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> It should be externalized to a degree. Why? We don't externalize age verification when buying alcohol or visiting the strip club. It's on the responsibility

> It should be externalized to a degree. Why? We don't externalize age verification when buying alcohol or visiting the strip club. It's on the responsibility of those establishments to verify age.

pstuart 7mo ago
Do we make contractors do age verification on their supplies when building a liquor store or strip club? The OS is a tool used by Meta, just like the utilities and the compute itself. Meta Apps can have age verification but it should be at the point of service, not the supply chain. And even if we were to agree to this, uploading your IDs to an untrusted third party is asking too much.
- alistairSH 7mo ago
  uploading your IDs to an untrusted third party is asking too much. So have the government do it? They already know who we are and when we were born.
  - kevin_thibedeau 7mo ago
    That requires trusting a government with a power that is likely to be abused.
    - ToucanLoucan 7mo ago
      The power to tell people how old someone is?
      - mgulick 7mo ago
        The power of correlating your real ID with your browsing activity on the internet.
        ToucanLoucan 7mo ago
        I mean, as much as I don't want the Government to be able to do that, I don't want private industry to be able to do that even more tbh. Though both options are pretty horrendous privacy-wise.
        pstuart 7mo ago
        Until recently I felt the opposite way -- what they could do with that was more targeted advertising. The government currently in power is demonstrating that they can do far worse, and plans to.
    - alistairSH 7mo ago
      But they already know my age (and my address, and my SS#, and my income, and a whole bunch of other stuff).
      - kevin_thibedeau 7mo ago
        They don't know your full behavioral profile. They also may be willing to sell that data to third parties who use it for nefarious purposes.
        monocasa 7mo ago
        They absolutely do. Anything you can get from data brokers doesn't require a warrant.
  - autoexec 7mo ago
    It's not enough for the government to know. Platforms, websites, and advertisers want to know. That's why the law facebook has been pushing for doesn't have a simple "is 18+" flag but instead has a long list of age buckets so that advertisers and platforms can target specific demographics even when they are minors.
    - pocksuppet 7mo ago
      Isn't that necessary because different levels of protection will be applied to each bracket?
      - autoexec 7mo ago
        The law doesn't require any protection levels at all. It just requires your OS to tell every website you visit which bucket your children fall into. Every website and platform can use that information in whatever ways they want, even if it's just to adjust how best to groom a victim or to decide which ads to push at a child. They could also use it to say that a 9 year old can't watch a certain video that a 13 year old can, but that would be entirely their choice.
  - lemoncookiechip 7mo ago
    I'd much rather a third party ID that I can easily bypass because they're lazy and cost saving every step of the way, than a governmental ID which will be x100 harder to bypass and can be abused by the goverment whenever there's a man-child in power who likes going after groups of people who don't agree with him. But in a perfect world it would be parents doing their job and parenting. You can grab your child's pad, phone, laptop, whatever, and black list the entire internet allowing only a few select white lists of your choice. But it's too hard to educate parents on how to do that I guess, assuming this was ever about children and not data collection, which it is that.
  - basilgohar 7mo ago
    And then the government gets official, explicit, intimate knowledge of everything we do online. With our express permission now.
sjsdaiuasgdia 7mo ago
In those in-person contexts, the identification document is still externalized - they're checking a government-issued photo ID in the vast majority of situations. It works for the in-person context because it's a physical object, making it easier to control access to it. A high resolution picture of the same ID is a privacy problem as it can be copied, shared, transferred, etc without the knowledge of the ID holder.
- boyoboy 7mo ago
  [dead]
deleted 7mo ago
[deleted]
davorak 7mo ago
> Why? I think that main goal would be to keep the ability to have accounts be anonymous or pseudo anonymous. If social mean company has to verify an accounts age themselves they then have to use some for of official government identification and with that any chance of anonymous or pseudo anonymous access.
- autoexec 7mo ago
  Facebook has less than zero interest in allowing people to use their platform anonymously. They very much want to know everything about their users including their age and they would never back a law that would stop them from collecting that data. Now that you know that facebook isn't pushing this law to protect anyone's anonymity why do you think they're doing it?
  - davorak 7mo ago
    > Now that you know that facebook isn't pushing this law to protect anyone's anonymity why do you think they're doing it? My comment was not about what I knew/know about facebook or not. I was answering the question of why age verification should be externalized to a degree and in this case externalized means the power stays with the user and parents rather than being in the hands of say facebook/meta. I was not talking about why facebook/meta would want it or not want it. Large companies want lots of different things. Sometimes it is required to know their motivations to discuss or decide on something. I think it can be detrimental to do that though without discussing/analyzing a topic/idea on its own merits first or at least parallel. My comment was focused on the merits not the motivations or desires of companies like facebook.
    - autoexec 7mo ago
      The point is that you can't just externalize age verification and expect that data to never be sent to facebook because facebook needs that data to do anything (good or bad). It doesn't matter if your OS broadcasts that your child is 6-9 to facebook or if facebook has to ask the government to tell them that same information, either way, in the end facebook will know that your child is 6-9. The power is then in facebook's hands. Facebook won't see a copy of their government issued ID, but what difference does that make when they've got their age, their selfies, and a list of every friend and family member.
monksy 7mo ago
Very good point. But there are businesses that are via the barcode on the back of the license. They're using machines to validate and do who knows what with that data.

> It should be externalized to a degree. Why? We don't externalize age verification when buying alcohol or visiting the strip club. It's on the responsibility of those establishments to verify age.

pstuart 7mo ago

Do we make contractors do age verification on their supplies when building a liquor store or strip club? The OS is a tool used by Meta, just like the utilities and the compute itself. Meta Apps can have age verification but it should be at the point of service, not the supply chain. And even if we were to agree to this, uploading your IDs to an untrusted third party is asking too much.

alistairSH 7mo ago
uploading your IDs to an untrusted third party is asking too much. So have the government do it? They already know who we are and when we were born.
- kevin_thibedeau 7mo ago
  That requires trusting a government with a power that is likely to be abused.
  - ToucanLoucan 7mo ago
    The power to tell people how old someone is?
    - mgulick 7mo ago
      The power of correlating your real ID with your browsing activity on the internet.
      - ToucanLoucan 7mo ago
        I mean, as much as I don't want the Government to be able to do that, I don't want private industry to be able to do that even more tbh. Though both options are pretty horrendous privacy-wise.
        pstuart 7mo ago
        Until recently I felt the opposite way -- what they could do with that was more targeted advertising. The government currently in power is demonstrating that they can do far worse, and plans to.
  - alistairSH 7mo ago
    But they already know my age (and my address, and my SS#, and my income, and a whole bunch of other stuff).
    - kevin_thibedeau 7mo ago
      They don't know your full behavioral profile. They also may be willing to sell that data to third parties who use it for nefarious purposes.
      - monocasa 7mo ago
        They absolutely do. Anything you can get from data brokers doesn't require a warrant.
- autoexec 7mo ago
  It's not enough for the government to know. Platforms, websites, and advertisers want to know. That's why the law facebook has been pushing for doesn't have a simple "is 18+" flag but instead has a long list of age buckets so that advertisers and platforms can target specific demographics even when they are minors.
  - pocksuppet 7mo ago
    Isn't that necessary because different levels of protection will be applied to each bracket?
    - autoexec 7mo ago
      The law doesn't require any protection levels at all. It just requires your OS to tell every website you visit which bucket your children fall into. Every website and platform can use that information in whatever ways they want, even if it's just to adjust how best to groom a victim or to decide which ads to push at a child. They could also use it to say that a 9 year old can't watch a certain video that a 13 year old can, but that would be entirely their choice.
- lemoncookiechip 7mo ago
  I'd much rather a third party ID that I can easily bypass because they're lazy and cost saving every step of the way, than a governmental ID which will be x100 harder to bypass and can be abused by the goverment whenever there's a man-child in power who likes going after groups of people who don't agree with him. But in a perfect world it would be parents doing their job and parenting. You can grab your child's pad, phone, laptop, whatever, and black list the entire internet allowing only a few select white lists of your choice. But it's too hard to educate parents on how to do that I guess, assuming this was ever about children and not data collection, which it is that.
- basilgohar 7mo ago
  And then the government gets official, explicit, intimate knowledge of everything we do online. With our express permission now.

sjsdaiuasgdia 7mo ago

In those in-person contexts, the identification document is still externalized - they're checking a government-issued photo ID in the vast majority of situations. It works for the in-person context because it's a physical object, making it easier to control access to it. A high resolution picture of the same ID is a privacy problem as it can be copied, shared, transferred, etc without the knowledge of the ID holder.

boyoboy 7mo ago
[dead]

deleted 7mo ago

[deleted]

davorak 7mo ago

> Why? I think that main goal would be to keep the ability to have accounts be anonymous or pseudo anonymous. If social mean company has to verify an accounts age themselves they then have to use some for of official government identification and with that any chance of anonymous or pseudo anonymous access.

autoexec 7mo ago
Facebook has less than zero interest in allowing people to use their platform anonymously. They very much want to know everything about their users including their age and they would never back a law that would stop them from collecting that data. Now that you know that facebook isn't pushing this law to protect anyone's anonymity why do you think they're doing it?
- davorak 7mo ago
  > Now that you know that facebook isn't pushing this law to protect anyone's anonymity why do you think they're doing it? My comment was not about what I knew/know about facebook or not. I was answering the question of why age verification should be externalized to a degree and in this case externalized means the power stays with the user and parents rather than being in the hands of say facebook/meta. I was not talking about why facebook/meta would want it or not want it. Large companies want lots of different things. Sometimes it is required to know their motivations to discuss or decide on something. I think it can be detrimental to do that though without discussing/analyzing a topic/idea on its own merits first or at least parallel. My comment was focused on the merits not the motivations or desires of companies like facebook.
  - autoexec 7mo ago
    The point is that you can't just externalize age verification and expect that data to never be sent to facebook because facebook needs that data to do anything (good or bad). It doesn't matter if your OS broadcasts that your child is 6-9 to facebook or if facebook has to ask the government to tell them that same information, either way, in the end facebook will know that your child is 6-9. The power is then in facebook's hands. Facebook won't see a copy of their government issued ID, but what difference does that make when they've got their age, their selfies, and a list of every friend and family member.

monksy 7mo ago

Very good point. But there are businesses that are via the barcode on the back of the license. They're using machines to validate and do who knows what with that data.