16 ms·

Age Verification Laws: A Backdoor to Surveillance

660 points by hn_acker 2y ago

9283409232 2y ago
The people behind these "save the children" age verification bills are funded by verification companies looking for contracts. Russell Vought, Mr.Project 2025 himself, is also a massive proponent of using porn as an excuse for more surveillance.
dinkblam 2y ago
age verification should be backed into the browser and not into websites. parents should be able to access a (password protected) setting in any browser that can exclude some types of websites (like porn). governments should be free to go after any website not respecting that setting. but forcing the age-verification onto websites is just moronic.
- JumpCrisscross 2y ago
  > age verification should be backed into the browser You want a mandated block of government code in every browser?
  - dinkblam 2y ago
    why government code? having a checkbox that corresponds to info passed with the HTTP requests is hardly something that requires a library or more than a few lines of code
    - JumpCrisscross 2y ago
      > why government code? Legal age verification in the browser means legislated code. Not line by line, necessarily, but state code in the browser.
  - michaelmior 2y ago
    Such a law doesn't necessarily have to require that every browser include the content filtering code. Only that websites must correctly report the content they serve. Of course then the obvious workaround for someone wanting to access restricted content is just to install a browser that does not enforce the restrictions. But that's a problem even if browsers were "forced" to implement this anyway. There would always be a browser out there that didn't adhere to this rule anyway.
    - JumpCrisscross 2y ago
      > Of course then the obvious workaround for someone wanting to access restricted content is just to install a browser that does not enforce the restrictions You really see a world where such a law is passed and such browsers aren’t outlawed?
      - michaelmior 2y ago
        Yes and no. There are (at least) two ways to effectively outlaw such browsers. One is penalties for the browser distributor. However, this really only applies to entities that are subject to US law. Of course the law could go one step further and try to go after ISPs for allowing access to download them, but that's already proved difficult in other arenas. The other way to limit access to such browsers is penalties for users of those browsers. But that feels even less likely. Even if such a law were on the books, how would it be enforced? Either someone would have to report someone using an "illegal" browser or perhaps some method of fingerprinting that is somehow tied back to the actual user. Both of these seem far-fetched to me. So perhaps such browsers would be outlawed, but I'm not sure it would practically do much.
    - Braxton1980 2y ago
      > Of course then the obvious workaround for someone wanting to access restricted content is just to install a browser that does not enforce the restrictions. But that's a problem even if browsers were "forced" to implement this anyway. There would always be a browser out there that didn't adhere to this rule anyway So why are you for it if the solution isn't valid?
- bobthepanda 2y ago
  it would be less terrible if there were some simple, Apple ID-like way to simply get redirected to a govt website, put in your driver's license, and the website only gets a token back that says "yes over age/no underage". The data already exists, it's what bars use to scan IDs with handheld readers IIRC.
  - dinkblam 2y ago
    i wasn't really talking about about any "verification". just a way for parents to disable what they want their kid to be able to browse. if parents don't care to change the setting, their kids would be free to browse anything.
  - baby_souffle 2y ago
    > The data already exists, it's what bars use to scan IDs with handheld readers IIRC. Sorta, yeah. But the reason that works is because there's a human guarding the door that can assert that the hand presenting the ID is attached to a face that looks just like the one on the ID. Otherwise a very smart 17 year old would just get their hands on the UUID or whatever for literally any ID that belongs to somebody that's 18+. Within _hours_ of this type of system going into effect, you'd have the age/id version of bugmenot.com
    - burnished 2y ago
      You're implying smart 17 year olds don't make it into bars. You rarely need anything approaching %100 compliance in order to have an effective policy, so if anything you're advocating for its effectiveness when you suggest the only people that would be in violation are the rare precocious kid.
      - AnthonyMouse 2y ago
        But that's the difference. For a 17 year old to get into a bar, they need to, themselves, acquire a fake ID. Anyone selling that physical object in your jurisdiction would then be subject to arrest. On the internet, one smart 17 year old sets up im-old.lol and then every kid everywhere has a one-click age verification bypass and the service is run by an anon on a server outside the jurisdiction.
- cls59 2y ago
  And then kinds just learn how to download and run an open-source browser produced outside of the country that does not implement the setting on the client side.
  - mrweasel 2y ago
    I was going to say that it's a great way to teach teenagers how to modify and compile a browser. Moving the verification to sites also isn't going you any good, as the site owners could just move to more liberal countries.
  - TylerE 2y ago
    Or just uses any of a gazillion proxies that strips the "I"m under 18" bit.
  - johnnyjeans 2y ago
    I consider that a feature. Working and training problem solving skills and persistence through trial-and-error to the degree required for that kind of thing is great. I feel it's underappreciated in potential that treating a wide swath of these kinds of rules as nothing more than cattle-fences can have a shockingly positive effect. One of the biggest problems that grows with each generation, is how do you get the youth to actually engage in constructive development of real skills? How do you get them to be interested in something that will be useful for society down the line? Quietly looking the other way while a statistical minority breaks some of the safety-rails of society basically solves that problem. Breaking the rules is cool. You're basically exploiting the rebellious nature of the youth to trick them into learning useful skillsets. So long as the hurdles to circumvent the rules remain reasonably involved to overcome, and the secret intention remains unspoken, you basically double up the rewards of the rules.
    - Der_Einzige 2y ago
      So the desire to jerk off is the ideal catalyst for being subversive? I mean it’s not that I disagree with you, but this is what you are saying!!!
  - 2y ago
- baby_souffle 2y ago
  > but forcing the age-verification onto websites is just moronic. Agree. > parents should be able to access a (password protected) setting in any browser that can exclude some types of websites (like porn). How would this work? Who's going to set up the taxonomy / classification tree for every domain/site on the internet just so a guardian can say "yes to drugs, no to porn, no to news, no to weapons..."? Or if that's not the implementation, how would an arbitrary site signal to the browser what the age limit is? Once you move beyond a binary "require parent consent for $domain" flag, you're quickly approaching traditional parental control software. I know I'm not the only one one this site that made a bit of spare $ back in the day helping kids at school go _around_ overbearing parental controls.
  - generalizations 2y ago
    This is the core fallacy I see in proponents of such rules: they think the rules can be enforced.
    - convolvatron 2y ago
      I think the parent had an even more important fallacy - that the rules can't even be _stated_. there is an implicit presumption that everyone everywhere agrees on what material is appropriate for what people and at what age.
      - evil-olive 2y ago
        yes, and that presumption is even older than the internet. this is from a 1964 Supreme Court decision [0]: > I shall not today attempt further to define the kinds of material I understand to be embraced within that shorthand description ["hard-core pornography"], and perhaps I could never succeed in intelligibly doing so. But I know it when I see it, and the motion picture involved in this case is not that. 0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_know_it_when_I_see_it https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_know_it_when_I_see_it
  - simion314 2y ago
    >How would this work? Pornhub knows they do not want to have trouble so they will respect the browser setting and not serve minors. There could be an institution that can receive complains about websites not using this API and those wbsites can be blocked from the country and fined if possible until they implement the API. We need all mobile and desktop OSes to make it easy for parents to setup accounts for their children, the church could also educated the people instead of just complaining. It is not perfect, soem clever kid can find a way to reset the BIOS/UEFI and install Ubuntu with a fake age on his PC , but most parents can feel safe and we would not have to show our ID card to Pornhub or even Steam because some game shows nipples and nipples are more dangerous in USA then nazi propaganda.
- Terr_ 2y ago
  I wouldn't say every browser, but the correct place for the policy is on the device of the parent who is demanding the special feature. Sites' obligations should be limited to basic disclosure of "this site might contain X" metadata. Benefits: 1. Orwellian abuse: No creepy-ass super-abuseable government panopticon knowing every goddamn service you've ever made an account on, with the ability to arbitrarily revoke them and/or block new ones. 2. Costs: The majority of the costs of creating and maintaining the system fall upon the people who actually use it and want it to exist, rather than a bunch of other adults across the globe. 3. Parent focus: Most enforcement exists in a physical realm where parents/guardians at least have a chance of understanding, monitoring, and managing it. "Little Timmy is using Daddy's phone" can be determined instantly at a glance. 4. Exceptions: If the child has some health-class homework and can't access the right Wikipedia pages anymore, the parent can easily grant exceptions and revoke them. 5. If someone's religion says that unclad ankles are smut, then their church can create their own site-rating-site and adherents configure their family's devices to it.
  - Braxton1980 2y ago
    What if a site doesn't comply or lies? Who is enforcing this
- barnabee 2y ago
  Age verification should be baked into the parenting. It's about the only place it might have the intended effect anyway, and has the advantage of not enabling mass surveillance.
- Braxton1980 2y ago
  Why
- butlike 2y ago
  Kids have nothing but time and energy to learn about their world, so you get weird things like the children rootkitting your device or "the home computer" on their quest to see salacious corners of the web. As always, parenting starts and stops with the parent. The internet should be open and if the child sees something that upsets them (or makes them question one of their assumptions), it's the parent's responsibility to cultivate an environment where the child feels comfortable talking about it with them.
  - Der_Einzige 2y ago
    I learned that the password my parents used on the computer was “Neo Maxi Zoom Dwebie” by password cracking my windows XP with rainbow tables at like age 11. I hate the breakfast club and think it’s one of the examples of movies which idolized anti-intellectualism and basically celebrates bullying nerdy types. Sadly ironic of a password choices from my “nerdy” family. If the rainbow tables didn’t work, I’d have rootkitted/RATed the computer.
- genewitch 2y ago
  And who decides what browsers are okay? Is it Apple and Google?
bobthepanda 2y ago
While I don't support age verification (I don't think that would solve anything) two of the targeted product categories, skincare and diet foods/supplements, are some of the heaviest spending ad categories I see nowadays, and feel very huckster-y as well.
- 9283409232 2y ago
  The answer isn't age verification but putting them under the scrutiny of the FDA. Supplements have almost no regulation and will soon actually have none since the head of the FDA is a big fan of supplements and has a supplement company. Supplements being regulated would fix so many issues in this space.
saurik 2y ago
This should be held up as a visceral demonstration of how the "slippery slope" isn't inherently a fallacy, as many oft like to claim: it is merely a form of argument that is easy enough to get wrong--leading to a fallacy when the cause is disconnected--that people have become overly-wary of it, reacting to the premise of the conclusion without even bothering to analyze how steep the slope might be before tuning the idea out :(.
- CamperBob2 2y ago
  Exactly. It's a fallacy when dealing with logical entities, but humans aren't logical entities.
  - ls612 2y ago
    It’s only a fallacy when dealing with logical relations under certainty. Once uncertainty and probability is introduced the slippery slope just is relating Bayes’ Rule in plain English.
    - deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
    - CamperBob2 2y ago
      Whatever. Point being, calling it a "fallacy" isn't useful or predictive when dealing with people who follow impulses rather than principles.
    - dragonwriter 2y ago
      > It’s only a fallacy when dealing with logical relations under certainty. Incorrect. Slippery slope is an informal fallacy, which applies to arguments based on evidence not logical relations under certainty. But it is a component of the slippery slope fallacy that the implicit premise (that the precondition that is the subject of the argument is likely to lead to the result that is the endpoint of the slippery slope) is inadequately justified, not merely that a slope from the precondition to the endpoint is presented.
  - 2y ago
valicord 2y ago
Haven't checked the others, but at least for the skin cream bill, the text explicitly lists "a date of birth entry or checkbox verifying age system" as sufficient, so the outrage about privacy seems overblown. Of course this raises questions as to what is the point of requiring verification that doesn't actually verify anything, but that's an entirely separate problem.
- valicord 2y ago
  Likewise the dietary pills bill only requires the ID to be verified either at a retail point of sale or when the online purchase is delivered, so there doesn't seem to be any invasive data collection required. To be clear: I'm strongly against any laws that require uploading government ID to sketchy websites, but at least 2 out of the 3 examples listed are not this.
- Teever 2y ago
  What's the point of anytl of this though? Like what public interest is served by having a date of birth entry or a checkbox for 'verifying' age? To me it serves no public interest as it's functionally useless and it will only serve as a thin end of a wedge to normalize more egregious requirements.
  - valicord 2y ago
    Oh, I agree, it seems completely useless as written. I'm just saying that it's no more of a privacy violation than Steam asking for your birth date (which somehow happens to be January 1st, 1900 for a shocking percentage of the population) to watch a video game trailer. I assume the point is virtue signaling.
- evil-olive 2y ago
  > Haven't checked the others, but at least for the skin cream bill if you did check the other two, you'd notice that they're much more restrictive. from the NY bill, apologies for the all-caps but it's in the original [0]: > "IDENTITY VERIFICATION" SHALL MEAN THE USE OF AN ON-DEMAND SELF-PHOTOGRAPH TO VERIFY THE OWNERSHIP OF A PERSON'S GOVERNMENT-ISSUED IDENTIFICATION; > "LICENSE VERIFICATION" SHALL MEAN THE USE OF TECHNOLOGY TO VERIFY A PERSON'S GOVERNMENT-ISSUED IDENTIFICATION; and the one in WA [1]: > For the purposes of this section, proof of legal age includes any of the following officially issued identification that shows the purchaser's age and bears the purchaser's signature and photograph: 0: https://www.nysenate.gov/legislation/bills/2025/A3323 https://www.nysenate.gov/legislation/bills/2025/A3323 1 (PDF): https://lawfilesext.leg.wa.gov/biennium/2025-26/Pdf/Bills/Senate%20Bills/5622.pdf?q=20250307113703 https://lawfilesext.leg.wa.gov/biennium/2025-26/Pdf/Bills/Se...
plasma_beam 2y ago
Am I missing something here? Entirely possible and likely. When I go to pornhub I have to click a button that days I’m 18. Some other sites I’ve seen actually make me enter a birthdate. Slightly more annoying but I always make one up. Is this what people are upset about? I get actual age verification with an account required or checking my ID is more invasive..but I guess I’ve not experienced this as an actual problem yet.
- mandevil 2y ago
  This is about a Texas Law that went before the Supreme Court recently. Texas' law, H.B. 1181, requires people visiting porn websites to prove their age by either uploading government-issued identification or a "commercially reasonable method" such as bank information. More than a dozen other states have passed similar bills, though they are all on hold pending what the Supreme Court decides.
  - 2OEH8eoCRo0 2y ago
    There's just too much money to be made selling porn to children.
    - 9283409232 2y ago
      No, there isn't. Almost all porn that is accessible to children is on freely available social media like instagram and twitter. Not on Pornhub.
      - twiclo 2y ago
        Are you saying kids don't go to pornhub?
        9283409232 2y ago
        No I'm not.
      - dragonwriter 2y ago
AtNightWeCode 2y ago
Preteen girls using peeling skin cream is a thing where I live. It causes skin damage. Tiktok bs.
- weaksauce 2y ago
  ok but the solution should be "parent better" vs. "legislate our privacy away"
- quickthrowman 2y ago
  How is a preteen girl ordering products from a website?
fortran77 2y ago
Parents can choose to restrict their kids internet access. That's the best way of handling this.
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 2y ago
  The Internet is so ubiquitous and intertwined in daily life that that's impossible and you know it.
  - michaelmior 2y ago
    I don't think the parent comment was suggesting disallowing access to the Internet entirely, but restricting the content that is accessible. Accessing pornographic material is obviously not a necessity for kids. That said, kids of course do often find a way around any blocks or filters put in place.
    - Lanolderen 2y ago
      Never underestimate being horny, curious and having copious amounts of free time. Having to go through hoops does make it clear you shouldn't be looking at it though.
  - natebc 2y ago
    And "porn" (or anything you might want your children not to see?) is also ubiquitous and so intertwined with the internet that it's impossible to block ... and you also know it. Responsibility really is the only fix here. I know we love technical solutions to problems but either porn is illegal for everyone or it isn't.
    - immibis 2y ago
      "Parental responsibility" is to parenting what "pilot error" was to plane crashes: a thought-terminating cliche that refuses to dig any deeper. When they stopped blaming crashes on "pilot error" they were able to properly investigate the causes of crashes and prevent more crashes. "Pilot error" is a suitable explanation if you are a mechanic investigating the crash. You determined that the plane moved the wrong way because the ailerons moved the wrong way because the pilot told them to move that way. It's not a suitable explanation for a final report because you need to find out why the pilot told them to move that way. Codeless Code 224
ajross 2y ago
[flagged]
- z0r 2y ago
  https://www.eff.org/press/releases/eff-sues-opm-doge-and-musk-endangering-privacy-millions https://www.eff.org/press/releases/eff-sues-opm-doge-and-mus... ?
  - ajross 2y ago
    EFF's legal side is... not as insane, I guess. And there are some sound minds surely there still. But I repeat: the data privacy dystopia is upon us, and what is EFF pushing for clicks and eyeballs? "Big Tech Bad". "Big Tech Bad" is precisely the kind of poorly-grounded outrage farm used to bring DOGE to power in the first place. Voters trying to bring their perceived enemies to heel are the actual threat! And EFF is part of the problem and not the solution. In the coming years we will remember fondly when our personal data lived in secure and well-managed centers run by Meta and Google and Amazon and not on some DOGE staffers' Macbook. Write it down.
    - throwaway83267 2y ago
      > In the coming years we will remember fondly when our personal data lived in secure and well-managed centers run by Meta and Google and Amazon and not on some DOGE staffers' Macbook. Seems odd to assume that the US government didn't have access to that data prior to the current administration.
      - ajross 2y ago
        "The US Government" is not some 20-something unvetted staffer hired on a whim because Elon liked something he said on a Twitch stream. Again, write it down. DOGE is a huge security hole and these people are not motivated by a genuine interest in the public good. This will go badly.
waltercool 2y ago
[dead]
rickandmortyy 2y ago
lmao it's hilarious when free folk talk about surveillance like cars on road aren't collecting data
- Braxton1980 2y ago
  [flagged]
deleted 2y ago
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mjevans 2y ago
The Internet should be Unrated and thus Adults Only by default. Just like public spaces. (Would you allow an 8 year old to wander New York City unattended? Arguments can be made for more controlled spaces but...) Have a website and want the chance for kids to see it? Advertise in the headers that it's moderated and intended to be a given rating. Various indexers can pick that up. Complaints can be forward to relevant government agencies (E.G. for a US based website the FTC, false advertising), or as usual other agencies for harder crimes. Parents can mark computer accounts as Child accounts and Browsers configured to follow a set of list filtering rules selected by the parent or current guardian (E.G. schools). So again. Internet == Unrated Free Zone -- Child Mode == Allow List filtered content.
- paulvnickerson 2y ago
  we arrest people who have sex in public...
  - mjevans 2y ago
    Only the ones who make a display of it (get seen by others). We don't randomly go around asking Papers Please! to everyone on the street.
    - ndriscoll 2y ago
      We do require ID to enter e.g. porn stores and bars though, or to make age restricted purchases. I also recall walking a few miles to e.g. the mall, target, walmart, etc. without any adults when I was around 10. I'm not sure I'd characterize public spaces as adult oriented by default.
      - choo-t 2y ago
        > We do require ID to enter e.g. porn stores and bars though Only if you look too young (and for the bars it's only for certain beverages), so the affected population is only a small parts of the customers.
    - 2y ago
washadjeffmad 2y ago
Who could have predicted this, though? If only there were some, no, any benevolent corporate deity poised to provide trusted global identity services for an event exactly like this. If only this hadn't come out of the blue, maybe there'd be someone out there, right now, who could make it so that your identity traveled with you everywhere across the internet, an authentic digital fingerprint and passport so invisible that you can't even see or access it to keep people from having to prove themselves over and over and over again. What a solution in search of a problem that would have been!
- 3np 2y ago
  How have you not heard about Worldcoin? /s/s
- genewitch 2y ago
  Google should be able to say that I've had continuous access to my Gmail account since 2005 and therefore it's impossible for me to be under 18. Or 21. Right? All of a sudden, the internet is incapable of tracking me with that much fidelity. They don't know how old I am. Discord knows how old I am. I never told them my birthday. This gets a big "hrrrrrrr. Durrrrrrr." From me.
  - washadjeffmad 2y ago
    Like "appearing under the age of 35" for carding for alcohol (note also that there's no legal requirement to verify age prior to sale), that's not an invalid method of age validation; there is no requirement for precision, only accuracy. Having an account that's at least 5 years old, assuming a legal age of 13 for registration on most services, should be enough. Some services already do it this way. Others offer to scan and analyze your face or ID. Leisure Suit Larry 1 used 1960s trivia for age verification. Given the list of states and awareness of some notable tech companies that operate out of them, it sounds like someone is doing a little competitive market making with the help of their legislators.
paulvnickerson 2y ago
The solution to this is trusted third party age verification services, such as SSL signing authorities, which are baked into browsers.
- drdaeman 2y ago
  I don't think so. This is not a technical problem - modern computers simply have no means to know who's sitting in front of them. And even if someone tries to invent some contraption to do so (idk, IR cameras, voice verification, DNA sequencers), I must remind that whoever has physical access can still feed computer any signals. For simpler methods (like a basic face recognition with a webcam to match the ID) spoofing is cheaper than the camera, and more sophisticated methods are extremely costly and full of undesirable side effects.
janci 2y ago
Our state-issued eID cards are supposed to have a function that allows anonymous age verification to a trusted party. It should work like this: a requesting party sends a request signed by state-issued certificate to the ID card, the card verifies the request authenticity and responds with a signed confirmation of legal age and that signature then can be verified by the requester. No personal information is shared. While I do not aggree with pervasive age restrictions, this is a nice technical solution to privacy preserving age verification
- drdaeman 2y ago
  Just curious: 1) which country/eID is this? and 2) does it send the date of birth back, or does it perform a zero-knowledge proof that the date of birth is greater or equal than a given value (current date minus age requirement)?
  - jer0me 2y ago
    A handful of states, including California, have a digital ID that can do this. It only sends the fact that you’re over a certain age. There’s a video halfway down this page showing the process in Apple Wallet: https://learn.wallet.apple/id/ https://learn.wallet.apple/id/ (notice “Age Over 21”)
- rs186 2y ago
  So kids just memorize their parents' driving license when they don't pay attention, and this is bypassed, just like in the old days.
  - Jolter 2y ago
    I don’t think that’s how a state e-ID works.
  - djsjajah 2y ago
    No. Kids would need to memorize the private key of their parents id card.
giantg2 2y ago
"no method of age verification is both privacy-protective and entirely accurate." No method of age verification is entirely actuate. It seem a hardline stance that we can't think up a process that would allow for a reasonable level of accuracy with privacy. It could literally be drawing a usb token from a bucket full of them after a human at the DMV visually checks your license.
- masfuerte 2y ago
  There was a serious proposal to do something like this in the UK [1] the last time the government tried to introduce age checks for online porn. Age checks are becoming mandatory this July but the idea of having a privacy-respecting option seems to have been dropped. [1]: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/porn-passes-newsagents-shops-online-pornography-website-id-uk-government-a8349281.html?source=techstories.org https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/porn-passes-...
- genewitch 2y ago
  That's cool. Do you think they'll mind if I surreptitiously put a couple of thumb drives of my own into the bucket?
diebeforei485 2y ago
I have my California Drivers License in my Apple Wallet. I should be able to prove to iPhone apps that I am 18+ (only a binary yes/no with no metadata) by the apps making a local API call to iOS, which checks this information with the unexpired drivers license on device.
- inetknght 2y ago
  What if you're born on February 29th? What if you're borth on March 1st and it's currently February 29, 18 years later?
  - SketchySeaBeast 2y ago
    I don't know that I care for the solution, but why would the API have a problem with either of those scenarios? What datetime library are you using that does, and why haven't you switched?
  - slyall 2y ago
    Age Laws worry about dates. They don't care about leap years, time of birth or timezones.
- 3np 2y ago
  That is trusting both Apple and the client, and also only works for iPhone. We can do better with zero-knowledge-proof-based schemes, which also allow securely decoupling issuance/certification from online verification. E.g. https://linc.cnil.fr/en/demonstration-privacy-preserving-age-verification-process https://linc.cnil.fr/en/demonstration-privacy-preserving-age...
  - whatshisface 2y ago
    It's a privacy issue as long as Jim's Blackmail and Certificates, Inc. knows who they've certified.
  - diebeforei485 2y ago
    I don't see why Google/Android can't implement the same solution.
robto 2y ago
I wonder if there's any chance of technology like Verifiable Credentials[0] getting any adoption because of these laws. I think there are legitimate use cases where you would want to say, "hey, some third-party authority can vouch for me that ____", and not reveal to the third party who's asking for verification and not reveal to the party requiring verification any other claim besides the specific one that they need (say, age in this case). [0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Verifiable_credentials https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Verifiable_credentials
- nesk_ 2y ago
  What's insane is that, in France, we have France Connect, which is exactly what you describe: a third-party authentication platform maintained by the government. Lately, a new law just passed to force porn websites to check the age of visitors. I would have been fine with an authentication going through France Connect: - the gov knows which website you went to, just like your DNS provider would, but it doesn't which content - and the website knows which content you've watched but not who's watching. Best of both worlds! But no, we have to send a copy of our ID card to the website, which is INSANE because the website knows WHO you are and WHAT you're watching.
  - notTooFarGone 2y ago
    It's mind boggling that governments don't offer that service for a lump sum per month
  - archon810 2y ago
    We need this in the US. Otherwise, once laws like this https://apnews.com/article/utah-app-store-age-verification-7e31de07ddca7b32cc82f7ead2c4adc9 https://apnews.com/article/utah-app-store-age-verification-7... go into effect, 3rd party app stores, like apkmirror.com, etc. are going to need to pull out of the US unless there's a service like that in the country. It's starting with Utah, but many states and even the feds are planning similar laws.
    - threecheese 2y ago
mannyv 2y ago
When the Internet was built there was an expectation of anonymity. But anonymity and privacy are not quite the same. And in fact, the Internet is not anonymous or private, as there are multiple ways to track and surveil members of the general public. IMO the next step in the Internet's evolution needs to be the authenticated internet. An Authenticated Internet pretty much removes all the security issues, since every connection is authenticated. And authentication doesn't necessarily mean you're not anonymous. Right now the Internet has become the worst of both worlds - not private, not anonymous, and all the problems associated with that (insecure, spoonable, etc). That's what the EFF has wrong: the Internet is already a backdoor to surveillance. They're trying to stick their finger in the dyke. But what needs to happen is to rebuild the whole thing.
- isaacremuant 2y ago
  No. You want it because you want "total security" to feel safe but your authoritarian world doesn't make me and others feel safe. Thankfully, the government wants the power so they'll use it against dissidents when it matters hence you'll get a semblance of your way. You can't block technology though. Government or not. People find a way.
isaacremuant 2y ago
[flagged]
- outer_web 2y ago
  Nonspecific covid policies getting support from "the mainstream" is proof that HN will support authoritarianism? Huh.
  - isaacremuant 2y ago
    Yes. That was the most clear cut case of authoritarianism I've ever seen in the post Berlin wall era. It's not hard to grasp if you read a constitution and see how right to assemble, right to work, right to bodily autonomy, right to speak, all got attacked in different degrees in different countries across the world with apparent widespread support. Of course, censorship of any alternative played a part and non compliance by people who pretended to comply happened all the time but by and large the authoritarian tune was sung. Now, you can call me one of the typical labels that were in vogue back then but, it doesn't really change facts.
    - outer_web 2y ago
      Uh what? Brief shelter in place orders followed by limitations on* occupancy of commercial spaces is proof that HN will embrace deanonymizing the internet? You are also gonna have to help me out what I am supposed to call you.
      - isaacremuant 2y ago
        [flagged]
    - LorenPechtel 2y ago
      If we had done as well as the places that were careful there would be about 1 million more Americans now than there actually are. But most of them were costs to society, not producers, and thus killing them was a win for the Republicans. (Although I don't think we had a chance of doing as well because it got here earlier.)
JanisErdmanis 2y ago
It does sounds like that the author is not aware of existence of zero knowledge range proofs for identity based authetification (anonymous credentials). In essence they work as follows: a third party vouches a commitment for your birth year into a commitment with a signature. This then can be used for to be shown to a service provider along with a range proof to ensure that the age limit gets respected. That way service provider does not learn your year while can ensure that all members respect some required age limit.
- Aloisius 2y ago
  > a third party vouches If the only porn requires this, then the third party has a record of every single person who wants to view porn.
  - JanisErdmanis 2y ago
    The third party vouches commitments with their year of birth for all individuals. The secret opening can be distributed to citizens with their identity card. Also multiple properties can be signed at the same time like location coordinates that can be used for other purposes and hence not making vouching exclusive to age verification.
- rs186 2y ago
  How does that third party know my birth year? And the precision of one year is way too low.
  - tzs 2y ago
    I don't know about the specific systems he is thinking of but I think the general approach is to use a third party that already knows that.
- hellojesus 2y ago
  What prevents 1. Me from sharing my credentials with everyone by publicly publishing them. 2. The third party from connecting with any service providers requiring verification to share info?
TZubiri 2y ago
This is one of those issues that is almost purely political. Either you believe the state is out to get you, or you believe that kids shouldn't access porn. Free software maxis will tell you that age laws are surveillance and that child pornography is an excuse to have subpoena mechanisms.
- qingcharles 2y ago
  But this law doesn't stop kids from accessing porn. It just moves the problem?
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
autoexec 2y ago
> California’s AB-728 mandates age verification for anyone purchasing skin care products or cosmetics that contain certain chemicals like Vitamin A or alpha hydroxy acids. On the surface, this may seem harmless—who doesn't want to ensure that minors are safe from harmful chemicals? Why would we want to keep minors safe from "harmful chemicals" but not adults? If skin cream products with Vitamin A or alpha hydroxy acids are harmful, and I'm entirely unconvinced they are (at reasonable concentrations), lets just get rid of them.
- JumpCrisscross 2y ago
  > Why would we want to keep minors safe from "harmful chemicals" but not adults? My understanding is they’re harmful if misused.
  - amrocha 2y ago
    That can be said about pretty much anything though. Don’t drink shampoo!
    - genewitch 2y ago
      Why does it have fruit on the bottle then?
      - amrocha 2y ago
        Deceptive advertising! haha
  - Aeolun 2y ago
    Pencils are harmful if misused. They make for effective stabbing. Is this about the chance about being inadvertedly misused to the point they’re harmful. I dunno, by all means, don’t sell them to kids, but should we really forbid a 15 year old unless they can show some form of ID? They’re not any more likely to do something dumb with it than an 18 year old.
tzs 2y ago
For the issue of underage people purchasing products they should not be able to I wonder if this could be handled by requiring sellers to only accept payment by credit card, and to only complete the sale if the shipping address matches the credit card account address? A child could borrow an adult's card, but then the items would be shipped to that adult's address which could make it hard for the child to get them without that adult noticing, and the purchase should show up on the next credit card statement further increasing the chances the adult will notice if the child is surreptitiously using the adult's credit card. Maybe even require the listing on the credit card statement to have a prominent annotation stating that there were purchases of age restricted products that month. This wouldn't stop all such purchases, but it should make it harder and it should make it easier for parents to find out that it is happening.
- beeflet 2y ago
  I feel like minors should be allowed to buy some stuff online as long as there is age verification for alcohol or whatever. They can go to a store and buy stuff in-person, so why not
- precommunicator 2y ago
  In my country people above 13, but under 18 are allowed to have debit cards (Mastercard/Visa) and bank accounts themselves (with parent's permission and automatic power of attorney to this account) I've had an account, card and state-issued ID since I was 13, all look the same as for any adult, the only difference being the date of birth on that ID. My parents just agreed, and didn't ever check or accessed the account (nor they probably even knew how).
hayst4ck 2y ago
Almost no discussion matters as long as Google Analytics/fonts is embedded in almost every website you visit. EFF is looking at individual grains of sand on a beach of surveillance. Pornhub publishes insights on their blog where they include an age/gender/country breakdown of their viewers. That data must come from somewhere, likely google analytics or something like it, which means that there is a thriving surveillance market whether there is age verification or not. The surveillance is already happening, there isn't any need to backdoor it because it's already there. People think google is a search company, but it's not. People think Facebook is a social media company, but it's not. They are privatized intelligence companies, intelligence as in the I in CIA. And rather than that intelligence being used to, said charitably, make America a safer place, that intelligence is being leveraged to make rich people richer and less regulated. Not enough of a spotlight is on privatized intelligence functions. It's no wonder it feels like corporations have more power than the government, they have access to mini privatized CIAs, with arguably much less oversight.
- monksy 2y ago
  > Pornhub publishes insights on their blog where they include an age/gender/country breakdown of their viewers. That data must come from somewhere, likely google analytics or something like it, which means that there is a thriving surveillance market whether there is age verification or not. Data brokers. But that data isn't exactly accurate. Relatively over the large population yes. Accurate for identifying indivdual users: no.
- Der_Einzige 2y ago
  It pisses me off the see you accuse them of being spook adjacent when the real “private intelligence” companies are much more mundane and lucrative: they are known as expert networks: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expert_network https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expert_network
CaffeineLD50 2y ago
Preventing kids from being exploited online is a damn good thing, whether its porn companies, Facebook, or CSAM PDFs doing the exploiting. Maybe we can even protect adults from being exploited online one of these days too (obviously not in the current US administration, but some day).
- LorenPechtel 2y ago
  The problem is that you're blaming the wrong targets. The porn companies aren't interested in kids, they don't have much money or ways to spend it on their content.
  - CaffeineLD50 2y ago
    [dead]
whoitwas 2y ago
They are. There's no need for them. Parents should parent.
yusyusyus 2y ago
Back in the day, during the short-lived reign of Communications Decency Act's provisions for dealing with pornographic material and minors, there emerged a site called sexkey.com that would provide a sort of SSO experience for doing age verification. That is, one would verify their age with sexkey.com and then, at participating sites, one would do a lil SSO bounce to verify age. When the CDA's porn provisions were struck down, the sort of industry argument was that they'd use the PICS site ratings and the content could be blocked in proxy/client side. This made a lot of sense in the context of the V-chip mandates of the 90's. AFAIK browsers stopped supporting this a long time back.
croes 2y ago
Everything of this kind of protection can be used for surveillance
alecco 2y ago
What if all the porn, adult, crypto, gambling, etc. content was in a separate part of Internet? Like a red lights district. Or at least be easily blocked (but with laws requiring them to help blocklists or IP/domain). In meatspace there are rules of how close those can be from schools and churches (of any denomination).
- commandersaki 2y ago
  Finally a use for ipv6!
buyucu 2y ago
most of the ''protect the kids!'' rhetoric originates from the government who want to use it as a smoke screen to push authoritarian surveillance laws.
- LorenPechtel 2y ago
  "Most"?? Where's the stuff that isn't a smoke screen?
  - buyucu 2y ago
    I tried really hard to find an example. I could not find one.
TZubiri 2y ago
We should recognize that this is a political issue and that a problem exists that needs a solution. One party to the debate claiming that the solution (age verification) to the problem (kids accessing adult content) is imperfect, is worthless. We know what the position of the EFF or FSF is on the matter, they prioritize online privacy over kid safety, got it. But if the message is going to be that the solution has a problem and there is no more contributions, then the implicit proposal is that there needs to be no solution and the initial problem is ignored. If the opposition to current age verification take this naive approach of denouncing age verification and offering no solutions, they will be kept at the sidelines while the adults vote in the senate for these solutions. Newsflash, you lost the debate, if you want back in, you are going to need more than this.
- c22 2y ago
  Online privacy is a key component of kid's safety on the internet.
  - TZubiri 2y ago
    It's also a huge risk. The privacy of attackers is a risk to kid safety. The privacy of messages sent is a risk to kid safety (law enforcement should be able to access them) The privacy of chilren activity is a risk to their safety (Parents should be able to view what their children do.)
    - c22 2y ago
      Yes, parental responsibility is perhaps the most critical component of kid safety. However, I know of no children who independently acquired and maintain a device with a connection to the internet. Are you entirely sure we need a governmental edict to allow parents to monitor and influence what their kids see and do online? Should law enforcement be able to access messages sent to my kid? I'm going to have to say no to this one.
      - TZubiri 2y ago
tfourb 2y ago
This wouldn't be a problem if the U.S. had decent privacy laws that were enforceable against both private companies and the government, as well as some form of actual government issued ID. The German constitution actually provides for a "right to informational self-determination", i.e. any individual has the right to decide what happens with their personal information, including what websites they visit. We also have a standard governmen-issued ID. In combination that makes it possible for private companies to offer web-based age verification, that check you ID-number against a government-provided service, verifying the age but not providing additional information. And because of the privacy laws, it would be a criminal offense to store the identity of the person being verified or for that information to be connected with the website you visit. The website in turn gets a legal record that they verified the age of the person, but not necessarily the actual identity of the person. Ideally, in the end each party only gets a piece of the total picture but by confirming to each other that the piece they have checks out, you can confirm your age to a porn site without any single party being able to piece the entire picture together.
abc123abc123 2y ago
The internet should be free, open and uncensored. Parents should then have the obligation of looking after their children. Yes, that means not buying a smartphone and give it to your 3 year old. I think, slowly, the world is starting to realize this.
- dennis_jeeves2 2y ago
  >Yes, that means not buying a smartphone and give it to your 3 year old. Agreed. >I think, slowly, the world is starting to realize this. Unlikely. You'd be surprised at the proportion of parents that want to outsource parenting to the govt.
- jrmg 2y ago
  The age you picked here makes your argument obviously right. But what age _should_ people get a phone and be able to use it unsupervised? I don’t think it’s reasonable that it be 21 or 18, even 16 feels quite puritanical.
  - borgdefenser 2y ago
    It is why I am happy to be child free. I am someone who would probably not own a smart phone if it wasn't such a pain to not have one. I can see with the kids in my extended family how even by 12, not having a smart phone is going to damage your social life. It was awkward enough for me at that age with rotary phones. I couldn't do that to my kid if I had one. We have put ourselves in a really bad spot. Even if a parent wants to do what is best for the kid, I have no idea what that is. To pretend there is some simple and obvious answer here is completely divorced from reality.
gabeio 2y ago
Privacy Passes for adults where age verification is needed would be an interesting solution. The government hands you as many tokens as you’d like to access websites as an “adult”. Defaulting to getting tokens so that it isn’t only people accessing websites for only adults which are grabbing tokens. I’m know this is a newer project but Kagi implemented this as a way to completely decouple users from their searches, when the user would like to be fully anonymous. https://privacypass.github.io/ https://privacypass.github.io/
- hellojesus 2y ago
  What stops me from generating a service that hands out privacy passes to anyone and everyone so that they don't have to generate a pass on their end?
LinuxBender 2y ago
I stand by my statement that the laws need only require servers and clients use the RTA header. [1] Not perfect but perfect is the enemy of good or so they say. No leakage, privacy compliant. Contact your reps. [1] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43249230 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43249230
neycoda 2y ago
People under 16 shouldn't have smartphones.
miatrwa 2y ago
There's a way to do that in a privacy-preserving way. A few weeks back, I created a PoC of such a solution https://x.com/maciejlotkowski/status/1899896737688436844 https://x.com/maciejlotkowski/status/1899896737688436844

660 points by hn_acker 2y ago

The people behind these "save the children" age verification bills are funded by verification companies looking for contracts. Russell Vought, Mr.Project 2025 himself, is also a massive proponent of using porn as an excuse for more surveillance.

dinkblam 2y ago

age verification should be backed into the browser and not into websites. parents should be able to access a (password protected) setting in any browser that can exclude some types of websites (like porn). governments should be free to go after any website not respecting that setting. but forcing the age-verification onto websites is just moronic.

JumpCrisscross 2y ago
> age verification should be backed into the browser You want a mandated block of government code in every browser?
- dinkblam 2y ago
  why government code? having a checkbox that corresponds to info passed with the HTTP requests is hardly something that requires a library or more than a few lines of code
  - JumpCrisscross 2y ago
    > why government code? Legal age verification in the browser means legislated code. Not line by line, necessarily, but state code in the browser.
- michaelmior 2y ago
  Such a law doesn't necessarily have to require that every browser include the content filtering code. Only that websites must correctly report the content they serve. Of course then the obvious workaround for someone wanting to access restricted content is just to install a browser that does not enforce the restrictions. But that's a problem even if browsers were "forced" to implement this anyway. There would always be a browser out there that didn't adhere to this rule anyway.
  - JumpCrisscross 2y ago
    > Of course then the obvious workaround for someone wanting to access restricted content is just to install a browser that does not enforce the restrictions You really see a world where such a law is passed and such browsers aren’t outlawed?
    - michaelmior 2y ago
      Yes and no. There are (at least) two ways to effectively outlaw such browsers. One is penalties for the browser distributor. However, this really only applies to entities that are subject to US law. Of course the law could go one step further and try to go after ISPs for allowing access to download them, but that's already proved difficult in other arenas. The other way to limit access to such browsers is penalties for users of those browsers. But that feels even less likely. Even if such a law were on the books, how would it be enforced? Either someone would have to report someone using an "illegal" browser or perhaps some method of fingerprinting that is somehow tied back to the actual user. Both of these seem far-fetched to me. So perhaps such browsers would be outlawed, but I'm not sure it would practically do much.
  - Braxton1980 2y ago
    > Of course then the obvious workaround for someone wanting to access restricted content is just to install a browser that does not enforce the restrictions. But that's a problem even if browsers were "forced" to implement this anyway. There would always be a browser out there that didn't adhere to this rule anyway So why are you for it if the solution isn't valid?
bobthepanda 2y ago
it would be less terrible if there were some simple, Apple ID-like way to simply get redirected to a govt website, put in your driver's license, and the website only gets a token back that says "yes over age/no underage". The data already exists, it's what bars use to scan IDs with handheld readers IIRC.
- dinkblam 2y ago
  i wasn't really talking about about any "verification". just a way for parents to disable what they want their kid to be able to browse. if parents don't care to change the setting, their kids would be free to browse anything.
- baby_souffle 2y ago
  > The data already exists, it's what bars use to scan IDs with handheld readers IIRC. Sorta, yeah. But the reason that works is because there's a human guarding the door that can assert that the hand presenting the ID is attached to a face that looks just like the one on the ID. Otherwise a very smart 17 year old would just get their hands on the UUID or whatever for literally any ID that belongs to somebody that's 18+. Within _hours_ of this type of system going into effect, you'd have the age/id version of bugmenot.com
  - burnished 2y ago
    You're implying smart 17 year olds don't make it into bars. You rarely need anything approaching %100 compliance in order to have an effective policy, so if anything you're advocating for its effectiveness when you suggest the only people that would be in violation are the rare precocious kid.
    - AnthonyMouse 2y ago
      But that's the difference. For a 17 year old to get into a bar, they need to, themselves, acquire a fake ID. Anyone selling that physical object in your jurisdiction would then be subject to arrest. On the internet, one smart 17 year old sets up im-old.lol and then every kid everywhere has a one-click age verification bypass and the service is run by an anon on a server outside the jurisdiction.
cls59 2y ago
And then kinds just learn how to download and run an open-source browser produced outside of the country that does not implement the setting on the client side.
- mrweasel 2y ago
  I was going to say that it's a great way to teach teenagers how to modify and compile a browser. Moving the verification to sites also isn't going you any good, as the site owners could just move to more liberal countries.
- TylerE 2y ago
  Or just uses any of a gazillion proxies that strips the "I"m under 18" bit.
- johnnyjeans 2y ago
  I consider that a feature. Working and training problem solving skills and persistence through trial-and-error to the degree required for that kind of thing is great. I feel it's underappreciated in potential that treating a wide swath of these kinds of rules as nothing more than cattle-fences can have a shockingly positive effect. One of the biggest problems that grows with each generation, is how do you get the youth to actually engage in constructive development of real skills? How do you get them to be interested in something that will be useful for society down the line? Quietly looking the other way while a statistical minority breaks some of the safety-rails of society basically solves that problem. Breaking the rules is cool. You're basically exploiting the rebellious nature of the youth to trick them into learning useful skillsets. So long as the hurdles to circumvent the rules remain reasonably involved to overcome, and the secret intention remains unspoken, you basically double up the rewards of the rules.
  - Der_Einzige 2y ago
    So the desire to jerk off is the ideal catalyst for being subversive? I mean it’s not that I disagree with you, but this is what you are saying!!!
- 2y ago
baby_souffle 2y ago
> but forcing the age-verification onto websites is just moronic. Agree. > parents should be able to access a (password protected) setting in any browser that can exclude some types of websites (like porn). How would this work? Who's going to set up the taxonomy / classification tree for every domain/site on the internet just so a guardian can say "yes to drugs, no to porn, no to news, no to weapons..."? Or if that's not the implementation, how would an arbitrary site signal to the browser what the age limit is? Once you move beyond a binary "require parent consent for $domain" flag, you're quickly approaching traditional parental control software. I know I'm not the only one one this site that made a bit of spare $ back in the day helping kids at school go _around_ overbearing parental controls.
- generalizations 2y ago
  This is the core fallacy I see in proponents of such rules: they think the rules can be enforced.
  - convolvatron 2y ago
    I think the parent had an even more important fallacy - that the rules can't even be _stated_. there is an implicit presumption that everyone everywhere agrees on what material is appropriate for what people and at what age.
    - evil-olive 2y ago
      yes, and that presumption is even older than the internet. this is from a 1964 Supreme Court decision [0]: > I shall not today attempt further to define the kinds of material I understand to be embraced within that shorthand description ["hard-core pornography"], and perhaps I could never succeed in intelligibly doing so. But I know it when I see it, and the motion picture involved in this case is not that. 0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_know_it_when_I_see_it https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_know_it_when_I_see_it
- simion314 2y ago
  >How would this work? Pornhub knows they do not want to have trouble so they will respect the browser setting and not serve minors. There could be an institution that can receive complains about websites not using this API and those wbsites can be blocked from the country and fined if possible until they implement the API. We need all mobile and desktop OSes to make it easy for parents to setup accounts for their children, the church could also educated the people instead of just complaining. It is not perfect, soem clever kid can find a way to reset the BIOS/UEFI and install Ubuntu with a fake age on his PC , but most parents can feel safe and we would not have to show our ID card to Pornhub or even Steam because some game shows nipples and nipples are more dangerous in USA then nazi propaganda.
Terr_ 2y ago
I wouldn't say every browser, but the correct place for the policy is on the device of the parent who is demanding the special feature. Sites' obligations should be limited to basic disclosure of "this site might contain X" metadata. Benefits: 1. Orwellian abuse: No creepy-ass super-abuseable government panopticon knowing every goddamn service you've ever made an account on, with the ability to arbitrarily revoke them and/or block new ones. 2. Costs: The majority of the costs of creating and maintaining the system fall upon the people who actually use it and want it to exist, rather than a bunch of other adults across the globe. 3. Parent focus: Most enforcement exists in a physical realm where parents/guardians at least have a chance of understanding, monitoring, and managing it. "Little Timmy is using Daddy's phone" can be determined instantly at a glance. 4. Exceptions: If the child has some health-class homework and can't access the right Wikipedia pages anymore, the parent can easily grant exceptions and revoke them. 5. If someone's religion says that unclad ankles are smut, then their church can create their own site-rating-site and adherents configure their family's devices to it.
- Braxton1980 2y ago
  What if a site doesn't comply or lies? Who is enforcing this
barnabee 2y ago
Age verification should be baked into the parenting. It's about the only place it might have the intended effect anyway, and has the advantage of not enabling mass surveillance.
Braxton1980 2y ago
Why
butlike 2y ago
Kids have nothing but time and energy to learn about their world, so you get weird things like the children rootkitting your device or "the home computer" on their quest to see salacious corners of the web. As always, parenting starts and stops with the parent. The internet should be open and if the child sees something that upsets them (or makes them question one of their assumptions), it's the parent's responsibility to cultivate an environment where the child feels comfortable talking about it with them.
- Der_Einzige 2y ago
  I learned that the password my parents used on the computer was “Neo Maxi Zoom Dwebie” by password cracking my windows XP with rainbow tables at like age 11. I hate the breakfast club and think it’s one of the examples of movies which idolized anti-intellectualism and basically celebrates bullying nerdy types. Sadly ironic of a password choices from my “nerdy” family. If the rainbow tables didn’t work, I’d have rootkitted/RATed the computer.
genewitch 2y ago
And who decides what browsers are okay? Is it Apple and Google?

bobthepanda 2y ago

While I don't support age verification (I don't think that would solve anything) two of the targeted product categories, skincare and diet foods/supplements, are some of the heaviest spending ad categories I see nowadays, and feel very huckster-y as well.

9283409232 2y ago
The answer isn't age verification but putting them under the scrutiny of the FDA. Supplements have almost no regulation and will soon actually have none since the head of the FDA is a big fan of supplements and has a supplement company. Supplements being regulated would fix so many issues in this space.

saurik 2y ago

This should be held up as a visceral demonstration of how the "slippery slope" isn't inherently a fallacy, as many oft like to claim: it is merely a form of argument that is easy enough to get wrong--leading to a fallacy when the cause is disconnected--that people have become overly-wary of it, reacting to the premise of the conclusion without even bothering to analyze how steep the slope might be before tuning the idea out :(.

CamperBob2 2y ago
Exactly. It's a fallacy when dealing with logical entities, but humans aren't logical entities.
- ls612 2y ago
  It’s only a fallacy when dealing with logical relations under certainty. Once uncertainty and probability is introduced the slippery slope just is relating Bayes’ Rule in plain English.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  - CamperBob2 2y ago
    Whatever. Point being, calling it a "fallacy" isn't useful or predictive when dealing with people who follow impulses rather than principles.
  - dragonwriter 2y ago
    > It’s only a fallacy when dealing with logical relations under certainty. Incorrect. Slippery slope is an informal fallacy, which applies to arguments based on evidence not logical relations under certainty. But it is a component of the slippery slope fallacy that the implicit premise (that the precondition that is the subject of the argument is likely to lead to the result that is the endpoint of the slippery slope) is inadequately justified, not merely that a slope from the precondition to the endpoint is presented.
- 2y ago

valicord 2y ago

Haven't checked the others, but at least for the skin cream bill, the text explicitly lists "a date of birth entry or checkbox verifying age system" as sufficient, so the outrage about privacy seems overblown. Of course this raises questions as to what is the point of requiring verification that doesn't actually verify anything, but that's an entirely separate problem.

valicord 2y ago
Likewise the dietary pills bill only requires the ID to be verified either at a retail point of sale or when the online purchase is delivered, so there doesn't seem to be any invasive data collection required. To be clear: I'm strongly against any laws that require uploading government ID to sketchy websites, but at least 2 out of the 3 examples listed are not this.
Teever 2y ago
What's the point of anytl of this though? Like what public interest is served by having a date of birth entry or a checkbox for 'verifying' age? To me it serves no public interest as it's functionally useless and it will only serve as a thin end of a wedge to normalize more egregious requirements.
- valicord 2y ago
  Oh, I agree, it seems completely useless as written. I'm just saying that it's no more of a privacy violation than Steam asking for your birth date (which somehow happens to be January 1st, 1900 for a shocking percentage of the population) to watch a video game trailer. I assume the point is virtue signaling.
evil-olive 2y ago
> Haven't checked the others, but at least for the skin cream bill if you did check the other two, you'd notice that they're much more restrictive. from the NY bill, apologies for the all-caps but it's in the original [0]: > "IDENTITY VERIFICATION" SHALL MEAN THE USE OF AN ON-DEMAND SELF-PHOTOGRAPH TO VERIFY THE OWNERSHIP OF A PERSON'S GOVERNMENT-ISSUED IDENTIFICATION; > "LICENSE VERIFICATION" SHALL MEAN THE USE OF TECHNOLOGY TO VERIFY A PERSON'S GOVERNMENT-ISSUED IDENTIFICATION; and the one in WA [1]: > For the purposes of this section, proof of legal age includes any of the following officially issued identification that shows the purchaser's age and bears the purchaser's signature and photograph: 0: https://www.nysenate.gov/legislation/bills/2025/A3323 https://www.nysenate.gov/legislation/bills/2025/A3323 1 (PDF): https://lawfilesext.leg.wa.gov/biennium/2025-26/Pdf/Bills/Senate%20Bills/5622.pdf?q=20250307113703 https://lawfilesext.leg.wa.gov/biennium/2025-26/Pdf/Bills/Se...

plasma_beam 2y ago

Am I missing something here? Entirely possible and likely. When I go to pornhub I have to click a button that days I’m 18. Some other sites I’ve seen actually make me enter a birthdate. Slightly more annoying but I always make one up. Is this what people are upset about? I get actual age verification with an account required or checking my ID is more invasive..but I guess I’ve not experienced this as an actual problem yet.

mandevil 2y ago
This is about a Texas Law that went before the Supreme Court recently. Texas' law, H.B. 1181, requires people visiting porn websites to prove their age by either uploading government-issued identification or a "commercially reasonable method" such as bank information. More than a dozen other states have passed similar bills, though they are all on hold pending what the Supreme Court decides.
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 2y ago
  There's just too much money to be made selling porn to children.
  - 9283409232 2y ago
    No, there isn't. Almost all porn that is accessible to children is on freely available social media like instagram and twitter. Not on Pornhub.
    - twiclo 2y ago
      Are you saying kids don't go to pornhub?
      - 9283409232 2y ago
        No I'm not.
    - dragonwriter 2y ago

AtNightWeCode 2y ago

Preteen girls using peeling skin cream is a thing where I live. It causes skin damage. Tiktok bs.

weaksauce 2y ago
ok but the solution should be "parent better" vs. "legislate our privacy away"
quickthrowman 2y ago
How is a preteen girl ordering products from a website?

fortran77 2y ago

Parents can choose to restrict their kids internet access. That's the best way of handling this.

2OEH8eoCRo0 2y ago
The Internet is so ubiquitous and intertwined in daily life that that's impossible and you know it.
- michaelmior 2y ago
  I don't think the parent comment was suggesting disallowing access to the Internet entirely, but restricting the content that is accessible. Accessing pornographic material is obviously not a necessity for kids. That said, kids of course do often find a way around any blocks or filters put in place.
  - Lanolderen 2y ago
    Never underestimate being horny, curious and having copious amounts of free time. Having to go through hoops does make it clear you shouldn't be looking at it though.
- natebc 2y ago
  And "porn" (or anything you might want your children not to see?) is also ubiquitous and so intertwined with the internet that it's impossible to block ... and you also know it. Responsibility really is the only fix here. I know we love technical solutions to problems but either porn is illegal for everyone or it isn't.
  - immibis 2y ago
    "Parental responsibility" is to parenting what "pilot error" was to plane crashes: a thought-terminating cliche that refuses to dig any deeper. When they stopped blaming crashes on "pilot error" they were able to properly investigate the causes of crashes and prevent more crashes. "Pilot error" is a suitable explanation if you are a mechanic investigating the crash. You determined that the plane moved the wrong way because the ailerons moved the wrong way because the pilot told them to move that way. It's not a suitable explanation for a final report because you need to find out why the pilot told them to move that way. Codeless Code 224

ajross 2y ago

[flagged]

z0r 2y ago
https://www.eff.org/press/releases/eff-sues-opm-doge-and-musk-endangering-privacy-millions https://www.eff.org/press/releases/eff-sues-opm-doge-and-mus... ?
- ajross 2y ago
  EFF's legal side is... not as insane, I guess. And there are some sound minds surely there still. But I repeat: the data privacy dystopia is upon us, and what is EFF pushing for clicks and eyeballs? "Big Tech Bad". "Big Tech Bad" is precisely the kind of poorly-grounded outrage farm used to bring DOGE to power in the first place. Voters trying to bring their perceived enemies to heel are the actual threat! And EFF is part of the problem and not the solution. In the coming years we will remember fondly when our personal data lived in secure and well-managed centers run by Meta and Google and Amazon and not on some DOGE staffers' Macbook. Write it down.
  - throwaway83267 2y ago
    > In the coming years we will remember fondly when our personal data lived in secure and well-managed centers run by Meta and Google and Amazon and not on some DOGE staffers' Macbook. Seems odd to assume that the US government didn't have access to that data prior to the current administration.
    - ajross 2y ago
      "The US Government" is not some 20-something unvetted staffer hired on a whim because Elon liked something he said on a Twitch stream. Again, write it down. DOGE is a huge security hole and these people are not motivated by a genuine interest in the public good. This will go badly.

waltercool 2y ago

[dead]

rickandmortyy 2y ago

lmao it's hilarious when free folk talk about surveillance like cars on road aren't collecting data

Braxton1980 2y ago
[flagged]

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

mjevans 2y ago

The Internet should be Unrated and thus Adults Only by default. Just like public spaces. (Would you allow an 8 year old to wander New York City unattended? Arguments can be made for more controlled spaces but...) Have a website and want the chance for kids to see it? Advertise in the headers that it's moderated and intended to be a given rating. Various indexers can pick that up. Complaints can be forward to relevant government agencies (E.G. for a US based website the FTC, false advertising), or as usual other agencies for harder crimes. Parents can mark computer accounts as Child accounts and Browsers configured to follow a set of list filtering rules selected by the parent or current guardian (E.G. schools). So again. Internet == Unrated Free Zone -- Child Mode == Allow List filtered content.

paulvnickerson 2y ago
we arrest people who have sex in public...
- mjevans 2y ago
  Only the ones who make a display of it (get seen by others). We don't randomly go around asking Papers Please! to everyone on the street.
  - ndriscoll 2y ago
    We do require ID to enter e.g. porn stores and bars though, or to make age restricted purchases. I also recall walking a few miles to e.g. the mall, target, walmart, etc. without any adults when I was around 10. I'm not sure I'd characterize public spaces as adult oriented by default.
    - choo-t 2y ago
      > We do require ID to enter e.g. porn stores and bars though Only if you look too young (and for the bars it's only for certain beverages), so the affected population is only a small parts of the customers.
  - 2y ago

washadjeffmad 2y ago

Who could have predicted this, though? If only there were some, no, any benevolent corporate deity poised to provide trusted global identity services for an event exactly like this. If only this hadn't come out of the blue, maybe there'd be someone out there, right now, who could make it so that your identity traveled with you everywhere across the internet, an authentic digital fingerprint and passport so invisible that you can't even see or access it to keep people from having to prove themselves over and over and over again. What a solution in search of a problem that would have been!

3np 2y ago
How have you not heard about Worldcoin? /s/s
genewitch 2y ago
Google should be able to say that I've had continuous access to my Gmail account since 2005 and therefore it's impossible for me to be under 18. Or 21. Right? All of a sudden, the internet is incapable of tracking me with that much fidelity. They don't know how old I am. Discord knows how old I am. I never told them my birthday. This gets a big "hrrrrrrr. Durrrrrrr." From me.
- washadjeffmad 2y ago
  Like "appearing under the age of 35" for carding for alcohol (note also that there's no legal requirement to verify age prior to sale), that's not an invalid method of age validation; there is no requirement for precision, only accuracy. Having an account that's at least 5 years old, assuming a legal age of 13 for registration on most services, should be enough. Some services already do it this way. Others offer to scan and analyze your face or ID. Leisure Suit Larry 1 used 1960s trivia for age verification. Given the list of states and awareness of some notable tech companies that operate out of them, it sounds like someone is doing a little competitive market making with the help of their legislators.

paulvnickerson 2y ago

The solution to this is trusted third party age verification services, such as SSL signing authorities, which are baked into browsers.

drdaeman 2y ago
I don't think so. This is not a technical problem - modern computers simply have no means to know who's sitting in front of them. And even if someone tries to invent some contraption to do so (idk, IR cameras, voice verification, DNA sequencers), I must remind that whoever has physical access can still feed computer any signals. For simpler methods (like a basic face recognition with a webcam to match the ID) spoofing is cheaper than the camera, and more sophisticated methods are extremely costly and full of undesirable side effects.

janci 2y ago

Our state-issued eID cards are supposed to have a function that allows anonymous age verification to a trusted party. It should work like this: a requesting party sends a request signed by state-issued certificate to the ID card, the card verifies the request authenticity and responds with a signed confirmation of legal age and that signature then can be verified by the requester. No personal information is shared. While I do not aggree with pervasive age restrictions, this is a nice technical solution to privacy preserving age verification

drdaeman 2y ago
Just curious: 1) which country/eID is this? and 2) does it send the date of birth back, or does it perform a zero-knowledge proof that the date of birth is greater or equal than a given value (current date minus age requirement)?
- jer0me 2y ago
  A handful of states, including California, have a digital ID that can do this. It only sends the fact that you’re over a certain age. There’s a video halfway down this page showing the process in Apple Wallet: https://learn.wallet.apple/id/ https://learn.wallet.apple/id/ (notice “Age Over 21”)
rs186 2y ago
So kids just memorize their parents' driving license when they don't pay attention, and this is bypassed, just like in the old days.
- Jolter 2y ago
  I don’t think that’s how a state e-ID works.
- djsjajah 2y ago
  No. Kids would need to memorize the private key of their parents id card.

giantg2 2y ago

"no method of age verification is both privacy-protective and entirely accurate." No method of age verification is entirely actuate. It seem a hardline stance that we can't think up a process that would allow for a reasonable level of accuracy with privacy. It could literally be drawing a usb token from a bucket full of them after a human at the DMV visually checks your license.

masfuerte 2y ago
There was a serious proposal to do something like this in the UK [1] the last time the government tried to introduce age checks for online porn. Age checks are becoming mandatory this July but the idea of having a privacy-respecting option seems to have been dropped. [1]: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/porn-passes-newsagents-shops-online-pornography-website-id-uk-government-a8349281.html?source=techstories.org https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/porn-passes-...
genewitch 2y ago
That's cool. Do you think they'll mind if I surreptitiously put a couple of thumb drives of my own into the bucket?

diebeforei485 2y ago

I have my California Drivers License in my Apple Wallet. I should be able to prove to iPhone apps that I am 18+ (only a binary yes/no with no metadata) by the apps making a local API call to iOS, which checks this information with the unexpired drivers license on device.

inetknght 2y ago
What if you're born on February 29th? What if you're borth on March 1st and it's currently February 29, 18 years later?
- SketchySeaBeast 2y ago
  I don't know that I care for the solution, but why would the API have a problem with either of those scenarios? What datetime library are you using that does, and why haven't you switched?
- slyall 2y ago
  Age Laws worry about dates. They don't care about leap years, time of birth or timezones.
3np 2y ago
That is trusting both Apple and the client, and also only works for iPhone. We can do better with zero-knowledge-proof-based schemes, which also allow securely decoupling issuance/certification from online verification. E.g. https://linc.cnil.fr/en/demonstration-privacy-preserving-age-verification-process https://linc.cnil.fr/en/demonstration-privacy-preserving-age...
- whatshisface 2y ago
  It's a privacy issue as long as Jim's Blackmail and Certificates, Inc. knows who they've certified.
- diebeforei485 2y ago
  I don't see why Google/Android can't implement the same solution.

robto 2y ago

I wonder if there's any chance of technology like Verifiable Credentials[0] getting any adoption because of these laws. I think there are legitimate use cases where you would want to say, "hey, some third-party authority can vouch for me that ____", and not reveal to the third party who's asking for verification and not reveal to the party requiring verification any other claim besides the specific one that they need (say, age in this case). [0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Verifiable_credentials https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Verifiable_credentials

nesk_ 2y ago
What's insane is that, in France, we have France Connect, which is exactly what you describe: a third-party authentication platform maintained by the government. Lately, a new law just passed to force porn websites to check the age of visitors. I would have been fine with an authentication going through France Connect: - the gov knows which website you went to, just like your DNS provider would, but it doesn't which content - and the website knows which content you've watched but not who's watching. Best of both worlds! But no, we have to send a copy of our ID card to the website, which is INSANE because the website knows WHO you are and WHAT you're watching.
- notTooFarGone 2y ago
  It's mind boggling that governments don't offer that service for a lump sum per month
- archon810 2y ago
  We need this in the US. Otherwise, once laws like this https://apnews.com/article/utah-app-store-age-verification-7e31de07ddca7b32cc82f7ead2c4adc9 https://apnews.com/article/utah-app-store-age-verification-7... go into effect, 3rd party app stores, like apkmirror.com, etc. are going to need to pull out of the US unless there's a service like that in the country. It's starting with Utah, but many states and even the feds are planning similar laws.
  - threecheese 2y ago

mannyv 2y ago

When the Internet was built there was an expectation of anonymity. But anonymity and privacy are not quite the same. And in fact, the Internet is not anonymous or private, as there are multiple ways to track and surveil members of the general public. IMO the next step in the Internet's evolution needs to be the authenticated internet. An Authenticated Internet pretty much removes all the security issues, since every connection is authenticated. And authentication doesn't necessarily mean you're not anonymous. Right now the Internet has become the worst of both worlds - not private, not anonymous, and all the problems associated with that (insecure, spoonable, etc). That's what the EFF has wrong: the Internet is already a backdoor to surveillance. They're trying to stick their finger in the dyke. But what needs to happen is to rebuild the whole thing.

isaacremuant 2y ago
No. You want it because you want "total security" to feel safe but your authoritarian world doesn't make me and others feel safe. Thankfully, the government wants the power so they'll use it against dissidents when it matters hence you'll get a semblance of your way. You can't block technology though. Government or not. People find a way.

isaacremuant 2y ago

[flagged]

outer_web 2y ago
Nonspecific covid policies getting support from "the mainstream" is proof that HN will support authoritarianism? Huh.
- isaacremuant 2y ago
  Yes. That was the most clear cut case of authoritarianism I've ever seen in the post Berlin wall era. It's not hard to grasp if you read a constitution and see how right to assemble, right to work, right to bodily autonomy, right to speak, all got attacked in different degrees in different countries across the world with apparent widespread support. Of course, censorship of any alternative played a part and non compliance by people who pretended to comply happened all the time but by and large the authoritarian tune was sung. Now, you can call me one of the typical labels that were in vogue back then but, it doesn't really change facts.
  - outer_web 2y ago
    Uh what? Brief shelter in place orders followed by limitations on* occupancy of commercial spaces is proof that HN will embrace deanonymizing the internet? You are also gonna have to help me out what I am supposed to call you.
    - isaacremuant 2y ago
      [flagged]
  - LorenPechtel 2y ago
    If we had done as well as the places that were careful there would be about 1 million more Americans now than there actually are. But most of them were costs to society, not producers, and thus killing them was a win for the Republicans. (Although I don't think we had a chance of doing as well because it got here earlier.)

JanisErdmanis 2y ago

It does sounds like that the author is not aware of existence of zero knowledge range proofs for identity based authetification (anonymous credentials). In essence they work as follows: a third party vouches a commitment for your birth year into a commitment with a signature. This then can be used for to be shown to a service provider along with a range proof to ensure that the age limit gets respected. That way service provider does not learn your year while can ensure that all members respect some required age limit.

Aloisius 2y ago
> a third party vouches If the only porn requires this, then the third party has a record of every single person who wants to view porn.
- JanisErdmanis 2y ago
  The third party vouches commitments with their year of birth for all individuals. The secret opening can be distributed to citizens with their identity card. Also multiple properties can be signed at the same time like location coordinates that can be used for other purposes and hence not making vouching exclusive to age verification.
rs186 2y ago
How does that third party know my birth year? And the precision of one year is way too low.
- tzs 2y ago
  I don't know about the specific systems he is thinking of but I think the general approach is to use a third party that already knows that.
hellojesus 2y ago
What prevents 1. Me from sharing my credentials with everyone by publicly publishing them. 2. The third party from connecting with any service providers requiring verification to share info?

TZubiri 2y ago

This is one of those issues that is almost purely political. Either you believe the state is out to get you, or you believe that kids shouldn't access porn. Free software maxis will tell you that age laws are surveillance and that child pornography is an excuse to have subpoena mechanisms.

qingcharles 2y ago
But this law doesn't stop kids from accessing porn. It just moves the problem?

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

autoexec 2y ago

> California’s AB-728 mandates age verification for anyone purchasing skin care products or cosmetics that contain certain chemicals like Vitamin A or alpha hydroxy acids. On the surface, this may seem harmless—who doesn't want to ensure that minors are safe from harmful chemicals? Why would we want to keep minors safe from "harmful chemicals" but not adults? If skin cream products with Vitamin A or alpha hydroxy acids are harmful, and I'm entirely unconvinced they are (at reasonable concentrations), lets just get rid of them.

JumpCrisscross 2y ago
> Why would we want to keep minors safe from "harmful chemicals" but not adults? My understanding is they’re harmful if misused.
- amrocha 2y ago
  That can be said about pretty much anything though. Don’t drink shampoo!
  - genewitch 2y ago
    Why does it have fruit on the bottle then?
    - amrocha 2y ago
      Deceptive advertising! haha
- Aeolun 2y ago
  Pencils are harmful if misused. They make for effective stabbing. Is this about the chance about being inadvertedly misused to the point they’re harmful. I dunno, by all means, don’t sell them to kids, but should we really forbid a 15 year old unless they can show some form of ID? They’re not any more likely to do something dumb with it than an 18 year old.

tzs 2y ago

For the issue of underage people purchasing products they should not be able to I wonder if this could be handled by requiring sellers to only accept payment by credit card, and to only complete the sale if the shipping address matches the credit card account address? A child could borrow an adult's card, but then the items would be shipped to that adult's address which could make it hard for the child to get them without that adult noticing, and the purchase should show up on the next credit card statement further increasing the chances the adult will notice if the child is surreptitiously using the adult's credit card. Maybe even require the listing on the credit card statement to have a prominent annotation stating that there were purchases of age restricted products that month. This wouldn't stop all such purchases, but it should make it harder and it should make it easier for parents to find out that it is happening.

beeflet 2y ago
I feel like minors should be allowed to buy some stuff online as long as there is age verification for alcohol or whatever. They can go to a store and buy stuff in-person, so why not
precommunicator 2y ago
In my country people above 13, but under 18 are allowed to have debit cards (Mastercard/Visa) and bank accounts themselves (with parent's permission and automatic power of attorney to this account) I've had an account, card and state-issued ID since I was 13, all look the same as for any adult, the only difference being the date of birth on that ID. My parents just agreed, and didn't ever check or accessed the account (nor they probably even knew how).

hayst4ck 2y ago

Almost no discussion matters as long as Google Analytics/fonts is embedded in almost every website you visit. EFF is looking at individual grains of sand on a beach of surveillance. Pornhub publishes insights on their blog where they include an age/gender/country breakdown of their viewers. That data must come from somewhere, likely google analytics or something like it, which means that there is a thriving surveillance market whether there is age verification or not. The surveillance is already happening, there isn't any need to backdoor it because it's already there. People think google is a search company, but it's not. People think Facebook is a social media company, but it's not. They are privatized intelligence companies, intelligence as in the I in CIA. And rather than that intelligence being used to, said charitably, make America a safer place, that intelligence is being leveraged to make rich people richer and less regulated. Not enough of a spotlight is on privatized intelligence functions. It's no wonder it feels like corporations have more power than the government, they have access to mini privatized CIAs, with arguably much less oversight.

monksy 2y ago
> Pornhub publishes insights on their blog where they include an age/gender/country breakdown of their viewers. That data must come from somewhere, likely google analytics or something like it, which means that there is a thriving surveillance market whether there is age verification or not. Data brokers. But that data isn't exactly accurate. Relatively over the large population yes. Accurate for identifying indivdual users: no.
Der_Einzige 2y ago
It pisses me off the see you accuse them of being spook adjacent when the real “private intelligence” companies are much more mundane and lucrative: they are known as expert networks: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expert_network https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expert_network

CaffeineLD50 2y ago

Preventing kids from being exploited online is a damn good thing, whether its porn companies, Facebook, or CSAM PDFs doing the exploiting. Maybe we can even protect adults from being exploited online one of these days too (obviously not in the current US administration, but some day).

LorenPechtel 2y ago
The problem is that you're blaming the wrong targets. The porn companies aren't interested in kids, they don't have much money or ways to spend it on their content.
- CaffeineLD50 2y ago
  [dead]

whoitwas 2y ago

They are. There's no need for them. Parents should parent.

yusyusyus 2y ago

Back in the day, during the short-lived reign of Communications Decency Act's provisions for dealing with pornographic material and minors, there emerged a site called sexkey.com that would provide a sort of SSO experience for doing age verification. That is, one would verify their age with sexkey.com and then, at participating sites, one would do a lil SSO bounce to verify age. When the CDA's porn provisions were struck down, the sort of industry argument was that they'd use the PICS site ratings and the content could be blocked in proxy/client side. This made a lot of sense in the context of the V-chip mandates of the 90's. AFAIK browsers stopped supporting this a long time back.

croes 2y ago

Everything of this kind of protection can be used for surveillance

alecco 2y ago

What if all the porn, adult, crypto, gambling, etc. content was in a separate part of Internet? Like a red lights district. Or at least be easily blocked (but with laws requiring them to help blocklists or IP/domain). In meatspace there are rules of how close those can be from schools and churches (of any denomination).

commandersaki 2y ago
Finally a use for ipv6!

buyucu 2y ago

most of the ''protect the kids!'' rhetoric originates from the government who want to use it as a smoke screen to push authoritarian surveillance laws.

LorenPechtel 2y ago
"Most"?? Where's the stuff that isn't a smoke screen?
- buyucu 2y ago
  I tried really hard to find an example. I could not find one.

TZubiri 2y ago

We should recognize that this is a political issue and that a problem exists that needs a solution. One party to the debate claiming that the solution (age verification) to the problem (kids accessing adult content) is imperfect, is worthless. We know what the position of the EFF or FSF is on the matter, they prioritize online privacy over kid safety, got it. But if the message is going to be that the solution has a problem and there is no more contributions, then the implicit proposal is that there needs to be no solution and the initial problem is ignored. If the opposition to current age verification take this naive approach of denouncing age verification and offering no solutions, they will be kept at the sidelines while the adults vote in the senate for these solutions. Newsflash, you lost the debate, if you want back in, you are going to need more than this.

c22 2y ago
Online privacy is a key component of kid's safety on the internet.
- TZubiri 2y ago
  It's also a huge risk. The privacy of attackers is a risk to kid safety. The privacy of messages sent is a risk to kid safety (law enforcement should be able to access them) The privacy of chilren activity is a risk to their safety (Parents should be able to view what their children do.)
  - c22 2y ago
    Yes, parental responsibility is perhaps the most critical component of kid safety. However, I know of no children who independently acquired and maintain a device with a connection to the internet. Are you entirely sure we need a governmental edict to allow parents to monitor and influence what their kids see and do online? Should law enforcement be able to access messages sent to my kid? I'm going to have to say no to this one.
    - TZubiri 2y ago

tfourb 2y ago

This wouldn't be a problem if the U.S. had decent privacy laws that were enforceable against both private companies and the government, as well as some form of actual government issued ID. The German constitution actually provides for a "right to informational self-determination", i.e. any individual has the right to decide what happens with their personal information, including what websites they visit. We also have a standard governmen-issued ID. In combination that makes it possible for private companies to offer web-based age verification, that check you ID-number against a government-provided service, verifying the age but not providing additional information. And because of the privacy laws, it would be a criminal offense to store the identity of the person being verified or for that information to be connected with the website you visit. The website in turn gets a legal record that they verified the age of the person, but not necessarily the actual identity of the person. Ideally, in the end each party only gets a piece of the total picture but by confirming to each other that the piece they have checks out, you can confirm your age to a porn site without any single party being able to piece the entire picture together.

abc123abc123 2y ago

The internet should be free, open and uncensored. Parents should then have the obligation of looking after their children. Yes, that means not buying a smartphone and give it to your 3 year old. I think, slowly, the world is starting to realize this.

dennis_jeeves2 2y ago
>Yes, that means not buying a smartphone and give it to your 3 year old. Agreed. >I think, slowly, the world is starting to realize this. Unlikely. You'd be surprised at the proportion of parents that want to outsource parenting to the govt.
jrmg 2y ago
The age you picked here makes your argument obviously right. But what age _should_ people get a phone and be able to use it unsupervised? I don’t think it’s reasonable that it be 21 or 18, even 16 feels quite puritanical.
- borgdefenser 2y ago
  It is why I am happy to be child free. I am someone who would probably not own a smart phone if it wasn't such a pain to not have one. I can see with the kids in my extended family how even by 12, not having a smart phone is going to damage your social life. It was awkward enough for me at that age with rotary phones. I couldn't do that to my kid if I had one. We have put ourselves in a really bad spot. Even if a parent wants to do what is best for the kid, I have no idea what that is. To pretend there is some simple and obvious answer here is completely divorced from reality.

gabeio 2y ago

Privacy Passes for adults where age verification is needed would be an interesting solution. The government hands you as many tokens as you’d like to access websites as an “adult”. Defaulting to getting tokens so that it isn’t only people accessing websites for only adults which are grabbing tokens. I’m know this is a newer project but Kagi implemented this as a way to completely decouple users from their searches, when the user would like to be fully anonymous. https://privacypass.github.io/ https://privacypass.github.io/

hellojesus 2y ago
What stops me from generating a service that hands out privacy passes to anyone and everyone so that they don't have to generate a pass on their end?

LinuxBender 2y ago

I stand by my statement that the laws need only require servers and clients use the RTA header. [1] Not perfect but perfect is the enemy of good or so they say. No leakage, privacy compliant. Contact your reps. [1] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43249230 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43249230

neycoda 2y ago

People under 16 shouldn't have smartphones.

miatrwa 2y ago

There's a way to do that in a privacy-preserving way. A few weeks back, I created a PoC of such a solution https://x.com/maciejlotkowski/status/1899896737688436844 https://x.com/maciejlotkowski/status/1899896737688436844