8 ms·

I find myself stuck on the fence with age checks. Companies have show that they are incapable or unwilling to address the problems they cause. And market force

I find myself stuck on the fence with age checks. Companies have show that they are incapable or unwilling to address the problems they cause. And market forces are not working to correct things. It’s also pretty obvious that saying “parent should take responsibility” is also not working. Just observe the world around you to know it’s a non starter. This is where regulation is supposed to come in. At the same time, companies have shown that they will abuse any personal information that is shared with them and we are now giving them more details about ourselves…

owbt 2mo ago
I have a feeling that, in order to protect privacy, those regulations must fall on the parents too. It is their primary responsibility to take care of their children. Maintaining your kids digital hygiene should be important to the lawmakers and the child protections services.
- inigyou 2mo ago
  What should they do about it?
  - owbt 2mo ago
    Who? The lawmakers? I believe banning children up to a certain age from having Internet-enabled mobile devices is a good starting point, and both child protection services and law enforcement services should fully cooperate with parents in enforcing that ban. If you see a kid smoking a cigarette or taking drugs, you know parents have failed somewhere along the road and it would be preferable if the government could step in to help.
    - sevenzero 2mo ago
      This is reasonable up to the point of lawmakers suddenly deeming rainbow flags just as bad as drugs (Russia as an example). Your example may work in well intended countries but completely ignores that a country can VERY easily shift into a regime that does not have good ethics abusing these kinda laws.
      - inigyou 2mo ago
        Not having an internet censorship law never stopped a country from making rainbow flags illegal.
    - inigyou 2mo ago
      This is a reasonable perspective, but don't you think the internet has the potential to do good as well as evil? I remember seeing some interactive lever applet as a kid where you could move the fulcrum. (Slightly) educational stuff. Shouldn't that be allowed?
      - ben_w 2mo ago
        Educational content was already a thing well before the internet got everywhere. When I was in primary school, one of the things teachers had us do was debate the pros- and cons- of television. The pro side included educational content. First Windows PC at any of my schools had Encarta. Wikipedia can be downloaded in entirety and read offline, though it is so broad it may need a degree of filtering to become age-appropriate even for 16 year olds.
      - cowboylowrez 2mo ago
        There are any number of alternatives, I favor a walled off whitelisted subset of the internet that requires age verification and then we can let kids on that and otherwise ban them from the general internet and also ban internet enabled devices in general. However, this costs and undoubtably wouldn't be perfect as there are people out there who want to chat up your kids, look at how much work a roblox style site needs to do against internet users who probably shouldn't be chatting up kids. For those precocious kids who parents decide should be the exception because they are "good with computers" well I'm thinking some sort of waiver would be required that held the parents responsible then maybe let the kid hack on the internet but this is an unpopular view, the unpopular part being the "parents being responsible for their kids" bit. But in general I think its a tough time to be legislating this stuff because "reasonable perspectives" are not what we are voting into office right now lol
      - owbt 2mo ago
        I have a feeling that, currently, the cons outweigh the pros. Maybe if the digital landscape changes in the future, then we can reconsider those limitations. So far, the mobile Internet - the apps mainly - is a hostile environment for a young human, and I'd say they are pretty dangerous to the adults too.
    - ranger_danger 2mo ago
      In many schools in the US now, kids are issued mandatory iPads from age 5 and are required to use them to complete school assignments.
      - owbt 2mo ago
        That is extremely upsetting.
        ranger_danger 2mo ago
        Wait until you hear about the pepper-spraying drones being put into service in schools. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49091153 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49091153
      - 1718627440 2mo ago
        Which sounds like a government mandated child harm measure to me.
        inigyou 2mo ago
        Most of the US education system is.
    - polipputter 2mo ago
      [dead]
K0nserv 2mo ago
I don't want the market solving this. If we are going to do age checks it should be based on public key cryptography, be open source, and handled by the government. You verify with the government (or don't since they already know your age), you get some form of cryptographic attestation, present said attestation to websites/apps. I'm not a fan of age verification in the first place, but I am extremely not a fan of random third parties doing the verifying.
- zx8080 2mo ago
  In this case will it be a transparent traceability and the mapping to user real identity close to 100%?
- oneeyedpigeon 2mo ago
  If it has to happen, this is exactly how it should. Please feel for those of us in the UK who are currently denied access to some pretty significant services unless we send our passport to a random third party.
  - sisve 2mo ago
    This is how it's planned in the EU is it not?
    - oneeyedpigeon 2mo ago
      Maybe? I'm not sure since the UK is no longer part of the EU; we're running quite a bit behind on this kind of thing now.
      - sisve 2mo ago
        https://digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu/en/policies/eu-age-verification https://digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu/en/policies/eu-age-ver...
  - bossyTeacher 2mo ago
    > some pretty significant services What services are those other than p*rn?
sschueller 2mo ago
There should be a law that forces social media companies to use a different algorithm for anyone under a certain age and be required to disclose it to the public. Possibly different algorithm depending on age group. There should however be no force age verification. Social media companies already know how old you are or very close to it using the data they collect everyday. Using this data they should be required to use "best effort" to determine which algorithm you fall in. Nothing is 100% and we should stop pretending it is, sure some kids will find a way around but they would also if there is a age verification system.
- watwut 2mo ago
  > There should be a law that forces social media companies to use a different algorithm for anyone under a certain age and be required to disclose it to the public. Possibly different algorithm depending on age group. Frankly, in that case I want the kids algorithm. It is preferable for me as an adult, I do not want the intentionally harmful one either.
  - flowrange 2mo ago
    This. Just give me the option to have pagination. Sweet, old, pagination. Like here on Hacker News. I can then review one or maybe 2 pages, and that is all. Like a physical magazine where there's a clear end. I have the firm belief that infinite scrolling is one of the darkest pattern that was ever invented.
    - oneeyedpigeon 2mo ago
      Hang on... Hacker News very clearly has a complex, opaque [1] algorithm that orders stuff. Maybe it's not user-specific, and maybe that's a good dividing line, but these are the kinds of factors we're going to have to think about if we want to introduce regulation around 'algorithms'. Infinite scrolling is a very different issue (although it's definitely a contributor to the harm, I agree). ([1] Unless I'm being unfair here; maybe the algorithm is available somewhere, I just don't see it obviously linked anywhere)
  - 2mo ago
oneeyedpigeon 2mo ago
I think you've done a great job identifying the three main options and why two of them (parents, censorship-by-default) just will not work. That leaves regulation; the only way we will prevent children—or anyone—from coming to harm is to stop companies from producing this harmful content in the first place. Either that, or just accept the harm.
- nxm 2mo ago
  Who decides what is harm? An unelected bureaucrat? Now you’re going into censorship area
  - oneeyedpigeon 2mo ago
    No, I'd prefer elected representatives to do that, in the same way they've decided on all the other existing harms we legislate for.
    - polipputter 2mo ago
      And what happens when those representatives decide things like rainbow flags being a crime or so much as mentioning the existence of trans people in front of a kid is equivalent to a sex crime. The US has states pushing legislation to make abortion a crime punishable by the death penalty while also using flock cameras to track people traveling across the country to places it's complete legal to do so. But yeah let's give those people a way to tie every website that woman may view while searching for a safe option now directly linked to her I.D. or that adult searching for gender affirming care is now outed because their ID is linked to the site. So when states like Kansas legislate all trans people's drivers licenses be revoked they can just say okay who in the state has looked at transgender healthcare related websites and have a list of people to go after.
ekjhgkejhgk 2mo ago
Parents should take responsibility and not let their children smoke, and we still banned selling cigarets to children. Just because something should be some way, doesn't mean as a society we shouldn't do anything about it. In any case, the story with parents and addictive devices is even harder for parents than e.g. cigarets. For example, a LOT of schools in the UK think that it's good to give childrens ipads to study, and there's nothing that parents can do to prevent this. In this specific situation saying that "parents should take responsibility" is unfair to parents, because their only option to avoid this is home schooling.
- EmbarrassedHelp 2mo ago
  That's a false equivalence. The only thing we should be doing is tackling addictive algorithms for everyone, and providing purely optional parental controls that are disabled by default.
  - ekjhgkejhgk 2mo ago
    > The only thing we should be doing is tackling addictive algorithms for everyone Oh so you agree with me, that it should be banned, like cigarettes. Thank you. Why'd you call it "false equivalence" then? Why not call it "a really good equivalence"?
c0n5pir4cy 2mo ago
The EU actually has a very good, privacy protecting way of doing this based on zero knowledge proofs. Unfortunately they completely botched it by having the proof-of-concept app rely on Apple & Googles integrity APIs - which a bunch of countries copied.
- inigyou 2mo ago
  ZKPs may as well just be unencrypted HTTP headers which would be way simpler and easier to implement. All a ZKP proves is that at least one person in the world is over 18.
  - palata 2mo ago
    This is not completely true. With ZKP, if you make a business out of reselling tokens you get with your own identity, eventually they will see that you use orders of magnitude more tokens than normal people. So with ZKP it's more difficult to cheat. Not impossible, just less accessible.
    - inigyou 2mo ago
      They're not ZK if they can do that
      - roblabla 2mo ago
        Each individual proof is zero knowledge, but downloading a _bunch_ of them is an indicator, yes. There's no real way to work around this with the current ZKP scheme. I'd argue ZKP is, in theory, the least worse option of all current age verification scheme. My personal opinion is that age verification itself is a bad idea, but if we're going to go ahead with it, I'd much rather we use ZKP for it than the current mess of "upload your passport and picture of yourself to dodgy 3rd parties that likely now have your browsing traffic associated with your real name"...
        inigyou 2mo ago
fc417fc802 2mo ago
> This is where regulation is supposed to come in. Yes, agreed. However regulation does not necessarily have to mean age checks. The most obvious low hanging fruit to start off with is open and interoperable content filtering infrastructure (ie parental controls) so that there's some common standard that literally everything supports out of the box. It needs to all work together - the current situation tends to be spotty and unreliable thus parents tend not to bother trying to use it. Start with an extensible metadata format that enables websites to self-classify pages. Account for things like loading alternative resources on the same page. Mandate that all websites and app stores include such metadata and that all browsers and operating systems have some baseline functionality for making use of such data in a sensible manner. Only after that has completely and utterly failed should we even begin to consider highly invasive measures such as mandating government ID checks.
tjpnz 2mo ago
The parenting argument is a complete cop-out. There's no universe where you can be shoulder hovering 24/7. This could've been solved years ago with robust parental controls. But companies like Google just didn't want to because they wanted to shove ads in kids' faces.
- oneeyedpigeon 2mo ago
  I think we can approach this from more than one angle. Yes, it cannot be entirely on parents, but parents should bear some responsibility to not just hand a device over to their children with unrestricted access to the entire internet.
  - tjpnz 2mo ago
    Up until relatively recently you would have to install custom VPNs and maybe add Pihole into the mix to achieve anything close to that. Easy for us here, but we're in a small minority.
    - jeroenhd 2mo ago
      Parental controls have been part of mobile devices for years, but so have bypasses. For instance, you can bypass Google's parental control settings by opening the help page in the Google settings and clicking links until you get to the Google homepage. I doubt it matters because nobody seems to configure the parental controls that are there, anyway. Only schools seem to try, and only because they're legally held responsible for what kids do on their computers.
      - pbhjpbhj 2mo ago
        Parental controls are complicated and obscure, IME. Setting up a child to play Minecraft through Microsoft was like setting up a web server with firewalls and reverse proxy... only less sensible. I'd appreciate that is so they can get parents to set accounts as 'adult' so Microsoft can exploit them. You can set up, for example a child friendly DNS (Family version of OpenDNS) then Firefox come along and bypass it (DoH). Probably, we need an OS level setting, per account, browsers would need to expose it to websites, apps installed would have to check and provide content according to local legislation/rules. Bypasses would have to be performed by an "adult" account. The main issue is that adults would be able to set themselves as children and avoid negative commercial activity. That's a problem because it means FANG, etc, will lobby against it and then ensure their implementations are convoluted and broken.
Xelbair 2mo ago
>It’s also pretty obvious that saying “parent should take responsibility” is also not working. Just observe the world around you to know it’s a non starter. Then who should? Government, where each implementation strips away rights to privacy - which in some countries, including mine, are a constitutional right? Where it expands powers of government to track everyone's activity online - and remember we're one election away from total policy shift(just like with latest US elections)? Free market? The profitable solution is, depending on environment - either ignore the problem(profit from ads served to children, no extra work necessary), or strip away all privacy (to filter out bots and get paid more per ad). The sad reality is that "parent should take responsibility" is least bad option available, and takes into the account individual development of a child. Even creation of a highly regulated child only internet creates more problems - as now that becomes a highly profitable target for bad actors(both individual abusers, and companies trying to serve ads)
- account42 2mo ago
  Let's also not forget that many of the problems this supposedly solves are not even specific to children. The attention economy is bad for everyone.
- ben_w 2mo ago
  In principle, it is possible to make a privacy-preserving age check. Site/app asks "≥18?", device generates a UUID specifically for that [app/domain + device], the device passes that UUID to government database along with the "≥18?" question and the ID card info but not the app/domain, government database gives the answer and signs just the UUID and the answer and doesn't include any ID card info. Government doesn't know what you're looking at, website doesn't know your ID. (There's probably also better ways to do all this, I'm not a cryptographer and I expect that will be obvious from this comment to people who are).
  - Xelbair 2mo ago
    In reality, the ones making such check will want extra capabilities 'just in case' as we observe now, or just go for simpler solution because it's cheaper. How does it prevent fingerprinting if you get access to both logs and try to time it? Even more so if you include already present tracking infrastructure, which as a government you can just request data from. It is possible to de-anonymize people based on aggregate data already, and this proposed solution just adds extra data points. Even in countries in which this requires a subpoena, agencies break the law frequently and don't get punished. Legal systems aren't computer systems. This isn't a technical problem but a social/political one.
fsflover 2mo ago
Related recent discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49084938 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49084938
codingjoe 2mo ago
100%, it's not like adults are immune to misinformation, social media addiction or scams. Those platforms should be safe for all people regardless of their age, nationality, sexual orientation, gender or religion.
jonathanstrange 2mo ago
> It’s also pretty obvious that saying “parent should take responsibility” is also not working. Just observe the world around you to know it’s a non starter. That's like saying "take a look at owners of fast sport cars, it's obvious this is not working and they have too many accidents." If you want to patronize other parents and think the government should be more responsible and parents less responsible, please state that honestly. Don't make up alleged "facts" to make a point. Otherwise, I'll just say "it's obvious you're wrong, just observe the world around you and you know age verification is a non starter."
Okawari 2mo ago
We have cars, and kids are not allowed to drive them. Yet we do not have mechanisms in place to ensure kids aren't driving cars because the responsibility falls on the parents, and it works. By and large, parents understand the threats and navigate this requirement perfectly fine; outliers are few enough that we can deal with them on an individual basis. The reason the current system doesn't work when it comes to unfettered internet access is either that parents by and large don't actually agree with the threat assessment of said internet access for kids, or they ignore it because the consequences of doing so are disproportionately small. Personally, my vote is that they just don't think it's that big of a problem. To me, the ideal solution would be more granular and better parental control configurations, especially on the web. Pair that with preconfigured devices that have "unremovable" parental controls, branded as "kids/youth phones." If parents care about this, they'll buy those phones for their kids and the problem is solved. If they don't, then this isn't something parents want, and we shouldn't really pursue it further.
- mapontosevenths 2mo ago
  > The reason the current system doesn't work when it comes to unfettered internet access is either that parents by and large don't actually agree with the threat assessment of said internet access for kids, or they ignore it because the consequences of doing so are disproportionately small. Sometimes parents know their children, and what's best for them, better than faceless politicians (who we've seen are often attracted to said children for some reason). Growing up in my household there was a time when I was allowed to read and watch whatever I found interesting. My younger brother was not. That was because my parents knew us and judged that at my level of maturity I was unlikely to be negatively impacted, whereas my brother would get nightmares or copy-cat things he saw that he definitely shouldn't. That's how it should be. Yes, there are bad parents who will decide poorly. That's the cost of freedom.
  - nathan_compton 2mo ago
    I sympathetic to this perspective, as a parent, but also, there are just a lot of kids out there with bad parents. My personal philosophy is that parents have a duty to raise their children but that duty is on behalf of the society into which the children will eventually enter. Consequently, a just society may sometimes impose itself on parental freedoms (in the case of neglect, for example) because, in the end, the child's ultimate guardian and responsibility is the society itself, not the parents. The internet is full of material exposure to which, for children, could reasonably be construed as neglect or abuse, and it is insufficient to leave the entirety of the responsibility to the parents, in that case. I don't know why Americans are so obsessed with freedom as if were the only social good that a society can pursue. There are many things which make life worth living, that contribute to flourishing, and freedom is high on that list, but its not the only thing. All that said, I don't approve of age checks of the sort being proposed everywhere now. We can do a lot better at mitigating these problems without damaging privacy so much.
duskdozer 2mo ago
Children here are a distraction. Any harm these companies are causing to children is also being inflicted on adults. The correct solution is to end the harmful behavior for all, not set up required identity verification.
StingyJelly 2mo ago
> Companies have show that they are incapable or unwilling to address the problems they cause > This is where regulation is supposed to come in. This is such a misdirected effort... Why the heck are we focusing on addressing those problems for a small subset of population (kids) while creating even bigger problems for the rest? Lets regulate those companies into actually addressing the problems they cause for everyone!
DANmode 2mo ago
> It’s also pretty obvious that saying “parent should take responsibility” is also not working. So punish those people. Stop letting them neglect the responsibility a parent innately has to their child and to the rest of us.
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 2mo ago
  Stop punishing me by asking for ID when I buy alcohol!
  - DANmode 2mo ago
    If you are an elderly person, this position becomes wildly reasonable. No youths are spoofing being 75 at the corner store.
  - EmbarrassedHelp 2mo ago
    That's a false equivalence and you know it.
  - 83642736392 2mo ago
    [dead]
2OEH8eoCRo0 2mo ago
> companies have shown that they will abuse any personal information that is shared with them This is the rot at the center of tech IMO. We have all these wondrous toys but we can't do something as simple as verify age without abuse. What's the point of all this tech if we can't trust any of it?
hbn 2mo ago
There's nothing to be confused about, this isn't about age verification. It's about increasing surveillance and ending anonymity. The "think of the children" shit is just a tactic to make emotional, non-critical-thinking people into die-hard soldiers for the cause that get angry when you argue against it. "Oh you're against protecting children? What are you, some kind of pedophile?"
hulitu 2mo ago
> This is where regulation is supposed to come in. And who do you think pushes/pais for regulations ? The same companies which are "regulated".

owbt 2mo ago

I have a feeling that, in order to protect privacy, those regulations must fall on the parents too. It is their primary responsibility to take care of their children. Maintaining your kids digital hygiene should be important to the lawmakers and the child protections services.

inigyou 2mo ago
What should they do about it?
- owbt 2mo ago
  Who? The lawmakers? I believe banning children up to a certain age from having Internet-enabled mobile devices is a good starting point, and both child protection services and law enforcement services should fully cooperate with parents in enforcing that ban. If you see a kid smoking a cigarette or taking drugs, you know parents have failed somewhere along the road and it would be preferable if the government could step in to help.
  - sevenzero 2mo ago
    This is reasonable up to the point of lawmakers suddenly deeming rainbow flags just as bad as drugs (Russia as an example). Your example may work in well intended countries but completely ignores that a country can VERY easily shift into a regime that does not have good ethics abusing these kinda laws.
    - inigyou 2mo ago
      Not having an internet censorship law never stopped a country from making rainbow flags illegal.
  - inigyou 2mo ago
    This is a reasonable perspective, but don't you think the internet has the potential to do good as well as evil? I remember seeing some interactive lever applet as a kid where you could move the fulcrum. (Slightly) educational stuff. Shouldn't that be allowed?
    - ben_w 2mo ago
      Educational content was already a thing well before the internet got everywhere. When I was in primary school, one of the things teachers had us do was debate the pros- and cons- of television. The pro side included educational content. First Windows PC at any of my schools had Encarta. Wikipedia can be downloaded in entirety and read offline, though it is so broad it may need a degree of filtering to become age-appropriate even for 16 year olds.
    - cowboylowrez 2mo ago
      There are any number of alternatives, I favor a walled off whitelisted subset of the internet that requires age verification and then we can let kids on that and otherwise ban them from the general internet and also ban internet enabled devices in general. However, this costs and undoubtably wouldn't be perfect as there are people out there who want to chat up your kids, look at how much work a roblox style site needs to do against internet users who probably shouldn't be chatting up kids. For those precocious kids who parents decide should be the exception because they are "good with computers" well I'm thinking some sort of waiver would be required that held the parents responsible then maybe let the kid hack on the internet but this is an unpopular view, the unpopular part being the "parents being responsible for their kids" bit. But in general I think its a tough time to be legislating this stuff because "reasonable perspectives" are not what we are voting into office right now lol
    - owbt 2mo ago
      I have a feeling that, currently, the cons outweigh the pros. Maybe if the digital landscape changes in the future, then we can reconsider those limitations. So far, the mobile Internet - the apps mainly - is a hostile environment for a young human, and I'd say they are pretty dangerous to the adults too.
  - ranger_danger 2mo ago
    In many schools in the US now, kids are issued mandatory iPads from age 5 and are required to use them to complete school assignments.
    - owbt 2mo ago
      That is extremely upsetting.
      - ranger_danger 2mo ago
        Wait until you hear about the pepper-spraying drones being put into service in schools. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49091153 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49091153
    - 1718627440 2mo ago
      Which sounds like a government mandated child harm measure to me.
      - inigyou 2mo ago
        Most of the US education system is.
  - polipputter 2mo ago
    [dead]

K0nserv 2mo ago

I don't want the market solving this. If we are going to do age checks it should be based on public key cryptography, be open source, and handled by the government. You verify with the government (or don't since they already know your age), you get some form of cryptographic attestation, present said attestation to websites/apps. I'm not a fan of age verification in the first place, but I am extremely not a fan of random third parties doing the verifying.

zx8080 2mo ago
In this case will it be a transparent traceability and the mapping to user real identity close to 100%?
oneeyedpigeon 2mo ago
If it has to happen, this is exactly how it should. Please feel for those of us in the UK who are currently denied access to some pretty significant services unless we send our passport to a random third party.
- sisve 2mo ago
  This is how it's planned in the EU is it not?
  - oneeyedpigeon 2mo ago
    Maybe? I'm not sure since the UK is no longer part of the EU; we're running quite a bit behind on this kind of thing now.
    - sisve 2mo ago
      https://digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu/en/policies/eu-age-verification https://digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu/en/policies/eu-age-ver...
- bossyTeacher 2mo ago
  > some pretty significant services What services are those other than p*rn?

sschueller 2mo ago

There should be a law that forces social media companies to use a different algorithm for anyone under a certain age and be required to disclose it to the public. Possibly different algorithm depending on age group. There should however be no force age verification. Social media companies already know how old you are or very close to it using the data they collect everyday. Using this data they should be required to use "best effort" to determine which algorithm you fall in. Nothing is 100% and we should stop pretending it is, sure some kids will find a way around but they would also if there is a age verification system.

watwut 2mo ago
> There should be a law that forces social media companies to use a different algorithm for anyone under a certain age and be required to disclose it to the public. Possibly different algorithm depending on age group. Frankly, in that case I want the kids algorithm. It is preferable for me as an adult, I do not want the intentionally harmful one either.
- flowrange 2mo ago
  This. Just give me the option to have pagination. Sweet, old, pagination. Like here on Hacker News. I can then review one or maybe 2 pages, and that is all. Like a physical magazine where there's a clear end. I have the firm belief that infinite scrolling is one of the darkest pattern that was ever invented.
  - oneeyedpigeon 2mo ago
    Hang on... Hacker News very clearly has a complex, opaque [1] algorithm that orders stuff. Maybe it's not user-specific, and maybe that's a good dividing line, but these are the kinds of factors we're going to have to think about if we want to introduce regulation around 'algorithms'. Infinite scrolling is a very different issue (although it's definitely a contributor to the harm, I agree). ([1] Unless I'm being unfair here; maybe the algorithm is available somewhere, I just don't see it obviously linked anywhere)
- 2mo ago

oneeyedpigeon 2mo ago

I think you've done a great job identifying the three main options and why two of them (parents, censorship-by-default) just will not work. That leaves regulation; the only way we will prevent children—or anyone—from coming to harm is to stop companies from producing this harmful content in the first place. Either that, or just accept the harm.

nxm 2mo ago
Who decides what is harm? An unelected bureaucrat? Now you’re going into censorship area
- oneeyedpigeon 2mo ago
  No, I'd prefer elected representatives to do that, in the same way they've decided on all the other existing harms we legislate for.
  - polipputter 2mo ago
    And what happens when those representatives decide things like rainbow flags being a crime or so much as mentioning the existence of trans people in front of a kid is equivalent to a sex crime. The US has states pushing legislation to make abortion a crime punishable by the death penalty while also using flock cameras to track people traveling across the country to places it's complete legal to do so. But yeah let's give those people a way to tie every website that woman may view while searching for a safe option now directly linked to her I.D. or that adult searching for gender affirming care is now outed because their ID is linked to the site. So when states like Kansas legislate all trans people's drivers licenses be revoked they can just say okay who in the state has looked at transgender healthcare related websites and have a list of people to go after.

ekjhgkejhgk 2mo ago

Parents should take responsibility and not let their children smoke, and we still banned selling cigarets to children. Just because something should be some way, doesn't mean as a society we shouldn't do anything about it. In any case, the story with parents and addictive devices is even harder for parents than e.g. cigarets. For example, a LOT of schools in the UK think that it's good to give childrens ipads to study, and there's nothing that parents can do to prevent this. In this specific situation saying that "parents should take responsibility" is unfair to parents, because their only option to avoid this is home schooling.

EmbarrassedHelp 2mo ago
That's a false equivalence. The only thing we should be doing is tackling addictive algorithms for everyone, and providing purely optional parental controls that are disabled by default.
- ekjhgkejhgk 2mo ago
  > The only thing we should be doing is tackling addictive algorithms for everyone Oh so you agree with me, that it should be banned, like cigarettes. Thank you. Why'd you call it "false equivalence" then? Why not call it "a really good equivalence"?

c0n5pir4cy 2mo ago

The EU actually has a very good, privacy protecting way of doing this based on zero knowledge proofs. Unfortunately they completely botched it by having the proof-of-concept app rely on Apple & Googles integrity APIs - which a bunch of countries copied.

inigyou 2mo ago
ZKPs may as well just be unencrypted HTTP headers which would be way simpler and easier to implement. All a ZKP proves is that at least one person in the world is over 18.
- palata 2mo ago
  This is not completely true. With ZKP, if you make a business out of reselling tokens you get with your own identity, eventually they will see that you use orders of magnitude more tokens than normal people. So with ZKP it's more difficult to cheat. Not impossible, just less accessible.
  - inigyou 2mo ago
    They're not ZK if they can do that
    - roblabla 2mo ago
      Each individual proof is zero knowledge, but downloading a _bunch_ of them is an indicator, yes. There's no real way to work around this with the current ZKP scheme. I'd argue ZKP is, in theory, the least worse option of all current age verification scheme. My personal opinion is that age verification itself is a bad idea, but if we're going to go ahead with it, I'd much rather we use ZKP for it than the current mess of "upload your passport and picture of yourself to dodgy 3rd parties that likely now have your browsing traffic associated with your real name"...
      - inigyou 2mo ago

fc417fc802 2mo ago

> This is where regulation is supposed to come in. Yes, agreed. However regulation does not necessarily have to mean age checks. The most obvious low hanging fruit to start off with is open and interoperable content filtering infrastructure (ie parental controls) so that there's some common standard that literally everything supports out of the box. It needs to all work together - the current situation tends to be spotty and unreliable thus parents tend not to bother trying to use it. Start with an extensible metadata format that enables websites to self-classify pages. Account for things like loading alternative resources on the same page. Mandate that all websites and app stores include such metadata and that all browsers and operating systems have some baseline functionality for making use of such data in a sensible manner. Only after that has completely and utterly failed should we even begin to consider highly invasive measures such as mandating government ID checks.

tjpnz 2mo ago

The parenting argument is a complete cop-out. There's no universe where you can be shoulder hovering 24/7. This could've been solved years ago with robust parental controls. But companies like Google just didn't want to because they wanted to shove ads in kids' faces.

oneeyedpigeon 2mo ago
I think we can approach this from more than one angle. Yes, it cannot be entirely on parents, but parents should bear some responsibility to not just hand a device over to their children with unrestricted access to the entire internet.
- tjpnz 2mo ago
  Up until relatively recently you would have to install custom VPNs and maybe add Pihole into the mix to achieve anything close to that. Easy for us here, but we're in a small minority.
  - jeroenhd 2mo ago
    Parental controls have been part of mobile devices for years, but so have bypasses. For instance, you can bypass Google's parental control settings by opening the help page in the Google settings and clicking links until you get to the Google homepage. I doubt it matters because nobody seems to configure the parental controls that are there, anyway. Only schools seem to try, and only because they're legally held responsible for what kids do on their computers.
    - pbhjpbhj 2mo ago
      Parental controls are complicated and obscure, IME. Setting up a child to play Minecraft through Microsoft was like setting up a web server with firewalls and reverse proxy... only less sensible. I'd appreciate that is so they can get parents to set accounts as 'adult' so Microsoft can exploit them. You can set up, for example a child friendly DNS (Family version of OpenDNS) then Firefox come along and bypass it (DoH). Probably, we need an OS level setting, per account, browsers would need to expose it to websites, apps installed would have to check and provide content according to local legislation/rules. Bypasses would have to be performed by an "adult" account. The main issue is that adults would be able to set themselves as children and avoid negative commercial activity. That's a problem because it means FANG, etc, will lobby against it and then ensure their implementations are convoluted and broken.

Xelbair 2mo ago

>It’s also pretty obvious that saying “parent should take responsibility” is also not working. Just observe the world around you to know it’s a non starter. Then who should? Government, where each implementation strips away rights to privacy - which in some countries, including mine, are a constitutional right? Where it expands powers of government to track everyone's activity online - and remember we're one election away from total policy shift(just like with latest US elections)? Free market? The profitable solution is, depending on environment - either ignore the problem(profit from ads served to children, no extra work necessary), or strip away all privacy (to filter out bots and get paid more per ad). The sad reality is that "parent should take responsibility" is least bad option available, and takes into the account individual development of a child. Even creation of a highly regulated child only internet creates more problems - as now that becomes a highly profitable target for bad actors(both individual abusers, and companies trying to serve ads)

account42 2mo ago
Let's also not forget that many of the problems this supposedly solves are not even specific to children. The attention economy is bad for everyone.
ben_w 2mo ago
In principle, it is possible to make a privacy-preserving age check. Site/app asks "≥18?", device generates a UUID specifically for that [app/domain + device], the device passes that UUID to government database along with the "≥18?" question and the ID card info but not the app/domain, government database gives the answer and signs just the UUID and the answer and doesn't include any ID card info. Government doesn't know what you're looking at, website doesn't know your ID. (There's probably also better ways to do all this, I'm not a cryptographer and I expect that will be obvious from this comment to people who are).
- Xelbair 2mo ago
  In reality, the ones making such check will want extra capabilities 'just in case' as we observe now, or just go for simpler solution because it's cheaper. How does it prevent fingerprinting if you get access to both logs and try to time it? Even more so if you include already present tracking infrastructure, which as a government you can just request data from. It is possible to de-anonymize people based on aggregate data already, and this proposed solution just adds extra data points. Even in countries in which this requires a subpoena, agencies break the law frequently and don't get punished. Legal systems aren't computer systems. This isn't a technical problem but a social/political one.

fsflover 2mo ago

Related recent discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49084938 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49084938

codingjoe 2mo ago

100%, it's not like adults are immune to misinformation, social media addiction or scams. Those platforms should be safe for all people regardless of their age, nationality, sexual orientation, gender or religion.

jonathanstrange 2mo ago

> It’s also pretty obvious that saying “parent should take responsibility” is also not working. Just observe the world around you to know it’s a non starter. That's like saying "take a look at owners of fast sport cars, it's obvious this is not working and they have too many accidents." If you want to patronize other parents and think the government should be more responsible and parents less responsible, please state that honestly. Don't make up alleged "facts" to make a point. Otherwise, I'll just say "it's obvious you're wrong, just observe the world around you and you know age verification is a non starter."

Okawari 2mo ago

We have cars, and kids are not allowed to drive them. Yet we do not have mechanisms in place to ensure kids aren't driving cars because the responsibility falls on the parents, and it works. By and large, parents understand the threats and navigate this requirement perfectly fine; outliers are few enough that we can deal with them on an individual basis. The reason the current system doesn't work when it comes to unfettered internet access is either that parents by and large don't actually agree with the threat assessment of said internet access for kids, or they ignore it because the consequences of doing so are disproportionately small. Personally, my vote is that they just don't think it's that big of a problem. To me, the ideal solution would be more granular and better parental control configurations, especially on the web. Pair that with preconfigured devices that have "unremovable" parental controls, branded as "kids/youth phones." If parents care about this, they'll buy those phones for their kids and the problem is solved. If they don't, then this isn't something parents want, and we shouldn't really pursue it further.

mapontosevenths 2mo ago
> The reason the current system doesn't work when it comes to unfettered internet access is either that parents by and large don't actually agree with the threat assessment of said internet access for kids, or they ignore it because the consequences of doing so are disproportionately small. Sometimes parents know their children, and what's best for them, better than faceless politicians (who we've seen are often attracted to said children for some reason). Growing up in my household there was a time when I was allowed to read and watch whatever I found interesting. My younger brother was not. That was because my parents knew us and judged that at my level of maturity I was unlikely to be negatively impacted, whereas my brother would get nightmares or copy-cat things he saw that he definitely shouldn't. That's how it should be. Yes, there are bad parents who will decide poorly. That's the cost of freedom.
- nathan_compton 2mo ago
  I sympathetic to this perspective, as a parent, but also, there are just a lot of kids out there with bad parents. My personal philosophy is that parents have a duty to raise their children but that duty is on behalf of the society into which the children will eventually enter. Consequently, a just society may sometimes impose itself on parental freedoms (in the case of neglect, for example) because, in the end, the child's ultimate guardian and responsibility is the society itself, not the parents. The internet is full of material exposure to which, for children, could reasonably be construed as neglect or abuse, and it is insufficient to leave the entirety of the responsibility to the parents, in that case. I don't know why Americans are so obsessed with freedom as if were the only social good that a society can pursue. There are many things which make life worth living, that contribute to flourishing, and freedom is high on that list, but its not the only thing. All that said, I don't approve of age checks of the sort being proposed everywhere now. We can do a lot better at mitigating these problems without damaging privacy so much.

duskdozer 2mo ago

Children here are a distraction. Any harm these companies are causing to children is also being inflicted on adults. The correct solution is to end the harmful behavior for all, not set up required identity verification.

StingyJelly 2mo ago

> Companies have show that they are incapable or unwilling to address the problems they cause > This is where regulation is supposed to come in. This is such a misdirected effort... Why the heck are we focusing on addressing those problems for a small subset of population (kids) while creating even bigger problems for the rest? Lets regulate those companies into actually addressing the problems they cause for everyone!

DANmode 2mo ago

> It’s also pretty obvious that saying “parent should take responsibility” is also not working. So punish those people. Stop letting them neglect the responsibility a parent innately has to their child and to the rest of us.

2OEH8eoCRo0 2mo ago
Stop punishing me by asking for ID when I buy alcohol!
- DANmode 2mo ago
  If you are an elderly person, this position becomes wildly reasonable. No youths are spoofing being 75 at the corner store.
- EmbarrassedHelp 2mo ago
  That's a false equivalence and you know it.
- 83642736392 2mo ago
  [dead]

2OEH8eoCRo0 2mo ago

> companies have shown that they will abuse any personal information that is shared with them This is the rot at the center of tech IMO. We have all these wondrous toys but we can't do something as simple as verify age without abuse. What's the point of all this tech if we can't trust any of it?

hbn 2mo ago

There's nothing to be confused about, this isn't about age verification. It's about increasing surveillance and ending anonymity. The "think of the children" shit is just a tactic to make emotional, non-critical-thinking people into die-hard soldiers for the cause that get angry when you argue against it. "Oh you're against protecting children? What are you, some kind of pedophile?"

hulitu 2mo ago

> This is where regulation is supposed to come in. And who do you think pushes/pais for regulations ? The same companies which are "regulated".