" alike, these laws are used to control locals.
| It's almost refreshingly straightforward and honest when a
| country just does the authoritarian things, instead of doing
| all the weaselly mental gymnastics to justify their power
| grabs.
|
| People who support this are ignorant or ideologically aligned
| with authoritarianism. There's no middle ground; anonymity and
| privacy are liberty and freedom. If you can't have the former
| you won't have the latter.
| jMyles wrote:
| I highly doubt the sentiment is from real humans. If anything,
| it proves that a web-of-trust-based-attestation-of-humanity is
| the real protection the internet needs.
| stuffn wrote:
| The average tech "literate" person uses discord, social media,
| a GitHub with their real name, a verified LinkedIn, and Amazon
| Echo.
|
| These are not the same people from 30 years ago. The new
| generation has come to love big brother. All it took to sell
| their soul was karma points.
| ghaff wrote:
| Many of the things you mention are also tools that many
| people use in a professional context which mostly doesn't
| work if you try to be anonymous. Yes, some people choose to
| be pseudonymous but that mostly doesn't work if your real-
| life and virtual identities intersect, such as attending
| conferences or company policies that things you write for
| company publications be under your real name.
| worldsayshi wrote:
| There are better and there are really really bad ways to do ID
| checks. In a world that is increasingly overwhelmed by bots I
| don't see how we can avoid proof-of-humanity and proof-of-
| adulthood checks in a lot of contexts.
|
| So we should probably get ahead of this debate and push for
| good ways to do part-of-identity-checks. Because I don't see
| any good way to avoid them.
|
| We could potentially do ID checks that only show exactly what
| the receiver needs to know and nothing else.
| semi-extrinsic wrote:
| > We could potentially do ID checks that only show exactly
| what the receiver needs to know and nothing else.
|
| A stronger statement: we know how to build zero-knowledge
| proofs over government-issued identification, cf.
| https://zkpassport.id/
|
| The services that use these proofs then need to implement
| that only one device can be logged in with a given identity
| at a time, plus some basic rate limiting on logins, and the
| problem is solved.
| 9dev wrote:
| Thank you - this gets way too few attention especially
| among tech folks. People act like uploading your government
| ID to random online services was the only solution to this
| problem, which is really just a red herring.
| worldsayshi wrote:
| Yes this is what I'm thinking about!
|
| The challenge here though is to prove to the user,
| especially without forcing the user to go into technical
| details, that it is indeed private and isn't giving away
| details.
|
| The user needs to be able to sandbox an app like that and
| have full control of its communications.
| alephnerd wrote:
| > Has the vibe really shifted so much among tech-literate
| people?
|
| Yes.
|
| Or more honestly, there was always an undercurrent of
| paternalistic thought and tech regulation from the Columbine
| Massacre days [0] to today.
|
| Also for those of us who are younger (below 35) we grew up in
| an era where anonymized cyberbullying was normalized [1] and
| amongst whom support for regulating social media and the
| internet is stronger [2].
|
| The reality is, younger Americans on both sides of the aisle
| now support a more expansive government, but for _their_ party.
|
| There is a second order impact of course, but most Americans
| (younger and older) don't realize that, and frankly, using the
| same kind of rhetoric from the Assange/Wikileaks, SOPA, and the
| GPG days just doesn't resonate and is out of touch.
|
| Gen X Techno-libertarianism isn't counterculture anymore, it's
| the status quo. And the modern "tech-literate" uses GitHub,
| LinkedIn, Venmo, Discord, TikTok, Netflix, and other services
| that are _already_ attached to their identity.
|
| [0] - https://www.nytimes.com/1999/05/02/weekinreview/the-
| nation-a...
|
| [1] - https://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/14/us/suicide-of-girl-
| after-...
|
| [2] - https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/06/09/why-
| young...
| embedding-shape wrote:
| > Has the vibe really shifted so much among tech-literate
| people?
|
| Actually, yes, it seems to have shifted quite a bit. As far as
| I can tell, it seems correlated with the amount of
| mis/disinformation on the web, and acceptance of more fringe
| views, that seems to make one group more vocal about wanting to
| ensure only "real people" share what they think on the
| internet, and a sub-section of that group wanting to enforce
| this "real name" policy too.
|
| It in itself used to be fringe, but really been catching on in
| mainstream circles, where people tend to ask themselves "But I
| don't have anything to hide, and I already use my real name,
| why cannot everyone do so too?"
| bakugo wrote:
| > Has the vibe really shifted so much among tech-literate
| people?
|
| HN has largely shifted away from tech literacy and towards
| business literacy in recent years.
|
| Needless to say that an internet where every user's real
| identity is easily verifiable at all times is very beneficial
| for most businesses, so it's natural to see that stance here.
| mulmen wrote:
| Beware the vocal minority. Internet comment sections only tell
| you the sentiments of people who make comments.
|
| HN comments sentiment seems to shift over the age of the thread
| and time of day.
|
| My suspicion is that the initial comments are from people in
| the immediate social circle of the poster. They share IRC or
| Slack or Discord or some other community which is likely to be
| engaged and have already formed strong opinions. Then if the
| story gains traction and reaches the front page a more diverse
| and thoughtful group weighs in. Finally the story moves to EU
| or US and gets a whole new fresh take.
|
| I'm not surprised that people who support something are the
| ones most tuned in to the discussion because for anyone opposed
| they also have their own unrelated thing they care about. So
| the supporters will be first since they're the originators.
| salawat wrote:
| This is a VC site, when the revenue generating model of the
| Internet has strongly shifted into surveillance capitalism
| overdrive.
|
| Cui bono?
| dyauspitr wrote:
| I think so. A lot of people think the internet now is a
| somewhat negative construct and don't feel so strongly about it
| somewhat dying away.
| Aurornis wrote:
| When ID checks are rolled out there is immediate outrage.
| Discord announced ID checks for some features a couple weeks
| ago and it has been a non-stop topic here.
|
| From what I've seen, most of the pro-ID commenters are coming
| from positions where they assume ID checks will only apply to
| other people, not them. They want services they don't use like
| TikTok and Facebook to become strict, but they have their own
| definitions of social media that exclude platforms they use
| like Discord and Hacker News. When the ID checks arrive and
| impact them they're outraged.
|
| Regulation for thee, not for me.
| some_random wrote:
| There's absolutely some astroturfing happening, but I wouldn't
| discount that there is some organic support as well.
| Journalists have been pushing total de-anonymization of the
| internet for a while now, and there are plenty of people
| susceptible to listening to them.
| bacchusracine wrote:
| I think the word you're missing is fatigue.
|
| The average tech literate person keep seeing their data
| breached over and over again. Not because THEY did anything
| wrong, but because these Corpos can't help themselves. No
| matter how well the tech literate person secures their privacy
| it has become clear that some Corpo will eventually release
| everything in an "accident" that causes their efforts to become
| meaningless.
|
| After a while it's only human for fatigue to build up. You
| can't stop your information from getting out there. And once
| it's out there it's out there forever.
|
| Meanwhile every Corpo out there in tech is deliberately
| creating ways to track you and extract your personal
| information. Taking steps to secure your information ironically
| just makes you stand out more and narrows the pool you're in to
| make it easier to find you and your information. And again
| you're always just one "bug" from having it all be for nothing.
|
| I still take some steps to secure my privacy, I'm not out there
| shouting my social security information or real name. But
| that's habit. I no longer believe that privacy exists.
|
| To the extent we ever had it in the past was simply the
| insurmountable restrictions on tracking and pooling the
| information into some kind of organization and easy lookup. Now
| that it is easier and easier to build profiles on mass numbers
| of people and to organize those and rank them the illusion is
| gone. Privacy is dead. Murdered.
|
| And people are tired of pretending otherwise.
| bondarchuk wrote:
| People are saying privacy is dead for decades, yet privacy
| continually declines more and more. And there's still quite a
| ways it can go from here. The defeatist attitude only helps
| further erosion.
| Altern4tiveAcc wrote:
| It does feel like a shift, and sometimes coordinated signaling.
| This post was at the top of this thread not long ago. Now it's
| all pro-age verification posts.
| ImPleadThe5th wrote:
| I think it's complicated by the turning tide on the health
| effects of social media.
|
| So people are kind of primed for "makes sense to keep kids from
| these attention driven platforms"
|
| But I think the average person isn't understanding the
| implications of the facial/id scanning.
| enjoykaz wrote:
| Most of this debate makes more sense if the actual goal is
| liability reduction, not child safety. If it were genuinely about
| protecting kids, you'd regulate infinite scroll and algorithmic
| engagement optimization, not who can log in.
| malfist wrote:
| If the US really cared about child safety they'd go after
| people in the epstien files.
| pembrook wrote:
| As we can see from this user who has fallen ill with Epstein
| Brain, the real victims of social media algorithms are
| actually adults.
|
| He is currently prepping to overthrow his local Pizzeria
| while the rest of us argue as if social media even exists
| anymore (it doesn't, it's just algorithmic TV now).
| malfist wrote:
| Judging by your recent posting history, you spend an awful
| lot of time telling people to stop trying to hold
| pedophiles accountable. I wonder why that is.
| pembrook wrote:
| Please seek help.
| kneel25 wrote:
| Pretty sure they're doing both of those things but it takes a
| long time for the regulation to reach the final stage
| kristopolous wrote:
| I think it's because there's always a group of nosy busybodies
| finger-wagging about protecting the children and we have to do
| decorative theatrics to satiate whatever narratives they've
| convinced themselves of
| swiftcoder wrote:
| This is a group particularly beloved by politicians, because
| you can pretty much use them as a smokescreen whenever you
| want to pass authoritarian legislation...
| EmbarrassedHelp wrote:
| I bet that the Chat Control lobbyist groups are involved to
| some degree, as they tried to require age verification in
| Chat Control before it was shot down. They probably haven't
| given up after that defeat.
| dfxm12 wrote:
| Interestingly, regulating these would be good for adults as
| well. A lot of these very large online companies enjoy an
| asymmetric power advantage. We should aim to protect ourselves
| against them, in addition to our children.
| barbazoo wrote:
| I'm happy they don't because they don't know what they're
| doing. Hopefully countries prioritizing public health will
| implement a social media ban for the vulnerable population
| which gives them some time to grow up without all that garbage
| poisoning their brains. Then when they're 16 or whatever age,
| hopefully by that age we'll have realized that this is actually
| like cigarettes and everyone, all age groups treat it like
| that.
|
| Better than muddying the waters trying to make it less
| addictive but then letting them on there when their brains
| aren't ready.
| stahorn wrote:
| I think this would be good for everybody, not just kids. It
| doesn't even have to be complicated: Just that after a certain
| amount of time scrolling/watching, put in a message asking if
| it's maybe time to stop with some information about how these
| algorithms try to keep you for as long as possible. Maybe a
| link to a government page with more information.
|
| It doesn't have to be perfect and there will of course be easy
| workarounds to hid the warnings for people that want. The goal
| is to improve the situation though, not solve it perfectly.
| Like putting information about the dangers of smoking on
| packages of smokes; it doesn't stop people from smoking but it
| does make the danger very easy to learn.
| bobpaw wrote:
| Some platforms did display notices like this for a while, but
| I noticed that they stopped the practice after a few months.
| cloverich wrote:
| Most people have only a light grasp of what infinite scroll and
| algorithmic engagement optimization means. They know they like
| the scrolling apps more, but it takes a bit of research and
| education to really understand the specific mechanics and
| alternatives. We get this well as tech literate but many people
| using these apps today, are neither tech literate, nor even
| remember a world before infinite scrolling media was a thing.
| It seems incredibly obvious mechanism but I've explained it to
| people, and it takes a few times for it to really sink in and
| become a specific mental model for how they see the world.
| closeparen wrote:
| If the concern is time-wasting, even having upvotes or likes
| and sorting on them is plenty engaging. I spent thousands of
| hours as a teenager on Reddit, HN, and the old blue Facebook
| chronological feed.
| publicdebates wrote:
| Isn't this the same debate as airports post 9/11, whether you can
| have _both_ privacy and security? Seems conclusive, no.
| armchairhacker wrote:
| Age verification is very hard, because parents will give their
| children their unlocked account, and children will steal their
| parents' unlocked account. If that's criminalized (like alcohol),
| it will happen too often to prosecute (much more frequently than
| alcohol, which is rarely prosecuted anyways). I don't see a
| solution that isn't a fundamental culture shift.
|
| _If_ there 's a fundamental culture shift, there's an easy way
| to prevent children from using the internet:
|
| - Don't give them an unlocked device until they're adults
|
| - "Locked" devices and accounts have a whitelist of data and
| websites verified by some organization to be age-appropriate
| (this may include sites that allow uploads and even subdomains,
| as long as they're checked on upload)
|
| The only legal change necessary is to prevent selling unlocked
| devices without ID. Parents would take their devices from
| children and form locked software and whitelisting organizations.
| Buttons840 wrote:
| And we need a standard where websites can self-rate their own
| content. Then locked devices can just block all content that
| isn't rated "G" or whatever.
| armchairhacker wrote:
| I imagine there would be a set of filters, including some on
| by default that most adults keep for themselves. For example,
| most people don't want to see gore. More would be OK with
| sexual content, even more would be OK with swear words, ...
| 9dev wrote:
| Wrong incentive. If you don't give a shit about exposing
| children to snuff or porn, but do give a shit about page
| views and ad revenue, you obviously don't rate your content
| or rate it as G to increase that revenue.
| everdrive wrote:
| Completely agree. The internet works differently than how
| people want it to, and filtering services are notoriously easy
| to bypass. Even if these age-verification laws passed with
| resounding scope and support, what would stop anyone from
| merely hosting porn in Romania or some country that didn't care
| about US age-verification laws. The leads to run down would be
| legion. I think you could seriously degrade the porn industry
| (which I wouldn't necessarily mind) but it would be more or
| less impossible to prevent unauthorized internet users from
| accessing pornography. And of course that's the say nothing of
| the blast radius that would come with age-verification becoming
| entrenched on the internet.
| armchairhacker wrote:
| > what would stop anyone from merely hosting porn in Romania
| or some country that didn't care about US age-verification
| laws
|
| A government could implement the equivalent of China's great
| firewall. Even if it doesn't stop everyone, it would stop
| most people. The main problem I suspect is that it would be
| widely unpopular in the US or Europe, because (especially
| younger) people have become addicted to porn and brainrot,
| and these governments are still democracies.
| a456463 wrote:
| eh... they are more like `dumbocracies` with these
| measures. None of this is to protect children. Except to
| satisfy rabid parents who think the world needs to serve
| them.
| 9dev wrote:
| That isn't necessary because porn companies don't exist to
| gift orgasms, but to make money. They need US citizens to
| pay them for premium content and subscriptions, and that
| dependency means they'll have to comply with US laws.
| everdrive wrote:
| The words of someone who does not actually look at
| pornography. The vast majority of pornography-by-
| consumption is free / ad-supported. Customers are not
| "paying" and those ads are usually the bottom of the
| barrel with regard to sleaziness or legality.
| 9dev wrote:
| It's still just a sales funnel for ads or subscriptions.
| Why do you think porn sites exist?
| 2duct wrote:
| Plenty of porn exists for free, posted online by models
| or digital artists. It's archived in places that
| circumvent copyright, don't require payment or accounts,
| and are easily accessible.
| SiempreViernes wrote:
| Sure: models need to advertise to find buyers too, but
| there's certainly not as many models or rehosts if
| there's no money to be made anywhere.
| big-and-small wrote:
| > A government could implement the equivalent of China's
| great firewall. Even if it doesn't stop everyone, it would
| stop most people.
|
| Porn is not just political information about human right
| abuses, government overreach or heavily censored overview
| of concentration camps for "group X". People can live just
| fine with government censorship buying into any kind of
| propaganda.
|
| Kids would find a way to access porn though. Whatever it
| VPNs, tor or USB stick black market. Government cant even
| win war on drugs and you expect them to successfully ban
| porn. What a joke.
| logicchains wrote:
| Even China hasn't been remotely successful at banning porn,
| and it already has the great firewall and porn is illegal
| there.
| noitpmeder wrote:
| I actually don't hate this??? As long as parents can set up
| their own whitelists and it's not up to the government to have
| the final say on any particular block.
| akersten wrote:
| Parents can do this today if they wanted to
|
| The problem of "kids accessing the Internet" is a purposeful
| distraction from the intent of these laws, which is
| population-level surveillance and Verified Ad Impressions.
| armchairhacker wrote:
| Today, in practice it's not a choice, because even the most
| attentive parents fail to block internet access. Parental
| controls are ineffective, and all the kid's friends have
| access so they become alienated.
| https://beasthacker.com/til/parental-controls-arent-for-
| pare...
|
| But laws alone won't fix this, and laws aren't necessary
| (except maybe a law that prevents kids from buying phones).
| In the article, the child's devices had parental controls,
| but they were ineffective. There's demand for a phone with
| better parental controls, so it will come, and more parents
| are denying access, so their kids will become less
| alienated.
| kristopolous wrote:
| I mean look, there's a point where the manufacturers back off
| and entrust the parents.
|
| Any parent can be reckless and give their children all kinds of
| things - poison, weapons, pornographic magazines ... at some
| point the device has enough protective features and it is the
| parents responsibility.
| 2duct wrote:
| Digital media use is easier to conceal than weapons. My
| parents did not protect me from it growing up because they
| were not responsible, and I was harmed as a result. To this
| day they still do not realize I was harmed, because I did not
| tell them and we are not on speaking terms. Trying to be
| honest would have resulted in further rejection from them.
| This was on a personality level and I had no way to deal with
| this as a developing human.
|
| I could not control how my parents were going to raise me, I
| was only able to play with the hand I was dealt. I hate the
| idea that parents are sacrosanct and do not share blame in
| these situations. At the same time, if this is just the
| family situation you're given and you're handed a device
| unaware of the implications, who is going to protect you from
| yourself and others online if your parents won't? Should
| anyone?
| delusional wrote:
| How does this solve the problem at all? You're just making more
| problems. Now you have to deal with a black market of
| "unlocked" phones. You're having to deal with kids sharing
| unlocked phone. Would police have to wal around trying to buy
| unlocked phones to catch people selling them to minors? What
| about selling phones on the internet, would they check ID now?
|
| SOME parents give their children access to their ID. That is
| NOT the same as ALL parents, and therefore is not a reason not
| to give those parents a helping hand.
|
| Even just informing children that they're entering an adult
| space has some value, and if they then have to go ask their
| parents to borrow their wallet, that's good enough for me.
| armchairhacker wrote:
| It would not be solved without a culture shift. But with a
| culture shift, giving a kid an unlocked device would be as
| rare as giving them drugs.
|
| I'm sure it will occasionally happen. But kids are terrible
| at keeping secrets, so they will only have the unlocked
| device for temporary periods, and I believe infrequent use of
| the modern internet is much, much less damaging than the
| constant use we see problems from today. A rough analogy,
| comparing social media to alcohol: it's as if today kids are
| suffering from chronic alcoholism, and in the future, kids
| occasionally get ahold of a six pack.
| delusional wrote:
| Doesn't the proposal as it's being implemented in the EU
| solve the problem under the exact same argumentation? Why
| are you dismissing a one proposal to then make your own
| that has exactly the same probable challenges?
| DeathArrow wrote:
| That is actually a very good solution that is respecting
| privacy. And is much more effective than asking everyone for ID
| when opening a website or app.
| cromka wrote:
| This is Nirvana/Perfect Solution fallacy. That's like saying
| limiting smoking to 18 y/o was futile because teenagers could
| always have some other adult buy them cigs, or use fake IDs.
|
| Ridiculous take.
| akersten wrote:
| Well, age verification is the "we have to do something about
| this nebulous problem even if the best thing we can think of
| actually makes everything worse for everyone but it makes us
| feel better" fallacy, which is equally ridiculous.
| cromka wrote:
| No, it's not the same. There are anonymous solutions that
| solve this problem that are perfectly acceptable. Not
| perfect for prevention, but a good compromise nonetheless.
| Like cig/alcohol underage consumption prevention.
| akersten wrote:
| I think we totally disagree on the degree of how much
| this is actually a problem compared to how much we're
| willing to invest in it. Those anonymous solutions are
| fairly idealistic and Nirvana-esque themselves, I don't
| think they'd see wide adoption. Beyond that I'm firmly in
| the camp that age verification for the kids is a complete
| smokescreen for the actual intent of these efforts, which
| is more surveillance, so on principal I'm opposed to any
| movement in this direction and doubt we'll find common
| ground.
| cromka wrote:
| Yeah, sure, no matter the studies, no matter the
| developmental indices, ni matter the WHO, no matter the
| psychologists. Let's also talk about climate change and
| how it's up for debate?
|
| We don't disagree on whether it is actually a problem,
| you just have your opinion about facts.
| akersten wrote:
| We are arguing different things. I have never stated
| "psychological effects of the Internet aren't real and
| therefore this discussion is moot." My argument is
| "psychological effects or not (and personally I think
| they are overplayed), the privacy tradeoff of trying to
| fix them is not worth it (and I doubt any vague gestures
| in the direction of age assurance would help)." You are
| focusing on the first parenthetical but the important
| part is outside it.
|
| We also have no way to actually measure this even if we
| wanted to do an experiment. So comparing this very soft
| science to climate change is a bit out of pocket.
| cromka wrote:
| > We also have no way to actually measure this even if we
| wanted to do an experiment.
|
| Sorry, WHAT? No way to measure it? My god, are we talking
| about the same thing? Are you sure you haven't missed
| past 12-24 months of increased reporting on the matter
| from several different angles, from cognitive skills,
| anxiety, sexual drive, and so on?
|
| EOT for me.
| EmbarrassedHelp wrote:
| There is no such thing as anonymous age verification in
| practice.
| hamdingers wrote:
| For the smoking analogy to fit, you'd have to have parents
| giving their children packs of cigarettes to play with and
| then being mad at Marlboro they figured out how to smoke
| them.
| armchairhacker wrote:
| I'm saying that, in today's culture, age-gating the internet
| is likely to be much less effective than age-gating alcohol
| or tobacco. Most kids spend an appalling amount of time on
| social media (think, 5 hours/day*); most kids didn't spend
| this much time or invest this much of their lives into drugs.
|
| * according to this survey from over 2 years ago:
| https://www.apa.org/monitor/2024/04/teen-social-use-
| mental-h...
| a456463 wrote:
| not saying that I support age verification in any form, but
| you seen the vape sales?
| armchairhacker wrote:
| I like to believe that, even with the amount of kids
| vaping, there aren't nearly as many as kids on social
| media.
|
| To give perspective: in my high school, there were a few
| kids who vaped in bathrooms, but the majority (including
| me) did not; we were told many times that it was
| unhealthy, and anyone caught vaping would be suspended.
| Everyone I know (including me) had social media, we were
| not told it was unhealthy (only to not use it too much,
| not give out PII, avoid bullying, etc.), and it wasn't
| even policed in some classrooms.
| scotty79 wrote:
| Prove of adulthood should be provided by the bank after logging
| into a bank account. I'm sure parents just would let their bank
| details be stolen and such.
|
| Of course no personal details should be provided to the site
| that requests age confirmation. Just "barer of this token" is
| an adult.
| 9dev wrote:
| So we trust a bank more than the government that they won't
| extend this to earn more money by disclosing more
| information? Bad idea. You need a neutral broker.
| armchairhacker wrote:
| AFAIK today if you buy a device, the bank doesn't get the
| device-unique identifier, at best it sees the model number.
| scotty79 wrote:
| Verifying identity works best when the stakes are high. And
| there are highest in online banking.
| m4rtink wrote:
| The "Bank identity" system in Czech Republic (and likely
| other countries) can be used to log into to various
| government services. The idea is that you already
| authenticated to the bank when getting the account, so they
| can be sure it is really sou when you log in - so why not
| make it possible for you to log in to other services as well
| if you want to ?
| scotty79 wrote:
| > The "Bank identity" system in Czech Republic (and likely
| other countries) can be used to log into to various
| government services.
|
| In Poland we have the same setup.
| TZubiri wrote:
| >parents will give their children their unlocked account, and
| children will steal their parents' unlocked account.
|
| I think either is better than the staus quo. In the first case
| the parent is waiving away the protections, and in the second
| the kid is.
|
| Even if a kid buys alcohol, I think it's healthier that they do
| it by breaking rules and faking ids and knowing that they are
| doing something wrong, than just doing it and having no way to
| know it's wrong (except a popup that we have been trained by UX
| to close without reading (fuck cookie legislation))
| armchairhacker wrote:
| That would be the status quo if we had better parental
| controls.
|
| Trying to enforce parental controls via regulation may only
| be as effective as Europe enforcing the DMA against Apple.
| But maybe not, because there's a huge market; if Apple XOR
| Android does it, they'll gain market share. Or governments
| can try incentive instead of regulation (or both) and fund a
| phone with better parental controls. Europe wants to launch
| their own phone; such a feature would make it stand out even
| among Americans.
| hawk_ wrote:
| > If there's a fundamental culture shift,
|
| You mean this culture shift is needed for the masses but I
| don't think that's the case. In my widest social circle I am
| not aware of anyone giving alcohol to young kids (yes by the
| time they are 16ish yes but even that's rare). Most guardians
| would willingly do similar with locked devices.
|
| The real problem is that the governments/companies won't get to
| spy on you if locked devices are given to children only. They
| want to spy on us all. That's the missing cultural shift.
| aleph_minus_one wrote:
| > Most guardians would willingly do similar with locked
| devices.
|
| Considering the echo chamber in which I was at school, my
| friends would have simply used some Raspberry Pi (or a
| similar device) to circumvent any restriction the parents
| imposed on the "normal" devices.
|
| Oh yes: in my generation pupils
|
| - were very knowledgeable in technology (much more than their
| parents and teachers) - at least the nerds who were actually
| interested in computers (if they hadn't been knowledgeable,
| they wouldn't have been capable of running DOS games),
|
| - had a lot of time (no internet means lots of time and being
| very bored),
|
| - were willing to invest this time into finding ways to
| circumvent technological restrictions imposed upon them (e.g.
| in the school network).
| armchairhacker wrote:
| The kids in your social circle are used to not having access
| to alcohol, but they're not used to not having access to
| social media.
|
| Hypothetically, if every kid in your social circle had their
| device "locked", the adults would probably have a very hard
| time the kids away from their devices, or just relent,
| because the kids would be very unhappy. Although maybe with
| today's knowledge, most people will naturally restrict new
| kids who've never had unrestricted access, causing a slow
| culture shift.
| horsawlarway wrote:
| I don't understand how this is any better.
|
| It's my job as a parent (and I have several kids...) to monitor
| the things they consume and talk with them about it.
|
| I don't want some blanket ban on content unless it's "age
| appropriate", because I don't approve that content being
| banned. (honestly - the idea of "age appropriate" is insulting
| in the first place)
|
| Fuck man, I can even legally give my kids alcohol - I don't see
| why it's appropriate to enforce what content I allow them to
| see.
|
| And I have absolutely all of the same tools you just discussed
| today. I can lock devices down just fine.
|
| Age verification is a scam to increase corporate/governmental
| control. Period.
| aidenn0 wrote:
| > Fuck man, I can even legally give my kids alcohol - I don't
| see why it's appropriate to enforce what content I allow them
| to see.
|
| In the USA it depends on the state. Federal guidelines for
| alcohol law does suggest exemptions for children drinking
| under the supervision of their parents, but that's not
| uniformly adopted. 19 states have no such exceptions, and in
| many of the remaining 31, restaurants may be banned from
| allowing alcohol consumption by minors even when their
| parents are there.
| gmueckl wrote:
| You're assuming that this person is in the US. Alcohol is
| treated far more liberally in other places. For example, in
| some places it is legal for restaurants to serve alcohol to
| minors who are accompanied by a parent...
|
| Another thing: I fundamentally disagree with certain age
| rarings for kids content. Some explicit violence is rated
| OK for young audiences, but insert a swear word or a some
| skin and the age rating is bumped up? This rating system is
| nonhelp at all. I have to review each bit of content anyway
| before I can be certain.
| aidenn0 wrote:
| Starting a comment with "In the USA..." is the exact
| opposite of assuming a person is in the US.
| armchairhacker wrote:
| You should be able to choose what's age-appropriate for your
| kids. Giving them access to e.g. "PG-13" media when they're 9
| isn't the problem. Giving mature kids unrestricted access
| isn't a problem. The problem is culture:
|
| - Many parents don't think about restricting their kids'
| online exposure at all. And I think a larger issue than NSFW
| is the amount of time kids are spending: 5 hours according to
| this survey from 2 years ago
| https://www.apa.org/monitor/2024/04/teen-social-use-
| mental-h.... Educating parents may be all that is needed to
| fix this, since most parents care about their kids and
| restrict them in other ways like junk food
|
| - Parents that want to restrict their kids struggle with
| ineffective parental controls:
| https://beasthacker.com/til/parental-controls-arent-for-
| pare.... _Optional_ parental controls would fix this
| SiempreViernes wrote:
| > Parents that want to restrict their kids struggle with
| ineffective parental controls:
| https://beasthacker.com/til/parental-controls-arent-for-
| pare.... Optional parental controls would fix this
|
| Did you mean "mandatory" parental controls? All current
| systems are optional and as you describe they are
| frequently ineffective, so not clear why keeping things
| like they are would be different.
| rolph wrote:
| this seems to be an issue of being able to be a parent,
| period.
|
| yup we should all be able, to talk to our kids instead of
| screaming at them.
| pelotron wrote:
| People angrily replying to the top comment on this article
| are going to be pissed when they find out about this guy.
| jatari wrote:
| The law is there to protect children in the case they have
| absent/neglectful parents. Unfortunately not every child has
| a parent as aware as you.
| Aurornis wrote:
| > Age verification is very hard, because parents will give
| their children their unlocked account, and children will steal
| their parents' unlocked account
|
| More simply: If ID checks are fully anonymous (as many here
| propose when the topic comes up) then every kid will just have
| their friends' older sibling ID verify their account one
| afternoon. Or they'll steal their parents' ID when they're not
| looking.
|
| Discussions about kids and technology on HN are very weird to
| me these days because so many commenters have seemingly
| forgotten what it's like to be a kid with technology. Before
| this current wave of ID check discussions it was common to
| proudly share stories of evading content controls or
| restrictions as a kid. Yet once the ID check topic comes up
| we're supposed to imagine kids will just give up and go with
| the law? Yeah right.
| aleph_minus_one wrote:
| > If ID checks are fully anonymous (as many here propose when
| the topic comes up) then every kid will just have their
| friends' older sibling ID verify their account one afternoon.
|
| Exactly the same way that kids used in former days to get
| cigarettes or alcohol: simply ask a friend or a sibling.
|
| By the way: the owners of the "well-known" beverage shops
| made their own rules, which were in some sense more strict,
| but in other ways less strict than the laws:
|
| For example some small shop in Germany sold beverages with
| little alcohol to basically everybody who did not look
| suspicious, but was insanely strict on selling cigarettes:
| even if the buyer was sufficiently old (which was in doubt
| strictly checked), the owner made serious attempts to refuse
| selling cigarettes if he had the slightest suspicion that the
| cigarettes were actually bought for some younger person. In
| other words: if you attempted to buy cigarettes, you were
| treated like a suspect if the owner knew that you had younger
| friends (and the owner knew this very well).
| armchairhacker wrote:
| The older sibling should be old enough to know better. Or if
| they're still a kid, they can have their privileges
| temporarily revoked.
|
| This problem probably can't be solved entirely
| technologically, but technology can definitely be a part of
| solving it. I'm sure it's possible to make parental controls
| that most kids can't bypass, because companies can make DRM
| that most adults can't bypass.
| Aurornis wrote:
| > The older sibling should be old enough to know better.
|
| This is exactly what I meant by my above comment: It's like
| the pro-ID check commenters have become completely
| disconnected from how young people work.
|
| Someone's 18 year old sibling isn't going to be stopped by
| "should know better". They probably disagree with the law
| on principal and think it's dumb, so they're just helping
| out.
| armchairhacker wrote:
| True, hence the culture shift is necessary.
|
| But imagine if a locked device was treated like alcohol.
| Most kids get access to alcohol at some point despite it
| being illegal, often from older siblings, and rarely with
| legal consequences for the adult. But it's much less of
| an issue, because most kids don't get it consistently.
| Furthermore, "good" kids understand that it's bad, and
| even some "bad" kids understand that they must limit
| themselves.
| kmijyiyxfbklao wrote:
| >Or if they're still a kid, they can have their privileges
| temporarily revoked.
|
| Since people are already talking about using the law
| instead of parenting this needs clarification. Are the
| parents the one that would revoke their privileges or the
| government?
| armchairhacker wrote:
| The parents. They're the ones who configure the parental
| controls. e.g. if their 15-year old gets caught sharing
| his device with their 7-year old, they can temporarily
| give him 7-year old permissions as punishment.
| __MatrixMan__ wrote:
| Circumventing controls as a kid is what taught me enough
| about computers to get the job that made college affordable
| (in those days you could just boot windows to a livecd Linux
| distro and have your way with the filesystem, first you feel
| like a hacker, later the adults are paying you to recover
| data).
|
| If we must have controls, I hope the process of circumventing
| them continues to teach skills that are useful for other
| things.
| skeptic_ai wrote:
| Probably will limit to one device per person, to save the
| children, so we won't share with others.
|
| (So you need to keep all your stuff into one device to be
| fully tracked easily. And have no control over your device,
| share your location... )
| Terretta wrote:
| _More simply: If ID checks are fully anonymous (as many here
| propose when the topic comes up) then every kid will just
| have their friends' older sibling ID verify their account one
| afternoon. Or they'll steal their parents' ID when they're
| not looking._
|
| Digital ID with binary assertion in the device is an API call
| that Apple's app store curation can ensure is called on app
| launch or switch. Just checking on launch or focus resolves
| that problem. It's no longer the account being verified per
| se, it's the account and the use.
| dyauspitr wrote:
| Yes we need a fundamental shift where sharing of parent
| accounts is akin to atleast some sort of infraction or maybe
| even a misdemeanor.
| armchairhacker wrote:
| This could help, but without the culture shift, way too many
| parents will intentionally and unintentionally break that
| law.
| brisky wrote:
| Just a personal anecdote from my life - I have set up Youtube
| account for my kid with correct age restrictions (he is 11).
| Also this account is under family plan so there are no ads.
|
| My kid logs out of this account so he can watch restricted
| content. I wonder - what is PG rating for logged out
| experience?
| raw_anon_1111 wrote:
| So kids can drive at 16. But can't get access to an unlocked
| phone until their 18? Who gets to decide the whitelist? The
| government?
| armchairhacker wrote:
| I never specified age.
|
| The whitelist would be decided by the market: the parents
| have the unlocked device, there are multiple solutions to
| lock it and they choose one. Which means that _in theory_ ,
| the dominant whitelist would be one that most parents agree
| is effective and reasonable; but seeing today's dominant
| products and vendor lock-in...
| skeptic_ai wrote:
| Definitively we should have constant verification of the
| current user with Face ID or similar tech. Every 5 minutes of
| usage, your camera is activated to check who's using your phone
| and validates it. So much secure and safe. /s
| kseniamorph wrote:
| > "Social media is going the way of alcohol, gambling, and other
| social sins: societies are deciding it's no longer kids' stuff."
|
| Oh, remember those good old times when alcohol was kids'
| stuff.......
| Noaidi wrote:
| In Italy it is common for 13 and 14 year olds to have a glass
| of wine with dinner. The sin is not drinking, it is gluttony.
| agentultra wrote:
| There are alternatives to ID verification if the goal is
| protecting children.
|
| You could, for example, make it illegal to target children with
| targeted advertising campaigns and addictive content. Then throw
| the executives who authorized such programs in jail. Punish the
| people causing the harm.
| varenc wrote:
| If targeting children with advertising got corporate execs
| thrown in jail, wouldn't the companies just roll out age
| verification for users like they do now? How would this rule
| change their behavior? They have to know who the children are
| to not target them.
|
| Stronger punishment creates more of an incentive to age verify.
| Which is basically why it's happening now.
| barbazoo wrote:
| At least then it wouldn't be the government requiring it, is
| what people may think I imagine.
| b40d-48b2-979e wrote:
| The problem is private companies being extensions of what
| the government wants to do, like all of the surveillance
| tech in the US right now basically eviscerating the fourth
| amendment since they willingly hand over their data to the
| government without even a court order in many cases.
| cloverich wrote:
| > They have to know who the children are to not target them.
|
| There is a difference between identifying specific children,
| and running programs that target children more generally; and
| / or having research that shows how your product harms
| children, and failing to do anything to stop it. We can
| tackle both of those issues without requiring age
| verification. We're headed down the path of age verification
| because we know now that not only is social media harmful,
| it's especially harmful to kids, and has been specifically
| targeted to them. Those are things that can be fixed,
| regardless of how you feel about age verification. Its not
| different than tobacco being not allowed to create
| advertisements for kids; its the same type of people doing
| the same types of things in the end.
| cubefox wrote:
| To avoid your proposed punishment, they will implement things
| like ... ID verification.
| Perz1val wrote:
| Then ones who won't will become the preferred choice
| scotty79 wrote:
| Facebook advertises outright scams and nobody manages to punish
| them for that.
| NoMoreNicksLeft wrote:
| >Then throw the executives who authorized such programs in
| jail.
|
| Gee, I wonder if the executives who are suspected of doing such
| things haven't spent the last 100 years building the
| infrastructure necessary to avoid charges, let alone jail time?
| Large corporate legal departments, wink-wink-nudge-nudge
| command and control hierarchies where nothing incriminating is
| ever put into writing, voluminous intra-office communications
| that bury even the circumstantial evidence so deeply no jury
| could understand it even if the plaintiffs/state could uncover
| it, etc.
|
| Anyone over the age of 12 that thinks corporate entities can be
| made to be accountable in a meaningful way is more than naive.
| They are cognitively defective. Or is it that you realize they
| can't be held accountable but you'd rather maintain the status
| quo than contemplate a country which abolished them and
| enforced that all business was the conducted by sole
| proprietorships and (small-n) partnerships?
| agentultra wrote:
| For a while it was thought that we could never bring back
| anti-trust.
|
| Sure, there's a lot of corruption right now. Doesn't have to
| stay that way.
| NoMoreNicksLeft wrote:
| >For a while it was thought that we could never bring back
| anti-trust.
|
| Ah. I see, you believe that the godzilla monsters are
| useful and that you know how to make leashes for them that
| will _definitely work this time_.
| TimPC wrote:
| Big tech likes this because there are a lot more face recognition
| technologies in the wild in real life and being able to connect
| all real life data to online data is quite valuable. It's also
| quite possibly the largest training set ever for face recognition
| if ids are stored and given how ids and images are sold across
| many companies it seems very high probability that some company
| will retain the data rather than delete after use.
| iririririr wrote:
| China (and US via latin american countries and it's own poor
| people ...via benefit programs access via id.gov) is testing
| both biometrics and device id to evaluate pros and cons, and to
| merge data, when it come to autocratic control.
|
| In china there are places to scan you device and get coupons.
| usually at elevators in residential buildings so they can track
| also if you're arriving or leaving easily.
|
| In the US every store tracks and report to ad networks your
| Bluetooth ids. and we know what happens to ad networks.
|
| US now requires cars to report data, which was optional before
| (e.g. onstar) and china joined on this since the ev boom.
|
| the public id space is booming.
| drnick1 wrote:
| > US now requires cars to report data, which was optional
| before (e.g. onstar) and china joined on this since the ev
| boom.
|
| This isn't true, there is no federal requirement for a
| cellular modem in cars. Most modern cars have one, but
| nothing prevents you from disabling or removing it. I
| certainly would not tolerate such a "bug" in by car.
|
| > In the US every store tracks and report to ad networks your
| Bluetooth ids.
|
| This also isn't true, modern phones randomize Bluetooth
| identifiers. I personally disable Bluetooth completely.
| iririririr wrote:
| read the connected vehicle laws. the intent was to forbid
| Chinese components. the actual effect is that even allowing
| to connect your phone will require full certification, at
| which point the manufacturer is financially motivated to
| not offer options without the telemetry they can sell to
| equifax et al (just like happened with smart tvs). So, yes,
| in practice all US cars will have radios, unless you
| specifically order a custom model.
|
| and yeah, your phone gives all the deniability and randon
| ids, etc. but if you allow apps to access location it's
| game over. also, just go see that google sells one option
| where you pay by people who saw you ad physically entered a
| store. (ps: sadly, I implemented the DSP side of this)
| drnick1 wrote:
| > even allowing to connect your phone will require full
| certification
|
| I am not sure I understand this.
|
| I am aware that manufacturers benefit from spying on
| people through car telemetry, or else they would not
| shoulder the cost of providing a cell plan. But, I, the
| owner of the vehicle, have every right to literally cut
| the cord (or simply unplug and remove the cellular
| modem).
|
| > and yeah, your phone gives all the deniability and
| randon ids, etc. but if you allow apps to access location
| it's game over.
|
| I don't. I run GrapheneOS (fully degoogled), and the only
| apps allowed to access location services are OSMand and a
| self-hosted Home Assistant instance. Of course that does
| not change the fact that millions of other people are
| being spied on.
| Noaidi wrote:
| So don't use big tech. No one needs discord, or porn, or social
| media. But this is not the answer. The answer is fighting to
| change the laws. And we can start changing the laws by
| boycotting big tech. Laws are changed by money flows, not
| ideology.
| DeathArrow wrote:
| 30 years of internet were possible with relative freedom, without
| spying and surveillance. All of the sudden it's not possible.
|
| Governments recycle "Think of the children" mantra and they are
| again after terrorists and bad guys.
| xinayder wrote:
| Mandatory age check is not going to reduce the number of
| criminals online. Period.
|
| We should focus on teaching parents how to educate their
| children properly, and teach children how to safely browse the
| internet and how to avoid common scams and pitfalls.
|
| I played Roblox when I was a teenager and all the time my aunt
| told me to be careful of who I talked to online, as they could
| be a pedo. Even though there wasn't a constant monitoring from
| my parents or family, her words were repeated many times that I
| actually thought 5 times before sharing any kind of personal
| information online, back then.
| iso1631 wrote:
| Helping parents would be useful rather than telling them to
| "just do it".
|
| The pain in trying to set up fortnite and minecraft online as
| parents is unsummounted, involving creating half a dozen
| accounts with different companies just to get some form of
| control. Far easier to just give them an adult account.
|
| The process to create a child account should be seamless and
| no harder than creating an adult account.
| Attrecomet wrote:
| >Governments recycle "Think of the children" mantra and they
| are again after terrorists and bad guys.
|
| nope, they are going after dissenters, not bad guys. It's how
| it always ends up.
| jonstaab wrote:
| Why is no one talking about using zero knowledge proofs for
| solving this? Instead of every platform verifying all its users
| itself (and storing PII on its own servers), a small number of
| providers could expose an API which provides proof of
| verification. I'm not sure if some kind of machine vision
| algorithm could be used in combination with zero-knowledge
| technology to prevent even that party from storing original
| documents, but I don't see why not. The companies implementing
| these measures really seem to be just phoning it in from a
| privacy perspective.
| thewebguyd wrote:
| People are talking about it, at least here anyway.
|
| The reason you don't see it in policy discussion from the
| officials pushing these laws is because removal of anonymity is
| the point. It's nit about protecting kids, it never was. It's
| about surveillance and a chilling effect on speech.
| tzs wrote:
| You do see it in policy discussions from officials in the EU.
| You probably don't see it in policy discussions in the US
| because the groups that _should_ be telling US officials how
| to do age verification without giving up anonymity are not
| doing so.
| quotemstr wrote:
| Technologists engage in an understandable, but ultimately
| harmful behavior: when they don't want outcome X, they deny
| that the technology T(X) works. Consider key escrow, DRM, and
| durable watermarking alongside age verification. They've all
| been called cryptographically impossible, but they're not. It's
| just socially obligatory to pretend they can't be done. And
| what happens when you create an environment in which the best
| are under a social taboo against working on certain
| technologies? Do you think that these technologies stop
| existing?
|
| LOL.
|
| Of course these technologies keep existing, and you end up with
| the worst, most wretched people implementing them, and we're
| all worse off. Concretely, few people are working on ZKPs for
| age verification because the hive mind of "good people" who
| know what ZKPs are make working on age verification social
| anathema.
| EmbarrassedHelp wrote:
| Zero knowledge proofs are only private and anonymous in theory,
| and require you to blindly trust a third party. In practice the
| implementation is not anonymous or private.
| tzs wrote:
| What third party do they require you to blindly trust?
| haunter wrote:
| This is my problem with the Discord situation too:
|
| Big tech don't have wait for an outright government ban when they
| can just say that we are a teen-only site by default and everyone
| have to verify if they are over 18 or not. This age verification
| will affect everyone no matter what.
| DeathArrow wrote:
| In most countries is illegal for small children to drive or to
| use fire arms. And it's their parents job to not let them to.
|
| Instead of requiring IDs, we should let parents manage what their
| children do online.
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| > And the only way to prove that you checked is to keep the data
| indefinitely.
|
| This is a false premise already; the company can check the age
| (or have a third party like iDIN [0] do it), then set a marker
| "this person is 18+" and "we verified it using this method at
| this date". That should be enough.
|
| [0] https://www.idin.nl/en/
| enraged_camel wrote:
| Nope, as the article notes, it is actually almost never enough
| because it does not stand up to legal scrutiny. And for good
| reason: there's no way to conclusively prove that the platform
| actually verified the user's age, as opposed to simply saying
| they did, before letting them in.
| Attrecomet wrote:
| Doesn't matter, I've already had to provably identify myself,
| the information is a) out there b) will be used and stored, and
| c) will be abused
|
| and there is nothing I or the few (in terms of power) well-
| meaning government and corporate actors can do to change that.
| reorder9695 wrote:
| And how do they prove to me they (and no 3rd party providers)
| aren't actually storing the data? I simply don't trust
| companies telling me they won't store something, so to me the
| only acceptable option is the data to never leave my device.
| ivan_gammel wrote:
| If third party does verification with ZKP, you only need to
| trust that third party. The company that requires
| verification will not have any data to store.
| Noaidi wrote:
| I have a problem with an open internet and allowing open access
| to everything the internet can offer to young children.
|
| It cannot be a friction-less experience. Allowing children to see
| gore and extreme porn at a young age is not healthy. And then we
| have all the "trading" platforms (gambling).
|
| Even though my brothers were able to get many hard drugs when I
| was young, around 1977, there was a lot of friction. Finding a
| dealer, trusting them, etc. Some bars would not card us but even
| then there was risk and sometimes they got caught. In NY we could
| buy cigarettes, no friction, and the one drug I took when I was
| young, addicted to them at 16, finally quitting for good at 20. I
| could have used some friction there.
|
| So how do we create friction? Maybe hold the parents liable? They
| are doing this with guns right now, big trial is just finishing
| and it looks like a father who gave his kid an ak47 at 13 is
| about to go to jail.
|
| I would like to see a state ID program when the ID is just
| verified by the State ID system. This way nothing needs to be
| sent to any private party. Sites like Discord could just get a OK
| signal from the state system. They could use facial recognition
| on the phone that would match it with the ID.
|
| Something needs to be done however. I disagree that the internet
| needs to be open to all at any age. You do not need an ID to walk
| into a library, but you need one to get into a strip club. I do
| not see why that should not be the same on the internet.
| bronlund wrote:
| I would argue that this has nothing to do with age verification,
| but everything to do with getting identifiable data on all of us.
| miss_haru wrote:
| parents: won't somebody else put some rules and safeguards in
| place to protect my children?
| logicchains wrote:
| Most of them probably don't even have kids of their own, they
| just hate social media for exposing children to conservative
| ideas and want to ban it to prevent that.
| fuzzfactor wrote:
| More like fear of exposing their children to anything _other
| than_ carefully curated "conservative" ideas.
| barfiure wrote:
| The internet isn't the same as it was when we were growing up,
| unfortunately. I miss the days of cruising DynamicHTML while
| playing on GameSpy but... yeah. It became an absolute clusterfuck
| and I'm not surprised they now want to enforce age restrictions.
|
| Maybe TBL is right and we need a new internet? I don't have the
| answer here, but this one is too commercialized and these
| companies are very hawkish.
| aqme28 wrote:
| If we're going to do this at all, it should be on the device, not
| the website/app. Parents flag their child's device or browser as
| under 18, and websites/apps follow suit. Parents get the control
| they're looking for, while service providers don't have to verify
| or store IDs. I guess it's just more difficult to pressure big
| dogs like google/apple/mozilla for this than pornhub and discord.
| thorio wrote:
| This sounds pretty reasonable to me. What am I missing?
| butterbomb wrote:
| It doesn't come with a ton of PII you can sell to data
| brokers.
| tolmasky wrote:
| I am so surprised by the comments on this thread. I was not
| expecting to see so many people on Hacker News _in favor_ of
| this. As is typically the case with things like this, the
| reasoning stems from agreeing with the _goal_ of age
| verification, with little regard to whether age verification
| could ever actually work. It reminds me in some sense to the
| situation with encryption where politicians want encryption that
| blocks "the bad guys" while still allowing "the good guys" to
| sneak in if necessary. Sure, that sounds cool, it's not possible
| though. I suppose DRM is a better analogue here, an increasingly
| convoluted system that slowly takes over your entire machine just
| so it can pretend that you can't view video while you're viewing
| it.
|
| To be clear, tackling the issue of child access to the internet
| is a valuable goal. Unfortunately, "well what if there was a
| magic amulet that held the truth of the user's age and we could
| talk to it" is not a worthwhile path to explore. Just off the top
| of my head:
|
| 1. In an age of data leaks, identity theft, and phishing, we are
| training users to constantly present their ID, and critically for
| things as low stakes as facebook. It would be one thing if we
| were training people to show their ID JUST for filing taxes
| online or something (still not great, but at least conveys the
| sensitivity of the information they are releasing), but no, we
| are saying that the "correct future" is handing this information
| out for Farmville (and we can expect its requirement to expand
| over time of course). It doesn't matter if it happens at the OS
| level or the web page level -- they are identical as far as
| _phishing_ is concerned. You spoof the UI that the OS would bring
| up to scan your face or ID or whatever, and everyone is trained
| to just grant the information, just like we 're all used to just
| hitting "OK" and don't bother reading dialogs anymore.
|
| 2. This is a mess for the ~1 billion people on earth that don't
| have a government ID. This is a huge setback to populations we
| should be _trying to get online_. Now all of a sudden your usage
| of the internet is dependent on your country having an advanced
| enough system of government ID? Seems like a great way for tech
| companies to gain leverage over smaller third world companies by
| controlling their access to the internet to implementing support
| for their government documents. Also seems like a great way to
| lock open source out of serious operating system development if
| it now requires relationships with all the countries in the
| world. If you think this is "just" a problem of getting IDs into
| everyone's hands, remember that it a common practice to take
| foreign worker's passports and IDs away from them in order to
| hold them effectively hostage. The internet was previously a
| powerful outlet for working around this, and would now instead
| _assist_ this practice.
|
| 3. Short of implementing HDCP-style hardware attestation (which
| more or less locks in the current players indefinitely), this
| will be trivially circumvented by the parties you're attempting
| to help, much like DRM was.
|
| Again, the _issues that these systems are attempting to address
| are valid_ , I am _not_ saying otherwise. These issues are also
| _hard_. The temptation to just have an oracle gate-checker is
| tempting, I know. But we 've seen time and again that this just
| (at best) creates a lot of work and doesn't actually solve the
| problem. Look no further than cookie banners -- nothing has
| changed from a data collection perspective, it's just created a
| "cookie banner expert" industry and possibly made users _more
| indifferent_ to data collection as a knee-jerk reaction to the UX
| decay banners have created on the internet as a whole. Let 's not
| 10 years from now laugh about how any sufficiently motivated
| teenager can scan their parent's phone while they're asleep, or
| pay some deadbeat 18 year-old to use their ID, and bypass any
| verification system, while simulateneously furthering the
| stranglehold large corporations have over the internet.
| Noaidi wrote:
| Whatever happened to all the innovation the tech world was
| capable of? This is 100% a solvable problem. It only needs the
| will and good law.
|
| 1) Person signs up with discord with fake name and fake email.
|
| 2) Discord asks (state system) for an age validation.
|
| 3) In pop up window, state validates the persons age with ID
| matching with face recognition.
|
| 3) State system sends token to discord with yes or no with zero
| data retention in the state records.
|
| 4) Discord takes action on the account.
|
| What is so hard about this?
| tolmasky wrote:
| I want to sincerely ask whether you read my post, because
| your response is so unrelated I believe you might
| accidentally be responding to another post? If so, please
| ignore the rest, which is only intended in the case where you
| are actually responding to what I wrote.
|
| Your system seems to address none of the issues I listed. For
| example, I argue that one difficulty is in the fact that
| these systems would be highly phishable -- a property that is
| present in your described "easy" solution. Your system trains
| users to become accustomed to being pestered by pop up
| windows that ask to see their ID and use their camera.
| Congrats, I can now trivially make a pop up a window that
| looks like this UI and use it to steal your info, as the user
| will just respond on auto-drive, as we have repeatedly shown
| both in user studies and in our own lived experiences. I also
| explained how a system like this would _assist_ in the
| practice of trapping migrant workers by confiscating their
| government credentials [1]. This is a huge problem today in
| Asia, and one of the _few_ outlets captive workers can use to
| escape this control is the internet -- a "loophole" your
| system would dutifully close for these corporations.
|
| I am happy to have a discussion about this -- it's how we
| come up with new solutions! But that requires reading and
| responding to the concerns I brought up, not assuming that my
| issue is that I can't imagine implementing a glorified OAuth
| login flow.
|
| 1. There's tons of articles about this, here is one of the
| first ones that comes up on Google:
| https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2025/05/saudi-
| arabia-...
| Noaidi wrote:
| > these systems would be highly phishable
|
| Well this is true of all of the internet, yes?
|
| https://bankingjournal.aba.com/2025/08/report-financial-
| inst...
|
| https://www.cyberdefensemagazine.com/the-rise-in-phishing-
| sc...
|
| Your example about migrant workers is not an internet
| problem, it is a government problem. And a capitalism
| problem. I mean migrant workers? Why do these workers need
| to migrate? Usually because the U.S. has probably decimated
| their country.
|
| But never mind, I agree that this is an unsolvable problem,
| not from lack of capability, but because we are ruled by
| sociopaths and most humans have been hacked by their
| addiction pathways. And I do not care about Saudi Arabia or
| Asia because I do not live there. And I do not care if they
| block all of the internet. We do not need it for anything,
| even less so for organizing.
|
| Maybe we should just leave the internet, which is only a
| capitalist and government collusion to make people spend
| money. All the internet did was concentrate power to a few
| oligarchs. For everything good that the internet has
| provided I can show you ten things that are not only bad,
| but 1000 times worse, like monkey torture video sharing.
|
| If I had kids today they would not even use the internet
| until they were out of my care. I only have six accounts on
| the internet. Including HN. I do not view porn, gamble,
| have any social media, and in fact I am trying to became
| un-homeless so I can go back to a flip phone.
|
| IMHO, the answer is not a fee internet, the answer is
| leaving the internet. But it seems you made and make a nice
| living at all of this so I see what a sacrifice that would
| be for you. You are probably part of the reason I am
| homeless today, with the separation for wealth and all
| that. I see that you dnated to a bunch of neoliberal types
| and that fits. Seems you had over $17,000 to give to
| politicians. That is more than I survive on for a year. I
| mean, you do not need to do any work at all today. You
| could retire right now.
|
| Sorry for the unrelated rant, but needed to get that off my
| chest for myself. Just tired of wealthy people trying to
| perfect a horrible system and technology that keeps making
| them money. You pretend like you care about the poor, like
| the migrant worker, but that is just laughable. If you did
| you would be against capitalism. You would give up all you
| own and follow Christ or Buddha or whatever. I mean you got
| $20 million and what did you do? You started making
| addictive games. And then you donate to these neoliberals
| who are no different than the neoconservatives.
|
| Love, a old homeless guy who left Cisco in 1999 because he
| saw where all of this was going and who is currently
| sitting in a hotel he cannot afford because the 2002
| minivan he lives in just lost its water pump.
| tolmasky wrote:
| If you need help (monetary or otherwise), please email me
| at tolmasky |at| gmail |dot| com. This is a sincere
| offer. I can't tell how much is hyperbole in your post,
| but if you're going through that and I can help, I'd be
| happy to.
|
| _> I mean you got $20 million and what did you do? You
| started making addictive games._
|
| I refrained from responding to the rest since it seems
| that there is a deeper issue, but I could not help
| setting the record straight here. I think everyone who
| has ever played Bonsai Slice will firmly attest to it
| being the opposite of addicting. My parents never let me
| own a game console so I never really wrapped my head
| around games, and made exactly the kind of game someone
| like that would come up with: a deep tech exploration, to
| hopefully make progress on two problems that were
| plaguing me at the time: 1) how little mobile UI had
| seemed to progress (instead getting stuck in one-tap
| local maxima), and 2) building an app that is generally
| considered to be the worst candidate for a pure immutable
| language... in a pure immutable language in order to
| serve as a forcing function to surface new ideas in the
| space. I've always believed that if you wanted to make a
| general purpose programming language, you should probably
| try to have as much varied experience as possible, or
| otherwise you'll end up with a domain-specific language
| that is misused for every other domain (this is how I
| would describe most programming languages. In fact, I'd
| say most programming languages are written for the niche
| use case of writing a compiler, since they are written by
| compiler writers. Ironic that that is the last thing most
| get used for.). As such, I made a decision to start
| actually writing a wide variety of apps.
| anon_shill wrote:
| From the second paragraph:
|
| > And the only way to prove that you checked is to keep the data
| indefinitely.
|
| This is not true and made me immediately stop reading. If a
| social media app uses a third party vendor to do facial/ID age
| estimation, the vendor can (and in many cases does) only send an
| estimated age range back to the caller. Some of the more privacy
| invasive KYC vendors like Persona persist and optionally pass
| back entire government IDs, but there are other age verifiers
| (k-ID, PRIVO, among others) who don't. Regulators are happy with
| apps using these less invasive ones and making a best effort
| based on an estimated age, and that doesn't require storing any
| additional PII. We really need to deconflate age verification
| from KYC to have productive conversations about this stuff. You
| can do one thing without doing the other.
| 0x000xca0xfe wrote:
| If you don't keep and cross-reference documents it is really
| easy to circumvent, e.g. by kids asking their older siblings to
| sign them up.
|
| I don't think a bulletproof age verification system can be
| implemented on the server side without serious privacy
| implications. It would be quite easy to build it on the client
| side (child mode) but the ones pushing for these systems
| (usually politicians) don't seem to care about that.
| anon_shill wrote:
| Yep, it is easy to circumvent, and the silver lining of all
| of this is that regulators don't care. They care that these
| companies made an effort in guessing.
| boerseth wrote:
| Does each service really need to collect this data from the user
| directly? They could instead have the user authorise them by e.g.
| OAuth2 to access their age with one of the de-facto online-
| identity-providers. I would be surprised if they didn't implement
| an API for this sometime soon, cause it would place them as the
| source of truth and give them unique access to that bit of user
| data. Seems like a chance and position they wouldn't want to
| lose.
| scotty79 wrote:
| If government is concerned shouldn't government just deliver auth
| based on birth certificate for everyone to use?
| cromka wrote:
| Someone explain me like I'm 5: there are some solutions already
| in effect that are based on cryptographically generated,
| anonymous, one-time use tokens that allow to confirm adults's age
| without being tied up yo your ID. Why on earth even technically
| skilled people completely ignore those? Is this pure NIMBY
| ignorance or am missing something?
| bakugo wrote:
| Because those solutions always have obvious flaws. If the
| cryptographic token is anonymous, how do you know the user
| verifying is the same one who generated the token? How do you
| know the same cryptographic key isn't verifying several
| accounts belonging to other people?
| cromka wrote:
| They are one time use by definition. You can't know they are
| used by respectful owner, but the idea is you have to provide
| a new token every few weeks/months. Much like when using
| other services nowadays, I mean even Gmail will have you
| authorize every few months even if you didn't log out. Plus
| you fine/prosecute those who sell/misuse theirs. Just like
| you prosecute adults who buy kids alcohol or other
| substances.
|
| Obvious flaws are OK. I absolutely hate the Nirvana fallacy
| that you people think is acceptable here, while hundreds of
| millions of kids suffer from serious developmental issues, as
| reported left and right by all kinds of organizations and
| governments themselves.
| akersten wrote:
| In my experience the people who want "privacy preserving age
| verification" are the same people who want "encryption backdoors
| but only for the good guys." Shockingly the technically minded
| among them do seem to recognize the impossibility of the latter,
| without applying the same chain of thought to the former.
| fny wrote:
| Isn't it a simpler solution to create some protocol for a browser
| or device announce an age restricted user is present and then
| have parents lock down devices as they see fit?
|
| Aside from the privacy concerns, all this age verification tech
| seems incredibly complicated and expensive.
| TZubiri wrote:
| I think this solution exists (e.g. android parental lock, but
| also ISP routers). But parents and industry have failed to do
| so on a greater scale. So legislation is going for a more
| affirmative action that doesn't require parental consent or
| collaboration.
|
| A service provider of adult content now cannot serve a child,
| regardless of the involvement or lack thereof of a parent.
| TZubiri wrote:
| >"None of this is an argument against protecting children online.
| It is an argument against pretending there is no tradeoff"
|
| Tradeoff acknowledged, and this runs both sides, there's hundreds
| of risks that these policies are addressing.
|
| To mention a specific one, I was exposed to pornography online at
| age 9 which is obviously an issue, the incumbent system allowed
| this to happen and will continue to do so. So to what tradeoffs
| in policy do detractors of age verification think are so terrible
| that it's more important than avoiding, for example, allowing
| kids first sexual experiences to be pornography. Dystopian vibes?
| Is that equivalent?
|
| Or, what alternative solutions are counter-proposed to avoid
| these issues without age verification and vpn bans.
|
| Note 2 things before responding:
|
| 1)per the original quote, it is not valid to ignore the trade
| offs with arguments like "child abuse is an excuse to install
| civilian control by governments"
|
| 2) this was not your initiave, another group is the one making
| huge efforts to intervene and change the status quo, so whatever
| solution is counterproposed needs to be new, otherwise, as an
| existing solution, it was therefore ineffective.
|
| If any of those is your argument, you are not part of the
| conversation, you have failed to act as wardens of the internet,
| and whatever systems you control will be slowly removed from you
| by authorities and technical professionals that follow the
| regulations. Whatever crumbs you are left as an admin, will be
| relegated to increasingly niche crypto communities where you will
| be pooled with dissidents and criminals of types you will need to
| either ignore or pretend are ok. You will create a new Tor, a
| Gab, a Conservapedia, a HackerForums, and you will be hunted by
| the obvious and inequivocal right side of the law. Your enemy
| list will grow bigger and bigger, the State? Money? The law? God?
| The notion of right and wrong which is like totally subjective
| anyways?
| alt227 wrote:
| > I was exposed to pornography online at age 9....allowing kids
| first sexual experiences to be pornography
|
| I was initially exposed to pornography at 8 years old, by
| finding a disgarded magazine in a hedge. However this was
| pretty soft.
|
| I was exposed to serious pornography at 10 years by finding a
| hidden VHS tape in the back of a drawer at a friends house and
| getting curious. This was hardcore German stuff with explicit
| violence. This has caused me to have therapy in my lifetime.
|
| This was all in the 80s by the way.
|
| Therefore anything you are mentioning happened long before the
| internet, and is totally possible in a completely offline world
| as well. So how do these new digital laws 'protect children'
| again?
| redog wrote:
| It's to continue the culture of bullying and lack-of-
| accountability by and for the perversely rich oligarchy.
|
| For you'll need to be accounted while they do the counting.
| kevincloudsec wrote:
| the companies pushing hardest for age verification are the same
| ones whose business model depends on knowing exactly who you are.
| the child safety framing is convenient cover for a data
| collection problem they were already trying to solve.
| Devasta wrote:
| I can understand the need to restrict some stuff kids can see,
| like when I was a teen it me hours and hours to download one 2
| minute porn clip from kazaa, but these days you could download a
| lifetime worth in one weekend. That can't be healthy.
|
| That being said nothing about these laws is about protecting
| children; their primary purpose is to crack down on the next Just
| Stop Oil or Palestine Action so for that reason should be
| opposed.
| simoncion wrote:
| > ...but these days you could download a lifetime worth in one
| weekend.
|
| Uh. I could check in the back of my parents' closet (hidden
| under some fabric) for at least a decade's worth of dirty
| magazines. It's true that that's less than a lifetime's worth
| of pictures and articles, but I'd say that that's effectively
| equivalent.
|
| > That can't be healthy.
|
| The only thing that's _unhealthy_ is not being able to talk
| frankly and honestly about sex and sexuality with your peers,
| parents, and other important adults in your life. Well, that
| and never being told that sex leads to pregnancy, or how to
| recognize common STDs... but you 're likely to get that "for
| free" if you're able to talk frankly and honestly about sex and
| sexuality.
| matthewmorgan wrote:
| That was the goal.
| callamdelaney wrote:
| We should just ban smartphones, it's where a great deal of the
| harm comes from and is harder for parents to manage. No need for
| children to have cameras connected to the internet whether via
| smartphones or computers.
| lightningspirit wrote:
| If there's only a centralized system that uses digital IDs to
| hand off providers only a "yay" or "nay"...
| julianozen wrote:
| There is missing a solution.
|
| Give our personal devices have the ability to verify our age and
| identity securely and store on device like they do our
| fingerprint or face data.
|
| Services that need access only verify it cryptographically. So my
| iPhone can confirm I'm over 21 for my DoorDash app in the same
| way it stores my biometric data.
|
| The challenge here is the adoption of these encryption services
| and whether companies can rely on devices for that for compliance
| without having to cut off service for those without it set up.
| snvzz wrote:
| The solution has always been there: Assume everybody is an
| adult.
|
| The only reasonable way to deal with children on the Internet
| is to treat Internet access like access to alcohol/drugs. There
| is no need for children to access the Internet full stop.
|
| Internet is a network in which everything can connect to
| everything, and every connected machine can run clients,
| servers, p2p nodes and what not. Controlling every possible
| endpoint your child might connect to is not feasible. Shutting
| the entire network down because "won't somebody please think of
| the children" is not acceptable.
|
| And, don't let them trick you. This is the endgoal. An
| unprecedented level of control over the flow of information.
| Squarex wrote:
| So you would deny children the greatest source of knowledge
| in the history? I have learned math and programming thanks to
| unlimited access to the web and would not be where I am
| without it.
| Almondsetat wrote:
| >I would not be where I am without it
|
| First of all, you cannot know that, since plenty of people
| before you learnt that stuff from libraries.
|
| >So you would deny children the greatest source of
| knowledge in the history?
|
| Yes, because other sources of knowledge exist and are much
| more appropriate for children. It is also the greatest
| source of despicable stuff in history. When you turn 18,
| have fun exploring the world wide web.
| luplex wrote:
| I think this is what my German electronic ID card does. The
| card connects to an app on my phone via NFC, a service can
| cryptographically verify a claim about my age, and no
| additional info is leaked to the service provider or the
| government.
| hexyl_C_gut wrote:
| But that doesn't verify that the person using the ID is the
| person that it was issued to.
| Seattle3503 wrote:
| Its better than what we have now. Maybe using the ID could
| require a PIN code if we wanted to enhance security.
| encrux wrote:
| I think this is actually the correct way to move forward.
|
| We should be able to verify facts about people on the
| internet without compromising personal data. Giving platforms
| the ability to select specific demographics will, in my view,
| make the web a better place. It doesn't just let us age
| restrict certain platforms, but can also make them more
| authentic. I think it's really important to be able to know
| some things to be true about users, simply to avoid foreign
| election interference via trolling, preventing scams and so
| much more.
|
| With this, enforcement would also be increasingly easy:
| Platforms just have to prove that they're using this method,
| e.g. via audit.
| some_random wrote:
| The real problem with this is that the ultimate objective isn't
| age verification, it's complete de-anonymization. I think
| different groups want this for different reasons, but the
| simple reality is that minimizing the identify information
| transferred around is antithetical to their goals.
| Seattle3503 wrote:
| If we create age verification tools with strong privacy
| protections that solve the problems they raise, we can can
| call their bluff.
|
| If we fight every and any solution, we may end up with
| _their_ solution, becauase they build it. We end up in the
| position of saying "don't use the thing they built" without
| offering alternatives. I'd rather be saying "use whatbwe
| built, ita is better."
| knallfrosch wrote:
| Google/Apple already know where you and your mistress live.
| In case you pay for any service, they've got your identity
| too. Ever had a single shipment confirmation to your address
| come to your mail? They know who you are.
|
| The hardware providers already have the information. You only
| need to make them reveal it to 3rd parties.
| EmbarrassedHelp wrote:
| We should be banning groups from collecting age related
| information, and not requiring it. And we definitely should
| not be forcing companies to share that information with
| third parties.
| dom96 wrote:
| Is it though? Do you have any proof that is the case?
| EnderWT wrote:
| ISO/IEC 18013-5 (Personal identification -- ISO-compliant
| driving licence -- Part 5: Mobile driving licence (mDL)
| application) is a potential solution for this.
| https://www.iso.org/obp/ui/en/#iso:std:iso-iec:18013:-5:ed-1...
|
| It would allow someone with an mDL on their device to present
| only their age instead of other identifying information.
| dom96 wrote:
| This kind of solution couldn't come soon enough. It will also
| enable us to verify humanity and have bot-free spaces on social
| media again. I wrote about this here:
| https://blog.picheta.me/post/the-future-of-social-media-is-h...
| b8 wrote:
| Hence why Illinois has already mame it illegal.
| djohnston wrote:
| (thats the point)
| simion314 wrote:
| Big Tech refused to work together to implement a age flag that
| parents would setup on the children device, now we get each
| European and each USA state with their own special rules.
| alt227 wrote:
| I like the solution Tim Burners-Lee is working on. Lets hope he
| has some success.
|
| https://solidproject.org/
|
| https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/jan/29/internet-...
| JohnMakin wrote:
| We'll try everything, it seems, other than holding parents
| accountable for what their children consume.
|
| In the United States, you can get in trouble if you recklessly
| leave around or provide alcohol/guns/cigarettes for a minor to
| start using, yet somehow, the same social responsibility seems
| thrown out the window for parents and the web.
|
| Yes, children are clever - I was one once. If you want to
| actually protect children and not create the surveillance state
| nightmare scenario we all know is going to happen (using
| protecting children as the guise, which is ironic, because often
| these systems are completely ineffective at doing so anyway) -
| then give parents strong monitoring and restriction tools and
| empower them to protect their children. They are in a much better
| and informed position to do so than a creepy surveillance nanny
| state.
|
| That is, after all, the primary responsibility of a parent to
| begin with.
| lenerdenator wrote:
| The thing is, what are the parents to do beyond restricting
| things? You find out some creep has been talking to Junior; do
| you talk to your local police department, state agency, or to
| the feds?
|
| We've never properly acted upon reports of predators grooming
| children by investigating them, charging them, holding trials,
| and handing down sentences on any sort of large scale. There's
| a patchwork of LEOs that have to handle things and they have to
| do it right. Once the packets are sent over state lines, we
| have to involve the feds, and that's another layer.
|
| Previously, I would have said it's up to platforms like Discord
| to organize internal resources to make sure that the proper
| authorities received reports, because it felt like there were
| instances of people being reported and nothing happening on the
| platform's side. Now, given recent developments, I'm not sure
| we can count upon authorities to actually do the job.
| robomartin wrote:
| > The thing is, what are the parents to do beyond restricting
| things?
|
| Well, I can't speak for parents (as in all parents). I can,
| however, tell you what we did.
|
| When two of my kids were young we gave them iPods. The idea
| was to load a few fun educational applications (I had written
| and published around 10 at the time). Very soon they asked
| for Clash of Clans to play for a couple of hours on
| Saturdays. We said that was OK provided they stuck to that
| rule.
|
| Fast forward to maybe a couple of months later. After
| repeated warnings that they were not sticking to the plan and
| promises to do so, I found them playing CoC under the
| blankets at 11 PM, when they were supposed to be sleeping and
| had school the next day.
|
| I did not react and gave no indication of having witnessed
| that.
|
| A couple of days later I asked each of them to their room and
| asked them to place their top ten favorite toys on the floor.
|
| I then produced a pair of huge garbage bags and we put the
| toys in them, one bag for each of the kids.
|
| I also asked for their iPods.
|
| No anger, no scolding, just a conversation at a normal tone.
|
| I asked them to grab the bags and follow me.
|
| We went outside, I opened the garbage bin and told them to
| throw away their toys. It got emotional very quickly. I also
| gave them the iPods and told them to toss them into the bin.
|
| After the crying subsided I explained that trust is one of
| the most delicate things in the world and that this was a
| consequence of them attempting to deceive us by secretly
| playing CoC when they knew the rules. This was followed by
| daily talks around the dinner table to explain just how
| harmful and addictive this stuff could be, how it made them
| behave and how important it was to honor promises.
|
| Another week later I asked them to come into the garage with
| me and showed them that I had rescued their favorite toys
| from the garbage bin. The iPods were gone forever. And now
| there was a new rule: They could earn one toy per month by
| bringing top grades from school, helping around the house,
| keeping their rooms clean and organized and, in general,
| being well behaved.
|
| That was followed by ten months of absolutely perfect kids
| learning about earning something they cherished every month.
| Of course, the behavior and dedication to their school work
| persisted well beyond having earned their last toy. Lots of
| talks, going out to do things and positive feedback of
| course.
|
| They never got the iPods back. They never got social media
| accounts. They did not get smart phones until much older.
|
| To this day, now well into university, they thank me for
| having taken away their iPods.
|
| So, again, I don't know about parents in the aggregate, but I
| don't think being a good parent is difficult.
|
| You are not there to be an all-enabling friend, you are there
| to guide a new human through life and into adulthood. You are
| there to teach them everything and, as I still tell them all
| the time, aim for them to be better than you.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=99j0zLuNhi8
| robofartin wrote:
| > I explained that trust is one of the most delicate things
| in the world
|
| > lies to own children about throwing their toys away
| Terr_ wrote:
| I can't tell whether "destroying all your favorite toys"
| was a clear expectation the kids already had as a
| possible outcome of their choices. __________
|
| 1. Teach children about consequences... by using clear
| expectations, timely feedback, and proportional
| responses.
|
| 2. Teach children about consequences... by allowing
| wrongdoing to become a festering mess until it
| "justifies" some big punishment that comes as deliberate
| emotional trauma and surprise.
|
| Separately from asking which one is more "effective" at
| conditioning an immediate behavior, each choice _also_
| affects how those kids are going to behave when _they_
| are in any position to set and enforce rules. Being a
| role-model is hard.
| Sohcahtoa82 wrote:
| This reads like something I'd find on /r/LinkedInLunatics,
| all the way down to the one-sentence/thought-per-line
| formatting.
| 2duct wrote:
| The issue with any parent's narrative, including yours, is
| that it's one-sided. We'd need the story told by the
| children-turned-adults to make any fair judgement. Some
| people are going to say what their family wants them to
| hear and only open up to professionals or a neutral third
| party.
| robomartin wrote:
| > We'd need the story told by the children-turned-adults
| to make any fair judgement.
|
| True enough. Of course, you are not going to get that in
| this case. All I can say is that those commenting here
| about potentially cataclysmic consequences are likely
| precisely the kind of people who will practice the kind
| of soft "friend class" parenting that can result in
| really troubled kids. If they even have kids at all,
| because some of the comments by others sound infantile.
|
| The other narrative that is utterly false is that of role
| models in the negative sense. Almost all of you are one
| or two generations away from a culture and style of
| parenting where beating the kids was considered normal
| and even good parenting. An era where teachers beating
| kids in school was also normal and accepted. And yet,
| that has largely not survived the generational divide
| except in some segments of some cultures.
|
| Raising kids and being a role model isn't a matter of
| single events or experiences, it is, like most other
| things in the human condition, a matter of building a
| relationship over time and understanding that life
| usually is a rollercoaster ride, not a straight-and-flat
| road.
| WorldPeas wrote:
| My parents took the same approach and it helped, but I will
| anecdotally point out that kids have played video games
| under covers for a while, even when I was young, I remember
| getting in trouble for playing this spyro game n' watch
| clone from mcdonalds at night, or gameboy with one of those
| lamps that plugged into the serial port. When I become a
| parent, I think I'd feel understanding of something like
| this, but would likely still only give them access to
| hardware like cell-enabled apple watches or DSes. The issue
| I take with modern games like CoC is that they are
| psychologically engineered to be mentally harmful, and push
| you to spend real money on fake things. I've seen many
| peers who were engaged in CoC as kids get into online
| gambling and sports gambling recently, it doesn't sit
| right.
| robomartin wrote:
| > The issue I take with modern games like CoC is that
| they are psychologically engineered to be mentally
| harmful
|
| Precisely. I am not saying I am perfect as a parent or
| that this was the best possible approach to the situation
| we had. Nobody is and perfect parenting is an absolute
| myth.
|
| I knew full well just how addictive gaming could be
| because I experienced it in my 20's. Needless to say that
| the "shock and awe" consequence to their deceit was not
| the result of a single data point. We had been seeing
| changes in behavior over time (six months or so). The
| objective was three fold: Take away the device that
| delivered the addictive behavior. Take away something of
| value to them. Make them earn it back with positive
| behavior.
|
| The decision was not planned and the consequences were
| not communicated in advance. Few things in life are like
| that. Sometimes people discover the consequences of their
| actions (or understand them) when they are sprung on them
| because of something they did. Drunk driving being one
| possible (though not perfect) example of this.
|
| In this case, it worked. Perhaps we got lucky. Not sure.
| I also did highlight that I cannot speak for all parents.
| I did the best I thought made sense at the time. Based on
| the outcome, many years later, I can say it worked.
|
| To the critics on this thread: Your mileage may vary.
| Some of the comments sound juvenile, perhaps you'll
| understand if you ever become a parent and face similar
| circumstances. Then see what you think of someone who
| thinks they know better from behind a keyboard than you
| did in the moment and without having to be responsible
| for the outcomes (which is a multi-year commitment).
| ipaddr wrote:
| Back in the day you would beat up that person.
| numbsafari wrote:
| Except companies provide wholly inadequate safeguards and
| tools. They are buggy, inconsistent, easily circumvented, and
| even at time malicious. Consumers should be better able to hold
| providers accountable, before we start going after parents.
|
| The only real solution is to keep children off of the internet
| and any internet connected device until they are older. The
| problem there is that everything is done on-line now and it is
| practically impossible to avoid it without penalizing your
| child.
|
| If social media and its astroturfers want to avoid outright age
| bans, they need to stop actively exploiting children and accept
| other forms of regulation, and it needs to come with teeth.
| jmholla wrote:
| > Except companies provide wholly inadequate safeguards and
| tools. They are buggy, inconsistent, easily circumvented, and
| even at time malicious. Consumers should be better able to
| hold providers accountable, before we start going after
| parents.
|
| We could mandate that companies that market the products
| actually have to deliver effective solutions.
| numbsafari wrote:
| Cue blog posts about section 230 and how it's impossible to
| do hard things and parents should be held accountable not
| companies, meager fines, captured bureaucrats,
| libertarians, and on and on...
| duped wrote:
| Step 0 is physical device access. Kids shouldn't have tablets
| or smartphones or personal laptops before age 16.
| raw_anon_1111 wrote:
| This is the craziest thing I've heard in a while. They
| shouldn't have connected game systems either?
| numbsafari wrote:
| No, because those devices have little or no controls and
| those controls are easily bypassed and/or not honored by
| the platform.
| mghackerlady wrote:
| I think they should. Theres a fine line between
| beneficial and detrimental. I had a 3DS growing up and
| could browse the web with its very gimped browser, and I
| think something like that is actually very good for a
| child (able to access the internet and view simple and
| informative sites while being too limited to access
| social media and the like)
| trashb wrote:
| Have you ever visited any game store and turned off nsfw
| protection?
|
| I love gaming, but I hate all the smutt games. It
| discredits the medium, essentially what has also happened
| to anime.
| rkomorn wrote:
| I'm kinda baffled about the Switch store's quantity of
| dating/whatever adult-ish games.
|
| I don't really want to turn on age-based filters (to the
| point that I've never investigated if they even exist)
| but at this rate, there's hardly anything worth looking
| at in the recent feed.
| WorldPeas wrote:
| The target demographics for Nintendo products have
| shifted from kids to.. kidults? Most kids nowadays play
| on phones or in rarer cases PC/Xbox, Nintendo's lost much
| of their cache (in my visible experience) save for
| children parented by the "mindful milennial" types
| rkomorn wrote:
| Makes sense but there's just... so much of it. That and
| all the shovelware.
|
| It's just hard to imagine that's anything close to what
| Nintendo wants users to experience, but I guess they need
| the money.
| WorldPeas wrote:
| They really could find a niche in making phones for kids
| that have walled-garden internet access, they were so
| good at doing so with the ds but alas..
| duped wrote:
| The problem is unrestricted access to mobile devices. A
| game console or desktop PC isn't as big of a deal.
| raw_anon_1111 wrote:
| What's the difference? They all reach the same internet
| mghackerlady wrote:
| 16 is a bit steep but I do generally agree with your
| sentiment. I wish there were more educational home
| computers like there were back in the day like the BBC
| micro. I have a startup idea to make something like that
| (mostly as a dumping ground for my plethora of OS-software
| and computer education ideas) but don't currently have the
| resources and have doubts on how successful something like
| that would even be in this day and age. I'm only 18ish (Not
| giving my actual age for privacy reasons but it's within a
| 5 year margin) and feel like my peers would rather be
| locked to platforms and consume than learn to create and
| actually use computers despite there being a very obvious
| need (I once had a 20 year old look at me like I had 2
| heads for asking them to move something into a folder)
| aleph_minus_one wrote:
| > Kids shouldn't have tablets or smartphones or personal
| laptops before age 16.
|
| If you make such a restriction, they'll secretly buy some
| cheap "unrestricted" device like some Raspberry Pi (just
| like earlier generations bought their secret "boob
| magazines").
| hellojesus wrote:
| Parents should have an allowlist of devices to be able to
| join their network. And then they can require root certs
| or something for access outside of a narrow allow list.
| There's a host of ways to solve both problems. Just
| remember to check for hardware keyloggers on your (the
| parents') devices, as kids could use them or try evil
| maid attacks, etc. if they feel totally encaged.
| aleph_minus_one wrote:
| This will only work in practice if one of the parents is
| a network technician. :-)
| duped wrote:
| I've said it before but prohibition works, if the goal is
| to reduce usage. I don't see this as a realistic problem.
| logicchains wrote:
| I hope they do pass a law like that, because it'd give my
| kids a gigantic advantage over the kids who had no access
| modern technology and the free flow of information until
| the age of 16. If you want to leave your kids completely
| unable to find any kind of gainful employment in the AI
| era, be my guest.
| butterbomb wrote:
| > If you want to leave your kids completely unable to
| find any kind of gainful employment in the AI era, be my
| guest.
|
| Your kid is screwed either way. Unless he moves to India.
| GaryBluto wrote:
| Today's young people are already technologically retarded
| (in the literal sense) and barely know how to use Microsoft
| Word or navigate with a file explorer, this would make the
| problem significantly worse.
| sanitycheck wrote:
| I bet not many of us would be here now if we hadn't had our
| own computers before age 16.
| raw_anon_1111 wrote:
| How easy is it for kids to bypass Parental Controls on iOS
| devices?
| rootusrootus wrote:
| Social engineering is the most effective strategy, because
| iOS screen time controls are so buggy that eventually
| parents throw up their hands in exasperation and enable
| broader access than they would otherwise choose.
| raw_anon_1111 wrote:
| It's one setting to only allow a whitelist and not allow
| apps to be downloaded. Yes parents might actually need to
| learn technology
| rootusrootus wrote:
| I use it, I am quite familiar with the bugs. The app
| controls randomly duplicate themselves and change in
| scope. It would almost be comical if it had not been
| happening for so many years to so many people. Apple
| knows, does not care.
| adolph wrote:
| When everything is turned off by default, iOS Screentime is
| very effective. It also has effective tools for to grant
| certain exceptions, facilitated by Messages. It also
| distinguishes between "daytime" and "downtime" for the
| purpose of certain apps and app attributes, like the
| contact list. For example, we have ourselves, grandparents
| and the neighbors as "all the time" contacts but their
| friends as daytime only. They don't retain their devices at
| night but it is possible for them to pull them from the
| charging cabinet.
| Avamander wrote:
| Yes, but how on earth is their malicious compliance at
| providing parental controls a good reason to go for the
| surveillance state that hurts absolutely everyone?
|
| Social media operators love the surveillance state idea.
| That's why they aren't pushing against this.
|
| I even cancelled YT Premium because their "made for kids"
| system interfered with being able to use my paid adult
| account. I urge other people to do the same when the
| solutions offered are insufficient.
| dyauspitr wrote:
| This tired argument again. It doesn't work. It's like keeping
| your kid from buying alcohol but all their friends are allowed
| to buy it. The whole age demographic has to be locked out of
| the ecosystem.
| wizzwizz4 wrote:
| Well, yes. If your friends can all go 'round to David's
| house, where David's parents hand each child a case of beer
| and send them on their way, any attempt by the other parents
| to prohibit underage drinking is going to be ineffective. But
| most parents don't do that. (I've actually never heard of
| it.) So social solutions involving parent consensus clearly
| do work here.
|
| "But it's behavioural!" I hear you cry. "What's stopping
| children from going out, buying a cheap unlocked smartphone /
| visiting their public library / hacking the parental control
| system, and going on the internet _anyway_? " And that's an
| excellent objection! But, what's stopping children from
| playing in traffic?
| dyauspitr wrote:
| Yeah but it's illegal for the parents to give the other
| kids beer with serious criminal repercussions. That's why
| most people make sure it doesn't happen, not just some
| social sense of reponsibility. You would need something
| similar for smartphones/social media.
| b40d-48b2-979e wrote:
| That's why most people make sure it doesn't happen
|
| Were you not invited to parties in high school? My
| experience growing up (and my experience being a neighbor
| to people with teenage children even now) says otherwise.
| dyauspitr wrote:
| Every high school and college freshman party I've been to
| involves some serious planning to find alcohol. It's
| always hit or miss and not easy.
| Sohcahtoa82 wrote:
| > Were you not invited to parties in high school?
|
| Did you forget what web site you're on?
| wizzwizz4 wrote:
| The US generally has strict anti-alcohol laws, with
| exceptions for legally-recognised familial relationships
| (e.g. children, spouses). The UK doesn't: its laws are
| restricted to "the relevant premises" (https://www.legisl
| ation.gov.uk/ukpga/2003/17/part/7/crosshea...) and "in
| public" (https://www.gov.uk/alcohol-young-people-law -
| can't find the actual law right now); but still, the
| behaviour I described does not occur in the UK often
| enough for me to have heard of it. I _have_ , however,
| heard about similar behaviour from the US, where "we all
| go out late at night and become alcoholics" seems to be a
| culturally-acceptable form of teenage rebellion.
|
| People, for the most part, have no respect for the law.
| They usually haven't even _read_ the law. They have
| respect for what they consider appropriate or
| inappropriate behaviour. ( _Knowingly_ breaking the law
| is, in most instances, considered an inappropriate
| behaviour - except copyright law, which people only care
| about if there are immediately-visible enforcement
| mechanisms. Basically everyone is fine with copying
| things from Google Images into their PowerPoint
| presentations... but I digress.) Most people would object
| to murder, even if the law didn 't forbid it. This
| distinction is important.
|
| Is there a law that says "children must not play in
| traffic"? Probably! Haven't the foggiest idea which it
| would be, though. That law (if it exists) is not why
| children don't play in traffic. The law against giving
| alcohol to children (if it exists) is not why we don't
| give alcohol to children. We can establish similar social
| norms for deliberately-addictive, deceptive, dangerous
| computer systems, such as modern corporate social media.
| ndriscoll wrote:
| We can establish social norms, but companies have a
| tendency to ignore those norms if it makes them money and
| it isn't illegal (maybe not all or even most companies,
| but if it's profitable, _some_ company will do it and
| expand into that niche). So it makes sense to make it
| illegal for those companies to provide services to
| children, and then establish a social norm that parents
| won 't create an account for their children/bypass the
| checks that companies need to do. Just like with alcohol:
| it is illegal for stores to sell it to minors, and they
| must check ID; we don't just let them shrug and say a 14
| year old looked 21, and at least in the US, that would be
| a criminal offense. It's then socially unacceptable (and
| maybe also illegal) for a parent to buy a ton of alcohol
| so their kid can host a rager for all of their friends.
|
| Drawing out the alcohol analogy further, you can actually
| buy alcohol on Amazon, subject to an ID check. I'm not
| sure why no one bats an eye at this, but somehow e.g.
| porn or other adult-only services are different.
|
| It's long been an established, reasonable stance that it
| is both the parent's responsibility and decision to allow
| or deny certain things, and it's also illegal for
| businesses to completely undermine the parent's ability
| to act as that gatekeeper for their kids.
| wizzwizz4 wrote:
| > _So it makes sense to make it illegal for those
| companies to provide services to children_
|
| I'm in favour of this, so long as the restriction is
| narrow. Children shouldn't be on Facebook, but they
| should be able to participate in the RuneScape forums
| under a pseudonym, or contribute to Wikipedia (provided
| they understand the "no, nothing can be deleted ever"
| nature of the edit history).
|
| However, most of the things we'd want to prohibit for
| children, aren't actually good for _anyone_. It would be
| much easier, in one sense, to blanket-ban the bad guys:
| no new accounts may be created on services like Facebook
| or Discord, unless they change their ways.
| basisword wrote:
| Just because you haven't heard of it doesn't mean it isn't
| common. Parents take different approaches. I had some
| friends parents who preferred we did it in their house
| where they could maintain some level of safety than us
| drinking recklessly in field. Others thought providing some
| beers was better than us buying the cheapest vodka
| available. And I'm sure other parents wouldn't have liked
| this approach if they knew about it.
| wizzwizz4 wrote:
| I'm familiar with the "semi-supervised drinking inside"
| approach. "Provide beer so they don't drink cheap vodka"
| isn't an approach I'd heard of; it's close enough to my
| Poe's-law straw position to weaken my argument.
| belorn wrote:
| I am a bit confused by that comment. Are parents social
| responsible to prevent companies from selling
| alcohol/guns/cigarettes to minors? If a company set up shop in
| a school and sold those things to minors during school breaks,
| who has the social responsibility to stop that?
| gleenn wrote:
| Not responsible for selling to all minors, just theirs.
| regularfry wrote:
| The school, in loco parentis.
| estimator7292 wrote:
| Companies are legally prohibited from marketing and selling
| certain products like tobacco and alcohol _because they
| historically tried to_.
|
| Parents are legally _and socially_ expected to keep their
| kids away from tobacco and alcohol. You 're breaking legal
| and social convention if you allow your kids to access
| dangerous drugs.
|
| Capitalist social media is exactly as dangerous as alcohol
| and tobacco. _Somebody_ should be held responsible for that,
| and the legal and social framework we already have for
| dealing with people who want to get kids addicted to shit
| works fairly well.
| trueismywork wrote:
| So we should ban social media is what you're saying but not
| what OC is saying.
| fuzzfactor wrote:
| At least give it a try.
| jatari wrote:
| All "social media" that uses recommendation algorithms
| should be unavaliable to children.
| pembrook wrote:
| > _Capitalist social media is exactly as dangerous as
| alcohol and tobacco._
|
| Most actual studies done on this topic find very little
| evidence this is true.
|
| It's a run-of-the-mill moral panic. People breathlessly
| repeating memes about whatever "kids these days" are up to
| and how horrible it is, as adults have done for thousands
| of years.
|
| I expect some emotional attacks in response for questioning
| the big panic of the day, but before you do so please
| explore:
|
| [1] Effects of reducing social media use are small and
| inconsistent: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article
| /pii/S266656032...
|
| [2] Belief in "Social media addiction" is wholly explained
| by media framing and not an actual addiction:
| https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-025-27053-2
|
| [3] No causal link between time spent on social media and
| mental health harm:
| https://www.theguardian.com/media/2026/jan/14/social-
| media-t...
|
| [4] The Flawed Evidence Behind Jonathan Haidt's Panic
| Farming: https://reason.com/2023/03/29/the-statistically-
| flawed-evide...
| nephihaha wrote:
| "Capitalist social media is exactly as dangerous as alcohol
| and tobacco. Somebody should be held responsible for that,
| and the legal and social framework we already have for
| dealing with people who want to get kids addicted to shit
| works fairly well."
|
| They work hand in hand with governments around the world,
| that's why they get the tax breaks. In return they hand
| over details about your opinions, social networks and
| whereabouts, not to mention facial recognition data via
| Facebook. They aren't remotely capitalist in any real sense
| since they have a bad business model.
| honkycat wrote:
| ISPs and OSs should be the ones providing these tools and
| make is stupid easy to set up a child's account and have a
| walled garden for kids to use.
| blindriver wrote:
| You must not have kids if you think it's easy to keep
| children off things that are bad for them.
| squigz wrote:
| It's really not some Herculean task to do so either,
| though.
| metadat wrote:
| Maybe you don't have kids of your own. Once you have 2 or
| 3, it is quite challenging to manage everything,
| especially over time.
| blindriver wrote:
| Especially if they are older, like 8+ years old. They are
| resourceful, sneaky and relentless.
| aleph_minus_one wrote:
| > They are resourceful, sneaky and relentless.
|
| ... and honest:
|
| - they will honestly tell you that they'd be very happy
| to see you dead when you impose restrictions upon them
| (people who are older will of course possibly get into
| legal trouble for such a statement)
|
| - they will tell they they wish you'd never have given
| birth to them (or aborted them)
|
| - they will tell you that since they never wanted to be
| born, they owe you nothing
|
| - ...
| squigz wrote:
| Sounds like a kid in need of psychiatric help.
| aleph_minus_one wrote:
| You barely ever had to deal with pubescent children? :-)
| squigz wrote:
| I mean, that's really not normal puberty stuff, but...
| okay.
| hunterpayne wrote:
| I raised kids. Never had to deal with anything like what
| is described. Sounds like someone read some questionable
| books on parenting, unfortunately followed the bad advice
| in those books and this is the result.
|
| And this entire thing is about bad parenting. Its always
| easier to just give the kid a tablet and go back to
| whatever you were doing. Its always better to actually
| interact with the kid. That trade-off of time is
| important because if you mess up when they are young, you
| spend a lot more time handling issues later on. That time
| you gained by giving them a tablet will get payed back
| someday, usually with interest. That's what is happening
| here.
| cgriswald wrote:
| Which is exactly why all people everywhere giving up
| their privacy will also be ineffective.
|
| Drugs, alcohol, cigarettes, pornography were all illegal
| for me to access as a kid but I wouldn't have had any
| trouble getting any of it.
| sarchertech wrote:
| Maybe at 16, not at 8.
| cgriswald wrote:
| The older kids are often the easy source for the younger
| kids. At 8 I had already seen a Playboy and knew kids who
| had seen harder stuff. I could have easily gotten a
| teenager to get me cigarettes (and drugs, but I didn't
| know what those were really). I had also already tasted
| alcohol. Any of this I could have stolen from any number
| of places.
|
| At 16 it was easier, but at 8 it wasn't hard.
| blindriver wrote:
| over 10 years ago, I had an intern from Harvard CS tell
| me that privacy is irrelevant unless you're doing
| something that you want to hide. I was gobsmacked that
| someone would not cherish their privacy but since then
| I've realized many don't care at all and have the same
| attitude that "I don't have anything to hide."
| hunterpayne wrote:
| Well that's your mistake right there. You hired someone
| from Harvard. Unless you are hiring that person to use
| their connections to market your product, there is no
| reason to hire someone from Harvard. They just bring bad
| ideology and STDs from Russian hookers to the table and
| nobody wants that.
|
| PS This post is partly satire, I will leave it to you as
| to which part is serious.
| Kaliboy wrote:
| I remember how my sister and I set up Google Family and
| fully locked down my niece her phone with app
| restrictions, screen time restrictions and a policy of
| accountability when we need to extend the screen time.
|
| It worked really well up until she got a school managed
| chromebook for homework with no access controls.
| hellojesus wrote:
| Can't your router block by Mac address? Just limit the
| Chromebook to allowlisted sites. And also school-issued
| computers are known for Spyware and even worse. It should
| probably be segregated in a separate network or vlan.
| scottLobster wrote:
| As a father of 3, one thing the wife and I had to learn
| over the course of the first two is that the modern world
| holds parents to impossible standards and a "fuck off"
| attitude is required for much of it.
|
| We've had pediatricians shame us for feeding our kids
| what they're willing to eat and not magically forcing "a
| more varied diet" down their throats at every meal,
| despite them being perfectly healthy by every objective
| metric. There are laws making it technically illegal for
| us to leave our kids unsupervised at home for any period
| of time in any condition, even a few minutes if one of us
| is running slightly late from work/appointments.
|
| Your not-quite-2-year-old is too tall for a rear-facing
| car-seat? You're a bad parent, possibly a criminal and
| putting them at risk by flipping the seat to face
| forward, a responsible parent spends hundreds of dollars
| they don't have on several different seats to maybe find
| one that fits better or have their kid ride uncomfortably
| and arguably unsafely with their legs hyper-extended up
| the seatback.
|
| Miss a flu shot because you were busy? Careful you don't
| come off as an antivaxxer.
|
| And all of this and more on top of changing diapers,
| doctors' appointments, daycare, preschool, school, family
| activities and full time jobs?
|
| Yeah, when my kids are old enough to engage with social
| media I will teach them how to use it responsibly, warn
| them about the dangers, make myself available to them if
| they have any problems, enforce putting the phones down
| at dinner and and keep a loose eye on their usage.
| Fortunately/unfortunately for them they have a
| technically sophisticated father who knows how to log web
| activity on the family router without their knowledge. So
| if anything goes sideways I'll have some hard information
| to look at. Most families don't have that level of
| technical skill.
| Wobbles42 wrote:
| I was almost certainly never going to be a parent for
| other unrelated reasons, but you have just given me a
| whole other list of confirmations for that decision that
| I hadn't thought of before.
|
| Thank you for that.
| friendzis wrote:
| [Any] task is much easier if you have the tools. Do/did
| you have a baby monitor? A technological tool, that
| allows you to "monitor" the baby while not being within
| an arms reach.
|
| Do you have an A+++++ oven with three panes of glass?
| It's [relatively] safe to touch and instead of monitoring
| if a child is somewhere near the oven you have to monitor
| if the child does not actively open the oven. That's
| _much_ easier.
| maccard wrote:
| I live in the UK. By default your ISP will block "mature"
| content and you have to contact them to opt out. iOS,
| Android, Playstation, Xbox, Switch all have parental
| controls that are enforced at an account level.
|
| A child with an iPhone, Xbox, and a Windows Laptop won't be
| able to install discord unless the parent explicitly lets
| them, or opts out of all the parental controls those
| platforms have to offer.
|
| The tech is here already, this is not about keeping
| children safe.
| drnick1 wrote:
| No, it's about corporate and government control.
| Thankfully, the UK government is clueless about tech,
| which means these controls can be bypassed relatively
| easily by using your own DNS or a public DNS server like
| Quad9.
| hunterpayne wrote:
| The corporations in this case are fighting against this.
| This is about your government and its desire to squash
| opinions they don't like. They are already going so far
| as to jail people for posting opinions they don't like.
| This has absolutely nothing to do with children, children
| are just the excuse.
| whywhywhywhy wrote:
| You have to be very tech savvy to know that your kid
| asking to install Discord to talk to/play games with
| their friend group is as dangerous as it is.
| maccard wrote:
| A single google search will tell you pretty unanimously
| that discord isn't for kids, is rated 13+ and has risks
| of talking to strangers.
| Gigachad wrote:
| Parts of discord are not safe at all for 13 year olds and
| currently there isn't a mechanism as far as I am aware to
| restrict a 13 year old from accessing them.
| techblueberry wrote:
| Mark Zuckerberg advocates for this, most people entrenched
| in this argument think it's worse. But I'm all for burning
| it to the ground so.
| MSFT_Edging wrote:
| There's a law going through in some state that want's to do
| this, but also put the onus on the OS developers to detect
| age aligned behavior. How do you do this with Linux? It
| would kill the open computer and kill ownership over
| computing.
| bigfishrunning wrote:
| Why would it be a problem to do this sort of thing with
| linux? Linux allows for oauth, proxied networking, what
| have you -- unless they're using some super-secret-
| unpublished-protocol, linux will be fine
|
| I'm against these age-verification laws, but to say it's
| impossible to comply with open-source software isn't
| really true.
| moffkalast wrote:
| Well the parents entrust their kids to the school, so they
| would be the ones responsible for what goes on on their
| premises. In turn, school computers are famously locked down
| to the point of being absolutely useless.
| HeWhoLurksLate wrote:
| That's really a district-by-district / school-by-school
| thing, some are significantly more locked down than others
| briffle wrote:
| when I was a kid in the early 90's, my state (and many
| others) banned cigarette vending machines since there was no
| way to prevent them being used by minors, unless they were
| inside a bar, where minors were already not allowed.
| unethical_ban wrote:
| The problem is, doing the analogous action with the entire
| internet is a privacy nightmare. You didn't have to tell
| 7-11 every item you bought at every store in the past 2
| years and opt-in to telling them what other stores you go
| to for the next 5.
|
| There is no digital equivalent of "flash an ID card and be
| done with it" in the surveillance state era of the
| internet. Using a CC is the closest we have and even then
| you're giving data away.
| Y-bar wrote:
| You do not need to control the entire internet. Put time
| limits on connected devices. Use parental controls. Talk
| to your kids about what they do online. Set clear
| boundaries. Reward good behaviour. Talk to other parents
| to align these limits to avoid social issues among the
| kids.
| unethical_ban wrote:
| We may be agreeing, I'm saying there is no battle tested,
| privacy safe _technical_ method of verifying age online,
| and this the controls need to be in the physical
| environment and setting social standards for social media
| and phone use.
| ndriscoll wrote:
| The analogous action is to only require age-restricted
| sites (or parts of sites) to check ID, not the entire
| Internet. e.g. no one is calling for mathisfun.com to
| check ID. I'd expect most parts of the web are child-
| friendly and would not be affected. Just like how almost
| all locations in physical space don't need to check ID.
|
| Additionally, the laws I've read mandate that no data be
| retained, so you have stronger legal protections than
| typical credit card use, or even giving your ID to a
| store clerk for age restricted purchases (many stores
| will scan it without asking, and in some states scanning
| is required).
| Gigachad wrote:
| This might have the benefit of reversing the trend where
| everything on the internet was rolled in to social media.
| If social media is age restricted, news, announcements,
| etc will have to break out to dedicated websites if they
| want to be accessible by all ages.
| cowboylowrez wrote:
| just ban kids from the internet already. if a parent
| allows the kid to have a full function smartphone and the
| kids get caught with it then throw the parents in jail
| and kids in an orphanage. people will catch on.
| Quarrelsome wrote:
| I think the argument is more around it being illegal so as to
| not be forced into playing "the bad guy". It's hard to
| prevent a level of entitlement and resentment if those less
| well parented have full access. If nobody is allowed then
| there's no parental friction at all.
|
| Its unfortunate that the application of this rule is being
| performed at the software level via ad-hoc age verification
| as opposed to the device level (e.g. smartphones themselves).
| However that might require the rigimirole of the state
| forcibly confiscating smartphones from minors or worrying
| nepalise outcomes.
| philipallstar wrote:
| But it's not playing the bad guy. It's playing the good
| guy.
| Quarrelsome wrote:
| in the abstract but in the social of the home you have to
| be the bad guy. While good parents manage that, the bar
| is too high for society in general.
| Gigachad wrote:
| From the perspective of the kids you are the bad guy.
| JohnMakin wrote:
| I'm saying hold parent's accountable for their children's
| online behavior and for their protection online, not
| companies (who want to profit off the kids, perverse
| incentive) or governments (who can barely be trusted to do
| this even if this was the only goal). For example if your
| kid starts making revenge CP of their classmates, and the
| parent could have reasonably mitigated or known about it, I
| think the parent absolutely should be held responsible.
|
| Don't punish the rest of the web for crappy parenting and
| crappy incentives by companies/govts.
| Quarrelsome wrote:
| > I'm saying hold parent's accountable for their
| children's online behavior and for their protection
| online
|
| You're saying the status quo and I think its fair to
| state you wouldn't intentionally design the status quo.
| Unless we have some wizard wheeze where we can easily
| arrest and detain or otherwise effectively punish parents
| without further reducing the quality of life for their
| children.
| evilantnie wrote:
| If we want parents to be accountable, then these
| platforms need to provide better tools to enable parents
| to do so. It is impossible to monitor the entirety of
| your child's behavior online through any of these
| platforms today. They are their own person, they make
| their own choices, and those choices are heavily
| influenced by a world the parents have increasingly less
| influence over, especially as they grow older.
|
| On the flip side, I do think we should also hold
| companies more accountable for this. We collectively
| prevented companies from advertising tobacco to minors
| through regulation with a pretty massive success rate.
| These companies know how harmful social media can be on
| youth, and there is little to no effective regulation
| around how children learn about these platforms and get
| enticed into them.
| JohnMakin wrote:
| I do not disagree with any of this, I was hoping it was
| implied by my original comment that this would be
| necessary.
| throwawayk7h wrote:
| Parents can't easily prevent their kids from going to those
| kinds of stores once they're at the age where the parent
| doesn't need to keep an eye on them all the time and they can
| travel about on their own.
|
| The difference though is that parents are generally the ones
| to give their kids their phones and devices. These devices
| could send headers to websites saying "I'm a kid" -- but this
| system doesn't exist, and parents apparently don't use
| existing parental controls properly or at all.
| srmatto wrote:
| Or people who aren't parents are yet again sharing strong
| opinions that are not based in reality. Plenty of parental
| controls are deployed, how long they last against a
| determined child is the real question. Here's a concrete
| example for you. Spotify has a web browser built in so that
| you can watch music videos, kids have figured out a way to
| use that to watch any video on YouTube--a 12 year old told
| me this. If you search on this subject you'll quickly learn
| this is well known and is generally being ignored by
| Spotify. Why not allow parents to disable the in-app web
| browser / video function?
|
| It's not as easy as you may believe to prevent that type of
| access.
| Forgeties79 wrote:
| So what's the alternative? Pretend we don't live in a
| digitally connected society and set our kids up for failure
| when they get one years after their peers?
| ajam1507 wrote:
| Keeping your kids off social media is setting them up for
| success.
| Forgeties79 wrote:
| I'm talking about phones specifically. Agree re: social
| media.
| ajam1507 wrote:
| The problem isn't with phones. We should have robust
| parental controls and the responsibility of parenting
| should be left to, wait for it... the parents.
| bigstrat2003 wrote:
| Let's assume for the sake of argument that social media
| is extremely harmful to children. Which means the answer
| to your question is "yes, obviously". If people were
| running around giving their kids fentanyl, you wouldn't
| say "but my kid's friends all use fentanyl and he'll be
| an outcast if he can't". You would say "any friends that
| he loses over this are well worth avoiding the damage".
| Why would it be different just because it's social media?
| Forgeties79 wrote:
| Phones, I mean. Sorry for the confusion there. I'm for
| holding off on social media.
| palata wrote:
| > These devices could send headers to websites saying "I'm
| a kid" -- but this system doesn't exist
|
| And there would be ways to work around it. If people find
| that privacy-preserving age verification is not good enough
| because "some kids will work around it", then nothing is
| good enough, period. Some will always work around anything.
| cowboylowrez wrote:
| if a parent gives a kid a full on smartphone, charge the
| parent with child abuse just like feeding the kid
| alcohol, cigarettes or having sex with them. people will
| catch on.
| runarberg wrote:
| Blaming parents is a bit unwarranted, when on the other end we
| have business interests driven by perverse incentives of
| predating on children's gullibility for their own profit.
|
| When you say " _We'll try everything_ " that is simply not
| true, in particular what we do not try is strict consumer
| protection laws which prohibits targeting children. Europe used
| to have such laws in the 1980s and the 1990s, but by the
| mid-1990s authorities had all but stopped enforcing them.
|
| We have tried consumer protection, and we know it works, but we
| are not trying it now. And I think there is exactly one reason
| for that, the tech lobby has an outsized influence on western
| legislators and regulators, and the tech industry does not want
| to be regulated.
| ipaddr wrote:
| It is literally the parents responsibility. You want to blame
| someone else. Raising a kid doesn't mean letting society
| raise them you have to make tough choices.
|
| If parents can't handle that they can give them up to the
| state.
| runarberg wrote:
| I am not gonna blame parents while businesses are allowed
| to target children with ads about the newest mobile game.
| Children are very easy to influence, and this is exploited
| heavily by the tech industry, who shower children with
| advertising. This is predatory behavior, which the
| legislator and the regulator of western governments
| (including Europe) has allowed to proliferate.
|
| We cannot expect every parent to be able to protect their
| children when they are being predated on by dozens of
| multi-million dollar companies, and the state is on the
| side of the companies.
| logicchains wrote:
| >Children are very easy to influence, and this is
| exploited heavily by the tech industry, who shower
| children with advertising
|
| The parents' job is to say no. If they're letting
| themselves be influenced too, that's bad parenting.
| runarberg wrote:
| And it is the job of the legislator to tell conflicting
| interests no. If they are influenced by lobby groups,
| that's a bad government.
| bigstrat2003 wrote:
| > I am not gonna blame parents while businesses are
| allowed to target children with ads about the newest
| mobile game.
|
| Those kids shouldn't even have a mobile device to play
| said game. That's where the parents can, and should, make
| a difference: don't let your kid even have a smartphone
| in the first place.
| runarberg wrote:
| Kids also tend to disobey, and whine about it. Sure you
| can say parents should be strict and thorough, but you
| can't expect 100% of parents (who are often tired from a
| hard day at work) to be 100% diligent 100% of the time.
|
| And the reason we have these ads is that corporations are
| hoping that the kids will indeed disobey, and whine
| constantly at their parents, until they have their way
| (as directed to by the targeted ad). There was a good
| reason why targeting kids in ads used to be illegal in
| Europe.
| taeric wrote:
| It is literally a platform's responsibility to make sure
| they are being used responsibly, as well?
|
| Imagine a gun range that was well aware that their grounds
| were being used in nefarious ways. We'd shut it down. A
| hospital that just blindly gave out pain killers to anyone
| that asked. We'd shut it down.
|
| Does this mean that a zero tolerance policy is what should
| be used to shut things down? I don't think so. We have some
| agency to control things, though.
| awakeasleep wrote:
| Individual Parents vs Meta Inc (1.66T mkt cap)
|
| May the best legal person win!
| EmbarrassedHelp wrote:
| Its more like age verification corporations, identity
| verification corporations, the child "safety" organizations
| that were lobbying for Chat Control versus individuals who
| want to protect their privacy.
| Salgat wrote:
| This only works if I ban my child from having any friends since
| they all have unlimited mobile access to the internet.
| jmye wrote:
| Sorry, I know it's a hard line for parents to tread and it's
| really easy to criticize parenting decisions other people are
| making, but the "everyone else is doing it so I have to"
| always seems as lazy to me today, as it probably did to my
| parents when I said it to them as a teenager.
|
| Is it more important to prevent your son from being
| weaponized and turned into a little ball of hate and anger,
| and your daughter from spending her teen years depressed and
| encouraged to develop eating disorders, or to make sure they
| can binge the same influencers as their "friends"?
| cgriswald wrote:
| The number of times I objected to my parents rules because
| my friends didn't have those rules and the response was:
| "I'm not their parent."
| friendzis wrote:
| Is it more important to prevent your child from <...>, or
| to not be seen as an adversarial monster?
| lurking_swe wrote:
| presumably being a parent is different from being a your
| child's friend. There is overlap, but yes, sometimes
| being a good parent requires "laying down the law".
|
| With that being said, i think explaining _in detail_ why
| you're laying down certain rules can go a LONG way toward
| building some trust and productive dialogue with your
| child. Maybe you'll find out they are more mature than
| you give them credit, can loosen up a bit. Or maybe a
| reasonable compromise can be found. Or maybe they'll be
| bitter for a few months, but they'll at least understand
| "why".
| whaleidk wrote:
| We used to teach kids to be themselves and stand up for
| what they believe in and their own authenticity and
| uniqueness even in the face of bullying. That having less
| or other doesn't mean your value is lesser or that you
| should be left out. Now we teach them... conform at all
| costs so you never have to risk being bullied or lonely?
| luxuryballs wrote:
| this is the biggest problem, so many parents are head-in-the-
| sand when it comes to things that can damage a child's mind
| like screen time, yet no matter how much you protect them if
| it's not a shared effort it all goes out the window, then the
| kid becomes incentivized to spend more time with friends just
| for the access, and can develop a sense that maybe mom and
| dad are just wrong because why aren't so-and-so's parents so
| strict?
|
| because their parents didn't read the research or don't care
| about the opportunity cost because it can't be that big of a
| deal or it would not be allowed or legal right? at least not
| until their kid gets into a jam or shows behavioral issues,
| but even then they don't evaluate, they often just fall prey
| to the next monthly subscription to cancel out the effects of
| the first: medication
| closeparen wrote:
| Do you believe the research shows that screens in and of
| themselves are so powerfully damaging that being exposed
| for, what, a few hours a week at a friend's house will
| cause them to require psychiatric medication?
|
| So many questions. Are you campaigning against billboards
| in your city? Do you avoid taking your kids to any business
| that has digital signage? I assume you completely abstain
| from all types of movies and TV? What about radio or books?
|
| What are you, personally, doing on HN?
|
| Fascinating.
| ipaddr wrote:
| Yes if they do bad things like drunk, have sex and do drugs.
|
| I would start with banning cellphones.
| techblueberry wrote:
| My greatest fear for my future young adult children is that
| they're on their cell phone all day and never have time to
| get in trouble with their friends, so there's that. Yes,
| Let's start with banning the cell phones.
| 1shooner wrote:
| Could your child not just call or text their friends? Or is
| the real expectation to not have to intervene at all about
| their preferred platform?
| jlokier wrote:
| I think the idea is for the child see their friends in
| person... not call, text, or internet.
|
| So even if their own child has no phone at all, they have
| access to the internet through _other_ children 's
| unlimited mobile access.
| closeparen wrote:
| When I was growing up, we loved to lend the sheltered
| kids from the more conservative families media they
| weren't supposed to have, like the Harry Potter books.
| Gigachad wrote:
| Only if all the other kids are not on social media. When I
| was in school, birthday parties and such were organised on
| facebook. If you were not on facebook, you weren't invited.
|
| If everyone was banned from facebook we would have
| organised them via text messages or email. That's the main
| point of social media age restrictions, individually
| banning kids is too punishing on those kids so parents and
| teachers don't try. Doing it across the whole population is
| much better.
| eesmith wrote:
| > We'll try everything, it seems, other than holding parents
| accountable for what their children consume.
|
| The way to keep kids from eating (yummy) lead-based paint chips
| was not holding parents accountable to what their kids ate, but
| banning lead-based paint.
| vinyl7 wrote:
| We live in a technofeudalist society now, we're all at the
| whims of the tech corps
| adolph wrote:
| > holding parents accountable for what their children consume
|
| There is a local dive bar down the street. I haven't expressly
| told my kids that entering and ordering an alcoholic drink is
| forbidden. In fact, that place has a hamburger stand out front
| on weekends and I wouldn't discourage my kids from trying it
| out if they were out exploring. I still expect that the
| bartender would check their ID before pulling a pint for them.
|
| It takes a village to raise a child. There are no panopticons
| for sale the next isle over from car seats. We are doing our
| best with very limited tooling from the client to across the
| network (of which the tremendously incompetent schools make a
| mockery with an endless parade of new services and cross
| dependencies). It will take a whole of society effort to lower
| risks.
| HeWhoLurksLate wrote:
| also there's a huge argument to be made that surveilling your
| kids is really _really_ bad for their development
| trinsic2 wrote:
| That same argument doesn't hold water on the internet. Its a
| communication medium. Its like a flow of information. You
| don't enter or leave physically spaces. the information flows
| to you where ever you are. trying to apply the same kinds of
| laws to the internet is a recipe for disaster because you are
| effecting everyone at the same time.
| onion2k wrote:
| _Yes, children are clever - I was one once._
|
| A counterargument to your point that children are clever - I
| was also one once.
| verisimi wrote:
| > We'll try everything, it seems, other than holding parents
| accountable for what their children consume.
|
| You've missed the point. No legislator or politician cares
| about what the parents are doing.
|
| What they care about is gaining greater control of people's
| data to then coerce them endlessly (with the assitance of
| technology) into acting as they would liike. To do that, they
| need all that info.
|
| "The children" is the sugar on the pill of de-anonymised
| internet.
| 2duct wrote:
| A monitoring solution might have worked for my case if my
| parents had monitored my Internet history, if they always made
| sure to check in on what I thought/felt from what I watched and
| made sure I felt secure in relying on them to back me up in the
| worst cases.
|
| But I didn't have emotionally mature parents, and I'm sure so
| many children growing up now don't either. They're going to
| read arguments like these and say they're already doing enough.
| Maybe they truly believe they are, even if they're mistaken. Or
| maybe they _won 't read arguments like these at all._ Parenting
| methods are diverse but smartphones are ubiquitous.
|
| So yes, I agree that parents need to be held accountable, but
| I'm torn on if the legal avenue is feasible compared to the
| cultural one. Children also need more social support if they
| can't rely on their parents like in my case, or tech is going
| to eat them alive. Social solutions/public works are kind of
| boring compared to technology solutions, but society has been
| around longer than smartphones.
| ipaddr wrote:
| Should the state have force your parents to give you up for
| adoption? That's the social support the state can offer.
| 2duct wrote:
| I don't think it would have helped, given the outcomes for
| foster children are near universally worse except in the
| most extreme cases of abuse. I did threaten to call CPS but
| I was, of course, berated for it and threatened that I
| would be taken away, so that shut me up. Since I was never
| assaulted I doubt it would have reached the standard for
| foster care anyway, yet the consequences still endure to
| this day.
|
| I was told over and over by in hindsight unqualified
| persons that emotional abuse wasn't real abuse, so after a
| few years I was disinclined to seek help.
|
| If I had had even _one_ person that supported me
| unconditionally instead of none at all, even if that person
| wasn 't a parent, I'm fairly certain I would have turned
| out differently. That was just a matter of luck, and I came
| out empty-handed. I never felt comfortable talking about
| what I was exposed to online with anyone, and that only
| hurt me further, but I was a child and couldn't see another
| option.
| jama211 wrote:
| So the only options are no support or give you up for
| adoption? No middle ground is possible?
| Wobbles42 wrote:
| This is the real point that needs to be made.
|
| You can argue that many parents are less than ideal
| parents, but that is not sufficient to justify having the
| state step in. You also have to show that the state is less
| bad.
|
| Decades of data on the foster system _strongly_ suggests
| otherwise. The state, by any objective measure, is terrible
| at raising children.
| croes wrote:
| > then give parents strong monitoring and restriction tools and
| empower them to protect their children.
|
| Because parents don't abuse massive surveillance tools.
|
| Given that most abuse happens in the family and by parents
| maybe it's a bad idea to give them so much power
| tinfoilhatter wrote:
| So we should trust the governments of the world? The same
| governments that don't seem to be doing anything about a
| large group of people that visited a specific island to abuse
| minors?
| croes wrote:
| Where did I say that?
|
| Exactly, nowhere.
|
| If I'm contra B, it doesn't mean I pro A
| watwut wrote:
| The expectations on parents in USA are at their historical
| high. What are you talking on about in here. The expectation
| that parents will perfectly supervise them at every moment of
| their life till their adulthood is a.) new b.) at its
| historical max.
| NoMoreNicksLeft wrote:
| >We'll try everything, it seems, other than holding parents
| accountable
|
| The government took over most parenting functions, one at a
| time, until the actual parent does or is capable of doing very
| little parenting at all. If the government doesn't like the
| fact that it has become the parent of these children, perhaps
| it shouldn't have undermined the actual parents these last 80
| years. At the very least, it should refrain from usurping ever
| more of the parental role (not that there is much left to
| take).
|
| You yourself seem to be insulated from this phenomena, maybe
| you're unaware that it is occurring. Maybe it wouldn't change
| your opinions even if you were aware.
|
| >If you want to actually protect children
|
| What if I don't want to protect children (other than my own) at
| all? Why would you want to be these children's parents (you
| suggest you or at least others want to "protect" them), which
| strongly implies that you will act in your capacity as
| government, but then get all grumpy that other people are
| wanting to protect children by acting in their capacity of
| government?
| SunshineTheCat wrote:
| The greatest of uphill battles in today's current climate is
| trying to push anything in the realm of personal
| responsibility.
|
| Politicians' whole basis for nearly every campaign is "you're
| helpless, let us fix it for you."
|
| For the vast majority of problems plaguing society, the answer
| isn't government, it's for people changing their behavior. Same
| goes for parenting.
|
| But unfortunately, "you're an adult, figure it out" isn't the
| greatest campaign slogan (if you want to win).
| skipants wrote:
| It wasn't always this way: "Ask not what your country can do
| for you -- ask what you can do for your country"
| amriksohata wrote:
| its like the food industry blaming parents, sugar like
| apps/games are designed to be addictive to the point they are
| act like a drug, stop the drug dealer, not the consumer.
| axus wrote:
| It's very easy to lock up alcohol/cigarettes, a child should
| never have access. Internet usage is more like broadcast media,
| a child should have regular access.
|
| The positives and negatives of Internet usage are more extreme
| than broadcast media but less than alcohol/guns. The majority
| of people lack the skills to properly censor Internet without
| hovering over the child's shoulder full-time as you would with
| a gun. Best you can do is keep their PC near you, but it's not
| enough.
|
| We agree that a creepy surveillance nanny state is not the
| solution, but training parents to do the censorship seems
| unattainable. As we do for guns/alcohol/cigarettes, mass
| education about the dangers is a good baseline.
|
| EDIT: And some might disagree about never having access to
| alcohol!
| KoolKat23 wrote:
| Devices such as phones come with an option when you start the
| device asking simply is this for a child or an adult. Your
| router generally these days comes with a parental filter
| option on start up too. Heck we have chatgpt that can guide a
| parent through setting up a system if they want something
| more custom.
|
| If people want to push, they should just push to make these
| set up options more ubiquitous, obvious and standardized. And
| perhaps fund some advertising for these features.
| fartfeatures wrote:
| This is where Apple, Microsoft and Android need to step up.
| Indeed they already have in many ways with things being
| better than they used to be.
|
| There needs to be a strict (as in MDM level) parental control
| system.
|
| Furthermore there needs to be a "School Mode" which allows
| the devices to be used educationally but not as a
| distraction. This would work far better than a ban.
| jama211 wrote:
| They could provide all the tools in the world. Unless
| there's legislation change to what children are allowed to
| consume legally, everyone will largely ignore it.
| axus wrote:
| Microsoft has done a good job with Microsoft accounts and
| Microsoft Family Safety. It's about as user-friendly as
| you'll get outside of Apple, though the speed could be
| improved. And this only covers PCs, Android 's system is
| less good.
|
| Even with this, the problem requires more than pushing a
| button. Time, thought, and adjustment are needed. Like home
| maintenance, its necessary but not everyone can do it
| without help.
|
| Getting AI assistance is good advice.
| trinsic2 wrote:
| I dunno man. IMHO, kids should not have access to devices
| of any kind until the brain develops. Im not sure what that
| number is, but lets say its 15. At that point, we as
| parents need to be role models and let kids make mistakes.
| There is this whole idea that if you focus too much on
| security, you open the door for increased risk. I feel this
| applies to this situation[0].
|
| When I was a kid, when I reached a certain age, 13 I think,
| there was nothing my parents good could do to stop me from
| learning from my own mistakes. I think using blanket laws
| and tech to curb internet behavior is just going to
| backfire.
|
| [0]: https://news.clemson.edu/the-safer-you-feel-the-less-
| safely-...
| basisword wrote:
| >> In the United States, you can get in trouble if you
| recklessly leave around or provide alcohol/guns/cigarettes for
| a minor to start using, yet somehow, the same social
| responsibility seems thrown out the window for parents and the
| web.
|
| So anyone can walk into a shop and purchase these things
| unrestricted? It's not the responsibility of the seller too?
| mothballed wrote:
| Tobacco, yes you can order pipe tobacco and cigars online
| sent to your house without ID.
|
| Guns yes, you can buy a schmidt-rubin cartridge rifle or
| black powder revolver sent straight to your home from an
| online (even interstate) vendor no ID or background check,
| perfectly legal.
|
| Alcohol yes, you can order wine straight to your house
| without ID.
|
| These are all somewhat less known "loopholes" but not really
| turned out to be a problem despite no meaningful controls on
| the seller. You probably didn't even know about these
| loopholes, actually -- that's how little of a problem it's
| been.
| jama211 wrote:
| Ah, the abstinence theory of protection. How it continues to
| rear its ugly head.
|
| Why this utter drivel is the top comment is beyond me,
| unbelievable.
| marliechiller wrote:
| Can you offer some rebuttal to give some credence to your
| point?
| JohnMakin wrote:
| That is not what the post you are replying to is advocating
| for at all - try reading it one more time without so much
| hostility
| Fervicus wrote:
| > We'll try everything, it seems, other than holding parents
| accountable for what their children consume.
|
| The mistake in this reasoning is assuming that they are
| actually interested in protecting the children.
| Wobbles42 wrote:
| This.
|
| The world is becoming increasingly more uncertain
| geopolitically. We have incipient (and actual) wars coming,
| and near term potential for societal disruption from
| technological unemployment. Meanwhile social media has all
| but completely undermined broadcast media as a means of
| social control.
|
| This isn't about protecting children. It's about preventing a
| repeated of the Arab Spring in western countries later this
| decade.
|
| "Think of the children" is the oldest trick in the book, and
| should always be met with skepticism.
| techblueberry wrote:
| I know this is weird, but I'm in some ways not really sure who
| is on the side of freedom here. I get your position, but like.
| The whole idea of the promise of the internet has been
| destroyed by newsfeeds and mega-corps.
|
| There is almost literally documented examples of Facebook
| executives twirling their mustaches wondering how they can get
| kids more addicted. This isn't a few bands with swear words,
| and in fact, I think that the damage these social media
| companies are doing is in fact, reducing the independence teens
| and kids that have that were the fears parents originally had.
|
| I dunno, are you uncertain about your case at all or just like.
| I just like, can't help but start with fuck these companies.
| All other arguments are downstream of that. Better the nanny
| state than Nanny Zuck.
| pokstad wrote:
| Social media is like tobacco. We went after tobacco for
| targeting kids, we should do the same to social media. Highly
| engineered addictive content is not unlike what was done to
| cigarettes.
| Gormo wrote:
| No, it isn't. Tobacco is a physical substance that alters
| users' biochemistry and creates a physical dependence.
| Social media is _information_ conveyed via a computing
| device. You can criticize social media for what it is in
| its own right, without having to engage in these kinds of
| disingenuous equivocations.
| csmcg wrote:
| the mechanisms by which that information is being
| conveyed have been shown to be addictive as well, no?
| ozim wrote:
| Sounds like you need to read up on dopamine and
| addictions a bit more.
|
| Gambling isn't introducing substance into user system it
| is making use of existing brain chemicals.
|
| Social media companies engineered every piece of
| addictive mechanisms from gambling to alter brain
| chemistry or reactions of users.
| jajuuka wrote:
| You're blurring the lines a bit. Gambling isn't
| inherently an addiction. Just like a good TV show isn't
| inherently addictive either. Social media trying to be
| more engaging shouldn't really be viewed as an evil
| action anymore than HBO trying to create compelling
| content is.
|
| The problem with comparing social media use to tobacco is
| that they are completely different. It's like saying weed
| is just like heroin because they both make you feel good.
| It's reductive and not productive.
|
| The completely anti-social media stance ignores the good
| parts of social media. People can connect from across the
| planet and found others who shares the same views or
| experiences. People who are marginalized can find
| community where none may exist in their local area. So we
| should approach this more carefully and grounded.
| Gigachad wrote:
| Nothing is inherently an addiction. You can smoke a
| cigarette without it being an addiction.
| tsimionescu wrote:
| You can make the point that social media has real
| positive benefits as well as negatives without minimizing
| the well proven fact that gambling creates a form of
| addiction in a significant proportion, though not all, of
| its users, one every bit as devastating as heroin or
| alcohol.
| pokstad wrote:
| You're right, it's actually worse than tobacco. Tobacco
| simply makes your body sick, but social media attacks the
| most vital part of us. Even the CDC has studied this:
| https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/73/su/su7304a3.htm
| fsflover wrote:
| Yes, it is: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24579498
| bdangubic wrote:
| Comparing Tobacco to Social Media is like comparing me to
| LeBron James. I'd rather have my kid smoke a pack of day
| than have social media accounts
| fuzzfactor wrote:
| Yes, go after Facebook and their kind only, avoid
| collateral damage to the remaining regular old internet.
| butvacuum wrote:
| Screw over Meta then. Not _everybody else_.
|
| Meta is the bozo in a panel van with no windows. All The
| legit porn sites put up Big Blinking Neon Signs.
| chris37879 wrote:
| I actually run an adults only community site and you are
| correct, I have it in a popup that appears on every "fresh"
| visit to the site, it's in the giant bold print you agree
| to when you register, and from a technical end, I send
| every possible header and other signal to let filtering
| software know it's an adult only space. If there is a child
| accessing that site, they are doing so because their parent
| didn't even attempt to prevent them from doing so. And now
| I'm having to look into ID verification services that are
| going to quintuple to costs of hosting this free community
| for people in a time where community is more important than
| ever.
| Terretta wrote:
| > _... start with fuck these companies. Better the nanny
| state than Nanny Zuck._
|
| I'm not sure how those two positions connect.
|
| Execs bad, so laws requiring giving those execs everyone's
| IDs, instead of laws against twirled mustaches?
| cowboylowrez wrote:
| these are just bad arguments all around, including gov't
| with this upload id crap. Why aren't we making internet
| 18+? The only unrefutable answers I get are just downvotes
| which is ok I guess, sort of validates my point because
| there's no reason for kids to get unrestricted internet
| access and downvotes are easy.
| nefarious_ends wrote:
| > There is almost literally documented examples of...
|
| lol
| netcan wrote:
| >Better the nanny state than Nanny Zuck.
|
| For me this is a crux, at least in principle. Once online
| media is so centralized... the from argument freedom is
| diminished.
|
| There are differences between national government power and
| international oligopoly but... even that is starting to get
| complicated.
|
| That said... This still leaves the problem in practice. We
| get decrees that age-restriction is mandatory. There will be
| bad compliance implementations. Privacy implications.
|
| Meanwhile a while... how much will we actually gain when it
| comes to child protection.
|
| You can come up will all sorts of examples proving "Facebook
| bad" but that doesn't mean these things are fixed when/if
| regulation actually comes into play.
| butterbomb wrote:
| > I know this is weird, but I'm in some ways not really sure
| who is on the side of freedom here. I get your position, but
| like.
|
| No one. You'll see a few politicians and more individuals
| stuck to their principles, but anyone with major clout sees
| the writing on the wall and is simply working to entrench
| their power.
|
| > Better the nanny state than Nanny Zuck.
|
| Indeed, what lolberts fail to understand usually is not a
| choice between government vs "freedom" it's a choice between
| the current government and whoever will fill up the power
| vacuum left by the government.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > I know this is weird, but I'm in some ways not really sure
| who is on the side of freedom here.
|
| That's because "freedom" is complicated and doesn't precisely
| map to the interests of any of the major actors. Its largely
| a war between parties seeking control for different elites
| for different purposes.
| fuzzfactor wrote:
| Yes, seeking more control for themselves and completely at
| the expense of everybody else's loss.
| ribosometronome wrote:
| >I get your position ... There is almost literally documented
| examples of Facebook executives twirling their mustaches
| wondering how they can get kids more addicted. This isn't a
| few bands
|
| Their position was to compare it to alcohol, guns, and
| tobacco, not bands using naughty words. Alcohol and tobacco
| definitely enter mustache swirling territory, getting
| children addicted and funding misinformation on the harms of
| their product.
| thegrim33 wrote:
| Nobody is putting a gun to your head and forcing you to use
| Facebook or whatever other site. I quit using most social
| media over a decade ago. If you don't want to use it, or you
| don't want your children to use it, then don't use it.
| bix6 wrote:
| O yeah? Where's that guy who couldn't get a job 6 months
| ago because he refuses to use LinkedIn.
| chris37879 wrote:
| Those execs were also using the tactics to addict adults, and
| while they may have targeted teens, the problem is, at its
| core: humans. So no amount of nannying by either the company
| nor the government will solve this issue.
|
| Who would be responsible if a child developed alcohol
| addiction? A nicotine problem? Any other addiction?
|
| Exactly. The same people that should be responsible for
| giving them unfettered access to an internet that is no
| longer safe. Even adults have to be wary of getting hooked on
| scrolling, and while I agree that the onus is on the
| companies, it has been demonstrated over and over again that
| they will not be held to account for their behavior.
|
| So the only logical choice left that actually preserves
| freedom is for parents to get off their ass and keep their
| child safe. Parent's that don't use filtering and monitoring
| software with their children should be charged with neglect.
| They are for sending a kid into the cold without a coat, or
| letting them go hungry, why is it different sending them onto
| the internet?
|
| And to your last point: You are dead wrong. No government
| anywhere in the world has demonstrated that they have the
| resources, expertise, or technical knowledge to solve this
| problem. The most famously successful attempt is the Chinese
| Great Firewall, which is breached routinely by folks. As soon
| as a government controls what speech you are allowed to
| consume, the next logical step for them is to restrict what
| speech you can say, because waging war on what people access
| will always fail. I mean, Facebook alone already contains
| tons of content that's against its terms of service, and they
| have more money than God, so either they actually want that
| content there, or they are too understaffed to deal with the
| volume, and the volume problem only ever increases.
|
| So in my view, you are the one against freedom by advocating
| for the government to control the speech adults can access
| for the sake of "protecting the children" when the actual
| people that are socially, morally, and legally culpable for
| that protection are derelict in their duties.
| techblueberry wrote:
| > Who would be responsible if a child developed alcohol
| addiction? A nicotine problem? Any other addiction?
|
| I mean, historically speaking, we blamed the tobacco
| companies.
| chris37879 wrote:
| Did we? I know they lost some court cases, had to adjust
| advertising and so on, but was any tobacco company
| actually held accountable for the harm they caused? The
| answer is no because they all still exist and are
| profitable entities. Corporations that cause the harm
| they did should be subject to dissolution.
|
| Also, if they were genuinely responsible, why can a
| child's parents be held accountable for them developing
| an addiction? The company was responsible, not the
| parent... do you see how ignorant that sounds?
| rpsw wrote:
| The de jure minimium age to purchase tobacco is 21 now in
| the US, so I guess anyone see to sell tobacco products to
| those under that age could be held responsible as well.
| chris37879 wrote:
| They are held responsible by paying a fine to the
| government or losing their tobacco license, which is
| better than nothing, but doesn't actually fix the harm
| they caused already for the kid that's now hooked.
| wedog6 wrote:
| > Who would be responsible if a child developed alcohol
| addiction? A nicotine problem? Any other addiction?
|
| The government literally actively prevents people selling
| all these things to children, rather than permit a free for
| all and then expect parents to take responsibility for
| steering their kids away from them.
| fuzzfactor wrote:
| Meta for one has proven terminally irresponsible at
| acceptable stewardship.
|
| Maybe it's about time that the proven predatory companies
| be restricted to something like their own adults-only
| internet cafes where age can be checked at the door.
|
| They had their chance with the open internet and they
| blew it.
| rectang wrote:
| > _Better the nanny state than Nanny Zuck._
|
| why-not-both.jpg
|
| Maximizing corporate freedom leads inevitably to corporate
| capture of government.
|
| Opposing either government concentration of power alone or
| corporate concentration of power alone is doomed to failure.
| Only by opposing both is there any hope of achieving either.
|
| Applying that principle to age-verification, which I think is
| inevitable: Prefer privacy-preserving decoupled age-
| verification services, where the service validates minimum
| age and presents a cryptographic token to the entity
| requiring age validation. Ideally, discourage entities from
| collecting hard identification by holding them accountable
| for data breaches; or since that's politically infeasible,
| model the service on PCI with fines for poor security.
|
| The motivation for this regime is to prevent distribution
| services from holding identification data, reducing the
| information held by any single entity.
| AnthonyMouse wrote:
| > Prefer privacy-preserving decoupled age-verification
| services, where the service validates minimum age and
| presents a cryptographic token to the entity requiring age
| validation.
|
| This is the wrong implementation.
|
| You require sites hosting adult content to send a header
| indicating what kind of content it is. Then the device can
| do what it wants with that information. A parent can then
| configure their child's device not to display it, without
| needing anybody to have an ID or expecting every government
| and lowest bidder to be able to implement the associated
| security correctly.
|
| It doesn't matter what kind of cryptography you invent.
| They either won't use it to begin with or will shamelessly
| and with no accountability violate the invariants taken as
| hard requirements in your theoretical proof. If you have to
| show your ID to the lowest bidder, you're pwned, so use the
| system that doesn't have that.
| rectang wrote:
| Your proposed architecture also achieves the goal of
| discouraging content-distributing entities from holding
| hard identification data, so it sounds good to me.
| tsimionescu wrote:
| This solves some probelms, such as children accessing
| porn sites (oh the horror). But it doesn't solve other
| problems, such as predators accessing children's spaces.
| YouTube Kids is purportedly a safe, limited place for
| kids - and yet, there are numerous disturbing videos that
| get past the automated censors. Pedophiles stalk places
| like Roblox.
| areoform wrote:
| > documented examples of Facebook executives twirling their
| mustaches wondering how they can get kids more addicted
|
| If you genuinely believe that this is about those moustache
| twirling executives, then I have a bridge to sell you.
|
| Have you ever wondered why and how these systems are being
| implemented? Have you ever gone why Discord / Twitch / what
| have you and why now? Have you ever thought that this might
| be happening because of Nepal and the fears of another Arab
| spring?
|
| https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2025/9/15/more-egalitarian-
| ho...
|
| I think too many people on this platform don't understand
| what this is about. This is about power. It's not about
| what's good for you or the children. Or for the constituents.
| It's about power. Real power. Karp-ian "scare enemies and on
| occasion kill them" power.
|
| There are many ways in which such a system could be
| implemented. They could have asked people to use a credit
| card. Adult entertainment services have been using this as a
| way to do tacit age verification for a very long time now.
| Or, they could have made a new zero-knowledge proof system.
| Or, ideally, they could have told the authorities to get
| bent. +
|
| Tech is hardly the first industry to face significant
| (justifiable or unjustifiable) government backlash. I am
| hesitant to use them as examples as they're a net harm,
| whereas this is about preventing a societal net harm, but the
| fossil fuel and tobacco industries fought their governments
| for decades and straight up changed the political system to
| suit them. ++
|
| FAANG are richer than they ever were. Even Discord can raise
| more and deploy more capital than most of the tobacco
| industry at the time. It's also a righteous cause. A cause
| most people can get behind (see: privacy as a selling point
| for Apple and the backlash to Ring). But they're not fighting
| this. They're leaning into it.
|
| Let's take a look at what Discord asked people for a second,
| the face scan, If you choose Facial Age
| Estimation, you'll be prompted to record a short video selfie
| of your face. The Facial Age Estimation technology runs
| entirely on your device in real time when you are performing
| the verification. That means that facial scans never leave
| your device, and Discord and vendors never receive it. We
| only get your age group.
|
| Their specific ask is to try and get depth data by moving the
| phone back and forth. This is not just "take a selfie" -
| they're getting the user to move the device laterally to
| extract facial structure. The "face scan" (how is that
| defined??) never leaves the device, but that doesn't mean the
| biometric data isn't extracted and sent to their third-party
| supplier, k-Id.
|
| There was an article that went viral for spoofing this,
| https://age-verifier.kibty.town/ //
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46982421 . In the
| article, the author found by examining the API response the
| system was sending, k-id, the age
| verification provider discord uses doesn't store or send your
| face to the server. instead, it sends a bunch of metadata
| about your face and general process details.
|
| The author assumes that "this [approach] is good for your
| privacy." It's not. If you give me the depth data for a face,
| you've given me the fingerprint for that face.
|
| We're anthropomorphising machines. _A machine doesn 't need
| pictures; "a bunch of metadata" will do just fine._
|
| We are assuming that the surveillance state will require
| humans sitting in a shadow-y room going over pictures and
| videos. It won't. You can just use a bunch of vectors and a
| large multi-modal model instead. Servers are cheap and never
| need to eat or sleep.
|
| Certain firms are already doing this for the US Gov,
| https://x.com/vxunderground/status/2024188446214963351 /
| https://xcancel.com/vxunderground/status/2024188446214963351
|
| We can assume de facto that Discord is also doing profiling
| along vectors (presumably behavioral and demographic
| features) which that author described as,
| after some trial and error, we narrowed the checked part to
| the prediction arrays, which are outputs, primaryOutputs and
| raws. turns out, both outputs and primaryOutputs
| are generated from raws. basically, the raw numbers are
| mapped to age outputs, and then the outliers get removed with
| z-score (once for primaryOutputs and twice for outputs).
|
| Discord plugs into games and allows people to share what
| they're doing with their friends. For example, Discord can
| automatically share which song a user is listening on Spotify
| with their friends (who can join in), the game they're
| playing, whether they're streaming on Twitch etc.
|
| In general, Discord seems to have fairly reliable data about
| the other applications the user is running. Discord also has
| data about your voice and now your face.
|
| Is some or all of this data being turned into features that
| are being fed to this third-party k-ID? https://www.k-id.com/
|
| https://www.forbes.com/sites/mattgardner1/2024/06/25/k-id-
| cl...
|
| https://www.techinasia.com/a16z-lightspeed-bet-singapore-
| par...
|
| k-ID is (at first glance) extracting fairly similar data from
| Snapchat, Twitch etc. With ID documents added into the mix,
| this certainly seems like a very interesting global profiling
| dataset backstopped with government documentation as ground
| truth.
|
| I'm sure that's totally unrelated. :)
|
| -
|
| + like they already have for algorithmic social media and
| profiling,
| https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2024/10/14/silicon-
| valley...
|
| Somehow there's tens to hundreds of millions available for
| crypto causes and algorithmic social media crusades, but
| there's none for the "existential threat" of age
| verification.
|
| ++ Once again, this is old hat. See also: Turbotax,
| https://www.propublica.org/article/inside-
| turbotax-20-year-f...
| AnthonyMouse wrote:
| > I just like, can't help but start with fuck these
| companies. All other arguments are downstream of that.
|
| The solution would then be to break them up or do things like
| require adversarial interoperability, rather than ineffective
| non-sequiturs like requiring them to ID everyone.
|
| The perverse incentive comes from a single company sitting on
| a network effect. You have to use Facebook because other
| people use Facebook, so if the algorithm shows you trash and
| rage bait you can't unilaterally decide to leave without
| abandoning everyone still there, and the Facebook company
| gets to show ads to everyone who uses it and therefore wants
| to maximize everyone's time wasted on Facebook, so the
| algorithm shows you trash and rage bait.
|
| Now suppose they're not allowed to restrict third party user
| agents. You get a messaging app and it can send messages to
| people on Facebook, Twitter, SMS, etc. all in the same
| interface. It can download the things in "your feed" and then
| put it in a different order, or filter things out, and again
| show content from multiple services in the same interface,
| including RSS. And then that user agent can do things like
| filter out adult content, if you want it to.
|
| We need to fix the actual problem, which is that the hosting
| service shouldn't be in control of the user interface to the
| service.
| mentalgear wrote:
| Indeed "Interoperability" is what would hurt social media
| giants the most - Cory Doctorow recently held an excellent
| talk where he stated that back in the early 00s Facebook
| (and others) used interoperability to offer services that
| allowed to interact, push and pull to mySpace (the big dog
| back then) to siphon off their users and content. But once
| Facebook became the dominant player, they moved to make the
| exact tactics they used (Interoperability and automation)
| illegal. Talking about regulatory capture ...
| fc417fc802 wrote:
| > ineffective non-sequiturs like requiring them to ID
| everyone.
|
| Is that really a non-sequitur though? Cigarettes are
| harmful and addictive so their sale is age gated. So too
| for alcohol. Gambling? Also yes. So wouldn't age gating
| social media be _entirely consistent_ in that case?
|
| Not that I'm necessarily in favor of it. I agree that
| various other regulations, particularly interoperability,
| would likely address at least some of the underlying
| concerns. But then I think it might not be such a bad idea
| to have all of the above rather than one or the other.
| conductr wrote:
| I don't get your point, at least not in relation to the GP
| post. I agree with GP, parents need to be more accountable.
| We as parents, _and We should all be concerned about future
| children /generations_, should be demanding more regulation
| to help force the change we need on this topic. We as a
| society need to treat SM like those other addictive product
| classes. The fact SM is addicting and execs try to juice it
| more, is frankly to be expected.
|
| Vilify them all you want, but same has been done with
| nicotine products, alcohol products, etc. and to GPs point,
| we SM as a toy for our children to play with. We chose to
| change the rules (laws, regulations, etc) because capitalists
| can never be simply trusted to do what's best for anything
| except their bottom line. That's a fundamental law no
| different than inertia or gravity in a capitalistic society.
| That's why regulators exist. Until you regulate it, they will
| wear their villain badge and rake in the billions. It's easy
| to be disliked when the topic of your disdain is what makes
| you filthy rich (in other words, they don't care what you or
| I think of what they're doing).
| sigbottle wrote:
| Centralization and standardization are going to be the topic
| in the 21st century.
| rcbdev wrote:
| For all the complaining some U.S.-Americans seem to do about
| the EU approach to these issues, things like the Digital
| Markets Act aim to fix exactly these types of issues.
| p0w3n3d wrote:
| The problem is that internet is used nowadays for democratic
| purposes. Once you introduce a globally unique personal ID,
| you will be monitored. And boy, you will be monitored
| throughoutly. In case of any democratic process that needs to
| be undertaken in future against government, this very
| government will take the tools of identification and will
| knock to the doors of people who try to raise awareness and
| maybe mutiny. And this is what Orwell wrote about
| txrx0000 wrote:
| > I just like, can't help but start with fuck these
| companies. All other arguments are downstream of that. Better
| the nanny state than Nanny Zuck.
|
| How about we reject all institutional nannies?
|
| It is much easier to implement user-controlled on-device
| settings than any sort of over-the-Internet verification
| scheme. Parents purchase their children's devices and can
| adjust those settings before giving it to their kids. This is
| the crux of the problem, and all other arguments are
| downstream of this.
| Aurornis wrote:
| > I just like, can't help but start with fuck these
| companies. All other arguments are downstream of that. Better
| the nanny state than Nanny Zuck.
|
| Wild times when we're seeing highest voted Hacker News
| commenters call for the nanny state.
|
| If you're thinking these regulations will be limited to
| singular companies or platforms you don't use, there is no
| reason to believe that's true.
|
| There was already outrage on Hacker News when Discord
| voluntarily introduced limited ID checks for certain
| features. The invitations to bring on the nanny state reverse
| course very quickly when people realize those regulations
| might impact the sites they use, too.
|
| A lot of the comments I'm seeing assume that only Facebook or
| other platforms will be impacted, but there's now way that
| would be the case.
| fuzzfactor wrote:
| OK, here's another one.
|
| How about taking all these websites that require PII onto
| their own members-only domain?
|
| This actually should have been in place and well fleshed-
| out before Google & Microsoft started pushing their
| "account" nonsense.
| commandlinefan wrote:
| > Better the nanny state than Nanny Zuck.
|
| The state can imprison you. Zuck can't.
| kooshball wrote:
| > Better the nanny state than Nanny Zuck.
|
| This is a huge self own. I can't believe I'm reading this on
| a website called "hacker news".
| dfee wrote:
| while i'm sympathetic to your position, the truth is that
| /that/ is where this site is now.
| Computer0 wrote:
| You sound like someone that would work for the CIA or FBI if
| they offered you a job. Those are the types of people that I
| cannot and will not ever trust. I do not respect your
| opinion.
| SecretDreams wrote:
| ITT are a lot* of tech workers who made their money as a cog in
| the system poisoning the internet that future generations would
| have to swim in. I wonder if toxic waste companies also tell
| the parents it's strictly on them to keep their kids out of the
| lakes that are poisoned, but once flowed cleanly?
|
| We live in a shared world with shared responsibilities. If you
| are working on a product, or ever did work on a product, that
| made the internet worse rather than better, you have a shared
| responsibility to right that wrong. And parents do have to
| protect their kids, but they can't do it alone with how
| systematically children are targeted today by predatory tech
| companies.
| EmbarrassedHelp wrote:
| Age verification tech companies are lobbying heavily for
| governments to legally require their services. The proposed
| "solutions" are about funneling money into the hands of other
| tech companies and shady groups, while violating user
| privacy.
|
| If anything, we should be banning the collection of any age
| related information to access social media and more mature
| content. We need companies to respect privacy, rather than
| legislation even more privacy violations.
| SecretDreams wrote:
| If anything, we should be preventing young people from
| being exposed to the version of the internet that currently
| exists until the tech companies that made it this way offer
| a solution. I am all ears if you have an alternative that
| big tech can implement to ensure this is the case while
| they are given the task of cleaning up the mess they've
| made?
| trinsic2 wrote:
| Bro the internet was made by everyday people.
| Corporations just imposed there shit on top of it. Im all
| for the corporate part going away, but I think its better
| if we make social media corporations transparent so we
| can target how they are operating those services. Age
| gating users is not the answer
| SecretDreams wrote:
| I've been on the internet for more than 20 years. It got
| a lot worse in the last 10. Individuals maybe shaped it
| in the early days, but the disastrous mess we have today
| is from the monetization and ensuing garbage that was
| pushed onto the world by some very profitable tech
| companies.
|
| Undo the damage or otherwise come up with a way to shield
| kids from it. I won't let my own kids anywhere near the
| open web the way it is today. It's poison for young minds
| and needs to be fixed or gated off. Like alcohol at this
| point.
| trinsic2 wrote:
| The last line in my statement answers your question. If
| you leave it up to government to try and regulate a
| medium you are asking for trouble. Its like telling a
| news source what they can and cant release news wise
| because a portion of the population (kids) are harmed by
| the information.
|
| I understand where you are coming from but age gating is
| not the answer for a communication medium.
| SecretDreams wrote:
| I'm asking you for the alternative. Every day this
| continues on is literally ruining lives before they
| start. Like lead in water, time is of the essence. So
| what is the alternative to fix it?
| fuzzfactor wrote:
| >If you are working on a product, or ever did work on a
| product, that made the internet worse rather than better,
| you have a shared responsibility to right that wrong.
|
| This is how the "predatory debt" involved has built up,
| and grown exponentially until now, and the only thing
| Facebook considers as a solution would be to pay it down
| using other peoples' resources instead of their own.
|
| No one else has matching leverage and the dollar figure
| would be many billions if not a full trillion or more,
| which is about what it's worth, and who else could afford
| that except Facebook?
|
| So it has to come from the collective subtraction of
| _everyone 's_ complete privacy. Just to amount to
| something comparable.
|
| Add that up and it shows you how valuable privacy really
| is and what it's worth in dollar figures.
|
| Yes, do the math, privacy is worth more than Facebok no
| matter what, it always was and always will be.
|
| You can't have both, so big tech should jettison Meta.
| Who else could afford it?
|
| A more non-existential solution would be for Meta to
| fully fund a completely anonymous internet to replace the
| one that they soiled from the beginning, and let them
| keep the (anti-)social-media exclusive network separate.
| SecretDreams wrote:
| I'm with you.
| fuzzfactor wrote:
| This is what I thought when Facebook first came out;
|
| It was going to be like MySpace where most people were
| expected to remain anonymous like the internet had always
| been, and only those who actually wanted to be
| identifiable could reveal as much information as _they
| personally_ wanted to.
|
| But no, Facebook wanted _everybody 's_ personally
| identifiable information as table stakes, not only those
| who really wanted to promote themselves or gain personal
| recognition.
|
| There was no other way to sign up.
|
| I thought people would be too smart for that. But
| Facebook was "free" to use, and learned a lot from it's
| first major gamescourge, Zynga.
|
| Naturally I've been waiting for it to stand the test of
| time, and it does look like it has been a complete
| failure when it comes to being worthwhile.
|
| Facebook started out with enshittification as a business
| model but the next major escalation came when people had
| to have an "account" before they could even browse the
| site any more.
|
| People who had actually enjoyed it were somewhat
| pressured to join just so they could continue following
| those who were promotional. Linkedin did this too and
| made it no longer worth visiting either. So much for
| supporting the members who were intended to be promoted.
|
| You can only imagine my shock years ago when I found out
| Facebook was a billion-dollar company.
|
| Things like this were never even supposed to be worth
| money.
| ragall wrote:
| The vast majority of parents aren't tech-savvy enough to be
| able to operate IT parental controls.
| b00ty4breakfast wrote:
| parents can be held liable for buying their kids cigarettes
| but, similarly, tobacco companies are (at least nominally) not
| supposed to target children in their advertising campaigns and
| in the design of their products.
|
| It's obviously not a 1/1 comparison here, because providing ID
| to access the internet is not analogous to providing ID to
| purchase a pack of Cowboy Killers but we can extrapolate to a
| certain extent.
|
| (inb4 DAE REGULATING FOR-PROFIT CORPORATIONS == NANNY
| STATE?!?!?!?!?)
| tinfoilhatter wrote:
| We should stop pretending these age-verification rollouts are
| about protecting children, because they aren't and never have
| been.
|
| Even if the world was full of responsible parents, there are
| still people and groups that want to establish a surveillance
| state. These systems are focused on monitoring and tracking
| online activity / limiting access to those who are willing to
| sacrifice their own personal sovereignty for access to
| services.
|
| There is most definitely a cult that is obsessed with the book
| of revelation and seeing Biblical prophecy fulfilled, and if
| that isn't readily obvious to folks at this juncture in time,
| I'm not sure what it will take. I guess they'll have to roll
| out the mark of the beast before people will be willing to
| admit it.
| redwall_hp wrote:
| It's funny, all the bible wankers screamed about "the mark of
| the beast" over things like RealID. Now we have fascists
| setting up surveillance and censorship tools to tie speech
| and movement to centralized ID...and they're lining up to
| lick boots.
|
| You should need to show ID and prove you're over 18 to enter
| a church. At least we know they're actually harmful to
| children.
| closeparen wrote:
| A physical realm that is safe for children to explore in their
| own is clearly preferable to one where it's transgressive to
| let a child go outside without an escort.
|
| It is plausible that the same applies to the digital realm.
| keithnz wrote:
| don't you have to age verify to get alcohol? We don't leave
| that up to the parents. Feels like you defeated your own
| argument with your examples.
| trinsic2 wrote:
| The internet is not an object, its a communication medium.
| That is an apples to organges argument, it doesn't wash.
| CobrastanJorji wrote:
| You're understating the US's policy on recklessness. We have
| "attractive nuisances," which means that if you put a
| trampoline in your backyard, and a kid passing through sees it,
| decides to do a sick jump off of it, and breaks their leg, that
| was partly your fault for having something so awesome that kids
| would probably like.
| Aurornis wrote:
| > which means that if you put a trampoline in your backyard,
| and a kid passing through sees it, decides to do a sick jump
| off of it, and breaks their leg, that was partly your fault
| for having something so awesome that kids would probably
| like.
|
| That's not exactly accurate. The two key parts of the
| attractive nuisance law are a failure to secure something
| combined with the victim being too young to understand the
| risks.
|
| So if you put a trampoline in your front yard, that's an easy
| attractive nuisance case.
|
| If you put a pool in your back yard with a fence and a locked
| gate, it would be much harder to argue that it was an
| attractive nuisance.
|
| If a 17 year old kid comes along and breaks into your back
| yard by hopping a 6-foot tall fence, you'd also have a hard
| time knowing they didn't understand that their activities
| came with some risk. Most cases are about very young
| children, though there are exceptions
| fuzzfactor wrote:
| >put a trampoline in your front yard
|
| This is exactly what one of our neighbors did when I was
| growing up.
|
| All the kids loved it.
|
| There just weren't very many lawsuits back then like there
| are now after the number of attorneys proliferated so much.
|
| To be as safe as they could, the parents put the trampoline
| in a pit where the bouncing surface was at ground level.
|
| If you drove by, you wouldn't even be able to see it, or
| have any idea that it was there.
|
| Unless there was somebody bouncing at the time.
|
| You should have seen the look on peoples' faces when they
| drove down our street and saw that for the first time :)
| rootusrootus wrote:
| It would not be _quite_ that simple. The trampoline (or pool,
| or whatever) would have to be visible, in a place children
| were likely to be, not protected by any reasonable amount of
| care, and the kid would have to be young enough to not know
| any better.
|
| The legal doctrine is also not specific to the US, of course.
| qball wrote:
| And that law is incredibly and hideously stupid, as it's a
| heckler's veto on having cool stuff.
|
| The Internet is basically the final frontier where this
| harmful law doesn't reach, though the Karens are really
| trying to expand their power there.
| kgwxd wrote:
| None of this push has anything to do with protecting children.
| Never has, never will. Stop helping them push the narrative,
| it's making the problem WAY worse.
| lencastre wrote:
| you can't blame it on parents alone, but the odds are stacked
| against children and their parents, there are very smart people
| whose income depends on making sure you never leave your black
| mirror
|
| the surveillance state is possible, achievable, and a few
| coordination games away from deployment with backing from a
| majority who should know better
|
| inertia kills, I dunno
| csours wrote:
| I'm 40. Do I need to get my parents to vouch for me? Who
| vouches for them?
|
| > then give parents strong monitoring and restriction tools
|
| As written, this sounds very glib. I cannot take this comment
| seriously without a game theory scenario with multiple actors.
| j45 wrote:
| The parents themselves weren't raised with the digital literacy
| required.
|
| This doesn't put the parents off the hooks, if you or anyone
| can share any resources that are as easily consumable, viral
| and applicable as the content that is the issue that can reach
| parents I would be happy to help it spread.
|
| The reality is kids today are facing the most advanced
| algorithms and even the most competent parents have a high bar
| to reach.
|
| The solution is simple.
|
| I want to permit whatever the pixels are on a childs screen.
| Full stop. That hasn't been solved for a reason. Because
| developing such a gate would work and not allow algorithms to
| reach kids directly and indirectly.
|
| The alternative is not ideal, but until there's something
| better, what it will be and that's well proven for the mental
| health side of things of raising resilient kids who don't
| become troubled young adults - no need for social media, or
| touch screens until 10-13.
|
| There are lots of ways to create with technology, and learning
| to use words (llms) and keyboards seems to increasingly have
| merit.
| fhub wrote:
| If you are interested in learning about the other perspective,
| you can watch some parents' congressional testimony here
| https://youtu.be/y8ddg4460xc?si=-yYduYDppF4TQWqD.
|
| The character.ai one is gut wrenching.
| Spooky23 wrote:
| It's weird that you blame the victim.
|
| The real question is why do we leave it to parents or intrusive
| surveillance instead of holding companies accountable?
| mrcwinn wrote:
| Do you have kids?
| luckydata wrote:
| Excellent example of low effort cookie cutter empty rhetoric
| that would fit perfectly in reddit.
| chairmansteve wrote:
| "We'll try everything, it seems, other than holding parents
| accountable for what their children consume".
|
| We'll try anything, it seems, other than hold internet
| companies accountable for the society destroying shit they
| publish.
|
| And it's not jusy children who's lives they are destroying.
| Forgeties79 wrote:
| > We'll try everything, it seems, other than holding parents
| accountable for what their children consume.
|
| It's not a fair fight. These are multi-billion dollar companies
| with international reach and decades of investment and research
| weaponized against us to make us all little addicts.
|
| Additionally, it's not fair or reasonable to ask parents to
| screen literally everything their kids do with a screen at all
| times any more than it was reasonable for your parents to
| always know what you were watching on TV at all times.
|
| This is bootstraps/caveat emptor by a different name. It's not
| "I want someone else to raise my kids." It's "the current state
| of affairs shouldn't be so hostile that I have to maintain
| constant digital vigilance over my children." Hell if you do
| people then lecture you about how "back in their day they
| played in the street and into the night" and call you a
| helicopter parent
| gretch wrote:
| I agree with you that parents should be responsible, but your
| argument is clearly flawed.
|
| > you can get in trouble if you recklessly leave around or
| provide alcohol/guns/cigarettes for a minor to start using
|
| In the example here, there are 3 things where age verification
| is required AND parents have responsibility.
|
| It's not just one or the other.
|
| The same responsibilities are not "thrown out", they are never
| acknowledged in the first place.
| txrx0000 wrote:
| It's much easier to give individual users control over their
| own device than to give a centralized authority control over
| what happens on everyone's device over the Internet. Local
| user-controlled toggles are just easier to implement.
|
| All parental moderation mechanisms can and should be
| implemented as opt-in on-device settings. What governments need
| to do is pressure companies to implement those on-device
| settings. And what we can do as open-source developers is beat
| them to the punch. Each parent will decide whether or not to
| use them. Some people will, some won't. It's not Bob's
| responsibility to parent Charlie's children. Bob and Charlie
| must parent their own children.
|
| To the people arguing that parents are too dumb to control
| their children's tech usage because they themselves are tech-
| illiterate: millennia ago, we invented this new thing called
| fire. Most people were also "too dumb" to keep their children
| away from the shiny flames. People didn't know what it was or
| how dangerous it could be. So the tribe leader (who, by the
| way, gropes your children) proposed a solution: centralize
| control of all the fire. Only the tribe leader gets to use it
| to cook. Everyone else just needs to listen to him. Remember,
| it's all for you and your children's safety.
| inejge wrote:
| > we invented this new thing called fire [...] So the tribe
| leader (who, by the way, gropes your children) proposed a
| solution: centralize control of all the fire
|
| Of all the things, a "save-the-children prolegomena to the
| Prometheus myth" certainly wasn't on my bingo card today. So
| thank you for that, but I'm not aware of any reports of fire-
| keeping in the way you've described. Societies and religions
| _do_ have sacred traditions related to fire (like
| Zoroastrians) but that doesn 't come with restrictions on
| practical use AFAIK.
| trueno wrote:
| Am I the only one that is repeatedly amused at how many smart
| people are just caving to making this about parents/children
| at all?
|
| We've literally watched things unfold in real time out in the
| open in the last year I don't know how much more obvious it
| could be that child-protections are the bad-faith excuse the
| powers that be are using here. Combined with their control of
| broadcasting/social media, it's the very thing they're
| pushing narratives in lockstep over. All this to effectively
| tie online identities to real people. Quick and easy digital
| profiles/analytics on anyone, full reads on chat history
| assessments of idealogies/political affiliations/online
| activities at scale, that's all this ever was and I _know_
| hackernews is smart enough to see that writing on the wall.
| Ofc porn sites were targeted first with legislation like
| this, pornography has always been a low-hanging fruit to run
| a smear campaign on political/idealogical dissidents. It
| wasn't enough, they want all platform activity in the
| datasets.
|
| I can't help but feel like the longer we debate the merits of
| good parenting, the faster we're just going to speedrun
| losing the plot entirely. I think it goes without saying that
| no shit good parenting should be at play, but this is hardly
| even about that and I don't know why people take the time of
| day. It's become reddit-caliber discussion and everyone's
| just chasing the high of talking about how _they_ would
| parent in any given scenario, and such discussion does
| literally nothing to assess/respond to the realities in front
| of us. In case I'm not being clear, talking about how
| correct-parenting should be used in lieu of online
| verification laws is going to do literally nothing to stop
| this type of legislation from continually taking over. It's
| not like these discussions and ideas are going to get
| distilled into the dissent on the congressional floors that
| vote on these laws. It is in it's own way a slice of culture
| war that has permeated into the nerd-sphere.
| ajam1507 wrote:
| > It's not like these discussions and ideas are going to
| get distilled into the dissent on the congressional floors
| that vote on these laws.
|
| You think the idea of parents, not governments, being
| responsible for parenting doesn't translate well to voters?
| In the country founded on the idea of freedom from
| overreaching governance and personal responsibility?
| trueno wrote:
| that's not what i'm saying at all. i highlighted that
| that is quite literally the convenient narrative that's
| being used to get everyone squabbling amongst themselves.
| it is very clear that this is being used in bad-faith to
| get people to immediately side a certain way. yet here on
| hackernews we find dissenting viewpoints to that, rather
| than discussion about the entirety of it and what the
| real motives at play are. i am once again amused at the
| efficacy of the smokescreen here.
|
| what i'm saying is these discussions around parenting
| have had zero impacts on preventing the
| passage/implementation of such legislation/policies to
| date despite many smart people in here understanding
| what's actually at stake. and it's very likely that these
| parenting discussions will again go on to have absolutely
| zero impact on preventing the continued impelmentation of
| id verification on platforms. these policies/legislations
| aren't simply being implemented because people have
| failed to fully thought-exercise out good/bad parenting
| styles enough yet in the marketplace of ideas, it's
| becoming a reality because we aren't collectively raising
| awareness of the downstream ways this legislation will be
| harnessed for shitty outcomes. we aren't talking about it
| for what it is, but instead talking about it in the way
| they want us to talk about it. these parenting discussion
| points have been beaten to death and nothing new or novel
| is being shared, and rather than looking straight at the
| wolves right here in the room with us (data brokerage &
| who benefits from this type of data brokerage & figuring
| out how to stop it) people just look at each other and
| get butthurt about idealogical parenting differences.
| it's literally a slice of the now-ever-so-common 2d
| culture war we're all acutely aware exists, right here on
| hackernews, and we're all actively participating.
| pwndByDeath wrote:
| As a parent blocking websights is a joy, maybe the rule should
| be to allow guardians more ability to control that. Trying to
| block some services is not trivial
|
| As a human, I'd love to see the rest of you fools quit that. If
| HN ever starts to algorithm me I'll be gone too.
| nazgul17 wrote:
| The difference with guns, tobacco and alcohol is huge: all
| negatives aside, giving kids what they want makes the life of a
| parent so much easier. Take it away and many parents will
| fight. Sugar is in the same game.
| cyanydeez wrote:
| We'll do everything, it seems, other than holding billionairs
| accountable for what their businesses consume.
| mikestorrent wrote:
| > give parents strong monitoring and restriction tools
|
| The problem is that it's bloody hard to actually do this. I'm
| in a war with my 7yo about youtube; the terms of engagement
| are, I can block it however I want from the network side, and
| if he can get around it, he can watch.
|
| Well, after many successful months of DNS block, he discovered
| proxies. After blocking enough of those to dissuade him, he
| discovered Firefox DNS-over-HTTPS, making it basically
| impossible to block him without blocking every Cloudflare IP or
| something. Would love to be wrong about that, but it seems like
| even just blocking a site is basically impossible without
| putting nanny-ware right on his machine; and that's only a
| bootable Linux USB stick away from being removed unless I lock
| down the BIOS and all that, and at that point it's not his
| computer and the rules of engagement have been voided.
|
| For now I'm just using "policy" to stop him, but IMO the tools
| that parents have are weak unless you just want your kid to be
| an iPad user and never learn how a computer works at all.
| Aurornis wrote:
| As a parent of young children, this is your entire problem:
|
| > the terms of engagement are, I can block it however I want
| from the network side, and if he can get around it, he can
| watch.
|
| You're treating this as a technical problem, not a parental
| rules problem. Your own rules say he's allowed to watch!
|
| You have to set the expectations and enforce it as a parent.
| MintPaw wrote:
| I think the point is that it's not enforceable.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| Putting controls on the machine you want to restrict is
| pretty normal. While I agree with your first sentence that
| it's hard for parents to get proper monitoring tools, the
| rest of this sounds like a self-imposed problem. If you don't
| want to mess with the actual machine then run a proxy it has
| to use.
| rkagerer wrote:
| Sounds like a smart kid, is part of you secretly proud of him
| for his tenacity?
|
| Is it impractical to keep an eye on what he's doing on his
| computer, i.e. physically checking in on him from time to
| time?
|
| How about holding him responsible for his own behavior, to
| develop respect for the rules you impose? Is it just
| hopeless, and if so how come? Is it impossible for him to
| understand why you don't want him watching certain content or
| why he should care about being worthy of your trust?
|
| I'm not judging here, I'm genuinely curious.
| stevage wrote:
| I remember when I was a kid that age there were rules and
| some were technically enforced. But if you found a way around
| the technical enforcement you were in huge trouble. The
| equivalent here would he been, if you used a proxy to watch
| what you weren't meant to, then you lose all screen time
| indefinitely. Sneaking around parents' rules was absolutely
| not on.
| hinkley wrote:
| The speech that worked (mostly) on the children in my life
| involved the concept of 'cannot unsee', which they seemed to
| understand. There are some parallels to gun safety here because
| there are things that even the adults in your life try not to
| do and it seems perfectly reasonable to expect the same from
| children.
|
| In fact being held to a standard that adults hold themselves to
| is frequently seen as a rite of passage. I'm a big girl now and
| I put on my big girl pants to prove it.
| ajsnigrutin wrote:
| If your goal is to "save the children", then sure, we can
| discuss this... if your goal, as a government, is to have
| everyone get some digital ID and tie their online identities to
| their real names, then you do just that.
| aczerepinski wrote:
| As a parent, I think you're understating how difficult it is to
| provide a specific amount of internet access (and no more) to a
| motivated kid. Kids research and trade parental control
| exploits, and schools issue devices with weak controls whether
| parents like it or not. I'm way at the extreme end of trying to
| control access (other than parents who don't allow any device
| usage at all) and it has been one loophole after another.
| Filip_portive wrote:
| My new comment
| 2duct wrote:
| I'm going to state that at one point I was one of the young
| people this kind of legislation is meaning to protect. I was
| exposed to pornography at too young an age and it became my only
| coping mechanism to the point where as an adult it cost me
| multiple jobs and at one point my love life.
|
| I don't think this legislation would have helped me. I found the
| material I did outside of social media and Facebook was not yet
| ubiquitous. I did not have a smartphone at the time, only a PC. I
| stayed off social media entirely in college. Even with nobody at
| all in my social sphere, it was still addicting. There are too
| many sites out there that won't comply and I was too technically
| savvy to not attempt to bypass any guardrails.
|
| The issue in my case was not one of "watching this material hurt
| me" in and of itself. It was having nobody to talk to about the
| issues causing my addiction. My parents were conservative and
| narcissistic and did not respect my privacy so I never talked
| about my addiction to them. They already punished me severely for
| mundane things and I did not want to be willingly subjected to
| more. To this day they don't realize what happened to me. The
| unending mental abuse caused me to turn back to pornography over
| and over. And I carried a level of shame and disgust so I never
| felt comfortable disclosing my addiction to any school counselors
| or therapists for decades. The stigma around sexual issues
| preventing people from talking about them has only grown worse in
| the ensuing years, unfortunately.
|
| At most this kind of policy will force teenagers off platforms
| like Discord which might help with being matched with strangers,
| but there are still other avenues for this. You cannot prevent
| children from viewing porn online. You cannot lock down the
| entire Internet. You can only be honest with your children and
| not blame or reproach them for the issues they have to deal with
| like mine did.
|
| In my opinion, _given_ that my parents were fundamentally unsafe
| people to talk to, causing me to think that _all_ people were
| unsafe, _then_ the issue of pornography exposure became an issue.
| In my case, I do not believe there was any hope for me that
| additional legislation or restrictions could provide, outside of
| waking up to my abuse and my sex addiction as an adult decades
| later. Simply put, I was put into an impossible situation, I didn
| 't have any way to deal with it as a child, and I was ultimately
| forsaken. In life, things like those just happen sometimes. All I
| can say was that those who forsook me were not the platforms, not
| the politicians, but the _people_ who I needed to trust the most.
|
| I believe many parents who need to think about this issue simply
| won't. The debate we're having here on this tech-focused site is
| going to pass by them unnoticed. They're not going to seriously
| consider these issues and the status quo will continue. They
| won't talk with their children to see if everything's okay. I
| don't have many suggestions to offer except "find your best
| family," even if they aren't blood related.
| alvatar wrote:
| zero knowledge cryptography solves this
| vaylian wrote:
| Is there any production ready implementation out there?
| MatteoFrigo wrote:
| ZKP is integrated in Google Wallet and has been running in
| production for a few months. We (Google) released the ZKP
| library as open source last year (this is the library used in
| production).
|
| Announcement: https://blog.google/innovation-and-
| ai/technology/safety-secu...
|
| Library: https://github.com/google/longfellow-zk
|
| Paper: https://eprint.iacr.org/2024/2010
|
| Afterwards, folks from ISRG produced an independent
| implementation https://github.com/abetterinternet/zk-cred-
| longfellow with our blessing and occasional help. I don't
| know if the authors would call it "production ready" yet, but
| it is at least code complete, fast enough, and interoperable
| with ours.
| vaylian wrote:
| Thanks. I'll have a look.
| EmbarrassedHelp wrote:
| Only in theory, and only if you blindly trust a third party.
| The implementations in practice are still massive privacy
| violations.
| robinwhg wrote:
| I'm not too knowledgeable about this, but couldn't you just
| provide a government issued key to every citizen and give a
| service provider that key and it's only valid if you're above a
| certain age?
| ct0 wrote:
| I don't get the alcohol analogy as in most places it's 100% legal
| for minors to consume alcohol in the home with parental
| permission in the USA. In public it's a different story.
| rglover wrote:
| Imagine an OIDC type solution but for parents might work here.
|
| Basically, kids can sign up for an account triggering a
| notification to parents. The parent either approves or rejects
| the sign in. Parents can revoke on demand. See kids login usage
| to various apps/services. Gets parental restrictions in the login
| flow without making it a PITA.
| rafaelero wrote:
| I have no idea where this idea that Internet is toxic to children
| is coming from. Is that some type of moral panic? Weren't most of
| you guys children/adolescents during the 2000's?
| Salgat wrote:
| Are you saying that social media isn't harmful to children?
| rafaelero wrote:
| Last time I checked there's no scientific consensus if social
| media causes harm at all. The best studies found null or very
| small effects. So yeah, I am skeptical it is harmful.
| ok123456 wrote:
| This is like rhetorically asking, "Are you saying that doom
| and marylin manson aren't harmful to children?"
|
| The problem with social media isn't the inherent mixing of
| children and technology, as if web browsers and phones have
| some action-at-a-distance force that undermines society; it's
| the 20 years or so they spent weaponizing their products into
| an infinite Skinner box. Duck walk Zuckerburg.
|
| This is all assuming good faith interest in "the children,"
| which we cannot assume when what government will gain from
| this is a total, global surveillance state.
| arrsingh wrote:
| Age Verification is very hard to do without exposing personal
| information (ask me how I know). I feel it should be solved by a
| platform company - someone like Apple (assuming we trust apple
| with our personal information but seems like we already do) - and
| the platform (ios) should be able to simply provide a boolean
| response to "is this person over 18" without giving away all the
| personal information behind the age verification.
|
| Now the issue of which properties can "ask to verify your age"
| and "apple now knows what you're looking at" is still an unsolved
| problem, but maybe that solution can be delivered by something
| like a one time offline token etc.
|
| But again, this is a very hard problem to solve and I would
| personally like to not have companies verify age etc.
| kuon wrote:
| Even if you design the perfect system, kids will just ask parents
| for an unlocked account, many parents will accept, myself
| included. My kids have full access to the internet and I never
| used parental control, I talk to them. Of course, I don't want to
| give parenting advice, that would be presumptuous. But, my point
| is that a motivated kid will find a way, you have to "work" on
| that motivation.
|
| Many of the worst present on the internet is not age gated at
| all, you have millions of porn websites without even a "are you
| over 18" popup. There are plethora of toxic forums...
|
| Of course it's a complex problem, but the current approach
| sacrifice a lot of what made the internet possible and I don't
| like it.
| kypro wrote:
| > Many of the worst present on the internet is not age gated at
| all, you have millions of porn websites without even a "are you
| over 18" popup. There are plethora of toxic forums...
|
| This is what I find most insane about the UK's age verification
| law. It's literally so easy to find adult content without
| proving your age... You can literally just type in "naked
| women" into a search engine and get porn...
|
| To call it ineffective would be an understatement. Finding
| adult content on the web almost just as easy as it's always
| been. The only thing it's made harder is accessing adult
| content from the normie-web - you can't access porn on places
| like Reddit anymore, but you can access porn on 4chan and other
| dodgy adult sites.
|
| If the argument is "think about the kids" there are more
| effective ways to do it... Requiring device-level filtering for
| example would likely be more effective because it could just
| blacklist domains with hosting adult content unless
| unrestricted. It would also put more power in the parents hands
| about what is and what isn't restrict.
| light_hue_1 wrote:
| As a parent, I'm happy that social bans are finally a thing.
|
| But, I don't get the approach. It's not like social media starts
| being a positive in our life at 20. The way these companies do
| social media is harmful to mental health at every age. This is
| solving the wrong problem.
|
| The solution is to take away their levers to make the system so
| addictive. A nice space to keep in touch with your friends.
| Nothing wrong with that.
| scythe wrote:
| It's crazy to me that we want to force age verification on every
| service across the Internet before we ban phones in school. I
| could understand being in favor of both, or neither, but
| implementing the policy that impacts everybody's privacy before
| the one that specifically applies within government-run
| institutions is just so disappointingly backwards it's tempting
| to consider conspiracy-like explanations.
|
| The advantage, I think, of age verification by private companies
| over cellphone bans in public schools is that cellphone bans
| appear as a line-item on the government balance sheet, whereas
| the costs of age verification are diffuse and difficult to
| calculate. It's actually quite common for governments to prefer
| imposing costs in ways that make it easier for the legislators to
| throw up their hands and whistle innocently about why everything
| just got more expensive and difficult.
|
| And the argument over age verification for merely viewing
| websites, which is technically difficult and invasive, muddles
| the waters over the question of age verification for social media
| profiles, where underage users are more likely to get caught and
| banned by simple observation. The latter system has already
| existed for decades -- I remember kids getting banned for
| admitting they were under 13 on videogame forums in the '00s all
| the time. It seems like technology has caused people to believe
| that the law has to be perfectly enforceable in order to be any
| good, but that isn't historically how the law has worked -- it is
| possible for most crimes to go unsolved and yet most criminals
| get caught. If we are going to preserve individual privacy and
| due process, we need to be willing to design imperfect systems.
| arbirk wrote:
| I know many will disagree and that is ok. Imo we need global id
| based on nation states national id. I know that the US doesn't
| have that, but the rest of the developed world do. I don't want
| id on porn sites because I don't think that is necessary, but I
| want bot-free social media, 13+ sharing forums like reddit and I
| want competitive games where if you are banned you need your
| brothers id to try cheating again.
| Seattle3503 wrote:
| > Some observers present privacy-preserving age proofs involving
| a third party, such as the government, as a solution, but they
| inherit the same structural flaw: many users who are legally old
| enough to use a platform do not have government ID. In countries
| where the minimum age for social media is lower than the age at
| which ID is issued, platforms face a choice between excluding
| lawful users and monitoring everyone. Right now, companies are
| making that choice quietly, after building systems and
| normalizing behavior that protects them from the greater legal
| risks. Age-restriction laws are not just about kids and screens.
| They are reshaping how identity, privacy, and access work on the
| Internet for everyone.
|
| This rebuttal to privacy preserving approaches isn't compelling.
| Websites can split the difference and use privacy preserving
| techniques when available, and fall back to other methods when
| the user doesn't have an ID. I'd go further and say websites
| should be required to prioritize privacy preserving techniques
| where available.
|
| There is a separate issue of improving access to government ID. I
| think that is important for reasons outside of age verification.
| Increasingly voting, banking, etc... already relies on having an
| ID.
| trashb wrote:
| I would like to take the discussion in the other direction. How
| about we offer safe spaces instead of banning the unsafe spaces
| for kids.
|
| Similar to how there is specific channels for children on the TV.
| Perhaps the government can even incentivize such channels. It
| would also make it easier for parents to monitor and set
| boundaries. Parents would only need to monitor if the tv is still
| tuned to disney channel or similar instead of some adult
| channels.
|
| Similarly this kind of method could be applied to online spaces.
| Ofcourse there will be some kids that will find ways around it
| but they will most likely be outliers.
| NoMoreNicksLeft wrote:
| >How about we offer safe spaces instead of banning the unsafe
| spaces for kids.
|
| Children shouldn't be associating with other children, except
| in small groups. Even the typical classroom count is far too
| large. They become the nastiest, most horrible versions of
| themselves when they congregate. A good 90% of the pathology of
| public schools can be blamed on the fact that, by definition,
| public schools require large numbers of children to congregate.
| antitoxic wrote:
| I work at a European identity wallet system that uses a zero
| knowledge proof age identification system. It derives an age
| attribute such as "over 18" from a passport or ID, without
| disclosing any other information such as the date of birth. As
| long as you trust the government that gave out the ID, you can
| trust the attribute, and anonymously verify somebodies age.
|
| I think there are many pros and cons to be said about age
| verification, but I think this method solves most problems this
| article supposes, if it is combined with other common practices
| in the EU such as deleting inactive accounts and such. These
| limitations are real, but tractable. IDs can be issued to younger
| teenagers, wallet infrastructure matures over time, and countries
| without strong identity systems primarily undermine their own age
| bans. Jurisdictions that accept facial estimation as sufficient
| verification are not taking enforcement seriously in the first
| place. The trap described in this article is a product of the
| current paradigm, not an inevitability.
| nemomarx wrote:
| This is true, but I think it's more that those jurisdictions
| don't actually care about something solving this securely so
| much as they want face scans for other purposes?
| brunoborges wrote:
| Yeah, but how to convince investors that trusting the
| government-issued ID is good enough? /s
| uniq7 wrote:
| In your system, can companies verify age offline, or do they
| need to send a token to the Government's authority to verify it
| (letting the Government identify and track users)?
|
| Switzerland is working on a system that does the former, but if
| Government really wants to identify users, they can still ask
| the company to provide the age verification tokens they
| collected, since the Government hosts a centralized database
| that associates people with their issued tokens.
| tgsovlerkhgsel wrote:
| Aren't the companies also expected to do revocation checking,
| essentially creating a record of who identified where, with a
| fig leaf of "pseudonymity" (that is one database join away
| from being worthless)?
| myrion wrote:
| The revocation checking is implemented in a way where the
| government doesn't know who you checked and you can even
| cache the information (if that's good enough for you) so
| they won't notice at all.
| myrion wrote:
| That assumes the companies store the individual tokens, as
| does the government. Neither of which are part of the design,
| but could be done if both sides desired it.
|
| The Swiss design actually doesn't store the issued tokens
| centrally. It only stores a trust root centrally and then a
| verifier only checks the signature comes from that trust root
| (slightly simplified).
| Terretta wrote:
| Not only EU -- Digital ID on iPhone does this today, and is
| accepted by many USA airports for travel, etc., with rollout
| for DLs.
| gigel82 wrote:
| Where can we learn more about your architecture?
|
| Someone brought up the need for device attestation for trust
| purposes (to avoid token smuggling for example). That would
| surely defeat the purpose (and make things much much worse for
| freedom overall). If you have a solution that doesn't require
| device attestation, how does that solve the smuggling issue
| (are tokens time-gated, is there a limit to token generation,
| other things)?
| chrishare wrote:
| It's this I believe: https://www.w3.org/TR/vc-data-model-2.0/
| gigel82 wrote:
| A Verifiable Credential fundamentally doesn't solve the
| problem of "sharing", "smuggling". All it takes is one
| verified adult to "leak" their VC somewhere, and millions
| of underage people would be able to use it to "prove" they
| are over 18.
|
| This would only work with something like MS TPM 2 / Apple
| Secure Enclave (device attestation), which is anti-freedom
| by design. I was curious if they found a way around that
| (maybe with time/rate limits, or some actual useful use of
| blockchain tech).
| dom96 wrote:
| That's really awesome. I hope that soon we will also have
| humanity verification without sacrificing our anonymity.
|
| With LLMs and paid actors wreaking havoc on social media I do
| think that social media needs pivot towards allowing only human
| users on it. I wrote about this here:
| https://blog.picheta.me/post/the-future-of-social-media-is-h...
| EmbarrassedHelp wrote:
| According to the EU Identity Wallet's documentation, the EU's
| planned system requires highly invasive age verification to
| obtain 30 single use, easily trackable tokens that expire after
| 3 months. It also bans jailbreaking/rooting your device, and
| requires GooglePlay Services/IOS equivalent be installed to
| "prevent tampering". You have to blindly trust that the tokens
| will not be tracked, which is a total no-go for privacy.
|
| These massive privacy issues have all been raised on their
| Github, and the team behind the wallet have been ignoring them.
| Aurornis wrote:
| Thanks for posting this.
|
| The inherent problem with all zero knowledge identity
| solutions is that they also prevent any of the safeguards
| that governments want for ID checking.
|
| A true zero knowledge ID check with blind signatures wouldn't
| work because it would only take a single leaked ID for
| everyone to authenticate their accounts with the same leaked
| ID. So the providers start putting in restrictions and
| logging and other features that defeat the zero knowledge
| part that everyone thought they were getting.
| jajuuka wrote:
| I mean that's kind of a problem with ANY solution. There
| will be workarounds and ways to break it. There is no
| perfect solution outside someone standing over you while on
| the internet. We need to look at this more like age checks
| on porn sites and gaming platforms where you just put in a
| birthdate. Obviously someone can lie, but that point isn't
| to be a perfect wall but a hurdle to clear to make sure
| users are aware of the content and that any sort of nanny
| software to block if set up.
| Aurornis wrote:
| > I mean that's kind of a problem with ANY solution.
| There will be workarounds and ways to break it.
|
| That's unnecessarily reductive.
|
| Yes, every solution will have problems, but not all
| solutions have similar problems.
|
| If a solution has problems such that it can be
| immediately reduced to security theater and bypassed by
| any teenager who cares, it's just extra hassle and
| privacy degradation for the rest of us.
|
| These details matter. If a weak solution is regulated
| into law and the government discovers kids are easily
| bypassing it, they will immediately pivot into requiring
| more restrictions on it.
| jajuuka wrote:
| Extra hassle is manageable. Sites or programs that want
| you to put in a birthday are extra hassle but objectively
| better than something like submitting an ID. Privacy
| degradation is also manageable as well. It just depends
| on the solution.
|
| We've had decades of age gating being "are you 18+ or
| not" yet it is only now that talks of something more
| enforceable are coming up. This discussion is largely
| about how one can create a sense of safety and
| protection. For the more extreme end it's face scans and
| submitting ID. Even though these are bypassed by any
| teenager who cares they are still being pushed seriously
| because it instills that sense of safety and protection
| for children. Security theater is just a part of managing
| the internet and not going away unfortunately.
| hiciu wrote:
| > A true zero knowledge ID check with blind signatures
|
| That is not true and "true zero knowledge ID check" + "age
| verification" with blind signatures is what's being
| implemented by the EU ID project.
|
| So someone's id leaks. It happens. In EUDI there are things
| called "cryptographic accumulators of non-revocation
| proofs". If your ID leaks it goes into the accumulator.
| Similar to the certificate revocation lists. During check,
| you include claims "im over 18" and "my id is not in the
| accumulator".
|
| This is included in the standard.
|
| This is also (I can only assume) one of the reasons why
| EUDI wallets require play integrity / attestation / secure
| element on the device. So your private key won't be easily
| leaked and no one can steal your ID.
| Aurornis wrote:
| You're assuming the leak was accidental, the person knows
| about it, and they didn't intend for others to use it.
|
| What happens when someone sets up a marketplace where
| people can sell those blind signatures using their ID for
| $2 each? And then kids just pay $2 to have someone else
| blindly use their ID to validate the account, because
| supposedly the system is structured so that nobody can
| tell which ID was used or tie it back to the account?
| hiciu wrote:
| That's where the google play integrity / attestation
| comes into the effect.
|
| In theory you cannot export your private key from the
| device (from the secure element), so for each $2 someone
| would have to quickly unlock their phone, scan code via
| the app and so on.
| dogcomplex wrote:
| This specific problem is solved by requiring that any
| anonymous ZK ID once used for an account be marked on an
| immutable ledger preventing multiple uses of the same ID.
| Sharing it would be pointless as multiple attempts to use
| it get burned. Yet none of those sites know who you are,
| only that you have a unique valid ID pass. They just have
| to check any login attempts against that ledger - easy
| enough.
| chrishare wrote:
| Link?
| EmbarrassedHelp wrote:
| https://github.com/eu-digital-identity-wallet/av-doc-
| technic...
|
| https://www.forbes.com/sites/federicoguerrini/2025/08/10/wh
| o...
| hiciu wrote:
| > EU's planned system requires highly invasive age
| verification
|
| EUDI wallets are connected to your government issued ID.
| There is no "highly invasive age verification".
|
| We are literally sending a request to our government's server
| to sign, with their private key, message "this john smith
| born on 1970-01-01 is aged over 18" + jwt iat. There are 3
| claims in there. They are hashed with different salts. This
| all is signed by the government.
|
| You get it with the salts. When you want to prove you are 18+
| you include salt for the "is aged over 18" claim, and the
| signed document with all the salts and the other side can
| validate if the document is signed and if your claim matches
| the document.
|
| No face scanning, no driver license uploading to god-knows-
| where, no anything.
|
| > to obtain 30 single use, easily trackable tokens that
| expire after 3 months
|
| This is the fallback mechanism. You are supposed to use bbs+
| signatures that are zero knowledge, are computed on the
| device and so on. It is supposed to provide the
| "unlinkability". I don't feel competent enough to explain how
| those work.
|
| > jailbreaking / "prevent tampering"
|
| This is true. The eidas directive requires that secret
| material lives in a dedicated hardware / secure element. It's
| really not much different than what a banking app would
| require.
|
| > You have to blindly trust that the tokens will not be
| tracked
|
| This is not true, the law requires core apps to be
| opensource. Polish EUDI wallet has been even decompiled by a
| youtuber to compare it with sources and check if the rumors
| about spying are true. So you can check yourself if the app
| tracks you.
|
| Also we can't have a meaningful discussion without expanding
| on definition of "tracking".
|
| Can the site owner track you when you verify if you are 18+?
| Not really, each token is unique, there should be no
| correlation here.
|
| Can the government track you? No, not alone.
|
| Can the site owner and the government collude to track you?
| Yes they can! Government can track all salts for your tokens,
| site can collect all salts, they can compare notes. There are
| so called policy mitigations currently: audits and
| requirements for governments to remove salts from memory the
| moment stuff is issued.
|
| Can they lie? Sure.
|
| Can the site owner and the government collude to track you if
| you are using bbs+? No. Math says no.
|
| Can they lie if you are using bbs+? Math says no.
| EmbarrassedHelp wrote:
| > This is not true, the law requires core apps to be
| opensource. Polish EUDI wallet has been even decompiled by
| a youtuber to compare it with sources and check if the
| rumors about spying are true. So you can check yourself if
| the app tracks you.
|
| The "open source" apps connect to proprietary backends run
| by a third party that you have to blindly trust. If EUDI
| wallets were truly open source and free from blindly
| trusting any authority, then you could simply remove that
| requirement and issue your own tokens without the use of
| potentially malicious third party.
| hiciu wrote:
| > issue your own tokens
|
| I mean, you can. It's like with TLS certificates. The
| standard is there. The code is there. You can issue your
| own.
|
| The question is, who will trust you?
| summm wrote:
| It is not at all like TLS. With TLS you at least can get
| your own certificate signed by an official CA, and use
| that private key on whatever system you want.
| summm wrote:
| > jailbreaking / "prevent tampering"
|
| Now your EU government requires you to have an unmodified
| Google or Apple device to use any age restricted services.
| Cementing the US mobile OS duopoly and locking out any free
| systems and desktop etc. forever.
|
| Any governmental service taking part in this is a violation
| of civil rights and even if you don't care about those,
| maybe you care about digital sovereignty.
|
| This is so lightly handwaved away, almost as if attention
| needs to be drawn away. By the looks of this I'd say the
| end of general computing might be the actual goal, and all
| the age verification is just yet another "think of the
| children" pretense?
| agentifysh wrote:
| this is slightly better but not the hero we want or need. zeero
| knowledge proofs are improvement over uploading raw documents,
| trust is still an issue here. why should users have to
| authenticate with a government-backed identity wallet to access
| platforms to play games or access a website in the first place.
| we didnt have any of these guards in the 90s and early 2000s
| and everybody turned out just fine . in fact the average gen z
| is in a lot worse place than we used to be despite that we had
| complete raw algorithm supervision free access to the internet
| with far more disturbing content (remember ogrish and KaZaA)
|
| The average person does not understand the math behind zero-
| knowledge proofs. They only see that state infrastructure is
| gatekeeping their web access. Furthermore, if the wallet relies
| on a centralized server for live revocation checks, the
| identity provider might still be able to log those
| authentication requests, effectively breaking anonymity at the
| state level.
|
| On a practical level, this method verifies the presence of an
| authorized device rather than the actual human looking at the
| screen. Unless the wallet demands a live biometric scan for
| every single age check, they will simply bypass the system
| using a shared family computer or a parent's unlocked phone. We
| used to find our way around any sort of nanny software
| (remember net nanny)
|
| what you are describing still remains a bubble and I really
| hope Americans aren't looking at EU for any sort of public
| policy directions here.
| SiempreViernes wrote:
| > we didnt have any of these guards in the 90s and early
| 2000s and everybody turned out just fine
|
| One of the most highly valued tech companies of today makes a
| software that sometimes talks its user's into killing
| themselves. Some guy put "uwu notices bulge" on a bullet
| casing and shot Charlie Kirk: things turned out fine indeed.
| ajsnigrutin wrote:
| People killed both themselves and others way before the
| internet even existed.
|
| Requiring everyone to show their id on every website will
| not change that. It will limit free speech though.
| viktorcode wrote:
| I have a few questions.
|
| In that system does the age verification result come with some
| sort of ID linked to my government issued ID card? Say, if I
| delete my account on a platform after verifying and then create
| a new one, will the platform get the same ID in the second
| verification, allowing it to connect the two and track me? Or
| is this ID global, potentially allowing to track me through all
| platforms I verified my age on?
|
| What a verification process looks like from the user
| perspective? Do I have to, as it happens now, pull out my
| phone, use it as a card reader (because I don't have a
| dedicated NFC device on my computer), enter the pin, and then
| I'll be verified on my computer so I can start browsing social
| media feed? Or, perhaps, you guys have come up with a simpler
| mechanism?
| myrion wrote:
| In the Swiss system, it depends on what they verified. If
| they required your full ID, that has a document number like a
| passport and they could track that.
|
| If they did the right thing and only asked for the over 18
| bit, then they wouldn't have a trackable identifier.
| donmcronald wrote:
| > It derives an age attribute such as "over 18" from a passport
| or ID, without disclosing any other information such as the
| date of birth.
|
| How? If it's analyzes my ID 100% client side I can fake any
| info I want. If my ID goes to a server, it's compromised IMO.
|
| I think the zero proof systems being touted are like ephemeral
| messaging in Snapchat. That is, we're being sold something
| that's impossible and it only "works" because most people don't
| understand enough to know it's an embellishment of
| capabilities. The bad actors will abuse it.
|
| Zero proof only works with some kind of attestation, maybe from
| the government, and there needs to be some amount of tracking
| or statistics or rate limiting to make sure everyone in a city
| isn't sharing the same ID.
|
| Some tracking turns into tracking everything, probably with an
| opaque system, and the justification that the "bad guys" can't
| know how it works. We've seen it over and over with big tech.
| Accounts get banned or something breaks and you can't get any
| info because you _might_ be a bad guy.
|
| Does your system work without sending my ID to a server and
| without relying on another party for attestation?
| runako wrote:
| > If it's analyzes my ID 100% client side I can fake any info
| I want. If my ID goes to a server,
|
| amplifying your point, there is effectively no way for the
| layperson to make this distinction. And because the app needs
| to send data over an encrypted channel, it would be difficult
| at best for a sophisticated person to determine whether their
| info is being sent over the wire.
| bitmasher9 wrote:
| Attestation from government sounds like the ideal solution.
| This could actually provide _more_ privacy because we can
| begin using attestation for things we currently use IDs for
| such as "Has the privilege of driving a car" or "Can purchase
| alcohol"
| Aurornis wrote:
| Amazing how fast these systems go from "zero knowledge" to
| "route the request through the government system every time
| you use your ID"
| hiciu wrote:
| there is no "route the request through the government
| system every time you use your ID".
|
| you get your sd-jwt document signed once and you reuse it
| for like 30 days or so.
| Aurornis wrote:
| I was responding to the comment above mine, which was
| calling for attestation from the government for specific
| privileges.
|
| > you get your sd-jwt document signed once and you reuse
| it for like 30 days or so
|
| So it still gets routed through the government once a
| month if you plan on using it.
| hiciu wrote:
| Yes we are still talking about attestation from the
| government for the specific privilege part.
|
| You get your document with fields like "can drive", "is
| over 18" and so on. It's valid for some time; physical ID
| is valid for like 10 years and then you have to get a new
| document, this digital one is valid for lets say 30 days
| and if it expires you get a new one.
|
| Then you present only those fields you want, when you
| want, without anyone talking to the government at all.
| All the other party needs to check is "is the document
| valid" and "do presented fields match the document". Like
| checking a tls certificate for a given domain name or
| purpose.
|
| Strictly speaking there is no "routing through the
| government" of any information. The government just
| "issues a certificate" valid for X days without knowledge
| with whom, how or when you are using it.
| Aurornis wrote:
| > Strictly speaking there is no "routing through the
| government" of any information. The government just
| "issues a certificate" valid for X days without knowledge
| with whom, how or when you are using it.
|
| I don't understand how you keep claiming there is no
| "routing through the government" right next to your
| explanations that the government is the one providing the
| documents every 30 days.
|
| Obviously something in the document is tied to your ID
| and the government has mechanisms to revoke it. No matter
| how many layers you put on top of that, this all has to
| come back to the government's control.
|
| I understand that the salts can be sent to 3rd party
| websites. However there's obviously a reason that those
| are only valid for 30 days instead of indefinitely.
| hiciu wrote:
| Yes, something in the document is tied to my ID. There's
| my name in there for example :). I don't have to share
| that information, because what government signed is a
| uniquely salted hash of my name and passed the salt to
| me.
|
| If I choose to share that salt, and provide my name,
| someone could hash all that information and compare it to
| the government-issued document to verify if my name
| really is john smith (or if my claim "I'm over 18" is
| valid).
|
| If I don't, they have no way of knowing.
|
| > no "routing through the government"
|
| > government is the one providing the documents
|
| I'm also lost. I mean, this is the government issued ID
| we are talking about, right? How are you expected to get
| it if not from the government? "Are you over 18" claim is
| part of that government issued ID.
|
| They don't have to know which sites or when you are
| visiting, but they do have to issue you the document.
|
| (To be clear, there are also other options, it doesn't
| have strictly to be government; for example banks around
| here can provide ID documents - for their clients.
| There's a list of who is trusted for what
| https://eidas.ec.europa.eu/efda/trust-
| services/browse/eidas/...).
|
| > However there's obviously a reason that those are only
| valid for 30 days instead of indefinitely.
|
| It's the same reason why we prefer tls certificates with
| short lifespans.
| summm wrote:
| Technically, if your phone needs to be remote attested,
| it can be considered a government system, not a user's
| system.
| myrion wrote:
| There's no dynamic analysis done, necessarily. In the Swiss
| design, fex, SD-JWTs are used for selective disclosure. For
| those, any information that you can disclose is pre-hashed
| and included in the signed credential. So `over_18: true` is
| provided as one of those hashes and I just show this to the
| verifier.
|
| The verifier gets no other information than the strictly
| necessary (issuer, expiry, that kind of thing) and the over
| 18 bit, but can trust that it's from a real credential.
|
| That's not strictly a zero knowledge proof based system,
| though, but it is prvacy-preserving.
| dogcomplex wrote:
| Correct. A ZK Proof backed identity system is a significant
| bump up in both privacy and security to even what we have right
| now.
|
| _Everyone does realize we 're being constantly tracked by
| telemetry, right?_
|
| A proper ZK economy would mitigate the vast majority of that
| tracking (by taking away any excuse for those in power to do so
| under the guise of "security") and create a market for truly-
| secure hardware devices, while still keeping the whole world at
| maximal security and about as close to theoretical optimum
| privacy as you're going to get. We could literally blanket the
| streets with cameras (as if they aren't already) and still have
| guarantees we're not being tracked or stored on any unless we
| violate explicit rules we pre-agree to and are enforceable by
| our lawyers. ZK makes explicit data custody rules the norm,
| rather than it all just flowing up to whatever behemoth
| silently owns us all.
| dark-star wrote:
| I don't see why platforms would have to store the data
| indefinitely.
|
| Once you are verified, you just flip a bit "verified" in the
| database and delete all identification data.
|
| No reason to store the data indefinitely
| knallfrosch wrote:
| All adults proof their identify multiple times per month: Every
| time they access digital health records, or when they use any
| electronic payment.
|
| Just make Google/Apple reveal part of that data (age > x years)
| to websites and apps.
|
| Boom, done. Privacy guarded. Easy.
| fuzzfactor wrote:
| >Every time they access digital health records, or when they
| use any electronic payment.
|
| This is the internet.
|
| Among those who were very familiar with it, the smartest money
| never started doing things like that.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| A lot of talk and no solutions. Exactly the reason we are where
| we are.
|
| Liquor stores, bars, strip clubs, adult bookstores, or similar
| businesses don't let kids in. Movie theatres don't let a 10 year
| old in to an R-rated movie. The tech industry ignored their
| social responsibility to keep kids away from adult and age-
| inappropriate content. Now, they are facing legal requirements to
| do so. Tough for them, but they could have been more proactive.
| reorder9695 wrote:
| What's always got me about this is when I was in school I had it
| absolutely drilled into me that I should never expose personal
| information online to anyone, I completely saw the logic in that
| and so heavily limit the personal data I give out. Now we're just
| expecting people to completely go against that and give away the
| most personal details possible to companies who cannot prove what
| they are or are not doing with it just because governments have
| decided that's best now?
| co_king_5 wrote:
| The people pushing for this resent schools because they instill
| a sense of dignity in the population.
|
| They are bothered that you were taught such things and have
| made sure that your children will never be exposed to such
| information.
| jama211 wrote:
| This thread is gonna be full of HN users blaming the parents for
| a systemic problem isn't it?
|
| Yup.
| Galanwe wrote:
| Well there are technical solutions for this: blind signatures.
|
| I could generate my own key, have the government blind sign it
| upon verifying my identity, and then use my key to prove I'm an
| adult citizen, without anyone (even the signing government) know
| which key is mine.
|
| Any veryfying entity just need to know the government public key
| and check it signed my key.
| halls-940 wrote:
| I was thinking the same thing. Why don't we just get a key from
| the government?
| Galanwe wrote:
| > Why don't we just get a key from the government?
|
| Because one could argue that the government could keep track
| of the keys they give away.
|
| That is where blind signing is interesting. The government
| can sign _your_ key without knowing it.
| Aurornis wrote:
| The ID check laws are about matching an identity to a user
| account.
|
| If the identity check was blind it wouldn't actually be an
| identity check. It would be "this person has access to an adult
| identity".
|
| If there is truly no logging or centralization, there is no
| limit on how many times a single ID could be used.
|
| So all it takes is one of those adult blind signatures to be
| leaked online and all the kids use it to verify their accounts.
| It's a blind process, so there's no way to see if it's
| happening.
|
| Even if there was a block list, you would get older siblings
| doing it for all of their younger siblings' friends because
| there is no consequence. Or kids stealing their parents'
| signature and using it for all of their friends.
| Galanwe wrote:
| I don't quite get your point. The signer is blind to what it
| signs, but that does not mean there is no identity per se.
|
| A signed key is still unique.
|
| - You can still check that user 1 and user 2 don't use the
| same key.
|
| - You can still issue a challenge to the user every 10 days
| to make sure he has indeed access to his key and not just
| borrowed it.
|
| - You can still enforce TPM use of said keys, so that they
| cannot be extracted or distributed online, but require a
| physical ID card.
|
| - You can still do whatever revocation system you want for
| the cases when a key is stolen or lost.
|
| Really the "blind" nature of the signature changes nothing to
| what you would normally do with a PKI.
| Aurornis wrote:
| You're only describing a half-blind system.
|
| If the site you send your information to gets a uniquely
| identifying piece of information, that's not blind to your
| identity.
|
| > - You can still check that user 1 and user 2 don't use
| the same key.
|
| The systems described elsewhere in the thread give people a
| set of signatures that can't be traced back to their
| source.
| arn3n wrote:
| Parents are competing with multi-trillion dollar companies who
| have invested untold amounts of cash and resources into making
| their content addictive. When parents try to help their children,
| it's an uphill battle -- every platform that has kids on it also
| tends to have porn, or violence, or other things, as these
| platform generally have disappointingly ineffective moderation.
| Most parents turn to age verification because it's the only way
| they can think of to compete with the likes of Meta or ByteDance,
| but the issue is that these platforms _shouldn 't have this
| content to begin with_. Platforms should be smaller -- the same
| site shouldn't be serving both pornography and my school
| district's announcement page and my friend's travel pictures.
| Large platforms are turning their unwillingness to moderate into
| legal and privacy issues, when in fact it should simply be a
| matter of "These platforms have adult content, and these ones
| don't". Then, parents can much more easily ban specific platforms
| and topics. Right now there's no levers to pull or adjust, and
| parent s have their hands tied. You can't take kids of Instagram
| or TikTok -- they will lose their friends. I hate the fact that
| the "keep up with my extended family" platform is the same as the
| "brainrot and addiction" one. The platforms need to be small
| enough that parents actually have choices on what to let in and
| what not to. Until either platforms are broken up via. antitrust
| or until the burden of moderation is on the company, we're going
| to _keep getting privacy-infringing solutions_.
|
| If you support privacy, you should support antitrust, else we're
| going to be seeing these same bills again and again and again
| until parents can effectively protect their children.
| flerchin wrote:
| The thing that needs to be age banned, or really just banned, is
| algorithmic feeds with infinite scroll. Kids (and adults) need to
| just interact with their friends, and block all the bait.
| brainwad wrote:
| For adults, I think a legal opt-in-only policy would work well.
| And require reconsent with every major algorithm change.
| Wobbles42 wrote:
| The purpose of a system is what it does.
|
| Undermining data protection and privacy is clearly the point. The
| fact that it's happening everywhere at the same time makes it
| look to me like a bunch of leaders got together and decided that
| online anonymity is a problem.
|
| It's not like kids having access to adult content is a new
| problem after all. Every western government just decided that we
| should do something about it at roughly the same time after
| decades of indifference.
|
| The "age verification" story is casus belli. This is about ID,
| political dissent, and fears of people being exposed to the wrong
| brand of propaganda.
| snerbles wrote:
| Exactly. So many comments here about technical solutions are
| missing the underlying government/authority problem, or are
| actively a part of it.
| qweflkj wrote:
| > The purpose of a system is what it does.
|
| How far does it go? Are all bugs features? Shall we assume that
| Boeing (via MCAS) and Ford (via the Pinto) were trying to kill
| their passengers? There's a difference between ulterior motive
| and incompetent execution of expressed intention.
| user3939382 wrote:
| No, this is proven false by reducing this theory to the
| individual level. Anyone who has tried to design/imagine ->
| actually build something, be it an artist, architect, song
| writer, programmer, or otherwise, knows there is inevitably a
| gap between design and realization. No one involved in that
| process would at any point consider the gap to be part of its
| "purpose".
|
| People do hide their intentions but that doesn't give us a
| license to reduce complex system dynamics to absurdities.
| Wobbles42 wrote:
| Bugs get fixed when systems are iterated on. They also tend
| to be single results from single mistakes, not compound end
| results of the implementation.
|
| Design features tend to persist.
|
| The phrase/idiom "the purpose of a system is what it does"
| maps best to situations where a multiple decisions within a
| system make little sense when viewed through the lens of the
| stated purpose, but make perfect sense if the actual outcome
| is the desired one.
|
| It is an invitation to analyze a system while suspending the
| assumption of good faith on the part of the implementors.
| user3939382 wrote:
| > Bugs get fixed when systems are iterated on.
|
| It's not that simple. Especially not in politics but even
| in the domain you're referencing, have you ever seen
| Mozilla's bug tracker? Once your project is so big and
| involves so many people you move beyond fixing everything
| you want.
|
| There may be central planning at play, in this case I
| assume there is, but to claim it necessarily is relies on
| an oversimplification that doesn't exist in human political
| machines that are a giant ship of theseus essentially.
| There's no identity -> management capacity proven anywhere
| enough to make that kind of claim. Institutions inherit and
| have emergent behavior driven by the dynamics of their
| constituents/individuals. That includes the inability to
| create imagined outcomes reliably. The platonic intent and
| physical regimes cannot be integrated.
| EmbarrassedHelp wrote:
| You are missing the profit driven angle. Age verification
| companies and their lobbyists are pouring massive amounts of
| resources into lobbying for mandatory age verification. And the
| reason why can be pretty simple. They get richer of off
| violating people's privacy, especially when those privacy
| violations are legally required.
| inetknght wrote:
| > _The fact that it 's happening everywhere at the same time
| makes it look to me like a bunch of leaders got together and
| decided that online anonymity is a problem._
|
| "People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for
| merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a
| conspiracy against the public." - Adam Smith
| Pxtl wrote:
| All of my kids devices are identified, at device level, as
| children's devices. They could've trivially exposed this as
| metadata to allow sites to enforce "no under 18" use. However,
| I'd disagree that my bigger concern for my kids isn't that they'd
| see a boob or a penis, but that they'd see an influencer who'd
| try to radicalize them to some extremist cause, and that's
| usually not considered 18+ content.
|
| And either way, none of that requires de-anonymizing literally
| everyone on the internet. I'd be more than happy to see
| governments provide cryptographically secure digital ID and so
| that sites can self-select to start requiring this digital ID to
| make moderation easier.
| almosthere wrote:
| I think this should work like OpenID connect but with just a
| true/false.
|
| PS = pr0n site
|
| AV = age verification site (conforming to age-1 spec and
| certified) PS: Send user to AV with generated
| token AV: Browser arrives with POST data from PS with
| generated token AV: AV specific flow to verify age - may
| capturing images/token in a database. May be instant or take days
| AV: Confirms age, provides link back to original PS PS:
| Requests AV/status response payload: { "age":
| 21, "status": "final" }
|
| No other details need to be disclosed to PS.
|
| I don't know if this is already the flow, but I suspect AV is
| sending name, address, etc... All stuff that isn't needed if AV
| is a certified vendor.
| EmbarrassedHelp wrote:
| That solution still violates user privacy.
|
| A better solution would be a simple "minor" flag that is only
| included on the devices of minors. No third party verification
| required for adults.
| almosthere wrote:
| That works until minor-removing-flag proxys start popping up.
| nye2k wrote:
| I worked for a decade in what I would consider the highest level
| of our kids' privacy ever designed, at PBS KIDS. This was coming
| off a startup that attempted to do the same for grownups, but
| failed because of dirty money.
|
| Every security attempt becomes a facade or veil in time, unless
| it's nothing. Capture nothing, keep nothing, say nothing. Kids
| are smart AF and will outlearn you faster than you can think.
| Don't even try to capture PII ever. Watch the waves and follow
| their flow, make things for them to learn from but be extremely
| careful how you let the grownups in, and do it in pairs, never
| alone.
| pessimizer wrote:
| The _point_ is to undermine data protection; this debate is
| useless. It 's a question about power and control, not a
| technical one. The people lobbying for this don't care about
| children, and neither are they getting big support from a
| constituency clamoring for this. This is an intelligence
| initiative, and a donor initiative from people who are in a
| position to control the platform (all computing and
| communications) after it is locked down.
|
| It's not even worth talking about online. There's too much
| inorganic support for the objectives of nation-states and the
| corporations that own them.
|
| Legislation has been advanced in Colorado demanding that _all
| OSes_ verify the user 's age. It will fail, but it will be
| repeated 100 times, in different places, smuggled attached to
| different legislation, the process and PR strategies refined and
| experimented with, versions of it passed in Australia, South
| Korea, maybe the UK and Europe, and eventually passed here. That
| means that "general purpose" computing will be eventually be lost
| to locked bootloaders.
|
| https://www.pcmag.com/news/colorado-lawmakers-push-for-age-v...
|
| [edit: I'm an idiot, they already passed it in California
| https://www.hunton.com/privacy-and-cybersecurity-law-blog/ca...]
|
| And it will be an entirely engineered and conscious process by
| people who have names. And we will babble about it endlessly
| online, pretending that we have some control over it, pretending
| that this is a technical discussion or a moral discussion, on
| platforms that they control, that they allow us to babble on as
| an escape valve. Then, one day the switch will flip, and advocacy
| of open bootloaders, or trading in computers that can install
| unattested OSes, will be treated as organized crime.
|
| All I can beg you to do is imagine how ashamed you'll be in the
| future when you're lying about having supported this now, or
| complaining that you shouldn't have "trusted them to do it the
| right way." Don't let dumb fairytales about Russians, Chinese,
| Cambridge Analytics and pedophile pornography epidemics have you
| fighting for your own domination. Maybe you'll be the piece of
| straw that slows things down just enough that current Western
| oligarchies collapse before they can finish. Maybe we'll get
| lucky.
|
| Polls and ballots show that none of this stuff has majority
| organic support. But polls can be manipulated, and good polls
| have to be publicized for people to know they're not alone, and
| not afraid they're misunderstanding something. If both candidates
| on the ballot are subverted, the question never ends up on the
| ballot.
|
| The article itself says nothing that hasn't been said before, and
| stays firmly under the premise that access to content online by
| under-18s is suddenly one of the most critical problems of our
| age, rather than a sad annoyance. What is gained by having this
| dumb discussion again?
| mgaunard wrote:
| "Think of the children" is merely a political argument to get a
| law to be popular among normal people.
| Ginden wrote:
| "Age-restriction laws push platforms toward intrusive
| verification systems that often directly conflict with modern
| data-privacy law" - when you make rules contradictory, someone
| always violate these laws, and you can use selective persecution
| to "convince" companies to favor you, the incumbent politician.
| You don't even have to use such power, just a "joke" may be
| enough to send have any rational CEO licking your shoes.
|
| European proponents of "anti-big-tech action" make it pretty
| explicit - broad discretionary power should be given to executive
| branch, because otherwise "international corporations" will use
| "loopholes" (and these "loopholes" are, in practice, explicitly
| written laws used as intended).
| kylecordes wrote:
| "Verifying age undermines everyone's data protection"
|
| That's the whole point, right? A pretense to remove any remaining
| anonymity from communications?
|
| Governments are endlessly infested with the worst people. They
| look back at historical attempts at totalitarianism and think to
| themselves, "Let's facilitate something like that, but worse".
| radium3d wrote:
| It's insanely dangerous to have so much data stored on so many
| servers that are inevitably not maintained.
| edoceo wrote:
| I'm certain there is a way to verify age without compromise of
| privacy or identity. I'm sure it's possible to build some oAuth
| like flow that could allow sites to verify both human-ness and
| age. The systems and corporations that gate that MUST (in the RFC
| sense) be separate from the systems and corporations that want
| the verification.
|
| Do we need laws to make this happen? What methods can be used to
| aid adoption? Do site operators really want to know the humanness
| and ages or are those just masks on adding more surveillance?
| catoc wrote:
| It's the same as scanning for CSAM, or encryption-backdoors "to
| catch criminals".
|
| Of course we hate child abuse.
|
| Of course we hate criminals.
|
| Of course we hate social media addicting our kids.
|
| But they're just used as emotional framing for the true
| underlying desire: government surveillance.
|
| (For the record: I am not into conspiracy theories; the EU has
| seen proposals for - imho technically impossible - "legally-
| breakable encryption" alone in 2020, 2022, and 2025; now we"ll
| also see repeated attempts at the "age verification" thing to
| force all _adults_ to upload their IDs to 'secure' web portals)
| 1vuio0pswjnm7 wrote:
| "In cases when regulators demand real enforcement rather than
| symbolic rules, platforms run into a basic technical problem. The
| only way to prove that someone is old enough to use a site is to
| collect personal data about who they are."
|
| These so-called "platforms" already collect data about who people
| are in order to facilitate online advertising and whatever else
| the "platform" may choose to do with it. There is no way for the
| user to control where that data may end up or how it may be used.
| The third party can use the data for any purpose and share it
| with anyone (or not). Whether they claim they do or don't do
| something with the data is besides the point, their internal
| actions cannot be verified and there are no enforceable
| restrictions in the event a user discovers what they are doing
| and wants to stop them (at that point it may be too late for the
| user anyway)
|
| "Tech" journalists and "tech bros" routinely claim these
| "platforms" know more about people than their own families,
| friends and colleagues
|
| That's not "privacy"
|
| Let's be honest. No one is achieving or maintaining internet
| "privacy" by using these "platforms", third party intermediaries
| (middlemen) with a surveillance "business model", in order to
| communicate over the internet
|
| On the contrary, internet "privacy" has been diminishing with
| each passing year that people continue to use them
|
| The so-called "platforms" have led to vast repositories of data
| about people that are used every day by entities who would
| otherwise not be legally authorised or technically capable of
| gathering such surveillance data. Most "platform" users are
| totally unaware of the possibilities. The prospect of "age
| verification" may be the wake up call
|
| "Age verification" could potentially make these "platforms" suck
| to a point that people might stop using them. For example, it
| might be impossible to implement without setting off users' alarm
| bells. In effect, it might raise more awareness of how the vast
| quantity of data about people these unregulated/underregulated
| third parties collect "under the radar" could be shared with or
| used by other entities. Collecting ID is above the radar and may
| force people to think twice
|
| The "platforms" don't care about "privacy" except to control it.
| Their "business model" relies on defeating "privacy", reshaping
| the notion into one where privacy from the "platform" does not
| exist
|
| Internet "privacy" and mass data collection about people via
| "platforms" are not compatible goals
|
| "... our founders displayed a fondness for hyperbolic
| vilification of those who disagreed with them. In almost every
| meeting, they would unleash a one-word imprecation to sum up any
| and all who stood in the way of their master plans.
|
| "Bastards!" Larry would exclaim when a blogger raised concerns
| about user privacy."
|
| - Douglas Edwards, Google employee number 59, from 2011 book "I'm
| feeling lucky"
|
| If a user decides to stop using a third party "platform"
| intermediary (middleman) that engages in data collection,
| surveillance and ad services, for example, because they wish to
| avoid "age verification", then this could be the first step
| toward meaningful improvements in "internet privacy". People
| might stop creating "accounts", "signing in" and continuing to be
| complacent toward the surreptititious collection of data that is
| subsequently associated with their identity to create "profiles"
| muyuu wrote:
| people really believe this coordinated push across jurisdictions
| is about kids and verifying their age? this excuse to try to end
| pseudonimity on the web is as old as the mainstream internet
| itself
|
| to a lot of people it never sat well that people could just go
| online and say whatever they want, and communicate with each
| other unsupervised at large scale, and be effectively
| untargetable while doing so - that model of the internet was only
| allowed because it happened under the radar and those
| uncomfortable with it have been fighting it since they got the
| memo
| Saline9515 wrote:
| Zero-knowledge proofs exist, that verify that a user's id holds
| certain properties, without leaking said ID.
| user3939382 wrote:
| Corporate interests don't care about data privacy or security
| they care about liability and compliance which are not the same
| thing.
|
| Major banks and government institutions can't even be bothered to
| implement the NIST password guidelines. If they got their gdpr
| soc2 fedramp whatever it's green lights and the rest is
| insurance.
| stainablesteel wrote:
| this is a broader parenting problem, the state doesn't need to do
| this
|
| politicians are interested in it because they're begging for some
| way to censor the internet, which would actually be even worse
| for parenting because now it prevents children from ever learning
| to be responsible with these highly addictive platforms
| jajuuka wrote:
| I feel like the ending undermines the whole piece. Throwing your
| hands up and going "we should do nothing" isn't really a
| solution. If a compromise exists I think it's adding age requests
| on device setup. There wouldn't be any verification but it could
| be used as a way to limit access to content globally. Content
| provides would just need a simple API to check if the age range
| fits and move right along.
|
| This puts more onus on parents and guardians to ensure their
| child's devices are set up correctly. The system wouldn't be
| perfect and people using something like Gentoo would be able to
| work around it, but I think it helps address the concerns. A
| framework would need to be created for content providers to
| enforce their own rating system but I don't think it's an
| impossible task. It obviously wouldn't cover someone not rating
| content operating out of Romania, but should be part of the
| accepted risk on an open internet.
|
| Personally I do agree with the "do nothing" stance, but I don't
| think it's going to hold up among the wider public. The die is
| cast and far too many average people are supporting moves like
| this. So the first defense should be to steer that conversation
| in a better way instead of stonewalling.
| kjeldsendk wrote:
| Surprisingly there is solutions that work just fine.
|
| It's like bankid or myid works in Scandinavian countries.
|
| When you need to identify yourself you are challenged by a 3rd
| party trusted service.
|
| Making this a age verification should be very easy.
|
| https://www.mitid.dk/en-gb/about-mitid/?language=en-gb
| ltbarcly3 wrote:
| It's amazing how much it's possible to foment arguments against
| something if you are very well funded and a regulation will cost
| your industry a lot of money.
|
| Age verification is a good thing. Giving children unrestricted
| access to hardcore pornography is _bad for them_. Whatever
| arguments you want to make, fundamentally this is true.
| nottorp wrote:
| How about we accept age verification but every parliamentary type
| that voted in favor goes to jail for just one year for each data
| breach?
|
| Practically that means all of them will be imprisoned for life,
| of course.
| fdefitte wrote:
| Every age verification scheme is really an identity verification
| scheme, "age" is just the acceptable entry point. Once the
| infrastructure exists to verify you are 18, it can verify you are
| not on a watchlist, verify your creditworthiness, verify your
| political associations.
|
| You are not building a parental filter. You are building rails.
|
| "Protect the children" is the canonical playbook for every
| surveillance expansion since forever. The children get protected
| for six months. The infrastructure stays forever.
| 111011111 wrote:
| Isn't clear whether the paradox is biometric verification or ID
| data collection.
| chaostheory wrote:
| That's the point: enable mass surveillance and thee loss of
| privacy under the guise of another cause, usually "protecting the
| children".
| alecco wrote:
| The purpose is to control the Internet. They've been trying this
| for ages. They tried with terrorism and other things. Now the
| excuse is protecting children.
|
| Not exactly a good moment for this caste of politicians to
| pretend they care about children's well-being, though.
| hash07e wrote:
| Same people who are on Epstein files wants to protect children?
| Ylpertnodi wrote:
| No. They want to fuck everybody.
| tsoukase wrote:
| Social media, at least, are reaching the state the smoking had in
| the 80's when it started to be banned. After an era of praising
| (00's) scepticism followed (10's) until an underage ban comes
| (20's). Maybe in the 30's they will be banned in public spaces!
|
| The problem of identifying a value for each person is very
| difficult. But government's role stops there. Until the
| teenager's screen more factors stay in the middle (parents,
| peers, criminals). I am curious how it turns out eventually. As a
| parent, I have already banned SM for my children, so not
| "affected" by the new policy.
| Gigachad wrote:
| Ban in public spaces might not make sense since there isn't a
| proximity hazard like smoke. But I can imagine after kids are
| banned from social media and we see how this was an obviously
| positive effect on their mental health, we will begin to
| acknowledge that this stuff is toxic for adults as well.
|
| We could start to ban many of the mechanisms social media
| companies have deployed over the last 10 years. Infinite
| scrolling, algorithmic feeds of "creator" content, AI generated
| ragebait from bot accounts, etc. I'd love to see social media
| reverted back to when it was just holiday photos from your
| friends.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2026-02-23 23:00 UTC)