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Online age-verification tools for child safety are surveilling adults
- Jemm 8mo agoOr we could let parents raise their own damn kids without making our lives worse. Parents can sign up for parental monitoring or better yet spend some time with their kids.
- basilikum 8mo ago403 for me https://web.archive.org/web/20260308223909/https://www.cnbc.com/2026/03/08/social-media-child-safety-internet-ai-surveillance.html https://web.archive.org/web/20260308223909/https://www.cnbc....
- pickleglitch 8mo agoOf course they are. That is their purpose.
- karlkloss 8mo agoTo the surprise of absolutely nobody.
- Aurornis 8mo ago> Social media company Discord announced plans in February to roll out mandatory age verification globally, Discord’s age verification is optional and only required to disable the image content filter, join adult servers, and a couple other features. I’m not saying it’s a good decision, but I am getting tired of the repeated claim that it’s mandatory to go do age verification to use the service. This lazy reporting is hurting the messaging because readers will believe that mandatory age verification was implemented and everything is fine, so new laws will not change anything for the worse. It needs to be clear that age verification laws would change the situation considerably, not be a nothingburger. I don’t plan to do the Discord age verification and neither do most of the people I interact with on Discord. It’s not mandatory. I don’t recommend anyone rush to do the Discord age verification unless you really need to for some reason. Don’t believe all of the lazy articles saying it’s mandatory.
- chewbacha 8mo agoMaybe! But laws like California’s new law and the Texas law both are making it mandatory from a legal compliance point of view. The direction of these restrictions is not “optional”
- righthand 8mo agoIt will be when everyone starts leaking from the big players. Age verification will make software development impossible or be impossible to implement without huge investment.
- ajsnigrutin 8mo ago> Age verification will make software development impossible or be impossible to implement without huge investment. Not really, you'll just be forced to use services from eg google or meta. And pay for them. And share user data.
- righthand 8mo agoAnd if my foss software doesnt implement those systems? Or someone downloads my foss software and removes those restrictions?
- iamnothere 8mo agoWe will go back to the days of underground networks, offline if needed. NNCP, UUCP, and FIDO.
- jimz 8mo agoJust because it's not openly shared does not mean that there aren't large databases of everything from working refresh keys to entire profiles indexed out there for the large services. Most data leaks and breaches don't get reported, or acknowledged, or are downplayed in their potential effect (but weirdly, also given more weight than they deserve since it becomes pointless to have so much data that doesn't add anything new to, say, a profile of a person)
- john_strinlai 8mo ago>An FTC spokesperson told CNBC that companies must limit how collected information is used. [...] The agency pointed to existing rules requiring firms to retain personal information only as long as reasonably necessary and to safeguard its confidentiality and integrity. the very same rules that have allowed literally every single piece of my data to be leaked several separate times, and now i have free credit monitoring instead of privacy? and all of those companies still operate normally, as if nothing ever happened? very neat. >Discord said it is using the additional time this year to add more verification options, including credit cards, more transparency on vendors and technical detail of how age verification will work and why didnt we start with credit cards? instead of facial recognition with peter thiel? (this is a rhetorical question)
- clumsysmurf 8mo ago> now i have free credit monitoring Might not even matter ... "TransUnion and Experian, two of the three major credit bureaus, have started dismissing a larger share of consumer complaints without help since the Trump administration began dismantling the CFPB." https://www.propublica.org/article/credit-report-mistakes-cfpb-experian-transunion https://www.propublica.org/article/credit-report-mistakes-cf...
- ArchieScrivener 8mo agoHow much money did the CFPB actually give back to wronged consumers?
- m4ck_ 8mo agoPre-trump's attempts to eliminate the department, almost $20 billion. https://www.consumerfinance.gov/enforcement/enforcement-by-the-numbers/ https://www.consumerfinance.gov/enforcement/enforcement-by-t...
- gibspaulding 8mo agoAnd one would hope that the purpose of the CFPB would be to dissuade lenders from wronging consumers in the first place, meaning the net benefit to consumers was likely much higher.
- bilekas 8mo agoThe fact that these tools are 'active' centric, i.e : You must perform an action to validate you're NOT a child, these will never protect children. A predator simply needs not to verify anything and appear benign and ironically more anonymous than law abiding people. I'm not saying the inverse is the answer either, just that if anyone without an agenda of surveillance looked at this for a second, the penny would have dropped. So I can only assume that this was the purpose the whole time.
- ej31 8mo agoAge verification doesn't stop determined bad actors, it just builds a database of everyone who cooperated...........
- BLKNSLVR 8mo agoKnow they sheep, the better to keep them penned.
- bilekas 8mo agoExactly my point.. And all the industry experts who they must have consulted in to write the laws are coincidently invested in personal data harvesting. Who could have foreseen this happening.
- SV_BubbleTime 8mo agoNow do Covid… tracking the non-compliant is surely the smaller task.
- kristopolous 8mo agoSob stories about children are always weaponized for oppression. It was used to bash interracial marriage, gay rights, suppress dissent, attack the first amendment, and now this. Whenever you hear some dramatic story involving kids about how you have to live a little less free, know the tactic.
- cultofmetatron 8mo ago
- agos 8mo agois this the great innovation that the GDPR is stifling in Europe? (sorry for the snark)
- beeforpork 8mo agoYou don't say.
- toby3d 8mo agoIt's curious why there are no reverse systems where, when accessing an adult resource, you have to prove that you are a child?
- MarkusQ 8mo agoI've seen some forums (mostly political) where you have to prove that you can act like a child to be welcome. So that's kind of like what you're talking about? (If anyone is offended by this, don't worry, I'm talking about the other side; I'm sure your side is full of reasonable adults who just get a little carried away sometimes.)
- juleiie 8mo agoNever provide such information. Forge it if you must
- a456463 8mo agoCompanies have lost our data so many times with lost penalties. Anybody remember Cambridge Analytica? Hell no company is getting my personal data.
- juleiie 8mo agoNot sending your ID to remote server is intuitively correct. What if they will force you to do it though? Is your wallet big enough to afford to say no and unplug? Mine is but what about the 99%?
- vadelfe 8mo agoThe uncomfortable part is that they try to solve a real problem (protecting minors) by requiring universal identification. In practice this means every adult has to prove who they are just to access any part of the internet. Once that infrastructure exists, it’s hard to imagine it not expanding beyond its original purpose.
- SAI_Peregrinus 8mo agoIt also means any child abuser who wants access to children away from the eyes of other adults just has to avoid providing ID.
- RHSeeger 8mo agoIts hard to imagine that it won't launch _already_ expanded beyond it's original purpose. My expectation is that there will be precisely 0 seconds between it and it being abused. The people building it will plan the abuse before it's even launched.
- squeefers 8mo ago[dead]
- thephyber 8mo agoDiscord specifically wanted to solve this by assuming everyone was a minor until they proved their age. Minors still have access to most spaces unless that space (or DMs with adults) was flagged / identified as adult-content. This is a pretty clear counter example to your snowball fallacy.
- casey2 8mo agoProtecting children means protecting them from people who wish to harm them, that includes the government and platform owners, since these laws don't provide any actual protections to children from those two entities it's reasonable to assume that the law is trying to facilitate child exploitation rather than prevent it. You have to keep in mind your idea of child protection is likely different from most of Americas'. The law makers' idea is to maximally enable them to perform (largely) uncompensated white collar work. Protected means that by the time they are 22 they have maximally warped their brain into an economically viable specialty and are in massive personal debt. If they make Roblox a $1M in the meantime of course that money won't go to their brainwashing, that would make them lazy.
- Kapura 8mo agono shit, this was obviously the point. the people who said so all along were correct, the people who insisted it wasn't were not speaking in good faith. we, as a society, need to stop taking companies at their word when they say that the obvious harms that are right around the corner are overblown.
- ByteBlaster 8mo agoThe EU is rolling out the EUDI system this year where citizens can verify their age (>16, >18, >21) without revealing any personal information. This is a solved problem over there.
- hellojesus 8mo agoDoesn't the act of notifying >16 today and >18 tomorrow leak birthdates?
- kiicia 8mo agowhich is nothing in comparison to leaking all of personal information you can also introduce some jitter like changing age range only once a week/month/year for everyone
- travisjungroth 8mo agoBirthday, zip code and gender is enough to uniquely identify most Americans.
- stephbook 8mo agoWell don't reveal your birthday then. Wait 5 days to confirm >18. If you run into a liquor store yelling "Im finally 18, here's proof." that's on you?
- casey2 8mo agoOf course you can still break the law. People are complaining that it's now illegal to do what you suggested 1 it requires DOB 2 it requires DOB to be accurate
- gowld 8mo agoIf you want privacy you need to fuzz the transition. Many platforms support that today. Or you can create a separate account when you graduate. But also, knowing someone's birthday without trying it to other information greatly reduces the risk of harm.
- rnxrx 8mo agoThis is probably fantastic news for the VPN providers. Lots of people who otherwise wouldn't have bothered are now likely incorporating VPN connectivity into their daily routine. This very obviously includes kids. I also wouldn't be surprised if there were plenty of people only dimly aware of the idea of a VPN who are now sitting up and taking note.
- rationalist 8mo agoAnd kids will do very stupid things to get "free" VPN access. Such as following directions from a YouTube video that instructs them to do sketchy things.
- a456463 8mo agoAnd old people will do stupid things as downloading APKs as well. But in both cases, the smart people and the careful people have to pay the cost of supporting the in-experienced whether via constant surveillance or via no more accessing apps to your own computer or phone
- triceratops 8mo agoVPNs only work while there are jurisdictions that don't have age verification laws and services don't ban access from those jurisdictions.
- commandlinefan 8mo agoThat's technically true right now, but I keep holding out hope that these sorts of draconian restrictions will drive even harder to stamp out privacy-preserving solutions. I'm old enough to remember the days before the internet well, when _everything_ was made for children because you never knew who was and wasn't. I was afraid that legislation would drive the internet back to public television (as it seems to be determined to do) and I was really grateful for Freenet when it was first announced. It never took off, but not because it didn't work, just because at the time not enough people thought it was necessary. Maybe this will be the push to get enough people on board to make it (or something like it) feasible? Anonymous communication is a technically solvable problem, as long as enough people agree that it's worth pursuing.
- antonyh 8mo agoMy default reaction to the introduction of any age-verification for any service is the closing account. Goodbye Discord, account closed out of protest. The second option is ignoring the verification request. Goodbye online-gaming-with-strangers on Xbox. (I see this as a positive). Same goes for Ubisoft who aggressively wanted my secret papers to verify my identity. I've yet to come across anything I want or need outside banking or government use where age verification benefits me, or is so useful/important that I would willingly hand over critical secret documents. I've not even needed to use a VPN for anything. It doesn't mean it won't happen, but when it does, option #1 or #2 is going to cover everything. Which circles back to the main point here - if I ignore it, then effectively I get identified as a non-adult. How does this protect anybody? (UK-based, might not be the same everywhere)
- gowld 8mo agoWhat's wrong with being flagged a non-adult? Being a non-adult means you are limited to supervised child-safe spaces. Child-safe doesn't mean "no adults" allowed. It means "monitored and censored"
- antonyh 8mo agoAside from the concept of adults masquerading as non-adults, nothing so long as those spaces are moderated fully. I have no problem with skipping the verification, but I do question the moderation of most services. The problems start when the space become not-for-children and identity validation is mandatory to use them, which will exclude people like me who categorically refuse to hand over personal secrets in order to have access. It does not warrant the inherent risk involved with granting access to personal details unrelated to the service offered. I reckon this will happen when someone decides it's better commercially to make a service adult-only than to moderate non-adult accounts. It's a slippery slope, and a predictable next step once adult have become accustomed to handing over papers for some services to have to do it for many, if not all.
- deleted 8mo ago[deleted]
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- dizzy9 8mo agoAge verification inherently requires identity verification. The UK's Online Safety Act originally had a proposal that would allow users to purchase an ID code anonymously in cash from a corner store, presenting only ID to the cashier the same way as buying alcohol. This was never implemented, because it's more useful for the government and corporations to link all online usage to a government ID.
- gowld 8mo agoHow do you prevent selling those ID codes to kids?
- pickleglitch 8mo agoSame way you prevent selling beer to kids. Impose harsh penalties for violators.
- aidenn0 8mo agoThe same way you prevented adults buying pornography for kids prior to the web, and the way you prevent adults from buying beer for kids now. Namely, you don't prevent it (I was 11 when I first saw hardcore pornography, on a VHS tape, at a sleepover party), but it does place a (surmountable) barrier in the way, which will reduce access to some degree. The degree to which that happens depends on a lot of things that are hard to predict. We have culturally normalized access to a lot of things for children, and reversing that will likely take more than just changes to a law.
- dizzy9 8mo ago> presenting only ID to the cashier the same way as buying alcohol Selling alcohol to minors is illegal in the UK. Some do circumvent this by various means (e.g. fake ID or having an adult purchase on their behalf, both of which are also illegal), but the same is already true for the current age verification system.
- subscribed 8mo agoHow do you prevent kids verifying as adults? That's the same question. Meanwhile apparently 70% of Australian under-16's retrained/regained access to social media. See, even intrusive, surveillance and privacy-busting methods don't work.
- iam_circuit 8mo ago[flagged]
- bluescrn 8mo agoThe entire point is to de-anonymise adults. Especially in countries that are escalating the policing of online speech. If it was actually about kids, we'd have done it a long time ago. With more focus on things like porn and gambling (including 'loot box' gambling in games) rather than social media.
- rdevilla 8mo agoIt's by design. Pedonazis have been used as the justification for the surveillance apparatus for decades now. [0] "Cypherpunks Uncut." https://www.dailymotion.com/video/xt3hpb https://www.dailymotion.com/video/xt3hpb
- Scapeghost 8mo agoMan... How did yall white Westerners turn out to be the weakest people in the world? You were supposed to be the bastions of freedom and justice, and the rest of the world begrudgingly admired you for that and were slowly improving to become like you, but ever since 9/11/2001 the rich old people that rule you have been feeding you boogeymen to make you their complacent b*tches and you lay down and crawl along and accept everything without even a whimper. Now your countries are little different from Russia or China or Dubai etc where the old money cabals run everything, and it's not some third world backhole that was suffering already anyway, but you yourself that are the worst victims of all their laws and wars.
- deleted 8mo ago[deleted]
- rdevilla 8mo agoThe west is lost.
- boothby 8mo agoIt will live on, encoded in the weights of LLMs
- rabbitlord 8mo agoThe world is lost, I don't think it is any better in non-western countries.
- chii 8mo agoyep. You are not wrong. Those who trade freedom for security will obtain neither.
- graemep 8mo agoComplacency. The west had a golden age from the fall of the Soviet Union, removing their main rival. It also reinforced its reinforced its belief in the inevitably of progress (the "end of history" nonsense, for example). They cannot now cope with threats or danger. That said, comparing the west to Russia, China etc. is a gross exaggeration.
- iso1631 8mo agoWater is wet. All for making sites to send a header with restrictions as they apply in law (age rating per location for example -- so a site could send "US:16 US-TX:18 IE:14 GB:18 DE:16" etc), and even categorise as not required in law (category=gambling or category=healthcare) That gives the browser/app/accessing device the power to display or not display The second part of this is to empower parents -- let them choose the age rating which can only be changed with a parental code etc. Make this the law on all consumer commercial devices -- i.e phones, macbooks, windows. This is trivial and worthwhile. Yes some 15 year old will build something in python in a user session to work around it as they have a general purpose computer, that's a tiny amount of the problem. Solve the 90% problem first.
- throwaway2027 8mo ago>put people into mandatory age verification >most people will not verify their age >can't be sure they're an adult so treat everyone like children just in case >wait what? the trojan horse allows them to monitor and surveil them? I'm shocked. Shocked! Well, not that shocked.
- 21asdffdsa12 8mo agoAnd you could relatively well determine the age of a person, by looking at the age of his social graph. No kids knows more then 5 adults, except over family groups.. thuse age identification should be viable via social login even without beeing bound to a passport.
- throwway120385 8mo agoThe race will be on for children to gain as many adult contacts as possible so they can pass age verification.
- Nevermark 8mo ago> causing major headaches for social media companies attempting to strike a balance for users between legal compliance and privacy. I can see how the problem is real. (Not sarcasm.) In technical terms, "balance" is trivial. Put an air/security gap between information collected for age verification and the dossiers they have on users. In business terms, conflict. They have relentless incentives and pressures to collect, collate and leverage every bit of information that can increase their return on users. Legal gray and black behaviors are rampant and tolerated where protectable. The number of paths to a creative interpretation of "balance" is unbounded. Right up to the c-suite. It is sad, but self-aware, if they feel awkward trusting themselves with a mandated database full of tasty information they are not supposed to taste.
- CrzyLngPwd 8mo agoWell, that's shocking news...said no one ever.
- dylkil 8mo agoZK proofs are the solution to this problem. Its a pity this tech is not taken more seriously. I recently used a product that required proof of country (or rather proof of not from certain countries). It was a very painless experience with https://zkpassport.id/ https://zkpassport.id/
- commandlinefan 8mo agoYou're assuming that anonymous age verification is or ever was actually the end goal here.
- EmbarrassedHelp 8mo agoTheir comment is advertising a product that undermines user privacy, so I don't think they care.
- jimmyjazz14 8mo agoShocked! Shocked I tell you! Could not have seen that coming, nope not even for one second.
- deleted 8mo ago[deleted]
- Bender 8mo agoI'm just whipping the dead horse again. Surely the poor thing is beyond micronized dust at this point. This could have been avoided [1] if the real goal was to protect small children. No need for third parties or sharing sensitive data that will eventually be "ooopsie leaked totally by mistake" or outright sold/shared. No perfect, nothing is. [1] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46152074 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46152074
- olliebrkr 8mo agoForgive the profanity, but no shit.
- Frieren 8mo ago[flagged]
- choo-t 8mo ago> To let unknown adults contact children in private messages is harmful. But the verification is not to prove you're a children. Everyone will be considered children until proven otherwise, which will not prevent this scenario at all.
- bengale 8mo agoIdeological is the best way to describe the reaction by most people on here I think, counterproductive is another one. The reality is most normal people want children protected, unless we can come to the table with good options we are going to end up with a terrible one thrust upon us. Slippery slope arguments and things like it are not going to convince people, "just parent your kids" is not going to convince people. Not because they're wrong, but because on balance they feel like the damage to children being exposed to this content is worse than the potential civil liberty issues. It will be very difficult to explain to people why this is not the same as alcohol being age-gated and you having to prove your identity to access it. Technically there should be no real reason we cannot do age attestation without fully revealing our identities anyway, there will need to be trust at some point in the system but the reality of the real world is that there is already and it's far less secure than we'd like.
- bigyabai 8mo ago> there will need to be trust at some point in the system This is why you don't have a technologically effective solution, here. "Trust" in this situation is a weasel word for surveillance, just like the pinkie promise that Client Side Scanning would never be abused by the government. Trust would not stop child abuse, or meaningfully prevent access to online pornography. Trust is not a technical solution, it's a political goal. If you have a productive suggestion, now is the time to voice it. All of the non-technical hand wringing is not helpful either, and feeds into the slippery slope logic that HN should be avoiding.
- istillcantcode 8mo agoI always wonder if this will fix the bot and ad/click fraud issues rampant on the Internet.
- amarant 8mo agoIt would be refreshing to see someone try to use "but think of the children" to actually help children, instead of just screwing over adults.
- ErigmolCt 8mo agoThe uncomfortable part is that both sides are right: there are real harms to kids online, but tying real-world identity to routine internet access fundamentally changes what the internet has been for decades
- txrx0000 8mo agoDon't give them an inch. The US defense budget is $1T. They can't spend it all on surveillance, but let's say the tech companies and the government spends that much every year combined. Our victory condition is to increase the cost of surveillance and deanonymization to >$10K per person per year, which is very doable. Every little habit and precaution you take against online tracking will raise the cost, probably a lot more than you think. Spreading the word multiplies that. Every open-source program and protocol spec that aims to decentralize and anonymize is like an incinerator for the surveillance dollars. And if you're more competent than that, you may consider following in the footsteps of Daniel Bernstein or Edward Snowden and make some trillion-dollar dents. Anonymous and uncensored information exchange can prevent the vast majority of violent conflicts and shorten the necessary ones. Most violence in human history could have been prevented if every human being had 1) the ability to telepathically communicate with anyone else in the world without being eavesdropped, and 2) the ability to broadcast information anonymously to all of humanity in real-time. I will leave the details of why for you to deduce. These things are within reach right now for the first time in history. So we can and should build the decentralized web, and democratize the entire computing supply chain all the way down to chip fabbing and electricity generation. It is the greatest unrealized potential of the Internet, and we mustn't cede ground to ensure the path to that future remains open.
- Smar 8mo agoEven if they didn't track all possible details of current adults, they would contain the details of future adults. But maybe this is yet another attemption to produce mindless factory workers who won't rise against their lords even if someone inserts something something to them. While recording it, of course. For the profit... Erm, science.
- butz 8mo agoEven with all age verifications implemented, some parents will just toss their phone with tiktoks to their toddler, just to keep them quiet for a second or two.
- atoav 8mo agoWell if you want to ensure there person in front of a machine at that time is actually above certain age the only way to do it is to reveal their identity. Of couese one could imagine a cryptographic scheme where only a binary true comes back etc. but you could sell these like fake IDs to minors.
- deleted 8mo ago[deleted]
- asdff 8mo agoI am sympathetic to the privacy concerns. But to be honest I don't understand where they come from. Seems people are upset about being de anonymized on the internet. It was my understanding that it is trivial for the government to deanonymize you directly through their own tooling and trivial for private industry to deanonymize you through statistical analysis. So in that sense, what new thing are we fearing that will come to bear that hasn't come to bear already? Seems to me we are already in a post anonymous world and just maybe most people don't understand that memo until this story came out. Media runs with it so much because people read about it not because it is actually anything new per say.
- CamperBob2 8mo ago... says "asdff."
- asdff 8mo agoLack of creativity for that username really. Slapped home row and called it a day. But still I'm sure FBI knows exactly who I am. Same for European and middle eastern intelligence orgs. I'm sure ad networks all over the world have me fingerprinted, especially considering I run firefox and block ads, like that alone narrows me down to probably less than a million people globally, maybe substantially less than that. And this is just me spitballing. Imagine if this is your life's career, 40 hours a week for 40 years, plus a whole department of coworkers all on this effort. And multiple companies and governments each with their own departments on these efforts. How far this would have advanced by now what 30+ years into world wide public computer networks. How far ahead the state of the art actually is compared to what the public must assume. What lawmakers must assume.
- deleted 8mo ago[deleted]
- anonymous908213 8mo agoWe are not in a post-anonymous world. People who care can absolutely still remain anonymous, for the time being, with enough effort. However, the number of services we can use is being increasingly cut off by these measures. If the trend continues, then we will soon be in such a world, but we are not there yet. I hate comments like yours beyond belief. "Oh, I'm so smart. It's too much effort to stay private, so I've accepted that a dystopian surveillance state where every action anyone ever takes is recorded permanently and accessible to anyone is inevitable. Look at these fucking idiots worrying about this issue. Can't they just accept it will happen and shut up?" It is also worth noting that there is a distinction to be made between government and corporate surveillance. Even if it were possible for state actors to de-anonymize specific targets with reliability (it's not, with sufficient opsec), that is very different from a corporation being able to do it. Once a corporation has your data, they will sell it to anyone and everyone, making your entire life public record for anyone to find with a bit of digging. That is a threat model that is much more likely for Average Joe than being targeted by the government, but it is also a threat which is easier to defeat than that of a state actor. This cynical defeatism is baseless.
- ChrisMarshallNY 8mo agoWorking as designed. #notabug #wontfix
- Noaidi 8mo agoThe only good internet is a dead internet. Can anyone point to resources to help me end my habitual dependence on the internet?
- cindyllm 8mo ago[dead]
- gnarlouse 8mo agoI'm literally about to stop using the internet and go back to using cash for everything. These people can promptly (and sharply) go fuck themselves. so sick of mankind turning into a farm of the have-nots for the haves to profit off of. And I'm sick of being strapped to a population of have-nots that are too fuck-dumb to do anything about it.
- tsoukase 8mo agoAll actors already know your age with 99% accuracy: tech giants (Google/Meta etc through your searches/choices) and government though your... birth. The same holds for your gender, job, spouse and more. And they share all of it to many other endpoints. They just want age verification to cover the rest 1% and to transfer the responsibility to the user. The problem with any online age verification system is not only that many other info is leaked (personal, IP address etc) but even the fact that YOU apply for such a service and might use it for nasty things.
- abalone 8mo agoHere's a good interview with the director of the Free Speech Coalition on the consequences of these "protect the kids" moral panic laws, which include widespread surveillance, banning VPNs and raising the cost of running an independent website to unsustainable levels. Remember it's not just about pornography. It's anything deemed "harmful to minors" including platforms like Reddit, Bluesky or stuff conservative lawmakers think is harmful like discussion forums for LGBTQ people, sexual health information or dissident political opinions. They also examine how these laws, which are often backed by the religious Right, are getting support more broadly from people who see it as a way to rein in Big Tech who are creating "social media addiction" and so forth. And even within our industry there is a lot of money to be made by creating and selling compliance products, so even on forums like this you will find people advocating for them. "Another Internet Law That Punishes Everyone" - Power User Podcast 1/9/26: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8bnp3nmpK9g https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8bnp3nmpK9g
- alansaber 8mo agoIt's thinly veiled authoritarianism, just the state pushing for more control
- stephen_g 8mo agoThis is so much bigger than the “religious right” though, UK and Australia have far less of that and parties from both sides of politics here and in the UK seem to be competing to out-do each other with surveillance, censorship and control of adults online under the guise of ‘child safety’. And all being pushed so, so much harder in just the last couple of years, all at the same time. I don’t know what’s the source…
- SturgeonsLaw 8mo agoGovernments around the world have sought to control the internet and strip away anonymity for years, they've now found their foot-in-the-door moment so they're all going for it in their own way. Some of it is governments watching and copying each other, some of it is dialogue happening at international events, being driven by groups like the Global Coalition for Digital Safety: https://initiatives.weforum.org/global-coalition-for-digital-safety/home https://initiatives.weforum.org/global-coalition-for-digital... It's probably not being driven by one single group, there are a number of private and government orgs whos interests in controlling information converge.
- phendrenad2 8mo agoI'm not convinced, as some are, that this is about surveilling adults. I also don't think it's about protecting kids from predators. I think it's actually about keeping young people from talking to one another on the internet. The one thing the nascent United States totalitarian government fears is young people, because people over 18 have already joined the workforce and are just trying to survive in this hellish economy.
- Coderacer1 8mo agoDamn, can't have nothin nice
- davemp 8mo agoLeave parenting to the parents. Stopping bad/evil parents is not possible. The tiktok/youtube recommendation algorithms will undoubtedly cause more harm to minors than wandering onto an adult website and learning about how babies are made.
- womitt 8mo agoAnd as we all know it its USA monopoly privilege
- b00ty4breakfast 8mo agoI figured that it would go without saying that the only way to do age-verification is to stop everybody at the proverbial tollbooth. Did people really think they were going to avoid the stop-and-frisk?
- darthvaden 8mo agoSo what is Instagram doing?
- casey2 8mo agoWhy do people fall for propaganda so easily? Just sub out the words "child" with "memory" and you get Rust. The correct response is "Yes, you do cut out a class of memory related bugs, but you invented that class arbitrarily. There is no data suggesting that your class corresponds to reality." It makes sense for some specific situations, but the goal is always to move towards a classes society. Classes (including Types, Traits, Lifetimes) are something you use because you have to, not because you want to. They warp thinking (and traceability) in measurable ways.
- zoezoezoezoe 8mo agofor found in kitchen!