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In general, any proposal to use government ID for "age verification" over the internet is going to end in someone using it for mass surveillance, and it's proba
by AnthonyMouse 8mo ago
In general, any proposal to use government ID for "age verification" over the internet is going to end in someone using it for mass surveillance, and it's probably not wrong to suspect that as the intention to begin with.
There is no benefit in doing that because parents already know how old their kid is. They don't need the government to certify it to them, and then they can configure the kid's device not to display adult content.
Involving government ID is pointless because the parent, along with the large majority of the general population, has an adult ID, and therefore has the ability to configure the kid's device to display adult content or not even in the presence of an ID requirement if that's what they want to do. At which point an ID requirement is nothing but a footgun to "accidentally" compromise everyone's privacy. Unless that was the point.
- gzread 8mo agoThe California and Colorado laws don't involve any ID.
- AnthonyMouse 8mo agoAnd those are better than the ones that do involve ID, which also exist, but not as good as the thing where the service tells your device the rating of the content instead of the user telling the service their age.
- gzread 8mo agoHow would that work when the service has mixed content? You'd have to go to kids.facebook.com to get the child-friendly version? With a client-sent signal they can just filter it, the same way Accept-Language can automatically translate the UI.
- hellojesus 8mo agoBut why do we need it at the os level? Couldn't a parent just set a header in the browser for their kid and be done with it?
- labcomputer 8mo agoWhat happens when the kid installs a different browser?
- hellojesus 8mo agoAgreed. Which is why I think the OS level is dumb. Kids can just live boot or launch a vm or keylog their parents' account. If it's windows, they can just live boot into the OS and get access to pretty much all the files anyway, if the parent didn't encrypt things. My point is, if the implementation is trivial to bypass, why do we need this legislation? Just let the parents use the existing tools we have and parent.
- gzread 8mo agoUnless the VM app is marked 18+
- hellojesus 8mo agoYou'll just get the proliferation of the scammy "free proxies" that claim to host virtual vms for you that are actual vms that just log all your data.
- AnthonyMouse 8mo agoElements that contain adult content are tagged and then the user agent doesn't display them. This also has the extremely useful benefit of making you aware that something is being censored, because then it has a censorship box in place of the content. Whenever censorship is happening it should be flagrantly conspicuous rather than invisible.
- brabel 8mo agoI don't know what the proposal for doing this in the US looks like, but the alternative I mentioned with Verifiable Presentations being used was designed to strictly prevent tracking, hence it's useless for mass surveillance. I would love to engage on discussions about the technical side of it and how the EU is currently developing its own identification system based on that, but this thread seems to be purely about politics unfortunately.