4 ms·

A lot of issues require holding two ideas in your head at once. Age verification chips away at privacy and internet freedom. It likely also reduces harm to some

by fhub 4mo ago

A lot of issues require holding two ideas in your head at once. Age verification chips away at privacy and internet freedom. It likely also reduces harm to some/many/whatever children, even if it’s imperfect and won’t stop everyone. The interesting question is where the right trade off sits. People often end up arguing only one side.

eastof 4mo ago
Massively downplaying it to say "chips away" this takes a sledgehammer to the core of internet privacy. In all cases in the world where this has been done before like China or Russia, freedom is also lost shortly after. Of course people only argue one side, the stakes are losing internet privacy and freedom in the entire world if the west also succumbs to these authoritarian policies. It isn't the government's job to prevent your child from getting access to a phone/ipad, that's your job as a parent.
- fhub 4mo ago
  I think you’re proving my point a little. You’re treating the costs as obvious and enormous, while treating any potential benefits as essentially zero.
  - roenxi 4mo ago
    We have to accept that there are policies with obvious and enormous downsides and essentially zero upsides, because they exist and get tried from time to time. Eastof (and the article) are providing an argument that this is one of those times. A pretty reasonable one too, I forget the implementation details of the UK scheme but in Australia and most of Europe the authoritarian bent of the people implementing these age restriction bans is concerning - it looks like they're setting up a general purposes minority targeting systems. I'm not sure how they're going to justify that and I don't recall seeing anyone make a reasonable argument to justify it yet beyond "We can and we're going to. Trust us and think of the children". Your argument seems to be that the issue is more nuanced than anyone else is saying, which is cool and all but then it sits with you to identify what the nuances you want to talk about are. Pointing out that someone else has identified different tradeoffs than you have is something of a given since that is the case with almost any pairing of people.
  - dlcarrier 4mo ago
    Revolutions have been fought over the freedom to act without constant surveillance. The obviousness and enormity of a need for privacy is well established.
- tlogan 4mo ago
  The government’s job is to make sure we behave (and vote) properly. Otherwise, as Bertolt Brecht said, the government might simply dissolve the people and elect a different one.
- Barrin92 4mo ago
  >China or Russia, freedom is also lost shortly after. This may come as a shock but neither China or Russia had their first encounter with losses of individual freedom in the 1990s. This is what the OP is talking about, this is the kind of shibboleth of online libertarianism that has little to do with real world policy outcomes. You'll find many similar laws concerning child safety in Norway that you find in China, different political systems and cultures can value the same things, even implement similar laws, without converging on the same political system. In most countries on earth protecting children is a collective job, not a parents private business. A functioning and safe social fabric is a condition for successful families. Just worth mentioning one data point. In the US 50% of young men (aged 18-49) now participate in online betting or gambling, likely as a consequence of the saturation of ads on social media and gaming platforms. Good luck with your parental responsibility when an entire country operates like this.
  - strictnein 4mo ago
    I mean, you're cutting off the qualifier with your selected quote. They are clearly talking about online freedom: > this takes a sledgehammer to the core of internet privacy. In all cases in the world where this has been done before like China or Russia, freedom is also lost shortly after. Russia's first online censorship was for truly abhorrent things. It moved on to become a ban on things the government didn't like. The book "The Red Web" does an excellent job detailing how this downward slide took place. It wasn't overnight, but it was a constant effort by those in power to erode privacy and freedom, and the first step was putting in place a basic censorship apparatus. https://www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/andrei-soldatov/the-red-web/9781610399579/?lens=publicaffairs https://www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/andrei-soldatov/the...
    - Barrin92 4mo ago
      >It wasn't overnight, but it was a constant effort by those in power to erode privacy and freedom yes because Russia is a dictatorship. These recent age limits on social media have had broad public support and are widely supported by parents. Not having your kid grow up on a combination of porn, gambling and body dysphoria and their data exfiltrated by a US mega-corporation isn't the dawn of internet censorship. What about the privacy of children and the ability to grow up outside of the morass of commercial surveillance platforms? Having your kids grow up free from that crap doesn't make you China, it makes you ca 1990s Denmark. Japan and China both have strict gun control laws, but Japan's a democracy. People are free to live by different values than Americans, just screaming red scares isn't going to convince anyone.
- denkmoon 4mo ago
  China and Russia did not have "freedom" prior to the internet.
- AuthAuth 4mo ago
  What internet privacy? Look at the sites this is being enforced on and tell me with a straight face you have privacy accessing those. Even for sites like X i'd argue truly anonymous users are horrible to have. Users should be accountable for what they say online in common public spaces. You want free speech and anonymity go to those spaces not facebook and X.
- andor 4mo ago
  It’s possible to verify age without disclosing identity. The German national ID (smartcard) allows this, but I’m not aware of any online service making use of the feature. I suppose it’s used offline by cigarette vending machines though.
api 4mo ago
A point I don’t often see made is: the argument that “the parents need to parent” is unintentionally classist. Wealthier people who can afford to have one parent stay home or have babysitters or nannies who will actually supervise the kid can do a much better job monitoring and redirecting than when both parents work long hours and have no money. So poorer kids are going to spend more time scrolling brain rot, which may lead to worse academic performance and concentration problems. They’re also more likely to get sucked into any number of garbage social media propagated cults, wacko ideologies, and dumb fads.
- Eridrus 4mo ago
  There are plenty of tech controls that exist for children's personal technological devices that do not require the state to intervene.
  - api 4mo ago
    They cost money or take many hours of time. Many families have neither. For the record I’m not a fan of the way this stuff is being pushed. At the same time, I feel like a lot of people are totally out of touch on a lot of the reasons why some people support this.
    - hn_acker 4mo ago
      > They cost money or take many hours of time. Many families have neither. The time can be amortized. Parental controls don't have to be set up in one sitting. Take the phone away for 2-3 weeks (during summer break if there is one), spend 20 minutes (almost) every day adding parental controls, and give the phone back after everything has been set up. Allowlist websites and password-block app downloads. Child needs the phone on weekdays? Instead add parental controls once or twice a week, across 4-6 weeks. The parents are already shelling out for a smartphone (because dumb phones are getting harder to buy, because peer pressure, because advertising, because some schools assign smartphone-based tasks, but nevertheless). The money aspect of elitism is a sunk cost. The next obstacle is the technical literacy aspect of elitism. What the parents need is the knowledge to use parental controls and the understanding that parental usage of parental controls should be almost not optional. I know most parents won't seek all of that knowledge on their own because lack of knowledge begets lack of enthusiasm, so this is where the government should be stepping in. (Also, the government should mandate that all stock Android/iOS devices have parental control features without necessarily mandating that the manufacturers or sellers turn those controls on before sale.) Have schools send emails and snail mails with big bold scary letters in English and Spanish: This Will Affect Your Child's Grades. Please Put Parental Controls On Your Child's Devices. Come To Our PTA Meetings About Parental Controls And Watch The Recordings If You Can't Attend.
autoexec 4mo ago
I don't think facebook needs some kind of age verification scheme at all. They are already fully aware of how old their users are. The kids post photos and messages every birthday. They use these platforms talk with their school friends. The platforms know who the children are. They already target them with ads and algorithmic manipulations accordingly. They don't need our biometric data to know that we're adults, they just want it anyway and this is their excuse.
- fhub 4mo ago
  WRT to how it was done in Australia. "Meta, which owns Facebook, Instagram and Threads, began closing teen accounts from 4 December last year. It said anyone mistakenly kicked off could use government ID or provide a video selfie to prove their age." So the bulk is done as you say but they still need* an age verification system for when they over-stepped. * need here is because of the way the laws were written AFAIK.
- harshreality 4mo ago
  Platforms can't know what the false positive and false negative rates are simply from cases where a user is thought to be a minor and proves otherwise. Even if the law were written better, for example to say that 95% accuracy is acceptable, platforms would still have to verify id from at least a random sampling of thought-to-be-adult users, which doesn't help you if you're one of the ones randomly selected. We need some kind of verification system that gives no extra information about users to the platforms, but I don't know if there's a true ZK way; it might require government involvement. I think that's fine. Govts could certainly run an age-verification system, give a signed yes or no token back to the user, with some permanently applied jitter per person so that platforms can't use cookies from returning users to figure out their birthday. As long as the government program has strict oversight to ensure it's not saving information about who's visiting what sites, it seems fine, or at least vastly better than entrusting photos of IDs to private 3rd parties.
thin_carapace 4mo ago
counterexample, the government could quickly institute a law stating that individuals knowingly allowing children to access tik tok must pay a fine. instead, government has teamed up with big business ... ostensibly to save the kids, however these actions conveniently benefit government and business alike (because ad tech can now seperate AI from human activity, and police/three letter orgs are granted automated citizen tracking). big fan of collectively considering contrasting ideas man but yeah i dont see how its ever going to be in the common mans best interests for the public and private sectors to team up.
mc32 4mo ago
Wouldn't a lot of the harm to adults and children be reduced if those companies went back to non-algorithmic feeds? No stupid discoveries based on searches, web history, fingerprints, or friends's interest. Just plain popularity and time sequence like they used to do before they went all aggro about finding ways to get you to consume the most inane, insipid and or crass and degueulasse shit they can to get more eyeballs and time on their services. Ban that --even in the best of cases, why continue to subject adults to that deluge?
onlyrealcuzzo 4mo ago
If you can't go into a strip club unless you're 18, why can't the government say you can't go to a strip club website unless you're 18? The government does government things. This doesn't seem like something crazy.
- big85 4mo ago
  We have a solution for that: parental controls. The new feature is that parental controls are enabled by default and cannot be disabled without the phone manufacturer's consent. The upcoming feature is that this also applies to non-adult sites like Facebook and YouTube. It's nothing less than the end of the free, open, and anonymous internet.
- mjevans 4mo ago
  TL;DR don't make everyone prove they're an adult (and thus who they are). Put the kids into the daycare if that's what you want the law to be. -- Don't let the kids wander Las Vegas / the adult section of town (the Internet) unsupervised? Or even better: Have any website that's intended for children make a Legal Claim that they are rated Child Safe / Friendly so they fall under Advertising Law coverage and/or soliciting a minor. Then have user agents (browsers) used by children configured to limit them to those places. Or even pay for a special VPN that limits access to those places.
  - flowerbreeze 4mo ago
    The last option is the only correct one. A simple HTTP header would do the trick.
Hizonner 4mo ago
> It likely also reduces harm to some/many/whatever children, While increasing harm to many others. Nobody ever wants to mention that part. It is not a clear "child safety" win. Personally I think it's probably a significant net loss.
Alex_toani 4mo ago
[dead]
jpfromlondon 4mo ago
[dead]

by fhub 4mo ago

eastof 4mo ago

Massively downplaying it to say "chips away" this takes a sledgehammer to the core of internet privacy. In all cases in the world where this has been done before like China or Russia, freedom is also lost shortly after. Of course people only argue one side, the stakes are losing internet privacy and freedom in the entire world if the west also succumbs to these authoritarian policies. It isn't the government's job to prevent your child from getting access to a phone/ipad, that's your job as a parent.

fhub 4mo ago
I think you’re proving my point a little. You’re treating the costs as obvious and enormous, while treating any potential benefits as essentially zero.
- roenxi 4mo ago
  We have to accept that there are policies with obvious and enormous downsides and essentially zero upsides, because they exist and get tried from time to time. Eastof (and the article) are providing an argument that this is one of those times. A pretty reasonable one too, I forget the implementation details of the UK scheme but in Australia and most of Europe the authoritarian bent of the people implementing these age restriction bans is concerning - it looks like they're setting up a general purposes minority targeting systems. I'm not sure how they're going to justify that and I don't recall seeing anyone make a reasonable argument to justify it yet beyond "We can and we're going to. Trust us and think of the children". Your argument seems to be that the issue is more nuanced than anyone else is saying, which is cool and all but then it sits with you to identify what the nuances you want to talk about are. Pointing out that someone else has identified different tradeoffs than you have is something of a given since that is the case with almost any pairing of people.
- dlcarrier 4mo ago
  Revolutions have been fought over the freedom to act without constant surveillance. The obviousness and enormity of a need for privacy is well established.
tlogan 4mo ago
The government’s job is to make sure we behave (and vote) properly. Otherwise, as Bertolt Brecht said, the government might simply dissolve the people and elect a different one.
Barrin92 4mo ago
>China or Russia, freedom is also lost shortly after. This may come as a shock but neither China or Russia had their first encounter with losses of individual freedom in the 1990s. This is what the OP is talking about, this is the kind of shibboleth of online libertarianism that has little to do with real world policy outcomes. You'll find many similar laws concerning child safety in Norway that you find in China, different political systems and cultures can value the same things, even implement similar laws, without converging on the same political system. In most countries on earth protecting children is a collective job, not a parents private business. A functioning and safe social fabric is a condition for successful families. Just worth mentioning one data point. In the US 50% of young men (aged 18-49) now participate in online betting or gambling, likely as a consequence of the saturation of ads on social media and gaming platforms. Good luck with your parental responsibility when an entire country operates like this.
- strictnein 4mo ago
  I mean, you're cutting off the qualifier with your selected quote. They are clearly talking about online freedom: > this takes a sledgehammer to the core of internet privacy. In all cases in the world where this has been done before like China or Russia, freedom is also lost shortly after. Russia's first online censorship was for truly abhorrent things. It moved on to become a ban on things the government didn't like. The book "The Red Web" does an excellent job detailing how this downward slide took place. It wasn't overnight, but it was a constant effort by those in power to erode privacy and freedom, and the first step was putting in place a basic censorship apparatus. https://www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/andrei-soldatov/the-red-web/9781610399579/?lens=publicaffairs https://www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/andrei-soldatov/the...
  - Barrin92 4mo ago
    >It wasn't overnight, but it was a constant effort by those in power to erode privacy and freedom yes because Russia is a dictatorship. These recent age limits on social media have had broad public support and are widely supported by parents. Not having your kid grow up on a combination of porn, gambling and body dysphoria and their data exfiltrated by a US mega-corporation isn't the dawn of internet censorship. What about the privacy of children and the ability to grow up outside of the morass of commercial surveillance platforms? Having your kids grow up free from that crap doesn't make you China, it makes you ca 1990s Denmark. Japan and China both have strict gun control laws, but Japan's a democracy. People are free to live by different values than Americans, just screaming red scares isn't going to convince anyone.
denkmoon 4mo ago
China and Russia did not have "freedom" prior to the internet.
AuthAuth 4mo ago
What internet privacy? Look at the sites this is being enforced on and tell me with a straight face you have privacy accessing those. Even for sites like X i'd argue truly anonymous users are horrible to have. Users should be accountable for what they say online in common public spaces. You want free speech and anonymity go to those spaces not facebook and X.
andor 4mo ago
It’s possible to verify age without disclosing identity. The German national ID (smartcard) allows this, but I’m not aware of any online service making use of the feature. I suppose it’s used offline by cigarette vending machines though.

api 4mo ago

A point I don’t often see made is: the argument that “the parents need to parent” is unintentionally classist. Wealthier people who can afford to have one parent stay home or have babysitters or nannies who will actually supervise the kid can do a much better job monitoring and redirecting than when both parents work long hours and have no money. So poorer kids are going to spend more time scrolling brain rot, which may lead to worse academic performance and concentration problems. They’re also more likely to get sucked into any number of garbage social media propagated cults, wacko ideologies, and dumb fads.

Eridrus 4mo ago
There are plenty of tech controls that exist for children's personal technological devices that do not require the state to intervene.
- api 4mo ago
  They cost money or take many hours of time. Many families have neither. For the record I’m not a fan of the way this stuff is being pushed. At the same time, I feel like a lot of people are totally out of touch on a lot of the reasons why some people support this.
  - hn_acker 4mo ago
    > They cost money or take many hours of time. Many families have neither. The time can be amortized. Parental controls don't have to be set up in one sitting. Take the phone away for 2-3 weeks (during summer break if there is one), spend 20 minutes (almost) every day adding parental controls, and give the phone back after everything has been set up. Allowlist websites and password-block app downloads. Child needs the phone on weekdays? Instead add parental controls once or twice a week, across 4-6 weeks. The parents are already shelling out for a smartphone (because dumb phones are getting harder to buy, because peer pressure, because advertising, because some schools assign smartphone-based tasks, but nevertheless). The money aspect of elitism is a sunk cost. The next obstacle is the technical literacy aspect of elitism. What the parents need is the knowledge to use parental controls and the understanding that parental usage of parental controls should be almost not optional. I know most parents won't seek all of that knowledge on their own because lack of knowledge begets lack of enthusiasm, so this is where the government should be stepping in. (Also, the government should mandate that all stock Android/iOS devices have parental control features without necessarily mandating that the manufacturers or sellers turn those controls on before sale.) Have schools send emails and snail mails with big bold scary letters in English and Spanish: This Will Affect Your Child's Grades. Please Put Parental Controls On Your Child's Devices. Come To Our PTA Meetings About Parental Controls And Watch The Recordings If You Can't Attend.

autoexec 4mo ago

I don't think facebook needs some kind of age verification scheme at all. They are already fully aware of how old their users are. The kids post photos and messages every birthday. They use these platforms talk with their school friends. The platforms know who the children are. They already target them with ads and algorithmic manipulations accordingly. They don't need our biometric data to know that we're adults, they just want it anyway and this is their excuse.

fhub 4mo ago
WRT to how it was done in Australia. "Meta, which owns Facebook, Instagram and Threads, began closing teen accounts from 4 December last year. It said anyone mistakenly kicked off could use government ID or provide a video selfie to prove their age." So the bulk is done as you say but they still need* an age verification system for when they over-stepped. * need here is because of the way the laws were written AFAIK.
harshreality 4mo ago
Platforms can't know what the false positive and false negative rates are simply from cases where a user is thought to be a minor and proves otherwise. Even if the law were written better, for example to say that 95% accuracy is acceptable, platforms would still have to verify id from at least a random sampling of thought-to-be-adult users, which doesn't help you if you're one of the ones randomly selected. We need some kind of verification system that gives no extra information about users to the platforms, but I don't know if there's a true ZK way; it might require government involvement. I think that's fine. Govts could certainly run an age-verification system, give a signed yes or no token back to the user, with some permanently applied jitter per person so that platforms can't use cookies from returning users to figure out their birthday. As long as the government program has strict oversight to ensure it's not saving information about who's visiting what sites, it seems fine, or at least vastly better than entrusting photos of IDs to private 3rd parties.

thin_carapace 4mo ago

counterexample, the government could quickly institute a law stating that individuals knowingly allowing children to access tik tok must pay a fine. instead, government has teamed up with big business ... ostensibly to save the kids, however these actions conveniently benefit government and business alike (because ad tech can now seperate AI from human activity, and police/three letter orgs are granted automated citizen tracking). big fan of collectively considering contrasting ideas man but yeah i dont see how its ever going to be in the common mans best interests for the public and private sectors to team up.

mc32 4mo ago

Wouldn't a lot of the harm to adults and children be reduced if those companies went back to non-algorithmic feeds? No stupid discoveries based on searches, web history, fingerprints, or friends's interest. Just plain popularity and time sequence like they used to do before they went all aggro about finding ways to get you to consume the most inane, insipid and or crass and degueulasse shit they can to get more eyeballs and time on their services. Ban that --even in the best of cases, why continue to subject adults to that deluge?

onlyrealcuzzo 4mo ago

If you can't go into a strip club unless you're 18, why can't the government say you can't go to a strip club website unless you're 18? The government does government things. This doesn't seem like something crazy.

big85 4mo ago
We have a solution for that: parental controls. The new feature is that parental controls are enabled by default and cannot be disabled without the phone manufacturer's consent. The upcoming feature is that this also applies to non-adult sites like Facebook and YouTube. It's nothing less than the end of the free, open, and anonymous internet.
mjevans 4mo ago
TL;DR don't make everyone prove they're an adult (and thus who they are). Put the kids into the daycare if that's what you want the law to be. -- Don't let the kids wander Las Vegas / the adult section of town (the Internet) unsupervised? Or even better: Have any website that's intended for children make a Legal Claim that they are rated Child Safe / Friendly so they fall under Advertising Law coverage and/or soliciting a minor. Then have user agents (browsers) used by children configured to limit them to those places. Or even pay for a special VPN that limits access to those places.
- flowerbreeze 4mo ago
  The last option is the only correct one. A simple HTTP header would do the trick.

Hizonner 4mo ago

> It likely also reduces harm to some/many/whatever children, While increasing harm to many others. Nobody ever wants to mention that part. It is not a clear "child safety" win. Personally I think it's probably a significant net loss.

Alex_toani 4mo ago

[dead]

jpfromlondon 4mo ago

[dead]