3 ms·

Say I'm a regular member of society and want to watch the trailer for a new Battlefield game. How should I do this? YouTube asks me to give them pictures of my

Say I'm a regular member of society and want to watch the trailer for a new Battlefield game. How should I do this? YouTube asks me to give them pictures of my ID for that. This is the mechanism that will be used for this right now. And it's all in the name of "protecting" children. This isn't some future hypothetical - it has already happened. I've been barred from a whole slew of content on YouTube because of this. Right now it's only used by Google. It's likely that in the future most websites will use this, because it's government regulation.

Spivak 5y ago
I mean this already existed prior to YouTube, it's just that before you couldn't access the 18+ trailer at all outside of an R rated movie theater or late night TV because it had to be made for prime time and print where content restrictions were enforced. I don't see this as any different than a theater asking to see your ID before letting your buy an R rated movie ticket. I sympathize that it's annoying hell but you probably also don't want Google deciding for themselves what your age is.
- mindslight 5y ago
  The standard we're comparing this to is the past 30 years of Internet Freedom where these invasive nags were nowhere to be found. Nobody was excited about the MPAA in 1995. But we were all excited about the Internet. Now "The Web" has become the MPAA et al. Lame. The real answer is the behemoths are going to become irrelevant, being inescapably bound to government control and surveillance capitalism. The more hoops and restrictions they add, the more tech people will move to decentralized solutions that don't suffer such bullshit, and eventually the normies will follow. It's just a tragic end to the past few decades of revolutionary energy, pointlessly wasted on centralized dead ends. And in the short term, it's fucking frustrating when trying to get anything done.
- sosborn 5y ago
  There is a real different between showing your ID to a person in front of you compared to uploaded a digitized image of it to the internet. The threat vector completely changes once you do that.
- Aerroon 5y ago
  Yes, it existed before and it was moronic even then. But recent EU regulation pushes it onto streaming sites too and that's a different beast altogether considering the enormous amount of tracking that goes on.
- iggldiggl 5y ago
  If only real 18+ content was the only thing that was affected – unfortunately random other stuff which might at most warrant something like PG (if even that) currently shows up as age-restricted, e.g. the original Tetris God video or the official upload of the Scatmans World music video.

Spivak 5y ago

I mean this already existed prior to YouTube, it's just that before you couldn't access the 18+ trailer at all outside of an R rated movie theater or late night TV because it had to be made for prime time and print where content restrictions were enforced. I don't see this as any different than a theater asking to see your ID before letting your buy an R rated movie ticket. I sympathize that it's annoying hell but you probably also don't want Google deciding for themselves what your age is.

mindslight 5y ago
The standard we're comparing this to is the past 30 years of Internet Freedom where these invasive nags were nowhere to be found. Nobody was excited about the MPAA in 1995. But we were all excited about the Internet. Now "The Web" has become the MPAA et al. Lame. The real answer is the behemoths are going to become irrelevant, being inescapably bound to government control and surveillance capitalism. The more hoops and restrictions they add, the more tech people will move to decentralized solutions that don't suffer such bullshit, and eventually the normies will follow. It's just a tragic end to the past few decades of revolutionary energy, pointlessly wasted on centralized dead ends. And in the short term, it's fucking frustrating when trying to get anything done.
sosborn 5y ago
There is a real different between showing your ID to a person in front of you compared to uploaded a digitized image of it to the internet. The threat vector completely changes once you do that.
Aerroon 5y ago
Yes, it existed before and it was moronic even then. But recent EU regulation pushes it onto streaming sites too and that's a different beast altogether considering the enormous amount of tracking that goes on.
iggldiggl 5y ago
If only real 18+ content was the only thing that was affected – unfortunately random other stuff which might at most warrant something like PG (if even that) currently shows up as age-restricted, e.g. the original Tetris God video or the official upload of the Scatmans World music video.