6 ms·

what do governments get out of this? Like I get it from ad/commercial perspective, but I don't see how this is highly unpopular from governments and still being

• Noaidi 6mo ago
  It depends on the type of government. A totalitarian government gets control out of it.
• andai 6mo ago
  The normalization of the nanny state.
• Gigachad 6mo ago
  It’s not highly unpopular. When polled, the Australian public were in favour of banning kids from social media. The harms of big tech, social media, and addiction mechanics are a lot more tangible to the average person than the anonymity aspect.
  • elric 6mo ago
    Age Verification and "banning kids from social media" are two different things. The former being an overzealous method of achieving the latter. Parental responsibility and better parental controls would be a MUCH better way of going about this. Of course, the polling public is blissfully unaware of the wide ranging consequences of such an Age Verification implementation. People will continue to pave the road to fascist hell with good intentions.
    • Gigachad 6mo ago
      What the public perceives it to be is the only thing that matters though. The OP question was asking how governments are getting this through, and the answer is the majority approve of what they see to be happening. The average person is not thinking about the ability for journalists and whistleblowers to create anonymous Facebook accounts, they are thinking about Mark Zuckerberg trying to sell sex chatbots to their kids and discord pedo servers.
    • farfatched 6mo ago
      > Parental responsibility and better parental controls would be a MUCH better way of going about this. Call we do all three? Also, what about the irresponsible parents, or parents who don't have time/opportunity to be responsible over this issue?
  • crest 6mo ago
    You have to understand children are only cute little extensions of their parents until they 18, but on that day they better be ready for the real world™. /s
  • seb1204 6mo ago
    Hold on a minute. Australians are for kids and teens social media ban. They have not been asked if their minors are all face catalogued by pop up companies that these social media companies externalise the verification process to. Insta and others simply opened the need for such 3rd party verification services, it's a way to limit their liability and risk. For Insta and co it's not their problem if these new 3rd party services become the next identity database of minors. I hate it.
    • Gigachad 6mo ago
      I think we will eventually see age verification become more like credit card processors where some kind of industry standard for secure processing is agreed on, where most companies do not implement it themselves, and where the providers who do implement it do it securely. There is no requirement to store ID information to verify ages and it's actively beneficial to delete everything after the verification is done. We might also see governments implement some kind of zero knowledge APIs where companies can check with the government API if the user is over age without knowing who the user is and without the government knowing what they are signing up for.
• gnfargbl 6mo ago
  Age verification is highly unpopular amongst heavily online users, but the voting population overall is in favour: https://yougov.com/en-gb/daily-results/20250731-91334-2 https://yougov.com/en-gb/daily-results/20250731-91334-2
  • stingraycharles 6mo ago
    Seems like even under young voters more people support it than being against it; 30% of people aged 18-23 are strongly in favor, 57% of people in that age group supports it. I wonder why? Maybe these types of surveys don’t consider the implementation / what you need to give up in order to have age verification?
    • SkyeCA 6mo ago
      > I wonder why? Because the internet, for all it's good, has caused society and individuals some pretty serious problems. I don't like the idea of mandatory age verification, but having unrestricted internet access as a kid was objectively bad for me and many of the people I know.
      • righthand 6mo ago
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        • deleted 6mo ago
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        • palmotea 6mo ago
          > That is your parent’s fault that it was bad for you. So don’t punish me or anyone else because you never learned control. I think you're suffering from a lack of empathy. That doesn't mean OS age verification should be implemented or not, but that you're going to be insufferable and pretty ignorant about what's going on. IMHO, the popularity of age-verification is due to the increasing awareness of the harms of much online activity, plus the impracticality of putting the whole burden of mitigating that for children onto the shoulders of parents. If you flippantly and contemptuously ignore those concerns, people will be happy to ignore your concerns. And since you brought it up: honestly, I wouldn't feel bad "punishing" you with this policy, just because of the attitude displayed in your comment. It's needlessly aggressive and making contemptuous assumptions. Your comment actually shoots your position in the foot.
• deleted 6mo ago
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• palata 6mo ago
  Disclaimer: talking about functioning democratic governments (obviously authoritarian governments are different). We do regulate a lot of things to protect the people, especially the children. It's common to make it illegal for children to drink alcohol, smoke stuff and drive vehicles, and it seems completely natural for many of us. We usually don't say "it should be legal for a schools to sell cigarettes and whisky to kids, because it's the responsibility of the parents to educate their kids". The same applies to the Internet: just like we don't want children to be able to buy porn in a store, we don't want them to be able to access porn on the Internet. Or, more recently, social media. So the obvious idea to prevent that is to do what we do in store: age verification. The problem on the Internet is mass surveillance, and done incorrectly, age verification adds to that. Technically, we can do age verification in a privacy-preserving way, but: - Politicians are generally not competent to understand "the right technical way", and the tech giants do benefit from surveillance. Even if they mean well, it's hard for them to take the right decision out of incompetence. - In some big countries that tend to set the technical norms (e.g. the US), many people completely distrust the government. But private companies have no interest in implementing the privacy-preserving solution, so the only viable way is with the help of government regulations (I would argue that the government should be the ones owning the service). - The vast majority of people, including the vast majority of politicians, do not understand and do not give a damn about surveillance capitalism. It just does not exist for them. And in those conditions, there is of course no reason to even consider a privacy-preserving solution, because it is technically more complex. I strongly believe that in many countries they mean to do well. They are just not competent to understand the problem, and they turn to tech giants who do understand it, but have an interest in making sure that the politicians implement it wrongly.
  • gausswho 6mo ago
    In the case of government representatives' role, I think you've reached for Hanlon's razor incorrectly. Malice better explains what is happening here than ignorance. The actual representatives are cardboard with makeup - they each have a whole team of folks doing the detailed diligence on this stuff. That team knows there's a privacy-preserving way to do this. There's a reason those solutions are not the ones on offer. Corporate regulatory capture is behind all of this.
• raincole 6mo ago
  This is highly unpopular... on HN. Which heuristically implies it's popular in the real world.