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I'm fundamentally opposed to age verification because it usually leads to mandatory account creation no matter how privacy friendly the age verification process

I'm fundamentally opposed to age verification because it usually leads to mandatory account creation no matter how privacy friendly the age verification process itself may be. It's already extremely annoying that, for example, on YouTube, you can no longer watch many videos without an account. Furthermore, the whole thing also reinforces monopolies. Once you've verified your age on one platform, the barrier to switching to another is even higher than before. The only acceptable solution would be for apps and websites to simply include a recommended age. Allowing parents to configure their children’s devices to block services that require users to be older than the specified age or that do not provide an age rating. Once this were established, websites targeting all age groups would have a strong incentive to participate. Otherwise, they would suddenly become invisible to a large portion of their underage users.

azernik 2mo ago
Your second paragraph describes the approach in the blog post almost exactly.
deleted 2mo ago
[deleted]
account42 2mo ago
And instead of an age you could even make the indication about what is potentially objectionable so that parents can choose when to allow their kids to see what - and adults can also choose to avoid certain things.
- iamnothere 2mo ago
  Exactly, without this you’re handing the power to decide what is “appropriate” to someone else.
  - godelski 2mo ago
    > you’re handing the power to The user?
    - johnnyanmac 2mo ago
      The server owner. If your parent won't curate the content, they will.
    - iamnothere 2mo ago
      I’m in favor of voluntarily giving the user (device owner) full control over what categories of content they want to allow. Age buckets don’t do that. (This includes giving the option for “everything is allowed” without any kind of verification. You bought it, you own it.)
  - codedokode 2mo ago
    No, you are handling the boring work to someone else. Most non-geek people, I assume, are not interesting in manually configuring the website white lists, so there should be a single "child mode" checkbox for 99% of population and "configure" for the rest of us.
- LelouBil 2mo ago
  Force a PEGI-like system for every apps please. It would be awesome.
  - dredmorbius 2mo ago
    PEGI: Pan-European Game Information, a video game content rating system. <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PEGI https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PEGI>
  - Marsymars 2mo ago
    The App/Play stores already basically have that, you can't submit apps without age ratings. One spot where it's a bit weird is for utility apps that don't have any "mature" content but that obviously isn't intended for kids, so e.g. your tax prep app gets rated as "Ages 4+".
    - LelouBil 2mo ago
      Yes, that's why the system should be a bit different. It should indicate notable features that influence the rating, like PEGI includes "online content" "gambling" and so on
    - giantg2 2mo ago
      Is exposure to a tax app going to cause harm to a 5yo? This doesn't seem like a real problem.
    - codedokode 2mo ago
      There is nothing wrong if a teenager wants to know more about taxes. Although exposure to tax rates might cause a slight emotional trauma.
- 1dom 2mo ago
  I might be being overly cynical here, but I think part of the problem is parents expect to give their kids the internet so they don't have to spend so much time/attention with them. I think this means any solution which involves active parent participation is going to get shunned by a vocal subset. I'm in my mid 30's. When I was very young I remember my Dad semi-regularly having to email or even fax off permission slips to websites aimed at kids before they would create an account for me.
  - forshaper 2mo ago
    It's what I see happening. None of this would be a big deal if parents were present, but we give our attention to work & entertainment, and find it easier to continue doing that if the kids are also being entertained instead of playing, which caused problems in the physical world.
  - thewebguyd 2mo ago
    > any solution which involves active parent participation is going to get shunned by a vocal subset Then we certainly shouldn't be passing laws mandating age verification. If parents want to abdicate their responsibility over their children, it's not the role of government to enshrine that abdication into law and take over the duty of parenting from them. If regulation is to be had, then it should take the form of mandating websites and services provide privacy preserving tools for parents to use, if they want to use them. If they don't, that's on them. Everyone else needn't suffer because a subset of the population has chosen to offload their responsibility into the government and web services.
  - DSMan195276 2mo ago
    > I might be being overly cynical here, but I think part of the problem is parents expect to give their kids the internet so they don't have to spend so much time/attention with them. > I think this means any solution which involves active parent participation is going to get shunned by a vocal subset. I don't think that's a fair assessment personally, rather you've missed a key detail that things are significantly more complicated than they used to be, it's not just an 'effort' issue. There is no universal "user is age X" setting that applies to everything everywhere, rather everything has a different system and pretty much all of them are terrible in various different ways. I'm very tech savvy and I still struggled just to set up a Microsoft/XBox account for my daughter so that we could play some computer games together. Access to all the different age rating settings is spread across something like three different apps and websites and in my experience they don't even all work consistently. That experience is also not dissimilar from the experience with other types of accounts. For people I know who are less tech savvy it honestly doesn't matter how much time they put into it, eventually they give up and turn off age ratings because something isn't work and even if there's a solution it would take them hours to figure out. Point being, if the existing tools were much better I don't think we would be having this kind of conversation.
QuadmasterXLII 2mo ago
I wonder if it would work to make it illegal to sell ad impressions of underage people. Do whatever you want as long as you can prove its being done to adults, or prove you have no economic incentive to algorithmically engagement bait
Steltek 2mo ago
> The only acceptable solution would be for apps and websites to simply include a recommended age. Allowing parents to configure their children’s devices to block services that require users to be older than the specified age or that do not provide an age rating. I'm afraid you'd get the cookie banner problem but way worse. Everyone that's not Meta/Google/Apple would immediately add a legal CYA "18+" age rating and stop thinking any more about it.
- grumbel 2mo ago
  That's how it should be. Make the Internet 18+ by default and sites targeted at younger audiences can add a more detailed rating. Let people configure their devices however they like it. The whole problem with the regulation we have right now is that it assumes the Internet is for kids, and everything for adults must be hidden. When we really just should declare the whole Internet as 18+ and the sites for kids should be the specially marked exceptions.
  - goda90 2mo ago
    Someone would complain that without ID verification kids would be able to sneak onto the regular Internet and therefore we should eliminate privacy on the regular Internet, just like they're doing now.
  - johen8 2mo ago
    I never thought about that and I find it might actually be the right way for a solution... I was just looking into the Google Play Store now: in Brazil apps need to have an age rating, facebook and instagram for example are 16+, but browsers like firefox, chrome, etc are rated for 'all ages', even though you can access the whole internet through them. If we actually did what you said and inverted the logic: restrict everything to 18+ and specifically mark what is allowed to under-18s it would make parental controls much more effective.
  - kelvinjps10 2mo ago
    So kids shouldn’t have access to sites like Wikipedia? Banning the internet is not the correct solution many kids depend on the internet to have access to education. The argument could be made for banning social media but the whole internet I don’t think it’s the correct approach
Eldt 2mo ago
Many years ago I worked a technical support job for Xbox services, and the amount of calls about "unauthorized charges" was obscene. Xbox provided parental controls, but it required the parent to set up their child's account themselves, and many couldn't be bothered. I imagine the same thing will happen here...
- 1718627440 2mo ago
  And people give their children cigarettes and liquor, that's bad as well. But that's the responsibility of being an adult. If the adult is deemed not worthy of raising children, society has already established a process of dealing with that too.
mrtksn 2mo ago
At glance this looks reasonable but how do you enforce that kids connection always goes through the parents control? You are just moving the verification point to another gate, it means that no anonymous connections are possible anymore to the entire Internet because we want to allow parents to control their kids. You want to use your friends Wi-Fi? Now that requires full identification so that we know that its not some kid trying to look at stuff their parents don't allow. Want to connect your cat toilet to the internet? Well, we will need to either cryptographically identify the device or attach its ID to your real ID because we don't want to allow kids look at stuff their parents did not allow and this might just be a proxy device for some nerdy 14 y/o. Want to use your old PC? Sorry that's not possible, now all devices that connect to the internet require biometric identification because we can't tell if this is an adult or just some kid using a legacy device to look at stuff their parents don't allow.
- 1718627440 2mo ago
  No, the point was that the actual decision happens client side and under the control of the sysadmin (the parent). > You are just moving the verification point to another gate Yeah, the gate being the decision of legal entities of age, aka. adults. > You want to use your friends, Wi-Fi? That would still do whatever your parent decided for you. > Want to connect your can toilet to the internet? Whether the toilet can connect to the network, is the decision of the network administrator, and toilets don't contain UAs, so that wouldn't even have software on them, where you could configure such behaviour.
  - mrtksn 2mo ago
    You're making the mistake of assuming that every kid has access to identified device and that device is under parent control. You can't make this assumption because that's not true. It might be true for some middle class helicopter parents that have iPhones and time to manage and keep it under strict control but there are non-middle class kids out there who just use whatever device they can get their hands on and their parens neither have time nor ability to control that.
    - 2mo ago
Noaidi 2mo ago
> for example, on YouTube, you can no longer watch many videos without an account. I do not like this argument. Does an adult theater let anyone in without an ID? Do movie theaters let kids under 18 into an R rated movie without ID? Why do we think this should be different on the internet? IMHO, they should have Youtube 18+ (Adult book store) where you need an ID and YouTube <18 where you do not (Barnes and Nobles), and they can filter the content as apporpriate. I think it is evil that YouTube enables kids access to both grooming and violent material.
- arielcostas 2mo ago
  > I do not like this argument. Does an adult theater let anyone in without an ID? Do movie theaters let kids under 18 into an R rated movie without ID? Why do we think this should be different on the internet? I don't like this one either. Does the cinema store the ID (or information extracted from said ID) of every single user visiting, along with what they've watched, on electronic records that can and will eventually be breached? Do they ask a third party (like Persona) for said verification providing the user's information? On the cinema you show your ID to the person in front of you, they check the birth date, if it's valid (and not an obvious forgery) and if the photo matches the person providing it.
  - Noaidi 2mo ago
    > On the cinema you show your ID to the person in front of you, they check the birth date, if it's valid (and not an obvious forgery) and if the photo matches the person providing it. This is something that can be done online as well. Capitalism is controllable.
    - MyMemoryfails 2mo ago
      Governments aren't clearly willing to regulate the companies. They just let them do whatever they want once they're too big to regulate. Internet Companies has 20 years of history of datamining for sake advertising. Still nothing is done about, why even allow them obtain even more leverage?
  - 2mo ago
mmooss 2mo ago
> The only acceptable solution would be for apps and websites to simply include a recommended age. Allowing parents to configure their children’s devices to block services that require users to be older than the specified age or that do not provide an age rating. Agreed, just make age controls available to parents, optional, and keep the user age data on the local device. External hosts can verify against it in obvious ways. But isn't that what California's law said, that commenters on HN opposed so strongly?
qurren 2mo ago
The part I'm most opposed to is requiring a full KYC, using "verifying age" as an excuse. My Gmail account has been active for >18 years, that should be enough proof.
- fn-mote 2mo ago
  … but how many people really believe that will happen? Fight together with everyone else, or when stage 2 (“full KYC”) is implemented you won’t have any leverage.
  - tyre 2mo ago
    It won’t because KYC is a legal process and you don’t want to prophets that across the entire system with bypasses for it. That’s legal trouble waiting to happen. Yes, Google also wants to tie back to legal identities to sell ads. I’m not saying they’re doing this in good faith, but proxies like this get messy and dangerous for legal/compliance.
    - dredmorbius 2mo ago
      "you don’t want to prophets that across the entire system"? Typo? But it's hard to tell what.
      - antonvs 2mo ago
        Propagate?
        dredmorbius 2mo ago
        Probably. (Prophetably? ;-)
- RachelF 2mo ago
  They should not call it "age verification" - it is actually identity verification.
SirMaster 2mo ago
>YouTube, you can no longer watch many videos without an account. What YouTube video can I not watch via yt-dlp without an account?
- jamesnorden 2mo ago
  Anything age-restricted.
  - anthk 2mo ago
    FreeTube can.
    - Scaled 2mo ago
      I love free tube, but in my experience it cannot get around the login requirement for mature-flagged videos.
cute_boi 2mo ago
Exactly. In the future, to view a youtube video we will need create a Gmail account, we'll need a phone, SMS verification, an ID card, and we'll probably have to rotate your head two or three times and talk to some AI.
- twothreeone 2mo ago
  Eventually they make you fill out some paper work, or pick up some boxes from somewhere and bring them to another place. You know quick human tasks, just to verify you're really human. It's just a verification check, nothing else.
ajsnigrutin 2mo ago
> Allowing parents to configure their children’s devices to block services that require users to be older than the specified age or that do not provide an age rating. This could be done with setting the age too. Kids don't have their own money and can't sign their own cell contracts, their parents do, and during the phone setup process, the parent could set "the owner of this phone is a minor" checkmark, set the age of birth (so it auto "unlocks" at 18), add a parental password to manually unlock for whatever app needed (or reset or change the setting). Then the phone would just send "user_is_a_minor" flag to whatever and/or filter the 18+ stuff.
kevin_thibedeau 2mo ago
The sensible solution doesn't build a consumer profile for resale and government surveillance.
- go_elmo 2mo ago
  Imagine, starts much earlier, everyone has a birth certificate. /s
stronglikedan 2mo ago
> Allowing parents to ... That's the crux of the issue - the state (pick one) wants to be "the parent".
autoexec 2mo ago
> The only acceptable solution would be for apps and websites to simply include a recommended age. Allowing parents to configure their children’s devices to block services that require users to be older than the specified age or that do not provide an age rating. That just entertains the false justification for what is ultimately about surveillance and control. There are privacy preserving alternatives to accounts and ID/face scans but no one in power is interested in them because the loss of privacy is the entire point.
- giantg2 2mo ago
  What might those be? Everything I've seen is ineffective or can be compromised. I think letting parents parent is probably the best option, but will require better/easier/free tools and education to help lock down different categories of harm.
  - autoexec 2mo ago
    There's nothing that can't be worked around or compromised in some way. Even the face scans and ID scans being used today are being circumvented. In the end we do need parents to parent, but websites should help. The easiest way would be for websites to send an HTTP header to the client so that censorware can know to block or allow it accordingly.
    - Gander5739 2mo ago
      > The easiest way would be for websites to send an HTTP header to the client so that censorware can know to block or allow it accordingly. That sounds very similar to the suggestion of the original commenter, that you responded to with >> That just entertains the false justification for what is ultimately about surveillance and control.
      - autoexec 2mo ago
        I assumed that when he asked "What might those be?" he was talking about privacy preserving ways to address that same false justification. I'm not sure how you took it some other way.
alightsoul 2mo ago
I am not sure creating an account is seen as an issue anymore given that the vast majority already have one. However yes as you say it helps create a monopoly. Combine that with a doomscrolling algorithmic feed on like YouTube and that's how you create a moat: age verification and doomscrolling.
xg15 2mo ago
I think sites and app developers don't really need external reasons to force account creation, they all seem to want to do it anyway. And at least this API would - in theory - enable age verification without needing an account.
skybrian 2mo ago
Attempting to prevent websites from learning about their audience is difficult. For example, Lego has a "play zone" and it has other pages geared towards adults. You get an immediate popup asking if you want to go to the play zone or not. If a user clicks on play zone, that's a good signal (but not guaranteed) that they're probably a child. Preventing this would be difficult. If there are any behavioral differences between children and adults, that's a signal. And it would mean websites couldn't build experiences tailored to their audiences. Do we really want to try to suppress all behavioral cues that can be used to distinguish children from adults? Is it worth it? A reasonable compromise is that websites and apps should be able to learn about devices, not people. It should be trivial to figure out whether a visit is from a child-locked device or not, no account needed. Much like clicking on "kids zone," it doesn't mean you know for sure who's really using the device. For example, it could be an parent who turned the child lock on to see what happens, because parents should know these things. It's another bit that could be used distinguish users, but giving away zero bits of information isn't practical.
- annzabelle 2mo ago
  I went to Australia recently, which is famous for requiring age verification on websites. When I first landed, Discord blocked a few channels I was in, but within a couple hours it was all unblocked with no action from me. Both Reddit and Discord worked with full functionality. My best guess is they have some sort of behavioral information that suggests I am extremely unlikely to be a minor.
  - antonvs 2mo ago
    It’s much more likely to be based on your advertising-based profile. Advertisers all already know your age range. That’s part of what makes it clear that the measures they’re trying to introduce are intended for other purposes.
yieldcrv 2mo ago
> Furthermore, the whole thing also reinforces monopolies. when the state gives you an exception to antitrust scrutiny that will survive between administrations, you take it
judge2020 2mo ago
https://www.rtalabel.org/ https://www.rtalabel.org/ Adult content providers already voluntarily embed this, with devices blocking websites when it detects this on the page if parental controls forbid adult content. Parents really just don't parent their children nowadays. They expect the government to do it for them - and why shouldn't they, when they already trust the government to babysit their kids during the day? Why can't the government also babysit their kids for the 6+ hours a day they let their kids spend on the iPad?

azernik 2mo ago

Your second paragraph describes the approach in the blog post almost exactly.

deleted 2mo ago

[deleted]

account42 2mo ago

And instead of an age you could even make the indication about what is potentially objectionable so that parents can choose when to allow their kids to see what - and adults can also choose to avoid certain things.

iamnothere 2mo ago
Exactly, without this you’re handing the power to decide what is “appropriate” to someone else.
- godelski 2mo ago
  > you’re handing the power to The user?
  - johnnyanmac 2mo ago
    The server owner. If your parent won't curate the content, they will.
  - iamnothere 2mo ago
    I’m in favor of voluntarily giving the user (device owner) full control over what categories of content they want to allow. Age buckets don’t do that. (This includes giving the option for “everything is allowed” without any kind of verification. You bought it, you own it.)
- codedokode 2mo ago
  No, you are handling the boring work to someone else. Most non-geek people, I assume, are not interesting in manually configuring the website white lists, so there should be a single "child mode" checkbox for 99% of population and "configure" for the rest of us.
LelouBil 2mo ago
Force a PEGI-like system for every apps please. It would be awesome.
- dredmorbius 2mo ago
  PEGI: Pan-European Game Information, a video game content rating system. <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PEGI https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PEGI>
- Marsymars 2mo ago
  The App/Play stores already basically have that, you can't submit apps without age ratings. One spot where it's a bit weird is for utility apps that don't have any "mature" content but that obviously isn't intended for kids, so e.g. your tax prep app gets rated as "Ages 4+".
  - LelouBil 2mo ago
    Yes, that's why the system should be a bit different. It should indicate notable features that influence the rating, like PEGI includes "online content" "gambling" and so on
  - giantg2 2mo ago
    Is exposure to a tax app going to cause harm to a 5yo? This doesn't seem like a real problem.
  - codedokode 2mo ago
    There is nothing wrong if a teenager wants to know more about taxes. Although exposure to tax rates might cause a slight emotional trauma.
1dom 2mo ago
I might be being overly cynical here, but I think part of the problem is parents expect to give their kids the internet so they don't have to spend so much time/attention with them. I think this means any solution which involves active parent participation is going to get shunned by a vocal subset. I'm in my mid 30's. When I was very young I remember my Dad semi-regularly having to email or even fax off permission slips to websites aimed at kids before they would create an account for me.
- forshaper 2mo ago
  It's what I see happening. None of this would be a big deal if parents were present, but we give our attention to work & entertainment, and find it easier to continue doing that if the kids are also being entertained instead of playing, which caused problems in the physical world.
- thewebguyd 2mo ago
  > any solution which involves active parent participation is going to get shunned by a vocal subset Then we certainly shouldn't be passing laws mandating age verification. If parents want to abdicate their responsibility over their children, it's not the role of government to enshrine that abdication into law and take over the duty of parenting from them. If regulation is to be had, then it should take the form of mandating websites and services provide privacy preserving tools for parents to use, if they want to use them. If they don't, that's on them. Everyone else needn't suffer because a subset of the population has chosen to offload their responsibility into the government and web services.
- DSMan195276 2mo ago
  > I might be being overly cynical here, but I think part of the problem is parents expect to give their kids the internet so they don't have to spend so much time/attention with them. > I think this means any solution which involves active parent participation is going to get shunned by a vocal subset. I don't think that's a fair assessment personally, rather you've missed a key detail that things are significantly more complicated than they used to be, it's not just an 'effort' issue. There is no universal "user is age X" setting that applies to everything everywhere, rather everything has a different system and pretty much all of them are terrible in various different ways. I'm very tech savvy and I still struggled just to set up a Microsoft/XBox account for my daughter so that we could play some computer games together. Access to all the different age rating settings is spread across something like three different apps and websites and in my experience they don't even all work consistently. That experience is also not dissimilar from the experience with other types of accounts. For people I know who are less tech savvy it honestly doesn't matter how much time they put into it, eventually they give up and turn off age ratings because something isn't work and even if there's a solution it would take them hours to figure out. Point being, if the existing tools were much better I don't think we would be having this kind of conversation.

QuadmasterXLII 2mo ago

I wonder if it would work to make it illegal to sell ad impressions of underage people. Do whatever you want as long as you can prove its being done to adults, or prove you have no economic incentive to algorithmically engagement bait

Steltek 2mo ago

> The only acceptable solution would be for apps and websites to simply include a recommended age. Allowing parents to configure their children’s devices to block services that require users to be older than the specified age or that do not provide an age rating. I'm afraid you'd get the cookie banner problem but way worse. Everyone that's not Meta/Google/Apple would immediately add a legal CYA "18+" age rating and stop thinking any more about it.

grumbel 2mo ago
That's how it should be. Make the Internet 18+ by default and sites targeted at younger audiences can add a more detailed rating. Let people configure their devices however they like it. The whole problem with the regulation we have right now is that it assumes the Internet is for kids, and everything for adults must be hidden. When we really just should declare the whole Internet as 18+ and the sites for kids should be the specially marked exceptions.
- goda90 2mo ago
  Someone would complain that without ID verification kids would be able to sneak onto the regular Internet and therefore we should eliminate privacy on the regular Internet, just like they're doing now.
- johen8 2mo ago
  I never thought about that and I find it might actually be the right way for a solution... I was just looking into the Google Play Store now: in Brazil apps need to have an age rating, facebook and instagram for example are 16+, but browsers like firefox, chrome, etc are rated for 'all ages', even though you can access the whole internet through them. If we actually did what you said and inverted the logic: restrict everything to 18+ and specifically mark what is allowed to under-18s it would make parental controls much more effective.
- kelvinjps10 2mo ago
  So kids shouldn’t have access to sites like Wikipedia? Banning the internet is not the correct solution many kids depend on the internet to have access to education. The argument could be made for banning social media but the whole internet I don’t think it’s the correct approach

Eldt 2mo ago

Many years ago I worked a technical support job for Xbox services, and the amount of calls about "unauthorized charges" was obscene. Xbox provided parental controls, but it required the parent to set up their child's account themselves, and many couldn't be bothered. I imagine the same thing will happen here...

1718627440 2mo ago
And people give their children cigarettes and liquor, that's bad as well. But that's the responsibility of being an adult. If the adult is deemed not worthy of raising children, society has already established a process of dealing with that too.

mrtksn 2mo ago

At glance this looks reasonable but how do you enforce that kids connection always goes through the parents control? You are just moving the verification point to another gate, it means that no anonymous connections are possible anymore to the entire Internet because we want to allow parents to control their kids. You want to use your friends Wi-Fi? Now that requires full identification so that we know that its not some kid trying to look at stuff their parents don't allow. Want to connect your cat toilet to the internet? Well, we will need to either cryptographically identify the device or attach its ID to your real ID because we don't want to allow kids look at stuff their parents did not allow and this might just be a proxy device for some nerdy 14 y/o. Want to use your old PC? Sorry that's not possible, now all devices that connect to the internet require biometric identification because we can't tell if this is an adult or just some kid using a legacy device to look at stuff their parents don't allow.

1718627440 2mo ago
No, the point was that the actual decision happens client side and under the control of the sysadmin (the parent). > You are just moving the verification point to another gate Yeah, the gate being the decision of legal entities of age, aka. adults. > You want to use your friends, Wi-Fi? That would still do whatever your parent decided for you. > Want to connect your can toilet to the internet? Whether the toilet can connect to the network, is the decision of the network administrator, and toilets don't contain UAs, so that wouldn't even have software on them, where you could configure such behaviour.
- mrtksn 2mo ago
  You're making the mistake of assuming that every kid has access to identified device and that device is under parent control. You can't make this assumption because that's not true. It might be true for some middle class helicopter parents that have iPhones and time to manage and keep it under strict control but there are non-middle class kids out there who just use whatever device they can get their hands on and their parens neither have time nor ability to control that.
  - 2mo ago

Noaidi 2mo ago

> for example, on YouTube, you can no longer watch many videos without an account. I do not like this argument. Does an adult theater let anyone in without an ID? Do movie theaters let kids under 18 into an R rated movie without ID? Why do we think this should be different on the internet? IMHO, they should have Youtube 18+ (Adult book store) where you need an ID and YouTube <18 where you do not (Barnes and Nobles), and they can filter the content as apporpriate. I think it is evil that YouTube enables kids access to both grooming and violent material.

arielcostas 2mo ago
> I do not like this argument. Does an adult theater let anyone in without an ID? Do movie theaters let kids under 18 into an R rated movie without ID? Why do we think this should be different on the internet? I don't like this one either. Does the cinema store the ID (or information extracted from said ID) of every single user visiting, along with what they've watched, on electronic records that can and will eventually be breached? Do they ask a third party (like Persona) for said verification providing the user's information? On the cinema you show your ID to the person in front of you, they check the birth date, if it's valid (and not an obvious forgery) and if the photo matches the person providing it.
- Noaidi 2mo ago
  > On the cinema you show your ID to the person in front of you, they check the birth date, if it's valid (and not an obvious forgery) and if the photo matches the person providing it. This is something that can be done online as well. Capitalism is controllable.
  - MyMemoryfails 2mo ago
    Governments aren't clearly willing to regulate the companies. They just let them do whatever they want once they're too big to regulate. Internet Companies has 20 years of history of datamining for sake advertising. Still nothing is done about, why even allow them obtain even more leverage?
- 2mo ago

mmooss 2mo ago

> The only acceptable solution would be for apps and websites to simply include a recommended age. Allowing parents to configure their children’s devices to block services that require users to be older than the specified age or that do not provide an age rating. Agreed, just make age controls available to parents, optional, and keep the user age data on the local device. External hosts can verify against it in obvious ways. But isn't that what California's law said, that commenters on HN opposed so strongly?

qurren 2mo ago

The part I'm most opposed to is requiring a full KYC, using "verifying age" as an excuse. My Gmail account has been active for >18 years, that should be enough proof.

fn-mote 2mo ago
… but how many people really believe that will happen? Fight together with everyone else, or when stage 2 (“full KYC”) is implemented you won’t have any leverage.
- tyre 2mo ago
  It won’t because KYC is a legal process and you don’t want to prophets that across the entire system with bypasses for it. That’s legal trouble waiting to happen. Yes, Google also wants to tie back to legal identities to sell ads. I’m not saying they’re doing this in good faith, but proxies like this get messy and dangerous for legal/compliance.
  - dredmorbius 2mo ago
    "you don’t want to prophets that across the entire system"? Typo? But it's hard to tell what.
    - antonvs 2mo ago
      Propagate?
      - dredmorbius 2mo ago
        Probably. (Prophetably? ;-)
RachelF 2mo ago
They should not call it "age verification" - it is actually identity verification.

SirMaster 2mo ago

>YouTube, you can no longer watch many videos without an account. What YouTube video can I not watch via yt-dlp without an account?

jamesnorden 2mo ago
Anything age-restricted.
- anthk 2mo ago
  FreeTube can.
  - Scaled 2mo ago
    I love free tube, but in my experience it cannot get around the login requirement for mature-flagged videos.

cute_boi 2mo ago

Exactly. In the future, to view a youtube video we will need create a Gmail account, we'll need a phone, SMS verification, an ID card, and we'll probably have to rotate your head two or three times and talk to some AI.

twothreeone 2mo ago
Eventually they make you fill out some paper work, or pick up some boxes from somewhere and bring them to another place. You know quick human tasks, just to verify you're really human. It's just a verification check, nothing else.

ajsnigrutin 2mo ago

> Allowing parents to configure their children’s devices to block services that require users to be older than the specified age or that do not provide an age rating. This could be done with setting the age too. Kids don't have their own money and can't sign their own cell contracts, their parents do, and during the phone setup process, the parent could set "the owner of this phone is a minor" checkmark, set the age of birth (so it auto "unlocks" at 18), add a parental password to manually unlock for whatever app needed (or reset or change the setting). Then the phone would just send "user_is_a_minor" flag to whatever and/or filter the 18+ stuff.

kevin_thibedeau 2mo ago

The sensible solution doesn't build a consumer profile for resale and government surveillance.

go_elmo 2mo ago
Imagine, starts much earlier, everyone has a birth certificate. /s

stronglikedan 2mo ago

> Allowing parents to ... That's the crux of the issue - the state (pick one) wants to be "the parent".

autoexec 2mo ago

> The only acceptable solution would be for apps and websites to simply include a recommended age. Allowing parents to configure their children’s devices to block services that require users to be older than the specified age or that do not provide an age rating. That just entertains the false justification for what is ultimately about surveillance and control. There are privacy preserving alternatives to accounts and ID/face scans but no one in power is interested in them because the loss of privacy is the entire point.

giantg2 2mo ago
What might those be? Everything I've seen is ineffective or can be compromised. I think letting parents parent is probably the best option, but will require better/easier/free tools and education to help lock down different categories of harm.
- autoexec 2mo ago
  There's nothing that can't be worked around or compromised in some way. Even the face scans and ID scans being used today are being circumvented. In the end we do need parents to parent, but websites should help. The easiest way would be for websites to send an HTTP header to the client so that censorware can know to block or allow it accordingly.
  - Gander5739 2mo ago
    > The easiest way would be for websites to send an HTTP header to the client so that censorware can know to block or allow it accordingly. That sounds very similar to the suggestion of the original commenter, that you responded to with >> That just entertains the false justification for what is ultimately about surveillance and control.
    - autoexec 2mo ago
      I assumed that when he asked "What might those be?" he was talking about privacy preserving ways to address that same false justification. I'm not sure how you took it some other way.

alightsoul 2mo ago

I am not sure creating an account is seen as an issue anymore given that the vast majority already have one. However yes as you say it helps create a monopoly. Combine that with a doomscrolling algorithmic feed on like YouTube and that's how you create a moat: age verification and doomscrolling.

xg15 2mo ago

I think sites and app developers don't really need external reasons to force account creation, they all seem to want to do it anyway. And at least this API would - in theory - enable age verification without needing an account.

skybrian 2mo ago

Attempting to prevent websites from learning about their audience is difficult. For example, Lego has a "play zone" and it has other pages geared towards adults. You get an immediate popup asking if you want to go to the play zone or not. If a user clicks on play zone, that's a good signal (but not guaranteed) that they're probably a child. Preventing this would be difficult. If there are any behavioral differences between children and adults, that's a signal. And it would mean websites couldn't build experiences tailored to their audiences. Do we really want to try to suppress all behavioral cues that can be used to distinguish children from adults? Is it worth it? A reasonable compromise is that websites and apps should be able to learn about devices, not people. It should be trivial to figure out whether a visit is from a child-locked device or not, no account needed. Much like clicking on "kids zone," it doesn't mean you know for sure who's really using the device. For example, it could be an parent who turned the child lock on to see what happens, because parents should know these things. It's another bit that could be used distinguish users, but giving away zero bits of information isn't practical.

annzabelle 2mo ago
I went to Australia recently, which is famous for requiring age verification on websites. When I first landed, Discord blocked a few channels I was in, but within a couple hours it was all unblocked with no action from me. Both Reddit and Discord worked with full functionality. My best guess is they have some sort of behavioral information that suggests I am extremely unlikely to be a minor.
- antonvs 2mo ago
  It’s much more likely to be based on your advertising-based profile. Advertisers all already know your age range. That’s part of what makes it clear that the measures they’re trying to introduce are intended for other purposes.

yieldcrv 2mo ago

> Furthermore, the whole thing also reinforces monopolies. when the state gives you an exception to antitrust scrutiny that will survive between administrations, you take it

judge2020 2mo ago

https://www.rtalabel.org/ https://www.rtalabel.org/ Adult content providers already voluntarily embed this, with devices blocking websites when it detects this on the page if parental controls forbid adult content. Parents really just don't parent their children nowadays. They expect the government to do it for them - and why shouldn't they, when they already trust the government to babysit their kids during the day? Why can't the government also babysit their kids for the 6+ hours a day they let their kids spend on the iPad?