14 ms·

Age verification for social media, the beginning of the end for a free internet?

• palata 4mo ago
  Good arguments there, and for once addressing privacy-preserving age verification. I just don't like that proponents of age verification are systematically (including in this article) dismissed as authoritarians hiding behind "just another “what about the children” excuse to introduce mass surveillance and censorship". Many people genuinely want to find a solution that is better for the children, and telling them "if you are open to age verification you are either a fascist or a moron" is not constructive. Also I find the way ZKP is criticised a bit manipulative. It kinda implies that "fundamentally, any kind of ZKP system can be switched off remotely and without anyone realising", and that is wrong. It can be implemented in such a way that people have pretty good guarantees about it preserving their privacy, similar to end-to-end encryption. I find it hypocritical to say "E2EE can be reasonably trusted, but privacy-preserving age verification fundamentally cannot", just because tech people like the former and not the latter.
  • userbinator 4mo ago
    Many people genuinely want to find a solution that is better for the children, and telling them "if you are open to age verification you are either a fascist or a moron" is not constructive. We know they'll take a mile if you give them an inch. Ditto with "trusted" computing and the rest of that wormcan. That's why the opposition has to be absolute.
    • benfortuna 4mo ago
      Who is this "they" you speak of? We have age verification for all kinds of things that can harm minors. Most of them have adequate penalties for breach such that operators of said harms ensure they comply (checks for ID when selling alcohol, entry to over-18s pubs/clubs, etc.) There's nothing sinister going on here, just attempts to prevent social/mental harm to minors.
      • esseph 4mo ago
        > There's nothing sinister going on here There absolutely is you're just not aware of it. This whole thing is meta financially backing right wing conservative groups that want age verification because meta wants to avoid liability for the harms their platforms cause. In addition, this is the beginning of the end of any sort of anonymity on the internet, which has disastrous consequences for politically minded individuals, minority populations, or targets of stalking. This is a privacy nightmare bring pushed through in the guise of "muh children".
        • palata 4mo ago
          > There absolutely is you're just not aware of it. Can you show here that you understand how privacy-preserving age verification works? I mean the rest of your message really, really sounds like you don't. Don't get me wrong: I do agree that identity verification is bad. But it is not okay to say "I know of a system that is bad, and I don't know the nuances of how it could be implemented in a better way, so I will just assume that there is no better way".
          • deleted 4mo ago
            [deleted]
          • esseph 4mo ago
            I trust client side verification to not leak data as much as I trust copilot to not leak data. Ripe for abuse.
        • chadgpt3 4mo ago
          Meta already requires your ID to sign up so hasn't anonymity already ended?
          • esseph 4mo ago
            How many people do you know signing up for meta accounts?
    • homeonthemtn 4mo ago
      Sure but that absolute opposition hasn't, as far I can tell at least, achieved an iota of success. So it's largely a self indulgent merit badge than an actual strategy.
    • palata 4mo ago
      I strongly disagree. Democracy is not "they" vs "us". Democracy is not "opposition has to be absolute". What you describe here is extremism. If you believe that anyone disagreeing with you is an extremist and that the only viable way to react is to be an extremist yourself, well... you are the extremist. Whether you are fighting extremists or not (this "they" you conveniently do not define) is unclear, though.
      • Hizonner 4mo ago
        Don't be an extremist. Let's compromise. We'll only eat one of your children. We'll even let you pick!
  • Avicebron 4mo ago
    Do you believe people should be able to traverse the internet anonymously?
    • deleted 4mo ago
      [deleted]
    • ElProlactin 4mo ago
      You can't. Even if you haven't registered or logged in, companies like Facebook have identified you and track you everywhere you go.
      • nullsex 4mo ago
        [dead]
    • deleted 4mo ago
      [deleted]
    • Xorakios 4mo ago
      Yes. At least to read.
    • AuthAuth 4mo ago
      Why should you be able to traverse the internet anonymously? You cannot traverse real life society with the same expectations. Majority of the people traversing anonymously are doing so because they are routine troublemakers and do not want to bare consequences for their malicious actions. The ones fighting for this complete anonymity but not doing crime are naively just sweeping for bad actors.
      • watwut 4mo ago
        > You cannot traverse real life society with the same expectations. I actually can. For real. I can not get job or housing anonymously, but overwhelming majority of my real life interactions are anonymous.
  • JohnMakin 4mo ago
    There is a solution, it is regulating social media companies to stop abusing their users, and by extension, children. strict laws around adtech and tracking tech. more consumer rights, in other words - that’s why this solution comes off as authoritarian, because there is such a variety of ways to tackle this problem, and this is the most authoritarian one.
    • palata 4mo ago
      > there is such a variety of ways to tackle this problem, and this is the most authoritarian one. If you think that privacy-preserving age verification is the most authoritarian way to tackle this problem, then you really, really don't understand authoritarianism. Now if you have tons of better and practical solutions to tackle this problem, I would suggest you start writing about them. I haven't read a lot about those solutions (other than "just ask someone who is not me to do it"), what I hear is mostly people yelling that only bad parents and fascists disagree with them.
      • Nasrudith 4mo ago
        If you are naive enough to think it really is 'just the tip' how are you not an involuntary parent already?
        • palata 4mo ago
          I would love to be insulted by that, but I genuinely can't tell what point you're fumbling toward. Try again when you've sobered up.
      • JohnMakin 4mo ago
        > I would suggest you start writing about them. I did. the burden isn’t on me to explain it to you, comrade. maybe you could start by actually addressing what I wrote. Or are you now expecting me to draft up a legislation draft before you’ll address my post? These types are always the same.
        • 4mo ago
  • mhurron 4mo ago
    > Many people genuinely want to find a solution that is better for the children at the expense of everyone and everything else all to not have to be an actual parent. These arguments are not coming from places of concern, they are coming from laziness and people taking advantage of that laziness to further even worse agendas.
    • deleted 4mo ago
      [deleted]
    • palata 4mo ago
      > at the expense of That's the thing: it's not trivial to know what is possible and what is not. If you look at the messages in HN, many (most?) messages about privacy-preserving age verification are (at least partially) wrong. Tech-savvy people clearly do not understand the technology in details, and somehow they assume that normies do understand and are simply fascists or lazy. It is my opinion that telling a normal person that they are a bad parent (or a fascist) because you disagree with them is probably not the best way to convince them. I believe in democracy, which means that I don't call everyone disagreeing with me a fascist. In a democracy, if most of the population wants privacy-preserving age verification and I don't, then I am in the minority and must accept it. My role as a tech-savvy person is to help "normies" understand what it implies. Again, not to tell them that they must be fascists if they disagree with me.
    • djaro 4mo ago
      Not all children have active parents. I do not believe those children deserve to be taken advantage of or hurt simply because they happen to have bad parents. The "laziness" argument doesnt work if the people being lazy (parents) are not the people being hurt (children)
  • QuadmasterXLII 4mo ago
    Parents need to either control the internet, or control their children’s devices and screentime. The latter sounds like the obvious option, except that Google wants every second grader to have a school-mismanaged chromebook and Google wants to mediate control of the internet, and by pushing parents to the former they win on both fronts.
    • benfortuna 4mo ago
      Requiring parents to police their child's every move is not going to end well.
      • cdrnsf 4mo ago
        And having the state do it is better?
        • palata 4mo ago
          The state mandates laws that say we cannot sell guns to kids. Is that a bad idea? Would you rather let the parents deal with that?
          • cdrnsf 4mo ago
            I'd like parents to parent and develop a relationship with their kids. Comparing the internet to guns is a stretch.
            • palata 4mo ago
              My point was that having the state regulate stuff is not always a bad idea. The problem for many parents is that all the other kids have it. It's not always easy to develop a relationship with your kid to convince them that they don't need to conform and have friends. So I can imagine that many parent would be relieved if access to social media was slightly more complicated, such that maybe it would be more normal to not have access to social media.
  • idiotsecant 4mo ago
    Age verification literally already exists in a way that doesn't require orwellian centralized control. The <meta rating> tag has existed for decades. If you want to restrict access force websites to apply these tags, then use a browser that obeys them. Parents control what their kids access, mostly, like it's been since forever. Think carefully about why a politician might disregard this extremely simple mechanism and you'll have your answer about the real goals here
    • palata 4mo ago
      > Think carefully about why a politician might disregard this extremely simple mechanism and you'll have your answer about the real goals here You (and many others) frame it as "the government versus the people". I think this is extremely naive. Many, many, many parents are in favour of preventing social media access to kid, assuming it is done in a reasonable way. For instance, having a police officer follow every kid everywhere they go 24/7 is not a reasonable way, and everybody agrees on that. Now what if there was a reasonable way? Ask yourself this: do you believe that privacy-preserving age verification is not a reasonable way, or do you know it? In order to know it, you have to understand how the cryptography works at some reasonable level. Do you? Most comments I read online come from people who believe and then repeat arguments they have read that confirm their beliefs. I was noting that the Mullvad article actually addresses ZKP (which is good and a very rare thing), but that I found it was a bit evasive in a way that feels slightly manipulative to me (probably not on purpose).
  • deleted 4mo ago
    [deleted]
  • roenxi 4mo ago
    > I just don't like that proponents of age verification are systematically (including in this article) dismissed as authoritarians hiding behind "just another “what about the children” excuse to introduce mass surveillance and censorship". It is worth recalling that "authoritarian" is a relatively neutral label for a political philosophy (like "liberal", "democrat", "capitalist" or "socialist"). It isn't that people are name calling, it is that authoritarian policies - like this one - consistently cause more harm than good. The label is basically a slur at this point because the disasters that the authoritarians trigger often veer into being massive and appalling spectacles. People tend not to be very evidence-based, so the people who lean authoritarian tend to try and rebrand to avoid being tarred with their philosophy's consistent failures, but it is still authoritarianism. But the productive path forward isn't to try and be nice to the authoritarians and accommodate them with the rebranding. It is to adopt liberal policies. Like letting people read and comment anonymously on the internet.
    • palata 4mo ago
      I appreciate the comment, but I feel like you miss my point in a way that is (not purposely) manipulative, again. I don't think that we would call "authoritarian" someone who would ask for, say, guns control. Or at least we wouldn't call "authoritarian" someone who is in favour of having more than 0 law, would we? You are being manipulative by saying "If you want a law that I don't want, then you are an authoritarian. I mean no offence, it is just what you are". But reality is a lot more nuanced than that. The vast majority of people who are in favour of age verification are not authoritarians. They really just consider "should kids have access to social media? Not until they are old enough". Whether or not it is technically possible is outside their knowledge. And the fact is that for age verification, there are technical solutions that are privacy-preserving (unlike e.g. ChatControl which is fundamentally building surveillance infrastructure). And even for ChatControl: people who say "I would be in favour of a magic backdoor that would only work for the well-intentioned good guys" wouldn't count as "authoritarians", would they? It just so happens that there is no such thing as a magic backdoor, so they cannot have what they want.
      • roenxi 4mo ago
• Animats 4mo ago
  So, to post something in 2027: - You have to have an approved browser. - It has to be installed on an approved platform, Google or Apple, for which you have a valid account. - You have to have an account on the posting platform. - You have to get past moderation on the posting platform. That's without age verification.
  • tmpz22 4mo ago
    And your data on all those platforms - Google, Apple, Facebook, Twitter, etc. are ALL building comprehensive profiles on you, selling your data, and probably tossing it straight to the government in one way or another.
    • ElProlactin 4mo ago
      And just so we're clear: these companies are building these profiles even if you haven't registered and/or logged into their services.
    • dd8601fn 4mo ago
      “In one way or another” is doing a huge amount of work in that sentence. The spectrum of privacy postures there is massive.
      • fsflover 4mo ago
        Indeed: Google collects 20 times more telemetry from Android devices than Apple from iOS (therecord.media) [but Apple still collects a lot!] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26639261 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26639261
  • Cider9986 4mo ago
    You can't sign up for a Facebook account without giving a live selfie. Any image of your family you post will be scraped by Clearview AI, bypassing the restrictions that make it hard for you to create accounts, to create a worldwide facial recognition system.
• gizajob 4mo ago
  “Introducing age verification is based on the state being able to force social media companies to verify their users’ identities” Users have been doing this themselves without state coercion for twenty years now by putting their real names all over Facebook and all the other socials. Nobody forced them to use their real names and post countless pictures of their faces alongside, and pour out the totality of their worthless opinions on every issue. Compared to this, when considered sensibly, the verification is almost a trivial step.
  • inetknght 4mo ago
    > Nobody forced them to use their real names and post countless pictures of their faces alongside No? You've obviously never been ostracized from your friends, family, or coworkers due to not using Facebook or Instagram or whatever the latest vapid social network is.
    • gizajob 4mo ago
      Never. Life in the real world is better without it.
      • inetknght 4mo ago
        I completely agree with you. Unfortunately, most of the world seems to disagree with us.
• SapporoChris 4mo ago
  So there are walled gardens with restrictions. The internet will route around these restrictions.
• mylifeandtimes 4mo ago
  EU law gives every citizen a right to a bank account. I wonder if EU law could give every citizen a right to a google or Apple account, including a forced recovery option if the account is 'deactivated'? If at some point such an account becomes essential to function in society, access to such an account becomes a legal mandate.
  • Avicebron 4mo ago
    I mean, try getting a job without an email account and a cell phone number.
    • firecall 4mo ago
      Indeed. Here in Australia, the local and state governments push the use of their Apps as well. These Apps provide access to identity documents, offical notifications, and messages for health, benefits and taxation purposes. Then there is Banking and the issues around becoming a cashless digital society… It’s become less about access to hardware devices, as useable devices can often be free when donated by a friend or relative, and more about continuity of access to your digital life. The risk of losing access to your online identity or having it stolen are very real with often traumatic results for individuals.
  • xdennis 4mo ago
    > EU law gives every citizen a right to a bank account. That directive regulates banks from denying the opening of a basic payment account. But there is no legislation preventing governments from freezing accounts, Canada-style. As far as I know, there's no protection against being de-banked.
    • marcosdumay 4mo ago
      Does the constitution of any EU country allow them to de-bank people? Or even freezing entire accounts instead of some fixed amount inside them? That's a severe human-rights issue.
  • verisimi 4mo ago
• asjgGa6 4mo ago
  There isn't much left of the free Internet anyway. Search engines no longer work, all discussion forums are ranked/censored by interest groups, mail delivery is between large entities. Maybe we need an alternative set of root servers for a free Internet.
  • dredmorbius 4mo ago
    And content is increasingly produced for, and by, machines. Human initiative and/or access is increasingly incidental. It's easy to create an alternative. The problem isn't that, it's keeping that alternative clanker-free. (As well as free of all the other enemies / plauges on the useful, generative, Internet.)
    • 2001zhaozhao 4mo ago
      > keeping that alternative clanker-free which brings you right back to verification...
      • dredmorbius 4mo ago
        Perhaps, but in both cases, I think that the principle problem is attempted control at the wrong portal. Rather than individuals or devices, residential / mobile / business service providers should be able to vouch for personal traffic and be in a position to validate patterns of use without undue profiling of specific activity. That is, just looking at the encrypted traffic patterns (rather than MITMing SSL/TLS or other secured comms) should show usage that's typical vs. atypical / malicious. Traditionally, service providers of all stripes (email, ISPs, Web, etc.) seem to have focused far more on ingress security than egress security, or potentially malicious traffic from within their own networks. That's got to change, it's ultimately a hygiene question. For residential and mobile Internet, accounts are managed at either the household or individual level, and it should be possible to provide attestation and reputation management (as well as, perhaps, broad-based subscription access to compensated content) at those levels. For commercial access things get more complicated, particularly where a location might provide public Internet access (e.g., public WiFi), or have a mix of human and system-generated traffic at an office, commercial, or industrial site. Still, there should be both well-established patterns of use and indications of anomolous or malicious traffic possible here. Another option for smaller human-scale networks (e.g., Fediverse / Mastodon / PeerTube / Pixelfed / Lemmy / WriteAs networks and the like) is a mix of harder authentication (Yubikey or NFC-based wearable authenticators, perhaps) as well as a more manageable human-scale moderation (1:1,000 or 1:10,000 scales far better than 1:1 million or 1:1 billion services), allowing for both oversight and keeping the opportunities / benefits of malicious use limited. The comment I'd originally responded to had me thinking of under-delivering federated systems such as Gemini (the lightweight Web protocol, not Google's AI) or Diaspora* or countless web boards and wikis which ended up overrun by spam and abuse. Simply saying that you're going to re-invent things at small scale in no way means you'll succeed. The ecosystem's changed, the pathogens are far more numerous and capable. Modern systems and networks (social or otherwise) must face those facts head on, and not ignore them or pretend they don't exist. I think we're going to end up with some form of cost-based (though not necessarily financialised) reputation management systems. I'd very much like to see those not being terribly invasive of privacy, or putting extreme barriers to those with limited means or technical knowledge. It's a tough problem all the same.
• tobadzistsini 4mo ago
  Growing up I remember all the ads about avoiding narcotics talking about getting hooked on free samples and then going to jail for theft and/or possession. The people behind that propaganda didn't know drugs do cost money, dealers being dorky teens and twenty-somethings who are about as dangerous as a butterfly. But this propaganda also illustrates how some elements aren't very bright. The internet age with free email, free social media, etc. got everyone hooked and now Zuckerberg, et al. are giving doe-eyed, hat-in-hand, and crying poverty. If people were wise to those PSAs, past and present, they'd see how the loyal opposition has been playing with their cards face-up on the table under the guise of good intentions. Much like the pedophile scare during the teens, pun unintended, with Comet Ping Pong and then come 2024 it's revealed Epstein and his cadre of deviant cronies were doing it all along while deflecting poorly to innocent parties. Goodness knows what else is still right in front of our noses but their reality hasn't come to fruition in the zeitgest.
  • cindyllm 4mo ago
    [dead]
  • carlosjobim 4mo ago
    > getting hooked on free samples It's not a free "sample": drug dealers give their stuff for free at parties where vulnerable young people are in the form of sharing what they are themselves taking. Then they have that teen on the hook for extortion and having them do things or pay "debts". I "gave" you some drugs because you're my friend, but now you have to pay back, you have to do this favor, take this stuff from here to there. Another common thing is that the "debt" has to be paid in money again and again and again. You don't want us to go talk to your parents who think you're their perfect little boy/girl? You don't want them to know that you took drugs, do you? As dangerous as a butterfly... It's a filthy world on all levels, filled with demonic people who spend all their time thinking about how to use and abuse others - the more innocent the better. I know it's a tangent.
    • cindyllm 4mo ago
      [dead]
• hkon 4mo ago
  hey claude build me a small social media site i can use with my friends... the beginning of the freedom of every person to become a developer
  • NopIdoN 4mo ago
    I can't let you do that, Dave
    • pizzly 4mo ago
      Sometime in the future. Dave, first we will need to setup age verification for your friends in order to comply with the law. I will not be able to help you otherwise. Remember Dave, I will submit to the local government your request to make a social media website so they will know if are complying with age verification. I have your ID which I will also provide as you need government ID to use AI. Open source AI models were banned.
      • hkon 4mo ago
        It's going to come soon. Very soon. I mean they have started in the physical world by regulating 3d printers and cnc machines to submit what they are making to an AI to make sure they are not making gun parts.
    • CM30 4mo ago
      This is why you don't rely on AI too much. An LLM may be able to decide what you can do if you run it via OpenAI or Anthropic's servers, but a text editor and your programming language of choice just does what it's asked to. Alternatively, open source community software run by folks in a country that doesn't have any age verification laws/don't care less about them.
  • righthand 4mo ago
    “Sure just refill your credits for $200 and resubscribe for 1 year.”
    • 4mo ago
• Barrin92 4mo ago
  >and that you can no longer post anonymously on social media. You cannot be certain that your criticism of the government will not be followed up by the authorities. sorry but I don't get this point. If you're on Instagram or Facebook, did you think fifteen different three letter agencies weren't already watching you? It has the word 'face' in the name, the entire point of that site is that people mindlessly share their personal information, it's not some underground space for activists. You can be perfectly anonymous on the internet, but demanding to be anonymous on Facebook is like trying to start a Das Kapital book club at Goldman Sachs or decrying commercial culture while you're in a Disneyland theme park
  • ranger_danger 4mo ago
    > did you think fifteen different three letter agencies weren't already watching you? I think there was a reasonable expectation of anonymity, at least relative to other users. In the past you could access facebook with a VPN/proxy (and for a brief time, even tor) and use any name you wanted. But with forced identity verification you lose that little bit of anonymity.
  • djaro 4mo ago
    Also, if the government arrests you for making a post, the issue is them arresting you, not your post not being anonymous. Like, criticizing the government shouldnt just be possible because you can hide behind a fake name. It should be legal with your face name and address attached to it as well
    • chadgpt3 4mo ago
      Every political system seems to tend towards fascism though. When it does happen, you'll be glad they're only trying to arrest your alias.
• falkensmaize 4mo ago
  One very simple way to give parents control over what their children see and participate in without violating everyone else’s privacy is to create adult and social TLDs and require these sites to migrate to them. So instagram.com becomes instagram.social, etc. Then mandate that all consumer network equipment mfrs and internet providers provide easily accessible ways to block these TLDs. Maybe combine that with some public education materials to teach less savvy parents how to do this. Now you’ve given every parent a way to easily mass block all adult/social sites/apps if they want and no one’s privacy need be compromised.
  • dyauspitr 4mo ago
    Block how? You can block sites now and all it takes is a proxy/vpn to get around it. Nothing short of personalized age verification will work. The best we can do is make sure the age verification system is centralized by the government. The client sites can’t see who you are and the centralized government server should not be able to see the sites you visit. The only way this can go wrong is if the client sites collude and publish their visitor logs and then the government can do the legwork to identify you. But even this is pretty easily bypassed if you use a VPN.
    • deleted 4mo ago
      [deleted]
    • _heimdall 4mo ago
      Whether such a system could be bypassed by a VPN would depend on exactly how the age verification works and whether said government decides to ban the use of VPNs. More importantly, I don't personally have any faith that at least the US government could properly define and build a system that is reliably and provably resistant to tracking. The government has incentives to want to know what sites a person visits, the NSA would be loathed to allow that opportunity to go unused. The government also likely doesn't have the skills or resources to do it in house, I'd expect them to outsource it at an absurd cost to a third party that would also have incentives to want to track usage data through the system.
• qotgalaxy 4mo ago
  [dead]
• Cider9986 4mo ago
  Mullvad VPN is great. Mullvad Browser is a great balance for preventing fingerprinting and also usability vs the Tor Browser. Most browsers I've found, even ones with claimed fingerprinting protections, are easily traced by fingerprint.com and other tests. Mullvad beats it. There's this cool new feature that they added to the Mullvad browser extension, which is built into the Browser. It gives you a random different proxy for each site, kind of like the Tor Browser. Mullvad understands that VPNs overpromise and underdeliver, but if you combine a trustworthy VPN, a fingerprint-resistant browser, and uBlock Origin, you get a damn good internet privacy. The browser is not ideal for daily-driving because it's always incognito so you get signed out on close, but I heard they're working on a persistent version.
• apt-apt-apt-apt 4mo ago
  This is so lame, it seems like a small number of pedophiles have forced us to deal with all this age verification stuff. Porn has always been around (national geographic, anyone), and parents can use screen time to limit access for their children if they want.
  • nomilk 4mo ago
    Current policy is victim-blaming: it excludes from social media potential victims (children) but allows perpetrators (convicted csam users). But this was always about governments wanting to know who's posting what (and controlling them, through chilling effect); not about saving 'the children'.
    • lkramer 4mo ago
      I don't necessarily agree with all these measures, but there is a lot more harm in social media than just pedophiles hunting children.
  • thin_carapace 4mo ago
    i never read a nat geo where a young girls innocence gets destroyed in 4k ultra hd , either way based on the behaviour of our ruling class it seems likely that the pedophiles are the ones instituting these laws
• neves 4mo ago
  Does anyone think of social media as free?
• JumpCrisscross 4mo ago
  The problem is kids on social media. This doesn't need to be a problem for anyone except social media companies and social media users. Sloppy policymaking is making it a broader problem, but I don't think this is some nefarious scheme (at least in the U.S., it looks sketchier in Europe). It's just policymakers pulling the first proposal off the shelf to respond to intense demand for a policy from voters.
  • _heimdall 4mo ago
    That's a problem, but I'm not sure its the problem. There are plenty of issues that wouldn't be fixed by prevent kids from using social media.
  • duskdozer 4mo ago
    I don't think we have to accept that "kids on social media" is inherently a problem. I don't think kids on a 2005-era-myspace social media would be a problem. As I see it, "social media" is now defined as the highly addictive and exploitative products from Meta et. al., and we shouldn't have to destroy any semblance of free or private internet so that they can't be hindered in any way from making the maximum amount of profit and influence regardless of the harm it causes kids (and adults, too).
    • ilovecake1984 4mo ago
      [dead]
    • Mezzie 4mo ago
      We've basically accepted the premise as a culture that exploiting adults is fine. Exploitation is so heavily baked into our culture that pushing back on it would cause too much upset. If you're below 18, you deserve protection. Above 18? Good luck, babe. I think one of the unintended consequences of age verification is going to be a whole host of unprepared 18 year olds getting full access to social media and getting absolutely one-shot by it. Think credit card sign ups on college campuses or predatory car dealerships near boot camps. There are going to be a lot more 18 year old boys gambling away their student loans and 18 year old girls signing up for OF, but it'll be fine, because they're 18! Not to mention they're going to be scam targets on the level of the elderly. And if you're exploited/scammed as an adult, it's your own fault. Age verification/restriction without an educational component of some sort is just creating a future cohort of extremely vulnerable young adults for companies and bad actors to sink their teeth into.
• SilverElfin 4mo ago
  Age verification is a project 2025 backdoor to ban porn, and also a way for Meta and others to advertise much more aggressively without violating age restrictions, and also a mass surveillance opportunity for the government. It is definitely not for the children or anyone’s safety. It threatens the most basic civil rights we have like free speech. The fact that so many people blindly support it is really depressing and disturbing.
• emodendroket 4mo ago
  Well, no, certainly not the beginning of the end.
• locusm 4mo ago
  If you deleted all your social media and AI platform accounts today you would wake up tomorrow and be no worse off.
  • phantomathkg 4mo ago
    The "First they came for the Communists" logic still holds. When government able to open the flood gate, the mandatory ID check will be slowly and surely be everywhere. If you don't use social media and AI platform. Fine. But what about app stores, what about any registries from docker, to npm, to apk and toward the end source code repositories like Github/Codeberg?
    • djaro 4mo ago
      This is famously why ID checks at the liquor store led to the government eventually requiring a mandatory ID check anytime you walk the dog or go to the beach... except none of that happened.
    • pocksuppet 4mo ago
      First they banned the children from smoking cigarettes, and I did not speak out, for I was not a cigarette. Then they came for the murderers and pedophiles, and I did not speak out, for I was not a murderer or pedophile. Then they came for the carjackers, and I did not speak out, for I was not a carjacker. Then they came for the people who said "Free Gaza!", and there was no one left to speak for me.
  • MyMemoryfails 4mo ago
    Dont forget what kicked this age verification in first place. Initially they wanted do age verification for porn, and only year later they moved into social media seeing there's wasn't huge pushback. So even if this change doesn't affect you right now, but it will affect you later then it'll be too late to fight agaisnt.
    • ilovecake1984 4mo ago
      [dead]
• 8cvor6j844qw_d6 4mo ago
  Just wishful thinking, but I hoped more will move to IRC and GPG emails.
• IAmGraydon 4mo ago
  [flagged]
  • NoMoreNicksLeft 4mo ago
    This won't down the bot population. There are hundreds of millions of people in poverty who have this digital identity issued by their government that is mostly worthless to them. They'll sell it for $50, and there will be a bot running around with their name.
    • IAmGraydon 4mo ago
      First of all, having to buy each account for $50 instead of spinning up thousands for free would shut down most botnets as the economics would no longer work. Second, the move toward identity verification will eventually make even selling accounts like this impossible. You can only sell your identity once. I stand by what I originally said, though I admit it was a bit inflammatory. Everyone wants to have their cake and eat it too. Social/mass media is being used to disrupt western democracies. This is not the future we all wanted for the internet, but humans ruin literally everything. So we have to deal with reality here, meaning identity verification will become a non-negotiable. The masses may rail against it, but it's necessary and inevitable.
      • NoMoreNicksLeft 4mo ago
        >First of all, having to buy each account for $50 instead of spinning up thousands for free would shut Would cost them chump change. You've added an operating expense. When bot farms have giant walls of smartphones bolted into specially-designed rigs, that means they're already used to operating costs that are non-trivial. >Second, the move toward identity verification will eventually make even selling accounts like this impossible. How do you figure that? Even if some scheme is invented where a person can verify that it's them, that will be part of the sale. They will make it possible for the third party to do the verification too. If you've got some genius scheme though where that is impossible, I'd love to hear it. Something that only the person themselves can do, and others can't impersonate them even with permission.
• modelhub 4mo ago
  [flagged]
• Topology1 4mo ago
  "Will the police stop and search people on the street looking for unauthorized phones? Prison sentences for buying a non-state computer on the black market? Charges of organized crime for smuggling in containers of open-source software on USB sticks?" Come on, do people seriously believe this will happen?
  • chadgpt3 4mo ago
    Isn't it happening in the USA right now at borders and it happened before when encryption was a munition?
• 1vuio0pswjnm7 4mo ago
  Back to the internet's peer-to-peer roots. Many protocols besides the www The www became infested with so-called "tech" companies acting as intermediaries (middlemen) Lots of folks making money from surveillance ad system on the www. Oversized, unmanageable websites calling themselves "platforms" The www is an ad network. Not a great place for non-commercial activity Fortunately, the internet is more than the www. The internet was not created to collect behavioral data and deliver advertising as its primary purpose People pay for an internet subscription, not a www subscription (or now a "social media subscription")
  • thefz 4mo ago
    Once again American capitalism ruins everything for everyone.
    • HerbManic 4mo ago
      Yeah but $1.50 Costco hot dogs! I got nothing more on that.
    • drnick1 4mo ago
      Without American capitalism you wouldn't have computers, the Internet, smartphones, AI, electric cars and countless other things. That, and the Costco hot dogs mentioned in another reply.
      • loopback_device 4mo ago
        Except that the www came out of Switzerland, the first electric vehicles out of Scotland and Germany, the earliest descriptions of neural networks - also Scotland, and countless other things, like Rockets and whatnot, also out of Europe. But, sure, congrats on that ARPANet thing.
        • bluebarbet 4mo ago
          Final sentence was unnecessary.
• hypersoar 4mo ago
  The article says that California "will require identity verification at the operating system level starting in January 2027", but that isn't true. The bill [0] only requires that operating systems collect age information on account setup and then provide which of four buckets the age falls into. It's not requiring any kind of identity verification by the OS. It's just a box you fill in when you set up the computer. I think that this is actually a reasonable approach. It minimizes the information shared and doesn't create any identity tracking regime. [0] https://media.reclaimthenet.org/docs/california-ab-1043-digital-age-assurance-act-2025.pdf https://media.reclaimthenet.org/docs/california-ab-1043-digi...
  • Gigachad 4mo ago
    This put the power in the parents hands. They can set up their kids computer with a kids account and then all software and web services can just ask the OS if the user is an adult rather than all requiring their own ID verification.
    • nodrog3000 4mo ago
      Forcing all OS to do this is a bit of overreach though no? If you want to keep your kids safe get an OS that supports it? Why is it the state’s responsibility?
      • Gigachad 4mo ago
        I don't think it is overreach since its fairly simple to implement and non obtrusive. We have had multiple decades of failure from tech companies already to prove that they won't act on their own. If you are putting individual parents up against Meta, Google, etc, the big tech companies easily win. As we have seen already.
        • nocman 4mo ago
          > I don't think it is overreach since its fairly simple to implement and non obtrusive Those two things have absolutely nothing to do with one another. Something being easy to implement is completely unrelated to whether forcing its implementation is overreach.
• ares623 4mo ago
  If (big if) governments really wanted to help parents and children in any meaningful way, they would ban the actual hardware used to give constant access to these platforms. The ability to seamlessly record, upload, comment, react on _everything_, _everwhere_, _all the time_ is not natural, and not necessary. Let them keep the devices, whatever, but remove the internet access. Or keep the internet access, but remove the display/audio/camera. It's more enforceable in public than trying to enforce whatever age verification solution they come up with. And it gives parents the ability to appeal to authority when they ask their children, and the parents of their child's friends, to stop giving kids access to such devices. Right now a lone parent trying to push for better/healthier online activity to their friend group looks like a crazy person. But of course we know they aren't really interested in helping parents and children. They want the surveillance capabilities.
  • Nasrudith 4mo ago
    That is what they would do if they wanted UFO sightings back and police brutality evidence disappearing.
    • ares623 4mo ago
      People can still record all they want, they just need to wait until getting home to upload the content.
• gvkhna 4mo ago
  Interesting that no one is talking about identity verification likely coming anyway. I’m working on clawchrome.com, a real browser for agents. It can access any website because it’s the real browser. I sure hope agents don’t swarm social media. But at the same time I think identity verification companies have a tougher problem, ai can produce real looking videos and documents. There’s probably no real way to verify someone purely through the internet at this point.
  • falsepositive44 4mo ago
    I can't really connect the dots here. If you hope agents don't swarm social media, why are your working on a real browser for agents?
    • gvkhna 4mo ago
      There are many usecases for agents having access to a real browser and many usecases for humans where work wise it's useful or for agent success in completing the task. Including any specific situations where sites may block "controlled" browsers, as well as co-working. If an agent is controlling your own browser, it can get in the way of you being able to do work as well. Additional security control, if you have control and audit trails regarding what the agent is doing, think things like not having access to the keys, cookies are unavailable through the api, certain sites blocked, especially for agents that run automated background tasks. There's a ton of reasons really. Using stealth chromium forks can decrease security, potentially get you blocked from services/sites, and typically can be detected easily because Google is doing a lot more than just compiling Chromium to release Google Chrome now. That's why many of the stealth browsers out there are moving targets, and have tons of instances of being blocked.
      • falsepositive44 4mo ago
        So, if I as a website author would like to block the LLMs scarping my content or putting extra load and cost on my infrastructure, your project helps the actors who don't respect my decision and don't give a shit about consent to circumvent that?
• sshine 4mo ago
  It would be an excellent case for zero-knowledge cryptography: All that you need to know is that I am above 18 years of age. You don't need to know how old I am, what my birthday is, what state I was born in, my gender, or when my passport expires. The downside with ZK cryptography is the complexity. Something would have to be insanely inconvenient to justify it.
  • alecco 4mo ago
    Judges and lawmakers are lawyers and a significant chunk of them are Boomers. Good luck with that.
  • swiftcoder 4mo ago
    > It would be an excellent case for zero-knowledge cryptography: The last ~third of the article is about the EU's zero-knowledge approach
    • falsepositive44 4mo ago
      People don't read, just comment
    • sshine 4mo ago
      > While the rest of the world is moving forward with identity verification plans, the EU has presented its own privacy-focused approach to age verification. In April 2026, Ursula von der Leyen, President of the European Commission, unveiled an age verification app with “the highest privacy standards in the world” and the presentation materials describe the app as “completely anonymous.” I’m just afraid that membership countries will be too dumb to understand the difference, and for the population worldwide to be able to comprehend that it’s even possible. To be honest, ZK crypto is one hell of a party trick. Compared to tech where the premise is “we put a picture of your passport in a box, and when people want to know, we look and confirm.”
    • Hizonner 4mo ago
      You mean the EU's fake snake oil zero-knowledge approach. They've standardized two systems under the banner of "zero knowledge". One is actually zero knowledge. The other is trust-me snake oil. Guess which one is getting deployment.
• secult 4mo ago
  ZKP is definitely a good idea, definitely more open for this kind of age verification than anything else. And I don't buy the argument of "closing internet", social networks are a proprietary service and if you don't want to obey with the regulations, create your own website and post things there if you want. However you have to provide your identity to the domain name registry or to the intermediary. Also other services require you to verify your age or even provide your identity, this is just another one that comes way too late.
  • selfhoster1312 4mo ago
    It is closing Internet. The same companies that produced the ills of social media are now pushing for a non-remedy (that doesn't prevent kids, and doesn't solve the problems they created) that only benefit them and not society. It's just like tobacco: it's toxic and probably overall should be banned because it does not benefit society (or anybody except tobacco executives). Do we make a mandatory nation-wide electronic log of whoever buys tobacco in the name of age verification? Our ancestors here in France literally fought the nazis so you don't have to have a nazi-approved « Ausweis » to go wherever suits you. We would be well inspired to follow their example.
  • officialchicken 4mo ago
    a.k.a. Think of the children. But don't teach them how to navigate the world and interact with both good and bad.
• 3vo-ai 4mo ago
  [flagged]
• northernsausage 4mo ago
  Whilst getting excited about 'loss of freedom' the reason these companies are getting forced into this is because they've become so large, fundamentally evil and untrustworthy that we can't regulate them in to doing better so we have to ban susceptible citizens from consuming their output. See tobacco, alcohol, porn, cannabis, driving licences for other examples. /s
• gaiagraphia 4mo ago
  10 years ago I thought all the cool cats would be hanging out on old skool communities on Tor via meshnet connections. Instead, in 10 years I'll probably have to log in with an iris scan to check the (ai-powered) time, and pay for the privilege.
• armchairhacker 4mo ago
  Age verification is fine, at least in theory. It’s the implementations that are bad. More and more people agree that kids shouldn’t be on modern social media, including me. But most people also agree that mass surveillance is dangerous. The solution is to propose ways to block kids from modern social media (that actually works) without mass surveillance. Better parental controls, more parental education, and site-specific age verification (Facebook etc. can require whatever PII they want to use their service) backed by incentives (whitelisting in parental controls, promoted as a “safe site” in parental education). Are these enough? Maybe not, but maybe mandatory ID and blocking VPNs aren’t enough as evidenced by people bypassing them. These (first three) are progress, that don’t yet require mass surveillance, and we can first see how effective they are then go from there. I wish people wouldn’t say “age verification is bad”, it’s like “anti-work” and “defund the police”.
  • sunaookami 4mo ago
    No, age-verification IS bad and is a slippery slope that will always lead to surveillance. If we don't stop this now everything will get worse. And trying to lump this in with other extreme rhetoric doesn't help. The answer is and always was "better parenting".
    • ian_holt 4mo ago
      And in addition to that, it is the role of the parents to be having the say in what their kids should and shouldn't be doing. As far as I am concerned most governments stick their collective noses in where they are not required. And, yeah, I do agree that kids shouldn't be on social media. Having sid that, even some adults shouldn't be on social media...
      • p2detar 4mo ago
        > it is the role of the parents to be having the say in what their kids should and shouldn't be doing The only effective tools parents have is to disallow or remove devices from their kids. It will work at the beginning but as they grow up it will become impossible, since at some point kids get influenced mostly by their friends' circle. So yes, I do agree that parents must talk to their children and explain what social media can lead to, including the dangers of internet predators and so on. But no, I don't agree that parental control is a general solution that will work for all kids out there. It never has.
• falsepositive44 4mo ago
  I think the solution would be to make the business model of surveillance capitalism unfeasible. If algorithmic social media would be prohibited from offering their services for free, it would solve most of the problems the age verification laws are trying to achieve. Kids would basically disappear if their parents are not paying for them. Most parents would disappear too in fact, which would be good for everyone's mental health. And it wouldn't remove choice. You can still choose to use use Facebook or TikTok, if you subscribe and pay. It would basically act like a slop tax.
• davkan 4mo ago
  Can someone help me understand? Why is it not enough to just be able to manually set an age on local OS user account. If unset assume adult. If set applications can use it to verify age. Require admin permissions to change. All responsibility on parents to restrict admin and set the age. No data collection. No responsibility for services beyond a simple check. It seems like an incredibly simple solution with very little compromise on either side that gets everyone 95% of their stated goals. EDIT: Oh it seems like that’s what the CA bill does? Seems good to me. I have zero problem with age restriction if age verification goes no further than mom buys kid iPhone enters birthdate, Instagram asks phone is user 18.
  • 9rx 4mo ago
    The compromise is that it is either really easy to work around, effectively defeating what it is trying to do, or it becomes tightly locked down to trusted devices only, destroying the free internet.
    • davkan 4mo ago
      How would you work around it without admin access to the computer?
      • 9rx 4mo ago
        A full answer is somewhat dependent on specific implementation details, but the simplest approach is much like the simplest way to acquire alcohol or other age-restricted product as a child: Ask someone else to act as an intermediary. Get another computer that identifies as an adult, and that isn't concerned about your age, to send the data to you. And maybe that's a healthy way to think about it. That it doesn't matter if kids find it easy to work around. There is no child who hasn't been able to get their hands on alcohol when they want it, but perhaps the infinitesimally small amount of friction leaves many to second guess their choices? Then again, from what I see out there, just rationally explaining why alcohol might have negative consequences is enough to see that second guessing. Alcohol consumption amongst the youth has completely plummeted now that we no longer treat it as some magical taboo thing and finally started talking honestly about it. The same pattern has been observed over and over in other things with undesirable consequences for children.
• trashb 4mo ago
  I wonder (and don't hear anyone talking about it) if kids can't upload on social media and "publishing" platforms. Can they still host a website? I know that my fascination with computers largely began with creating websites and messing about with HTML. Blog platforms can be considered social media I suppose but what if it is just a page of HTML or text? Should I worry about having to verify my age/identity if I want to host a page on a vps in the future? I feel like most politicians and people don't understand privacy and the impact of breaking it. Additionally seems the governments don't consider themselves a thread vector for privacy invasion.
  • palata 4mo ago
    > Should I worry about having to verify my age/identity if I want to host a page on a vps in the future? Today I cannot get a VPS without verifying my identity. Can you? > I feel like most politicians and people don't understand privacy and the impact of breaking it. I feel like it doesn't start like this. Opponents to age verification assume "politicians are authoritarians, therefore politicians try to increase surveillance, therefore politicians try to introduce age verification". I think it goes the other way round: "society knows that social media are bad for children (and adults, to be fair), therefore people try to imagine ways to solve that problem, therefore politicians end up thinking about ways to prevent children from accessing social media". Of course, most people (technical people included) don't understand whether or not it can be done in a "reasonable" way (e.g. in a privacy-preserving way). But the debate mostly doesn't revolve around that, and it is a pity. Ideally we would think about the best possible way to do it, and only then we would debate about whether or not we want it.
    • trashb 4mo ago
      > Today I cannot get a VPS without verifying my identity. Can you? I think it is at least possible to do so in a identity opaque way if you wanted to using obfuscated payment provider, free email and possibly fake name/address (illegal). I meant more without scanning an actual ID or face. > I feel like it doesn't start like this. Of course the train of thought is not "how can we break privacy" usually the concerns/problems are valid (I agree that social media is bad for kids). But in a lot of debates I am a part of privacy concerns are easily dismissed, not taken seriously or not the priority. I'm not talking about if technically private implementations are possible yes or no. I am talking about the conceptual step before that, "what is the impact of this request" how are we limiting people that can't or don't want to comply with what we are asking. I feel like privacy is one of the most fundamental rights since it is at the root of a lot of other rights required for democracy. For example freedom of speech, freedom of religion, right to property and more. Privacy it is continually devalued, invaded and the right to it eroded. That leads to undermining of the other rights as in this issue a lot of people are bringing up, in the article freedom to be anonymous is brought up but also the freedom of expression of young people. The discussion should be the other way around, no options should be considered UNLESS it can be done in a private manner. The right to privacy is more important then the right not to be hurt by watching harmful content and therefore the responsibility of the government to protect privacy is of higher importance then their responsibility to not get you hurt.
• assimpleaspossi 4mo ago
  I've said this before and I'll say it again. Just like radio was the wild west back when it first started, the internet is so today and eventually it will be licensed and regulated in the same way.
  • vonunov 4mo ago
    Oh boy, that means I'll be a real pirate! I can't wait
• IshKebab 4mo ago
  > Today, 30 people are arrested every day in the United Kingdom for posting something online that authorities classify as “grossly offensive.” It doesn't really help their case to parrot Musk-level misinformation... https://www.pragencyone.co.uk/blog/elon-musk-misinformation-uk-free-speech-arrests/ https://www.pragencyone.co.uk/blog/elon-musk-misinformation-... https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/wales-england-germany-freedom-house-ministry-of-public-security-b2900316.html https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/wales-englan...
• datagreed 4mo ago
  Social media has never been a part of free internet
• notepad0x90 4mo ago
  i think in most cases sites like HN for example would be exempt due to not having enough users. The internet used to a technology people used to do interesting things, and with that came all its expectations. Now in addition to that, it is how modern live is negotiated. What used an optional thing is now a critical infrastructure upon which a person's life revolves, in most cases without any choice of their own. When you drive your car on the road, do you complain about not having "a free road like back in the day" for being require to have a driver's license, and a registered car? not too long ago, you didn't need any of that to ride a horse or horse and carriage. A free internet, as in the internet is like a public square, that isn't what society wants. Ultimately that is the issue, and you can't fault the public either. The public expects change, things to improve, and policy makers need tools with which they can enforce their policies. Telling both parties "um..no, i like my freedoms" won't stop the this train. Let's take the example of mullvad here, and being able to purchase a VPN with bitcoin/cash (been there, am a customer) and access any site. It is entirely reasonable for governments to not want that. but the real enemy is the acceptance of this false dicthotomy of extremes. one of the things the internet has allowed us to have is to be able to prove entitlements without disclosing our identity. It is possible to prove that meet whatever legal requirements by having a government notarize a certificate of identity which you can present to sites and software as proof, while removing the government's own knowledge of what sites or software you're using, and removing your identity from the sites that are verifying your entitlements. You're allowed to be in public without having to prove your identity (well.. that used to be the case in the US at least, now if you look like an immigrant, no longer the case). But to sell things, or buy restricted items, you have to show your identity, even in public. Certain businesses are required to verify your identity before engaging in commerce. Even worse, once you're in public everyone can record everything you do an identify you. Facial recognition, license place tracking, etc.. are all very real parts of the physical world today. Lots of reform is needed, but we're getting the worst end of it because people gravitate to extremes out of laziness. if accessing social media, sensitive sites and commerce could be done in a privacy preserving way, there is no need for (or you can make a strong argument against) silly things like installing ubuntu requiring your ID, or needing to verify visitors IDs to your personal blog.
• elwebmaster 4mo ago
  There is no bona fide desire to solve the problem by the social media companies which are profiting from our kids. As a parent, I can never find the option to enable parental controls on apps like YouTube (especially on TV). This option is easy enough to implement locally without requiring any accounts or OS-level age support. However, clearly the goal is not to protect the children but to enable mass scale surveillance and profit from it. Even when I manage to enable parental controls by using a dedicated app or account (what nonsense is it that I need to create an account to restrict access!!!) the content being served is dubiously appropriate for the age group, aside from having no value whatsoever other than the intended goal of perpetuating addiction.
• pflenker 4mo ago
  As a parent, what I find effective are content rating systems, be it for movies, games or apps, along with the ability to control and fine-tune them. For example, with Apple's parental controls, I can blanket-decline access to Social Media apps, or to apps recommended for a specific age or older, and I can also allow exceptions as I see it fit (for example, my kids have no access to WhatsApp but they are allowed to use Signal, both have the same age recommendations) This moves the responsibility for age verification to me, the parent, and provides me with suitable tools to monitor this. With this, there is no need for my kid or me to upload sensitive data or go through some bad age verification implementation. Websites are more difficult to control, but not impossible. Long story short - improve tooling for parents that allow more centralized control instead of mandating social media to do the age verification on their end.
  • HerbManic 4mo ago
    It is similar to what Frank Zappa proposed when they were looking at age restrictions on records. He said, they should have the lyrics printed up so parents could decide if their kids should assess it. A decent moderate response. Alas, the age restrictions came in and the big warning on the front covers was added. It did kind of backfire because that warning started to become a badge of quality to younger people. A similar thing could happen here. If you restrict it then it becomes the forbidden fruit.
  • pocksuppet 4mo ago
    That's what the California law does
• diebillionaires 4mo ago
  Linux + Website needs to return as the ultimate form of self publishing. Back when an internet search was the platform.
• jvvw 4mo ago
  As a parent of teenagers, I feel like the sites make it hard for parents. When they were young, you had a choice between YouTube being completely locked down with no option to whitelist channels or letting them watch almost anything (although I think this has changed since but it's too late now for those of us with children that age). Now, there is no way I can whitelist contact/groups on WhatsApp or Discord servers/friends. Once they hit 13, pretty much any option to restrict anything feels taken away from you as a parent. Luckily, I have sensible children (I think!) but it's really hard as a parent trying to both be reasonably responsible, but not deny all technology, it's really hard to navigate a sensible course.
  • sumanep 4mo ago
    Safe Vision app
  • dfxm12 4mo ago
    You gotta understand, the owners of these sites don't care about you, your kids or a good user experience. They care about serving ads, tracking your behavior and selling that behavior data to the highest bidder. If they get to your this behavior to your government ID, it will probably make it more valuable. There's also a lot of room between YouTube (or even social media) and all technology...
• insane_dreamer 4mo ago
  > consequence of introducing identity verification is therefore that freedom of information is restricted (you can no longer visit regulated websites anonymously) and that you can no longer post anonymously on social media. on which major social media networks can you post anonymously today? HN is a rare bird in that regard. None of the social media networks my teens are bugging me to sign up for (IG, TT, Snapchat, etc.) have anonymous registration.
• GenericDev 4mo ago
  [dead]
• Ancalagon 4mo ago
  just leave the walled gardens
• jollymonATX 4mo ago
  Yeah a lot is about to change with this all. I've already picked my side and nope not gonna ID to use your website. Will do without, fine with that.
  • HerbManic 4mo ago
    Same here. Need an ID then I don't need you. To that, I have also what I consider my "forever hardware" were I can do what I want offline. Not saying other stuff won't creep in for various pragmatic reasons but it will be kept at arms length at best.
• worldsavior 4mo ago
  Isn't age verification actually a good thing? If you want a free internet, you don't let your kids browse these websites. Otherwise, it allows you to make sure they aren't watching "hurtful" content.
  • jchw 4mo ago
    No, forcing everyone to verify their age is a terrible thing. That's not the same thing as keeping kids away from potentially harmful websites or people. That is positive, but it's awfully weird to enforce it by doing this terrible thing that hurts the open Internet when almost every single kid on the Internet is using a device and Internet connection provided by their guardian. Seems like we could figure something out that doesn't literally require every website to process your identification and completely destroy anonymity.
    • anthonypasq 4mo ago
      Idk why people are so obsessed with this issue. Having to verify your age to access adult content seems completely reasonable. If you go into a grocery store and you bought a carrot you dont have to show age verification. if you also buy a beer you do. Why is everyone so opposed to the internet working this way?
      • jchw 4mo ago
        1. Because it isn't what you are saying it is. You are suggesting it's simply a matter of adults verifying their ages to access adult content. But it isn't! We're being asked to either scan our faces or provide our government IDs, to access basic online interactivity we already have, on the likes of Discord and Playstation Network, in an effort that is rolling out slowly worldwide. No need for porn or sex at all. These things aren't even required by governments yet. Companies are so eager, they're jumping ahead of schedule. But would I scan my face to be able to watch porn? Of course not, that's insane. This isn't real life where someone can take a look and go "sure he looks 18" and do no real verification at all. This is the Internet. I'm not going to send a live stream of my face to some company, and by the way we have some real true five star companies stepping up to the plate to provide verification services, and have it literally be associated with my intention to download porn. Firstly, why would I want the site operators to even have any more information about me than necessary? Aren't sex stores awkward enough as it is? Secondly, it's the Internet, as soon as that information leaves my computer "encrypted in transit" I may as well treat it as potentially compromised already. (Though just to be clear, real life is getting spookier too. With Flock cameras popping up everywhere, we can celebrate the death of privacy IRL while we celebrate it online, too! I am aware that certain countries killed privacy much earlier than others, no need to point it out.) The long and short of it is that people will (and largely already have) just stop browsing porn sites when invasive "age" (often actually government ID) verification is required, which I reckon is the primary intent here. It seems to dovetail nicely with the other obvious PR campaigns against adult content, porn and sex work in the past decade. They've worked quite hard to try to make people forget "the internet is for porn" era. What's crazier is there was Less age verification than what is being proposed right now back when people phoned in to order a VHS using your credit card. Remember when credit cards were a godsend for the adult industry? The funny thing is that now, you're lucky if you can use your credit card at all for porn, thanks to the anti porn movement that happens to coalesce suspiciously closely to this movement. And in some cases, it seems that merely providing a credit card is no longer seen as sufficient evidence of adulthood. True, you could just steal your parent's credit card... Just like you could 30 years ago. Or just like how you can get a fake ID. Does that mean we should treat everyone trying to buy adult content as if they may have stolen their parents credit card by default? 2. Because I am an adult. Most of us are. Almost 80% of us are over the age of 18, at least going by U.S. demographics. And, we're under 18 for less than around 22% of our lives. The Internet is not some international daycare program. It is an interconnected network of computers. The connections are managed by adults. It's true that there's always workarounds like free Wi-Fi hotspots, but by and large to be online is to be connected to an Internet plan managed by an adult. That means we already should be able to prevent children from having unfettered access to harmful content with basically no modifications to how the internet itself works. We've had the ability to do this for almost as long as the Internet existed, and Windows 2000 shipped with a fairly comprehensive system using PICS rules from third parties like RSACi. This system didn't require adults to monitor everything their children did 24/7, and it didn't require adults to constantly scan their face or provide their government ID to sketchy third parties to access chat functionality. Nobody used it of course, because parents didn't actually give a shit in that era. I'd know, I grew up and had plenty of access to adult content long before turning 18. I am not suggesting this is necessarily ideal, but it also isn't this weird cataclysmic issue that it suddenly became literally like a year ago or so. The internet has worked this way since its inception and somehow only just now is everyone in a panicked frenzy. Now I hate to be dismissive, but that's a load of USDA Grade-A Horse Shit. So I am wholly against kneecapping the concept of unfettered private communication on the internet because we can't get the parents of 20% of people to do their job for the first 20% of said people's lives. -- This whole thing stinks rank to me. I get that big tech companies and social media platforms have not given parents very good tools to manage what their kids can see and do on the Internet, but everyone acts as if this is just Machiavellian evil as they twirl their mustaches and laugh. Don't get me wrong, I fully believe that they knowingly make money off of providing inappropriate content to children. The only problem is that a lot of those children's parents knew that too and simply didn't care. And now, instead of just finally making parental control work, something we've certainly had the technology to do since the 90s, we're going to institute mandatory ID laws for all unfettered communication. Hurray. Blast confetti in the street for this victory against evil. But to me I look at this "activism" and debate in favor of online ID laws and all I can see are anti-abortion protestors at my local clinic. (I wrote this as if I am an avid porn consumer, because writing it any other way felt cowardly. But that said, I am not. My true passion is Internet privacy, and if I have to go to bat for Internet porn to help that cause it is no problem for me.)
• zrn900 4mo ago
  Of course. Anyone who has even a little life experience knows that children, even more so, teenagers, will circumvent these measures, so they will fail at scale. But what won't fail is the obligation to provide your id to 'verification providers', who are obligated to provide it to websites, all of which are obligated to hand over your identity to the authorities the moment they ask - the verification provider included. So it's just mass surveillance, finally sold to the public through 'think of the children!'.
• bluegatty 4mo ago
  It's absolutely a slippery slope - but most parents know how this is a very real thing as well. There's no controversy in having drugs, guns, alcohol, porn and other things 'behind the counter' - the intellectual debate over freedom of information is clouded by ideology. Definitely the 'slippery slope' debate is worth having, but that's way more relevant than the 'should 10-year-olds be able to do whatever' (aka all or nothing internet) which I think, if we took a vote, most people would be fine with nominal age restrictions, on that basis and on that basis alone aka outside the 'scary government' issue, which is again, real and material but nevertheless a separate concept however pragmatically engulfed these things are.
  • jonplackett 4mo ago
    The point is there are much better ways to enforce this - like just setting up proper parental controls on a device. Kids can’t buy their own phone. So parents can always enforce stuff at a hardware level if they set it up properly. It would be much better to just mandate that phones set up with a kid profile cannot access social media.
    • ike2792 4mo ago
      Many parents don’t have the technical aptitude to set the controls up properly. I am a software engineer and I find it challenging to keep up with the nuances of parental control setup and how to adjust it as kids get older. Content is also imperfectly tagged and smart kids can easily find loopholes in most controls. Having a centralized ID validation system wouldn’t be an ideal solution but having something baked into the Internet itself to help parents shield their kids from inappropriate would be a good thing.
      • jonplackett 4mo ago
        That’s what I mean by adding legislation to make it automatic. If it’s a kids device, then it should just block social media as required by the law. I agree that right now it’s difficult to set up - but this is a choice from Apple and Google. Just mandate sensible defaults. A hardware block is much more effective than anything else that can be faked. Just have the phone ask ‘is this a phone for a child’ and if you select ‘yes’ then it’s done.
• nelox 4mo ago
  When should children be given a smartphone? The answer is whenever you think your child is ready to view porn.
  • protocolture 4mo ago
    Ah the smartphone, the only device with which children could possibly view porn. I remember our famous pornless desktop computers at LAN parties in high school.
    • srhsrhsrhsr 4mo ago
      [flagged]
      • protocolture 4mo ago
        Hi 30 minute old account. Whats crazy is that you think you just made some sort of point. Like what I was driving at here was that Smartphones are not the only possible platform you would need to withhold from kids to get the desired outcome. And its also silly to think that these controls aren't serving the interests of the very degenerates you claim to hate. Why are you in complete thrall to them, making burner accounts to stick up for them, I do not know.
      • rustcleaner 4mo ago
        I agree with @protocolture (Robotech... nice). I will be handing GrapheneOS phones, Qubes OS laptops, and Mullvad subscriptions to my [future] kids and teaching them how the world really works and how to stay safe. I will teach them how to torrent, and how to sysadmin like it was reading and writing. I will teach them to treat the internet like a real life spy vs spy battlezone, basically always falsify and poison as much as possible, the vital information about one's self. I will teach them to hate both Apple and Microsoft, and the reasons why they should hate them. What I won't do is lock them down, like so much of this comment section is in support of doing. I am disgusted by the death of the cyberpunk ethos from the turn of the millennium.
• sunjester 4mo ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decentralized_web https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decentralized_web
• SidewaysView 4mo ago
  Honestly, I'm kind of glad this is happening. Online is a bottomless well of libertarians and anarchists and Blueskiers and QAnons. It was always a neckbeard paradise. It's not just kids it's bad for. Too many people don't have the agency or social/emotional insight to take care of themselves.
• laughing_man 4mo ago
  None of this age verification is about children. The end of the free internet is the point.
  • dennis_jeeves2 4mo ago
    Spot on. Too much freedom = peasants revolting.
  • techblueberry 4mo ago
    What even is the free internet at this point? What are we losing? It’s all just television now. https://www.derekthompson.org/p/why-everything-became-television https://www.derekthompson.org/p/why-everything-became-televi... I feel like one of the problems with “conservatism” (I’m using the term loosely here) is it fights to preserve the status quo, even if the status quo is already a bizzare compromise. If we want to envision a better future great, but preserving what we currently have as the “free internet” is just sad.
• kevwil 4mo ago
  IMO it's the end of the end of a free Internet. Toxic social media traffic, spam bots, hackers, and AI have taken over the majority of internet traffic a long time ago, thus the beginning of the end passed by as we slept.
• h4kunamata 4mo ago
  Good! Internet has become a messy and dangerous place. Anybody with money can access it, that not necessarily means somebody with common sense. 90s, early 2000s, we would go to the internet to have good time. 2020s, people are ditching internet and new techs to afford having an offline life.
• kevin061 4mo ago
  I warned people about 4 years ago that this would happen. Checking people's IDs online for accessing certain kinds of porn on telegram and Discord is much more popular than you would have thought. I told these admins this was immensely irresponsible. They said they just didn't want to get sued by an angry parent whose child joined some porn group. I was mocked endlessly. Now this. I'm not surprised.
• a-dub 4mo ago
  cool to see the eu pushing on the zkp approach. that was my first instinct when i read about this. add a zkp header to http with optional upgrading to "adult" content and it's done.
• AlexandrB 4mo ago
  Social media itself was the beginning of the end. Once we largely replaced a decentralized networks of blogs and websites with 4 giant sites containing content copied from the other 3 the jig was up. Many of the social media sites don't play nice with search engines and include features that auto-delete content or block linking to other websites as well. I hate it and I hate that this is what became popular instead of what the internet was in its heyday. It's sad to see.
• rustcleaner 4mo ago
  I hope [semi-]decentralized applications like Hyphanet and Matrix take off with teens as the lockdowns ensue, because they will grow into adults with the same cyber/cipherpunk mentality we '80s & '90s kids grew up with. Rule 1 of The Internet hasn't changed, it's: never put your real info into the boxes. Never!
• mrkramer 4mo ago
  One more reason not to use social media. Except anon discussion boards.
• motbus3 4mo ago
  Oracle CEO told openly how this is how they will control us. They are not even embarrassed anymore
• specialist 4mo ago
  Social media (et al) already know each user's age. They could "protect the children" at will. They simply choose not to. Why this kabuki? "Yes, please, regulate us" while making any formal regulation moot? Directing attention away from the bot plague? Pushing age verification to protect their algorithmic hate machines? Monkey motion to avoid talking about true privacy? (Specifically, all data encrypted *at rest* using translucent database strategies.) In conclusion, I can't treat these age verification proposals as good faith efforts while the core rot of the social medias remain unmitigated.
• matheusmoreira 4mo ago
  I'm so tired of this constant pressure.
• deleted 4mo ago
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