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My kid has recently just quit playing Roblox because of the sketchy facial age check process. She said that her and all her friends know not to ever upload a pi

My kid has recently just quit playing Roblox because of the sketchy facial age check process. She said that her and all her friends know not to ever upload a picture of themselves to the Internet (good job, fellow Other Parents!!) so they're either moving on to other games or just downloading stock photos of people from the internet and uploading those (which apparently works). What a total joke. These companies need to stop normalizing the sharing of personal private photos. It's literally the opposite direction from good Internet hygiene, especially for kids!

next_xibalba 10mo ago
[flagged]
- polski-g 10mo ago
  What evidence led you to believe this, when controlling for heritability?
  - gjsman-1000 10mo ago
    [flagged]
    - irusensei 10mo ago
      I'm trying to find the contact for the does-not-imply-causation dept but I think I lost my slashdot account in 2004.
      - gjsman-1000 10mo ago
        Nobody studying this issue, from the UK government to independent researchers to NGOs, says this anymore. PornHub in legal filings never uses this argument, but instead focuses on rights to expression rather than dispute the claim. The causation is clear, documented, proven. Increased pornography exposure with dangerous behaviors, causes those dangerous behaviors to be repeated, even when participants are warned of the risk. At this point, denial is like saying flat earth has merit.
        idiotsecant 10mo ago
        So what? The problem here would be if these activities are nonconsensual. I've seen no evidence of that. If you're just trying to thought police ideas that lead to people doing risky things you better drop your clutching pearls and pick up a pencil cause that's a long list, some of which are probably things you do.
        irishcoffee 10mo ago
        The internet in a nutshell: I’m right and if you don’t agree, you’re wrong. Facts need not apply.
        iamnothere 10mo ago
        The extreme danger of marijuana and its role as a “gateway drug” was also extensively studied and “proven” by a handful of moralist researchers and groups who had an agenda to push. The highly biased “researchers” who pursued this were often directly funded by the US government. And now? This research has been debunked. It’s likely bad for people prone to mental illness, especially when taken regularly and in excess, and even stable people shouldn’t overdo it, much like alcohol. But it’s not going to cause lasting harm to most people. Regarding porn, your argument from authority is extremely suspect. Porn is considered morally suspect due to lingering Puritan values, and if there is a research deficit (which I doubt) then it is likely because reputable researchers avoid the topic due to reputational damage. Sex researchers in general have often faced harassment, targeted government inquiries, and threats. So in short, I don’t believe you here. I haven’t personally met anyone whose life was negatively affected by porn, except for a couple of people who were in relationships where one partner considered porn to be a form of infidelity. Utterly ridiculous from my perspective. Edit: Total bunk. After looking into it, reputable meta-studies have showed no link between porn and sexual violence, ED, or mental health issues. It’s trivial to find this research, search for it if you care.
    - john01dav 10mo ago
      > combined with studies showing there is zero safe threshold without brain damage markers in the blood? Are you saying that there's zero safe threshold of choking, or for viewing porn? (To be clear, choking someone without consent is assault and unacceptable, whether a blood test shows damage or not.)
      - gjsman-1000 10mo ago
        A. There is zero safe threshold for choking. B. Choking is inherently, obviously, dangerous. C. Pornography has caused choking behaviors among youth to go from negligible to over 38%. D. Brain damage is measurable in anyone who has been choked. E. As such, pornography does, in fact, have blame for encouraging this kind of experimentation. F. If "fighting words" and "misinformation" shouldn't be free speech, who is to say pornography does not incite risk, when other things can?
        array_key_first 10mo ago
        The argument I commonly hear of pornography causing more extreme sexual experimentation is a very weak one. I know, for sure, pornography did not cause me to be a homosexual. Kinks, BDSM, and what have you, have always existed and will continue to exist. The solution is teaching safe ways to participate, and the importance of consent. A desire to just wipe them out is naive, and will not work.
        stickfigure 10mo ago
        > Pornography has caused choking behaviors among youth to go from negligible to over 38%. That which is asserted without evidence, can be dismissed without evidence.
        d1sxeyes 10mo ago
        I have a lot of concerns about your presentation of this. A. It’s also true that there is no safe level of alcohol consumption and yet we sort of see experimentation with alcohol as a rite of passage. B. I mean, so is walking out your front door. I don’t see this as adding much to point A. C. This is a big jump. First, we see more openness about sexual behaviour. While I’m prepared to agree that it has likely gone up, I would not be comfortable with the degree you imply. Second, while I do think it is likely that pornography has indeed contributed to this, pornography has also likely contributed to an increase in experimentation in general, with other sexual behaviours also likely seeing an increase (for example oral/anal sex, water play, etc). D. I find this very hard to accept at face value. Do you have studies/evidence to support this claim? E. Yes, I would likely agree, although whether “encourages sexual experimentation” is a bad thing or not is a question for further debate. F. This conflates some very weird things. “Fighting words” are a specific type of restricted speech (i.e. you can’t go round shouting “I’ll kill you”). Sharing misinformation is broadly not illegal (except in very specific sets of circumstances-fraud, inciting violence, etc.). It’s also broadly speaking not against the law to tell the truth. “Some people like to choke each other during sex” is a true statement, even if it’s harmful. Do you support a ban on porn all together? That’s quite a radical view.
    - dangus 10mo ago
      > Before the widespread adoption of pornography, this rate was near 0%. Big giant citation needed on that one. How would it ever have been near 0%? First, I’d like to point out that we don’t make other media illegal or age gated with privacy-compromising tactics because it depicts harmful things. There’s no age verification gate for watching movies and TV that depict murder and other serious crimes. You can watch Gaston drink beer and fall to his death and the Beast bleed in a kids movie rated G. Watching NFL football, boxing, and UFC fighting isn’t illegal even those sports conclusively cause brain damage. Pornography is singled out because it’s taboo and for no other reason. People won’t politically defend it because nobody can publicly admit that they like watching it, even though most people consume it. Over 90% of men and over 60% of women in the last month. [1] Second, what I see missing from your links is really solid studied link to an increase in choking injuries directly caused by changes in pornography trends and viewership. Were these kinks just underreported in the past? Heck, I read 4 of your linked articles and none of them actually compared the rate of choking injury over time, they just sort of pointed it out as something that exists and jumped to blaming pornography. I am perfectly willing to accept your hypothesis but I don’t think we’ve been anywhere near scientific enough about evaluating it, and even if that was the case, we don’t really treat pornography the same as other media just like I mentioned. We need a lot more information. Personally, I think there’s nothing wrong with sexual pleasure and believe it’s stigmatized way too much. I also believe that normalizing sexual pleasure helps people talk about consent and avoids issues like doing a sexual act when you don’t enjoy it. [1] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30358432/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30358432/
    - stickfigure 10mo ago
      > Before the widespread adoption of pornography, this rate was near 0% Bullshit. Men and women have been dying of autoerotic asphyxiation long before the internet. And we only hear about the ones that fuck up badly enough to make the news. I'm puzzled by this phenomenon myself, but there is apparently a significant minority of women who enjoy getting choked in bed: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s13178-025-01247-9 https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s13178-025-01247-9 This doesn't excuse people who choke without consent, but there's something going on here waaaay more complex than "see it in porn, do it". Humans are weird.
      - gjsman-1000 10mo ago
        Nobody is saying that nobody did this before. We are saying now that it is a health crisis, objectively. You're the guy saying that 110 MPH speed limits can't be responsible for crashes because people also died at 20 MPH.
        stickfigure 10mo ago
        You did in fact just say that nobody did it before - or very strongly implied it based on how sloppy you want to be with the phrase "near 0%". Stop pretending you know what that number is.
- pixl97 10mo ago
  >it might prevent that On the global internet... good luck with that. Oh, they'll ban us from looking at other countries net's soon enough for our safety.
- Barrin92 10mo ago
  >and this seems like it might prevent that sorry but we're on the internet. You can type the literal words 'hardcore pornography' into any search engine of your choice and find about fifteen million bootleg porn sites hosted on some micro-nation that don't care about your age verification. In fact ironically, this will almost certainly drive people to websites that host anything.
- drnick1 10mo ago
  Age verification on mainstream porn sites does absolutely zilch against teenagers accessing porn. There are countless other ways of obtaining porn. Even DDG with the safety off will provide plenty of it.
- deleted 10mo ago
  [deleted]
kevmo 10mo ago
I was getting a haircut last week and chatting about our kids with the stylist, who said (basically): "I just started letting my 7 year old on Roblox. I know its full of pedophiles. I told him to come to me or his older brother if anyone tries to talk to him." If the million reports of Mark Zuckerberg enabling pedophiles and scam artists haven't made it clear, the executives of these tech companies just don't care. They will sell children into sexual slavery if it improves next quarter's numbers.
- rhplus 10mo ago
  The drip-feed of mindless brain-rot, micro-payments, and cyber-bullying should be much higher up the list of reasons for not letting a 7 year old use Roblox (and YouTube and FaceBook and…)
turblety 10mo ago
There seems to be a big movement (UK specifically) from governments using age gateing as an excuse to increase surveillance and online tracking. I don't know where Roblox is based or it's policies, but it's likely they are just implementing what the government has forced them to do. We need to push back against governments that try and restrict the freedom of the internet and educate them on better regulations. Why can sites not dictate the content they provide, then let device providers provide optional parental controls. Governments forcing companies to upload your passport/ID, upload pictures/videos of your face, is dangerous and we are going to see a huge increase of fraud and privacy breaches, all while reducing our freedoms and rights online.
- anon84873628 10mo ago
  IMO it should not be hard for large services like Roblox and Instagram to get together with device makers to come up with a sensible solution. When you create a new profile on Netflix you mark it as "kids" and voila. Devices should have kid profiles with lots of sane defaults. The parent profiles have a thorough monitoring and governance features that are dead simple to use. As always it's not perfect but it will go a long way. Just getting a majority of parents on sane defaults will help unknot the broader coordination problems.
- phatfish 10mo ago
  I see lots of claims about governments using age gating to "track" people, but no evidence. Your last point about uploading ID documents to random online services (which i agree is a privacy risk) would be solved with a government digital ID. That is never going to happen it seems, as -- in the UK at least -- people go crazy whenever it is mentioned. Despite "the government" having the ability to track whatever they wanted already, should they care to. Age gating discussions always devolve into some fantasy land were people are arguing for children to have access to porn and other inappropriate material, and happily construct some straw man where age gates lead to censorship for everyone. If your government wanted to censor the internet they can do it without age gates. As a parent I am happy to have society agree on some basic rules around what children can do online, as there are rules on what children can do in the real world. Yes, I know all the come back arguments about how it is my responsibility as a parent. Don't worry, I will be responsible for what my children do online when they are older. But in the end a society raises children, and society should agree a limit on what children can be exposed to online.
btown 10mo ago
One aspect of this normalization of photo uploading is that, if a platform allows user-generated content that can splash a modal to kids, a bad actor can do things like say “you need to re-verify or you’ll lose all your in-game currency, go here” and then collect photo identification without even needing to compromise identity verification providers! I truly fear the harm that will be done before legislators realize what they’ve created. One only hopes that this prevents the EU and US from doing something similar.
- pfraze 10mo ago
  I’m sorry to say that a number of US states have instituted age verification laws over the past year
  - pixl97 10mo ago
    Aka, morality laws mostly.
- kspacewalk2 10mo ago
  The fundamental question that needs answering is: should we actually prevent minors below the age of X from accessing social media site Y? Is the harm done significant enough to warrant providing parents with a technical solution for giving them control over which sites their X-aged child signs up, and a solution that like actually works? Obviously pinky-swear "over 13?" checkboxes don't work, so this currently does not exist. You can work through robustness issues like the one you bring up (photo uploading may not be a good method), we can discuss privacy trade-offs like adults without pretending this is the first time we legitimately need to make a privacy-functionality or privacy-societal need trade-off, etc. Heck, you can come up with various methods where not much privacy needs trading off, something pseudonymous and/or cryptographic and/or legislated OS-level device flags checked on signup and login. But it makes no sense to jump to the minutiae without addressing the fundamental question.
  - array_key_first 10mo ago
    The real solution, IMO, is a second internet. Domain names will be whitelisted, not blacklisted, and you must submit an application to some body or something.
irusensei 10mo ago
I think the way Roblox is doing right now separating the users in age groups just makes it easier for predators to find victim.
- jacobsenscott 10mo ago
  Governments and corporations are never interested in protecting children - they don't vote, and they don't have money. So making it "easier for predators to find victims" is not a failure of the policy.
  - account42 10mo ago
    People who do care about their children or children in general do vote though. Not that politicians care that much about what their voters want once elected.
bigfatkitten 10mo ago
My kids also know that as far as the internet is concerned, their date of birth is 1 January 1970.
- apricot 10mo ago
  By an amazing coincidence, that's also my date of birth, as well as my kids'.
- satiric 10mo ago
  I wondered for a while why I got so many ads targeted towards seniors when I made my facebook account as a kid. Then I remembered my birth year was set to 1905. I guess I should let the Guinness World Records know that their listing for oldest man in the world is inaccurate.
cortesoft 10mo ago
Having to manage my kids online accounts have been a nightmare. So many different rules, with arbitrary age limits on things that go completely against my own rules for what my kids can do at different ages, with weird methods for linking or verifying or sharing/transferring purchases. I have gotten so frustrated trying to get accounts set up so we can play together.
- theshrike79 10mo ago
  My favourite is Youtube. I can get Youtube Family so my kids don't get ads. But if your kids are under 13, they can't be added to a family account on YT - so they MUST watch the ads. Can someone explain the logic here?
doctorpangloss 10mo ago
> She said that her and all her friends know not to ever upload a picture of themselves to the Internet (good job, fellow Other Parents!!) it's a video game, it's an aesthetic experience, if uploading a photo of yourself doesn't feel good, it's valid to say, it's a bad game or whatever. but by some more objective criteria, this photo upload thing that you are saying doesn't really matter. they are uploading photos of themselves to the Internet all the time (what do you think Apple Photos is). of course, with kids, i can understand the challenges of making nuanced guidelines, but by that measure, it's simpler to just say, playing roblox is kind of a waste of time, or suggesting better games to play, rather than making it about some feel-good nonsense i'm-a-savvy-Internet-user rule. it's what this whole article is about, providing real answers, but who under 18 years old is going to read the whole thing?
- ryandrake 10mo ago
  > they are uploading photos of themselves to the Internet all the time I worried about this at first, too. But I also check, like a good parent. And to my surprise my kid already learned on her own how to mask/blur faces and even details about the inside of her room when sharing photos. And her friends do, too. They are surprisingly savvy about Internet privacy and risks for their age--certainly more cognizant of the dangers than my generation was growing up with the Wild West Internet.
WhyNotHugo 10mo ago
> These companies need to stop normalizing the sharing of personal private photos. It's literally the opposite direction from good Internet hygiene, especially for kids! While I agree with you entirely, it's important to remember that these companies want to mis-educate the masses (and especially children) against their own interest. It's not just unfortunate that they're normalising uploading a photo just to play a videogame: it's an intentional choice to de-normalise privacy and normalise deeper and more in-grained online stalking.
- jeroenhd 10mo ago
  Most of these companies don't even want to add age gates. They get in the way of their normal predatory marketing schemes, the little bits of extra data isn't worth it. Stupid laws are forcing these companies to implement something. In most countries, there is no privacy-preserving way to verify that you're old enough digitally, so when these companies are forced to get something good enough going, they're going to go with the cheapest offer they can legally get away with. Governments know this. They want certain websites to disappear entirely, and for certain platforms to just stop existing. Both sides are using weaponised incompetence to blame the other and users end up losing regardless of whose fault it is.
crooked-v 10mo ago
The funniest case I've seen was somebody fooling one of these tools using Gmod by playing with the face sliders of those stock Half-Life characters.
raxxorraxor 10mo ago
But I also don't want the alternative, that I have to ID myself. Anonymous and pseudonymous access is the best solution. The EU tries to introduce age verification, simultaneously it currently talks about sharing police data with the US for the Visa waiver program. If this verification data is collected and normalised, we will constantly have to fight how much data that is required for auth and it can just be legislated.

next_xibalba 10mo ago

[flagged]

polski-g 10mo ago
What evidence led you to believe this, when controlling for heritability?
- gjsman-1000 10mo ago
  [flagged]
  - irusensei 10mo ago
    I'm trying to find the contact for the does-not-imply-causation dept but I think I lost my slashdot account in 2004.
    - gjsman-1000 10mo ago
      Nobody studying this issue, from the UK government to independent researchers to NGOs, says this anymore. PornHub in legal filings never uses this argument, but instead focuses on rights to expression rather than dispute the claim. The causation is clear, documented, proven. Increased pornography exposure with dangerous behaviors, causes those dangerous behaviors to be repeated, even when participants are warned of the risk. At this point, denial is like saying flat earth has merit.
      - idiotsecant 10mo ago
        So what? The problem here would be if these activities are nonconsensual. I've seen no evidence of that. If you're just trying to thought police ideas that lead to people doing risky things you better drop your clutching pearls and pick up a pencil cause that's a long list, some of which are probably things you do.
        irishcoffee 10mo ago
        The internet in a nutshell: I’m right and if you don’t agree, you’re wrong. Facts need not apply.
      - iamnothere 10mo ago
        The extreme danger of marijuana and its role as a “gateway drug” was also extensively studied and “proven” by a handful of moralist researchers and groups who had an agenda to push. The highly biased “researchers” who pursued this were often directly funded by the US government. And now? This research has been debunked. It’s likely bad for people prone to mental illness, especially when taken regularly and in excess, and even stable people shouldn’t overdo it, much like alcohol. But it’s not going to cause lasting harm to most people. Regarding porn, your argument from authority is extremely suspect. Porn is considered morally suspect due to lingering Puritan values, and if there is a research deficit (which I doubt) then it is likely because reputable researchers avoid the topic due to reputational damage. Sex researchers in general have often faced harassment, targeted government inquiries, and threats. So in short, I don’t believe you here. I haven’t personally met anyone whose life was negatively affected by porn, except for a couple of people who were in relationships where one partner considered porn to be a form of infidelity. Utterly ridiculous from my perspective. Edit: Total bunk. After looking into it, reputable meta-studies have showed no link between porn and sexual violence, ED, or mental health issues. It’s trivial to find this research, search for it if you care.
  - john01dav 10mo ago
    > combined with studies showing there is zero safe threshold without brain damage markers in the blood? Are you saying that there's zero safe threshold of choking, or for viewing porn? (To be clear, choking someone without consent is assault and unacceptable, whether a blood test shows damage or not.)
    - gjsman-1000 10mo ago
      A. There is zero safe threshold for choking. B. Choking is inherently, obviously, dangerous. C. Pornography has caused choking behaviors among youth to go from negligible to over 38%. D. Brain damage is measurable in anyone who has been choked. E. As such, pornography does, in fact, have blame for encouraging this kind of experimentation. F. If "fighting words" and "misinformation" shouldn't be free speech, who is to say pornography does not incite risk, when other things can?
      - array_key_first 10mo ago
        The argument I commonly hear of pornography causing more extreme sexual experimentation is a very weak one. I know, for sure, pornography did not cause me to be a homosexual. Kinks, BDSM, and what have you, have always existed and will continue to exist. The solution is teaching safe ways to participate, and the importance of consent. A desire to just wipe them out is naive, and will not work.
      - stickfigure 10mo ago
        > Pornography has caused choking behaviors among youth to go from negligible to over 38%. That which is asserted without evidence, can be dismissed without evidence.
      - d1sxeyes 10mo ago
        I have a lot of concerns about your presentation of this. A. It’s also true that there is no safe level of alcohol consumption and yet we sort of see experimentation with alcohol as a rite of passage. B. I mean, so is walking out your front door. I don’t see this as adding much to point A. C. This is a big jump. First, we see more openness about sexual behaviour. While I’m prepared to agree that it has likely gone up, I would not be comfortable with the degree you imply. Second, while I do think it is likely that pornography has indeed contributed to this, pornography has also likely contributed to an increase in experimentation in general, with other sexual behaviours also likely seeing an increase (for example oral/anal sex, water play, etc). D. I find this very hard to accept at face value. Do you have studies/evidence to support this claim? E. Yes, I would likely agree, although whether “encourages sexual experimentation” is a bad thing or not is a question for further debate. F. This conflates some very weird things. “Fighting words” are a specific type of restricted speech (i.e. you can’t go round shouting “I’ll kill you”). Sharing misinformation is broadly not illegal (except in very specific sets of circumstances-fraud, inciting violence, etc.). It’s also broadly speaking not against the law to tell the truth. “Some people like to choke each other during sex” is a true statement, even if it’s harmful. Do you support a ban on porn all together? That’s quite a radical view.
  - dangus 10mo ago
    > Before the widespread adoption of pornography, this rate was near 0%. Big giant citation needed on that one. How would it ever have been near 0%? First, I’d like to point out that we don’t make other media illegal or age gated with privacy-compromising tactics because it depicts harmful things. There’s no age verification gate for watching movies and TV that depict murder and other serious crimes. You can watch Gaston drink beer and fall to his death and the Beast bleed in a kids movie rated G. Watching NFL football, boxing, and UFC fighting isn’t illegal even those sports conclusively cause brain damage. Pornography is singled out because it’s taboo and for no other reason. People won’t politically defend it because nobody can publicly admit that they like watching it, even though most people consume it. Over 90% of men and over 60% of women in the last month. [1] Second, what I see missing from your links is really solid studied link to an increase in choking injuries directly caused by changes in pornography trends and viewership. Were these kinks just underreported in the past? Heck, I read 4 of your linked articles and none of them actually compared the rate of choking injury over time, they just sort of pointed it out as something that exists and jumped to blaming pornography. I am perfectly willing to accept your hypothesis but I don’t think we’ve been anywhere near scientific enough about evaluating it, and even if that was the case, we don’t really treat pornography the same as other media just like I mentioned. We need a lot more information. Personally, I think there’s nothing wrong with sexual pleasure and believe it’s stigmatized way too much. I also believe that normalizing sexual pleasure helps people talk about consent and avoids issues like doing a sexual act when you don’t enjoy it. [1] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30358432/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30358432/
  - stickfigure 10mo ago
    > Before the widespread adoption of pornography, this rate was near 0% Bullshit. Men and women have been dying of autoerotic asphyxiation long before the internet. And we only hear about the ones that fuck up badly enough to make the news. I'm puzzled by this phenomenon myself, but there is apparently a significant minority of women who enjoy getting choked in bed: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s13178-025-01247-9 https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s13178-025-01247-9 This doesn't excuse people who choke without consent, but there's something going on here waaaay more complex than "see it in porn, do it". Humans are weird.
    - gjsman-1000 10mo ago
      Nobody is saying that nobody did this before. We are saying now that it is a health crisis, objectively. You're the guy saying that 110 MPH speed limits can't be responsible for crashes because people also died at 20 MPH.
      - stickfigure 10mo ago
        You did in fact just say that nobody did it before - or very strongly implied it based on how sloppy you want to be with the phrase "near 0%". Stop pretending you know what that number is.
pixl97 10mo ago
>it might prevent that On the global internet... good luck with that. Oh, they'll ban us from looking at other countries net's soon enough for our safety.
Barrin92 10mo ago
>and this seems like it might prevent that sorry but we're on the internet. You can type the literal words 'hardcore pornography' into any search engine of your choice and find about fifteen million bootleg porn sites hosted on some micro-nation that don't care about your age verification. In fact ironically, this will almost certainly drive people to websites that host anything.
drnick1 10mo ago
Age verification on mainstream porn sites does absolutely zilch against teenagers accessing porn. There are countless other ways of obtaining porn. Even DDG with the safety off will provide plenty of it.
deleted 10mo ago
[deleted]

kevmo 10mo ago

I was getting a haircut last week and chatting about our kids with the stylist, who said (basically): "I just started letting my 7 year old on Roblox. I know its full of pedophiles. I told him to come to me or his older brother if anyone tries to talk to him." If the million reports of Mark Zuckerberg enabling pedophiles and scam artists haven't made it clear, the executives of these tech companies just don't care. They will sell children into sexual slavery if it improves next quarter's numbers.

rhplus 10mo ago
The drip-feed of mindless brain-rot, micro-payments, and cyber-bullying should be much higher up the list of reasons for not letting a 7 year old use Roblox (and YouTube and FaceBook and…)

turblety 10mo ago

There seems to be a big movement (UK specifically) from governments using age gateing as an excuse to increase surveillance and online tracking. I don't know where Roblox is based or it's policies, but it's likely they are just implementing what the government has forced them to do. We need to push back against governments that try and restrict the freedom of the internet and educate them on better regulations. Why can sites not dictate the content they provide, then let device providers provide optional parental controls. Governments forcing companies to upload your passport/ID, upload pictures/videos of your face, is dangerous and we are going to see a huge increase of fraud and privacy breaches, all while reducing our freedoms and rights online.

anon84873628 10mo ago
IMO it should not be hard for large services like Roblox and Instagram to get together with device makers to come up with a sensible solution. When you create a new profile on Netflix you mark it as "kids" and voila. Devices should have kid profiles with lots of sane defaults. The parent profiles have a thorough monitoring and governance features that are dead simple to use. As always it's not perfect but it will go a long way. Just getting a majority of parents on sane defaults will help unknot the broader coordination problems.
phatfish 10mo ago
I see lots of claims about governments using age gating to "track" people, but no evidence. Your last point about uploading ID documents to random online services (which i agree is a privacy risk) would be solved with a government digital ID. That is never going to happen it seems, as -- in the UK at least -- people go crazy whenever it is mentioned. Despite "the government" having the ability to track whatever they wanted already, should they care to. Age gating discussions always devolve into some fantasy land were people are arguing for children to have access to porn and other inappropriate material, and happily construct some straw man where age gates lead to censorship for everyone. If your government wanted to censor the internet they can do it without age gates. As a parent I am happy to have society agree on some basic rules around what children can do online, as there are rules on what children can do in the real world. Yes, I know all the come back arguments about how it is my responsibility as a parent. Don't worry, I will be responsible for what my children do online when they are older. But in the end a society raises children, and society should agree a limit on what children can be exposed to online.

btown 10mo ago

One aspect of this normalization of photo uploading is that, if a platform allows user-generated content that can splash a modal to kids, a bad actor can do things like say “you need to re-verify or you’ll lose all your in-game currency, go here” and then collect photo identification without even needing to compromise identity verification providers! I truly fear the harm that will be done before legislators realize what they’ve created. One only hopes that this prevents the EU and US from doing something similar.

pfraze 10mo ago
I’m sorry to say that a number of US states have instituted age verification laws over the past year
- pixl97 10mo ago
  Aka, morality laws mostly.
kspacewalk2 10mo ago
The fundamental question that needs answering is: should we actually prevent minors below the age of X from accessing social media site Y? Is the harm done significant enough to warrant providing parents with a technical solution for giving them control over which sites their X-aged child signs up, and a solution that like actually works? Obviously pinky-swear "over 13?" checkboxes don't work, so this currently does not exist. You can work through robustness issues like the one you bring up (photo uploading may not be a good method), we can discuss privacy trade-offs like adults without pretending this is the first time we legitimately need to make a privacy-functionality or privacy-societal need trade-off, etc. Heck, you can come up with various methods where not much privacy needs trading off, something pseudonymous and/or cryptographic and/or legislated OS-level device flags checked on signup and login. But it makes no sense to jump to the minutiae without addressing the fundamental question.
- array_key_first 10mo ago
  The real solution, IMO, is a second internet. Domain names will be whitelisted, not blacklisted, and you must submit an application to some body or something.

irusensei 10mo ago

I think the way Roblox is doing right now separating the users in age groups just makes it easier for predators to find victim.

jacobsenscott 10mo ago
Governments and corporations are never interested in protecting children - they don't vote, and they don't have money. So making it "easier for predators to find victims" is not a failure of the policy.
- account42 10mo ago
  People who do care about their children or children in general do vote though. Not that politicians care that much about what their voters want once elected.

bigfatkitten 10mo ago

My kids also know that as far as the internet is concerned, their date of birth is 1 January 1970.

apricot 10mo ago
By an amazing coincidence, that's also my date of birth, as well as my kids'.
satiric 10mo ago
I wondered for a while why I got so many ads targeted towards seniors when I made my facebook account as a kid. Then I remembered my birth year was set to 1905. I guess I should let the Guinness World Records know that their listing for oldest man in the world is inaccurate.

cortesoft 10mo ago

Having to manage my kids online accounts have been a nightmare. So many different rules, with arbitrary age limits on things that go completely against my own rules for what my kids can do at different ages, with weird methods for linking or verifying or sharing/transferring purchases. I have gotten so frustrated trying to get accounts set up so we can play together.

theshrike79 10mo ago
My favourite is Youtube. I can get Youtube Family so my kids don't get ads. But if your kids are under 13, they can't be added to a family account on YT - so they MUST watch the ads. Can someone explain the logic here?

doctorpangloss 10mo ago

> She said that her and all her friends know not to ever upload a picture of themselves to the Internet (good job, fellow Other Parents!!) it's a video game, it's an aesthetic experience, if uploading a photo of yourself doesn't feel good, it's valid to say, it's a bad game or whatever. but by some more objective criteria, this photo upload thing that you are saying doesn't really matter. they are uploading photos of themselves to the Internet all the time (what do you think Apple Photos is). of course, with kids, i can understand the challenges of making nuanced guidelines, but by that measure, it's simpler to just say, playing roblox is kind of a waste of time, or suggesting better games to play, rather than making it about some feel-good nonsense i'm-a-savvy-Internet-user rule. it's what this whole article is about, providing real answers, but who under 18 years old is going to read the whole thing?

ryandrake 10mo ago
> they are uploading photos of themselves to the Internet all the time I worried about this at first, too. But I also check, like a good parent. And to my surprise my kid already learned on her own how to mask/blur faces and even details about the inside of her room when sharing photos. And her friends do, too. They are surprisingly savvy about Internet privacy and risks for their age--certainly more cognizant of the dangers than my generation was growing up with the Wild West Internet.

WhyNotHugo 10mo ago

> These companies need to stop normalizing the sharing of personal private photos. It's literally the opposite direction from good Internet hygiene, especially for kids! While I agree with you entirely, it's important to remember that these companies want to mis-educate the masses (and especially children) against their own interest. It's not just unfortunate that they're normalising uploading a photo just to play a videogame: it's an intentional choice to de-normalise privacy and normalise deeper and more in-grained online stalking.

jeroenhd 10mo ago
Most of these companies don't even want to add age gates. They get in the way of their normal predatory marketing schemes, the little bits of extra data isn't worth it. Stupid laws are forcing these companies to implement something. In most countries, there is no privacy-preserving way to verify that you're old enough digitally, so when these companies are forced to get something good enough going, they're going to go with the cheapest offer they can legally get away with. Governments know this. They want certain websites to disappear entirely, and for certain platforms to just stop existing. Both sides are using weaponised incompetence to blame the other and users end up losing regardless of whose fault it is.

crooked-v 10mo ago

The funniest case I've seen was somebody fooling one of these tools using Gmod by playing with the face sliders of those stock Half-Life characters.

raxxorraxor 10mo ago

But I also don't want the alternative, that I have to ID myself. Anonymous and pseudonymous access is the best solution. The EU tries to introduce age verification, simultaneously it currently talks about sharing police data with the US for the Visa waiver program. If this verification data is collected and normalised, we will constantly have to fight how much data that is required for auth and it can just be legislated.