A long, long time ago (within the past ten years), I had to verify my age with a site. They didn't ask for my ID, or my facial scan, but instead asked for my credit card number. They issued a refund to the card of a few cents, and I had to tell them (within 24hr) how much the refund was for, after which point they'd issue a charge to claw it back. They made it clear that debit and gift cards would not be accepted, it must be a credit card. So I grabbed my Visa card, punched in the numbers, checked my banking app to see the +$0.24 refund, entered the value, got validated, and had another -$0.24 charge to claw it back.
Voila, I was verified as an adult, because I could prove I had a credit card.
The whole point of mandating facial recognition or ID checks isn't to make sure you're an adult, but to keep records of who is consuming those services and tie their identities back to specific profiles. Providers can swear up and down they don't retain that information, but they often use third-parties who may or may not abide by those same requests, especially if the Gov comes knocking with a secret warrant or subpoena.
Biometric validation is surveillance, plain and simple.
That was, in fact, what COPA mandated in the US in 1998, and SCOTUS struck it down as too onerous in Ashcroft v. American Civil Liberties Union, kicking off the last 20 years of essentially completely unregulated Internet porn commercially available to children with nothing more than clicking an "I'm 18" button. At the time, filtering was seen as a better solution. Nowadays filtering is basically impossible thanks to TLS (with things like DoH and ECH being deployed to lock that down even further), apps that ignore user CAs and use attestation to lock out owner control, cloud CDNs, TLS fingerprinting, and extreme consolidation of social media (e.g. discord being for both minecraft discussions and furry porn).
Despite TLS, filtering is easier to set up now than it was in 1998. You might have to block some apps in the short term, but if you suggest apps can avoid age verification if they stop pinning certificates then they'll jump at the option.
Filtering has never been easy or practical for the general public. But the situation has become much worse.
In 1998 it was easy for a family to have no computer at all, or to put their single computer in the living room where it could be supervised. Internet use was limited because it tied up the phone line. These factors made it easy for parents to supervise their children.
Today, computers are everywhere, fit in your pocket, and its very easy to get online. Even if you don't buy any computer for your children (which is hard, because your children will tell you that they're getting bullied and socially ostracized, which probably won't even be a lie!) they will probably be given a computer by their school and any filters on that computer will inevitability be circumvented. And even if that doesn't happen, they can trade or buy one of their peers old phones and use that on free WiFi to access the internet without you knowing it. Are you going to thoroughly search their belongings every week? If you do, they'll know and find ways to hide it anyway.
And yes, I know kids used to procure and hide porno mags. What they have access to on the internet is a lot more extreme than a tattered playboy.
Banning encryption that the device owner can't control actually seems like a great idea. So e.g. for TLS it should be easy to install a CA and MITM filtering proxy as an admin user and all applications must trust that CA.
lets just skip straight to the logical conclusion, buddy. no amount of "web" or "discord" regulation stops porn consumption. the statistic of "minors viewing porn" wouldn't be affected even slightly, even if all of the regulation in question here were passed to the fullest extent. this is because people can just download and run whatever software they want, and communicate with any party they want. what you want is for people to not have control over their computers/communications made from them. people talk about a middle ground, but there is none, because you will always just notice that the "minors viewing porn" statistic is not affected by your latest law, until you have absolute control over civilian communications. this is completely against what anyone in the open source community let alone democracy, stand for.
My complaint was exactly that with modern devices, the owner does not have absolute control over communication on the device, and that's a problem. I think anyone in the open source community or people that believe in democracy would agree that e.g. the owner of a phone or computer should absolutely have the ability to intercept, record, manipulate, and filter all communication that device is doing.
This has already come up before the Supreme Court, with the argument that filtering was a less invasive technique to fulfill the government’s legitimate interests back in the early 2000s.
That ship has sailed. Even the opposition admits that trying to get everyone to filter is not going to work and is functionally insignificant. The only question is whether age verification is still too onerous.
We never needed everyone to filter, just parents busy lobbying the government to impose crap onto every possible service and website across the entire world.
Instead, they should purchase devices for their kids that have a child-lock and client-side filters. All sites have to do is add an HTTP header loosely characterizing it's content.
1. Most of the dollar costs of making it all happen will be paid by the people who actually need/use the feature.
2. No toxic Orwellian panopticon.
3. Key enforcement falls into a realm non-technical parents can actually observe and act upon: What device is little Timmy holding?
4. Every site in the world will not need a monthly update to handle Elbonia's rite of manhood on the 17th lunar year to make it permitted to see bare ankles. Instead, parents of that region/religion can download their own damn plugin.
There's a peer / social issue at play as well though. If you believe that smart phones are disastrous for kids (I happen to think so), and don't allow your 13yo daughter to have one, you are pretty much forcing her to be the odd one out. Maybe that's OK for some parents, but you can't deny that this cost exists.
Preventing your son from playing certain video games that all of his friends enjoy also has a social cost.
This is why I think it's great when schools ban phones in class. When left up to the parents individually it's an absolute disaster.
These are just some specific examples of where I the nanny state can be beneficial. For most things in general though I'd also prefer people govern themselves (and their kids) whenever possible.
So does being vegetarian or vegan. So does being not the dominant culture in any aspect of life. That's a decision for parents to make and honestly "they'll be left out" is such a crap parenting take. Especially since it's a bunch of parents together who don't want their kid to have access thinking this together. If they actually talked to each each or just made a stand so people could see, we wouldn't even have this so called social cost.
I'm seeing this as a parent in real time. I'm actually changing my kid's friend's parent behaviors by simply being like, "Cool. But my kid isn't/is going to do that" I don't know when parenting happened by social committee, but I don't believe in it.
> I don't know when parenting happened by social committee, but I don't believe in it.
It's always been the case. We've just become so individualistic, at least in some western cultures, that we rail against it. There's even an old saying "It takes a village to raise a child".
Your points only make sense in the absence of bad and/neglectful parents. For many decades it was required to prove age in order to consume porn. Porn on the internet ought to have the same requirement. I don’t know the best way to implement it but since the industry isn’t trying to find a solution then government should impose one.
Then the government should come up with a good way to prove age that does not negatively impact privacy. It shouldn't be possible for "who is viewing what porn (or other thing)" to be accidentally leaked; because it should be possible to not store the "who" part.
Such a proof does not exist. It is already the case that your porn viewing habits can be leaked. It’s just that at present the one storing the information is not the government.
Then create one, or something much better than is being demanded, first; before demanding companies use it.
If a porn company has to collect all the information about me (name, address, age, etc) and keep it in their database then, if they get hacked, then all that information, connected to what I viewed, is available to the hackers.
If the porn company has an ID that it assigns each person, and it reaches out to some government agency to say "is this person of age" (without their internal ID), then stores "yes/no" with the ID; then hacking cannot (or is much less likely to be able to) connect "what account has viewed what" with "what human being is attached to the account".
Effectively, by making the porn site need to collect and maintain personal information, privacy is made less safe. If the government is going to demand proof of age, then the government is on the hook for supplying a reasonable way to check it.
Years ago Google released anonymized browsing data to researchers. The researchers were able to determine who did the searches. I imagine a state actor can already determine almost everyone’s online activity.
There's definitely some critical information missing there. I don't think you could individually identify me if all you had to go on was the text and timestamp of the searches I made within the past 24 hours. At least yesterday I didn't even look up any local businesses on maps.
State actor and porn site operator are two very different things. Pointing to the former in this context reads like a non sequitur to me.
I believe most websites keep track of viewing history and ip addresses of where that history comes from. I believe if the government wanted to determine what your internet history is they could do so with a great deal of accuracy. As such I think the complaint that requiring proof of age would be a privacy nightmare is not relevant.
We already live in an age of relatively little privacy.
A targeted investigation by the government is not the same as dragnet surveillance is not the same as sharing the equivalent of my driver's license with some random site operator who can potentially turn around and sell that data (or just inadvertently leak it). The complaint is relevant because the proposed measure would make the status quo significantly worse than it currently is. That applies regardless of how bad it already is at present.
The government could fairly easily gain access to the contents of a security deposit box. That doesn't justify a policy requiring proactively declaring their contents to the authorities.
And all of that is before we even get to the essential question - would the proposed measure actually accomplish the officially stated goal?
So after a protracted back and forth your reasoning comes down to the following. The government is already engaging in dragnet surveillance. Somehow this automagically unmasks VPN usage (global dragnet (as opposed to targeted) traffic correlation on that scale would be a seriously impressive feat) in addition to any other privacy measures a typical individual might take. Therefore we should be okay with a system that enables the government to see you registering with various websites, or alternatively with a system that reveals various personal information to said website operator, or alternatively both simultaneously.
Or to summarize, the situation is already organically bad so everyone should be okay if we enact laws that artificially make it even worse in new ways.
To be blunt your reasoning seems entirely specious to me.
It’s not ok to allow easy access to hardcore pornography by minors. There is already virtually no privacy in these matters in the sense that Google and others already track us so the argument against age verification on privacy grounds is weak. As with most things there are tradeoffs and there is no perfect solution. I favor age verification being the law. You don’t.
The choice between you and others keeping the belief that your porn viewing habits are completely anonymous vs. allowing minors unfettered access to hardcore pornography I choose the latter as the more important issue.
> It’s not ok to allow easy access to hardcore pornography by minors.
I don't believe anyone here suggested that it was.
> Google and others already track us
This is not related to the discussion at hand. I already explained to you. Google does not track me on non-google sites. My state government does not track my browsing history. Neither does the federal government.
> the argument against age verification on privacy grounds is weak
You are responding with nonsense and ignoring the information I provided.
> As with most things there are tradeoffs and there is no perfect solution.
An empty platitude. The thing you are arguing for fundamentally does not work to accomplish the stated goal, although it is quite likely to accomplish other unstated goals. The "tradeoff" is a systematic loss of privacy that is likely to weaken civil liberties in the long run.
> keeping the belief that your porn viewing habits are completely anonymous vs. allowing minors unfettered access
Yet another misrepresentation. At this point I have to assume that your behavior is intentional. I'm left with the impression that you are an ideologically motivated actor who is fully aware that you don't have a leg to stand on but is attempting to sway the perception of an unseen audience anyhow.
The actual choice presented here is between a "solution" that openly invites government overreach without actually solving the stated problem versus the current status quo or possibly some alternative approach. Honestly I've yet to be convinced of the issue with the current status quo. Parental controls exist. Whitelists exist. Why can't we expect parents to do their jobs by parenting?
The mainstream social networks don't permit nudity. If you really have so little faith in your own child's judgment then whitelist Facebook, Wikipedia, and a few others and call it a day. Although I do have to wonder. Assuming they're a teenager, why do you have so little faith in their cognitive abilities?
In the end I'm reasonably certain that unfettered access to social networks is far worse for development than unfettered access to hardcore pornography. C'est la vie.
The fact that there are already many threats to our privacy is not a reason to not push back on new threats. Rather, it's a reason to push back harder, and then try to fix the existing threats, too.
That's just not possible in practice. There's lots of people who enjoy publishing their sex, not commercially. There's no place under a single jurisdiction that can be filtered or required to prove age. Any social network will contain groups of people using it to distribute porn. When common ones are closed, dedicated ones are created.
I don’t understand what you are saying. The government can force providers to make their users prove their age. And people can violate the law and try to avoid this.
> This is why I think it's great when schools ban phones in class.
Agreed on the classroom angle, there are many reasons (e.g. cheating, concentration) to treat the availability of devices in a uniform way there.
> If you believe that smart phones are disastrous for kids
A focus on the handheld device also makes it easier to handle other related concerns that can't really be solved any other way, like "no social-media after bedtime."
It's important to teach our children that different people have different restrictions. Some of my daughter's friends have no phone. One of them has no phone, but does have a tablet. To the best of my knowledge, none of them are ostracized by the group. I mean, I've seen them hanging out at our house and other places.
> To the best of my knowledge, none of them are ostracized by the group.
Yes, in my experience it isn't as severe as "Ostracized", but definitely a bit "left out" occasionally, especially when friends are all doing "snap streaks" and swap BFFs (as they do) etc.
So at least in my area, a girl at 12+ will miss out on some social peer activities if she does not have a phone. End of the world? Probably not, but I guess it depends on your community's local culture. Also, the valley probably isn't a great baseline for comparison.
I'm not recommending anything. I just think we tend to ignore the nuance.
Just curious, how old are they? I'm planning on having kids and I'm afraid of how to answer the smart phone question. I imagine that it could start to be an issue by 12 or 13
Not even close. Some peers will have effectively their phone at 6 or lower. https://www.waituntil8th.org/ tries to promote delaying till 8yo. It may start being an issue as soon as they get to primary school.
My daughter is 13 and has a phone for a number of years, and she got it later than some friends, earlier than others. I know that's not a lot of info, but it gives you some idea of the range _I_ saw.
In other words it is a multi-agent coordination problem from game theory. You can have an outside force change the rules, or you can figure out how to collaborate/compete within the game.
> This is why I think it's great when schools ban phones in class.
This was the absolute norm in the 00s when cellphones became common and cheap enough for teens to often have one. If you were seen with a phone out it would be confiscated. At some point schools apparently just gave up and only a few are starting to rediscover the policy as though it's a novel idea.
What the fuck happened? When exactly did this transition happen?
In the late 2000s, as a response to a parental demand for communication and safety following high-profile school emergencies, especially school shootings.
Crazy. Compromising the quality of education for everybody every school day so that on rare occasions a very small number of students might be able to call their parents (who will be powerless to help over the phone.)
Yea I’m a parent and “what if there’s an emergency” is one of the silliest excuses to allow students to have phones. If there’s an emergency, the school is already going to have called the police. What the hell am I going to do if my kid calls me? I’ll tell her to hang up the phone and follow whatever emergency procedure they have.
> just parents busy lobbying the government to impose crap onto every possible service and website across the entire world.
Its not parents, primarily.
IMO the pressure comes from a few lobby groups, media scares, companies with age verification products to sell and big tech - the last because it imposes compliance costs that removes competition, and new entrants in particular.
> The only question is whether age verification is still too onerous.
You've skipped right past the "does it work" question. It doesn't. Porn is available on file sharing networks in far greater quantity than it is on reputable websites.
The only realistic methods I'm aware of are whitelist filtering, sufficient supervision, or sufficient interaction and education.
Jesus, how does your society still function when underage people can see videos of people having sex?! It's one thing for minors to be having sex, but to watch others doing it? Reprehensible.
I suppose you do not have children. I am open-minded, mid 40's. The level of violence in porn you can get access to with just one click, has no comparison with what I could get access to as a kid (basically nothing).
With the net, you get access in one click to the worse and the best. It is a lot of work as a parent to educate the kids about that.
As kids, teenager and even as 20 something, if we wanted to do some experience, we had to physically access the media or be physically present. This was not on-demand over a screen.
So, I filter the access at home while also trying my best to educate. This is not easy and I can understand that non tech savvy people request more laws, even so I am personally against.
The article is pretty well balanced, we have no silver bullet here.
Sure, but if the goal is to minimise access to violence, why did the GP say "they can access porn" instead of "they can access violence"? I doubt the two are synonymous.
They're not synonymous but a vast amount of pornography available online constitutes violence against women.
The commercial sex trade, including both porn and prostitution, is a multi-billion dollar industry that seeks to normalize extreme acts and promotes the dehumanisation of women and girls.
This framing trades nuance for moral panic. The assertion that pornography inherently constitutes violence against women is not an argument but a slogan. It is ideological posturing, not analysis. The so-called ‘commercial sex trade’ as you put it is complex, and your narrative is not intellectually serious.
Nice idea, but how? How could that actually be accomplished, without stacking SCOTUS with conservative and/or feminist justices? My other comment pointing out the 1A problem with proposals to ban porn was downvoted but nobody has been able to explain how I'm wrong.
Requiring porn businesses to check IDs would be, legally and politically, much easier.
The whole point here is to prevent impressionable children from growing up watching videos of women being treated like objects, so that they don't grow up to view women as objects
If the states banning porn weren’t generally the same states restricting medical care for women, I’d say you have a point, but that’s simply not the case.
“Protecting women” is the sales pitch, not the objective.
Noncentral fallacy. Nobody's against "medical care for women" except where they believe it overlaps with "legalized murder of children", and it's extremely disingenuous for you to ignore that and act like "medical care" is the part they're against.
Has there been some outbreak of this? Genuinely confused. My impression is that sort of behavior has been decreasing my entire life while access to porn has been increasing.
As a recovering porn addict that had issues with socializing with the opposite sex growing up... I don't think there's enough evidence to scientifically conclude anything either way.
As for me, I sought out a large amount of porn "too early". The porn was not violent and I was ashamed to talk about it with anyone. Then again this was before social media became mainstream. I wanted to talk to girls my age but had too much anxiety and depression from my upbringing. ..the real reason for my addiction. So I got called a teenage stalker and got punished so hard I stopped talking to women entirely. The porn was because I was so depressed in the following years. Nobody even realized I had a porn addiction to this day, because I didn't talk about it because... it was cringe.
Still a bachelor but I go to meetings and have worked on it for several years by now. When I worked on my issues enough the urges went away. To the point I wondered why this was such an issue for so long. I no longer feel the need to find a mate to feel complete anymore. Which ironically would make talking to women possible again. But that wasn't because of porn - it was because of depression/anxiety.
I ascribed the causes incorrectly for a long time ("excess porn usage causes the tendency to sexually harass/assault people you're attracted to") which only contributed to my shame and depression for a long time. I think it's because people don't want to admit that they cannot help every person with major depressive disorder ("you need to want help to get help"), so they go after bigger fish that are open to litigation to make it seem like the problem is being addressed. And all this labeling of porn as a problem rubs off onto actual addicts who misjudge the real root of their issues like me.
I have a hypothesis that telling teenagers their minds will be permanently corrupted by too much pornography of any kind and they should be ashamed of themselves for having sexual urges is... not exactly the most productive decision. Especially when gore videos remain unregulated and legal. I think depression/anxiety has a greater chance to cause the behavior they're talking about - "hurt people hurt people" - and those people just so happen to be addicted to something to self-medicate. Shaming people is certainly one way to make them depressed.
But I was sorta glad I avoided talking to people I was attracted to for so long, in my depressed state not much good would have happened. I now have a healthier appreciation of the other sex without completely abstaining and in my view it had nothing do with porn. It was actually about seeing and accepting reality for what it is, not through a depressed filter.
My impression is that parents are increasingly alarmed at young boys becoming bitter misogynists. Maybe that isn't happening and it's just a moral panic? Or maybe those boys watching lots of pornography and coming to believe that women are whores are two entirely unrelated phenomenons?
Media diet shapes what we are, and kids are more impressionable than most. It is therefore natural and reasonable for parents to want some control over what media gets fed to their kids.
> My impression is that parents are increasingly alarmed at young boys becoming bitter misogynists
This seems more in line with the increase of mysoginist influencers (Andrew Tate and the like) and less to do with porn. The former of course being the type of content that social media companies are more than happy to proactively promote to children.
I'm not particularly familiar with Tate or his story, but wasn't he literally arrested for human trafficking in connection with a porn site that he ran? And that site was part of the start of his "Internet" career? And part of his shtick is bragging about being an "Internet pimp" and running said site?
Even the stuff that’s less extreme than Tate should be totally unacceptable for children and teens to access. Not just the “manosphere” but everything adjacent to it: the alt-right, Nazis and White Supremecists, Qanon, conspiracy sites, flat earthers, antivaxxers, cryptoscammers and so on. They are all in orbit of the same dark barycenter of toxicity.
I’d rather my kid accidentally run into porn than them accidentally run into this garbage. But guess which one I have to worry about all the algorithms steering my kid to? Hint: it’s not the porn.
I don't think that's quite what's happening, I think the phenomenon in question is occurring primarily within a specific age group, and I think it doesn't correlate with porn availability or consumption.
If X predates A by a long time then any attribution of A to X is going to need extensive evidence.
I think the phenomenon you refer to has to do with politics and culture. It's loosely related to the pendulum swinging back against DEI type stuff. Depending on your political persuasion you might replace "bitter misogynists" with something like "angry cynics".
The first ammendment, as presently interpreted, makes banning violent pornography virtually impossible. Restricting access to it is a far more tractable solution.
I keep hearing this argument, but I don’t come across any violent porn unless I explicitly look for it. What are the search terms you people are using?
My girl discovered self-pleasure at the age of 5, ironically during an exam from her doctor (she doesn't think it was intentional). I had an ex discover masturbation around the same age. I personally discovered it around 11 or 12. All of the above discovered porn accidentally as kids. I don't know about them but after that I intentionally sought it out.
Guess what! Both of us are perfectly fine!! (Well the ex is a bit psychotic but that's unrelated...)
This obsession with protecting kids from the realities of life is just fucking stupid. We as a species have the stupidest, most ridiculous views about something that is required to keep us alive!
The problem is that most porn depicts sex as somewhat violent and sets unreasonable expectations of what sex is like.
Not every woman is capable of deep-throating or going straight from vaginal to anal without adding some extra lube. Most women don't want their man to put his hands around her throat during sex. Almost none of them are okay with going from ass to mouth.
Porn also sets an unrealistic standard for penis size. When the average is 5.2 inches with a standard deviation of about an inch, it becomes clear that the 7+ inch penises used in porn are like the top 5%.
I don't think parents are having these conversations with their kids about this.
I would be interested in a discussion here about what sex acts people find demeaning to women. You cherry-picked from a narrow band of agreeable examples. Are blow jobs themselves demeaning to women? I suspect that many (perhaps here but certainly elsewhere) would say so.
I would also welcome a discussion about how porn might be disadvantageous to boys (and the very medicated male performers) and how all this contrasts with tolerance towards non-sexual violence depicted on screen.
What? There's zero suggestion in ndriscoll's comment that he's talking about "extremely violent porn".
The most specific he gets is "furry porn", which might be a kink you don't approve of but is not obviously more objectionable than "people having sex".
I was being somewhat flippant while also using a group that's known as a gateway to more deviant behaviors (e.g. libertarianism). I think though that you'll likely not find much success in litigating whether children ought to be able to access porn (and whether porn has anything close to a healthy depiction of relationships/sex. Yes, some healthy material exists. It's extremely rare, especially with commercial websites). e.g. no one thinks children should be able to shop at physical adult stores. It's probably more productive to participate in the "what to do about it" discussion.
> Jesus, how does your society still function when underage people can see videos of people having sex?!
It kind of isn't anymore. But not just because of porn, obviously.
Early porn exposure goes hand in hand with the problems we see typified in the recent Netflix movie Adolescence. Seen women constantly railed and treated like meat when that young probably does do something.
"Videos of people having sex" is deliberately misleading, modern porn is not dry educational science videos. It's clear you'd rather be snide than correct.
> Early porn exposure goes hand in hand with the problems we see typified in the recent Netflix movie Adolescence
There's really no evidence of this. I find it much more plausible that the boom in misogynistic radicalism is caused by the flourishing of radically far-right niche content online. Our society has become more politically extreme in a number of ways over the past couple decades, and there's no porn equivalent for anti-immigrant or anti-trans sentiment. Andrew Tate, however, is very much of a kind with figures like Nick Fuentes and Alex Jones.
That's not to say porn viewership doesn't have an effect on kids, but I expect it would be much more modest. Unrealistic ideas about sex, anxieties about penis size. I'm in my mid-20s; internet porn was highly accessible to me & my peers when we were young, and while it did have an effect on youth culture, it was quite modest—nothing like the hard pivot to misogyny which I've heard teachers describe when their students become interested in (again) Andrew Tate.
> "Videos of people having sex" is deliberately misleading, modern porn is not dry educational science videos.
Implying the opposite is deliberately misleading too. "Modern porn" is not entirely 1 thing or another. Much of it's sensible, a lot of it is extreme. Much like any area in life, I think, the real solution is to teach our children what's wrong with the more extreme stuff.
People are scared of porn causing their children to "objectify women"? Then teach them to respect women from a young age and when they see the extreme side of things they'll be like "That's wrong"
It's probably easier to blame the Internet though and to try to neuter it instead - rather than teach your kid the values you want them to have, just make sure they're never faced with values other than those!
> "Videos of people having sex" is deliberately misleading
it literally isn't. porn is mostly people having normal sex or just nude images of a woman. the existence of fringe fetish stuff doesn't affect that in any practical way. but your confusion seems to be thinking this discussion was about feminism or something when it's really just a decrepit boomer who is against sex being even legal lying through his teeth to justify completely pointless and harmful legislation (see 2 posts up)
You can map the availability of pornography to a rise in risky sex practices like choking. This isn't a problem inherent to pornography itself—rather, it's a factor of inadequate sex ed combined with the commonplace irresponsible presentation of certain sex acts in porn. Still, it'd be misleading to present porn as an entirely neutral depiction of sex. Mainstream pornography demonstrably does spread some harmful ideas. This is also true of Hollywood cinema, though; all media works this way, to a greater or lesser extent.
Is card verification a lesser form of surveillance? And there’s a good chance your card issuer (or your bank, one hop away from it) has your biometrics anyway.
I don’t like either of them… (And why does YouTube ask me to verify my age when I’m logged into a Google account I created in 2004?)
Oh, make no mistake, I hate both of these. I loathe this forced surveillance of everyone because parents can't be bothered to supervise and teach their children about the most primary of human animal functions (sex), regardless of their reasons for it.
I take great pains to keep minors out of my adult spaces, and don't have to resort to anything as invasive as biometric surveillance or card charges. This notion that the entire world should be safe for children by default, and that anything and everything adult should be vilified and locked up, is toxic as all get-out and builds shame into the human animal over something required for the perpetuation of the species.
The adult content isn't the problem, it's the relationship some folks have towards it that's the issue. That's best corrected by healthy intervention early on, not arbitrary age checks everywhere online that mainly serve as an exercise of power by the ruling class against "undesirable" elements of society.
> take great pains to keep minors out of my adult spaces, and don't have to resort to anything as invasive as biometric surveillance or card charges.
What sort of spaces are these (online or in person), and how do you enforce this? I have an online space where such non invasive measures could be useful.
Mine are rooted in the 90s/00s internet: I know the people I allow into my spaces, and extend to them a degree of trust to let others in who are also of legal age. I rotate the credentials every so often at random, forcing everyone to request the new password from me. Other spaces I inhabit also operate off this sort of "community trust" system, only letting in folks we already know ourselves. It's how we keep out minors and trolls, as well as just bad/no-longer-trusted actors.
It's inconvenient, sure, and it's not SEO-friendly, but it generally works and doesn't require checking IDs or doing biometric verifications. The thing is, I'm building a community, not a product, and therefore don't have the same concerns as, say, PornHub, for checking IDs. It's also not a scalable solution - I have to build individual rapports with people I can then trust to have the access keys to my space(s), and then monitor that trust at each password change to ensure it's not violated. It's hard work, but it's decently reliable for my needs.
For larger/at-scale providers...I think the better answer is just good-old-fashioned on-device or home-network filtering. The internet was NEVER meant to be child-friendly, and we need to make it abundantly clear to parents that it's never going to be so they take necessary steps to protect their children. I'd personally like to see more sites (in general, not just adult) contribute their domain names and CDNs to independent list maintainers (or published in a help article linked via their main footer) so individuals and organizations can have greater control over their online experience. I think if someone wants to, say, block the entire domain ranges of Amazon for whatever reason, then that information should be readily available without having to watch packet flows and analyzing CDN domain patterns.
It's just good netiquette, I think, but I'm an old-fashioned dinosaur in that regard.
> I'd personally like to see more sites (in general, not just adult) contribute their domain names and CDNs to independent list maintainers (or published in a help article linked via their main footer)
This would be so useful. I once tried to get this information from a company you've all heard of, so that we could reliably whitelist their services on our corporate firewall, and the answer was "they're dynamic, so that's impossible". I said "but you know them, you could dynamically make that information available to your customers", but got nowhere. I'd like this to be a regulatory requirement, but the people who make the rules aren't sufficiently technically competent to identify technical solutions, and don't seem to listen to people who are.
[Edit to add: I really like your old-school approach to building online community for yourself. I don't know your interests, or if I'd like yours, but I wish more spaces with your approach were around. The world in general (not only the internet) is a better place when we interact with each other in ways that aren't commercially determined.]
> This notion that the entire world should be safe for children by default, and that anything and everything adult should be vilified and locked up, is toxic as all get-out and builds shame into the human animal over something required for the perpetuation of the species.
The world should be safe for kids because kids are the future of our society. When the world isn't safe, families won't have kids and society will start to decline. Maybe that means giving up some of the privileges you have. That's the cost of our future.
> Is card verification a lesser form of surveillance?
It's not just about which is worse surveillance, it's also simply that everyone has a face but not everyone has a credit card. I'm not deemed creditworthy in this country I moved to (never had a debt in my life but they don't know that) so the card application got rejected. Do we want to upload biometrics or exclude poor and unknown people from "being 18"? I really don't know which is the lesser poison
> (And why does YouTube ask me to verify my age when I’m logged into a Google account I created in 2004?)
I'd guess they didn't want to bother with that edge case. Probably <0.01% of active Youtube accounts are >18 years old
Does everyone who is 18+ have a face that passes for 18+ (and the inverse as well)?
Overall it seems like a bad idea, but one demanded by what sounds like a good idea with not reasonable way to fully implement it, leading to a tangled network of bad ideas patching other bad ideas patching other bad ideas all the way down.
The thing being demanded is decidedly not a good idea. A reasonable demand would be that sites over a certain size include a standardized age or content rating in the headers. That would facilitate a whitelist approach, which is the only viable way to accomplish the stated goal.
The issue is that there are some online activities which we all agree that children must be banned from no matter the cost to do so. Society has now started shifting in what actually falls in that group, but no one is arguing against the group entirely. There are very invasive solutions to this that have historically been accepted in the most agreed upon use cases, but not that society has started to shift on what falls into that category, we see a lot of friction as others don't want those solutions applied elsewhere.
Whitelisting was never an accepted solution for this worst category, and thus it will not be an accepted solution to any specific cases that society has started to move into that category (accepted to the portion of society moving it into that category, those who don't put it in that category will see such solutions are massive overreach).
Whitelisting is literally the only available technical solution. None of the others work and they can't realistically be made to. Anyone who tells you they do is either hopelessly non-technical, woefully misinformed, trying to sell you snake oil, or has an ulterior motive (surveillance).
I suppose something like the Great Firewall is also kind of sort of workable but that's government coordinated filtering so expansive that it begins to share more in common with whitelists than blacklists.
For every site that complies with age verification laws there will be uncountably many that don't. And that's before getting to file sharing networks. And then there's the dark net. Both of the latter are readily accessible outside of the Great Firewall.
No, but the original thread was about providing your credit card number to these service providers. I’m saying that’s one hop from your bank, who has your biometric information.
Don't know about the US, but over here the last couple of years it has been a big wave of "enable biometrics sign-in! Totes safe, your face is the best ID, just click this checkbox, please, we would really like you to use it, pretty please" in the bank apps. No idea why they pushed it so hard, and it seems to have largely subsided now.
What you describe is called QES (Qualified Electronic Signature) and is still widely used to validate identities.
Unfortunately it is not enough to prove an identity (you could be using the credit card of your traveling uncle) and regulation requires for it to be combined with another proof.
I see a lot of people associating identity verification with evil intent (advertising, tracking).
I work in this domain and the reality is a lot less interesting: identity verification companies do this and only this, under strict scrutiny both from their customers and from the regulators.
We are not where we want to be from a privacy standpoint but the industry is making progress and the usage of identity data is strictly regulated.
I'm in a different regulated industry (healthcare), so we have a lot of different international standards there, and wondered how that worked in a different space.
Paypal used this method as identity (or at least account) verification back in the very early days, IIRC. They made a very small deposit and I think they just let you keep it but I can't recall that for sure.
Credit cards are trivially traceable to your legal identity, since anti-money-laundering and know-your-customer laws require that credit card companies keep this information. The government can subpoena this information just as easily as they could with pictures of your face or ID.
What if you don't have a credit card? This solves nothing, the good way to do this is as system like Polish "MojeID" (my ID) [1]. This works in the following way, a site needs to verify information X, then it redirects users to a bank (that has to provide this service), login over there and then agree to let the bank know whatever it was requested - it could be only one information, birth date.
This is a good solution, as banks are obliged to provide free bank account for anyone (there is EU regulation on that), this is very save, gives users full information what data third party requested.
1. Your old credit card solution needs a credit card. So you exclude out the poor, bad credit, etc.
2. Parents will help kids bypass checks like that.
3. It can be bypassed by a half-smart 13-year-old who can access an app on a phone that will give them the card details and be able to see transactions.
Any verification that doesn't actually verify you via proper means is easy to fake. Hell, we can fake passport/id photos easy enough so now we have to jump on calls with the passport and move it around.
The days of the wild west of the internet are long gone. It's time to realise that it's so important that it deserves the same level of verification we give to in person activities. Someone seeing you and/or your id. It's the only thing that has the best chances of not being bypassed with ease.
They issued a refund to the card of a few cents, and I had to tell them (within 24hr) how much the refund was for, after which point they'd issue a charge to claw it back.
This was one of the methods that CompuServe used back in the 1980's, though using a checking account.
It's sad that so many aspects of technology have completely failed to improve in half a century.
This is not about tracking, having your biometrics means they can resell the data to other providers (e.g. palantir or some other hellish enterprise). With that, the places and means of following you in real time are practically limitless...
There have been so many dystopian movies about this kind of tech, it's a good insight of what comes next.
> Biometric validation is surveillance, plain and simple.
Eh. It's just easier and cheaper. I'll bet Discord has outsourced this to one of those services that ask you for a face scan when you sign up to [some other service].
People are less likely to criticize the government, or even participate in political debate, if their online identities are know by the government. Governments like obedient, scared citizens.
The only ethical response to laws like this, is for websites and apps to terminate operations completely in countries that create them. Citizens who elect politicians without respect for human rights and privacy don't really deserve anything nice anyway.
Providing identity and access services at scale is certainly a few people's next big plan, and it appears they've managed to sell the representatives of their own states on it first.
This sort of thing can't happen except through the largest tech companies in the world, who are coincidentally already poised to be the world's official providers of digital identity, and private internet enclaves.
Look at what Microsoft has done with Windows - mandatory minimum TPM to install and a Microsoft account registration for a local user. Try using an Apple iPad or iPhone without an iCloud account or adding a payment method. Google wants you to sign in with them, everywhere, aggressively. Cloudflare has been the web's own private gatekeeper for the last decade. Facebook's whole product is identity. IBM has sold surveillance, IAM, and facial recognition services for decades.
Instead of a clunky IP-based Great Firewall, imagine being able to render VPNs ineffective and unnecessary everywhere on the planet by a person's (verified national) identity. Click. Block and deactivate all members of group "Islamic State" on your platform. Click. Allow IDs registered to this ZIP Code to vote in this election. Click. CortanaSupreme, please dashboard viewer metrics by usage patterns that indicate loneliness, filtering for height, last assessed property values, and marriage status, and show their locations.
Currently, laws don't require age verification, just that ineligible parties are excluded. There's no legal requirement to card someone before selling them alcohol, and there's no reason anyone would need a depth map of someone's face when we could safely assume that the holder of a >5 year old email account is likely to be 18 if 13 is the minimum age to register with the provider.
Shifting the onus to parents to control what their kids do on the internet hasn't worked. However, that's a bare sliver of what's at stake here.
The anonymous, unchecked Internet got us where we are today. It was a great experiment in worldwide communication, but has now been converted into a weapon for the same type of authoritarians that previously used traditional media and propaganda channels. AI is only accelerating the possibilities for abuse. Critical thinking skills taught from a young age is the only defense.
That’s a very strange take on governments, treating them as a singular entity. A government that deserves that name is first and foremost and elected set of representatives of the constituents, and thus like citizens that vote for them again, act in their interests.
If the government is not working like that, you have an administrative problem, not a societal one. A state is its population.
Very dangerous thinking. Unless each and every citizens has approved the elected "representative" and every decision they made (which will never happen), you cannot assimilate the state and the population. The state has to be considered a separate entity, one which operate beyond the common man's thinking.
> Unless each and every citizens has approved the elected "representative" and every decision they made
But they have, by electing the representatives that ought to represent them, and thereby yield the power to make decisions on behalf of their constituents. If they do no not act accordingly, they will not be elected again in subsequent terms; if they act against the law, they will be fairly tried; and if the laws don't sufficiently capture the reality anymore, they will be adapted. That is how a representative democracy should work. If it doesn't, you have an implementation problem, not a systemic one (admittedly, this is almost a true Scotsman, but still.)
> The state has to be considered a separate entity, one which operate beyond the common man's thinking.
This isn't mutually exclusive. Of course the state has to make higher-level considerations and people in power will invariably be corrupted to some degree, but concluding that the state is your enemy and cannot be trusted is the wrong one, in my opinion.
With that attitude, you're just waiting for it to become truly evil so you can say "See? I told you all along." Better to try and shape the state you have into something better while you still can.
> But they have, by electing the representatives that ought to represent them
Yes this is the theory, but what if there is no political party "representing" me, what about people abstaining from voting, what if peoples elect an authoritarian figure I didn't vote for ?
This is one of the pitfalls of your system, if only one citizen disagree, or do not feel represented in it, this justification falls apart. You cannot hide this behind an "implementation problem", because there is no such implementation.
If "we are the government" so everything the state is doing to me (or any other individual) will be "voluntary". With this reasoning the state is not putting me in prison for my dissident opinion, I went to prison myself.
> concluding that the state is your enemy and cannot be trusted is the wrong one, in my opinion
I didn't conclude such a thing, I only wanted to make clear that the state is a distinct institution that cannot possibly represent everyone, thus not worthy of the title "we".
Also yes I do not trust it :)
> what if there is no political party "representing" me
If it bothers you enough, you’re supposed to create your own party. Democracy doesn’t mean that everyone else is doing the hard work for you.
> what about people abstaining from voting
Silent disagreement—if they were bothered enough, they would go voting.
> what if peoples elect an authoritarian figure I didn't vote for
If a few people do this, the system can (and has, for hundreds of years) handle it just fine. If more and more people do it, something is off, and nobody did anything about it. Part of the problem is people stopped caring and participating, expecting someone else to.
> if only one citizen disagree, or do not feel represented in it, this justification falls apart.
It’s no justification. We live in a shared society, democracy is a compromise to make the most people in it happy.
> the state is not putting me in prison for my dissident opinion, I went to prison myself.
As far as I can see, no democratic state is putting you in prison for a dissenting opinion, as long as you don’t endanger someone else with it.
Otherwise, yes: if you willingly went against the rules you agreed to follow by actively enjoying the benefits of a free, democratic society, then it’s reasonable to go to prison if you’re caught. You expect the same of other criminals, even if they may not realise the error of their ways yet.
People take everything around them for granted, acting like their freedom doesn’t come at a cost. It does. By living in a democracy, you enjoy boundless riches, housing, health care, fair trials, roads, plumbing, electricity, supermarkets, and a myriad of scale effects that are only possible because a lot of people have agreed to work together. The price to thrive in that system is to adhere to our collective rules, and deal with the fact that we constantly need to make compromises with our neighbours so the majority of people can be as happy as possible. And yes, that means even a government that you don’t fully agree with represents you, if not perfectly; it means taking responsibility for the mechanism that feeds you.
> If it bothers you enough, you’re supposed to create your own party.
Yeah, and that party wouldn't get any seats. I'm sorry, how did we go from "the state IS the population" to "well if your policy preferences fall outside the two agendas on offer, you have to start an electorally-successful third party—something NOBODY has managed to do—and if you don't or if it doesn't work, then it's your fault."
It sounds like you're trying to apportion blame for why the state ISN'T the population, and at that point, you've already conceded that your initial claim was wrong.
I respectfully disagree. If we replace all idealism with realism in the way we think about our political system, there is nothing left to do other than burying our heads in the sand. I firmly believe that people must participate in democracy, and that involves fighting for your convictions.
It's not your fault how things are, but doing nothing and expecting things to get better on their own isn't going to work either.
Realism doesn't mean doing nothing. It means taking a critical attitude toward your own strategies for effecting change.
> but doing nothing and expecting things to get better on their own isn't going to work either
Isn't this exactly what you advocate for? You say democracies faithfully represent the will of the people, and yet the American president's rock-bottom approval ratings indicate otherwise. Your attitude (correct me if I'm misrepresenting you) is basically that the system is fine, and the problem is that all the people in it are just irresponsible. Well, that's not a plan to fix anything. It's a do-nothing ideology. Or are you going to wave your magic wand and make everyone responsible?
> By living in a democracy, you enjoy boundless riches, housing, health care, fair trials
Tell that to poor people, homeless people, uninsured people, and the countless people unjustly imprisoned in the largest prison system in the world (1.8 million inmates).
Oh that's not true at all. A state is an institution which is influenced by its population, but if anything, the attitudes of the population are more a product of the state, its constituent political parties, and the associated media apparatuses than of a freestanding "will of the people."
To give a trivial counterexample, if the American state "is" its population, then why does your presidential vote only matter if you live in a swing state, and why can you only vote for one of two candidates? Surely your vote should reflect all of your policy preferences and have equal influence no matter where you live.
It isn’t realistic, it’s pessimistic. If the government, the system, is your opponent, there is no other outcome than subversion, everything is futile anyway. That leaves no room for democratic participation, for any kind of peaceful change, if you’re being earnest with it. And that seems very cynical and ideologically driven to me. There’s a lot of room for improvement that doesn’t involve tearing everything down because it’s beyond the pale anyway; it isn’t.
I am not advocating tearing everything down, as that will make things worse, especially if done violently.
> That leaves no room for democratic participation
I think there is very limited room for democratic participation and it has become far to difficult to change anything. If I vote and I do not care which of the parties that have a chance of winning wins because their policies are so similar it does not matter, where is my democratic participation? Even if the parties are different and I do not like the policies of either, what is the value of my vote?
I think things will improve in the long term when there is sufficient pushback, but it will take a long time.
> If I vote and I do not care which of the parties that have a chance of winning wins because their policies are so similar it does not matter, where is my democratic participation?
In joining a party that represents you better—or founding one if no such party exists—and campaigning for it. Democracy doesn't end with casting a ballot, especially in trying times like these. Nobody is going to come and save us; if we don't stand up, nobody will.
I can wholeheartedly recommend the book "The Germans: They thought they were free" by Milton Mayer[1]. It very thoroughly describes how a society ends up asking how the holocaust could possibly have happened while nobody did anything about it while it did.
> It very thoroughly describes how a society ends up asking how the holocaust could possibly have happened while nobody did anything about it while it did.
> If the government is not working like that, you have an administrative problem, not a societal one. A state is its population.
My point is that the German society wasn't inherently evil, but stunned, indifferent; a comparatively small group of thoroughly sinister people managed to use that to their advantage. The correct thing to do would have been civil resistance, while it was still possible.
But a state is its population, by your own words. How can you say German society wasn't inherently evil and yet hold that a state IS its people? Either the German population is evil and willed evil into existence, or the state is greater than the sum of its parts. It seems obvious that the latter is the case.
Now that's mixing things. We are talking about democracies; and there, a state is its population: Every constituent carries responsibility for the government—the state—that is elected in fair elections. Even by abstaining, you agree with the majority. Without the German people, there wouldn't be a state of Germany.
But of course that doesn't apply to autocracies and dictatorships, which Germany pre-WW2 obviously turned into. My point is that the Germans voted for the NSDAP, and dit not resist the transformation into an autocratic state. They let this happen, out of indifference, wrong assumptions, anger, stupidity, and fear. That means one way or another, the German people decided what the state became.
False dichotomy. "Either the system is perfect or it is useless." No: systems can have mixed results, and they can be improved. Even when they can't be improved, they can be replaced by better (but still imperfect) systems.
You present a choice between pretending everything is fine and giving up. This is no choice at all. Both options entail giving up; one is just honest about it.
People, and the governments they compose, respond to incentives.
If platforms like discord take a hard-line stance of "no, we're not enabling a surveillance state apparatus" and the government then forces them to cease business in that country, that is a decision with consequences. People don't like when the government takes away their nice things due to motives they don't agree with. It catalyzes a position - "unchecked government surveillance is creating negative outcomes for me".
Over time, if enough actors behave the same way, public sentiments will shift and, assuming a healthy democracy, the government line will as well.
But acquiescing to demands like these only further entrenches the position, as the public is only loosely incentivized to care. The boiling of the privacy frog in a surveillance state like the UK means most people won't care enough to change it until it's too late
> Citizens who elect politicians without respect for human rights and privacy don't really deserve anything nice anyway.
Unfortunately things don't always work out that cleanly:
- Sometimes you vote for the pro-freedom candidate, but your candidate loses.
- Sometimes there are only two dominant candidates, and both disrespect human rights.
- Sometimes one candidate disrespects human rights in some particular way, but the other candidate has different, bigger problems, so you vote for the lesser of two evils.
- Sometimes a candidate says one thing while campaigning, and then when elected does something different.
Aside from the privacy nightmare, what about someone who is 18 and just doesn't have the traditional adult facial features? Same thing for someone who's 15 and hit puberty early? I can imagine that on the edges, it becomes really hard to discern.
If they get it wrong, are you locked out? Do you have to send an image of your ID? So many questions. Not a huge fan of these recent UK changes (looking at the Apple E2E situation as well). I understand what they're going for, but I'm not sure this is the best course of action. What do I know though :shrug:.
Wise (nee Transferwise) requires a passport style photo taken by a webapp for KYC when transferring money. I was recently unable to complete that process over a dozen tries, because the image processing didn't like something about my face. (Photos met all criteria.)
On contacting their support, I learned that they refused to use any other process. Also it became apparent that they had outsourced it to some other company and had no insight into the process and so no way to help. Apparently closing one's account will cause an escalation to a team who determines where to send the money, which would presumably put some human flexability back into the process.
(In the end I was able to get their web app to work by trying several other devices, one had a camera that for whatever reason satisfied their checks that my face was within the required oval etc.)
> On contacting their support, I learned that they refused to use any other process.
I suspect this won't help you, but I think it's worth noting that the GDPR gives people the right to contest any automated decision-making that was made on a solely algorithmic basis. So this wouldn't be legal in the EU (or the UK).
Hah, indeed, a similar experience here. The desktop option is worse, trying to get a webcam to focus on an ID card took forever. The next step wanted a 3rd party company to do a live webcam session, no thanks! Closed the account. Or at least tried, after a several step nag process, they still keep the email blocked to that account, in case you change your mind...
There seems no way to push back against these technologies. Next it will be an AI interview for 'why do you transfer the money?'
Also, key point in the framing, when was it decided that Discord supposed to be the one enforcing this? A pop-up saying "you really should be 18+" is one thing, but this sounds like a genuine effort to lock out young people. Neither Discord nor a government ratings agency should be taking final responsibility for how children get bought up, that seems like something parents should be responsible for.
When a corner shop sells cigarettes to minors, who's breaking the law?
When a TV channel broadcast porn, who gets fined?
These are accepted laws that protect kids from "harm", which are relatively uncontroversial.
Now, the privacy angle is very much the right question. But as Discord are the one that are going to get fined, they totally need to make sure kids aren't being exposed to shit they shouldn't be seeing until they are old enough. In the same way the corner shop needs to make sure they don't sell booze to 16 year olds.
Now, what is the mechanism that Discord should/could use? that's the bigger question.
Can government provide fool proof, secure, private and scalable proof of age services? How can private industry do it? (Hint: they wont because its a really good source of profile information for advertising.)
At least the ways that a corner shop verifies age don't have the same downsides as typical online age verifiers. They just look at an ID document; verify that it's on the official list of acceptable ID documents, seems to be genuine and valid and unexpired, appears to relate to the person buying the product, and shows an old enough age; and hand the document back.
The corner shop has far fewer false negatives, far lower data privacy risk, and clear rules that if applied precisely won't add any prejudice about things like skin color or country of origin to whatever prejudice already exists in the person doing the verification.
That's exactly how a digital ID system would work, and yet people argue against those all the time as well.
Additionally, the corner shop does not have far lower data privacy risks - actually it's quite worse. They have you on camera and have a witness who can corroborate you are that person on camera, alongside a paper trail for your order. There is no privacy there, only the illusion of such.
By data privacy risks I meant the risk of a breach, compromise, or other leak of the database of verified IDs. No information about the IDs are generally collected in a corner shop, at least when there's no suspicion of fraud; they're just viewed temporarily and returned. Not only do online service providers retain a lot of information about their required verifications, they do so for hugely more people than a typical corner shop.
Also, corner shop cameras don't generally retain data for nearly as long as typical online age verification laws would require. Depending on the country and the technical configuration, physical surveillance cameras retain data for anywhere from 48 hours to 1 year. Are you really saying that most online age verification laws worldwide require or allow comparably short retention periods? (This might actually be the case for the UK law, if I'm correctly reading Ofcom's corresponding guidance, but I doubt that's true for most of the similar US state laws.)
A lot of these shops have cameras which could similarly be compromised. In fact the camera is likely to be more vulnerable and probably already had been hacked by DDoS orgs.
I hate sites asking for photo verification, but I think it is more about convenience/reliability for me. My bigger fear is that if AI locks me out with no one to go for support.
Where I live they scan the barcode on the back of the ID into their POS. I don't know what data that exposes, or exactly what's retained, but I suspect it's enough to thoroughly compromise the privacy of that transaction - with no pesky, gumshoe witness-statement and camera-footage steps necessary.
At least the US laws I've looked at have all specifically mandated that data shall not be retained, some with rather steep penalties for retention (IIRC ~$10k/affected user).
When the corner shop checks your ID, they won't take a photo of it. Digital IDs can easily be stored without the user's knowledge. That's a privacy nightmare.
The cornershop does not have access to your friend graph. Also, if you pay by card, digital ID only provides corroboration, your payment acts as a much more traceable indicator.
The risk of "digital ID" is that it'll leak grosly disprocotionate amounts of data on the holder.
For Age verification, you only need a binary old enough flag, from a system that verifies the holder's ID.
The problem is, people like google and other adtech want to be the people that provide those checks, so they can tie your every action to a profile with a 1:1 link. Then combine it to card transactions to get an ad impression to purchase signal much clearer.
The risk here is much less from government but private companies.
Expiry places a bound on duplication and forcing additional duplication allows you to update standards. It's a tradeoff to produce a strictness ratchet.
Broadcasting porn isn't an age ID issue, it's public airwaves and they're regulated.
These aren't primarily "think of the children" arguments, the former is a major public health issue that's taken decades to begin to address, and the latter is about ownership.
I don't think that chat rooms are in the same category as either public airwaves or drugs. Besides what's the realistic outcome here? Under 18's aren't stupid, what would you have done as a kid if Discord was suddenly blocked off? Shrug and not talk to your friends again?
Or would you figure out how to bypass the checks, use a different service, or just use IRC? Telegram chats? Something even less moderated and far more open to abuse, because that's what can slip under the radar.
So no I don't think this is about protecting kids, I think it's about normalizing the loss of anonymity online.
> These aren't primarily "think of the children" arguments
Are you kidding me? v-chip, mary whitehouse, Sex on TV are all the result of "think of the children" moral panics. Its fuck all to do with ownership.
> I don't think that chat rooms are in the same category as either public airwaves
Discord are making cash from underage kids, in the same way that meta and google are, in the same way that disney and netflix offering kids channels.
Look I'm not saying that discord should be banned for kids, but I really do think that there is a better option than the binary "Ban it all"/"fuck it, let them eat porn"
Kids need to be able to talk to each other, but they also should be able to do that without being either preyed upon by nonces, extremists, state actors and more likely bored trolls.
Its totally possible to provide anonymous age gating, but its almost certainly going to be provided by an adtech company unless we, the community provide something cheaper and better.
> This is over-reach. Both in the UK and Australia
2/3 of Australians support minimum age restrictions for social media [1] and it was in-particular popular amongst parents. Putting the responsibility solely on parents shows ignorance of the complexities of how children are growing up these days.
Many parents have tried to ban social media only for those children to experience ostracisation amongst their peer group leading to poorer educational and social developmental outcomes at a critical time in their live.
That's why you need governments and platform owners to be heavily involved.
You realize that is how EVERY law works right... The person your replying to says the public overall supports the idea/law. If following that law is a deal breaker for you you either need to persuade thos ppl to your view or move
maybe it's "puritan" or maybe it's a normal view and it looks puritan from where you stand. how do you know which? One bit of evidence is the 2/3 to 1/3 split.
It almost certainly is overreach, but locking young people out of porn is hardly a new concern. We have variants of this argument continuously for decades. I'm not sure there is a definitive answer.
There's a SCOTUS case in FSC v. Paxton that could very well decide if age verification is enforced in the US as well so sadly this is just the beginning.
It's a good thing to think about. I knew a guy in high school who had male pattern baldness that started at 13 or 14. Full blown by the time he was 16. Dude looked like one of the teachers.
Same in my drivers ed at 16, guy had a mans face, large stocky build, and thick full beard. I once was talking to a tall pretty woman who turned out to be a 12 year old girl. And I have a friend who for most of his 20's could pass for 13-14 and had a hell of a time getting into bars.
This facial thing feel like a loaded attempt to both check a box and get more of that sweet, sweet data to mine. Massive privacy invasion and exploitation of children dressed as security theater.
It's not even edge cases - I was a pretty young looking woman and was mistaken for a minor until I was about 24-25. My mother had her first child (me) at 27 and tells me about how she and my father would get dirty looks because they assumed he was some dirty old man that had impregnated a teenager. (He was 3 years older than her).
I think, ironically, the best way to fight this would be to lean on identity politics: There are probably certain races that ping as older or younger. In addition, trans people who were on puberty blockers are in a situation where they might be 'of age' but not necessarily look like an automated system expects them to, and there might be discrepancies between their face as scanned and the face/information that's show on their ID. Discord has a large trans userbase. Nobody cares about privacy, but people make at least some show of caring about transphobia and racism.
> So many questions.
Do they keep a database of facial scans even though they say they don't? If not, what's to stop one older looking friend (or an older sibling/cousin/parent/etc.) from being the 'face' of everyone in a group of minors? Do they have a reliable way to ensure that a face being scanned isn't AI generated (or filtered) itself? What prevents someone from sending in their parent's/sibling's/a stolen ID?
Seems like security theater more than anything else.
I don't think they make much of a show of caring about trans rights in the UK right about now, unfortunately. In the US you can make a strong case that a big database of faces and IDs could be really dangerous though I think
It's mostly about the service's audience. Discord is a huge trans/queer/etc. hub. If Discord were X or Instagram etc. it wouldn't matter. Users of Discord are, as a group, more likely to be antagonistic to anything that could be transphobic or racist than the general populace. (Whereas they don't care about disability rights, which is why people with medically delayed puberty aren't a concern.)
I witnessed the Better Off Ted water fountain skit play out in real life once, it was incredible awkward. I was helping my buddy and his black friend and his wife set up accounts on online casinos in Michigan for the promos/refer-a-friend rewards. Some of the sites require the live video facial verification and we were doing it in a darkly lit space at night. It worked instantly and without issue for my friend and me but oh man, many many attempts later and many additional lights needed to get it to work for his friends.
With the UK currently battling Apple, Discord has no chance of not getting a lawsuit.
Ofcom is a serious contender in ruling their rules especially where Discord is multi-national that even "normies" know and use.
And if they got a slap of "we will let you off this time" they would still have to create some sort of verification service to please the next time.
You might as well piss off your consumers, loose them whatever and still hold the centre stage than fight the case for not. Nothing is stopping Ofcom from launching another lawsuit there after.
> Is there a market for leaked facial scans?
There's a market for everything. Fake driver licenses with fake pictures have been around for decades, that would be no different.
> what about someone who is 18 and just doesn't have the traditional adult facial features?
This can be challenging even with humans. My ex got carded when buying alcohol well into her mid thirties, and staff at the schools she taught at mistook her for a student all the time.
I grew a beard when I was younger because I was tired of being mistaken for a highschooler its quite annoying to have people assume you are 15 when your 20. still regularly carded in my 30s
No it's just nonsense you invented because you were unwilling to do any research.
The actual situation was that the board refused classification where an adult was intentionally pretending to be an underage child not that they looked like one.
I added an edit to correct myself however this was not something I invented. This story goes back to 09 - 2010. I will confess I didn't do any research to confirm though and that was my bad.
FWIW, I can confirm that user 9283409232 didn't make that up. I heard that multiple reputable places, years ago.
And it was believable, given a history of genuine but inept attempts by some to address real societal problems. (As well as given the history of fake attempts to solve problems for political points for "doing something". And also given the history of "won't someone think of the children" disingenuous pretexts often used by others to advance unrelated goals.) Basically, no one is surprised when many governments do something that seems nonsensical.
So, accusing someone of making up a story of a government doing something odd in this space might be hasty.
I suspect better would be to give a quick check and then "I couldn't find a reference to that; do you have a link?"
Interestingly I actually heard this in Australia many years ago. I assumed it was real (as an Australian) but the answer is more complicated (with the actual answer being no)
I don't think the problem is that young people are finding porn on the internet. There is a problem, though, and it has to deal with psychological warfare on attention
Formats like shorts or news feeds to you algorithmically with zero lag are the problem. It makes for the zombification of decision making. Endless content breaks people down precisely because it's endless. I think if you add age verification but don't root out the endless nature, you will not really help any young person or adult.
When you look at people with unhealthy content addiction, it is always a case of excess and not necessarily type of content. There are pedophiles but honestly, we have had that throughout all time, with and without the internet. But the endless feeding of the next video robs people of the ability to stop by mentally addiciting them to see just one more. And because content is not really infinite, endless feeds invariably will feed people with porn, eating disorders, and other "crap" in quantities that slowly erode people.
There was just another article on HN about how Snapchat is harming children at an industrial scale. Not just giving them access to drugs, violence, pedophiles, and extortionists, but actively connecting them with those accounts. Kids have died from fentanyl or committed suicide from bullying and harassment.
Porn addiction is bad but it seems there are even worse things happening.
Different types of pornography have different dangers and all of it has been broadly available since before the internet.
> And then you have shit like watchpeopledie.tv.
I think there's a broad gulf between these activities and I don't think they impact the brain in the same way as pornography. This type of violence can be found in movies and video games which also clearly predate the internet.
> Children should have been banned from the internet a decade ago
I'd rather pornography be banned.
> I'm completely willing to give up some privacy to make it happen.
Why? It should be incumbent on the people profiting from this activity to police it not on me to give up constitutional rights to protect their margins.
> The social media company requires users to take a selfie video on their phone and uses AI to estimate the person's age.
What I did not see in this article was anything about how AI can tell a 13 year old from a 12.9 year old with confidence. This seems unlikely to me.
I agree with the article's implication that websites will now want a scan of everyone's faces forever. Their insistence that they won't store the face scans is like one those cute lies that kids tell, and adults aren't fooled by. Either you're outright lying, or you're using the loophole of not storing the image, but rather storing a set of numbers, drived from the image, which act as a unique fingerprint. Or, you're sending it to a third party for storage. Or something like that. But you're definitely keeping track of everyone's faces, don't try to pull a fast one on me young lady, I've been around the block before.
I would like to think there there is a solution that can be engineered, in which a service is able to verify that a user is above an appropriate age threshold, while maintaining privacy safeguards, including, where relevant, for the age-protected service not to be privy to the identity of the user, and for the age verification service to not be privy to the nature of the age-protected service being accessed.
In this day and age, of crypto, and certificates, and sso, and all that gubbins, it's surely only a matter of deciding that this is a problem that needs solving.
(Unless the problem really isn't the age of the user at all, but harvesting information...)
Unfortunately, no amount of blockchains and zero-knowledge proofs can compensate for the fact that 15 year old has a 18 year old friend. Or the fact that other 15 year old looks older than some 20 year olds. Or the fact that other 15 year old's dad often leaves his wallet, with his driving license, unattended.
Over the next five years, you can look forward to a steady trickle of stories in the press about shocked parents finding that somehow their 15 year old passed a one-time over-18 age verification check.
The fact compliance is nigh-impossible to comply with is intentional - the law is designed that way, because the intent is to deliver a porn ban while sidestepping free speech objections.
Talking about it or explaining it is like pulling teeth; generally just a thorough misunderstanding of the notion....even though cryptographic certificates make the modern internet possible.
Any number of entities can be certificate issuers, as long as they can be deemed sufficiently trustworthy. Schools, places of worship, police, notary, employers...they can all play the role of trust anchor.
The app allows for self-revocation using the private key or a revocation code given when cert is issued, this is useful if a certificate is compromised...there is also an admin interface a trust anchor can use to revoke certificates they issue, a rogue trust anchor chain can also be revoked.
Each trust anchor gets issued a single certificate that can have delegation ability, ie the ability to issue new trust anchor certs to others.
So if say a UPS store is issued a cert and they go rogue, we can just revoke the trust anchor cert that was issued to the store, all certs issued further down are also automatically revoked...the revocation check is done either in the app or in the case of a third-party performing the verification they will recognize that there is a cert on the issuing chain that is revoked and reject the cert.
This is how TLS certs are handled too, if a CA goes rogue, all certs issued by that CA are revoked once the CA's root cert is revoked.
As for refund issues, that's a problem for the cert issuer to deal with.
> As for refund issues, that's a problem for the cert issuer to deal with.
no, it's your problem, as it's your brand slapped over everything, and now you've got tens of thousands of innocent people angry that you've revoked the IDs they paid for in good faith
When you say that “we” can revoke, I assume you are talking about your company - the app. What sort of resources would be required to constantly audit the potentially thousands or hundreds of thousands of certificate issuers on your platform?
All certificates are cryptographically linked to an identity-anchor certificate, meaning buying a certificate would require the seller reveal the private key tied to the identity-anchor certificate, a tall order I would argue.
In the case of stolen identity certificates, they can be revoked thus making their illegitimate utility limited.
We can still have laws, e.g. that using someone else's certificate (or knowingly giving them your certificate) would constitute fraud.
We have laws against kids buying alcohol, even though kids can (and do) try to get adults to buy them booze, but I don't think that's a good reason to say we shouldn't have laws against kids drinking.
Provide easy to use on-device content filtering tools so parents can easily control what their children can access (there are a few ways to do this through law, like requiring it from OS providers or ISPs or just writing these tools directly).
To make it easy, Discord can provide their services under both adults.discord.com and minors.discord.com so parents can more easily block only the 18+ version of Discord.
Require personal responsibility from parents to decide what is appropriate for their child.
Already exists in a lot of places. German national IDs for like 10 years or something like that have an eID feature. It's basically just a public/private key signing scheme. The government and a bunch of other trusted public providers are able to issue identities, you can sign transactions with them or verify your age to commercial service providers, or transfer some data if that's required with your consent. (https://www.personalausweisportal.de/Webs/PA/EN/citizens/ele...)
Estonia and South Korea I think also have similar features on their IDs, it's already a solved problem.
The problem is who pays to maintain the system. There are systems that allow you to share your age anonymously (among other things) and they’re already widely used in Europe but the system knows what you’re using it for since the second party pays for the information, and some accounting info is needed for the billing. It would be completely illegal for the system to use that info for anything else though.
> a service is able to verify that a user is above an appropriate age threshold, while maintaining privacy safeguards
AFAIU, the German electronic ID card ("elektronischer Personalausweis") can do this, but it is not widely implemented, and of course geographically limited.
The problem is that it is much easier to implement such a check in a way which lets the verification service link the site to the user, with no discernable difference to the end user
e: I get the same feeling as I do reading about key escrow schemes in the Clipper chip vein, where nobody claimed it was theoretically impossible to have a "spare key" only accessible by warrant, but the resulting complexity and new threat classes [1] just was not worth it
Transferring your age and a way to verify it to any third party is by definition a privacy violation. Doing so in a safe way is literally impossible since I don't want to share that information in the first place.
I feel like you could, theoretically, have a service that has an ID (as drivers license ID), perhaps operated by your government, that has an API and a notion of an ephemeral identifier that can be used to provide a digital attestation of some property without exposing that property or the exact identity of the person. It would require that the attestation system is trusted by all parties though, which is I think the core problem.
Wouldn't this require the API provider to know that tbe citizen is connecting to the app? Grindr users might be squeamish about letting the current US admin know about that.
ICAO compliant ID cards (aka passports) and many national ID cards already are smartcards with powerful crypto processors.
Hand out certificates to porn, gambling or whatever sites, that allow requesting the age of a person from the ID card, have the user touch their ID card with their phone to sign a challenge with its key (and certificate signed by the government), that's it.
Government doesn't know what porn site you visited, and porn site only gets the age.
> Transferring your age and a way to verify it to any third party is by definition a privacy violation.
No it's not. Unless...
> Doing so in a safe way is literally impossible since I don't want to share that information in the first place.
...well then it is.
But it's not constructive to claim that proving your age to someone is by definition a privacy violation. If someone wants to prove their age to someone, then that's a private communication that they're entitled to choose to make.
It is true that if technology to achieve this becomes commonplace, then those not wishing to do so may find it impractical to maintain their privacy in this respect. But that doesn't give others the right to obstruct people who wish to communicate in this way.
Crypto comes up every time this topic is discussed but it misses the point.
The hard part is identifying with reasonable accuracy that the person sitting in front of the device is who they say they are, or a certain age.
Offloading everything to crypto primitive moves the problem into a different domain where the check is verifying you have access to some crypto primitive, not that it’s actually you or yours.
Any fully privacy-preserving crypto solution would have the flaw that verifications could be sold online. Someone turns 21 (or other age) and begins selling verifications with their ID because there is no attachment back to them, and therefore no consequences. So people then start imaging extra layers that would protect against this, which start eroding the privacy because you’re returning back to central verification of something.
I'm in the UK and discord has asked me to complete this check (but I haven't, yet). I can still use discord just fine, it just won't let me view any media it considers "adult".
I am an adult but refuse to let them scan my face as a matter of principle, so I've considered using https://github.com/hacksider/Deep-Live-Cam to "deepfake" myself and perform the verification while wearing a fake face. If it works, I'll write about it.
I suspect the endgame of this campaign is to have mandatory ID checks for social media. Police would have access to these upon court orders etc and be able to easily prosecute anyone who posts 'harmful' content online.
<tin-foil-hat> ultimately, i think the endgame is to require government ID in order to access internet services in general, a la ender's game. </tin-foil-hat>
Funnily enough, when the Philippines did this, it was decried as a violation of human rights [1]. But usually, media are so silent on such things I'd call them complicit. One already cannot so much as rent a hotel room anywhere in the EU without showing government ID.
I'm in NL and had my wallet fall out of my pocket once at one of the bigger train stations. I realized within ~5 minutes, and basically as soon as I realized got a call from an anonymous number. It was the police, who had found my wallet with my ID in it and were calling me to inform me about it. Luckily I was still at the station and could just meet them and got my wallet back.
I couldn't help but feel extremely creeped out, and my girlfriend still to this day doesn't understand why I felt uneasy about it. "But you got your wallet back!", she says. "Of course the police know your number!". Having 0 privacy has been completely normalized, and I'm afraid we're far too late to do anything about it.
To be fair, your phone number has never been considered private information. You can open any phone book and find that info. They likely just looked up your name in the population register.
yup, and this gives the ability to look up per-citizen location data.
sidebar: i've been trying to raise awareness about "joint communications and sensing" wherever i can lately; many companies involved in 6G standardization (esp. nokia) want the 6G network to use mmWave radio to create realtime 3d environment mappings, aka a "digital twin" of the physical world, aka a surveillance state's wet dream.
Not only rent, but in Spain there is a central database where your details are sucked in real time when you rent a room or a car, and no oversight how this data is used.
Walk into a coffee shop. Look at the wifi password, usually a sign near the register. Log onto the wifi network using the wifi password. Browse in peace.
Is this sort of flow normal elsewhere? It's certainly normal where I live.
I'd walk to a local library and use their wifi. Or walk to a local McDonalds and use their wifi. Or walk to a friend's/family's house and use their wifi. Or...
I'm in the US. I do have government ID, but I don't recall showing it to my network providers. Certainly, some telcos want a social security number to run credit; but that's often avoidable. I'm pretty sure could also wander down to an electronics store (maybe a grocery/drug store too) and pick up a prepaid cell phone with internet access, pay for it with cash, and get that going without government id in the US. It's a bit of a hike to get to the electronics store from where I live, but I can get part of the way there with the bus that takes cash too.
That would not be unprecedented: The first major change by the Lee Myung-bak government was to require websites with over 100,000 daily visitors to make their users register their real name and social security numbers. - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_censorship_in_South_K...
I'm afraid the endgame is, all this activity tied to real identities will be repeatedly leaked, get used for blackmail, and by foreign intelligence agencies.
The West isn't China and Korea. They can't opt out of authoritarian-state surveillance and great firewall, whereas we have options more amenable to privacy, even if you want to quibble that they aren't perfect.
Also the fact that UK and Australia are kind of backwards on online privacy.
That aside, this is targeted. The fediverse and vbulletin forums of old, even reddit, are all social media but will never require facial recognition. If they do, then far worse things are happening to freedom.
Korea is a democratic Western nation, they host US military bases and fly F-35. Korean made phones are trusted enough that American special forces use it for some parachute jumpings.
Among the many definitions of "Western" is the original sense of "First World", encompassing members of the geopolitical bloc centered historically on the US.
I don't think it would kill social media, but it'd make it more similar to Chinese social media. Essentially impossible to use for protests or criticism of things the government doesn't critiques on.
It ties real world ultraviolence with social media. It won't kill social media, just make it materially toxic. IIUC South Korea in 2000s had exactly this, online dispute stories coming from there were much worse than anything I had heard locally.
Why is the Internet any different than say, a porn or liquor store? Why are we so fuckin allergic to verification? I'll tell ya why- money. Don't pretend it's privacy.
there two false equivalencies in your argument, as presented in response to GP:
1. ID checks are not the same as age verification.
2. a social media website is not the same as a porn website.
if you take the stance that social media sites should require ID verification, then i would furthermore point out that this is likely to impact any website that has a space for users to add public feedback, even forums and blogs.
Like many other people here, I'm wondering what we'll end up having to do at work do deal with this. We don't have the resources to put a full time person on this, and the UK's not a huge market.
For unrelated reasons, we already have to implement geoblocking, and we're also intentionally VPN friendly. I suspect most services are that way, so the easy way out is to add "UK" to the same list as North Korea and Iran.
Anyway, if enough services implement this that way, I'd expect the UK to start repealing laws like this (or to start seeing China-level adoption of VPN services). That limits the blast radius to services actually based in the UK. Those are already dropping like flies, sadly.
I hope the rest of the international tech community applies this sort of pressure. Strength in numbers is about all we have left these days.
I'm reasonably sure we will not. Dealing with an integration like that means not shipping some other feature to the rest of the planet. The marginal gain of accepting UK users is lower than the marginal gain of increasing addressable market everywhere else.
This feels more like spying on everyone than making the internet safe for kids. Big companies and the government are already tracking what we do online. This just seems like a further reduction of our privacy on the internet.
Parents need to be more involved in what their kids do online, just like in real life. Grounding them isn't enough. We wouldn't let them wander into dangerous places, so we shouldn't let them wander online without adult supervision. Also, parents need to prepare for having tough conversations, like what pornography or gambling is.
Online companies need to really work to make their sites safe for everyone. They should act like they own a mall. If they let bad stuff in (like pornography, scams, gambling), it hurts their reputation, and people will leave.
Instead of banning everything, because some people take pleasure in those activities, maybe there should be separate online spaces for adults who want that kind of content, like how cities have specific areas for adult businesses. This way, it would be easier to restrict children's access to some hardcore stuff.
If we all put some effort into figuring out easy and privacy-friendly solutions to safeguard kids, we can rely on simple principles. For example, if you want to sell toys to kids, you shouldn't sell adult toys under the same roof (same domain) or have posters that can affect young minds.
> This feels more like spying on everyone than making the internet safe for kids.
That’s always been the point. “Protecting children online” is the trojan horse against privacy, and apart from a few of us nerds, everyone is very much in favour of these laws. The fight for privacy is pretty much lost against such a weapon.
I hear you on the 'Trojan horse,' but I'm still hopeful! We can vote with our money and maybe even crowdfund platforms that truly respect our privacy and time. We already have paid, privacy-friendly options for things like email and messaging, perhaps a Discord altrenative isn't too far fetched!
Of all the terrible, dumb-headed ideas. I would not want my kids scanning their face into who-knows-what third party's service.
I already decline this technology when finance companies want to use it for eg. KYC verification ("Sorry, I don't own a smartphone compatible with your tool. If you want my business you'll have to find another way.
Happy to provide a notarized declaration if you'd like" has worked in the past).
This response is a textbook example of a manipulative false dichotomy that poisons legitimate discourse about child safety online.
Presenting the only options as either "scan your child's biometric data into opaque systems" or "let your child be groomed and/or get addicted to porn" is intellectually dishonest and deliberately inflammatory. It's a rhetorical trap designed to shame parents with valid privacy concerns into compliance.
Privacy rights and child protection are not mutually exclusive. Numerous approaches exist that don't require harvesting biometric data from minors, from improved content filtering and educational initiatives to parental controls and account verification methods that don't rely on facial scanning. Corporations are simply implementing the most convenient (for them) solution that technically satisfies regulatory requirements while creating new data streams they can potentially monetize.
What's actually happening here is deeply troubling: we're normalizing the idea that children must surrender their biometric data as the price of digital participation. This creates permanent digital identifiers that could follow them throughout their lives, with their data stored in systems with questionable security, unclear retention policies, and potential for future misuse.
Weaponizing the fear of child exploitation to silence legitimate concerns about corporate overreach isn't just manipulative - it's morally reprehensible. Framing opposition to biometric surveillance as being pro-exploitation deliberately poisons the well against anyone who questions these systems.
We can and must develop approaches that protect children without surrendering their fundamental privacy rights. Pretending these are our only two options isn't just wrong - it actively undermines the nuanced conversation we should be having about both child safety and digital rights.
>from improved content filtering and educational initiatives to parental controls
Parents can do all of that now. They are not doing so. Time to actually cut the kids off from porn. Fuck their privacy rights. Not being a porn addicted gooner at 14 is infinitely more important. Simple as.
Frankly I'm scared by governments and corporations going "papers, please" for people to be allowed to access the Internet. On top of endangering privacy by tying pseudonymous online interactions to real-life ID and biometrics, attempts to block under-18 people from finding information or interacting online will only amplify how society regards them as not having rights. This will isolate people (especially gay and trans teens) living with abusive parents from finding support networks, and prevent them from learning (by talking to friends in different situations) that being beaten or emotionally put down by parents is abusive and traumatizing.
I know all too well that when you grow up you're psychologically wired to assume that the way the parents treated you is normal, and if they harmed you then you deserve to be hurt. I've made friends with and assisted many teens and young adults in unsafe living situations (and talked to people who grew up in fundamentalist religions and cults), and they're dependent on online support networks to recognize and cope with abuse, get advice, and seek help in dangerous situations.
To add to this, some people might be left out because companies are not financially incentivised to verify them.
In Germany, immigrants struggle to open a bank account because the banks require documents that they don't have (and that they can hardly get with a bank account). Russian, Iranian and Syrian citizens have a particularly hard time finding a bank that works for them. The most common video document verification system does not support some Indian passports, among others.
To banks, leaving these people out is a rational business decision. The same thing will happen to those deemed too risky or too much hassle by the internet's gatekeepers, but at a much bigger scale.
If I remember correctly there are a dozen variants, and most of them lack a basic feature. I think it's either a signature, latin letters or biometric features.
US citizens also had issues due to FATCA requirements although it seems to have improved since they were introduced.
Yes, sort of. You can always force it, but it takes time, resources and knowledge that recent immigrants lack. Usually they get funneled towards more immigrant-friendly banks.
> prevent them from learning (by talking to friends in different situations) that being beaten or emotionally put down by parents is abusive and traumatizing.
parents didn't know I'm gay, but they did control all flow of information (before social media) by controlling all movements outside school.
it took me until my thirties to realise how deeply abusive my childhood was. the only hints I had, in hindsight, was the first Christmas at uni, everybody was excited to go home and I couldn't fathom why on earth anybody would want to. I dismissed it as an oddity at the time.
It's interesting how the "features" which many claim IRC is missing turn out to be a huge liability. Adult content is applied via image hosting, video/audio chat, etc. All things IRC lacks.
There is a definitely a textual privilege in media. You can write things in books that would never be allowed to be depicted in video. Even in Game of Thrones, Ramsay's sadism had to be sanitised a little for live action.
This is doubly so if your book is historic in some sense. Still find it crazy that Marquis de Sade's stuff is legal.
IRC gives you all the features of a normal client but you've got to create them yourself which itself is a dark-art that's been squandered by today's gimmicky services.
Just because it doesn't have a fancy UI to present the media doesn't mean it can't.
Encode to base64 and post in channel. Decode it back to normal format... IRC is excellent for large amounts of stringed text.
You could even stream the movie in base64 and have a client that captures the data stream and decodes.
The only thing that IRC lacks is a feature to recall conversations where if someone isn't present. But if you're someone who needs that host a bouncer or something.
Yes, because you don't need to fork $$$ to enable the basic "native" features. Not forgetting the advertising, having your data mined and any other miscreant features that they decide to implement.
You buy Nitro within discord and you still have advertisements.
Let's assign one or ideally two adults to each underage child, who are aware of the childs real age and can intervene and prevent the child from installing discord (and any other social media) in the first place or confiscate the equipment if the child breaks the rules. They could also regulate many other thing in the childs life, not just social network use.
> confiscate the equipment if the child breaks the rules.
Even you acknowledge this plan is flawed and that the child can break the rules. And it's not that difficult. After all, confiscating the equipment assumes that they know about the equipment and that they can legally seize the equipment. Third parties are involved, and doing what you suggests would land these adults in prison.
I know you thought you were being smart with your suggestion that maybe parents should be parents, but really you just highlighted your ignorance.
The goal of these laws are to prevent children from accessing content. If some adults get caught in the crossfire, they don't care.
Now, I'm not defending these laws or saying anything about them. What I am saying is that your "suggestion" is flawed from the point of view of those proposing these laws.
These are not 20 something college students with jobs and rented apartments, doing stuff without their parents knowing.
These are kids younger than 13, they don't have jobs, they live with their parents, no internet/data planes outside of control of their parents, no nothing.
The goal of these laws is to get ID checks on social networks for everyone, so the governments know who the "loud ones" (against whatever political cause) are. Using small kids as a reason to do so is a typical modus operandi to achieve that.
Yes, those "one or two adults" I meantioned should be the parents, and yes, parents can legally confiscate their kids phones if they're doing something stupid online. They can also check what the kid is doing online.
If a 12yo kid (or younger) can somehow obtain money and a phone and keep it hidden from their parents, that kid will also be able to avoid such checks by vpn-ing (or using a proxy) to some non-UK country, where those checks won't be mandatory. This again is solved by the parents actually parenting, again... it's kids younger than 13, at that age, parents can and should have total control of their child.
It has to be acknowledged that some things, like social media and pornography, are harmful to children. "Maintain the status quo" isn't an attractive response to that. ID laws are not a perfect solution, maybe not even a good one.
You undermine your whole point by pretending VPNs are going to make the whole thing moot. Why do you care when you won't be affected because you can just use a VPN? Why does pornhub make such a fuss when their users can just use a VPN? Because in reality, introducing that much friction will stop a lot of people.
ID laws are the end goal, the children and porn are just an excuse to get ID laws, which would give the governments a lot more control over the internet and social networks. Just imagin someone like Trump/Ursula requesting full list of names of everyone criticizing them on eg reddit (because reddit has porn, and you'd have to show your ID to be able to use reddit, because of your reasons). This is objectively bad for the people and for the internet.
Parenting is a good solution, not just giving the kids tablets so they stay quiet. Yes, kids are curious, kids will still find porn, ID laws or not, but parents should teach them and limit their access, not IDs on discord.
And of course porhub is making a fuss, are you, an (assuming an) adult going to go to your telco with your ID and say "hi, i'm John, i want to watch porn and jerk off, but you need to see my ID first"? Or will you find some other alternatives, where pornhub doesn't earn that money?
So? They equally persist in the face of endless laws, I don't see how it follows that piling more laws on top is a better idea than deferring this to parents.
Parenting was the answer to kids not wearing their seatbelt, and getting maimed and killed by very survivable accidents. Simply teach your kids to wear their seatbelt. Yet seatbelt laws reduced fatality (8%) and serious injury (9%) in kids. It follows that "piling" such a law "on top", one that people decried as unconstitutional, was a better idea than deferring to the parents.
> It has to be acknowledged that some things, like social media and pornography, are harmful to children.
It only "has to be acknowledged" if it's true. The "evidence" for either of those, but especially social media (as if that were even a single well defined thing to begin with) is pretty damned shakey. Nobody "has to acknowledge" your personal prejudices.
>These are kids younger than 13, they don't have jobs, they live with their parents, no internet/data planes outside of control of their parents, no nothing.
Yes they do. If all that is preventing them from having a job is depending upon their parents to stop that behavior, there are enough parents who aren't going to intervene that I will reasonably be able to staff my coal mine. Sure, the parents should do a better job, but history shows us that many don't (be it choice or be it other factors). So are we willing for the kids of those parents to effectively be treated as adults by everyone else or are we going to keep laws that protect kids even when parents aren't doing so?
> The goal of these laws is to get ID checks on social networks for everyone
The UK government is nowhere near competent enough to be that stealthy.
Also, it already has this ability already. Identifying a person on social media is pretty simple, All it takes is a request to the media company, and to the ISP/phone provider.
> If a 12yo kid (or younger) can somehow obtain money and a phone and keep it hidden from their parents,
Then you have bigger fucking problems. If a 12yo can do that, in your home and not let on, then you've raised a fucking super spy.
> parents can and should have total control of their child.
Like how? constantly check their phones? that's just invasion of privacy, your kid's never going to trust you. Does the average parent know how to do that, will they enforce non-disappearing messages?
Allowing kids to be social, safe and not utter little shits online is fucking hard. I'm really not sure how we can make sure kids aren't being manipulated by fucking tiktok rage bait. (I mean adults are too, but thats a different problem)
So, what will be the proper technology to apply here? I have no problem with verification of my age (not the date of birth, just the boolean, >18yo), but I do have a problem with sending any party a picture of my face or my passport.
Discord got me to do this about 2 weeks ago (I'm Australian so they seem to be rolling this out here too), at least for the face scan the privacy policy said it occurred on device, so if you believe that you're not sending anyone images of your face.
we don't store your face [just the unique biometric metadata weights]. a computer doesn't need a picture to identify you, just store the numbers and you can legally claim you aren't "storing the picture".
Maybe someone like apple will make a "verify user looks over 18" neural net model they can run in the secure enclave of iphones, which sends some kind of "age verified by apple" token to websites without disclosing your identity outside your own device?
Having said that, I bet such a mechanism will prove easy to fake (if only by pointing the phone at grandad), and therefore be disallowed by governments in short order in favour of something that doesn't protect the user as much.
Apple lets you add IDs to your wallet in some jurisdictions. I wouldn't be surprised if they eventually introduce a system-wide age verification service and let developers piggyback on it with safe, privacy-preserving assertions.
This is a social problem and as such cannot be solved with technology. You would have to make social media so uncool that young people didn't use it. One of the easiest ways of doing this is associating it with old people. Therefore the fastest way to get young people off discord is to get geriatric on discord and en-mass.
The issue isn't social media is bad, the issue is that social media has no effective moderation. If an adult is hanging out at the park talking to minors, thats easy to spot and correct. there is a strong social pressure to not let that happen.
The problem is when moving to chat, not only is a mobile private to the child, there are no safe mechanisms to allow parents to "spot the nonce". Moreover the kid has no real way of knowing they are adults until it's too late.
Its a difficult problem, doing nothing is going to ruin a generation (or already has), doing it half arsed is going to undermine privacy and not solve the problem.
OIDC4VCI(OpenID for Verifiable Credential Issuance)[0] is what I think has the most promise.
My understanding is that an issuer can issue a Credential that asserts the claims (eg, you are over 18) that you make to another entity/website and that entity can verify those claims you present to them (Verifiable Credentials).
For example, if we can get banks - who already know our full identity - to become Credential Issuers, then we can use bank provided Credentials (that assert we are over 18) to present to websites and services that require age verification WITHOUT having to give them all of our personal information. As long the site or service trust that Issuer.
It doesn't have to be your bank if you don't want, have the DMV be an issuer or your car insurance, or health insurance or cell phone service etc.
You choose which one you want you want to have assert your claim. They already know you. It's a better option than giving every random website or service all of your info and biometric data so you can 'like' memes or bother random people with DM's or whatever people do on those types of social media platforms
For Australia (who will need something like this this year per current legislation), the only sensible location is the government my.gov.au central service portal. None of the other services have an incentive or requirement to do it (Medicare, drivers license issuers, Centrelink). And given the scope of the rollout (all major social media, as nominated by the gov), it would need almost all of the banks or super funds to implement the same API for the project to not fail.
But I don't think anyone has told my.gov.au that needs to happen, so we are either going to get some proprietary solution from social media companies (tricky, since they will need to defend it in court as they are liable, but maybe discord saying 'best we can do sorry' or 'better than our competitors' will let them off). Or just switching off the services for a few days until the politicians panic about the blow back and defer the rollout until some committee can come up with a workable solution (ideally in the next election cycle).
> It doesn't have to be your bank if you don't want,
"If I don't want"? I would get no choice at all about who it would be, because in practice the Web site (or whoever could put pressure on the Web site) would have all of the control over which issuers were or were not acceptable. Don't pretend that actual users would have any meaningful control over anything.
The sites, even as a (almost certainly captured and corrupt) consortium, wouldn't do the work to accept just any potentially trustworthy issuer. In fact they probably wouldn't even do the work to keep track of all the national governments that might issue such credentials. Nor would you get all national governments, all banks, all insurance companies, all cell phone carriers, all neighborhood busibodies, or all of any sufficiently large class of potentially "trustable" issuers to agree to become issuers. At least not without their attaching a whole bunch of unacceptable strings to the deal. What's in it for them, exactly?
Coordinating on certifying authorities is the fatal adoption problem for all systems like that. Even the X.509 CA infrastructure we have only exists because (a) it was set up when there were a lot fewer vested interests, and (b) it's very low effort, because it doesn't actually verify any facts at all about the certificate holder. The idea that you could get around that adoption problem while simultaneously preserving anything like privacy is just silly.
Furthermore, unless you use an attestation protocol that's zero-knowledge in the identity of the certifier, which OpenID is unlikely ever to specify, nor are either issuers or relying parties going to adopt this side of the heat death of the Universe, you as a user are still always giving up some information about your association with something.
Worse, even if you could in fact get such a system adopted, it would be a bad thing. Even if it worked. Even if it were totally zero-knowledge. Infrastructure built for "of adult age" verification will get applied to services that actively should not have such verification. Even more certainly, it will extended and used to discriminate on plenty of other characteristics. That discrimination will be imposed on services by governments and other pressuring entities, regardless of their own views about who they want to exclude.
And some of it will be discrimination you will think is wrong.
It's not a good idea to go around building infrastructure like that even if you can get it adopted and even if it's done "right". Which again no non-zero-knowledge system can claim to be anyway.
Counterproposal: "those types of social media platforms" get zero information about me other than the username I use to log in, which may or may not resemble the username I use anywhere else. Same for every other user. The false "need" to do age verification gets thrown on the trash heap where it belongs.
> Don't pretend that actual users would have any meaningful control over anything.
You do have control, you just don't like the option of control you have which is to forgo those social/porn sites altogether. You want to dictate to businesses and the government how to run their business or country laws that you want to use. And you can sometimes, if you get a large enough group to forgo their services over their policies, or to vote in the right people for your cause. You can also wail about it til the cows come home, or you can try and find working solutions that will BOTH guard privacy and allows a business to keep providing services by complying with laws that allow them to be in business in the first place. It's not black & white and it's not instant, it's incremental steps and it's slow and sometimes requires minor compromise that comes with being an Adult and finding Adult solutions. I'm not interested in dreaming about some fantasy of a libertarian Seasteading world. Been there done that got the t-shirt. I prefer finding solutions in the real world now.
> The false "need" to do age verification gets thrown on the trash heap where it belongs.
This is something you should send to your government that makes those rules. The businesses (that want to stay in compliance) follow the government rules given to them. The ones that ask for more are not forcing you against your will to be a part of it.
I get you don't like it, I don't care for it either; but again, you can throw a fit and pout about it - or try tofind workable solutions. This is what I choose to do even though I made the choice long ago to not use social media (except for this site and GitHub for work if you want to count those) porn sites or gambling or other nonsense. So all these things don't affect me since I don't go around signing up for or caring for all the time wasting brain rot(imo) things. But I am interested in solutions because I care about data privacy
Those businesses also have control. They just don't like the option of control they have, which is to stay out of those countries altogether.
> This is something you should send to your government that makes those rules.
My government hasn't made those rules, at least not yet. Last time they tried, I joined the crowd yelling at them about it. It's easier to do that if people aren't giving them technology they can pretend solves the fundamental problems with what they're doing.
> Those businesses also have control. They just don't like the option of control they have, which is to stay out of those countries altogether.
Yes. ?
Apparently they don't want to leave and are happy staying there and complying. If you don't like a businesses practice, don't use them. . .
> Last time they tried, I joined the crowd yelling at them about it.
Good. I hope more people that feel as strongly about the subject as you will follow your lead.
> It's easier to do that if people aren't giving them technology they can pretend solves the fundamental problems with what they're doing.
No one is "giving" them technology that pretends anything. There is a community effort to come up with privacy focused, secure solutions. If you noticed the OIDC4VC protocols are still in the draft phase. If it's fubar no one will use it. Worse than that is, if nothing comes of any proposed solutions, the state won't just say oh well you tried.
Either we will continue to deal with the current solution of businesses collecting our ids and biometrics and each one having a db of this info to sell/have stolen, or, some consultant that golfs with some gov official will tell them the tech industry can't figure it out but they have a magic solution that's even better and will build a system (using tax dollars) that uses government IDs with the added bonus of tracking and then all of our internet usage can be tracked by the government.
Wantonly dismissing any effort to make things better in an acceptable way is not going to make it magically go away forever. That ship has sailed. You can resist efforts to find a privacy focused solution and get stuck with an even worse one from the state, or, get your crowd yelling hat back on and help make sure data and privacy protections are solidly baked into these solutions the tech community is trying to build.
This is probably difficult, but if everyone collectively didn't use services that had such egregious requirements it would likely die quickly. The companies being requires to do such things would have to start pushing back against government policies that are killing their business.
Considering everyone currently and without a second thought lets Apple scan their face just for the convenience of unlocking their phone I think this is a lost cause.
> Platkin says there were two catalysts for the investigation. One is personal: A few years ago, a family friend came to Platkin, astonished that his 10-year-old son was able to sign up for Discord, despite the platform forbidding children under 13 from registering.
> The second was the mass-shooting in Buffalo, in neighboring New York. The perpetrator used Discord as his personal diary in the lead-up to the attack.
In other words, this is yet another attack on privacy in the name of "protecting the children".
This is how you lose your comfortable market monopoly like Skype did. Recall that Skype had better P2P tech than Discord did and would still be the market leader if MS had chosen to update anything at all besides the logo bi-yearly.
Regulators would never comprehend internet. They are making it look like they have no idea that on the internet you can: move to another country without visa in 2 minutes, change your face, voice, fingerprints to whatever you like. Get any passport, any document you want to mock any KYC or impersonate anyone without a trace, all within 10$ range.
Sure, companies have no option but to implement funny policies like these, and I'm sure any kid is much smarter than the government, so he will feel good circumventing it.
Maybe the start of a bigger shift to another platform. I'd wager a large portion of the Discord user-base is underage, and they've got nothing but time.
why wouldn't an identity/age verification scheme that blinds both sides work?
e.g. a site wants to have some proof of identity. it generates a token and sends the user with it to a government service. the service verifies the user's identity, signs the token and sends the user back.
now the site knows that the government service has verified the identity (and relevant characteristics, like age threshold), but doesn't know the identity. the government service obviously knows the user but doesn't know the online account tied to the identity. this can be further separated by using a middleman authentication provider, so that even the site identity itself doesn't reach the government.
am i missing something obvious why that wouldn't work?
It wont work because gov has no interest in not knowing which service the user is trying to authenticate themself to, it is in its interest to connect these informations. We see exactly these attempts every 2-4 years in the eu parliament.
This will definitely just apply to social media and the situation won't be abused by other companies even if they have no legal requirement, absolutely not, no sir.
I am getting sick and tired of the thinly veiled excuse of "we need to strip away more of your privacy in order to protect the childen" we all know they are doing it because they want to surveil/track you more easily.
and for those that think they are actually doing this to protect the children and you are concerned about what your children sees online this might sound a bit harsh but why dont you actually parent. Stop giving your kids unlimited access you tablets/computers etc. back in my day there was the option of having a single computer for the child in a public room that could not be moved. you could create whitelist only sites nowadays very easily even for laymens.
i understand it is a bit harder nowdays because more parents are both working to support the family but i rather not loose what little privacy we have left as a society because its requires more work for you to parent
The fact that you think that anything you suggested would prevent or hinder a child from seeing things you don't want them to see online, or that it would affect a child's ability to be affected by what is online is indicative of the bigger problem. To put it into terms you might understand, you are storing your passwords in plaintext and the traffic isn't encrypted.
Basically, you're ignorant.
This isn't to say that the laws that the majority put into place are good. I'm not speaking on that. You are, in this situation, that layman, who cannot solve the problem you are claiming you want to solve.
you could never solve the problem of completely preventing a child or anyone from that matter from doing something if they are determined enough and you are naive in thinking so. should we remove all forms of encryption because pedophiles/terrorists use it?
if a child is determined to see naughty things online theyll just find a website that doesnt care about facial recognition laws while our privacy is still stripped away even more. So we lose more privacy as a society and kids still see what they desire just taking them a few minutes/ at most hours longer.
once again being a parent and paying attention to what your child is doing online or just talking to them about it. you choose to be a parent and that does require work to do a good job at it
It's worth noting that Matt Navarra, the sole source of "this is part of a bigger shift", is an ex member of the UK government who worked in the PM's office and worked for the BBC.
This story is a tempest in a teacup. The administration found someone to spread this nonsense so every later goes "well that was inevitable, the BBC predicted it would be."
Yeah, and bank robbers can predict that a bank is going to have less cash after a certain day.
This obsession the British have with kids online is so tiresome. You want to stop child sexual assault? Maybe do something about your royalty flying to island getaways organized by a human trafficker and ultra-high-end pimp for underage kids? Or do something about your clergy diddling kids?
Maybe the reason the UK government thinks this is such a big issue is because these legislators and officials are so surrounded by people who do it...because politicians are right there next to clergy in terms of this stuff.
I'm on several UK-based soccer message boards and none of this seems to be required there. The forums are running on Xenforo or PhpBB, self-hosted by the admin. Some of those forums have thousands of user accounts registered.
Is Discord considered to be different as it's a centralized aggregator platform like Reddit, vs a standalone thing like a message board?
Note the list of "messengers that are relevant but did not make it on the list" in case none of the messengers in the comparison meets your requirements. Even that isn't exhaustive, but there are lots of options.
Identity verification remains unsolved and likely will remain that way. Any attempts at improvement are authoritarian. And the status quo leave massive room for circumvention.
Personally, I grew up in an era before there was any expectation of validation, and enjoyed the anonymity of message boards and forums. But when people are posting blatantly illegal activity online, I can see the appeal for more validation. Just makes me sad.
Which makes one wonder how much of the illegal activities are by people who really are interested in engaging in that illegal activity and how much of it is from those who see it as a means to destroy anonymity online.
> This is the first book to examine the growth and phenomenon of a securitized and criminalized compliance society which relies increasingly on intelligence-led and predictive technologies to control future risks, crimes, and security threats. It articulates the emergence of a ‘compliance-industrial complex’ that synthesizes regulatory capitalism and surveillance capitalism to impose new regimes of power and control, as well as new forms of subjectivity subservient to the ‘operating system’ of a pre-crime society.
Nope. There's better ways to check your over 18; credit cards have been mentioned above. If a platform I'm using attempts this, with no other option, I'll delete my account and data on that platform.
VPNs are really a requirement for UK residents now.
discord is shit, poorly designed software, with all the most obnoxious poor security decisions (like requiring phone calls), with poor political decisions on top as well as spying. probably one of the worst pieces of software to ever exist. all it has is momentum. it's like pop music where a million people make bands and one wins the fame lottery.
it's primarily a windows program and they can't even make a proper windows gui but embed a website, so clicking on anything is like a link instead of focusing into it. for instance if you middle click someone's name it opens it in a browser. fuck off. pressing alt+f4 closes discord instead of sending it to the tray (despite being a tray program). it's always updating something and then it just says "logging in" instead of saying what it's doing. it gets stuck indefinitely if you log in on a slow connection or you unplug lan while it's logging in or doing whatever it's doing at any given moment. absolutely the most frustrating crap to use. it has a billion options for stupid "hardcore" gamers (i am, too, but i don't need it) with special needs while not being a basic quality application that conforms to any UI standard.
they openly spy on you, not even trying to hide it.
instead of real software, it's a stupid fucking social media "community", so you can't just use it as a MECHANISM NOT POLICY program, instead every time you do something like log into a different account you have to check whether this is morally correct or will somehow harm their "community". like say i want to work on my blockchain, who are dumb enough to use discord as their main communication platform. i obviously then would want one account for that, then another - completely separate (but perhaps with the same phone number to make it logistically easier which SHOULDNT EVEN BE A THING, this is the internet) - account for playing games (often during work), i can't just log into these simultaneously, i have to go check what their policy is on that. literally, my first thought is that like typical incompetent american software devs, they will think i'm trying to scam people or some other kind of "abuse". and of course, they appear to have conceded to partially implement this "feature" (by undoing their nonsense about forensically attempting to forbid this)
They’re using the databases to go after illegal immigrants right now. Soon it’ll be using the porn databases to go after Gay people. They’re trying to use the healthcare databases to go after Trans people. All this verification is nothing but a way to commit genocide against minorities. Porn is so far down on the list of harmful things. There’s no pearl clutching over alcohol and other drugs like Americans have with porn. Nation of pansies.
I see a lot of comments here arguing age requirements are overreach and these decisions should be left to the parents. To those presenting such arguments, do you think that applies to other activities as well? What about smoking/drinking/firearms? Pornography? Driving?
I haven't researched the topic of social media's effect on young people, but the common sentiment I encounter is that it's generally harmful, or at least capable of harm in a way that is difficult to isolate and manage as a parent.
The people closest to this issue, that is parents, school faculty, and those who study the psychology and health of children/teens, seem to be the most alarmed about the effects of social media.
If that's true, I can understand the need to, as a society, agree we would like to implement some barrier between kids/teens and the social media companies. How that is practically done seems to be the challenge. Clicking a box that say's, in effect, "I totally promise I am old enough." is completely useless for anything other than a thin legal shield.
>I see a lot of comments here arguing age requirements are overreach and these decisions should be left to the parents. To those presenting such arguments, do you think that applies to other activities as well? What about smoking/drinking/firearms? Pornography? Driving?
Yes. The state has far, far too much involvement in everybody's lives.
This is a great stance to have if consequences have zero value.
Every time we shrug and say "let the parents decide," we gamble with the most vulnerable: the kids who don’t yet know how to refuse a cigarette, who don’t yet grasp the weight of a loaded weapon, who don’t yet understand that porn isn’t a harmless curiosity. We gamble with the soul of childhood—and when we lose, those children don’t get a second chance. They leave behind empty chairs at dinner tables, empty beds in houses that echo with what might have been. That’s the true cost of unfettered "parental freedom," and it’s a price that's easy to pay with someone else's life. But hey, Fuck those kids, right?
I can't express strongly enough that arguing about how to raise children is an incredibly deep, contentious topic. Over and over i see that the state terrifies me deep into my soul, as does the power that a parent has over shaping its children. You're gambling either way and there will always be disturbing consequences. You do not know the optimal way to raise a child - nobody does. It is subjective. Parents NEED to take on massive responsibility and raise their own children rather than leaving it up to the state or letting the state dictate how children are raised. Do you trust Donald Trump to shape your child? Who knows who could be elected next wherever you live
A part of me thinks the opinion people have on this topic is partly mediated by whether or not the state or their parents abused them growing up. It's just dumb luck, and it is hard to imagine being in someone else's position since the consequences can only really be understood from lived experience.
For me it isn't either/or but I have a bias towards fixing abusive parenting. But I don't think even the government will have much luck with that, when so much "not good enough" parenting can be perceived as normal and forgotten about. Every dysfunctional family is broken in their own unique way, and there will never be a catch-all solution. Heck, it's so personal an issue the only way most people will even know it's a problem is if people bring it up themselves. It's too personal and individualized for people to randomly start talking about and unite under as opposed to issues of the state/politics, when it's likely that there is no solution to be found except cutting off the family and moving on.
I've noticed the left, right, and center have all become more obsessed than ever these past few years with the idea the state and society aren't doing enough to forcibly protect people from themselves, that preventing potential self-inflicted harm due to a poor or risky decision is worth literally any cost; 1% aggregate harm reduction is now considered preferable to freedom of choice. No amount of risk is ever acceptable, and no one is allowed to perform their own risk calculus because they don't know better. And yes, as you said, abusive parenting is a major issue as well. Hard problems to solve.
The difference is that requiring ID for those activities doesn't generally drastically erode the privacy of other people.
Instead of destroying the concept of privacy and anonymity on the Internet... how about we just stop these companies from being as harmful as they are, regardless of your age?
> I see a lot of comments here arguing age requirements are overreach and these decisions should be left to the parents. To those presenting such arguments, do you think that applies to other activities as well? What about smoking/drinking/firearms? Pornography? Driving?
My gut feel here mostly has to do with how I view the activity overall. Smoking I see as a social ill that both adults and children would be better off without, so I don't particularly mind an ID check that inconveniences adults, and that can be opted-out from by simply not smoking. (Social media I see as pretty akin to smoking.)
Inconveniencing adults with ID checks is probably not actually a good way to create incentives though.
(Driving is a special case due to negative externalities and danger you cause to others.)
> My gut feel here mostly has to do with how I view the activity overall. Smoking I see as a social ill that both adults and children would be better off without, so I don't particularly mind an ID check that inconveniences adults, and that can be opted-out from by simply not smoking. (Social media I see as pretty akin to smoking.)
The big difference for me is, the person looking at my ID at the gas station isn't storing all the data on it in some database, which may or may not be properly secured.
If age verification can be done ephemerally, then I think it's largely a non-issue. But of course it won't, you'll have to submit some combo of personal info + a photo or face scan, and that information will be stored by any number of third parties, probably permanently, only to end up in the next data breach.
There's also an issue of anonymity, which is increasingly under attack on the web. Even in the gas station example, while I'm not truly anonymous when I buy alcohol, the gas station attendant likely isn't going to remember me or my name, and it's certainly not being stored along side an entire customer profile.
For services on the web, we need a similar level of privacy with the age verification, otherwise it's not just age verification it's identity verification as well (and by extension, the tying of all of your activity on that service directly to you) which I do have a big problem with.
If we want age verification online, we have to have a way to do it ephemerally and psuedo-anonymously.
Clicking a box gives person a chance to decide whether they want to enter a website or not, without getting exposed to it immediately. It's not useless.
It also povides no useful information to the website operator, which is good. If the info is useful, it will be logged.
If it is logged, well, I've seen what morally derailed hightech state will do with any and all data they can get hold off. They'll put it all in a giant AI lottery machine to generate and "justify" targets for their genocide, to kill and burn entire families at once. It's happening now elsewhere in the world.
What should be scary to everyone is that it's being justified or at best ignored by supposedly morally "normal" western states (like mine) which are not engaged directly in such behavior, yet.
I do not trust "elites", who are able to ignore or justify this being done elsewhere, with making traceable any of my behavioral data directly to me, by forced provision of identity to services that don't need any for their function.
> I see a lot of comments here arguing age requirements are overreach and these decisions should be left to the parents. To those presenting such arguments, do you think that applies to other activities as well? What about smoking/drinking/firearms? Pornography? Driving?
All of the things on your list are primarily enforced by parents already.
This law is regulatory capture that's going to strengthen the monopolies of the exact social media sites that you allude to. It makes it harder for smaller, focused sites to exist. Instead the only option will be sites with algorithmic feeds that currently push right-wing nazi propaganda, anti-vaxxers, flat earthers, nihilist school shooting clubs for teenagers, or whatever fresh hell the internet came up with this morning.
If you think age verification is going to fix these problems on the big sites, I suggest watching YouTube Kids. Actually, don't. I wouldn't wish that trauma on anyone. Seriously.
> To those presenting such arguments, do you think that applies to other activities as well?
You’re acting like it’s not normal for parents to decide which activities a child can do, cannot do, and must do, and to make these decisions with appropriate ages in mind. I tend to lean towards allowing parents a long leash in their own home and other private places but to regulate behavior in schools and public places.
A long, long time ago (within the past ten years), I had to verify my age with a site. They didn't ask for my ID, or my facial scan, but instead asked for my credit card number. They issued a refund to the card of a few cents, and I had to tell them (within 24hr) how much the refund was for, after which point they'd issue a charge to claw it back. They made it clear that debit and gift cards would not be accepted, it must be a credit card. So I grabbed my Visa card, punched in the numbers, checked my banking app to see the +$0.24 refund, entered the value, got validated, and had another -$0.24 charge to claw it back.
Voila, I was verified as an adult, because I could prove I had a credit card.
The whole point of mandating facial recognition or ID checks isn't to make sure you're an adult, but to keep records of who is consuming those services and tie their identities back to specific profiles. Providers can swear up and down they don't retain that information, but they often use third-parties who may or may not abide by those same requests, especially if the Gov comes knocking with a secret warrant or subpoena.
Biometric validation is surveillance, plain and simple.
That was, in fact, what COPA mandated in the US in 1998, and SCOTUS struck it down as too onerous in Ashcroft v. American Civil Liberties Union, kicking off the last 20 years of essentially completely unregulated Internet porn commercially available to children with nothing more than clicking an "I'm 18" button. At the time, filtering was seen as a better solution. Nowadays filtering is basically impossible thanks to TLS (with things like DoH and ECH being deployed to lock that down even further), apps that ignore user CAs and use attestation to lock out owner control, cloud CDNs, TLS fingerprinting, and extreme consolidation of social media (e.g. discord being for both minecraft discussions and furry porn).
Despite TLS, filtering is easier to set up now than it was in 1998. You might have to block some apps in the short term, but if you suggest apps can avoid age verification if they stop pinning certificates then they'll jump at the option.
Consolidation is the only tricky part that's new.
Filtering has never been easy or practical for the general public. But the situation has become much worse.
In 1998 it was easy for a family to have no computer at all, or to put their single computer in the living room where it could be supervised. Internet use was limited because it tied up the phone line. These factors made it easy for parents to supervise their children.
Today, computers are everywhere, fit in your pocket, and its very easy to get online. Even if you don't buy any computer for your children (which is hard, because your children will tell you that they're getting bullied and socially ostracized, which probably won't even be a lie!) they will probably be given a computer by their school and any filters on that computer will inevitability be circumvented. And even if that doesn't happen, they can trade or buy one of their peers old phones and use that on free WiFi to access the internet without you knowing it. Are you going to thoroughly search their belongings every week? If you do, they'll know and find ways to hide it anyway.
And yes, I know kids used to procure and hide porno mags. What they have access to on the internet is a lot more extreme than a tattered playboy.
Seems like a reasonable argument to ban encryption rather than actually parent your children. As a conservative voter with nothing to hide, I’m in.
Banning encryption that the device owner can't control actually seems like a great idea. So e.g. for TLS it should be easy to install a CA and MITM filtering proxy as an admin user and all applications must trust that CA.
I non sarcastically agree that communication obfuscation should not prevent owner access to comms, but that’s not really the point I was making.
lets just skip straight to the logical conclusion, buddy. no amount of "web" or "discord" regulation stops porn consumption. the statistic of "minors viewing porn" wouldn't be affected even slightly, even if all of the regulation in question here were passed to the fullest extent. this is because people can just download and run whatever software they want, and communicate with any party they want. what you want is for people to not have control over their computers/communications made from them. people talk about a middle ground, but there is none, because you will always just notice that the "minors viewing porn" statistic is not affected by your latest law, until you have absolute control over civilian communications. this is completely against what anyone in the open source community let alone democracy, stand for.
My complaint was exactly that with modern devices, the owner does not have absolute control over communication on the device, and that's a problem. I think anyone in the open source community or people that believe in democracy would agree that e.g. the owner of a phone or computer should absolutely have the ability to intercept, record, manipulate, and filter all communication that device is doing.
Do you believe the ease with which a service can be used influences the amount of people who use that service?
Like with marginal users?
Right. My friends in middle school would trade floppies with porn on them, which older students and siblings would be happy to provide.
This has already come up before the Supreme Court, with the argument that filtering was a less invasive technique to fulfill the government’s legitimate interests back in the early 2000s.
That ship has sailed. Even the opposition admits that trying to get everyone to filter is not going to work and is functionally insignificant. The only question is whether age verification is still too onerous.
> trying to get everyone to filter
We never needed everyone to filter, just parents busy lobbying the government to impose crap onto every possible service and website across the entire world.
Instead, they should purchase devices for their kids that have a child-lock and client-side filters. All sites have to do is add an HTTP header loosely characterizing it's content.
1. Most of the dollar costs of making it all happen will be paid by the people who actually need/use the feature.
2. No toxic Orwellian panopticon.
3. Key enforcement falls into a realm non-technical parents can actually observe and act upon: What device is little Timmy holding?
4. Every site in the world will not need a monthly update to handle Elbonia's rite of manhood on the 17th lunar year to make it permitted to see bare ankles. Instead, parents of that region/religion can download their own damn plugin.
There's a peer / social issue at play as well though. If you believe that smart phones are disastrous for kids (I happen to think so), and don't allow your 13yo daughter to have one, you are pretty much forcing her to be the odd one out. Maybe that's OK for some parents, but you can't deny that this cost exists.
Preventing your son from playing certain video games that all of his friends enjoy also has a social cost.
This is why I think it's great when schools ban phones in class. When left up to the parents individually it's an absolute disaster.
These are just some specific examples of where I the nanny state can be beneficial. For most things in general though I'd also prefer people govern themselves (and their kids) whenever possible.
So does being vegetarian or vegan. So does being not the dominant culture in any aspect of life. That's a decision for parents to make and honestly "they'll be left out" is such a crap parenting take. Especially since it's a bunch of parents together who don't want their kid to have access thinking this together. If they actually talked to each each or just made a stand so people could see, we wouldn't even have this so called social cost.
I'm seeing this as a parent in real time. I'm actually changing my kid's friend's parent behaviors by simply being like, "Cool. But my kid isn't/is going to do that" I don't know when parenting happened by social committee, but I don't believe in it.
> I don't know when parenting happened by social committee, but I don't believe in it.
It's always been the case. We've just become so individualistic, at least in some western cultures, that we rail against it. There's even an old saying "It takes a village to raise a child".
Your points only make sense in the absence of bad and/neglectful parents. For many decades it was required to prove age in order to consume porn. Porn on the internet ought to have the same requirement. I don’t know the best way to implement it but since the industry isn’t trying to find a solution then government should impose one.
Then the government should come up with a good way to prove age that does not negatively impact privacy. It shouldn't be possible for "who is viewing what porn (or other thing)" to be accidentally leaked; because it should be possible to not store the "who" part.
Such a proof does not exist. It is already the case that your porn viewing habits can be leaked. It’s just that at present the one storing the information is not the government.
Then create one, or something much better than is being demanded, first; before demanding companies use it.
If a porn company has to collect all the information about me (name, address, age, etc) and keep it in their database then, if they get hacked, then all that information, connected to what I viewed, is available to the hackers.
If the porn company has an ID that it assigns each person, and it reaches out to some government agency to say "is this person of age" (without their internal ID), then stores "yes/no" with the ID; then hacking cannot (or is much less likely to be able to) connect "what account has viewed what" with "what human being is attached to the account".
Effectively, by making the porn site need to collect and maintain personal information, privacy is made less safe. If the government is going to demand proof of age, then the government is on the hook for supplying a reasonable way to check it.
Then create one, or something much better than is being demanded, first; before demanding companies use it.
Before demanding car companies build safer vehicles I first invented the seat belt.
Can they? It seems highly unlikely to me that most web site operators are colluding with my VPN provider to unmask me.
(Yes fingerprinting is a huge issue but the implications of that get fairly complicated.)
Years ago Google released anonymized browsing data to researchers. The researchers were able to determine who did the searches. I imagine a state actor can already determine almost everyone’s online activity.
There's definitely some critical information missing there. I don't think you could individually identify me if all you had to go on was the text and timestamp of the searches I made within the past 24 hours. At least yesterday I didn't even look up any local businesses on maps.
State actor and porn site operator are two very different things. Pointing to the former in this context reads like a non sequitur to me.
I believe most websites keep track of viewing history and ip addresses of where that history comes from. I believe if the government wanted to determine what your internet history is they could do so with a great deal of accuracy. As such I think the complaint that requiring proof of age would be a privacy nightmare is not relevant.
We already live in an age of relatively little privacy.
A targeted investigation by the government is not the same as dragnet surveillance is not the same as sharing the equivalent of my driver's license with some random site operator who can potentially turn around and sell that data (or just inadvertently leak it). The complaint is relevant because the proposed measure would make the status quo significantly worse than it currently is. That applies regardless of how bad it already is at present.
The government could fairly easily gain access to the contents of a security deposit box. That doesn't justify a policy requiring proactively declaring their contents to the authorities.
And all of that is before we even get to the essential question - would the proposed measure actually accomplish the officially stated goal?
Since Obama’s presidency we know dragnet surveillance by the government is already the norm.
So after a protracted back and forth your reasoning comes down to the following. The government is already engaging in dragnet surveillance. Somehow this automagically unmasks VPN usage (global dragnet (as opposed to targeted) traffic correlation on that scale would be a seriously impressive feat) in addition to any other privacy measures a typical individual might take. Therefore we should be okay with a system that enables the government to see you registering with various websites, or alternatively with a system that reveals various personal information to said website operator, or alternatively both simultaneously.
Or to summarize, the situation is already organically bad so everyone should be okay if we enact laws that artificially make it even worse in new ways.
To be blunt your reasoning seems entirely specious to me.
It’s not ok to allow easy access to hardcore pornography by minors. There is already virtually no privacy in these matters in the sense that Google and others already track us so the argument against age verification on privacy grounds is weak. As with most things there are tradeoffs and there is no perfect solution. I favor age verification being the law. You don’t.
The choice between you and others keeping the belief that your porn viewing habits are completely anonymous vs. allowing minors unfettered access to hardcore pornography I choose the latter as the more important issue.
> It’s not ok to allow easy access to hardcore pornography by minors.
I don't believe anyone here suggested that it was.
> Google and others already track us
This is not related to the discussion at hand. I already explained to you. Google does not track me on non-google sites. My state government does not track my browsing history. Neither does the federal government.
> the argument against age verification on privacy grounds is weak
You are responding with nonsense and ignoring the information I provided.
> As with most things there are tradeoffs and there is no perfect solution.
An empty platitude. The thing you are arguing for fundamentally does not work to accomplish the stated goal, although it is quite likely to accomplish other unstated goals. The "tradeoff" is a systematic loss of privacy that is likely to weaken civil liberties in the long run.
> keeping the belief that your porn viewing habits are completely anonymous vs. allowing minors unfettered access
Yet another misrepresentation. At this point I have to assume that your behavior is intentional. I'm left with the impression that you are an ideologically motivated actor who is fully aware that you don't have a leg to stand on but is attempting to sway the perception of an unseen audience anyhow.
The actual choice presented here is between a "solution" that openly invites government overreach without actually solving the stated problem versus the current status quo or possibly some alternative approach. Honestly I've yet to be convinced of the issue with the current status quo. Parental controls exist. Whitelists exist. Why can't we expect parents to do their jobs by parenting?
The mainstream social networks don't permit nudity. If you really have so little faith in your own child's judgment then whitelist Facebook, Wikipedia, and a few others and call it a day. Although I do have to wonder. Assuming they're a teenager, why do you have so little faith in their cognitive abilities?
In the end I'm reasonably certain that unfettered access to social networks is far worse for development than unfettered access to hardcore pornography. C'est la vie.
The fact that there are already many threats to our privacy is not a reason to not push back on new threats. Rather, it's a reason to push back harder, and then try to fix the existing threats, too.
That's just not possible in practice. There's lots of people who enjoy publishing their sex, not commercially. There's no place under a single jurisdiction that can be filtered or required to prove age. Any social network will contain groups of people using it to distribute porn. When common ones are closed, dedicated ones are created.
I don’t understand what you are saying. The government can force providers to make their users prove their age. And people can violate the law and try to avoid this.
> This is why I think it's great when schools ban phones in class.
Agreed on the classroom angle, there are many reasons (e.g. cheating, concentration) to treat the availability of devices in a uniform way there.
> If you believe that smart phones are disastrous for kids
A focus on the handheld device also makes it easier to handle other related concerns that can't really be solved any other way, like "no social-media after bedtime."
It's important to teach our children that different people have different restrictions. Some of my daughter's friends have no phone. One of them has no phone, but does have a tablet. To the best of my knowledge, none of them are ostracized by the group. I mean, I've seen them hanging out at our house and other places.
> To the best of my knowledge, none of them are ostracized by the group.
Yes, in my experience it isn't as severe as "Ostracized", but definitely a bit "left out" occasionally, especially when friends are all doing "snap streaks" and swap BFFs (as they do) etc.
So at least in my area, a girl at 12+ will miss out on some social peer activities if she does not have a phone. End of the world? Probably not, but I guess it depends on your community's local culture. Also, the valley probably isn't a great baseline for comparison.
I'm not recommending anything. I just think we tend to ignore the nuance.
Just curious, how old are they? I'm planning on having kids and I'm afraid of how to answer the smart phone question. I imagine that it could start to be an issue by 12 or 13
Not even close. Some peers will have effectively their phone at 6 or lower. https://www.waituntil8th.org/ tries to promote delaying till 8yo. It may start being an issue as soon as they get to primary school.
The website you linked encourages waiting until 8th grade (ie. about 14 years old), not 8 years old.
That's what I get for posting while tired...
My daughter is 13 and has a phone for a number of years, and she got it later than some friends, earlier than others. I know that's not a lot of info, but it gives you some idea of the range _I_ saw.
In other words it is a multi-agent coordination problem from game theory. You can have an outside force change the rules, or you can figure out how to collaborate/compete within the game.
> This is why I think it's great when schools ban phones in class.
This was the absolute norm in the 00s when cellphones became common and cheap enough for teens to often have one. If you were seen with a phone out it would be confiscated. At some point schools apparently just gave up and only a few are starting to rediscover the policy as though it's a novel idea.
What the fuck happened? When exactly did this transition happen?
> When exactly did this transition happen?
In the late 2000s, as a response to a parental demand for communication and safety following high-profile school emergencies, especially school shootings.
Crazy. Compromising the quality of education for everybody every school day so that on rare occasions a very small number of students might be able to call their parents (who will be powerless to help over the phone.)
Yea I’m a parent and “what if there’s an emergency” is one of the silliest excuses to allow students to have phones. If there’s an emergency, the school is already going to have called the police. What the hell am I going to do if my kid calls me? I’ll tell her to hang up the phone and follow whatever emergency procedure they have.
> just parents busy lobbying the government to impose crap onto every possible service and website across the entire world.
Its not parents, primarily.
IMO the pressure comes from a few lobby groups, media scares, companies with age verification products to sell and big tech - the last because it imposes compliance costs that removes competition, and new entrants in particular.
Ah, the old "all we have to do" solution to complex technical problems. "Just" design it this way!
> The only question is whether age verification is still too onerous.
You've skipped right past the "does it work" question. It doesn't. Porn is available on file sharing networks in far greater quantity than it is on reputable websites.
The only realistic methods I'm aware of are whitelist filtering, sufficient supervision, or sufficient interaction and education.
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Jesus, how does your society still function when underage people can see videos of people having sex?! It's one thing for minors to be having sex, but to watch others doing it? Reprehensible.
I suppose you do not have children. I am open-minded, mid 40's. The level of violence in porn you can get access to with just one click, has no comparison with what I could get access to as a kid (basically nothing).
With the net, you get access in one click to the worse and the best. It is a lot of work as a parent to educate the kids about that.
As kids, teenager and even as 20 something, if we wanted to do some experience, we had to physically access the media or be physically present. This was not on-demand over a screen.
So, I filter the access at home while also trying my best to educate. This is not easy and I can understand that non tech savvy people request more laws, even so I am personally against.
The article is pretty well balanced, we have no silver bullet here.
Sure, but if the goal is to minimise access to violence, why did the GP say "they can access porn" instead of "they can access violence"? I doubt the two are synonymous.
They're not synonymous but a vast amount of pornography available online constitutes violence against women.
The commercial sex trade, including both porn and prostitution, is a multi-billion dollar industry that seeks to normalize extreme acts and promotes the dehumanisation of women and girls.
This framing trades nuance for moral panic. The assertion that pornography inherently constitutes violence against women is not an argument but a slogan. It is ideological posturing, not analysis. The so-called ‘commercial sex trade’ as you put it is complex, and your narrative is not intellectually serious.
So why would the solution to dehumanising women be "minors shouldn't be able see it"?
Perhaps because as an adult you understand we understand this can influence them when its not supervised?
Perhaps it would be a better solution to ban the dehumanising kind of porn for everyone.
Nice idea, but how? How could that actually be accomplished, without stacking SCOTUS with conservative and/or feminist justices? My other comment pointing out the 1A problem with proposals to ban porn was downvoted but nobody has been able to explain how I'm wrong.
Requiring porn businesses to check IDs would be, legally and politically, much easier.
The whole point here is to prevent impressionable children from growing up watching videos of women being treated like objects, so that they don't grow up to view women as objects
If the states banning porn weren’t generally the same states restricting medical care for women, I’d say you have a point, but that’s simply not the case.
“Protecting women” is the sales pitch, not the objective.
Noncentral fallacy. Nobody's against "medical care for women" except where they believe it overlaps with "legalized murder of children", and it's extremely disingenuous for you to ignore that and act like "medical care" is the part they're against.
I’m disputing your claim that I am invoking a logical fallacy here.
Revoking access to life-critical medical care that is specific to one’s sex is indisputably making the people of a given sex less safe.
Threatening to persecute people who wish to assist women in pursuing life-critical medical care is making women less safe.
If medical care specific to one’s sex cannot be considered protecting the safety of someone on the basis of their sex, what is?
Has there been some outbreak of this? Genuinely confused. My impression is that sort of behavior has been decreasing my entire life while access to porn has been increasing.
As a recovering porn addict that had issues with socializing with the opposite sex growing up... I don't think there's enough evidence to scientifically conclude anything either way.
As for me, I sought out a large amount of porn "too early". The porn was not violent and I was ashamed to talk about it with anyone. Then again this was before social media became mainstream. I wanted to talk to girls my age but had too much anxiety and depression from my upbringing. ..the real reason for my addiction. So I got called a teenage stalker and got punished so hard I stopped talking to women entirely. The porn was because I was so depressed in the following years. Nobody even realized I had a porn addiction to this day, because I didn't talk about it because... it was cringe.
Still a bachelor but I go to meetings and have worked on it for several years by now. When I worked on my issues enough the urges went away. To the point I wondered why this was such an issue for so long. I no longer feel the need to find a mate to feel complete anymore. Which ironically would make talking to women possible again. But that wasn't because of porn - it was because of depression/anxiety.
I ascribed the causes incorrectly for a long time ("excess porn usage causes the tendency to sexually harass/assault people you're attracted to") which only contributed to my shame and depression for a long time. I think it's because people don't want to admit that they cannot help every person with major depressive disorder ("you need to want help to get help"), so they go after bigger fish that are open to litigation to make it seem like the problem is being addressed. And all this labeling of porn as a problem rubs off onto actual addicts who misjudge the real root of their issues like me.
I have a hypothesis that telling teenagers their minds will be permanently corrupted by too much pornography of any kind and they should be ashamed of themselves for having sexual urges is... not exactly the most productive decision. Especially when gore videos remain unregulated and legal. I think depression/anxiety has a greater chance to cause the behavior they're talking about - "hurt people hurt people" - and those people just so happen to be addicted to something to self-medicate. Shaming people is certainly one way to make them depressed.
But I was sorta glad I avoided talking to people I was attracted to for so long, in my depressed state not much good would have happened. I now have a healthier appreciation of the other sex without completely abstaining and in my view it had nothing do with porn. It was actually about seeing and accepting reality for what it is, not through a depressed filter.
My impression is that parents are increasingly alarmed at young boys becoming bitter misogynists. Maybe that isn't happening and it's just a moral panic? Or maybe those boys watching lots of pornography and coming to believe that women are whores are two entirely unrelated phenomenons?
Media diet shapes what we are, and kids are more impressionable than most. It is therefore natural and reasonable for parents to want some control over what media gets fed to their kids.
> My impression is that parents are increasingly alarmed at young boys becoming bitter misogynists
This seems more in line with the increase of mysoginist influencers (Andrew Tate and the like) and less to do with porn. The former of course being the type of content that social media companies are more than happy to proactively promote to children.
Why are they in a state of mind where people like Andrew Tate resonant with them in the first place?
Because they’re young and impressionable.
I'm not particularly familiar with Tate or his story, but wasn't he literally arrested for human trafficking in connection with a porn site that he ran? And that site was part of the start of his "Internet" career? And part of his shtick is bragging about being an "Internet pimp" and running said site?
He was but he’s more well known for his social media posting than for his cam site stuff
Andrew Tate is basically the core of the Manosphere [0].
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manosphere
Even the stuff that’s less extreme than Tate should be totally unacceptable for children and teens to access. Not just the “manosphere” but everything adjacent to it: the alt-right, Nazis and White Supremecists, Qanon, conspiracy sites, flat earthers, antivaxxers, cryptoscammers and so on. They are all in orbit of the same dark barycenter of toxicity.
I’d rather my kid accidentally run into porn than them accidentally run into this garbage. But guess which one I have to worry about all the algorithms steering my kid to? Hint: it’s not the porn.
I don't think that's quite what's happening, I think the phenomenon in question is occurring primarily within a specific age group, and I think it doesn't correlate with porn availability or consumption.
If X predates A by a long time then any attribution of A to X is going to need extensive evidence.
I think the phenomenon you refer to has to do with politics and culture. It's loosely related to the pendulum swinging back against DEI type stuff. Depending on your political persuasion you might replace "bitter misogynists" with something like "angry cynics".
Is porn a bigger problem than Andrew Tate in that regard?
The first ammendment, as presently interpreted, makes banning violent pornography virtually impossible. Restricting access to it is a far more tractable solution.
I keep hearing this argument, but I don’t come across any violent porn unless I explicitly look for it. What are the search terms you people are using?
My girl discovered self-pleasure at the age of 5, ironically during an exam from her doctor (she doesn't think it was intentional). I had an ex discover masturbation around the same age. I personally discovered it around 11 or 12. All of the above discovered porn accidentally as kids. I don't know about them but after that I intentionally sought it out.
Guess what! Both of us are perfectly fine!! (Well the ex is a bit psychotic but that's unrelated...)
This obsession with protecting kids from the realities of life is just fucking stupid. We as a species have the stupidest, most ridiculous views about something that is required to keep us alive!
The problem is that most porn depicts sex as somewhat violent and sets unreasonable expectations of what sex is like.
Not every woman is capable of deep-throating or going straight from vaginal to anal without adding some extra lube. Most women don't want their man to put his hands around her throat during sex. Almost none of them are okay with going from ass to mouth.
Porn also sets an unrealistic standard for penis size. When the average is 5.2 inches with a standard deviation of about an inch, it becomes clear that the 7+ inch penises used in porn are like the top 5%.
I don't think parents are having these conversations with their kids about this.
I would be interested in a discussion here about what sex acts people find demeaning to women. You cherry-picked from a narrow band of agreeable examples. Are blow jobs themselves demeaning to women? I suspect that many (perhaps here but certainly elsewhere) would say so.
I would also welcome a discussion about how porn might be disadvantageous to boys (and the very medicated male performers) and how all this contrasts with tolerance towards non-sexual violence depicted on screen.
it is recommended not to employ sarcasm when counterpoints are easily available
Unfortunately, when counterpoints are easily available, I expect the person to have already thought of them, hence the sarcasm.
Edited to delete my comment. I was mistaken about who was replying to who. As such my comment was entirely wrong.
What? There's zero suggestion in ndriscoll's comment that he's talking about "extremely violent porn".
The most specific he gets is "furry porn", which might be a kink you don't approve of but is not obviously more objectionable than "people having sex".
I made a mistake about who stavros was replying to. I edited my comment.
I was being somewhat flippant while also using a group that's known as a gateway to more deviant behaviors (e.g. libertarianism). I think though that you'll likely not find much success in litigating whether children ought to be able to access porn (and whether porn has anything close to a healthy depiction of relationships/sex. Yes, some healthy material exists. It's extremely rare, especially with commercial websites). e.g. no one thinks children should be able to shop at physical adult stores. It's probably more productive to participate in the "what to do about it" discussion.
Please point me to where the original comment mentioned anything about violence.
Thought the comment in question was a reply to loic. The mistake is mine.
Ah, fair enough, that's an easy mistake to make, I've replied to the wrong comment many times too.
> Jesus, how does your society still function when underage people can see videos of people having sex?!
It kind of isn't anymore. But not just because of porn, obviously.
Early porn exposure goes hand in hand with the problems we see typified in the recent Netflix movie Adolescence. Seen women constantly railed and treated like meat when that young probably does do something.
"Videos of people having sex" is deliberately misleading, modern porn is not dry educational science videos. It's clear you'd rather be snide than correct.
> Early porn exposure goes hand in hand with the problems we see typified in the recent Netflix movie Adolescence
There's really no evidence of this. I find it much more plausible that the boom in misogynistic radicalism is caused by the flourishing of radically far-right niche content online. Our society has become more politically extreme in a number of ways over the past couple decades, and there's no porn equivalent for anti-immigrant or anti-trans sentiment. Andrew Tate, however, is very much of a kind with figures like Nick Fuentes and Alex Jones.
That's not to say porn viewership doesn't have an effect on kids, but I expect it would be much more modest. Unrealistic ideas about sex, anxieties about penis size. I'm in my mid-20s; internet porn was highly accessible to me & my peers when we were young, and while it did have an effect on youth culture, it was quite modest—nothing like the hard pivot to misogyny which I've heard teachers describe when their students become interested in (again) Andrew Tate.
> "Videos of people having sex" is deliberately misleading, modern porn is not dry educational science videos.
Implying the opposite is deliberately misleading too. "Modern porn" is not entirely 1 thing or another. Much of it's sensible, a lot of it is extreme. Much like any area in life, I think, the real solution is to teach our children what's wrong with the more extreme stuff.
People are scared of porn causing their children to "objectify women"? Then teach them to respect women from a young age and when they see the extreme side of things they'll be like "That's wrong"
It's probably easier to blame the Internet though and to try to neuter it instead - rather than teach your kid the values you want them to have, just make sure they're never faced with values other than those!
> "Videos of people having sex" is deliberately misleading
it literally isn't. porn is mostly people having normal sex or just nude images of a woman. the existence of fringe fetish stuff doesn't affect that in any practical way. but your confusion seems to be thinking this discussion was about feminism or something when it's really just a decrepit boomer who is against sex being even legal lying through his teeth to justify completely pointless and harmful legislation (see 2 posts up)
You can map the availability of pornography to a rise in risky sex practices like choking. This isn't a problem inherent to pornography itself—rather, it's a factor of inadequate sex ed combined with the commonplace irresponsible presentation of certain sex acts in porn. Still, it'd be misleading to present porn as an entirely neutral depiction of sex. Mainstream pornography demonstrably does spread some harmful ideas. This is also true of Hollywood cinema, though; all media works this way, to a greater or lesser extent.
Is card verification a lesser form of surveillance? And there’s a good chance your card issuer (or your bank, one hop away from it) has your biometrics anyway.
I don’t like either of them… (And why does YouTube ask me to verify my age when I’m logged into a Google account I created in 2004?)
Oh, make no mistake, I hate both of these. I loathe this forced surveillance of everyone because parents can't be bothered to supervise and teach their children about the most primary of human animal functions (sex), regardless of their reasons for it.
I take great pains to keep minors out of my adult spaces, and don't have to resort to anything as invasive as biometric surveillance or card charges. This notion that the entire world should be safe for children by default, and that anything and everything adult should be vilified and locked up, is toxic as all get-out and builds shame into the human animal over something required for the perpetuation of the species.
The adult content isn't the problem, it's the relationship some folks have towards it that's the issue. That's best corrected by healthy intervention early on, not arbitrary age checks everywhere online that mainly serve as an exercise of power by the ruling class against "undesirable" elements of society.
> take great pains to keep minors out of my adult spaces, and don't have to resort to anything as invasive as biometric surveillance or card charges.
What sort of spaces are these (online or in person), and how do you enforce this? I have an online space where such non invasive measures could be useful.
Mine are rooted in the 90s/00s internet: I know the people I allow into my spaces, and extend to them a degree of trust to let others in who are also of legal age. I rotate the credentials every so often at random, forcing everyone to request the new password from me. Other spaces I inhabit also operate off this sort of "community trust" system, only letting in folks we already know ourselves. It's how we keep out minors and trolls, as well as just bad/no-longer-trusted actors.
It's inconvenient, sure, and it's not SEO-friendly, but it generally works and doesn't require checking IDs or doing biometric verifications. The thing is, I'm building a community, not a product, and therefore don't have the same concerns as, say, PornHub, for checking IDs. It's also not a scalable solution - I have to build individual rapports with people I can then trust to have the access keys to my space(s), and then monitor that trust at each password change to ensure it's not violated. It's hard work, but it's decently reliable for my needs.
For larger/at-scale providers...I think the better answer is just good-old-fashioned on-device or home-network filtering. The internet was NEVER meant to be child-friendly, and we need to make it abundantly clear to parents that it's never going to be so they take necessary steps to protect their children. I'd personally like to see more sites (in general, not just adult) contribute their domain names and CDNs to independent list maintainers (or published in a help article linked via their main footer) so individuals and organizations can have greater control over their online experience. I think if someone wants to, say, block the entire domain ranges of Amazon for whatever reason, then that information should be readily available without having to watch packet flows and analyzing CDN domain patterns.
It's just good netiquette, I think, but I'm an old-fashioned dinosaur in that regard.
> I'd personally like to see more sites (in general, not just adult) contribute their domain names and CDNs to independent list maintainers (or published in a help article linked via their main footer)
This would be so useful. I once tried to get this information from a company you've all heard of, so that we could reliably whitelist their services on our corporate firewall, and the answer was "they're dynamic, so that's impossible". I said "but you know them, you could dynamically make that information available to your customers", but got nowhere. I'd like this to be a regulatory requirement, but the people who make the rules aren't sufficiently technically competent to identify technical solutions, and don't seem to listen to people who are.
[Edit to add: I really like your old-school approach to building online community for yourself. I don't know your interests, or if I'd like yours, but I wish more spaces with your approach were around. The world in general (not only the internet) is a better place when we interact with each other in ways that aren't commercially determined.]
> This notion that the entire world should be safe for children by default, and that anything and everything adult should be vilified and locked up, is toxic as all get-out and builds shame into the human animal over something required for the perpetuation of the species.
The world should be safe for kids because kids are the future of our society. When the world isn't safe, families won't have kids and society will start to decline. Maybe that means giving up some of the privileges you have. That's the cost of our future.
“Censorship is telling a man he can't have a steak just because a baby can't chew it.” ― Mark Twain
The parent said "entire world".
My partner and I do not have kids. Our bedroom is not safe for kids. It will not be made safe for kids (as we're not having any).
> And why does YouTube ask me to verify my age when I’m logged into a Google account I created in 2004?
Yeah those checks are super annoying. The internet has been around long enough, mechanisms for this should exist.
And even in the smaller term, if I had to be 13 to make this account, and it has been more than 5 years, maybe relax?
> Is card verification a lesser form of surveillance?
It's not just about which is worse surveillance, it's also simply that everyone has a face but not everyone has a credit card. I'm not deemed creditworthy in this country I moved to (never had a debt in my life but they don't know that) so the card application got rejected. Do we want to upload biometrics or exclude poor and unknown people from "being 18"? I really don't know which is the lesser poison
> (And why does YouTube ask me to verify my age when I’m logged into a Google account I created in 2004?)
I'd guess they didn't want to bother with that edge case. Probably <0.01% of active Youtube accounts are >18 years old
>everyone has a face
Does everyone who is 18+ have a face that passes for 18+ (and the inverse as well)?
Overall it seems like a bad idea, but one demanded by what sounds like a good idea with not reasonable way to fully implement it, leading to a tangled network of bad ideas patching other bad ideas patching other bad ideas all the way down.
The thing being demanded is decidedly not a good idea. A reasonable demand would be that sites over a certain size include a standardized age or content rating in the headers. That would facilitate a whitelist approach, which is the only viable way to accomplish the stated goal.
The issue is that there are some online activities which we all agree that children must be banned from no matter the cost to do so. Society has now started shifting in what actually falls in that group, but no one is arguing against the group entirely. There are very invasive solutions to this that have historically been accepted in the most agreed upon use cases, but not that society has started to shift on what falls into that category, we see a lot of friction as others don't want those solutions applied elsewhere.
Whitelisting was never an accepted solution for this worst category, and thus it will not be an accepted solution to any specific cases that society has started to move into that category (accepted to the portion of society moving it into that category, those who don't put it in that category will see such solutions are massive overreach).
Whitelisting is literally the only available technical solution. None of the others work and they can't realistically be made to. Anyone who tells you they do is either hopelessly non-technical, woefully misinformed, trying to sell you snake oil, or has an ulterior motive (surveillance).
I suppose something like the Great Firewall is also kind of sort of workable but that's government coordinated filtering so expansive that it begins to share more in common with whitelists than blacklists.
For every site that complies with age verification laws there will be uncountably many that don't. And that's before getting to file sharing networks. And then there's the dark net. Both of the latter are readily accessible outside of the Great Firewall.
Right. Yes, I'll have to agree simply neither option is good at all
Why/how would my bank have my biometrics?
I logged into my Starling Bank account on a new phone, and I had to film my face reading a 6 digit number.
Wow, I would move my money elsewhere rather than comply with that.
Yeah I agree, the problem is that my money is already in there, so I have no choice but to comply.
They almost certainly have a photo of your passport or other identification.
For the purpose of KYC checks.
That doesn't mean every service provider (discord, roblox, pornhub) should have the same.
No, but the original thread was about providing your credit card number to these service providers. I’m saying that’s one hop from your bank, who has your biometric information.
Don't know about the US, but over here the last couple of years it has been a big wave of "enable biometrics sign-in! Totes safe, your face is the best ID, just click this checkbox, please, we would really like you to use it, pretty please" in the bank apps. No idea why they pushed it so hard, and it seems to have largely subsided now.
What you describe is called QES (Qualified Electronic Signature) and is still widely used to validate identities.
Unfortunately it is not enough to prove an identity (you could be using the credit card of your traveling uncle) and regulation requires for it to be combined with another proof.
I see a lot of people associating identity verification with evil intent (advertising, tracking).
I work in this domain and the reality is a lot less interesting: identity verification companies do this and only this, under strict scrutiny both from their customers and from the regulators.
We are not where we want to be from a privacy standpoint but the industry is making progress and the usage of identity data is strictly regulated.
As someone looking in from the outside: what regulations govern this type of work?
In EU: eIDAS and ETSI.
In the US: BIPA started in Illinois and is expanding to other states.
BIPA sets a brutal bar in terms of regulation.
Okay, that makes sense.
I'm in a different regulated industry (healthcare), so we have a lot of different international standards there, and wondered how that worked in a different space.
Paypal used this method as identity (or at least account) verification back in the very early days, IIRC. They made a very small deposit and I think they just let you keep it but I can't recall that for sure.
As we've seen, if the information is retained, it will be used.
The only safe approach is for that information not to exist in the first place.
Credit cards are trivially traceable to your legal identity, since anti-money-laundering and know-your-customer laws require that credit card companies keep this information. The government can subpoena this information just as easily as they could with pictures of your face or ID.
How do you prove the person typing in the credit card details is the same person who owns the card?
I know I've read stories of kids taking cards to purchase games or other things online numerous times over the last 20+ years.
I had a debit card when I was 13. An absolute godsend during international travel, not having to bother with cash as a forgetful teenager.
The card providers share your identity in monetary transactions, but I don't think this data does & should include birthdate.
These checks accept only a credit card.
That's useful as one option, but can't be expected of 18 year olds in most countries, and older adults in many.
I had a credit card at 15. I had to travel for some school related stuff and it was easier to carry a card than excessive amounts of cash.
What if you don't have a credit card? This solves nothing, the good way to do this is as system like Polish "MojeID" (my ID) [1]. This works in the following way, a site needs to verify information X, then it redirects users to a bank (that has to provide this service), login over there and then agree to let the bank know whatever it was requested - it could be only one information, birth date.
This is a good solution, as banks are obliged to provide free bank account for anyone (there is EU regulation on that), this is very save, gives users full information what data third party requested.
[1] https://www.kir.pl/nasza-oferta/klient-indywidualny/identyfi...
1. Your old credit card solution needs a credit card. So you exclude out the poor, bad credit, etc.
2. Parents will help kids bypass checks like that.
3. It can be bypassed by a half-smart 13-year-old who can access an app on a phone that will give them the card details and be able to see transactions.
Any verification that doesn't actually verify you via proper means is easy to fake. Hell, we can fake passport/id photos easy enough so now we have to jump on calls with the passport and move it around.
The days of the wild west of the internet are long gone. It's time to realise that it's so important that it deserves the same level of verification we give to in person activities. Someone seeing you and/or your id. It's the only thing that has the best chances of not being bypassed with ease.
They issued a refund to the card of a few cents, and I had to tell them (within 24hr) how much the refund was for, after which point they'd issue a charge to claw it back.
This was one of the methods that CompuServe used back in the 1980's, though using a checking account.
It's sad that so many aspects of technology have completely failed to improve in half a century.
I don't really get your point, surely a credit card is even more strongly linked to your identify than your face?
I basically agree with you, but it's not like you could not be tracked using your credit card number.
This is not about tracking, having your biometrics means they can resell the data to other providers (e.g. palantir or some other hellish enterprise). With that, the places and means of following you in real time are practically limitless...
There have been so many dystopian movies about this kind of tech, it's a good insight of what comes next.
> Biometric validation is surveillance, plain and simple.
Eh. It's just easier and cheaper. I'll bet Discord has outsourced this to one of those services that ask you for a face scan when you sign up to [some other service].
This is never about protecting the children.
This is always about government overreach.
People are less likely to criticize the government, or even participate in political debate, if their online identities are know by the government. Governments like obedient, scared citizens.
The only ethical response to laws like this, is for websites and apps to terminate operations completely in countries that create them. Citizens who elect politicians without respect for human rights and privacy don't really deserve anything nice anyway.
Providing identity and access services at scale is certainly a few people's next big plan, and it appears they've managed to sell the representatives of their own states on it first.
This sort of thing can't happen except through the largest tech companies in the world, who are coincidentally already poised to be the world's official providers of digital identity, and private internet enclaves.
Look at what Microsoft has done with Windows - mandatory minimum TPM to install and a Microsoft account registration for a local user. Try using an Apple iPad or iPhone without an iCloud account or adding a payment method. Google wants you to sign in with them, everywhere, aggressively. Cloudflare has been the web's own private gatekeeper for the last decade. Facebook's whole product is identity. IBM has sold surveillance, IAM, and facial recognition services for decades.
Instead of a clunky IP-based Great Firewall, imagine being able to render VPNs ineffective and unnecessary everywhere on the planet by a person's (verified national) identity. Click. Block and deactivate all members of group "Islamic State" on your platform. Click. Allow IDs registered to this ZIP Code to vote in this election. Click. CortanaSupreme, please dashboard viewer metrics by usage patterns that indicate loneliness, filtering for height, last assessed property values, and marriage status, and show their locations.
Currently, laws don't require age verification, just that ineligible parties are excluded. There's no legal requirement to card someone before selling them alcohol, and there's no reason anyone would need a depth map of someone's face when we could safely assume that the holder of a >5 year old email account is likely to be 18 if 13 is the minimum age to register with the provider.
Shifting the onus to parents to control what their kids do on the internet hasn't worked. However, that's a bare sliver of what's at stake here.
The anonymous, unchecked Internet got us where we are today. It was a great experiment in worldwide communication, but has now been converted into a weapon for the same type of authoritarians that previously used traditional media and propaganda channels. AI is only accelerating the possibilities for abuse. Critical thinking skills taught from a young age is the only defense.
That’s a very strange take on governments, treating them as a singular entity. A government that deserves that name is first and foremost and elected set of representatives of the constituents, and thus like citizens that vote for them again, act in their interests.
If the government is not working like that, you have an administrative problem, not a societal one. A state is its population.
> A state is its population.
Very dangerous thinking. Unless each and every citizens has approved the elected "representative" and every decision they made (which will never happen), you cannot assimilate the state and the population. The state has to be considered a separate entity, one which operate beyond the common man's thinking.
> Unless each and every citizens has approved the elected "representative" and every decision they made
But they have, by electing the representatives that ought to represent them, and thereby yield the power to make decisions on behalf of their constituents. If they do no not act accordingly, they will not be elected again in subsequent terms; if they act against the law, they will be fairly tried; and if the laws don't sufficiently capture the reality anymore, they will be adapted. That is how a representative democracy should work. If it doesn't, you have an implementation problem, not a systemic one (admittedly, this is almost a true Scotsman, but still.)
> The state has to be considered a separate entity, one which operate beyond the common man's thinking.
This isn't mutually exclusive. Of course the state has to make higher-level considerations and people in power will invariably be corrupted to some degree, but concluding that the state is your enemy and cannot be trusted is the wrong one, in my opinion. With that attitude, you're just waiting for it to become truly evil so you can say "See? I told you all along." Better to try and shape the state you have into something better while you still can.
> But they have, by electing the representatives that ought to represent them
Yes this is the theory, but what if there is no political party "representing" me, what about people abstaining from voting, what if peoples elect an authoritarian figure I didn't vote for ? This is one of the pitfalls of your system, if only one citizen disagree, or do not feel represented in it, this justification falls apart. You cannot hide this behind an "implementation problem", because there is no such implementation. If "we are the government" so everything the state is doing to me (or any other individual) will be "voluntary". With this reasoning the state is not putting me in prison for my dissident opinion, I went to prison myself.
> concluding that the state is your enemy and cannot be trusted is the wrong one, in my opinion
I didn't conclude such a thing, I only wanted to make clear that the state is a distinct institution that cannot possibly represent everyone, thus not worthy of the title "we". Also yes I do not trust it :)
> what if there is no political party "representing" me
If it bothers you enough, you’re supposed to create your own party. Democracy doesn’t mean that everyone else is doing the hard work for you.
> what about people abstaining from voting
Silent disagreement—if they were bothered enough, they would go voting.
> what if peoples elect an authoritarian figure I didn't vote for
If a few people do this, the system can (and has, for hundreds of years) handle it just fine. If more and more people do it, something is off, and nobody did anything about it. Part of the problem is people stopped caring and participating, expecting someone else to.
> if only one citizen disagree, or do not feel represented in it, this justification falls apart.
It’s no justification. We live in a shared society, democracy is a compromise to make the most people in it happy.
> the state is not putting me in prison for my dissident opinion, I went to prison myself.
As far as I can see, no democratic state is putting you in prison for a dissenting opinion, as long as you don’t endanger someone else with it.
Otherwise, yes: if you willingly went against the rules you agreed to follow by actively enjoying the benefits of a free, democratic society, then it’s reasonable to go to prison if you’re caught. You expect the same of other criminals, even if they may not realise the error of their ways yet.
People take everything around them for granted, acting like their freedom doesn’t come at a cost. It does. By living in a democracy, you enjoy boundless riches, housing, health care, fair trials, roads, plumbing, electricity, supermarkets, and a myriad of scale effects that are only possible because a lot of people have agreed to work together. The price to thrive in that system is to adhere to our collective rules, and deal with the fact that we constantly need to make compromises with our neighbours so the majority of people can be as happy as possible. And yes, that means even a government that you don’t fully agree with represents you, if not perfectly; it means taking responsibility for the mechanism that feeds you.
> If it bothers you enough, you’re supposed to create your own party.
Yeah, and that party wouldn't get any seats. I'm sorry, how did we go from "the state IS the population" to "well if your policy preferences fall outside the two agendas on offer, you have to start an electorally-successful third party—something NOBODY has managed to do—and if you don't or if it doesn't work, then it's your fault."
It sounds like you're trying to apportion blame for why the state ISN'T the population, and at that point, you've already conceded that your initial claim was wrong.
I respectfully disagree. If we replace all idealism with realism in the way we think about our political system, there is nothing left to do other than burying our heads in the sand. I firmly believe that people must participate in democracy, and that involves fighting for your convictions.
It's not your fault how things are, but doing nothing and expecting things to get better on their own isn't going to work either.
Realism doesn't mean doing nothing. It means taking a critical attitude toward your own strategies for effecting change.
> but doing nothing and expecting things to get better on their own isn't going to work either
Isn't this exactly what you advocate for? You say democracies faithfully represent the will of the people, and yet the American president's rock-bottom approval ratings indicate otherwise. Your attitude (correct me if I'm misrepresenting you) is basically that the system is fine, and the problem is that all the people in it are just irresponsible. Well, that's not a plan to fix anything. It's a do-nothing ideology. Or are you going to wave your magic wand and make everyone responsible?
> By living in a democracy, you enjoy boundless riches, housing, health care, fair trials
Tell that to poor people, homeless people, uninsured people, and the countless people unjustly imprisoned in the largest prison system in the world (1.8 million inmates).
> A state is its population.
Oh that's not true at all. A state is an institution which is influenced by its population, but if anything, the attitudes of the population are more a product of the state, its constituent political parties, and the associated media apparatuses than of a freestanding "will of the people."
To give a trivial counterexample, if the American state "is" its population, then why does your presidential vote only matter if you live in a swing state, and why can you only vote for one of two candidates? Surely your vote should reflect all of your policy preferences and have equal influence no matter where you live.
I would say it is a realistic take, and yours is idealistic.
It isn’t realistic, it’s pessimistic. If the government, the system, is your opponent, there is no other outcome than subversion, everything is futile anyway. That leaves no room for democratic participation, for any kind of peaceful change, if you’re being earnest with it. And that seems very cynical and ideologically driven to me. There’s a lot of room for improvement that doesn’t involve tearing everything down because it’s beyond the pale anyway; it isn’t.
I am not advocating tearing everything down, as that will make things worse, especially if done violently.
> That leaves no room for democratic participation
I think there is very limited room for democratic participation and it has become far to difficult to change anything. If I vote and I do not care which of the parties that have a chance of winning wins because their policies are so similar it does not matter, where is my democratic participation? Even if the parties are different and I do not like the policies of either, what is the value of my vote?
I think things will improve in the long term when there is sufficient pushback, but it will take a long time.
> If I vote and I do not care which of the parties that have a chance of winning wins because their policies are so similar it does not matter, where is my democratic participation?
In joining a party that represents you better—or founding one if no such party exists—and campaigning for it. Democracy doesn't end with casting a ballot, especially in trying times like these. Nobody is going to come and save us; if we don't stand up, nobody will.
I can wholeheartedly recommend the book "The Germans: They thought they were free" by Milton Mayer[1]. It very thoroughly describes how a society ends up asking how the holocaust could possibly have happened while nobody did anything about it while it did.
[1]: https://press.uchicago.edu/Misc/Chicago/511928.html
> It very thoroughly describes how a society ends up asking how the holocaust could possibly have happened while nobody did anything about it while it did.
> If the government is not working like that, you have an administrative problem, not a societal one. A state is its population.
How do you jive these two statements?
My point is that the German society wasn't inherently evil, but stunned, indifferent; a comparatively small group of thoroughly sinister people managed to use that to their advantage. The correct thing to do would have been civil resistance, while it was still possible.
But a state is its population, by your own words. How can you say German society wasn't inherently evil and yet hold that a state IS its people? Either the German population is evil and willed evil into existence, or the state is greater than the sum of its parts. It seems obvious that the latter is the case.
Now that's mixing things. We are talking about democracies; and there, a state is its population: Every constituent carries responsibility for the government—the state—that is elected in fair elections. Even by abstaining, you agree with the majority. Without the German people, there wouldn't be a state of Germany.
But of course that doesn't apply to autocracies and dictatorships, which Germany pre-WW2 obviously turned into. My point is that the Germans voted for the NSDAP, and dit not resist the transformation into an autocratic state. They let this happen, out of indifference, wrong assumptions, anger, stupidity, and fear. That means one way or another, the German people decided what the state became.
False dichotomy. "Either the system is perfect or it is useless." No: systems can have mixed results, and they can be improved. Even when they can't be improved, they can be replaced by better (but still imperfect) systems.
You present a choice between pretending everything is fine and giving up. This is no choice at all. Both options entail giving up; one is just honest about it.
We can make things better.
People, and the governments they compose, respond to incentives.
If platforms like discord take a hard-line stance of "no, we're not enabling a surveillance state apparatus" and the government then forces them to cease business in that country, that is a decision with consequences. People don't like when the government takes away their nice things due to motives they don't agree with. It catalyzes a position - "unchecked government surveillance is creating negative outcomes for me".
Over time, if enough actors behave the same way, public sentiments will shift and, assuming a healthy democracy, the government line will as well.
But acquiescing to demands like these only further entrenches the position, as the public is only loosely incentivized to care. The boiling of the privacy frog in a surveillance state like the UK means most people won't care enough to change it until it's too late
> treating them as a singular entity
The entities that keep pushing for that stuff tends to be quite centralized.
> Citizens who elect politicians without respect for human rights and privacy don't really deserve anything nice anyway.
Unfortunately things don't always work out that cleanly:
- Sometimes you vote for the pro-freedom candidate, but your candidate loses. - Sometimes there are only two dominant candidates, and both disrespect human rights. - Sometimes one candidate disrespects human rights in some particular way, but the other candidate has different, bigger problems, so you vote for the lesser of two evils. - Sometimes a candidate says one thing while campaigning, and then when elected does something different.
Aside from the privacy nightmare, what about someone who is 18 and just doesn't have the traditional adult facial features? Same thing for someone who's 15 and hit puberty early? I can imagine that on the edges, it becomes really hard to discern.
If they get it wrong, are you locked out? Do you have to send an image of your ID? So many questions. Not a huge fan of these recent UK changes (looking at the Apple E2E situation as well). I understand what they're going for, but I'm not sure this is the best course of action. What do I know though :shrug:.
Wise (nee Transferwise) requires a passport style photo taken by a webapp for KYC when transferring money. I was recently unable to complete that process over a dozen tries, because the image processing didn't like something about my face. (Photos met all criteria.)
On contacting their support, I learned that they refused to use any other process. Also it became apparent that they had outsourced it to some other company and had no insight into the process and so no way to help. Apparently closing one's account will cause an escalation to a team who determines where to send the money, which would presumably put some human flexability back into the process.
(In the end I was able to get their web app to work by trying several other devices, one had a camera that for whatever reason satisfied their checks that my face was within the required oval etc.)
> On contacting their support, I learned that they refused to use any other process.
I suspect this won't help you, but I think it's worth noting that the GDPR gives people the right to contest any automated decision-making that was made on a solely algorithmic basis. So this wouldn't be legal in the EU (or the UK).
Hah, indeed, a similar experience here. The desktop option is worse, trying to get a webcam to focus on an ID card took forever. The next step wanted a 3rd party company to do a live webcam session, no thanks! Closed the account. Or at least tried, after a several step nag process, they still keep the email blocked to that account, in case you change your mind...
There seems no way to push back against these technologies. Next it will be an AI interview for 'why do you transfer the money?'
Also, key point in the framing, when was it decided that Discord supposed to be the one enforcing this? A pop-up saying "you really should be 18+" is one thing, but this sounds like a genuine effort to lock out young people. Neither Discord nor a government ratings agency should be taking final responsibility for how children get bought up, that seems like something parents should be responsible for.
This is over-reach. Both in the UK and Australia.
When a corner shop sells cigarettes to minors, who's breaking the law?
When a TV channel broadcast porn, who gets fined?
These are accepted laws that protect kids from "harm", which are relatively uncontroversial.
Now, the privacy angle is very much the right question. But as Discord are the one that are going to get fined, they totally need to make sure kids aren't being exposed to shit they shouldn't be seeing until they are old enough. In the same way the corner shop needs to make sure they don't sell booze to 16 year olds.
Now, what is the mechanism that Discord should/could use? that's the bigger question.
Can government provide fool proof, secure, private and scalable proof of age services? How can private industry do it? (Hint: they wont because its a really good source of profile information for advertising.)
At least the ways that a corner shop verifies age don't have the same downsides as typical online age verifiers. They just look at an ID document; verify that it's on the official list of acceptable ID documents, seems to be genuine and valid and unexpired, appears to relate to the person buying the product, and shows an old enough age; and hand the document back.
The corner shop has far fewer false negatives, far lower data privacy risk, and clear rules that if applied precisely won't add any prejudice about things like skin color or country of origin to whatever prejudice already exists in the person doing the verification.
That's exactly how a digital ID system would work, and yet people argue against those all the time as well.
Additionally, the corner shop does not have far lower data privacy risks - actually it's quite worse. They have you on camera and have a witness who can corroborate you are that person on camera, alongside a paper trail for your order. There is no privacy there, only the illusion of such.
By data privacy risks I meant the risk of a breach, compromise, or other leak of the database of verified IDs. No information about the IDs are generally collected in a corner shop, at least when there's no suspicion of fraud; they're just viewed temporarily and returned. Not only do online service providers retain a lot of information about their required verifications, they do so for hugely more people than a typical corner shop.
Also, corner shop cameras don't generally retain data for nearly as long as typical online age verification laws would require. Depending on the country and the technical configuration, physical surveillance cameras retain data for anywhere from 48 hours to 1 year. Are you really saying that most online age verification laws worldwide require or allow comparably short retention periods? (This might actually be the case for the UK law, if I'm correctly reading Ofcom's corresponding guidance, but I doubt that's true for most of the similar US state laws.)
A lot of these shops have cameras which could similarly be compromised. In fact the camera is likely to be more vulnerable and probably already had been hacked by DDoS orgs.
I hate sites asking for photo verification, but I think it is more about convenience/reliability for me. My bigger fear is that if AI locks me out with no one to go for support.
Where I live they scan the barcode on the back of the ID into their POS. I don't know what data that exposes, or exactly what's retained, but I suspect it's enough to thoroughly compromise the privacy of that transaction - with no pesky, gumshoe witness-statement and camera-footage steps necessary.
At least the US laws I've looked at have all specifically mandated that data shall not be retained, some with rather steep penalties for retention (IIRC ~$10k/affected user).
When the corner shop checks your ID, they won't take a photo of it. Digital IDs can easily be stored without the user's knowledge. That's a privacy nightmare.
Its a different risk.
The cornershop does not have access to your friend graph. Also, if you pay by card, digital ID only provides corroboration, your payment acts as a much more traceable indicator.
The risk of "digital ID" is that it'll leak grosly disprocotionate amounts of data on the holder.
For Age verification, you only need a binary old enough flag, from a system that verifies the holder's ID.
The problem is, people like google and other adtech want to be the people that provide those checks, so they can tie your every action to a profile with a 1:1 link. Then combine it to card transactions to get an ad impression to purchase signal much clearer.
The risk here is much less from government but private companies.
> and unexpired
Because certainly one's identity might totally change if one's ID card expires...
Expiry places a bound on duplication and forcing additional duplication allows you to update standards. It's a tradeoff to produce a strictness ratchet.
The person in possession of an expired ID can quite easily change, yeah.
Cigarettes are deadly
Broadcasting porn isn't an age ID issue, it's public airwaves and they're regulated.
These aren't primarily "think of the children" arguments, the former is a major public health issue that's taken decades to begin to address, and the latter is about ownership.
I don't think that chat rooms are in the same category as either public airwaves or drugs. Besides what's the realistic outcome here? Under 18's aren't stupid, what would you have done as a kid if Discord was suddenly blocked off? Shrug and not talk to your friends again?
Or would you figure out how to bypass the checks, use a different service, or just use IRC? Telegram chats? Something even less moderated and far more open to abuse, because that's what can slip under the radar.
So no I don't think this is about protecting kids, I think it's about normalizing the loss of anonymity online.
You can swap cigarettes with another age restricted product, like pornography or 18-rated DVDs if you prefer.
The UK also has rules on what can be broadcast on TV depending on the time of day.
> These aren't primarily "think of the children" arguments
Are you kidding me? v-chip, mary whitehouse, Sex on TV are all the result of "think of the children" moral panics. Its fuck all to do with ownership.
> I don't think that chat rooms are in the same category as either public airwaves
Discord are making cash from underage kids, in the same way that meta and google are, in the same way that disney and netflix offering kids channels.
Look I'm not saying that discord should be banned for kids, but I really do think that there is a better option than the binary "Ban it all"/"fuck it, let them eat porn"
Kids need to be able to talk to each other, but they also should be able to do that without being either preyed upon by nonces, extremists, state actors and more likely bored trolls.
Its totally possible to provide anonymous age gating, but its almost certainly going to be provided by an adtech company unless we, the community provide something cheaper and better.
> This is over-reach. Both in the UK and Australia
2/3 of Australians support minimum age restrictions for social media [1] and it was in-particular popular amongst parents. Putting the responsibility solely on parents shows ignorance of the complexities of how children are growing up these days.
Many parents have tried to ban social media only for those children to experience ostracisation amongst their peer group leading to poorer educational and social developmental outcomes at a critical time in their live.
That's why you need governments and platform owners to be heavily involved.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/article/2024/jun/...
> Putting the responsibility solely on parents shows ignorance of the complexities of how children are growing up these days.
Don't have kids if you're unwilling to parent them. "It's hard! :(" is not an argument.
"We've tried nothing and we're all out of ideas!"
that sounds quite puritan. my god says I can't, is one thing. my god says you can't either, is very different.
now replace god with parent.
You realize that is how EVERY law works right... The person your replying to says the public overall supports the idea/law. If following that law is a deal breaker for you you either need to persuade thos ppl to your view or move
A law to stop people from not going out of their way to include you when you made a choice to be unreachable sounds pretty desperate.
maybe it's "puritan" or maybe it's a normal view and it looks puritan from where you stand. how do you know which? One bit of evidence is the 2/3 to 1/3 split.
Everybody loves government overreach until the government starts to tell you how to live.
It almost certainly is overreach, but locking young people out of porn is hardly a new concern. We have variants of this argument continuously for decades. I'm not sure there is a definitive answer.
There's a SCOTUS case in FSC v. Paxton that could very well decide if age verification is enforced in the US as well so sadly this is just the beginning.
It's a good thing to think about. I knew a guy in high school who had male pattern baldness that started at 13 or 14. Full blown by the time he was 16. Dude looked like one of the teachers.
Same in my drivers ed at 16, guy had a mans face, large stocky build, and thick full beard. I once was talking to a tall pretty woman who turned out to be a 12 year old girl. And I have a friend who for most of his 20's could pass for 13-14 and had a hell of a time getting into bars.
This facial thing feel like a loaded attempt to both check a box and get more of that sweet, sweet data to mine. Massive privacy invasion and exploitation of children dressed as security theater.
i went to school with a guy who had serious facial hair at like 14. dude was rocking 5 oclock shadows by the end of the school day
I had a friend who had a serious beard by the age of 15; he would order whisky and cola at the bar, and nobody ever asked him for any kind of ID xD
I myself have a mighty beard but took a couple more years to develop...
Was your school located at 21 Jump Street?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/21_Jump_Street
Was it Steve Buscemi toting a skateboard?
https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/how-do-you-do-fellow-kids
It's not even edge cases - I was a pretty young looking woman and was mistaken for a minor until I was about 24-25. My mother had her first child (me) at 27 and tells me about how she and my father would get dirty looks because they assumed he was some dirty old man that had impregnated a teenager. (He was 3 years older than her).
I think, ironically, the best way to fight this would be to lean on identity politics: There are probably certain races that ping as older or younger. In addition, trans people who were on puberty blockers are in a situation where they might be 'of age' but not necessarily look like an automated system expects them to, and there might be discrepancies between their face as scanned and the face/information that's show on their ID. Discord has a large trans userbase. Nobody cares about privacy, but people make at least some show of caring about transphobia and racism.
> So many questions.
Do they keep a database of facial scans even though they say they don't? If not, what's to stop one older looking friend (or an older sibling/cousin/parent/etc.) from being the 'face' of everyone in a group of minors? Do they have a reliable way to ensure that a face being scanned isn't AI generated (or filtered) itself? What prevents someone from sending in their parent's/sibling's/a stolen ID?
Seems like security theater more than anything else.
I had a colleague, that when going out with her boyfriend, police was called on him as someone believed he is a pedophile.
She was 26. She just was that young looking.
:/
I don't think they make much of a show of caring about trans rights in the UK right about now, unfortunately. In the US you can make a strong case that a big database of faces and IDs could be really dangerous though I think
It's mostly about the service's audience. Discord is a huge trans/queer/etc. hub. If Discord were X or Instagram etc. it wouldn't matter. Users of Discord are, as a group, more likely to be antagonistic to anything that could be transphobic or racist than the general populace. (Whereas they don't care about disability rights, which is why people with medically delayed puberty aren't a concern.)
A tactical observation more than anything else.
> In the US you can make a strong case that a big database of faces and IDs could be really dangerous though I think
The government already has this from RealID.
Right but only your photo taken for the Id, not up to date face scans that discord is requesting
it seems to me like I'd be more hesitant to go get a govt photo taken right now at least.
I witnessed the Better Off Ted water fountain skit play out in real life once, it was incredible awkward. I was helping my buddy and his black friend and his wife set up accounts on online casinos in Michigan for the promos/refer-a-friend rewards. Some of the sites require the live video facial verification and we were doing it in a darkly lit space at night. It worked instantly and without issue for my friend and me but oh man, many many attempts later and many additional lights needed to get it to work for his friends.
The right thing to do here is for Discord to ignore the UK laws and see what happens, IMO.
Is there a market for leaked facial scans?
With the UK currently battling Apple, Discord has no chance of not getting a lawsuit.
Ofcom is a serious contender in ruling their rules especially where Discord is multi-national that even "normies" know and use.
And if they got a slap of "we will let you off this time" they would still have to create some sort of verification service to please the next time.
You might as well piss off your consumers, loose them whatever and still hold the centre stage than fight the case for not. Nothing is stopping Ofcom from launching another lawsuit there after.
> Is there a market for leaked facial scans?
There's a market for everything. Fake driver licenses with fake pictures have been around for decades, that would be no different.
It says in the article - you can send them a scan or photo of your ID if the face check doesn't work (or if you don't want to do the face scan).
What if I don't want them to have any personally identifiable information about me in a database?
Discord also has a manual review process.
https://support.discord.com/hc/en-us/articles/30326565624343...
Devil's advocate: couldn't this be better for privacy than other age checks because it doesn't require actual identification?
Considering the ubiquity of facial recognition tech, I imagine it could very quickly be abused to identify people
> what about someone who is 18 and just doesn't have the traditional adult facial features?
This can be challenging even with humans. My ex got carded when buying alcohol well into her mid thirties, and staff at the schools she taught at mistook her for a student all the time.
I grew a beard when I was younger because I was tired of being mistaken for a highschooler its quite annoying to have people assume you are 15 when your 20. still regularly carded in my 30s
it doesn't even has to be "un traditional face feature". Hpw are they going to differentiate 18yo from 17y11mo? The latter is not legally adult
Didn't Australia ban porn with women who have A cups under the justification of pedos like them?
Edit: This isn't how it played out. See the comment below.
No it's just nonsense you invented because you were unwilling to do any research.
The actual situation was that the board refused classification where an adult was intentionally pretending to be an underage child not that they looked like one.
I added an edit to correct myself however this was not something I invented. This story goes back to 09 - 2010. I will confess I didn't do any research to confirm though and that was my bad.
FWIW, I can confirm that user 9283409232 didn't make that up. I heard that multiple reputable places, years ago.
And it was believable, given a history of genuine but inept attempts by some to address real societal problems. (As well as given the history of fake attempts to solve problems for political points for "doing something". And also given the history of "won't someone think of the children" disingenuous pretexts often used by others to advance unrelated goals.) Basically, no one is surprised when many governments do something that seems nonsensical.
So, accusing someone of making up a story of a government doing something odd in this space might be hasty.
I suspect better would be to give a quick check and then "I couldn't find a reference to that; do you have a link?"
Interestingly I actually heard this in Australia many years ago. I assumed it was real (as an Australian) but the answer is more complicated (with the actual answer being no)
https://tysonadams.com/2013/04/23/did-australia-ban-small-br...
I don't think the problem is that young people are finding porn on the internet. There is a problem, though, and it has to deal with psychological warfare on attention
Formats like shorts or news feeds to you algorithmically with zero lag are the problem. It makes for the zombification of decision making. Endless content breaks people down precisely because it's endless. I think if you add age verification but don't root out the endless nature, you will not really help any young person or adult.
When you look at people with unhealthy content addiction, it is always a case of excess and not necessarily type of content. There are pedophiles but honestly, we have had that throughout all time, with and without the internet. But the endless feeding of the next video robs people of the ability to stop by mentally addiciting them to see just one more. And because content is not really infinite, endless feeds invariably will feed people with porn, eating disorders, and other "crap" in quantities that slowly erode people.
There was just another article on HN about how Snapchat is harming children at an industrial scale. Not just giving them access to drugs, violence, pedophiles, and extortionists, but actively connecting them with those accounts. Kids have died from fentanyl or committed suicide from bullying and harassment.
Porn addiction is bad but it seems there are even worse things happening.
minor correction, it was about tiktok. and although it's a long read it's worth understanding just how absurd things have gotten.
https://www.afterbabel.com/p/industrial-scale-harm-tiktok
By the time I got there, dang updated the link to the same publication's article on Snapchat, since the TikTok one had been discussed already.
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> 2 straight generations of porn addicts
Different types of pornography have different dangers and all of it has been broadly available since before the internet.
> And then you have shit like watchpeopledie.tv.
I think there's a broad gulf between these activities and I don't think they impact the brain in the same way as pornography. This type of violence can be found in movies and video games which also clearly predate the internet.
> Children should have been banned from the internet a decade ago
I'd rather pornography be banned.
> I'm completely willing to give up some privacy to make it happen.
Why? It should be incumbent on the people profiting from this activity to police it not on me to give up constitutional rights to protect their margins.
>Different types of pornography have different dangers and all of it has been broadly available since before the internet.
A child couldn't get hardcore porn as easily as they can now, one google search away. Or just on their reddit/X feed.
>This type of violence can be found in movies and video games
Yeah but those aren't real. Videos of real death and violence being available to kids is worse than video games where fake characters die.
>I'd rather pornography be banned.
Adults are free to fuck themselves up, kids are not. We don't say "well I'd rather alcohol be banned" when it comes to kids not being allowed alcohol.
>Why?
Because I'd rather live in a society with less privacy than a degenerate society full of mentally ill shutins that don't have sex.
>to protect their margins.
Fuck margins, I care about the overall wellbeing of society.
> The social media company requires users to take a selfie video on their phone and uses AI to estimate the person's age.
What I did not see in this article was anything about how AI can tell a 13 year old from a 12.9 year old with confidence. This seems unlikely to me.
I agree with the article's implication that websites will now want a scan of everyone's faces forever. Their insistence that they won't store the face scans is like one those cute lies that kids tell, and adults aren't fooled by. Either you're outright lying, or you're using the loophole of not storing the image, but rather storing a set of numbers, drived from the image, which act as a unique fingerprint. Or, you're sending it to a third party for storage. Or something like that. But you're definitely keeping track of everyone's faces, don't try to pull a fast one on me young lady, I've been around the block before.
I would like to think there there is a solution that can be engineered, in which a service is able to verify that a user is above an appropriate age threshold, while maintaining privacy safeguards, including, where relevant, for the age-protected service not to be privy to the identity of the user, and for the age verification service to not be privy to the nature of the age-protected service being accessed.
In this day and age, of crypto, and certificates, and sso, and all that gubbins, it's surely only a matter of deciding that this is a problem that needs solving.
(Unless the problem really isn't the age of the user at all, but harvesting information...)
Unfortunately, no amount of blockchains and zero-knowledge proofs can compensate for the fact that 15 year old has a 18 year old friend. Or the fact that other 15 year old looks older than some 20 year olds. Or the fact that other 15 year old's dad often leaves his wallet, with his driving license, unattended.
Over the next five years, you can look forward to a steady trickle of stories in the press about shocked parents finding that somehow their 15 year old passed a one-time over-18 age verification check.
The fact compliance is nigh-impossible to comply with is intentional - the law is designed that way, because the intent is to deliver a porn ban while sidestepping free speech objections.
None of these things are a problem.
> 15 year old has a 18 year old friend
Adults can be prosecuted for helping minors circumvent the checks.
> Or the fact that other 15 year old looks older than some 20 year olds
See Australian approach. Site can verify you and both government and site don't know who you are. No need for photo.
> shocked parents finding
No law is a replacement for bad parenting. But good parenting is easier with the right laws.
> a one-time over-18 age verification check
it can happen more than once non intrusively.
> Adults can be prosecuted for helping minors circumvent the checks.
If you skip the need for privacy protection and just retain a copy of the photo ID used to verify the account? Then sure.
But if age is validated in a way that preserves privacy? Then there's no evidence linking the adult to the crime.
"No evidence" doesn't make it not a crime. Most people wouldn't do crime even if no one found out.
And once that adult committed a crime anyone involved can report it, including that minor friend. It's blackmail material. Better not fall out!
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By any means?
Yes.
A humorous age verification quiz for the Leisure Suit Larry game.
My boss is a. a jerk. b. a total jerk. c. an absolute total jerk. d. responsible for my paycheck. Correct answer: d.
dated, and very politically incorrect...
https://allowe.com/games/larry/tips-manuals/lsl1-age-quiz.ht...
(scroll down past answers to questions and answers)
I'd say all of the above but my boss is very forgiving of me. It helps that I am self-employed.
There is a solution and I am the developer:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40298552#40298804
Talking about it or explaining it is like pulling teeth; generally just a thorough misunderstanding of the notion....even though cryptographic certificates make the modern internet possible.
How are the certificates issued?
https://certisfy.com/partnership/
Any number of entities can be certificate issuers, as long as they can be deemed sufficiently trustworthy. Schools, places of worship, police, notary, employers...they can all play the role of trust anchor.
This just moves the issue elsewhere though. I do agree that adding an extra step of having to notarize documents will filter many people.
But outside of this if someone is determined they can issue fake documents at this level of provenance.
Drivers licenses for example you can buy the printing machine and blanks (illegally) so you actually need to check the registrar in that location.
interesting idea...
how do you handle revocation when people inevitably start certifying false information?
The app allows for self-revocation using the private key or a revocation code given when cert is issued, this is useful if a certificate is compromised...there is also an admin interface a trust anchor can use to revoke certificates they issue, a rogue trust anchor chain can also be revoked.
how does rogue anchor revocation in practice?
say if an anchor has issued tens of thousands of legitimate ids, and also ten to career fraudsters who gave them $10000 each
as you've outsourced the trust you have no idea which are legitimate, and if you revoke the lot you're going to have a lot of refunds to issue
(ultimately this is why countries only allow people who can be banned from their profession to certify documents)
Each trust anchor gets issued a single certificate that can have delegation ability, ie the ability to issue new trust anchor certs to others.
So if say a UPS store is issued a cert and they go rogue, we can just revoke the trust anchor cert that was issued to the store, all certs issued further down are also automatically revoked...the revocation check is done either in the app or in the case of a third-party performing the verification they will recognize that there is a cert on the issuing chain that is revoked and reject the cert.
This is how TLS certs are handled too, if a CA goes rogue, all certs issued by that CA are revoked once the CA's root cert is revoked.
As for refund issues, that's a problem for the cert issuer to deal with.
> As for refund issues, that's a problem for the cert issuer to deal with.
no, it's your problem, as it's your brand slapped over everything, and now you've got tens of thousands of innocent people angry that you've revoked the IDs they paid for in good faith
this would translate into lawsuits, against you
When you say that “we” can revoke, I assume you are talking about your company - the app. What sort of resources would be required to constantly audit the potentially thousands or hundreds of thousands of certificate issuers on your platform?
Who is the entity that has the ability to revoke the certificate?
I don’t get it. What is to prevent a 9 year-old from buying a certificate and using it?
This video addresses that:
https://youtu.be/92gu4mxHmTY
All certificates are cryptographically linked to an identity-anchor certificate, meaning buying a certificate would require the seller reveal the private key tied to the identity-anchor certificate, a tall order I would argue.
In the case of stolen identity certificates, they can be revoked thus making their illegitimate utility limited.
So an older brother gives his sibling a key.
Why would your design prevent that?
We can still have laws, e.g. that using someone else's certificate (or knowingly giving them your certificate) would constitute fraud.
We have laws against kids buying alcohol, even though kids can (and do) try to get adults to buy them booze, but I don't think that's a good reason to say we shouldn't have laws against kids drinking.
Sure, I agree. But we're talking about a claim by GP that his cyrpographic system prevents this behavior.
If it can't, it's no better than a button that says "I'm 18"
Here is my solution:
Provide easy to use on-device content filtering tools so parents can easily control what their children can access (there are a few ways to do this through law, like requiring it from OS providers or ISPs or just writing these tools directly).
To make it easy, Discord can provide their services under both adults.discord.com and minors.discord.com so parents can more easily block only the 18+ version of Discord.
Require personal responsibility from parents to decide what is appropriate for their child.
Already exists in a lot of places. German national IDs for like 10 years or something like that have an eID feature. It's basically just a public/private key signing scheme. The government and a bunch of other trusted public providers are able to issue identities, you can sign transactions with them or verify your age to commercial service providers, or transfer some data if that's required with your consent. (https://www.personalausweisportal.de/Webs/PA/EN/citizens/ele...)
Estonia and South Korea I think also have similar features on their IDs, it's already a solved problem.
The problem is who pays to maintain the system. There are systems that allow you to share your age anonymously (among other things) and they’re already widely used in Europe but the system knows what you’re using it for since the second party pays for the information, and some accounting info is needed for the billing. It would be completely illegal for the system to use that info for anything else though.
> a service is able to verify that a user is above an appropriate age threshold, while maintaining privacy safeguards
AFAIU, the German electronic ID card ("elektronischer Personalausweis") can do this, but it is not widely implemented, and of course geographically limited.
The problem is that it is much easier to implement such a check in a way which lets the verification service link the site to the user, with no discernable difference to the end user
e: I get the same feeling as I do reading about key escrow schemes in the Clipper chip vein, where nobody claimed it was theoretically impossible to have a "spare key" only accessible by warrant, but the resulting complexity and new threat classes [1] just was not worth it
[1] https://academiccommons.columbia.edu/doi/10.7916/D8GM8F2W
Transferring your age and a way to verify it to any third party is by definition a privacy violation. Doing so in a safe way is literally impossible since I don't want to share that information in the first place.
I feel like you could, theoretically, have a service that has an ID (as drivers license ID), perhaps operated by your government, that has an API and a notion of an ephemeral identifier that can be used to provide a digital attestation of some property without exposing that property or the exact identity of the person. It would require that the attestation system is trusted by all parties though, which is I think the core problem.
Wouldn't this require the API provider to know that tbe citizen is connecting to the app? Grindr users might be squeamish about letting the current US admin know about that.
ICAO compliant ID cards (aka passports) and many national ID cards already are smartcards with powerful crypto processors.
Hand out certificates to porn, gambling or whatever sites, that allow requesting the age of a person from the ID card, have the user touch their ID card with their phone to sign a challenge with its key (and certificate signed by the government), that's it.
Government doesn't know what porn site you visited, and porn site only gets the age.
Not necessarily, you can define the protocol such that it's all done with opaque IDs instead of identifying info.
This is not only theoretical, the German ID card ("elektronischer Personalausweis") can do exactly this.
Do you feel this way when you enter credit card information when making a purchase online?
Yes.
> Transferring your age and a way to verify it to any third party is by definition a privacy violation.
No it's not. Unless...
> Doing so in a safe way is literally impossible since I don't want to share that information in the first place.
...well then it is.
But it's not constructive to claim that proving your age to someone is by definition a privacy violation. If someone wants to prove their age to someone, then that's a private communication that they're entitled to choose to make.
It is true that if technology to achieve this becomes commonplace, then those not wishing to do so may find it impractical to maintain their privacy in this respect. But that doesn't give others the right to obstruct people who wish to communicate in this way.
Crypto comes up every time this topic is discussed but it misses the point.
The hard part is identifying with reasonable accuracy that the person sitting in front of the device is who they say they are, or a certain age.
Offloading everything to crypto primitive moves the problem into a different domain where the check is verifying you have access to some crypto primitive, not that it’s actually you or yours.
Any fully privacy-preserving crypto solution would have the flaw that verifications could be sold online. Someone turns 21 (or other age) and begins selling verifications with their ID because there is no attachment back to them, and therefore no consequences. So people then start imaging extra layers that would protect against this, which start eroding the privacy because you’re returning back to central verification of something.
That sounds like a reasonable compromise to me, it's already what happens with ID for pubs etc so I don't think it's much different to the status quo
I'm in the UK and discord has asked me to complete this check (but I haven't, yet). I can still use discord just fine, it just won't let me view any media it considers "adult".
I am an adult but refuse to let them scan my face as a matter of principle, so I've considered using https://github.com/hacksider/Deep-Live-Cam to "deepfake" myself and perform the verification while wearing a fake face. If it works, I'll write about it.
Why not leave the platform and actually send a message?
The platform isn't the problem, it's the legislation.
I suspect the endgame of this campaign is to have mandatory ID checks for social media. Police would have access to these upon court orders etc and be able to easily prosecute anyone who posts 'harmful' content online.
<tin-foil-hat> ultimately, i think the endgame is to require government ID in order to access internet services in general, a la ender's game. </tin-foil-hat>
Many countries (including in the EU) already required ID to use a SIM card: https://forestvpn.com/blog/news/countries-sim-card-registrat...
Funnily enough, when the Philippines did this, it was decried as a violation of human rights [1]. But usually, media are so silent on such things I'd call them complicit. One already cannot so much as rent a hotel room anywhere in the EU without showing government ID.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SIM_Registration_Act
I'm in NL and had my wallet fall out of my pocket once at one of the bigger train stations. I realized within ~5 minutes, and basically as soon as I realized got a call from an anonymous number. It was the police, who had found my wallet with my ID in it and were calling me to inform me about it. Luckily I was still at the station and could just meet them and got my wallet back.
I couldn't help but feel extremely creeped out, and my girlfriend still to this day doesn't understand why I felt uneasy about it. "But you got your wallet back!", she says. "Of course the police know your number!". Having 0 privacy has been completely normalized, and I'm afraid we're far too late to do anything about it.
To be fair, your phone number has never been considered private information. You can open any phone book and find that info. They likely just looked up your name in the population register.
yup, and this gives the ability to look up per-citizen location data.
sidebar: i've been trying to raise awareness about "joint communications and sensing" wherever i can lately; many companies involved in 6G standardization (esp. nokia) want the 6G network to use mmWave radio to create realtime 3d environment mappings, aka a "digital twin" of the physical world, aka a surveillance state's wet dream.
https://www.nokia.com/blog/building-a-network-with-a-sixth-s...
Not only rent, but in Spain there is a central database where your details are sucked in real time when you rent a room or a car, and no oversight how this data is used.
You can buy (and top up) a SIM card without an ID in the EU.
That depends on a country and for once there is no visible pattern or usual suspects in who requires it or not
Please walk me from scratch how you would access the internet on your own right now without any form of Government ID
Walk into a coffee shop. Look at the wifi password, usually a sign near the register. Log onto the wifi network using the wifi password. Browse in peace.
Is this sort of flow normal elsewhere? It's certainly normal where I live.
???
I'd walk to a local library and use their wifi. Or walk to a local McDonalds and use their wifi. Or walk to a friend's/family's house and use their wifi. Or...
I know right. There are entire business models where “comfortable place to connect to WiFi” is an important part of the strategy.
I'm in the US. I do have government ID, but I don't recall showing it to my network providers. Certainly, some telcos want a social security number to run credit; but that's often avoidable. I'm pretty sure could also wander down to an electronics store (maybe a grocery/drug store too) and pick up a prepaid cell phone with internet access, pay for it with cash, and get that going without government id in the US. It's a bit of a hike to get to the electronics store from where I live, but I can get part of the way there with the bus that takes cash too.
Prepaid SIM from one of the EU countries that still has them, such as Denmark. Purchase in cash from a kiosk.
Prepaid 5G phone bought with cash and activated by dialing 611.
That would not be unprecedented: The first major change by the Lee Myung-bak government was to require websites with over 100,000 daily visitors to make their users register their real name and social security numbers. - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_censorship_in_South_K...
I'm afraid the endgame is, all this activity tied to real identities will be repeatedly leaked, get used for blackmail, and by foreign intelligence agencies.
Followed by governments basically shrugging.
Which would kill social media. The cherry-picked tech giant iterations anyway.
They already have this in China and Korea. Hasn't stopped people from using social media.
The West isn't China and Korea. They can't opt out of authoritarian-state surveillance and great firewall, whereas we have options more amenable to privacy, even if you want to quibble that they aren't perfect.
Also the fact that UK and Australia are kind of backwards on online privacy.
That aside, this is targeted. The fediverse and vbulletin forums of old, even reddit, are all social media but will never require facial recognition. If they do, then far worse things are happening to freedom.
> The West isn't China and Korea.
They have this in South Korea: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43716932
This law was struck down for violating the constitution.
Korea is a democratic Western nation, they host US military bases and fly F-35. Korean made phones are trusted enough that American special forces use it for some parachute jumpings.
Since when is East Asia considered "Western"?
I live in a Japanese city with a US military base and trust me, the only Western thing here are the few bars that cater to them.
Among the many definitions of "Western" is the original sense of "First World", encompassing members of the geopolitical bloc centered historically on the US.
Sources? It is the first time I see that definition, and sorry but it doesn't make any sense.
If the world splits into a China bloc and an American bloc, Japan would almost certainly join the American bloc, right?
I don't think it would kill social media, but it'd make it more similar to Chinese social media. Essentially impossible to use for protests or criticism of things the government doesn't critiques on.
Why? People make social media accounts with their real name and face already. I doubt it would have any effect.
It ties real world ultraviolence with social media. It won't kill social media, just make it materially toxic. IIUC South Korea in 2000s had exactly this, online dispute stories coming from there were much worse than anything I had heard locally.
Exactly, targeting children with their parents credit cards is a profitable business.
See e.g. "Ohio social media parental notification act"
(mind you, ID/age requirements for access to adult content go way, way back in all countries)
They already have access to this.
If you run a social media site, then you have an API that allows government access to your data.
You need to ask what would Trump do. Court order probably skipped, or from a friendly judge.
Good!
Why is the Internet any different than say, a porn or liquor store? Why are we so fuckin allergic to verification? I'll tell ya why- money. Don't pretend it's privacy.
there two false equivalencies in your argument, as presented in response to GP:
1. ID checks are not the same as age verification.
2. a social media website is not the same as a porn website.
if you take the stance that social media sites should require ID verification, then i would furthermore point out that this is likely to impact any website that has a space for users to add public feedback, even forums and blogs.
It's about power not money. The Chinese social media companies who do this are plenty profitable.
How about we don't pretend there's only 1 single facet to this issue, no matter which you think it is?
Money? Every big ad tech company would love to be provided with all that juicy verification data.
If they could make more money with verification than without then we would already have it.
But they do : haven't you noticed the rise of "login to do X" over the last few decades ?
Like many other people here, I'm wondering what we'll end up having to do at work do deal with this. We don't have the resources to put a full time person on this, and the UK's not a huge market.
For unrelated reasons, we already have to implement geoblocking, and we're also intentionally VPN friendly. I suspect most services are that way, so the easy way out is to add "UK" to the same list as North Korea and Iran.
Anyway, if enough services implement this that way, I'd expect the UK to start repealing laws like this (or to start seeing China-level adoption of VPN services). That limits the blast radius to services actually based in the UK. Those are already dropping like flies, sadly.
I hope the rest of the international tech community applies this sort of pressure. Strength in numbers is about all we have left these days.
> I suspect most services are that way
I don't know actual numbers, but I gave up using VPN by default because in my experience they definitely are not.
You'll likely end up paying someone else to do it for you.
I'm reasonably sure we will not. Dealing with an integration like that means not shipping some other feature to the rest of the planet. The marginal gain of accepting UK users is lower than the marginal gain of increasing addressable market everywhere else.
…as will everyone else. The same company. Who will have all that data in one convenient database just waiting to be leaked.
This feels more like spying on everyone than making the internet safe for kids. Big companies and the government are already tracking what we do online. This just seems like a further reduction of our privacy on the internet.
Parents need to be more involved in what their kids do online, just like in real life. Grounding them isn't enough. We wouldn't let them wander into dangerous places, so we shouldn't let them wander online without adult supervision. Also, parents need to prepare for having tough conversations, like what pornography or gambling is.
Online companies need to really work to make their sites safe for everyone. They should act like they own a mall. If they let bad stuff in (like pornography, scams, gambling), it hurts their reputation, and people will leave.
Instead of banning everything, because some people take pleasure in those activities, maybe there should be separate online spaces for adults who want that kind of content, like how cities have specific areas for adult businesses. This way, it would be easier to restrict children's access to some hardcore stuff.
If we all put some effort into figuring out easy and privacy-friendly solutions to safeguard kids, we can rely on simple principles. For example, if you want to sell toys to kids, you shouldn't sell adult toys under the same roof (same domain) or have posters that can affect young minds.
> This feels more like spying on everyone than making the internet safe for kids.
That’s always been the point. “Protecting children online” is the trojan horse against privacy, and apart from a few of us nerds, everyone is very much in favour of these laws. The fight for privacy is pretty much lost against such a weapon.
I hear you on the 'Trojan horse,' but I'm still hopeful! We can vote with our money and maybe even crowdfund platforms that truly respect our privacy and time. We already have paid, privacy-friendly options for things like email and messaging, perhaps a Discord altrenative isn't too far fetched!
Of all the terrible, dumb-headed ideas. I would not want my kids scanning their face into who-knows-what third party's service.
I already decline this technology when finance companies want to use it for eg. KYC verification ("Sorry, I don't own a smartphone compatible with your tool. If you want my business you'll have to find another way. Happy to provide a notarized declaration if you'd like" has worked in the past).
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This response is a textbook example of a manipulative false dichotomy that poisons legitimate discourse about child safety online.
Presenting the only options as either "scan your child's biometric data into opaque systems" or "let your child be groomed and/or get addicted to porn" is intellectually dishonest and deliberately inflammatory. It's a rhetorical trap designed to shame parents with valid privacy concerns into compliance.
Privacy rights and child protection are not mutually exclusive. Numerous approaches exist that don't require harvesting biometric data from minors, from improved content filtering and educational initiatives to parental controls and account verification methods that don't rely on facial scanning. Corporations are simply implementing the most convenient (for them) solution that technically satisfies regulatory requirements while creating new data streams they can potentially monetize.
What's actually happening here is deeply troubling: we're normalizing the idea that children must surrender their biometric data as the price of digital participation. This creates permanent digital identifiers that could follow them throughout their lives, with their data stored in systems with questionable security, unclear retention policies, and potential for future misuse.
Weaponizing the fear of child exploitation to silence legitimate concerns about corporate overreach isn't just manipulative - it's morally reprehensible. Framing opposition to biometric surveillance as being pro-exploitation deliberately poisons the well against anyone who questions these systems.
We can and must develop approaches that protect children without surrendering their fundamental privacy rights. Pretending these are our only two options isn't just wrong - it actively undermines the nuanced conversation we should be having about both child safety and digital rights.
>from improved content filtering and educational initiatives to parental controls
Parents can do all of that now. They are not doing so. Time to actually cut the kids off from porn. Fuck their privacy rights. Not being a porn addicted gooner at 14 is infinitely more important. Simple as.
Frankly I'm scared by governments and corporations going "papers, please" for people to be allowed to access the Internet. On top of endangering privacy by tying pseudonymous online interactions to real-life ID and biometrics, attempts to block under-18 people from finding information or interacting online will only amplify how society regards them as not having rights. This will isolate people (especially gay and trans teens) living with abusive parents from finding support networks, and prevent them from learning (by talking to friends in different situations) that being beaten or emotionally put down by parents is abusive and traumatizing.
I know all too well that when you grow up you're psychologically wired to assume that the way the parents treated you is normal, and if they harmed you then you deserve to be hurt. I've made friends with and assisted many teens and young adults in unsafe living situations (and talked to people who grew up in fundamentalist religions and cults), and they're dependent on online support networks to recognize and cope with abuse, get advice, and seek help in dangerous situations.
To add to this, some people might be left out because companies are not financially incentivised to verify them.
In Germany, immigrants struggle to open a bank account because the banks require documents that they don't have (and that they can hardly get with a bank account). Russian, Iranian and Syrian citizens have a particularly hard time finding a bank that works for them. The most common video document verification system does not support some Indian passports, among others.
To banks, leaving these people out is a rational business decision. The same thing will happen to those deemed too risky or too much hassle by the internet's gatekeepers, but at a much bigger scale.
What is it about some Indian passports? Do they need to have a biometric chip to work? (just checked, and those were introduced in 2024)
Banks worldwide regularly refuse service to people who have US citizenship, so I don't think you're far off on that point.
If I remember correctly there are a dozen variants, and most of them lack a basic feature. I think it's either a signature, latin letters or biometric features.
US citizens also had issues due to FATCA requirements although it seems to have improved since they were introduced.
Is banking not deemed a right in Germany ? Aren't there "banks of last resort" ? Or does that right somehow not extend to non-EU refugees ?
Yes, sort of. You can always force it, but it takes time, resources and knowledge that recent immigrants lack. Usually they get funneled towards more immigrant-friendly banks.
> prevent them from learning (by talking to friends in different situations) that being beaten or emotionally put down by parents is abusive and traumatizing.
parents didn't know I'm gay, but they did control all flow of information (before social media) by controlling all movements outside school.
it took me until my thirties to realise how deeply abusive my childhood was. the only hints I had, in hindsight, was the first Christmas at uni, everybody was excited to go home and I couldn't fathom why on earth anybody would want to. I dismissed it as an oddity at the time.
It's interesting how the "features" which many claim IRC is missing turn out to be a huge liability. Adult content is applied via image hosting, video/audio chat, etc. All things IRC lacks.
There is a definitely a textual privilege in media. You can write things in books that would never be allowed to be depicted in video. Even in Game of Thrones, Ramsay's sadism had to be sanitised a little for live action.
This is doubly so if your book is historic in some sense. Still find it crazy that Marquis de Sade's stuff is legal.
> All things IRC lacks.
IRC gives you all the features of a normal client but you've got to create them yourself which itself is a dark-art that's been squandered by today's gimmicky services.
Just because it doesn't have a fancy UI to present the media doesn't mean it can't.
Encode to base64 and post in channel. Decode it back to normal format... IRC is excellent for large amounts of stringed text.
You could even stream the movie in base64 and have a client that captures the data stream and decodes.
The only thing that IRC lacks is a feature to recall conversations where if someone isn't present. But if you're someone who needs that host a bouncer or something.
I personally enjoy entering a blank slate.
sending any reasonably sized jpeg as base64 text will take you several minutes with typical server flood protection
You could chunk it, compress it with gzip. Usenet uses yENC.
Public servers sure, may have protections in place but your own server and with IRCd's being easy configurable makes it non-trivial.
And this is somehow better than a "gimmicky" service which handles images natively? Interesting.
Yes, because you don't need to fork $$$ to enable the basic "native" features. Not forgetting the advertising, having your data mined and any other miscreant features that they decide to implement.
You buy Nitro within discord and you still have advertisements.
I think regulation could be done better...
Let's assign one or ideally two adults to each underage child, who are aware of the childs real age and can intervene and prevent the child from installing discord (and any other social media) in the first place or confiscate the equipment if the child breaks the rules. They could also regulate many other thing in the childs life, not just social network use.
> confiscate the equipment if the child breaks the rules.
Even you acknowledge this plan is flawed and that the child can break the rules. And it's not that difficult. After all, confiscating the equipment assumes that they know about the equipment and that they can legally seize the equipment. Third parties are involved, and doing what you suggests would land these adults in prison.
I know you thought you were being smart with your suggestion that maybe parents should be parents, but really you just highlighted your ignorance.
The goal of these laws are to prevent children from accessing content. If some adults get caught in the crossfire, they don't care.
Now, I'm not defending these laws or saying anything about them. What I am saying is that your "suggestion" is flawed from the point of view of those proposing these laws.
These are not 20 something college students with jobs and rented apartments, doing stuff without their parents knowing.
These are kids younger than 13, they don't have jobs, they live with their parents, no internet/data planes outside of control of their parents, no nothing.
The goal of these laws is to get ID checks on social networks for everyone, so the governments know who the "loud ones" (against whatever political cause) are. Using small kids as a reason to do so is a typical modus operandi to achieve that.
Yes, those "one or two adults" I meantioned should be the parents, and yes, parents can legally confiscate their kids phones if they're doing something stupid online. They can also check what the kid is doing online.
If a 12yo kid (or younger) can somehow obtain money and a phone and keep it hidden from their parents, that kid will also be able to avoid such checks by vpn-ing (or using a proxy) to some non-UK country, where those checks won't be mandatory. This again is solved by the parents actually parenting, again... it's kids younger than 13, at that age, parents can and should have total control of their child.
It has to be acknowledged that some things, like social media and pornography, are harmful to children. "Maintain the status quo" isn't an attractive response to that. ID laws are not a perfect solution, maybe not even a good one.
You undermine your whole point by pretending VPNs are going to make the whole thing moot. Why do you care when you won't be affected because you can just use a VPN? Why does pornhub make such a fuss when their users can just use a VPN? Because in reality, introducing that much friction will stop a lot of people.
ID laws are the end goal, the children and porn are just an excuse to get ID laws, which would give the governments a lot more control over the internet and social networks. Just imagin someone like Trump/Ursula requesting full list of names of everyone criticizing them on eg reddit (because reddit has porn, and you'd have to show your ID to be able to use reddit, because of your reasons). This is objectively bad for the people and for the internet.
Parenting is a good solution, not just giving the kids tablets so they stay quiet. Yes, kids are curious, kids will still find porn, ID laws or not, but parents should teach them and limit their access, not IDs on discord.
And of course porhub is making a fuss, are you, an (assuming an) adult going to go to your telco with your ID and say "hi, i'm John, i want to watch porn and jerk off, but you need to see my ID first"? Or will you find some other alternatives, where pornhub doesn't earn that money?
> Parenting is a good solution
Yes, to most of society's problems. Yet they persist.
So? They equally persist in the face of endless laws, I don't see how it follows that piling more laws on top is a better idea than deferring this to parents.
Parenting was the answer to kids not wearing their seatbelt, and getting maimed and killed by very survivable accidents. Simply teach your kids to wear their seatbelt. Yet seatbelt laws reduced fatality (8%) and serious injury (9%) in kids. It follows that "piling" such a law "on top", one that people decried as unconstitutional, was a better idea than deferring to the parents.
https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w13408/w134...
> It has to be acknowledged that some things, like social media and pornography, are harmful to children.
It only "has to be acknowledged" if it's true. The "evidence" for either of those, but especially social media (as if that were even a single well defined thing to begin with) is pretty damned shakey. Nobody "has to acknowledge" your personal prejudices.
You've convinced me that pornography is, in fact, beneficial to children. What was I thinking? Thank you for your reply.
Nice try, but the burden of proof for your assertion is still on you.
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>These are kids younger than 13, they don't have jobs, they live with their parents, no internet/data planes outside of control of their parents, no nothing.
Yes they do. If all that is preventing them from having a job is depending upon their parents to stop that behavior, there are enough parents who aren't going to intervene that I will reasonably be able to staff my coal mine. Sure, the parents should do a better job, but history shows us that many don't (be it choice or be it other factors). So are we willing for the kids of those parents to effectively be treated as adults by everyone else or are we going to keep laws that protect kids even when parents aren't doing so?
> The goal of these laws is to get ID checks on social networks for everyone
The UK government is nowhere near competent enough to be that stealthy.
Also, it already has this ability already. Identifying a person on social media is pretty simple, All it takes is a request to the media company, and to the ISP/phone provider.
> If a 12yo kid (or younger) can somehow obtain money and a phone and keep it hidden from their parents,
Then you have bigger fucking problems. If a 12yo can do that, in your home and not let on, then you've raised a fucking super spy.
> parents can and should have total control of their child.
Like how? constantly check their phones? that's just invasion of privacy, your kid's never going to trust you. Does the average parent know how to do that, will they enforce non-disappearing messages?
Allowing kids to be social, safe and not utter little shits online is fucking hard. I'm really not sure how we can make sure kids aren't being manipulated by fucking tiktok rage bait. (I mean adults are too, but thats a different problem)
You keep saying it's flawed but I don't see how or why.
What exactly is wrong with the idea that parents should look after their kids?
In the eyes of people who propose laws like this, what's wrong is that that wouldn't let them forcibly impose their values on everyone else.
So, what will be the proper technology to apply here? I have no problem with verification of my age (not the date of birth, just the boolean, >18yo), but I do have a problem with sending any party a picture of my face or my passport.
Discord got me to do this about 2 weeks ago (I'm Australian so they seem to be rolling this out here too), at least for the face scan the privacy policy said it occurred on device, so if you believe that you're not sending anyone images of your face.
Fascinating. If it really isn't sending the face images, spoofing the verification could be as simple as returning a boolean to some API.
we don't store your face [just the unique biometric metadata weights]. a computer doesn't need a picture to identify you, just store the numbers and you can legally claim you aren't "storing the picture".
Maybe someone like apple will make a "verify user looks over 18" neural net model they can run in the secure enclave of iphones, which sends some kind of "age verified by apple" token to websites without disclosing your identity outside your own device?
Having said that, I bet such a mechanism will prove easy to fake (if only by pointing the phone at grandad), and therefore be disallowed by governments in short order in favour of something that doesn't protect the user as much.
Apple lets you add IDs to your wallet in some jurisdictions. I wouldn't be surprised if they eventually introduce a system-wide age verification service and let developers piggyback on it with safe, privacy-preserving assertions.
This is a social problem and as such cannot be solved with technology. You would have to make social media so uncool that young people didn't use it. One of the easiest ways of doing this is associating it with old people. Therefore the fastest way to get young people off discord is to get geriatric on discord and en-mass.
Underage drinking is a social problem.
The issue isn't social media is bad, the issue is that social media has no effective moderation. If an adult is hanging out at the park talking to minors, thats easy to spot and correct. there is a strong social pressure to not let that happen.
The problem is when moving to chat, not only is a mobile private to the child, there are no safe mechanisms to allow parents to "spot the nonce". Moreover the kid has no real way of knowing they are adults until it's too late.
Its a difficult problem, doing nothing is going to ruin a generation (or already has), doing it half arsed is going to undermine privacy and not solve the problem.
OIDC4VCI(OpenID for Verifiable Credential Issuance)[0] is what I think has the most promise.
My understanding is that an issuer can issue a Credential that asserts the claims (eg, you are over 18) that you make to another entity/website and that entity can verify those claims you present to them (Verifiable Credentials).
For example, if we can get banks - who already know our full identity - to become Credential Issuers, then we can use bank provided Credentials (that assert we are over 18) to present to websites and services that require age verification WITHOUT having to give them all of our personal information. As long the site or service trust that Issuer.
[0] https://openid.net/specs/openid-4-verifiable-credential-issu...
You mean without giving them any personal information other than where to find your bank account.
It doesn't have to be your bank if you don't want, have the DMV be an issuer or your car insurance, or health insurance or cell phone service etc.
You choose which one you want you want to have assert your claim. They already know you. It's a better option than giving every random website or service all of your info and biometric data so you can 'like' memes or bother random people with DM's or whatever people do on those types of social media platforms
For Australia (who will need something like this this year per current legislation), the only sensible location is the government my.gov.au central service portal. None of the other services have an incentive or requirement to do it (Medicare, drivers license issuers, Centrelink). And given the scope of the rollout (all major social media, as nominated by the gov), it would need almost all of the banks or super funds to implement the same API for the project to not fail.
But I don't think anyone has told my.gov.au that needs to happen, so we are either going to get some proprietary solution from social media companies (tricky, since they will need to defend it in court as they are liable, but maybe discord saying 'best we can do sorry' or 'better than our competitors' will let them off). Or just switching off the services for a few days until the politicians panic about the blow back and defer the rollout until some committee can come up with a workable solution (ideally in the next election cycle).
I think the post office could suffice in most countries for this.
Or server operators could just implement RTA headers and put the liability on apps/devices to look for the header.
> It doesn't have to be your bank if you don't want,
"If I don't want"? I would get no choice at all about who it would be, because in practice the Web site (or whoever could put pressure on the Web site) would have all of the control over which issuers were or were not acceptable. Don't pretend that actual users would have any meaningful control over anything.
The sites, even as a (almost certainly captured and corrupt) consortium, wouldn't do the work to accept just any potentially trustworthy issuer. In fact they probably wouldn't even do the work to keep track of all the national governments that might issue such credentials. Nor would you get all national governments, all banks, all insurance companies, all cell phone carriers, all neighborhood busibodies, or all of any sufficiently large class of potentially "trustable" issuers to agree to become issuers. At least not without their attaching a whole bunch of unacceptable strings to the deal. What's in it for them, exactly?
Coordinating on certifying authorities is the fatal adoption problem for all systems like that. Even the X.509 CA infrastructure we have only exists because (a) it was set up when there were a lot fewer vested interests, and (b) it's very low effort, because it doesn't actually verify any facts at all about the certificate holder. The idea that you could get around that adoption problem while simultaneously preserving anything like privacy is just silly.
Furthermore, unless you use an attestation protocol that's zero-knowledge in the identity of the certifier, which OpenID is unlikely ever to specify, nor are either issuers or relying parties going to adopt this side of the heat death of the Universe, you as a user are still always giving up some information about your association with something.
Worse, even if you could in fact get such a system adopted, it would be a bad thing. Even if it worked. Even if it were totally zero-knowledge. Infrastructure built for "of adult age" verification will get applied to services that actively should not have such verification. Even more certainly, it will extended and used to discriminate on plenty of other characteristics. That discrimination will be imposed on services by governments and other pressuring entities, regardless of their own views about who they want to exclude.
And some of it will be discrimination you will think is wrong.
It's not a good idea to go around building infrastructure like that even if you can get it adopted and even if it's done "right". Which again no non-zero-knowledge system can claim to be anyway.
Counterproposal: "those types of social media platforms" get zero information about me other than the username I use to log in, which may or may not resemble the username I use anywhere else. Same for every other user. The false "need" to do age verification gets thrown on the trash heap where it belongs.
> Don't pretend that actual users would have any meaningful control over anything.
You do have control, you just don't like the option of control you have which is to forgo those social/porn sites altogether. You want to dictate to businesses and the government how to run their business or country laws that you want to use. And you can sometimes, if you get a large enough group to forgo their services over their policies, or to vote in the right people for your cause. You can also wail about it til the cows come home, or you can try and find working solutions that will BOTH guard privacy and allows a business to keep providing services by complying with laws that allow them to be in business in the first place. It's not black & white and it's not instant, it's incremental steps and it's slow and sometimes requires minor compromise that comes with being an Adult and finding Adult solutions. I'm not interested in dreaming about some fantasy of a libertarian Seasteading world. Been there done that got the t-shirt. I prefer finding solutions in the real world now.
> The false "need" to do age verification gets thrown on the trash heap where it belongs.
This is something you should send to your government that makes those rules. The businesses (that want to stay in compliance) follow the government rules given to them. The ones that ask for more are not forcing you against your will to be a part of it.
I get you don't like it, I don't care for it either; but again, you can throw a fit and pout about it - or try tofind workable solutions. This is what I choose to do even though I made the choice long ago to not use social media (except for this site and GitHub for work if you want to count those) porn sites or gambling or other nonsense. So all these things don't affect me since I don't go around signing up for or caring for all the time wasting brain rot(imo) things. But I am interested in solutions because I care about data privacy
Those businesses also have control. They just don't like the option of control they have, which is to stay out of those countries altogether.
> This is something you should send to your government that makes those rules.
My government hasn't made those rules, at least not yet. Last time they tried, I joined the crowd yelling at them about it. It's easier to do that if people aren't giving them technology they can pretend solves the fundamental problems with what they're doing.
Any more bright ideas?
> Those businesses also have control. They just don't like the option of control they have, which is to stay out of those countries altogether.
Yes. ?
Apparently they don't want to leave and are happy staying there and complying. If you don't like a businesses practice, don't use them. . .
> Last time they tried, I joined the crowd yelling at them about it.
Good. I hope more people that feel as strongly about the subject as you will follow your lead.
> It's easier to do that if people aren't giving them technology they can pretend solves the fundamental problems with what they're doing.
No one is "giving" them technology that pretends anything. There is a community effort to come up with privacy focused, secure solutions. If you noticed the OIDC4VC protocols are still in the draft phase. If it's fubar no one will use it. Worse than that is, if nothing comes of any proposed solutions, the state won't just say oh well you tried.
Either we will continue to deal with the current solution of businesses collecting our ids and biometrics and each one having a db of this info to sell/have stolen, or, some consultant that golfs with some gov official will tell them the tech industry can't figure it out but they have a magic solution that's even better and will build a system (using tax dollars) that uses government IDs with the added bonus of tracking and then all of our internet usage can be tracked by the government.
Wantonly dismissing any effort to make things better in an acceptable way is not going to make it magically go away forever. That ship has sailed. You can resist efforts to find a privacy focused solution and get stuck with an even worse one from the state, or, get your crowd yelling hat back on and help make sure data and privacy protections are solidly baked into these solutions the tech community is trying to build.
Variation of PassKeys could work well.
Especially if it was tightly integrated into the OS so that parents could issue an AgeKey to each of their children which sites would ask for.
Parents?
Fuck this, need a law to explicitly ban face scanning
It won't happen. The police are using it in meatspace. It will become the norm all over the UK.
How do we fight back against this? I don't want my face scanned on a smartphone to use goods and services. Kyc checks for banks are bad enough.
I miss the internet of the early 2000s.
This is probably difficult, but if everyone collectively didn't use services that had such egregious requirements it would likely die quickly. The companies being requires to do such things would have to start pushing back against government policies that are killing their business.
Considering everyone currently and without a second thought lets Apple scan their face just for the convenience of unlocking their phone I think this is a lost cause.
I don't think there are any easy answers to the question of how to respond to this but you might consider:
- voting with your feet
- contacting your elected representatives
- contacting media outlets
- becoming a member or donor of civil liberties campaigns
- listening to people who don't yet get it and trying to ensure that they can switch to your view without losing face
Relevant news article from yesterday:
https://www.wired.com/story/new-jersey-sues-discord/
> Platkin says there were two catalysts for the investigation. One is personal: A few years ago, a family friend came to Platkin, astonished that his 10-year-old son was able to sign up for Discord, despite the platform forbidding children under 13 from registering.
> The second was the mass-shooting in Buffalo, in neighboring New York. The perpetrator used Discord as his personal diary in the lead-up to the attack.
In other words, this is yet another attack on privacy in the name of "protecting the children".
This is how you lose your comfortable market monopoly like Skype did. Recall that Skype had better P2P tech than Discord did and would still be the market leader if MS had chosen to update anything at all besides the logo bi-yearly.
Regulators would never comprehend internet. They are making it look like they have no idea that on the internet you can: move to another country without visa in 2 minutes, change your face, voice, fingerprints to whatever you like. Get any passport, any document you want to mock any KYC or impersonate anyone without a trace, all within 10$ range.
Sure, companies have no option but to implement funny policies like these, and I'm sure any kid is much smarter than the government, so he will feel good circumventing it.
Maybe the start of a bigger shift to another platform. I'd wager a large portion of the Discord user-base is underage, and they've got nothing but time.
why wouldn't an identity/age verification scheme that blinds both sides work?
e.g. a site wants to have some proof of identity. it generates a token and sends the user with it to a government service. the service verifies the user's identity, signs the token and sends the user back.
now the site knows that the government service has verified the identity (and relevant characteristics, like age threshold), but doesn't know the identity. the government service obviously knows the user but doesn't know the online account tied to the identity. this can be further separated by using a middleman authentication provider, so that even the site identity itself doesn't reach the government.
am i missing something obvious why that wouldn't work?
It wont work because gov has no interest in not knowing which service the user is trying to authenticate themself to, it is in its interest to connect these informations. We see exactly these attempts every 2-4 years in the eu parliament.
i suspect it's a matter of how you sell the idea of this service to the governments.
i agree that the usual overreach will stand in the way, but i feel (perhaps wrongly) that the idea hasn't been pitched in earnest.
You mean like the DiD w3 spec? https://www.w3.org/TR/did-1.0/
It's not _double_ blinded but it allows end users control over information shared and has proof of ownership built into it.
it works (ZKP, DID) and some countries do it (https://www.forbes.com.au/news/innovation/why-the-future-of-..., Germany too allegedly)
This will definitely just apply to social media and the situation won't be abused by other companies even if they have no legal requirement, absolutely not, no sir.
thispersondoesnotexist.com
Now off ya go, little rascals.
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The day discord asks me for a picture, is the day I close my account
I thought the same at first. But I imagine it’d be relatively trivial to generate a fake ID to upload that would suffice.
I am getting sick and tired of the thinly veiled excuse of "we need to strip away more of your privacy in order to protect the childen" we all know they are doing it because they want to surveil/track you more easily.
and for those that think they are actually doing this to protect the children and you are concerned about what your children sees online this might sound a bit harsh but why dont you actually parent. Stop giving your kids unlimited access you tablets/computers etc. back in my day there was the option of having a single computer for the child in a public room that could not be moved. you could create whitelist only sites nowadays very easily even for laymens.
i understand it is a bit harder nowdays because more parents are both working to support the family but i rather not loose what little privacy we have left as a society because its requires more work for you to parent
I've made this suggestion in past discussions on this topic.
Users should be anonymous.
Sites should verify that user is over 18 using a government web service.
The fact that you think that anything you suggested would prevent or hinder a child from seeing things you don't want them to see online, or that it would affect a child's ability to be affected by what is online is indicative of the bigger problem. To put it into terms you might understand, you are storing your passwords in plaintext and the traffic isn't encrypted.
Basically, you're ignorant.
This isn't to say that the laws that the majority put into place are good. I'm not speaking on that. You are, in this situation, that layman, who cannot solve the problem you are claiming you want to solve.
you could never solve the problem of completely preventing a child or anyone from that matter from doing something if they are determined enough and you are naive in thinking so. should we remove all forms of encryption because pedophiles/terrorists use it?
if a child is determined to see naughty things online theyll just find a website that doesnt care about facial recognition laws while our privacy is still stripped away even more. So we lose more privacy as a society and kids still see what they desire just taking them a few minutes/ at most hours longer.
once again being a parent and paying attention to what your child is doing online or just talking to them about it. you choose to be a parent and that does require work to do a good job at it
> To put it into terms you might understand, you are storing your passwords in plaintext and the traffic isn't encrypted.
What?
It's worth noting that Matt Navarra, the sole source of "this is part of a bigger shift", is an ex member of the UK government who worked in the PM's office and worked for the BBC.
This story is a tempest in a teacup. The administration found someone to spread this nonsense so every later goes "well that was inevitable, the BBC predicted it would be."
Yeah, and bank robbers can predict that a bank is going to have less cash after a certain day.
This obsession the British have with kids online is so tiresome. You want to stop child sexual assault? Maybe do something about your royalty flying to island getaways organized by a human trafficker and ultra-high-end pimp for underage kids? Or do something about your clergy diddling kids?
Maybe the reason the UK government thinks this is such a big issue is because these legislators and officials are so surrounded by people who do it...because politicians are right there next to clergy in terms of this stuff.
This is a privacy nightmare. Mandatory biometrics are pure insanity.
> Mandatory biometrics are pure insanity.
Yup someone tell the US government, because visitors can't enter the US without giving biometrics
I'm on several UK-based soccer message boards and none of this seems to be required there. The forums are running on Xenforo or PhpBB, self-hosted by the admin. Some of those forums have thousands of user accounts registered.
Is Discord considered to be different as it's a centralized aggregator platform like Reddit, vs a standalone thing like a message board?
I haven't read the article. They aren't coming for Evoweb next are they? The UK is looking screwed man... something bad is cooking there...
Yea, I'm not doing that. What alternatives are their for 10-20 person gaming groups that want voice chat and streaming?
There's a comparison table of messengers here: https://eylenburg.github.io/im_comparison.htm
Note the list of "messengers that are relevant but did not make it on the list" in case none of the messengers in the comparison meets your requirements. Even that isn't exhaustive, but there are lots of options.
The march towards digital dystopia continues
Identity verification remains unsolved and likely will remain that way. Any attempts at improvement are authoritarian. And the status quo leave massive room for circumvention.
Personally, I grew up in an era before there was any expectation of validation, and enjoyed the anonymity of message boards and forums. But when people are posting blatantly illegal activity online, I can see the appeal for more validation. Just makes me sad.
Which makes one wonder how much of the illegal activities are by people who really are interested in engaging in that illegal activity and how much of it is from those who see it as a means to destroy anonymity online.
It seems likely that this will be defeated by AI generated video.
Discord is a walled garden. Sucks how popular it is for communities which used to be free and indexable on the web.
A book recommendation on the topic:
> This is the first book to examine the growth and phenomenon of a securitized and criminalized compliance society which relies increasingly on intelligence-led and predictive technologies to control future risks, crimes, and security threats. It articulates the emergence of a ‘compliance-industrial complex’ that synthesizes regulatory capitalism and surveillance capitalism to impose new regimes of power and control, as well as new forms of subjectivity subservient to the ‘operating system’ of a pre-crime society.
https://www.amazon.com/Compliance-Industrial-Complex-Operati...
The U.S., at least, needs a national ID. That, and a verification system for businesses to use, would solve so many of these issues.
That's just creepy.
Now we have a good use-case for diffusion-based image generation: bypass these insanely privacy-invasive requirements.
This is gong to do a real number on YouTube drama documentary channels.
Where are you gonna get your content if the lolcows can't creep on minors on Discord anymore?
I mean, in theory, they could find ways to circumvent it, but if they were that smart, they wouldn't be the subject of YouTube drama documentaries.
Nope. There's better ways to check your over 18; credit cards have been mentioned above. If a platform I'm using attempts this, with no other option, I'll delete my account and data on that platform.
VPNs are really a requirement for UK residents now.
They will do just enough so that they comply with the law while kids will be able to easily bypass it.
Where there is a will, there is mean and teenager looking for porn... That's a big willpower.
Maybe now open-source projects will get off of Discord for their official chat/support?
discord is shit, poorly designed software, with all the most obnoxious poor security decisions (like requiring phone calls), with poor political decisions on top as well as spying. probably one of the worst pieces of software to ever exist. all it has is momentum. it's like pop music where a million people make bands and one wins the fame lottery.
it's primarily a windows program and they can't even make a proper windows gui but embed a website, so clicking on anything is like a link instead of focusing into it. for instance if you middle click someone's name it opens it in a browser. fuck off. pressing alt+f4 closes discord instead of sending it to the tray (despite being a tray program). it's always updating something and then it just says "logging in" instead of saying what it's doing. it gets stuck indefinitely if you log in on a slow connection or you unplug lan while it's logging in or doing whatever it's doing at any given moment. absolutely the most frustrating crap to use. it has a billion options for stupid "hardcore" gamers (i am, too, but i don't need it) with special needs while not being a basic quality application that conforms to any UI standard.
they openly spy on you, not even trying to hide it.
instead of real software, it's a stupid fucking social media "community", so you can't just use it as a MECHANISM NOT POLICY program, instead every time you do something like log into a different account you have to check whether this is morally correct or will somehow harm their "community". like say i want to work on my blockchain, who are dumb enough to use discord as their main communication platform. i obviously then would want one account for that, then another - completely separate (but perhaps with the same phone number to make it logistically easier which SHOULDNT EVEN BE A THING, this is the internet) - account for playing games (often during work), i can't just log into these simultaneously, i have to go check what their policy is on that. literally, my first thought is that like typical incompetent american software devs, they will think i'm trying to scam people or some other kind of "abuse". and of course, they appear to have conceded to partially implement this "feature" (by undoing their nonsense about forensically attempting to forbid this)
They’re using the databases to go after illegal immigrants right now. Soon it’ll be using the porn databases to go after Gay people. They’re trying to use the healthcare databases to go after Trans people. All this verification is nothing but a way to commit genocide against minorities. Porn is so far down on the list of harmful things. There’s no pearl clutching over alcohol and other drugs like Americans have with porn. Nation of pansies.
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The ophidian lubricant has entered the chat.
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I see a lot of comments here arguing age requirements are overreach and these decisions should be left to the parents. To those presenting such arguments, do you think that applies to other activities as well? What about smoking/drinking/firearms? Pornography? Driving?
I haven't researched the topic of social media's effect on young people, but the common sentiment I encounter is that it's generally harmful, or at least capable of harm in a way that is difficult to isolate and manage as a parent.
The people closest to this issue, that is parents, school faculty, and those who study the psychology and health of children/teens, seem to be the most alarmed about the effects of social media.
If that's true, I can understand the need to, as a society, agree we would like to implement some barrier between kids/teens and the social media companies. How that is practically done seems to be the challenge. Clicking a box that say's, in effect, "I totally promise I am old enough." is completely useless for anything other than a thin legal shield.
>I see a lot of comments here arguing age requirements are overreach and these decisions should be left to the parents. To those presenting such arguments, do you think that applies to other activities as well? What about smoking/drinking/firearms? Pornography? Driving?
Yes. The state has far, far too much involvement in everybody's lives.
This is a great stance to have if consequences have zero value.
Every time we shrug and say "let the parents decide," we gamble with the most vulnerable: the kids who don’t yet know how to refuse a cigarette, who don’t yet grasp the weight of a loaded weapon, who don’t yet understand that porn isn’t a harmless curiosity. We gamble with the soul of childhood—and when we lose, those children don’t get a second chance. They leave behind empty chairs at dinner tables, empty beds in houses that echo with what might have been. That’s the true cost of unfettered "parental freedom," and it’s a price that's easy to pay with someone else's life. But hey, Fuck those kids, right?
I can't express strongly enough that arguing about how to raise children is an incredibly deep, contentious topic. Over and over i see that the state terrifies me deep into my soul, as does the power that a parent has over shaping its children. You're gambling either way and there will always be disturbing consequences. You do not know the optimal way to raise a child - nobody does. It is subjective. Parents NEED to take on massive responsibility and raise their own children rather than leaving it up to the state or letting the state dictate how children are raised. Do you trust Donald Trump to shape your child? Who knows who could be elected next wherever you live
A part of me thinks the opinion people have on this topic is partly mediated by whether or not the state or their parents abused them growing up. It's just dumb luck, and it is hard to imagine being in someone else's position since the consequences can only really be understood from lived experience.
For me it isn't either/or but I have a bias towards fixing abusive parenting. But I don't think even the government will have much luck with that, when so much "not good enough" parenting can be perceived as normal and forgotten about. Every dysfunctional family is broken in their own unique way, and there will never be a catch-all solution. Heck, it's so personal an issue the only way most people will even know it's a problem is if people bring it up themselves. It's too personal and individualized for people to randomly start talking about and unite under as opposed to issues of the state/politics, when it's likely that there is no solution to be found except cutting off the family and moving on.
Help me understand how we went from "Social media is bad for kids" to "optimal way to raise a child."
Avoiding a harm is not equivalent to optimal way in my mind, but it seems like it is in yours? How does that work?
I've noticed the left, right, and center have all become more obsessed than ever these past few years with the idea the state and society aren't doing enough to forcibly protect people from themselves, that preventing potential self-inflicted harm due to a poor or risky decision is worth literally any cost; 1% aggregate harm reduction is now considered preferable to freedom of choice. No amount of risk is ever acceptable, and no one is allowed to perform their own risk calculus because they don't know better. And yes, as you said, abusive parenting is a major issue as well. Hard problems to solve.
The difference is that requiring ID for those activities doesn't generally drastically erode the privacy of other people.
Instead of destroying the concept of privacy and anonymity on the Internet... how about we just stop these companies from being as harmful as they are, regardless of your age?
> I see a lot of comments here arguing age requirements are overreach and these decisions should be left to the parents. To those presenting such arguments, do you think that applies to other activities as well? What about smoking/drinking/firearms? Pornography? Driving?
My gut feel here mostly has to do with how I view the activity overall. Smoking I see as a social ill that both adults and children would be better off without, so I don't particularly mind an ID check that inconveniences adults, and that can be opted-out from by simply not smoking. (Social media I see as pretty akin to smoking.)
Inconveniencing adults with ID checks is probably not actually a good way to create incentives though.
(Driving is a special case due to negative externalities and danger you cause to others.)
> My gut feel here mostly has to do with how I view the activity overall. Smoking I see as a social ill that both adults and children would be better off without, so I don't particularly mind an ID check that inconveniences adults, and that can be opted-out from by simply not smoking. (Social media I see as pretty akin to smoking.)
The big difference for me is, the person looking at my ID at the gas station isn't storing all the data on it in some database, which may or may not be properly secured.
If age verification can be done ephemerally, then I think it's largely a non-issue. But of course it won't, you'll have to submit some combo of personal info + a photo or face scan, and that information will be stored by any number of third parties, probably permanently, only to end up in the next data breach.
There's also an issue of anonymity, which is increasingly under attack on the web. Even in the gas station example, while I'm not truly anonymous when I buy alcohol, the gas station attendant likely isn't going to remember me or my name, and it's certainly not being stored along side an entire customer profile.
For services on the web, we need a similar level of privacy with the age verification, otherwise it's not just age verification it's identity verification as well (and by extension, the tying of all of your activity on that service directly to you) which I do have a big problem with.
If we want age verification online, we have to have a way to do it ephemerally and psuedo-anonymously.
> I see a lot of comments here arguing age requirements are overreach and these decisions should be left to the parents.
No you don't. The bulk of the comments at this point in time don't mention things being left to parents at all.
Clicking a box gives person a chance to decide whether they want to enter a website or not, without getting exposed to it immediately. It's not useless.
It also povides no useful information to the website operator, which is good. If the info is useful, it will be logged.
If it is logged, well, I've seen what morally derailed hightech state will do with any and all data they can get hold off. They'll put it all in a giant AI lottery machine to generate and "justify" targets for their genocide, to kill and burn entire families at once. It's happening now elsewhere in the world.
What should be scary to everyone is that it's being justified or at best ignored by supposedly morally "normal" western states (like mine) which are not engaged directly in such behavior, yet.
I do not trust "elites", who are able to ignore or justify this being done elsewhere, with making traceable any of my behavioral data directly to me, by forced provision of identity to services that don't need any for their function.
> I see a lot of comments here arguing age requirements are overreach and these decisions should be left to the parents. To those presenting such arguments, do you think that applies to other activities as well? What about smoking/drinking/firearms? Pornography? Driving?
All of the things on your list are primarily enforced by parents already.
This law is regulatory capture that's going to strengthen the monopolies of the exact social media sites that you allude to. It makes it harder for smaller, focused sites to exist. Instead the only option will be sites with algorithmic feeds that currently push right-wing nazi propaganda, anti-vaxxers, flat earthers, nihilist school shooting clubs for teenagers, or whatever fresh hell the internet came up with this morning.
If you think age verification is going to fix these problems on the big sites, I suggest watching YouTube Kids. Actually, don't. I wouldn't wish that trauma on anyone. Seriously.
> To those presenting such arguments, do you think that applies to other activities as well?
You’re acting like it’s not normal for parents to decide which activities a child can do, cannot do, and must do, and to make these decisions with appropriate ages in mind. I tend to lean towards allowing parents a long leash in their own home and other private places but to regulate behavior in schools and public places.