8 ms·

I'm still on the fence about government doing a parent's job here, especially for kids under 13, but I can't stand that no one pushing these bills has come up w

by goda90 3y ago

I'm still on the fence about government doing a parent's job here, especially for kids under 13, but I can't stand that no one pushing these bills has come up with an actually reasonable age verification method.

bamboozled 3y ago
You could say the same about smoking I guess ? For kids under 13 to see any of the content , ask them to enter a credit card ?
- LeifCarrotson 3y ago
  Adults should not have to enter a credit card to, say, read HN. But kids should. And therein lies the problem...
  - thsksbd 3y ago
    Why not? Honestly asking here. Let's assume oposition to the law is a "progressive" position: If there is a constitutional right to absolutely 100% friction free access to information then what happens to all the barriers the government has erected to access covid, Trump, Russia and other "disinformation" progressive pushed for? (You can invert this example for a right wing if you want)
    - nickthegreek 3y ago
      Not everyone has a credit card. Some people cannot obtain a credit card. People under the age of 18 can also have a credit card. I do not trust random sites with my credit card.
      - thsksbd 3y ago
        So these are objections in practice, not principle. Important but consider: - Most states give free IDs - Your safety concern is addressed by other commenters here (see the verifying age anonymously)
        averageRoyalty 3y ago
        You understand the intenet isn't made up of US states, right?
        Tadpole9181 3y ago
        How about this: I don't want every little thing I do on the internet tracked and tied to my real identity? Is the CCP conducting a psyops on HN right now or something? Since when were we all for every tiny interaction you have on the internet requiring you to look in the scanner and say "My name is X and I love my government and McDonalds"?
        CaptainFever 3y ago
        HN seems to have become a lot more mainstream, in comparison to the old cyberlibertarian "privacy and piracy" days.
        Tadpole9181 3y ago
        Where's the new hangout?
        djfdat 3y ago
        Gut check was that the "Most states give free IDs" statement wouldn't hold up. So I checked real quick. "At least eight states issue free or discounted IDs to low-income or homeless residents and at least 10 states waive ID fees for seniors." That's far from most states, and even then it comes with stipulations.
        nickthegreek 3y ago
        You changed the argument from credit card to government Id (an even worse idea imo). You seem to want the law to be that I need to show ID to enter most internet establishments. I will never, ever, ever hold that opinion.
    - frumper 3y ago
      Growing up I remember the trope about showing papers to do anything in the USSR. It was in direct contrast to the display of freedom in America.
    - jMyles 3y ago
      > If there is a constitutional right to absolutely 100% friction free access to information then what happens to all the barriers the government has erected to access covid, Trump, Russia and other "disinformation" progressive pushed for? ...those barriers go away. They never really existed in the first place in any real way. Like the Great Firewall, they were a polite fiction defining what people are allowed to know, but were trivially circumvented from minute zero. This is one of the most reliable and desirable features of the internet in the first place.
Goronmon 3y ago
I'm still on the fence about government doing a parent's job here, especially for kids under 13, but I can't stand that no one pushing these bills has come up with an actually reasonable age verification method. How do you anonymously verify someone's age?
- ip26 3y ago
  Third party, perhaps. You sign up for service A. Service A queries service B, which knows who you are and provides a one-time ack of your age.
  - tnbp 3y ago
    That sounds nightmarish. I don't want the verifier to know what porn sites I visit. Someone else proposed the following system to me: a third party authority issues a certificate which I can then use to prove I'm 18. The CA cannot see where I use the certificate, though.
    - Tadpole9181 3y ago
      Er... The CA needs to be used to verify the certificate by the third party, ergo it will know the websites. It's virtually impossible to make a verification system that's anonymous. Somewhere the third party and authenticator will need to share a secret that you cannot touch. Furthermore, you would need the government to agree to this system and mandate this system universally and pay for the authentication services to exist. That's not what Florida is doing.
      - tnbp 3y ago
        I can show my government-issued ID to any third party without the government knowing about whom I've shown this ID to. The third party needs to trust the government and the authenticity of the ID. The problem is that my ID contains too much information; I would prefer a document (i.e. digital certificate) that only certifies my age, not my name, address etc.
zo1 3y ago
While people are on the fence about it, our children are having their youth, innocence and brains destroyed by tiktok et al. Those platforms are cancer to adults even, let alone impressionable kids... yet here we are still debating it and faffing around about "1st amendment yaddi yadda".
- Clubber 3y ago
  >children are having their youth, innocence and brains destroyed by tiktok For one, ease up on the hyperbole if you want to be taken seriously. I'll give you the benefit of the doubt because the news is nothing but hyperbole these days, so it's easy to pick up the habit. Second, most kids aren't having "their youth, innocence and brains destroyed." The news takes the edge cases, amplifies them and presents it as the norm to peddle fear because fear sells. Nothing ever is bad as the news makes it out to be, but they gotta make a dollar, you see how bad the news business is since the internet? FWIW, my kid uses social media and just connects with her friends. Nothing overly malicious goes on, they just goof off. I've checked. You really wanna protect the kids from anxiety and whatnot, block the news and all the talking heads trying to manipulate the next generation to their political opinions.
  - zo1 3y ago
    I exaggerate for a reason, because I feel strongly about it and think that it does do those things in a literal sense. Besides, I've consumed tiktok and seen the content. It is nowhere near appropriate for children, it's night and day.
  - light_hue_1 3y ago
    Don't minimize what's going on. There's a massive rise in depression in young children. The teen suicide rate has almost doubled. The idea that you know what's going on, on their social media is pretty funny. Certainly what every adult always assumed about me. And now that I have kids, I can see how easily other kids fool their parents all the time. And what's overly malicious? It may be social media itself without anything bad driving this. Merely seeing a sanitized version of people's lives over and over again, without anyone bullying you, that leads to depression because your life isn't as good. No. Don't block the news. Because then you miss important things like this. https://www.hhs.gov/surgeongeneral/priorities/youth-mental-health/social-media/index.html https://www.hhs.gov/surgeongeneral/priorities/youth-mental-h...
insane_dreamer 3y ago
> government doing a parent's job the govt already set the bar at 13, so what's different about setting it at 16?
mbitsnbites 3y ago
> government doing a parent's job The problem here is that it's pretty much out of the hands of the parents. If your kids' friends have social media, your kids will absolutely need it too in order to not be left out. I've witnessed the pressure, and it's not pretty. Add to that the expectation from society that children shall have access to social media. Regulation is pretty much the only way to send the right signals to parents, schools, media companies (e.g. Swedish public service TV has a kids app that until recently was called "Bolibompa Baby", but it's now renamed to "Bolibompa Mini"), app designers, and so on.
safog 3y ago
We're barreling towards an internet that requires an id before you can use it. It's a bit upsetting but I don't harbor the early 2000s naiveté about the free internet where regulation doesn't exist, the data exchange happens over open formats and connecting people from across the world is viewed as an absolute positive. Govt meddling on social media platforms, the filter bubble, platforms locking data in, teenage depression stats post Instagram, doom scrolling on tiktok have flipped me the other way. Internet Anonymity is going to die - let's see if that makes this place any better.
- Tadpole9181 3y ago
  > Govt meddling on social media platforms And the government having unfettered knowledge of every site you visit - in particular the more salacious ones - is how we solve that? Surely that won't be used as a political cudgel to secure power at any point, nor will it ever be used to target specific demographics or accidentally get leaked.
soared 3y ago
https://developers.google.com/privacy-sandbox/protections/private-state-tokens https://developers.google.com/privacy-sandbox/protections/pr... Private State Tokens enable trust in a user's authenticity to be conveyed from one context to another, to help sites combat fraud and distinguish bots from real humans—without passive tracking. An issuer website can issue tokens to the web browser of a user who shows that they're trustworthy, for example through continued account usage, by completing a transaction, or by getting an acceptable reCAPTCHA score. A redeemer website can confirm that a user is not fake by checking if they have tokens from an issuer the redeemer trusts, and then redeeming tokens as necessary. Private State Tokens are encrypted, so it isn't possible to identify an individual or connect trusted and untrusted instances to discover user identity.
- Tadpole9181 3y ago
  This system clearly and trivially deanonymizes the internet. Even worse than a centralized system, it uses a simple "just trust me bro" mentality that issuers would never injure users for personal gain and would never keep logs or have data leaks, which would expose the Internet traffic of a real person.
KaiserPro 3y ago
> I'm still on the fence about government doing a parent's job here The issue is, as a parent who is not very technical, how do they _safely_ audit their child's social media use? I am reasonably confident that I could control my kid's social media habit, but only up to a point. there isn't anything really stopping them getting their own cheap phone/signing in on another person's machine. The problem is, to safely stop kids getting access requires either strong authentication methods to the ISP. ie, to get an IP you need 2fa to sign in. But thats also how censorship/de-anonymisation happens.

by goda90 3y ago

bamboozled 3y ago

You could say the same about smoking I guess ? For kids under 13 to see any of the content , ask them to enter a credit card ?

LeifCarrotson 3y ago
Adults should not have to enter a credit card to, say, read HN. But kids should. And therein lies the problem...
- thsksbd 3y ago
  Why not? Honestly asking here. Let's assume oposition to the law is a "progressive" position: If there is a constitutional right to absolutely 100% friction free access to information then what happens to all the barriers the government has erected to access covid, Trump, Russia and other "disinformation" progressive pushed for? (You can invert this example for a right wing if you want)
  - nickthegreek 3y ago
    Not everyone has a credit card. Some people cannot obtain a credit card. People under the age of 18 can also have a credit card. I do not trust random sites with my credit card.
    - thsksbd 3y ago
      So these are objections in practice, not principle. Important but consider: - Most states give free IDs - Your safety concern is addressed by other commenters here (see the verifying age anonymously)
      - averageRoyalty 3y ago
        You understand the intenet isn't made up of US states, right?
      - Tadpole9181 3y ago
        How about this: I don't want every little thing I do on the internet tracked and tied to my real identity? Is the CCP conducting a psyops on HN right now or something? Since when were we all for every tiny interaction you have on the internet requiring you to look in the scanner and say "My name is X and I love my government and McDonalds"?
        CaptainFever 3y ago
        HN seems to have become a lot more mainstream, in comparison to the old cyberlibertarian "privacy and piracy" days.
        Tadpole9181 3y ago
        Where's the new hangout?
      - djfdat 3y ago
        Gut check was that the "Most states give free IDs" statement wouldn't hold up. So I checked real quick. "At least eight states issue free or discounted IDs to low-income or homeless residents and at least 10 states waive ID fees for seniors." That's far from most states, and even then it comes with stipulations.
      - nickthegreek 3y ago
        You changed the argument from credit card to government Id (an even worse idea imo). You seem to want the law to be that I need to show ID to enter most internet establishments. I will never, ever, ever hold that opinion.
  - frumper 3y ago
    Growing up I remember the trope about showing papers to do anything in the USSR. It was in direct contrast to the display of freedom in America.
  - jMyles 3y ago
    > If there is a constitutional right to absolutely 100% friction free access to information then what happens to all the barriers the government has erected to access covid, Trump, Russia and other "disinformation" progressive pushed for? ...those barriers go away. They never really existed in the first place in any real way. Like the Great Firewall, they were a polite fiction defining what people are allowed to know, but were trivially circumvented from minute zero. This is one of the most reliable and desirable features of the internet in the first place.

Goronmon 3y ago

ip26 3y ago
Third party, perhaps. You sign up for service A. Service A queries service B, which knows who you are and provides a one-time ack of your age.
- tnbp 3y ago
  That sounds nightmarish. I don't want the verifier to know what porn sites I visit. Someone else proposed the following system to me: a third party authority issues a certificate which I can then use to prove I'm 18. The CA cannot see where I use the certificate, though.
  - Tadpole9181 3y ago
    Er... The CA needs to be used to verify the certificate by the third party, ergo it will know the websites. It's virtually impossible to make a verification system that's anonymous. Somewhere the third party and authenticator will need to share a secret that you cannot touch. Furthermore, you would need the government to agree to this system and mandate this system universally and pay for the authentication services to exist. That's not what Florida is doing.
    - tnbp 3y ago
      I can show my government-issued ID to any third party without the government knowing about whom I've shown this ID to. The third party needs to trust the government and the authenticity of the ID. The problem is that my ID contains too much information; I would prefer a document (i.e. digital certificate) that only certifies my age, not my name, address etc.

zo1 3y ago

While people are on the fence about it, our children are having their youth, innocence and brains destroyed by tiktok et al. Those platforms are cancer to adults even, let alone impressionable kids... yet here we are still debating it and faffing around about "1st amendment yaddi yadda".

Clubber 3y ago
>children are having their youth, innocence and brains destroyed by tiktok For one, ease up on the hyperbole if you want to be taken seriously. I'll give you the benefit of the doubt because the news is nothing but hyperbole these days, so it's easy to pick up the habit. Second, most kids aren't having "their youth, innocence and brains destroyed." The news takes the edge cases, amplifies them and presents it as the norm to peddle fear because fear sells. Nothing ever is bad as the news makes it out to be, but they gotta make a dollar, you see how bad the news business is since the internet? FWIW, my kid uses social media and just connects with her friends. Nothing overly malicious goes on, they just goof off. I've checked. You really wanna protect the kids from anxiety and whatnot, block the news and all the talking heads trying to manipulate the next generation to their political opinions.
- zo1 3y ago
  I exaggerate for a reason, because I feel strongly about it and think that it does do those things in a literal sense. Besides, I've consumed tiktok and seen the content. It is nowhere near appropriate for children, it's night and day.
- light_hue_1 3y ago
  Don't minimize what's going on. There's a massive rise in depression in young children. The teen suicide rate has almost doubled. The idea that you know what's going on, on their social media is pretty funny. Certainly what every adult always assumed about me. And now that I have kids, I can see how easily other kids fool their parents all the time. And what's overly malicious? It may be social media itself without anything bad driving this. Merely seeing a sanitized version of people's lives over and over again, without anyone bullying you, that leads to depression because your life isn't as good. No. Don't block the news. Because then you miss important things like this. https://www.hhs.gov/surgeongeneral/priorities/youth-mental-health/social-media/index.html https://www.hhs.gov/surgeongeneral/priorities/youth-mental-h...

insane_dreamer 3y ago

> government doing a parent's job the govt already set the bar at 13, so what's different about setting it at 16?

mbitsnbites 3y ago

> government doing a parent's job The problem here is that it's pretty much out of the hands of the parents. If your kids' friends have social media, your kids will absolutely need it too in order to not be left out. I've witnessed the pressure, and it's not pretty. Add to that the expectation from society that children shall have access to social media. Regulation is pretty much the only way to send the right signals to parents, schools, media companies (e.g. Swedish public service TV has a kids app that until recently was called "Bolibompa Baby", but it's now renamed to "Bolibompa Mini"), app designers, and so on.

safog 3y ago

We're barreling towards an internet that requires an id before you can use it. It's a bit upsetting but I don't harbor the early 2000s naiveté about the free internet where regulation doesn't exist, the data exchange happens over open formats and connecting people from across the world is viewed as an absolute positive. Govt meddling on social media platforms, the filter bubble, platforms locking data in, teenage depression stats post Instagram, doom scrolling on tiktok have flipped me the other way. Internet Anonymity is going to die - let's see if that makes this place any better.

Tadpole9181 3y ago
> Govt meddling on social media platforms And the government having unfettered knowledge of every site you visit - in particular the more salacious ones - is how we solve that? Surely that won't be used as a political cudgel to secure power at any point, nor will it ever be used to target specific demographics or accidentally get leaked.

soared 3y ago

https://developers.google.com/privacy-sandbox/protections/private-state-tokens https://developers.google.com/privacy-sandbox/protections/pr... Private State Tokens enable trust in a user's authenticity to be conveyed from one context to another, to help sites combat fraud and distinguish bots from real humans—without passive tracking. An issuer website can issue tokens to the web browser of a user who shows that they're trustworthy, for example through continued account usage, by completing a transaction, or by getting an acceptable reCAPTCHA score. A redeemer website can confirm that a user is not fake by checking if they have tokens from an issuer the redeemer trusts, and then redeeming tokens as necessary. Private State Tokens are encrypted, so it isn't possible to identify an individual or connect trusted and untrusted instances to discover user identity.

Tadpole9181 3y ago
This system clearly and trivially deanonymizes the internet. Even worse than a centralized system, it uses a simple "just trust me bro" mentality that issuers would never injure users for personal gain and would never keep logs or have data leaks, which would expose the Internet traffic of a real person.

KaiserPro 3y ago

> I'm still on the fence about government doing a parent's job here The issue is, as a parent who is not very technical, how do they _safely_ audit their child's social media use? I am reasonably confident that I could control my kid's social media habit, but only up to a point. there isn't anything really stopping them getting their own cheap phone/signing in on another person's machine. The problem is, to safely stop kids getting access requires either strong authentication methods to the ISP. ie, to get an IP you need 2fa to sign in. But thats also how censorship/de-anonymisation happens.