5 ms·

It is a technical ratchet. Once you accept part of the implementation it will never be undone, more will be added.

by mosura 2mo ago

AnimalMuppet 2mo ago
Stronger: Once you accept their right to ask, then you open the door to their right to a truthful answer, and thus to a verified answer.
- avianlyric 2mo ago
  Hasn’t the right to ask existed since the invention of consent laws? The state being able demand a persons age, and gate their behaviour based on that, has existed for hundreds of years so far. During that entire time the requirement to be truthful has also existed otherwise the laws would be meaningless. All that’s changing now, is figuring out how that extends into the digital realm. I personally find the argument that the digital realm is somehow special compared to the physical realm, and thus certain laws simply shouldn’t apply when “done on a computer”, difficult to reconcile.
  - xp84 2mo ago
    Hard agree. I don't think we allowed video store operators in 1995 to just let kids wander into the back room and rent porn, but we're so used to there just being "no rules" online, it is coming as a massive shock now when it's being suggested that maybe there should be some basic guardrails to discourage that. Let me be clear, I don't want face scans, or more of those creepy companies that operate this age verification crap for Discord, etc. Because I know it's not going to be implemented in the privacy-preserving way it could be, if there's ANY involvement with identity documents. Not least because we don't even have any proper cryptographically useful identity cards, so everything like that operates on a "trust us bro" basis where they pinky promise not to accidentally store everyone's raw face scans / ID cards / numbers / etc and inevitably leak them. But out-of-box age declaration is not extreme and is not slippery-slope, any more than out-of-box user account creation 25 years ago has led to out-of-box ID card checks.
singpolyma3 2mo ago
Literally a slippery slope argument
- eterm 2mo ago
  Sometimes when you see your opponents getting out a ramp and a barrel of lube, you can call it a slippery slope.
  - xp84 2mo ago
    Or alternatively - you could recognize that normal people are getting more and more pissed off by the fact that social media companies are force-feeding garbage into their kids eyeballs 16 hours a day. We could give them a reasonable solution that demonstrably preserves privacy and doesn't inconvenience anyone else (Suppose you want to see all the uncensored everything, you open your new PC or phone and say your DOB is 1/1/1900. Done. Status quo.) Or we could be alarmist about that, torpedo that plan, and then in 2 more years when people are even MORE pissed, a horrifying new plan comes out, where the government scans your photo ID (with the help of some crappy private contractor of course) and both of them promise to probably not store the info and log your access. And that one manages to scrape by because people are at that point even more pissed and are determined to solve the problem somehow. The actual 'bad guys' just wouldn't be able to get the public support for that second, shitty plan, if we basically solve the problem now with this very modest plan that's on the table now. Parents can handle this simple one-time out-of-box prompt and it makes sense. Device owner, the parent, that's the one who should make the call.
    - eterm 2mo ago
      I actually agree with you, but you have an optimism about the ability for open source maintainers to have achievable political aims, in a way that I haven't seen happen for decades. What your happier future looks like requires both a technical solution, but more importantly political wins to sell that solution as the better one. The current operating systems weighted by users, are entirely under the control of three major players, who are incentivised to further centralise things. ( I'm counting the three operating systems as Google Play Services, IOS and Windows. Yes, AOSP exists, but it's useless without Google Play Services. ). I also don't think a device level switch would stop anything for a second, given the number of stories of parents who seem to hand their children their credit card, then complain about them racking up thousands of dollars on Roblox or whatever. When the light-touch measures fail, the framework will be leveraged to start requiring more centralised and less private solutions.
terribleperson 2mo ago
I don't think this is a safe assumption. As a counter, actual age verification is being rolled out in other places. I really don't think we're in a position of choosing between no age-based access mechanism, and age-based access mechanism. Between the anti-porn types and public demand for some kind of regulations on social media, regulation of some kind is inevitable. Our actual choice may only be what type of restriction we can live with, and I much prefer this type to the kind that requires websites to demand my id and photos of my face. Especially since some implementations of this concept (the California one, I think) declare that websites aren't legally required to look deeper than the attested age, which is a very nice feature. Mind you, I don't know why the legislators are bothering mandating OS support for these features. It would be much easier to mandate that websites support the feature, make it clear to them that supporting the feature appropriately will free them from liability for children accessing content, and then wait as users demand that their OS support the feature.
- JoshTriplett 2mo ago
  > I really don't think we're in a position of choosing between no age-based access mechanism, and age-based access mechanism. It is impossible to win a battle you stop fighting.
  - terribleperson 2mo ago
    But it's possible to lose a battle you were never going to win in the first place, and end up in a worse place. I think that if these types of laws (illinois, california) don't hit a critical mass, we're going to see ID verification become the dominant method of age verification. Most websites will use it, and it'll become global because it's easier to just demand an ID and a photo for every user through some third party provider than to offer looser restrictions for the handful of states that have different demands. This is especially true since it's now been demonstrated that states (like Texas) can go after out-of-state sites serving people in Texas. Sure, you could scrupulously try to identify which state someone is in and use the appropriate level of verification, but then you might be liable if it turns out it was someone from Texas or Georgia or Britain using a VPN.
bodge5000 2mo ago
Very true, though this is something thats pretty difficult to get to by tiny increments, which is usually how these nefarious means are accomplished. One tiny thing is asked after another, each one too small to put up a fight against, and then suddenly they've crossed your line and you didn't even notice. Thats not particularly easy to do here, so the line will remain just as strong. Maybe next they'll ask maintainers to go from a bracket to a specific age, and then next ask for verification, but the jump from specific age to verification is big enough that there'll be just as much resistance to it.
tstrimple 2mo ago
This is a nonsense argument considering over half the states have already put actual ID verification requirements in front of "adult content". Blue states are trying to ratchet to what red states just pass? Why? They could just follow suit and require you to upload your ID to a 3rd party service and scan your face. Your conspiracy theories don't seem to hold up to reality.

It is a technical ratchet. Once you accept part of the implementation it will never be undone, more will be added.

by mosura 2mo ago

It is a technical ratchet. Once you accept part of the implementation it will never be undone, more will be added.

Stronger: Once you accept their right to ask, then you open the door to their right to a truthful answer, and thus to a verified answer.

avianlyric 2mo ago
Hasn’t the right to ask existed since the invention of consent laws? The state being able demand a persons age, and gate their behaviour based on that, has existed for hundreds of years so far. During that entire time the requirement to be truthful has also existed otherwise the laws would be meaningless. All that’s changing now, is figuring out how that extends into the digital realm. I personally find the argument that the digital realm is somehow special compared to the physical realm, and thus certain laws simply shouldn’t apply when “done on a computer”, difficult to reconcile.
- xp84 2mo ago
  Hard agree. I don't think we allowed video store operators in 1995 to just let kids wander into the back room and rent porn, but we're so used to there just being "no rules" online, it is coming as a massive shock now when it's being suggested that maybe there should be some basic guardrails to discourage that. Let me be clear, I don't want face scans, or more of those creepy companies that operate this age verification crap for Discord, etc. Because I know it's not going to be implemented in the privacy-preserving way it could be, if there's ANY involvement with identity documents. Not least because we don't even have any proper cryptographically useful identity cards, so everything like that operates on a "trust us bro" basis where they pinky promise not to accidentally store everyone's raw face scans / ID cards / numbers / etc and inevitably leak them. But out-of-box age declaration is not extreme and is not slippery-slope, any more than out-of-box user account creation 25 years ago has led to out-of-box ID card checks.

singpolyma3 2mo ago

Literally a slippery slope argument

eterm 2mo ago
Sometimes when you see your opponents getting out a ramp and a barrel of lube, you can call it a slippery slope.
- xp84 2mo ago
  Or alternatively - you could recognize that normal people are getting more and more pissed off by the fact that social media companies are force-feeding garbage into their kids eyeballs 16 hours a day. We could give them a reasonable solution that demonstrably preserves privacy and doesn't inconvenience anyone else (Suppose you want to see all the uncensored everything, you open your new PC or phone and say your DOB is 1/1/1900. Done. Status quo.) Or we could be alarmist about that, torpedo that plan, and then in 2 more years when people are even MORE pissed, a horrifying new plan comes out, where the government scans your photo ID (with the help of some crappy private contractor of course) and both of them promise to probably not store the info and log your access. And that one manages to scrape by because people are at that point even more pissed and are determined to solve the problem somehow. The actual 'bad guys' just wouldn't be able to get the public support for that second, shitty plan, if we basically solve the problem now with this very modest plan that's on the table now. Parents can handle this simple one-time out-of-box prompt and it makes sense. Device owner, the parent, that's the one who should make the call.
  - eterm 2mo ago
    I actually agree with you, but you have an optimism about the ability for open source maintainers to have achievable political aims, in a way that I haven't seen happen for decades. What your happier future looks like requires both a technical solution, but more importantly political wins to sell that solution as the better one. The current operating systems weighted by users, are entirely under the control of three major players, who are incentivised to further centralise things. ( I'm counting the three operating systems as Google Play Services, IOS and Windows. Yes, AOSP exists, but it's useless without Google Play Services. ). I also don't think a device level switch would stop anything for a second, given the number of stories of parents who seem to hand their children their credit card, then complain about them racking up thousands of dollars on Roblox or whatever. When the light-touch measures fail, the framework will be leveraged to start requiring more centralised and less private solutions.

terribleperson 2mo ago

I don't think this is a safe assumption. As a counter, actual age verification is being rolled out in other places. I really don't think we're in a position of choosing between no age-based access mechanism, and age-based access mechanism. Between the anti-porn types and public demand for some kind of regulations on social media, regulation of some kind is inevitable. Our actual choice may only be what type of restriction we can live with, and I much prefer this type to the kind that requires websites to demand my id and photos of my face. Especially since some implementations of this concept (the California one, I think) declare that websites aren't legally required to look deeper than the attested age, which is a very nice feature. Mind you, I don't know why the legislators are bothering mandating OS support for these features. It would be much easier to mandate that websites support the feature, make it clear to them that supporting the feature appropriately will free them from liability for children accessing content, and then wait as users demand that their OS support the feature.

JoshTriplett 2mo ago
> I really don't think we're in a position of choosing between no age-based access mechanism, and age-based access mechanism. It is impossible to win a battle you stop fighting.
- terribleperson 2mo ago
  But it's possible to lose a battle you were never going to win in the first place, and end up in a worse place. I think that if these types of laws (illinois, california) don't hit a critical mass, we're going to see ID verification become the dominant method of age verification. Most websites will use it, and it'll become global because it's easier to just demand an ID and a photo for every user through some third party provider than to offer looser restrictions for the handful of states that have different demands. This is especially true since it's now been demonstrated that states (like Texas) can go after out-of-state sites serving people in Texas. Sure, you could scrupulously try to identify which state someone is in and use the appropriate level of verification, but then you might be liable if it turns out it was someone from Texas or Georgia or Britain using a VPN.

bodge5000 2mo ago

Very true, though this is something thats pretty difficult to get to by tiny increments, which is usually how these nefarious means are accomplished. One tiny thing is asked after another, each one too small to put up a fight against, and then suddenly they've crossed your line and you didn't even notice. Thats not particularly easy to do here, so the line will remain just as strong. Maybe next they'll ask maintainers to go from a bracket to a specific age, and then next ask for verification, but the jump from specific age to verification is big enough that there'll be just as much resistance to it.

tstrimple 2mo ago

This is a nonsense argument considering over half the states have already put actual ID verification requirements in front of "adult content". Blue states are trying to ratchet to what red states just pass? Why? They could just follow suit and require you to upload your ID to a 3rd party service and scan your face. Your conspiracy theories don't seem to hold up to reality.