7 ms·

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,

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 5mo 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 5mo 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 5mo 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.
    - ian_holt 5mo ago
      <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> Very true & having 6 kids of my own, I know that only too well. I still don't like the idea of Mr Government trying to tell me how to raise my family. Here in Australia the government seems to like that a lot...
      - maigret 5mo ago
        Well the thing is that people often love when the government tells other families how to live, and partly for good reasons including enabling basic education for everyone. Partly the wants of the parents and the needs of the kids might be at odds. Society is a complex construct.
  - pocksuppet 5mo ago
    Governments are required to enforce that devices must give the choices to parents though, right? Otherwise devices won't give the choices to parents because it's more profitable if you don't.
- notepad0x90 5mo ago
  How is that the answer when even parents don't have the right tools for this. are parents supposed to surveil their kids 24/7 and monitor their internet traffic? Why is the internet special, do you also believe physical stores shouldn't check for ID for cigarettes and alcohol, because the solution is better parenting?
  - jchw 5mo ago
    I never had to get my ID checked to be able to talk to strangers.
    - SiempreViernes 5mo ago
      Did you to talk to the strangers in the night club when you were 11? Or were there several completely separate reasons for why you couldn't?
      - jchw 5mo ago
        The internet has explicitly R-18 chats. Random IRC channels are not nightclubs. I am moving the goal posts back, if you touch them again we're escorting you off of the field.
        chadgpt3 5mo ago
        Most things that happen at nightclubs are not R-18 either.
        jchw 5mo ago
        That doesn't make adult spaces equivalent to family friendly spaces, off the field now sir.
    - notepad0x90 5mo ago
      in real life people can see you and determine your age at a rough estimate and be able to tell if you're an adult or not. Do you support having to turn on your webcam and show your face in real time then, to talk to strangers on the internet? many age verification sites are doing just that.
- deleted 5mo ago
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- jenscow 5mo ago
  I won't disagree with that. And "better parenting" is a solution. However, what about the children who don't have the advantage of "better parenting"? Rightfully blaming bad parents is reactionary
  - coldtea 5mo ago
    >Rightfully blaming bad parents is reactionary So? Not all reactionary (if you mean "conservative") takes are bad. Sometimes they're better than the alternative: accepting bad parenting as some default and working around it with technological restrictions.
    - Nasrudith 5mo ago
      "Reactionary"'s origins as far are pure political DARVO and gaslighting anyway. It originated in the French revolution and basically declared "You are morally wrong for being horrified at my horrific and evil actions." That origin tainted the term for me personally. The actual modern reactionary meaning of "referrant to a mythical past as a standard" always felt like it deserved a better term. But nobody would get what you were saying if you called them a "fairytaleland resident" or similar.
      - pocksuppet 5mo ago
        I always read "reactionary" as "oh no, someone did something! now I have to react by getting angry!" and it seems to fit well enough.
  - platevoltage 5mo ago
    If parents don't want their kids on social media, get them a dumb phone, or use the parental control features. Maybe some parents don't care, and that's their prerogative. None of this is about protecting children, it's about "protecting" adults from "bad ideas".
    - djaro 5mo ago
      The problem is many parents will not do that. Do those children then deserve to be taken advantage of by social media corporations? Generally, things that are harmful and addictive such as alcohol, cigarettes and casinos require age verification. We dont just put the onus on parents because a child with bad or absent parents still deserves to be shielded from alcoholism at 12 years old.
- intended 5mo ago
  HN is filled with people who are on the other side of an "internet best practices" information divide. For everyone else, the internet is already a shit show and a half. They want control, because it means putting a stop to being predated upon, or more nihilistically, harming the firms that are harming them. I don't know how to let other commenters see how bad it is, or make the gulf in view points clear.
  - Nasrudith 5mo ago
    Giving up control is always a mistake - they never do what they promised and you never get back the control. There is never a refutation to this fac: just a childish "But I want it!".
    - pocksuppet 5mo ago
      I agree. That's why the government shouldn't stop toddlers from buying guns.
- deleted 5mo ago
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- armchairhacker 5mo ago
  Everything good is a slippery slope: every step in the right direction is bad if you overshoot. Maybe age verification isn’t needed, and educating parents is important; but without more, they’d have to be ultra-helicopter parents to stop their kids from accessing social media. At minimum, parents need other parents in their local community to be educated; and better parental controls, so they can give their kid a phone and computer (for good reasons like safety and education) that won’t let them access social media (even unintentionally, some parental controls are that bad). Both can be done without laws, only social pressure and at least the potential for new (locked-down) devices. (In theory, kids should also be prevented from buying unlocked devices, like drugs and alcohol. And showing the local cashier your ID to buy a generic device (whose packaging is indistinguishable from other device packing, so it can’t be traced to you afterward) is technically a form of age verification. But in practice this may not be necessary, because hardware is too expensive for most kids.)
- insane_dreamer 5mo ago
  The slippery slope was ad-sponsored social media in the first place. Ban it at the source rather than trying to fix downstream problems.
- djaro 5mo ago
  Age verification has always existed in the physical world, such as at bars and casinos. I just dont see why the internet should be immune to real world rules we decided upon for good reason.
- zrn900 5mo ago
  > "better parenting" This has nothing to do with parenting. It's surveillance. They failed to do it through child porn argument. They are doing it through 'social media is harmful for children' argument. People did not bite on the former. They ate up the latter out of hate for social media platforms.
Hugsbox 5mo ago
I don't believe children should be on social media. Some other people might not share that belief. Should be up to parents to decide what's okay for their kids, not governments or companies. Age verification will always lead to more surveillance. People need to just be more mindful of what their children are doing online, maybe stop giving them smartphones, and just be parents.
- lmz 5mo ago
  Somehow this "leave it to the parents" logic isn't followed when it comes to cigarettes or alcohol. Why is social media different?
  - roysting 5mo ago
    I think you’re missing that this abdication of personal freedoms to the government in the form of government imposed restrictions on cigarette and alcohol sales is precisely how we’ve gotten to this point over time; arguably following a planned strategy. People who normalized prior subordination to government in the case like cigarettes, alcohol and other things; are now already even more primed to abdicate even more freedom to mommy and daddy government than the prior generation. It seems clear to me that America is heading into an extremely repressive system where even the nominal use of America may just end up falling by the wayside within the lifetimes of some people alive today. Functionally speaking the, notional or spiritual death of America happened a very long time ago, probably 1840 but obviously no later than the outcome of the Civil War which turned a decentralized union of federated states that formed a republic, into a centralized dictatorial federal power and later the groundwork for becoming the empire we are only 55-80 years after the Civil War, depending on how you want to look at it. I think people forget that there would have been people who experienced the Civil War that destroyed the central premise of the Constitution, that sovereign states join in a Union to cooperate, and the formation of the Empire of America by no later than the end of WWII. Those things never happen abruptly, they happen in following a long strategic plan based on objectives not timelines. Part of such a plan is causing ever increasing dependence, deference, and subjugation to government, which is really just someone else’s control over you, the people who make up the “government”, instead of your own control over you. Part of that is giving the impression that money and daddy government will take care of the children, as a tool to psychologically manipulate people by hijacking their instinctual care and concern for protecting children. It’s why and how they’re more pushing age verification, not ban for minors with similar criminal penalties for anyone who allows minors on the internet/social media. No, you as an adult need to confirm and tie your identity to the digital fingerprint that is tied to all the data that was and is collected about your activity over the last 20+ years … to protect the children of course. It’s why some people refer to the majority of humans as cattle. You just have to herd them around and they moo and then start fattening up on corn instead of grass, just like the last generation did before they were harvested.
Hizonner 5mo ago
> More and more people agree that kids shouldn’t be on modern social media, including me. Has it occurred to you that nobody cares, or should care, about your opinions about what other people and other people's kids do? You and the "more and more" people who agree with you are cordially invited to fuck off. > The solution is to propose ways to block kids from modern social media (that actually works) without mass surveillance. The solution is for you to get over your bullshit, not to chase impossible pipe dreams.
- djaro 5mo ago
  > Has it occurred to you that nobody cares, or should care, about your opinions about what other people and other people's kids do? Uhmm... Yes they do? That's... the whole point of living in a society? With laws? So we can collectively decide what is and isn't desired? Children are also banned from purchasing alcohol or going to the casino. There are tons of things we collectively decided children shouldn't do.
y0eswddl 5mo ago
why aren't you using your full government name as your handle here on HN? age verification is a cover for universal internet IDs. you'll never be able to go online and do anything anonymously again.
pocksuppet 5mo ago
That's what was in the California bill that we all complained about until Linux got an exemption. We called it an age verification bill even though it has nothing to do with age verification, and was all about making sure every OS has a parental controls feature.
reaperducer 5mo ago
Age verification is fine, at least in theory. It’s the implementations that are bad. I sometimes wonder what HN would be like with age verification.
- amanaplanacanal 5mo ago
  I doubt we have that many underage kids here.
  - reaperducer 5mo ago
    I think you'd be surprised. Also, imagine being able to filter posts by the age of the writer. I think it would be interesting to be able to compare the responses to a post by age. Or to just filter everything by age, and view HN as anything from AI Hype Club to Graybeard's Tavern. If nothing else, it would get rid of all the bots and AI nonsense.
hydrogen7800 5mo ago
Why isn't there a simple solution in the software world that's functionally equivalent to flashing your ID at the liquor store? They get the verification they need with no permanent record of your PII. This can't be that hard. Can't I get an electronic certificate/flag verified by a trusted third party using my ID, where this cert retains no PII? This is what I come up with after not thinking very hard about the problem, and I can't be alone. Maybe its naive to think that harvesting PII isn't the point.
- jsmith45 5mo ago
  In theory, sure, an identity verifier could issue you you a bunch of single use JWTs signed by them that contain `{"over18":"true", "nonce": 12748583..., "iss": "<issuerurl>"}`, signed by their key. A relying party just needs to know the public keys of all the issuers they trust, and can consume this JWT, verify it, and never learn anything about your IRL identity. The important things are that they must issue a bunch at once. (Otherwise, correlating who you are becomes easy). They must keep no record tying nonce or the full JWT to an individual identity. Something user local or otherwise trustworthy (not keeping logs), needs to hold on to these, and send them out as needed, being very very careful never to reuse one (as that would enable cross site tracking). Lastly a relying party must be required to trust many issuers, not just those they are colluding with track users across sites with this. The European Commission actually proposed pretty much exactly this system, also with a variation where instead of revealing the signed token, a ZSNARK proof (that you possess a validly signed token with the over18 attribute from a specific issuer) could be given to the relying party instead (to make it impossible for issuer and relying party to collude to release your identity). Many people here seemed to not like it.
- chadgpt3 5mo ago
  California just mandated a simple solution in this style.

sunaookami 5mo 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 5mo 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 5mo 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.
  - ian_holt 5mo ago
    <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> Very true & having 6 kids of my own, I know that only too well. I still don't like the idea of Mr Government trying to tell me how to raise my family. Here in Australia the government seems to like that a lot...
    - maigret 5mo ago
      Well the thing is that people often love when the government tells other families how to live, and partly for good reasons including enabling basic education for everyone. Partly the wants of the parents and the needs of the kids might be at odds. Society is a complex construct.
- pocksuppet 5mo ago
  Governments are required to enforce that devices must give the choices to parents though, right? Otherwise devices won't give the choices to parents because it's more profitable if you don't.
notepad0x90 5mo ago
How is that the answer when even parents don't have the right tools for this. are parents supposed to surveil their kids 24/7 and monitor their internet traffic? Why is the internet special, do you also believe physical stores shouldn't check for ID for cigarettes and alcohol, because the solution is better parenting?
- jchw 5mo ago
  I never had to get my ID checked to be able to talk to strangers.
  - SiempreViernes 5mo ago
    Did you to talk to the strangers in the night club when you were 11? Or were there several completely separate reasons for why you couldn't?
    - jchw 5mo ago
      The internet has explicitly R-18 chats. Random IRC channels are not nightclubs. I am moving the goal posts back, if you touch them again we're escorting you off of the field.
      - chadgpt3 5mo ago
        Most things that happen at nightclubs are not R-18 either.
        jchw 5mo ago
        That doesn't make adult spaces equivalent to family friendly spaces, off the field now sir.
  - notepad0x90 5mo ago
    in real life people can see you and determine your age at a rough estimate and be able to tell if you're an adult or not. Do you support having to turn on your webcam and show your face in real time then, to talk to strangers on the internet? many age verification sites are doing just that.
deleted 5mo ago
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deleted 5mo ago
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jenscow 5mo ago
I won't disagree with that. And "better parenting" is a solution. However, what about the children who don't have the advantage of "better parenting"? Rightfully blaming bad parents is reactionary
- coldtea 5mo ago
  >Rightfully blaming bad parents is reactionary So? Not all reactionary (if you mean "conservative") takes are bad. Sometimes they're better than the alternative: accepting bad parenting as some default and working around it with technological restrictions.
  - Nasrudith 5mo ago
    "Reactionary"'s origins as far are pure political DARVO and gaslighting anyway. It originated in the French revolution and basically declared "You are morally wrong for being horrified at my horrific and evil actions." That origin tainted the term for me personally. The actual modern reactionary meaning of "referrant to a mythical past as a standard" always felt like it deserved a better term. But nobody would get what you were saying if you called them a "fairytaleland resident" or similar.
    - pocksuppet 5mo ago
      I always read "reactionary" as "oh no, someone did something! now I have to react by getting angry!" and it seems to fit well enough.
- platevoltage 5mo ago
  If parents don't want their kids on social media, get them a dumb phone, or use the parental control features. Maybe some parents don't care, and that's their prerogative. None of this is about protecting children, it's about "protecting" adults from "bad ideas".
  - djaro 5mo ago
    The problem is many parents will not do that. Do those children then deserve to be taken advantage of by social media corporations? Generally, things that are harmful and addictive such as alcohol, cigarettes and casinos require age verification. We dont just put the onus on parents because a child with bad or absent parents still deserves to be shielded from alcoholism at 12 years old.
intended 5mo ago
HN is filled with people who are on the other side of an "internet best practices" information divide. For everyone else, the internet is already a shit show and a half. They want control, because it means putting a stop to being predated upon, or more nihilistically, harming the firms that are harming them. I don't know how to let other commenters see how bad it is, or make the gulf in view points clear.
- Nasrudith 5mo ago
  Giving up control is always a mistake - they never do what they promised and you never get back the control. There is never a refutation to this fac: just a childish "But I want it!".
  - pocksuppet 5mo ago
    I agree. That's why the government shouldn't stop toddlers from buying guns.
deleted 5mo ago
[deleted]
armchairhacker 5mo ago
Everything good is a slippery slope: every step in the right direction is bad if you overshoot. Maybe age verification isn’t needed, and educating parents is important; but without more, they’d have to be ultra-helicopter parents to stop their kids from accessing social media. At minimum, parents need other parents in their local community to be educated; and better parental controls, so they can give their kid a phone and computer (for good reasons like safety and education) that won’t let them access social media (even unintentionally, some parental controls are that bad). Both can be done without laws, only social pressure and at least the potential for new (locked-down) devices. (In theory, kids should also be prevented from buying unlocked devices, like drugs and alcohol. And showing the local cashier your ID to buy a generic device (whose packaging is indistinguishable from other device packing, so it can’t be traced to you afterward) is technically a form of age verification. But in practice this may not be necessary, because hardware is too expensive for most kids.)
insane_dreamer 5mo ago
The slippery slope was ad-sponsored social media in the first place. Ban it at the source rather than trying to fix downstream problems.
djaro 5mo ago
Age verification has always existed in the physical world, such as at bars and casinos. I just dont see why the internet should be immune to real world rules we decided upon for good reason.
zrn900 5mo ago
> "better parenting" This has nothing to do with parenting. It's surveillance. They failed to do it through child porn argument. They are doing it through 'social media is harmful for children' argument. People did not bite on the former. They ate up the latter out of hate for social media platforms.

Hugsbox 5mo ago

I don't believe children should be on social media. Some other people might not share that belief. Should be up to parents to decide what's okay for their kids, not governments or companies. Age verification will always lead to more surveillance. People need to just be more mindful of what their children are doing online, maybe stop giving them smartphones, and just be parents.

lmz 5mo ago
Somehow this "leave it to the parents" logic isn't followed when it comes to cigarettes or alcohol. Why is social media different?
- roysting 5mo ago
  I think you’re missing that this abdication of personal freedoms to the government in the form of government imposed restrictions on cigarette and alcohol sales is precisely how we’ve gotten to this point over time; arguably following a planned strategy. People who normalized prior subordination to government in the case like cigarettes, alcohol and other things; are now already even more primed to abdicate even more freedom to mommy and daddy government than the prior generation. It seems clear to me that America is heading into an extremely repressive system where even the nominal use of America may just end up falling by the wayside within the lifetimes of some people alive today. Functionally speaking the, notional or spiritual death of America happened a very long time ago, probably 1840 but obviously no later than the outcome of the Civil War which turned a decentralized union of federated states that formed a republic, into a centralized dictatorial federal power and later the groundwork for becoming the empire we are only 55-80 years after the Civil War, depending on how you want to look at it. I think people forget that there would have been people who experienced the Civil War that destroyed the central premise of the Constitution, that sovereign states join in a Union to cooperate, and the formation of the Empire of America by no later than the end of WWII. Those things never happen abruptly, they happen in following a long strategic plan based on objectives not timelines. Part of such a plan is causing ever increasing dependence, deference, and subjugation to government, which is really just someone else’s control over you, the people who make up the “government”, instead of your own control over you. Part of that is giving the impression that money and daddy government will take care of the children, as a tool to psychologically manipulate people by hijacking their instinctual care and concern for protecting children. It’s why and how they’re more pushing age verification, not ban for minors with similar criminal penalties for anyone who allows minors on the internet/social media. No, you as an adult need to confirm and tie your identity to the digital fingerprint that is tied to all the data that was and is collected about your activity over the last 20+ years … to protect the children of course. It’s why some people refer to the majority of humans as cattle. You just have to herd them around and they moo and then start fattening up on corn instead of grass, just like the last generation did before they were harvested.

Hizonner 5mo ago

> More and more people agree that kids shouldn’t be on modern social media, including me. Has it occurred to you that nobody cares, or should care, about your opinions about what other people and other people's kids do? You and the "more and more" people who agree with you are cordially invited to fuck off. > The solution is to propose ways to block kids from modern social media (that actually works) without mass surveillance. The solution is for you to get over your bullshit, not to chase impossible pipe dreams.

djaro 5mo ago
> Has it occurred to you that nobody cares, or should care, about your opinions about what other people and other people's kids do? Uhmm... Yes they do? That's... the whole point of living in a society? With laws? So we can collectively decide what is and isn't desired? Children are also banned from purchasing alcohol or going to the casino. There are tons of things we collectively decided children shouldn't do.

y0eswddl 5mo ago

why aren't you using your full government name as your handle here on HN? age verification is a cover for universal internet IDs. you'll never be able to go online and do anything anonymously again.

pocksuppet 5mo ago

That's what was in the California bill that we all complained about until Linux got an exemption. We called it an age verification bill even though it has nothing to do with age verification, and was all about making sure every OS has a parental controls feature.

reaperducer 5mo ago

Age verification is fine, at least in theory. It’s the implementations that are bad. I sometimes wonder what HN would be like with age verification.

amanaplanacanal 5mo ago
I doubt we have that many underage kids here.
- reaperducer 5mo ago
  I think you'd be surprised. Also, imagine being able to filter posts by the age of the writer. I think it would be interesting to be able to compare the responses to a post by age. Or to just filter everything by age, and view HN as anything from AI Hype Club to Graybeard's Tavern. If nothing else, it would get rid of all the bots and AI nonsense.

hydrogen7800 5mo ago

Why isn't there a simple solution in the software world that's functionally equivalent to flashing your ID at the liquor store? They get the verification they need with no permanent record of your PII. This can't be that hard. Can't I get an electronic certificate/flag verified by a trusted third party using my ID, where this cert retains no PII? This is what I come up with after not thinking very hard about the problem, and I can't be alone. Maybe its naive to think that harvesting PII isn't the point.

jsmith45 5mo ago
In theory, sure, an identity verifier could issue you you a bunch of single use JWTs signed by them that contain `{"over18":"true", "nonce": 12748583..., "iss": "<issuerurl>"}`, signed by their key. A relying party just needs to know the public keys of all the issuers they trust, and can consume this JWT, verify it, and never learn anything about your IRL identity. The important things are that they must issue a bunch at once. (Otherwise, correlating who you are becomes easy). They must keep no record tying nonce or the full JWT to an individual identity. Something user local or otherwise trustworthy (not keeping logs), needs to hold on to these, and send them out as needed, being very very careful never to reuse one (as that would enable cross site tracking). Lastly a relying party must be required to trust many issuers, not just those they are colluding with track users across sites with this. The European Commission actually proposed pretty much exactly this system, also with a variation where instead of revealing the signed token, a ZSNARK proof (that you possess a validly signed token with the over18 attribute from a specific issuer) could be given to the relying party instead (to make it impossible for issuer and relying party to collude to release your identity). Many people here seemed to not like it.
chadgpt3 5mo ago
California just mandated a simple solution in this style.