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I'm so tired of tech people saying "it has to suck because the law requires it", when they clearly haven't read it. You hear it all the time when discussing tra

I'm so tired of tech people saying "it has to suck because the law requires it", when they clearly haven't read it. You hear it all the time when discussing tracking banners or ID verification. NO, the law does NOT require your implementation to suck, and most laws give you plenty of leeway in how you implement it. This is really not personal, but I HATE the argument. Take this as an example. The AVMSD isn't new, it was codified in 2010. It has a website[1], and on that website you can read the rules (they even simplified them for us). The rules about minors are pretty relaxed[2]. For non-linear content (such as on-demand video) the law requires that content which "might seriously impair the physical, mental or moral development of minors" wont "normally" be seen/heard by kids. Nowhere does it say that YouTube has to require a National ID to show a video of a zombie. It's all interpretation, because that's how we do laws. It's true that YouTube said that it's "in line with AVMSD"[3], but it's a lazy excuse to shove in a feature. [1]: https://ec.europa.eu/archives/information_society/avpolicy/reg/tvwf/provisions/index_en.htm https://ec.europa.eu/archives/information_society/avpolicy/r... [2]: https://ec.europa.eu/archives/information_society/avpolicy/reg/tvwf/protection/index_en.htm#12 https://ec.europa.eu/archives/information_society/avpolicy/r... [3]: https://blog.youtube/news-and-events/using-technology-more-consistently-apply-age-restrictions/ https://blog.youtube/news-and-events/using-technology-more-c...

ehsankia 5y ago
If it was codified in 2010, was is it only going into affect now 10 years later? I'm not an expert in browsing EU law, but I do see a "revision" of AVMSD [0] that passed in 2018 and started going into effect around 2021 in various countries [1]. The two links you posted very clearly say "archived on 2012" so they are not the new version. [0] https://digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu/en/policies/revision-avmsd https://digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu/en/policies/revision-a... [1] https://www.obs.coe.int/en/web/observatoire/avmsd-tracking https://www.obs.coe.int/en/web/observatoire/avmsd-tracking
zo1 5y ago
It's possibly not how they wanted to interpret it (though I see how it helps their ad/tracking business). But it is probably how they have to interpret it because they might get sued if they didn't. At the very least it's an expensive court case to dismiss. All whilst eyeball-thirsty news agencies print articles such as "Google Refuses to Support EU Child-Protection Legislation", and Twitter-personas post tweets like "Uh Google - what about the kids?"
akersten 5y ago
> NO, the law does NOT require your implementation to suck, When the law is "you have to verify a meatspace user's age before showing them content that could arbitrarily be considered 'adult' by some group of lawmakers who most likely have different and more puritan values than you," yes, it does require your implementation to suck, because that law sucks by definition. I'm glad YouTube implemented it this way, so that the pain of shitty laws can be felt instead of being allowed to proceed. Maybe people will actually try to push back against overzealous Internet regulation at some point.
kllrnohj 5y ago
> I'm so tired of tech people saying "it has to suck because the law requires it", when they clearly haven't read it. [..] The AVMSD isn't new, it was codified in 2010. It has a website[1] You know, if you were going to rant about people not reading things, you probably should have first validated your own assumptions. AVMSD was just updated ( https://digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu/en/policies/revision-avmsd https://digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu/en/policies/revision-a... ) which just recently went into effect. The updated law requires online video platforms to age gate content for children. How, exactly, do you propose they do that with an implementation that doesn't suck?
- delusional 5y ago
  > if you were going to rant about people not reading things, you probably should have first validated your own assumptions I did, but I didn't stumble on this revision. Now that you linked it, I see hints everywhere that I should have noticed the first time around. Thanks for bringing it up. Although, I'm rather unhappy if my rant was taken to be about reading comprehension though. It really wasn't. I'm annoyed at people blaming laws for poor implementation. To tackle the revision though, lets looks at the revised text. It's kind of hard to get a hold of, since the EU document database is apparently down, but i managed to find a copy[1]. The relevant text seems to be: establishing and operating age verification systems for users of video-sharing platforms with respect to content which may impair the physical, mental or moral development of minors; Even here, it only calls for age verification. Again, there's no requirement for checking credit cards or passports. If we look at one of the drafts of the now enacted law[2], we see that they seem way more concerned with the differentiated moderation between platforms than the adequacy of the age verification process. We have to keep in mind that watershed (only showing adult content after a certain time) is considered an appropriate way of deterring minors from watching. The EU commission clearly don't think we should disallow children at any cost. I don't think it's on my to find a better implementation for YouTube, but with all the smart engineers they have access to, I would think they could come up with something less intrusive. [1]: https://www.europarl.europa.eu/doceo/document/TC1-COD-2016-0151_EN.pdf https://www.europarl.europa.eu/doceo/document/TC1-COD-2016-0... [2]: https://www.eu.dk/samling/20161/kommissionsforslag/kom(2016)0287/forslag/1328077/1638572.pdf https://www.eu.dk/samling/20161/kommissionsforslag/kom(2016)... Page 20 around the middle of the page.
michaelmrose 5y ago
How do you even define content that "might" seriously impair the physical, mental, or moral development of minors. This is so subjective I don't see how you could get away with marking anything that wouldn't in the US be rated PG. At that point in order to ensure that such content isn't shown to minors you have to require a credit card or an ID because any reasonably kid would figure out how to set his or her age to a reasonable age of majority to avoid being pigeonholed into kid stuff. Can you give me an example of an alternative strategy that would be legal and more reasonable?
danShumway 5y ago
> NO, the law does NOT require your implementation to suck, This is kind of an excuse though, because I have never seen an implementation of an age gate online that isn't kind of awful. You either make something that is trivial for kids to bypass, or you make something that is invasive, like Youtube's system. So we get these laws that say, "solve the problem", and there isn't a way to solve the problem. But criticism of the law or criticism of the law's outcomes aren't allowed because the law doesn't technically require that your solution to be terrible. It just asks you to do something that's impossible to do well without violating someone's privacy. In the US (at least for a while) this was solved by pretending that self-reported ages are an effective way to protect kids. And we pretended that would at least reduce exposure to this kind of content, even though in practice it has basically no impact at all. But if the law doesn't care about effectiveness, then why have the law in the first place? So we raise the standards a bit so that the law has some teeth. But again, nobody has ever in any context demonstrated a working age gate to me online that doesn't involve violating someone's privacy or collecting identifying information about them like a credit card or ID. So it doesn't actually matter whether or not the law says the solution has to be terrible. The only outcomes that are possible from these laws are either ineffective solutions or invasive solutions. If there is only one method to accomplish an outcome, then requiring the outcome is effectively the same as requiring the method.
- dane-pgp 5y ago
  > So we get these laws that say, "solve the problem", and there isn't a way to solve the problem. To give another obvious example of this pattern, there's "Make a crypto system which only lets the good guys in, not the bad guys". In both cases, there's a "think of the children" imperative attached, but at least with laws about age restrictions there's more of a chance that the politicians' true goal isn't mass surveillance.
jeroenhd 5y ago
I'm not saying that the law requires that YouTube does this, all I'm saying is that this policy is the result of the AVMSD. Without the extensions to the AVMSD, Google would not have implemented this behaviour. You can argue that they've implemented an intentionally awful way to comply just to spite the politicians, or that they're overthinking the law, but there's still a direct relation between the update of the directive and the change in YouTube's policies.

ehsankia 5y ago

If it was codified in 2010, was is it only going into affect now 10 years later? I'm not an expert in browsing EU law, but I do see a "revision" of AVMSD [0] that passed in 2018 and started going into effect around 2021 in various countries [1]. The two links you posted very clearly say "archived on 2012" so they are not the new version. [0] https://digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu/en/policies/revision-avmsd https://digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu/en/policies/revision-a... [1] https://www.obs.coe.int/en/web/observatoire/avmsd-tracking https://www.obs.coe.int/en/web/observatoire/avmsd-tracking

zo1 5y ago

It's possibly not how they wanted to interpret it (though I see how it helps their ad/tracking business). But it is probably how they have to interpret it because they might get sued if they didn't. At the very least it's an expensive court case to dismiss. All whilst eyeball-thirsty news agencies print articles such as "Google Refuses to Support EU Child-Protection Legislation", and Twitter-personas post tweets like "Uh Google - what about the kids?"

akersten 5y ago

> NO, the law does NOT require your implementation to suck, When the law is "you have to verify a meatspace user's age before showing them content that could arbitrarily be considered 'adult' by some group of lawmakers who most likely have different and more puritan values than you," yes, it does require your implementation to suck, because that law sucks by definition. I'm glad YouTube implemented it this way, so that the pain of shitty laws can be felt instead of being allowed to proceed. Maybe people will actually try to push back against overzealous Internet regulation at some point.

kllrnohj 5y ago

> I'm so tired of tech people saying "it has to suck because the law requires it", when they clearly haven't read it. [..] The AVMSD isn't new, it was codified in 2010. It has a website[1] You know, if you were going to rant about people not reading things, you probably should have first validated your own assumptions. AVMSD was just updated ( https://digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu/en/policies/revision-avmsd https://digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu/en/policies/revision-a... ) which just recently went into effect. The updated law requires online video platforms to age gate content for children. How, exactly, do you propose they do that with an implementation that doesn't suck?

delusional 5y ago
> if you were going to rant about people not reading things, you probably should have first validated your own assumptions I did, but I didn't stumble on this revision. Now that you linked it, I see hints everywhere that I should have noticed the first time around. Thanks for bringing it up. Although, I'm rather unhappy if my rant was taken to be about reading comprehension though. It really wasn't. I'm annoyed at people blaming laws for poor implementation. To tackle the revision though, lets looks at the revised text. It's kind of hard to get a hold of, since the EU document database is apparently down, but i managed to find a copy[1]. The relevant text seems to be: establishing and operating age verification systems for users of video-sharing platforms with respect to content which may impair the physical, mental or moral development of minors; Even here, it only calls for age verification. Again, there's no requirement for checking credit cards or passports. If we look at one of the drafts of the now enacted law[2], we see that they seem way more concerned with the differentiated moderation between platforms than the adequacy of the age verification process. We have to keep in mind that watershed (only showing adult content after a certain time) is considered an appropriate way of deterring minors from watching. The EU commission clearly don't think we should disallow children at any cost. I don't think it's on my to find a better implementation for YouTube, but with all the smart engineers they have access to, I would think they could come up with something less intrusive. [1]: https://www.europarl.europa.eu/doceo/document/TC1-COD-2016-0151_EN.pdf https://www.europarl.europa.eu/doceo/document/TC1-COD-2016-0... [2]: https://www.eu.dk/samling/20161/kommissionsforslag/kom(2016)0287/forslag/1328077/1638572.pdf https://www.eu.dk/samling/20161/kommissionsforslag/kom(2016)... Page 20 around the middle of the page.

michaelmrose 5y ago

How do you even define content that "might" seriously impair the physical, mental, or moral development of minors. This is so subjective I don't see how you could get away with marking anything that wouldn't in the US be rated PG. At that point in order to ensure that such content isn't shown to minors you have to require a credit card or an ID because any reasonably kid would figure out how to set his or her age to a reasonable age of majority to avoid being pigeonholed into kid stuff. Can you give me an example of an alternative strategy that would be legal and more reasonable?

danShumway 5y ago

> NO, the law does NOT require your implementation to suck, This is kind of an excuse though, because I have never seen an implementation of an age gate online that isn't kind of awful. You either make something that is trivial for kids to bypass, or you make something that is invasive, like Youtube's system. So we get these laws that say, "solve the problem", and there isn't a way to solve the problem. But criticism of the law or criticism of the law's outcomes aren't allowed because the law doesn't technically require that your solution to be terrible. It just asks you to do something that's impossible to do well without violating someone's privacy. In the US (at least for a while) this was solved by pretending that self-reported ages are an effective way to protect kids. And we pretended that would at least reduce exposure to this kind of content, even though in practice it has basically no impact at all. But if the law doesn't care about effectiveness, then why have the law in the first place? So we raise the standards a bit so that the law has some teeth. But again, nobody has ever in any context demonstrated a working age gate to me online that doesn't involve violating someone's privacy or collecting identifying information about them like a credit card or ID. So it doesn't actually matter whether or not the law says the solution has to be terrible. The only outcomes that are possible from these laws are either ineffective solutions or invasive solutions. If there is only one method to accomplish an outcome, then requiring the outcome is effectively the same as requiring the method.

dane-pgp 5y ago
> So we get these laws that say, "solve the problem", and there isn't a way to solve the problem. To give another obvious example of this pattern, there's "Make a crypto system which only lets the good guys in, not the bad guys". In both cases, there's a "think of the children" imperative attached, but at least with laws about age restrictions there's more of a chance that the politicians' true goal isn't mass surveillance.

jeroenhd 5y ago

I'm not saying that the law requires that YouTube does this, all I'm saying is that this policy is the result of the AVMSD. Without the extensions to the AVMSD, Google would not have implemented this behaviour. You can argue that they've implemented an intentionally awful way to comply just to spite the politicians, or that they're overthinking the law, but there's still a direct relation between the update of the directive and the change in YouTube's policies.