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From my experience it took very active moderation to even poorly enforce COPA style rules and that was with a small user base, not the mega-userbases of today's
by ehnto 4y ago
From my experience it took very active moderation to even poorly enforce COPA style rules and that was with a small user base, not the mega-userbases of today's social media. Kids just sign up anyway and then the moderators wait for them to slip up and still are just making an educated guess.
The only way to make it more effective I feel is ID verification but then you are looking at collecting IDs from kids and that is a total non-starter in my opinion, not to mention they don't usually have a verifiable ID yet.
I don't have the solution, but if we look at other age prohibited activities they are usually restricted up until the age that you are considered an adult and as such ID is more reasonable to ask for.
- PragmaticPulp 4y ago> Kids just sign up anyway and then the moderators wait for them to slip up and still are just making an educated guess. I’m baffled by all of these HN posts from people who seemingly forgot what being a kid is like. Kids are experts at circumventing the rules. All of these suggestions about fining companies any time a kid manages to use the website are DOA. Kids will use the internet and steal their parents accounts, IDs, and credit cards. The harder you lock it down, the more terrible the internet is going to become for anyone trying to use it. Meanwhile, every social website will just pick up and relocate to a country with sane laws overnight.
- johnny22 4y agoi mean really.. the site is called "Hacker News" and breaking established rules and restrictions is kind of the point.
- baq 4y agoThe government or a bank or some other private or public trustworthy institution could be a limited identity provider which could authenticate that this guy is not really a kid. The trustworthy part is going to be difficult though. It works in Europe for adults, but US folks seem to be allergic to the idea.
- protocolture 4y agoSweet. New Social Engineering vector just dropped.
- ehnto 4y agoYou would need an ID intermediate I agree, but there is not a single institution I trust to keep children's data safe. It is just better for it not to exist at all. I am aware of government records of birth and medical records etc, but they exist as a tradeoff of necessity over security. Gaining access to a social network doesn't warrant the same tradeoff in my opinion, and it introduces much extra risk during the handoff and third party processing and storage. We could bikeshed technical solutions, but history tells us tech is fallible, and I think it's just not a road worth going down.