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.
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.
> 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.
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 ...
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
> 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.
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
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.
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.
> 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.
Your proposed architecture also achieves the goal of discouraging content-distributing entities from holding hard identification data, so it sounds good to me.
> 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.
>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.
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.
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).
> 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.
> 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?
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.
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.
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/
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.
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.
> 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.
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?
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.
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?
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.
> 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.
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.
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?
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?
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
[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.
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.
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."
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.
- 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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
"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.
> 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:
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.
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.
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.
> 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
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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?
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.
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.
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"?
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?
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”.
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
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
> 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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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…
> 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").
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.
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)
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)
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.
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
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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?
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
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.
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.
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?
>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.
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.
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.
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.
>> 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?
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.
>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?
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.legislation.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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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?
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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?
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.
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”
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.
> 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 document.
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.
> 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.
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.
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)?
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.
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).
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.
> 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.
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.
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?
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?
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.
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)?
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).
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.
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.
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
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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.
>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?
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.
> 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).
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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, ...
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.
> 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).
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.
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...
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.
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?
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.
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 ?
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.
>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))
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
>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?
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.
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.
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."
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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)
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
>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.
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.
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.
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.
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."
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
>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.
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.
>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.
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?
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.
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.
>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.
> 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.
>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.
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.
> 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
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?
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.
>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.
> ...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.
>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.
> ...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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
"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).
> 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.
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?
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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?
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?
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.
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.
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).
> 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.
> 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.
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
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.
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.
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.)
> 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?
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.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
> 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.
> 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.
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]
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.
> 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?
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.
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.
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.
"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.
> 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.
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."
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!
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.
> 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?
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.”
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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)
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
> 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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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?"
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 exposés, 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.
> 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.
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”
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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?
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.
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)?
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:
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.
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).
> 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.
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?
> 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.
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.
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 façade they hide behind.
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!
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
> 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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
"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".
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.
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?
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
> 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...
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
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.
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.
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.
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.)
>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.
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"
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.
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.
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
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?
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.
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)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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
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.
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.
> ...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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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)
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.
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.
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.
Free wifi generally is everywhere, however it is often heavily filtered and firewalled to stop being doing things the internet owner wouldnt approve of.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
"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"
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.
>"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?
> 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?
Fuck data privacy, what privacy? Your ISP knows you, sites track you, cookies track you. It's a myth. But oh, we totally can't figure out age verification. Fuck off, I dont buy it.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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 ...
>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.
> ... 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?
> 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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
the mechanisms by which that information is being conveyed have been shown to be addictive as well, no?
Yes, go after Facebook and their kind only, avoid collateral damage to the remaining regular old internet.
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.
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.
> 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.
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
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.
> 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.
> 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.
Your proposed architecture also achieves the goal of discouraging content-distributing entities from holding hard identification data, so it sounds good to me.
> 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.
Centralization and standardization are going to be the topic in the 21st century.
>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.
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.
O yeah? Where’s that guy who couldn’t get a job 6 months ago because he refuses to use LinkedIn.
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).
> 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.
Yes, seeking more control for themselves and completely at the expense of everybody else's loss.
> 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,
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,
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,
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...
> There is almost literally documented examples of…
lol
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
> 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.
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.
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?
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?
Phones, I mean. Sorry for the confusion there. I’m for holding off on social media.
Keeping your kids off social media is setting them up for success.
I’m talking about phones specifically. Agree re: social media.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I do not disagree with any of this, I was hoping it was implied by my original comment that this would be necessary.
> 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.
But it's not playing the bad guy. It's playing the good guy.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
You must not have kids if you think it's easy to keep children off things that are bad for them.
[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.
It's really not some Herculean task to do so either, though.
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.
Especially if they are older, like 8+ years old. They are resourceful, sneaky and relentless.
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.
Maybe at 16, not at 8.
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.
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."
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.
> 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
- ...
Sounds like a kid in need of psychiatric help.
You barely ever had to deal with pubescent children? :-)
I mean, that's really not normal puberty stuff, but... okay.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The school, in loco parentis.
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.
So we should ban social media is what you're saying but not what OC is saying.
All "social media" that uses recommendation algorithms should be unavaliable to children.
At least give it a try.
"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.
> 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...
Not responsible for selling to all minors, just theirs.
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.
That's really a district-by-district / school-by-school thing, some are significantly more locked down than others
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.
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.
> 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
>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 :)
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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?
This only works if I ban my child from having any friends since they all have unlimited mobile access to the internet.
Yes if they do bad things like drunk, have sex and do drugs.
I would start with banning cellphones.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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"?
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?
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.”
Is it more important to prevent your child from <...>, or to not be seen as an adversarial monster?
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”.
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
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.
Individual Parents vs Meta Inc (1.66T mkt cap)
May the best legal person win!
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.
Should the state have force your parents to give you up for adoption? That's the social support the state can offer.
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.
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.
So the only options are no support or give you up for adoption? No middle ground is possible?
> 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.
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.
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.
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).
It wasn’t always this way: “Ask not what your country can do for you — ask what you can do for your country”
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.
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.
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.
"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.
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!
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.
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.
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-...
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.
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.
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?!?!?!?!?)
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.
We'll do everything, it seems, other than holding billionairs accountable for what their businesses consume.
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
The vast majority of parents aren't tech-savvy enough to be able to operate IT parental controls.
Yes, children are clever - I was one once.
A counterargument to your point that children are clever - I was also one once.
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.
The internet is not an object, its a communication medium. That is an apples to organges argument, it doesn't wash.
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.
> 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
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.
How easy is it for kids to bypass Parental Controls on iOS devices?
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.
It’s one setting to only allow a whitelist and not allow apps to be downloaded. Yes parents might actually need to learn technology
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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…
Step 0 is physical device access. Kids shouldn't have tablets or smartphones or personal laptops before age 16.
> 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").
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.
This will only work in practice if one of the parents is a network technician. :-)
I've said it before but prohibition works, if the goal is to reduce usage. I don't see this as a realistic problem.
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)
This is the craziest thing I’ve heard in a while. They shouldn’t have connected game systems either?
No, because those devices have little or no controls and those controls are easily bypassed and/or not honored by the platform.
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)
The problem is unrestricted access to mobile devices. A game console or desktop PC isn't as big of a deal.
What’s the difference? They all reach the same internet
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.
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.
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
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.
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..
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.
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.
> 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.
Excellent example of low effort cookie cutter empty rhetoric that would fit perfectly in reddit.
Do you have kids?
> 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
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?
Where did I say that?
Exactly, nowhere.
If I‘m contra B, it doesn’t mean I pro A
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?
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.
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.
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.
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?
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
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.
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.
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?
>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.
I'm with you.
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.
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.
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.
>> 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?
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.
>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?
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.
> 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.
also there's a huge argument to be made that surveilling your kids is really really bad for their development
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.
We live in a technofeudalist society now, we're all at the whims of the tech corps
> 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.
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.
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?
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.
> Were you not invited to parties in high school?
Did you forget what web site you're on?
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.
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.legislation.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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Back in the day you would beat up that person.
> 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
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.
This reads like something I'd find on /r/LinkedInLunatics, all the way down to the one-sentence/thought-per-line formatting.
> I explained that trust is one of the most delicate things in the world
> lies to own children about throwing their toys away
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
>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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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
Can you offer some rebuttal to give some credence to your point?
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
> 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?
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.
> 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.
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?
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
Link?
https://github.com/eu-digital-identity-wallet/av-doc-technic...
https://www.forbes.com/sites/federicoguerrini/2025/08/10/who...
> 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?
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.
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”
Amazing how fast these systems go from "zero knowledge" to "route the request through the government system every time you use your ID"
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.
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.
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.
> 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 document.
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.
> 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.
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.
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)?
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.
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).
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.
> 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.
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.
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?
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...
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?
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.
Not only EU -- Digital ID on iPhone does this today, and is accepted by many USA airports for travel, etc., with rollout for DLs.
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)?
It's this I believe: https://www.w3.org/TR/vc-data-model-2.0/
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).
Yeah, but how to convince investors that trusting the government-issued ID is good enough? /s
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.
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.
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
> 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.
> 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.
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.
Starting a comment with "In the USA..." is the exact opposite of assuming a person is in the US.
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.
People angrily replying to the top comment on this article are going to be pissed when they find out about this guy.
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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.
>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?
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.
> 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).
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.
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… )
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
It’s still just a sales funnel for ads or subscriptions. Why do you think porn sites exist?
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.
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.
> 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.
Even China hasn't been remotely successful at banning porn, and it already has the great firewall and porn is illegal there.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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, ...
> 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.
> 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).
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.
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?
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...
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.
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?
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.
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 ?
> 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.
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.
AFAIK today if you buy a device, the bank doesn't get the device-unique identifier, at best it sees the model number.
Yes we need a fundamental shift where sharing of parent accounts is akin to atleast some sort of infraction or maybe even a misdemeanor.
This could help, but without the culture shift, way too many parents will intentionally and unintentionally break that law.
>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))
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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
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.
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.
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.
There is no such thing as anonymous age verification in practice.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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...
not saying that I support age verification in any form, but you seen the vape sales?
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.
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.
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.
This sounds pretty reasonable to me. What am I missing?
It doesn’t come with a ton of PII you can sell to data brokers.
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.
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.
> 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.
At least then it wouldn't be the government requiring it, is what people may think I imagine.
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.
To avoid your proposed punishment, they will implement things like ... ID verification.
Then ones who won't will become the preferred choice
>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?
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.
>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.
Facebook advertises outright scams and nobody manages to punish them for that.
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.
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.
Is it though? Do you have any proof that is the case?
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."
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.
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.
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.
But that doesn't verify that the person using the ID is the person that it was issued to.
Its better than what we have now. Maybe using the ID could require a PIN code if we wanted to enhance security.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
>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.
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.
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.
> 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.
Exactly. So many comments here about technical solutions are missing the underlying government/authority problem, or are actively a part of it.
> 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
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.
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.
> 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.
> 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/
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
If the US really cared about child safety they'd go after people in the epstien files.
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).
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.
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.
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.
Some platforms did display notices like this for a while, but I noticed that they stopped the practice after a few months.
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.
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.
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
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.
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...
Pretty sure they’re doing both of those things but it takes a long time for the regulation to reach the final stage
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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)
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
>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"
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.
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…
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.
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.
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."
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.
Do it then
> This is a problem [..]
(This is a genuine question) please could you describe the underlying problem that age verification is attempting to solve?
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.
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.
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.
Why should gambling be the exception? One could argue other app-based vices are just as bad, if not worse.
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.
> 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
That's true. It's probably at least 50% the latter. And I don't really blame them.
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.
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.
Does the German ID system know what you are trying to access? Based on the requestor.
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).
So do you buy an ID every month or can we depreciate that over 15 years?
Not unless you are offering to front everyone that money for no interest.
Providing every citizen an ID every X years at no cost does seem like good policy.
You have to get a new one every 5 years.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
> 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.
Zero-knowledge proofs exist, that verify that a user's id holds certain properties, without leaking said ID.
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.
>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.
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.
>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.
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?
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.
Sorry I'd misunderstood I thought you were describing infrastructure that already exists and making a comparison to just using your ID.
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-...>
>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.
> 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.
>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.
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.
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.
> 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]
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?
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.
>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.
> ...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.
>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.
> ...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).
>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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
The companies don’t, and th government already has your government id.
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.
"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).
> 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.
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?
Are you saying that social media isn't harmful to children?
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.
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.
Here is an example of the problem with inference-based verification:
https://streamable.com/3tgc14
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
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?
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.
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-...
> "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.......
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.
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.
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.
For adults, I think a legal opt-in-only policy would work well. And require reconsent with every major algorithm change.
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?
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.
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?
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.
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.
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).
> 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.
There's never been a definitive way and yes, the bar is probably rising.
All is not lost, though: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
> 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.
That’s not cynicism, it’s reality.
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
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.
Maybe the US gov needs more tor users and is therefore doing this to drive more traffic to the onion network.
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.
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.)
> 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
> 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?
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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>
> 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.
> 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:
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.
> 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.
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...
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.
That's fascinating. I'd love to read an account from somebody who's been through that pipeline about how it worked.
> 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?
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.
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.
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.
"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.
> 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.
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."
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!
>In the 90's no one could envision rounding up immigrants.
Both Clinton and Obama deported way more people than Trump.
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.
> 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?
Ineffective. Too much noise, too little removals.
Do you think Trump's first term was a failure because he didn't deport as many people as Obama?
Trump's first term was a total failure for many reasons. He didn't implement nothing of his agenda successfully.
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
> "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.
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
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.
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.
When anonymity is outlawed, then only outlaws will be anonymous.
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.
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.
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?
This also means the only operating systems allowing access to the internet will be these with the immense surveillance and ad-infested.
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.
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.
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)
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.
>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.
now?
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.
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.
This is what the LLMs are actually good for.
it's a solid business model actually
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.
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
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-...
Unless you live in North Korea, no there is not. This is pure conspiracy theory.
well at least your screen name is accurate, which is more than can be said of your comment.
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.
> 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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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).
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.
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.
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.
> 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?"
Could be astroturfing
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.
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?
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.
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
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.
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.
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?
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.
Absolutely, yes. They don’t ping to see that you are of age, but that the random challenge generated by your ID checks out.
Where is it implemented that way?
In the proposal from the European Union, and in the implementation in Denmark.
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...
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
The audience shifted from tech-literate to the opposite.
Too may in tech for the money that’s for sure. No fundamentals, just drilled leetcode.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 exposés, 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.
This is a VC site, when the revenue generating model of the Internet has strongly shifted into surveillance capitalism overdrive.
Cui bono?
> 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...
Better to let a hundred people’s “privacy” be violated than to let another child be radicalized or abused or misled by online predation.
> 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.
> “privacy”
Why did you put "privacy" in scare quotes?
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.
I don't subscribe to this. I value my privacy more.
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”
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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?
Why did AOC stop calling them "concentration camps" when Biden took office?
> 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.
Same. Also on Facebook and Nextdoor (with real names and addresses).
Real name moderator is a fallacy.
That's what I believe as well. Anons have turned the internet into an unsafe cesspit. It's the opposite of a "town square."
Internet anonymity is FAR from something new.
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.
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)?
I think the tech crowd appreciates how hard it is to lock down access to tech, since they were the kids bypassing the restrictions
You are the one handing them those screens.
> 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 )
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.
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).
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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?
> Freedom to do what, exactly?
You may be failing to comprehend the concept of "freedom".
Please, O wise one, explain "freedom" to the political scientist and lawyer you're talking to. Let me get my popcorn first.
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.
Alternatively, you could provide a substantive and respectful argument instead of a snipe, as you should have done in the first place.
I'm sorry but I don't think I have the proper training to debate someone so far outside of my intellectual weight class.
> 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.
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.
Where I said that?
You didn’t say that; the person I was responding to did. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47123782
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 façade they hide behind.
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!
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.
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.
> 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.
> requiring an ID to surf the internet
Who's proposing this? I don't want to argue over a straw man.
Age verification === require an ID
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.
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.
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. -->
> 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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
I was thinking the same thing. Why don't we just get a key from the government?
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
What third party do they require you to blindly trust?
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.
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.
Isn't clear whether the paradox is biometric verification or ID data collection.
"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".
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.
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?
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?
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.
I would argue that this has nothing to do with age verification, but everything to do with getting identifiable data on all of us.
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.
It's insanely dangerous to have so much data stored on so many servers that are inevitably not maintained.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
This thread is gonna be full of HN users blaming the parents for a systemic problem isn’t it?
Yup.
That’s the point: enable mass surveillance and thee loss of privacy under the guise of another cause, usually “protecting the children”.
If there's only a centralized system that uses digital IDs to hand off providers only a "yay" or "nay"...
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.
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
Astroturfing will still be a thing after ID. What, you think the government is going to go after their own bot armies?
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
>I think it would be a lot more difficult for anyone to do
Why? Like, what makes you think that?
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
> 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...
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
most kids dont have parents who care to that degree.
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 :)
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.
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.
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.)
Do you genuinely believe the major tech companies and gov reps actually want to close their addiction revenue taps?
> 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.
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"
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.
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
(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?
newer passports and driver licenses do.
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.
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)
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.
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.
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.
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?
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-...
> 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.
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.
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.
Hence why Illinois has already mame it illegal.
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.
parents: won't somebody else put some rules and safeguards in place to protect my children?
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.
More like fear of exposing their children to anything other than carefully curated "conservative" ideas.
Same people who are on Epstein files wants to protect children?
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.
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.
>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.
Isn't this the same debate as airports post 9/11, whether you can have both privacy and security? Seems conclusive, no.
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.
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)
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.
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.
That works until minor-removing-flag proxys start popping up.
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.
(thats the point)
zero knowledge cryptography solves this
Only in theory, and only if you blindly trust a third party. The implementations in practice are still massive privacy violations.
Is there any production ready implementation out there?
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.
Thanks. I'll have a look.
It's just another way to surveil the population and won't cause any real problems for anyone who can work around it.
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
"Think of the children" is merely a political argument to get a law to be popular among normal people.
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
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.
That was the goal.
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.
> ...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.
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.
If government is concerned shouldn't government just deliver auth based on birth certificate for everyone to use?
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.
My new comment
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.
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.
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.
>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.
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" ?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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)
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.
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.
> if you are paying for internet access you have to be over 18, no?
No, that's not the case.
every contract by every ISP i have ever signed has required me to be over the age of 18 to enter the contract.
In many countries, it's possible to get a prepaid SIM with data access - without any ID or age requirement whatsoever.
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.
And then how does public wifi work? Stand outside a Weatherspoons, or just walk down a highstreet with free internet, back to square one
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)
unless your kid never goes to public school that isn't true
or goes outside at all. free wifi is everywhere
Free wifi generally is everywhere, however it is often heavily filtered and firewalled to stop being doing things the internet owner wouldnt approve of.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
"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"
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.
>"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?
> 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?
Fuck data privacy, what privacy? Your ISP knows you, sites track you, cookies track you. It's a myth. But oh, we totally can't figure out age verification. Fuck off, I dont buy it.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.