Of course they do. Only fools expected anything else.
Does else anyone remember the "age verification" on '80s video games? Some of them were hilarious. I think it was Leisure Suit Larry that asked multiple choice history questions that I guess were meant to be impossible for fifth graders to guess. I was the local history nerd, so I remember getting calls from classmates, like "we're trying to get into a game; when was JFK assassinated?" If I didn't know I'd ask my dad, who never knew he was contributing to the delinquency of (other) minors.
> I think it was Leisure Suit Larry that asked multiple choice history questions that I guess were meant to be impossible for fifth graders to guess.
I'm from a non-English-speaking country. We didn't understand the questions at all, but all us kids in the neighborhood got into the game just fine with some brute forcing.
Also, coming up with the expected commands in the game was way beyond our skills so we'd only advance to a point where someone had seen and memorized others play. Didn't matter, as it was one of the only games in the system so we'd play it anyway. I still remember how hard it was to type "ken sent me" in the allotted time window.
That wasn’t the era of global releases via the internet. You had to either buy it in person or, order by mail or get a copy from a BBS. It was an American game made for Americans.
Well, the main hurdle was that we were 7-9 years old iirc and didn't know any English at all, beyond the memorized "knock knock" etc. So the topic of the questions wasn't on the table :-)
I love this story. I remember seeing two pre-literate kindergarten kids playing on a gameboy or similar handheld, one of them teaching the other strings of button presses for things like “save game” - just navigating through all the menus by memory.
I played through the entire Pokemon Yellow without understanding a lick of english. You just remembered what the commands did, and you learnt by experimenting.
Like, I remember someone telling me at one point that the thing in Head over Heels was a Dalek with prince Charles head. I didn't know either of those.
My brother and I had a notepad with all the questions and possible answers, and we'd run the game several times until we got through, then make a note of the answers. Eventually we had all of them.
"Ken sent me" is buried in my brain for that same reason. :)
I learned to read very early because I really wanted to be able to start the games on the family computer (instead of having to ask an adult to do it for me).
And only then I realised that it was all in English :-).
There is one thing I do not remember, and that is if Leisure Suit Larry was advertised toward children and how much of Leisure Suit Larry revenue sales came from 0–12 years old, adolescent of 13–17 years old, and then adult customers.
It could be that that Leisure Suit Larry age verification was actually fairly good, if one put it in relation towards how much of their customer base and revenue came from selling the game to young children.
Of course rules are circumvented. Maybe even frequently. But that doesn't mean on the margin none of this stuff has an impact and is not worth the effort.
It's the whole "kids are going to drink anyway so I may as well buy them booze" brain rot.
The next age verification tech will involve checking tallness so we'll have kids standing on eachother's shoulders in a big trenchcoat to do the very adult act of installing linux.
My 12yo son is already significantly taller than me! We had to use his passport to prove he’s much younger than these systems report because they were locking him out from chatting to his friends (said the age gap was too big)
And when they need to find a way to circumvent this, they will ask for the full height picture without clothes on. Instead of addressing the problem of this entire idea and implementation they will continue to double down on it.
Lol. Or standing next to a dollhouse or something.
Let's be realistic here. All this age verification stuff is pseudoscience and more importantly it isn't tested or standardized at all. It's just theater so the creeps get all the data on your children they can.
Meta has made a killing, literally, exploiting children psychology. Social media is the orphan crunching machine for nonorphans or something.
>All this age verification stuff is pseudoscience and more importantly it isn't tested or standardized at all. It's just theater
<lightbulb moment>
Abdicating responsibility, standards and government enforcement are three of white collar America's favorite things.
Seems like an opportunity for someone to become a billionaire by creating a standardization and licensing agency and then paying for some shills to get the ball rolling. Give it 5yr and everyone will have to do business with you lest the feds kick in their door. Give it 10yr and the useful idiots will be in the comment section talking about how XYZ age verification mechanism must be good because it's "certified" by your garbage and that the sky will fall if we get rid of it.
I hope I'm too jaded, but frankly I don't think I'm jaded enough.
They are trying for it that's for sure. It reminds me of the us war on drugs for some reason. Obviously I don't want kids doing drugs but it had ludicrous takes that were terrible for society. I guess there aren't enough wars going on? Have to go to war against the Internet or something now.
I assume that everyone's ID is identifiable by willing state actors (at least adults) . Perhaps they want to create databases of possible child terrorists?
And this will then be used by the Apple and Google to make "security" on the OS "stronger" so that "we can protect the children" better (i.e. lock down the OS even more and take control away from us consumers). In this new idiocracy, this this is how corporates and government work together to take away our rights ...
Already a thing for a lot of services (like financial), but still. There's better ways that don't involve sending your ID or facial scans to a first or third party.
Yeah, I set up a trading212 account lately and they wanted ID scan + live video. I mind that a bit less for finance: identity theft is real, and there are significant disadvantages to me if someone can set up a bank account in my name without getting ID checked.
In a similar vein: A while ago, Chinese adolescents were bypassing age restrictions for playtime in Mainland China by using the published national ID numbers of insolvent debtors (which are apparently published online to ensure that no financial institutions extend credit to them) to sign up for accounts. From what I understand, they started partially masking these national ID numbers in response to that.
I think, the best way to keep children from dangerous content is large fines for parents, for example, $4000 for every adult video their child was traumatized by due to their negligence. 50% of the fine is shared with the person who reported the violation (including site operators). After all being a parent is a responsibility.
Such law would not cause inconvenience to normal Internet users without children, would provide additional source of income for vigilant people and underpaid school staff, and would result in much higher degree of compliance. Why you guys don't elect people like me.
Don't you think our society has already pushed too far in the direction of mandated helicopter parenting? You can hardly let your kids play independently nowadays in the US without getting a CPS check-up due to someone believing kids should be on leashes; what your proposing is significantly more draconian
Maybe, but why normal people without children need to experience inconvenience, Internet restrictions and verifications just because there are a minority of negligent parents? Children are parents responsibility. Instead of banning adult sites, is not it better to ban families with children from Internet? Make some family-friendly Internet and let them all go there and not bother normal people.
Probably not in places like Germany where over half the population is over 45. As US becomes more like child-devoid europe, it will become even more hostile to children. And parents will be more and more slaves to the state, to raise children however society says they ought to be raised. The purpose of the parent is to pay and be punished, the purpose of the outsider is to rest on the smug shoulders of the state and proclaim how morally superior they are at no cost to themselves.
Collectively we have fought long and hard for internet freedom, it's depressing that all it takes is a generation and some bureaucratic idiocy for all that to be undone.
This "freedom" runs exactly inverse to how many normies know about the internet. The more accessible it's become, the worse it's got for freedom. They weren't regulating what they didn't know about back in the glory days
Why do you think Google, the world's largest ad company, is paying money out of its ears to research those topics? The sooner people realize all major us tech companies are contractors for the us department of war the better.
Go ahead use metas verifier, give your biometrics to openai, type all your personal and financial information into copilot for advice, email your boss tell him anthropics boris was right you are now redundant, click on all of the ads you see, only engage with your peers on Facebook to let the algorithm decide how that goes, only drive in roads with flock cameras to stay safe, turn off your ad blocker, don't use vpns, etc. it's your life.
None of this prohibition works. Kids will find ways around it, authorities will get stricter, rinse and repeat. A total shitshow.
A lot of people mentioning off-license/booze/tobacco like that was a success story. It isn’t. Outside main/high streets, kids manage to buy stuff just fine. Success requires enforcement, constant vigilance and heavy penalties. Not applicable to Meta at al.
Social media is a drug. Just like crack, making it illegal won’t make it go away. Only education can change this. Unfortunately, we now have multiple generations hooked on it, so I’m not sure this is even possible anymore.
I blocked all social media on my daughter’s phone until she turned 17. I am/was a massive control freak. Guess what happened after that?
I still have control over her apps. I still won’t let install snapchat and every other crap app she asks for. She understands it is for her own good, but none of that matters when “all her friends use it.”
The first iPhone went on sale when she was born. Obama was elected when she was a baby. The world sucks right now.
Reading the comments here, I see a lot of criticism along the line of "age verification doesn't work, it's completely stupid".
I believe it is counter-productive, because "not having age verification" is a lost battle. Unlike E2EE (where it is impossible to give access "only to the good guys"), it is possible to implement age verification in a privacy-preserving manner. And look at the ChatControl fight: even though it is not possible, we are still struggling to convince politicians of it. Good luck with age verification where it is actually possible to do something.
It should be a public service: just like the government issues IDs already, it should run the privacy-preserving system that allows citizens to prove their age. We should fight for that, otherwise we will get non-privacy-preserving systems managed by private companies (which is already starting).
That won't happen. Because the intent of the people pushing for "age verification" has nothing to do with the "think about the children" moral panic. It has to do with eliminating encryption and eliminating online anonymity. It is a dog whistle.
There are a lot of issues with the UK approach. Privacy is a big one. But requiring this on every service is both a tax on the service and requires constantly authorizing stuff. That opens up the possibility for scams, data misuse, etc.
And no, saying we said to only use the data for verification clearly doesn't work. It didn't work for discord, or Persona, or Tea or AU10TIX or any others. Verification now means sharing that data with credit agencies and third party databases. Verification means keeping some data to resolve customer support disputes. There's data leakage for training and creating derived data products like biometric embeddings for future use.
Third party verification is a security nightmare.
I don't know why device based approvals abd controls aren't considered at all. Or really any privacy preserving technique.
I don't want to give my ID to every service I interact online. But I also don't think it's reasonable to ask of parents to ensure their children aren't accessing age restricted content online.
What about liquor shops or strip clubs? They ask for ID, which makes sense; we're not expecting parents to make sure their children don't go into these places. But the liquor shop takes a look at the ID and then doesn't collect the data.
Being entirely against age verification is not a good stance I think, but we should definitely have a hard stance on the privacy issue. There are systems that preserve privacy while still making it possible to verify you're old enough to use a service.
People like to make fun of and poke holes in the EU's planned implementation of this, but so far they seem to be the only ones trying to implement this in a way that doesn't give my name to every online service or give some identity provider full knowledge which services I sign up to
The California bill about setting an age in the OS was another interesting idea. Have the parents police a single setting on the device, then websites and apps can query that setting. Of course that's little more than the parental controls we always had, but apparently everyone forgot about those
>> Being entirely against age verification is not a good stance I think
I think the problem is that the internet has existed for quite a while without it. I'm sure there were similar complaints from people when you suddenly needed to pass a test to drive a car or when insurance became mandatory.
>> There are systems that preserve privacy while still making it possible to verify you're old enough to use a service.
There are some funny videos of people in pubs in the UK discussing how bad the incoming drink drive rules were, it's a similar deal I think. No one likes being restricted from something they've been allowed to do.
I process the manual ID reviews for a small system. I don't get many, but I have seen some funny stuff. Last week a kid tried to use a still from a Spiderman movie.
The only good justification of it can be that the companies can claim that the age verification was done as per Terms of Service, so in the future no parent or parent group can come after them for the content. Along with better targeted advertising by identifying the target audiences.
Logically parents are probably best suited to gate the content for their children how they see it fit.
"Never attribute to stupidity that which is adequately explained by malice."
The Helen Lovejoy argument "will somebody please think of the children" provided for the foot in the door. The intended outcome is that only iris scans will allow for full child protection ... and that was the plan all along.
One big problem is that the verification is trying to estimate your age instead of looking up who is the actual person and then checking what the age is of that person. If the lookup returns that the face is that of a video game character it should reject as opposed to trying to estimate the age of that character.
What if we...now hear me out....what if we didn't try to shoehorn a stupid and unworkable technological solution into this problem space and just...made parents responsible for their kids?
Nono too radical, parents dont have time, they need it to scroll some shitty social media cash grab to feel themselves even more shitty about their lives.
... and we would like to call our generation 'smart'. While knowing deep inside very well what a failure as a parent many of our generation are. The proof for/against are our kids right in front of our eyes and there is no escaping from this basic truth, thats why its so crushing.
Sorry gotta go, need to check some shitty sites who spy on me and try to push in vain on me some primitive ads.
Says a lot about the state of society when parenting is outsourced to technology, so that the parents can be further enslaved (because almost no one chooses to work two jobs).
Most of a "living wage" is from the cost of living. We make living space artificially scarce and then your rent is high but so is the rent on the small businesses that employ people. The restaurant can't pay the waitress more when their own costs have gone up, and the money is going to the landlords rather than the employers.
Likewise, when some megacorps capture the government and monopolize a market, the costs go up on both individuals and all the employers in other markets who are now paying monopoly rents with the money they could have otherwise used to hire more people (bidding up wages) or lower the prices workers pay when they buy their products.
Just asking them to pay more doesn't work when the party you want to pay more isn't the party which is extracting the money, and higher costs are just as much of a problem as lower wages.
> If you end it with "and make a good easy to use technical solution instead" then you found my stance.
That assumes a good easy to use technical solution is possible. What if classifying user-generated content as safe for kids is enormously subjective, and the labor required to accurately classify it even given a hypothetical objective standard would cost more than users are willing to pay to have it done?
(you can sort of do this in countries with national ID schemes if you don't care about foreigners; for example, various people have found this in China where random things are gated behind having a WeChat account which requires a Chinese ID. You can't do this in the US or UK, which are big pushers of the ""age verification"" scheme)
You don't need an Id. For example, you can crawl the internet for selfies and then try and tie that face with the person it belongs to. With enough datasets you can start to put together a database of relevant people enough that it's okay to do deeper validation for the people you did not collect a face for.
Of course they do. Only fools expected anything else.
Does else anyone remember the "age verification" on '80s video games? Some of them were hilarious. I think it was Leisure Suit Larry that asked multiple choice history questions that I guess were meant to be impossible for fifth graders to guess. I was the local history nerd, so I remember getting calls from classmates, like "we're trying to get into a game; when was JFK assassinated?" If I didn't know I'd ask my dad, who never knew he was contributing to the delinquency of (other) minors.
> I think it was Leisure Suit Larry that asked multiple choice history questions that I guess were meant to be impossible for fifth graders to guess.
I'm from a non-English-speaking country. We didn't understand the questions at all, but all us kids in the neighborhood got into the game just fine with some brute forcing.
Also, coming up with the expected commands in the game was way beyond our skills so we'd only advance to a point where someone had seen and memorized others play. Didn't matter, as it was one of the only games in the system so we'd play it anyway. I still remember how hard it was to type "ken sent me" in the allotted time window.
Nowhere does the us "center of the universe" mindset shine more through, then when to expect the world to remember the presidential dogs name.
That wasn’t the era of global releases via the internet. You had to either buy it in person or, order by mail or get a copy from a BBS. It was an American game made for Americans.
Well, the main hurdle was that we were 7-9 years old iirc and didn't know any English at all, beyond the memorized "knock knock" etc. So the topic of the questions wasn't on the table :-)
I love this story. I remember seeing two pre-literate kindergarten kids playing on a gameboy or similar handheld, one of them teaching the other strings of button presses for things like “save game” - just navigating through all the menus by memory.
I played through the entire Pokemon Yellow without understanding a lick of english. You just remembered what the commands did, and you learnt by experimenting.
Even as an English speaker the Pokémon all sounded gibberish to me so it wouldn't have been much help
I think everybody does this to some extent.
Like, I remember someone telling me at one point that the thing in Head over Heels was a Dalek with prince Charles head. I didn't know either of those.
I don't think that the larry games where to be released to the whole world.
Same same!
My brother and I had a notepad with all the questions and possible answers, and we'd run the game several times until we got through, then make a note of the answers. Eventually we had all of them.
"Ken sent me" is buried in my brain for that same reason. :)
Thanks for bringing back the memories!
> Ken sent me
I also remember the joke that was written on the same wall 'it takes leather balls to play rugby'.
I didn't get the joke till much later, but somehow it stuck with me.
I learned to read very early because I really wanted to be able to start the games on the family computer (instead of having to ask an adult to do it for me).
And only then I realised that it was all in English :-).
There is one thing I do not remember, and that is if Leisure Suit Larry was advertised toward children and how much of Leisure Suit Larry revenue sales came from 0–12 years old, adolescent of 13–17 years old, and then adult customers.
It could be that that Leisure Suit Larry age verification was actually fairly good, if one put it in relation towards how much of their customer base and revenue came from selling the game to young children.
It’s hilarious when adults forget how smart a motivated group of children with an ocean of free time can be.
Solution: make sure the kids don't have any free time. Let's schedule their days for optimum productivity instead.
There were so many of these wink-wink things I wouldn't know about if not for trying to brute force LSL.
Of course rules are circumvented. Maybe even frequently. But that doesn't mean on the margin none of this stuff has an impact and is not worth the effort.
It's the whole "kids are going to drink anyway so I may as well buy them booze" brain rot.
The next age verification tech will involve checking tallness so we'll have kids standing on eachother's shoulders in a big trenchcoat to do the very adult act of installing linux.
My 12yo son is already significantly taller than me! We had to use his passport to prove he’s much younger than these systems report because they were locking him out from chatting to his friends (said the age gap was too big)
And when they need to find a way to circumvent this, they will ask for the full height picture without clothes on. Instead of addressing the problem of this entire idea and implementation they will continue to double down on it.
And that’s how the laws designed to protect children ended up producing the worlds largest collection of photos of naked children.
Mostly naked grownups, with a few fairly tall children who are naked, except for the fake pubic hair.
Don't worry, most "protect the children" regulation casts a web so wide it includes plenty of pubic hair and sexually active teens
I can already see angry post on reddit that some short king failed a verification test.
Lol. Or standing next to a dollhouse or something.
Let's be realistic here. All this age verification stuff is pseudoscience and more importantly it isn't tested or standardized at all. It's just theater so the creeps get all the data on your children they can.
Meta has made a killing, literally, exploiting children psychology. Social media is the orphan crunching machine for nonorphans or something.
>All this age verification stuff is pseudoscience and more importantly it isn't tested or standardized at all. It's just theater
<lightbulb moment>
Abdicating responsibility, standards and government enforcement are three of white collar America's favorite things.
Seems like an opportunity for someone to become a billionaire by creating a standardization and licensing agency and then paying for some shills to get the ball rolling. Give it 5yr and everyone will have to do business with you lest the feds kick in their door. Give it 10yr and the useful idiots will be in the comment section talking about how XYZ age verification mechanism must be good because it's "certified" by your garbage and that the sky will fall if we get rid of it.
I hope I'm too jaded, but frankly I don't think I'm jaded enough.
They are trying for it that's for sure. It reminds me of the us war on drugs for some reason. Obviously I don't want kids doing drugs but it had ludicrous takes that were terrible for society. I guess there aren't enough wars going on? Have to go to war against the Internet or something now.
It reminds me of Tipper Gore and her righteous crusade against video games.
The result will be age verification with a passport or ID "to protect the children". Probably this was the goal all along.
I assume that everyone's ID is identifiable by willing state actors (at least adults) . Perhaps they want to create databases of possible child terrorists?
Tier 1 networks legally not allowed to route packets that aren't digitally signed by a cryptographic ID linked to you
Politicians worldwide are salivating at the chance of throwing their opposition and critics in prison.
The EU age id app is this, with some extra privacy hurdles (the id is only on your phone not on the remote server).
And this will then be used by the Apple and Google to make "security" on the OS "stronger" so that "we can protect the children" better (i.e. lock down the OS even more and take control away from us consumers). In this new idiocracy, this this is how corporates and government work together to take away our rights ...
Already a thing for a lot of services (like financial), but still. There's better ways that don't involve sending your ID or facial scans to a first or third party.
Yeah, I set up a trading212 account lately and they wanted ID scan + live video. I mind that a bit less for finance: identity theft is real, and there are significant disadvantages to me if someone can set up a bank account in my name without getting ID checked.
I'm not doing it for bloody discord or bsky DMs.
I'm paying Fidelity's fees instead of completing the verification process with Trading 212.
I guess thats one important upside of age verification systems I didn't think of. They encourage creativity and a healthy disregard for stupid rules.
The best thing to happen to tech is kids finding ways to make a fool of modern tech
In a similar vein: A while ago, Chinese adolescents were bypassing age restrictions for playtime in Mainland China by using the published national ID numbers of insolvent debtors (which are apparently published online to ensure that no financial institutions extend credit to them) to sign up for accounts. From what I understand, they started partially masking these national ID numbers in response to that.
The governments know fully well that simple checks for age verification will be bypassed. So they will "fix" this issue by demanding a digital id.
Is it possible to generate or edit video with AI to pass the verification?
I think, the best way to keep children from dangerous content is large fines for parents, for example, $4000 for every adult video their child was traumatized by due to their negligence. 50% of the fine is shared with the person who reported the violation (including site operators). After all being a parent is a responsibility.
Such law would not cause inconvenience to normal Internet users without children, would provide additional source of income for vigilant people and underpaid school staff, and would result in much higher degree of compliance. Why you guys don't elect people like me.
Don't you think our society has already pushed too far in the direction of mandated helicopter parenting? You can hardly let your kids play independently nowadays in the US without getting a CPS check-up due to someone believing kids should be on leashes; what your proposing is significantly more draconian
Maybe, but why normal people without children need to experience inconvenience, Internet restrictions and verifications just because there are a minority of negligent parents? Children are parents responsibility. Instead of banning adult sites, is not it better to ban families with children from Internet? Make some family-friendly Internet and let them all go there and not bother normal people.
You are punching down instead of up. The problem is not children, or parents, but the state trying to enforce restrictions.
The problem is all the complacent people not fighting this obvious dystopian spiral.
> let them all go there and not bother normal people.
The normal state does include people with children.
Probably not in places like Germany where over half the population is over 45. As US becomes more like child-devoid europe, it will become even more hostile to children. And parents will be more and more slaves to the state, to raise children however society says they ought to be raised. The purpose of the parent is to pay and be punished, the purpose of the outsider is to rest on the smug shoulders of the state and proclaim how morally superior they are at no cost to themselves.
I originally read your previous post as sarcasm (hard to tell on the web) but now I see you're describing an absolute hellhole without a hint of irony
They also use VPNs, as anyone would have predicted within two seconds.
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cn72ydj70g5o
Consequently, we're now discussing VPN bans for under 18 year olds <insert facepalm emoji>.
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cn438z3ejxyo
Collectively we have fought long and hard for internet freedom, it's depressing that all it takes is a generation and some bureaucratic idiocy for all that to be undone.
> internet freedom
This "freedom" runs exactly inverse to how many normies know about the internet. The more accessible it's become, the worse it's got for freedom. They weren't regulating what they didn't know about back in the glory days
The vpn ban movement also has support from powerful (and corrupt) entities like the Spanish football federation ...
I've never seen efforts to make laws as damn bulletproof like this.
They must really be scared of the voice and power anonymity gives normal people who wouldn't normally have it.
Vpns are really under attack this year. All the LLM providers desperately don't want to have the majority of users using them.
It's basically the leading reason why quantum computing is being funded. They gotta break your encryption to read your activity.
Pretty sad world.
> It's basically the leading reason why quantum computing is being funded.
What? Can you provide any evidence for this claim?
Why do you think Google, the world's largest ad company, is paying money out of its ears to research those topics? The sooner people realize all major us tech companies are contractors for the us department of war the better.
> Why do you think Google, the world's largest ad company, is paying money out of its ears to research those topics?
The numerous commercially viable applications of quantum computing. No conspiracy theory needed, you nutjob
First time I have been called a nut job. Nice
That's FUD.
Alright then.
Go ahead use metas verifier, give your biometrics to openai, type all your personal and financial information into copilot for advice, email your boss tell him anthropics boris was right you are now redundant, click on all of the ads you see, only engage with your peers on Facebook to let the algorithm decide how that goes, only drive in roads with flock cameras to stay safe, turn off your ad blocker, don't use vpns, etc. it's your life.
Or ... https://www.npr.org/2026/03/25/nx-s1-5752369/ice-surveillanc...
https://www.forbes.com/sites/emmawoollacott/2025/02/27/us-go...
https://www.wired.com/story/dhs-surveillance-phone-tracking-...
it's funny, but this is not going to end well.
Time to go back to modems (over phone maybe) and BBSs?
None of this prohibition works. Kids will find ways around it, authorities will get stricter, rinse and repeat. A total shitshow.
A lot of people mentioning off-license/booze/tobacco like that was a success story. It isn’t. Outside main/high streets, kids manage to buy stuff just fine. Success requires enforcement, constant vigilance and heavy penalties. Not applicable to Meta at al.
Social media is a drug. Just like crack, making it illegal won’t make it go away. Only education can change this. Unfortunately, we now have multiple generations hooked on it, so I’m not sure this is even possible anymore.
I blocked all social media on my daughter’s phone until she turned 17. I am/was a massive control freak. Guess what happened after that?
I still have control over her apps. I still won’t let install snapchat and every other crap app she asks for. She understands it is for her own good, but none of that matters when “all her friends use it.”
The first iPhone went on sale when she was born. Obama was elected when she was a baby. The world sucks right now.
Rant over.
Maybe age verification will encourage kids to be more social in person, because they’ll need to have at least two inside the trenchcoat.
Kids also not allowed outside..
How so? You never see kids outdoors?
I mean I see em, but I feel like there should be a lot more playing in the street.
Reading the comments here, I see a lot of criticism along the line of "age verification doesn't work, it's completely stupid".
I believe it is counter-productive, because "not having age verification" is a lost battle. Unlike E2EE (where it is impossible to give access "only to the good guys"), it is possible to implement age verification in a privacy-preserving manner. And look at the ChatControl fight: even though it is not possible, we are still struggling to convince politicians of it. Good luck with age verification where it is actually possible to do something.
It should be a public service: just like the government issues IDs already, it should run the privacy-preserving system that allows citizens to prove their age. We should fight for that, otherwise we will get non-privacy-preserving systems managed by private companies (which is already starting).
That won't happen. Because the intent of the people pushing for "age verification" has nothing to do with the "think about the children" moral panic. It has to do with eliminating encryption and eliminating online anonymity. It is a dog whistle.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dog_whistle_(politics)#
https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Code_word
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_panic
I'm writing my (Canadian) MP to this effect.
There are a lot of issues with the UK approach. Privacy is a big one. But requiring this on every service is both a tax on the service and requires constantly authorizing stuff. That opens up the possibility for scams, data misuse, etc.
And no, saying we said to only use the data for verification clearly doesn't work. It didn't work for discord, or Persona, or Tea or AU10TIX or any others. Verification now means sharing that data with credit agencies and third party databases. Verification means keeping some data to resolve customer support disputes. There's data leakage for training and creating derived data products like biometric embeddings for future use.
Third party verification is a security nightmare.
I don't know why device based approvals abd controls aren't considered at all. Or really any privacy preserving technique.
And all this for ~54% efficacy?
What if politicians are creating these systems that are easy to bypass so they have an excuse for starting to officially ID everyone?
That was always the plan from day 1.
I don't want to give my ID to every service I interact online. But I also don't think it's reasonable to ask of parents to ensure their children aren't accessing age restricted content online.
What about liquor shops or strip clubs? They ask for ID, which makes sense; we're not expecting parents to make sure their children don't go into these places. But the liquor shop takes a look at the ID and then doesn't collect the data.
Being entirely against age verification is not a good stance I think, but we should definitely have a hard stance on the privacy issue. There are systems that preserve privacy while still making it possible to verify you're old enough to use a service.
People like to make fun of and poke holes in the EU's planned implementation of this, but so far they seem to be the only ones trying to implement this in a way that doesn't give my name to every online service or give some identity provider full knowledge which services I sign up to
The California bill about setting an age in the OS was another interesting idea. Have the parents police a single setting on the device, then websites and apps can query that setting. Of course that's little more than the parental controls we always had, but apparently everyone forgot about those
There's age verification and then there's "age verification" (mass surveillance dragnet)
One of these is clearly a very extremely bad thing
>> Being entirely against age verification is not a good stance I think
I think the problem is that the internet has existed for quite a while without it. I'm sure there were similar complaints from people when you suddenly needed to pass a test to drive a car or when insurance became mandatory.
>> There are systems that preserve privacy while still making it possible to verify you're old enough to use a service.
What are these systems?
There are some funny videos of people in pubs in the UK discussing how bad the incoming drink drive rules were, it's a similar deal I think. No one likes being restricted from something they've been allowed to do.
I process the manual ID reviews for a small system. I don't get many, but I have seen some funny stuff. Last week a kid tried to use a still from a Spiderman movie.
The only good justification of it can be that the companies can claim that the age verification was done as per Terms of Service, so in the future no parent or parent group can come after them for the content. Along with better targeted advertising by identifying the target audiences.
Logically parents are probably best suited to gate the content for their children how they see it fit.
I think the reverse Hanlon's Razor applies here:
"Never attribute to stupidity that which is adequately explained by malice."
The Helen Lovejoy argument "will somebody please think of the children" provided for the foot in the door. The intended outcome is that only iris scans will allow for full child protection ... and that was the plan all along.
If you’re in Canada please write your MP about bill S-209, which brings this nonsense here.
As someone on a tech forum, we’re the only people who can really articulate the issues with the age verification approach.
It’s really the worst solution to these problems with awful tradeoffs.
Source: https://www.internetmatters.org/hub/research/online-safety-a...
Some more earlier: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48017190
Another step towards "Insert your verification probe to continue"
I'm sure it will actually be "drink verification can to continue".
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36542487
Life finds a way...
Well of course. What else did they expect kids were going to do? This whole idea was braindead from the start.
One big problem is that the verification is trying to estimate your age instead of looking up who is the actual person and then checking what the age is of that person. If the lookup returns that the face is that of a video game character it should reject as opposed to trying to estimate the age of that character.
That's one idea. I have a different one.
What if we...now hear me out....what if we didn't try to shoehorn a stupid and unworkable technological solution into this problem space and just...made parents responsible for their kids?
Nono too radical, parents dont have time, they need it to scroll some shitty social media cash grab to feel themselves even more shitty about their lives.
... and we would like to call our generation 'smart'. While knowing deep inside very well what a failure as a parent many of our generation are. The proof for/against are our kids right in front of our eyes and there is no escaping from this basic truth, thats why its so crushing.
Sorry gotta go, need to check some shitty sites who spy on me and try to push in vain on me some primitive ads.
/s
Parents who work fulltime, some even more than one job?
Says a lot about the state of society when parenting is outsourced to technology, so that the parents can be further enslaved (because almost no one chooses to work two jobs).
Oof. Now I has a sad. :(
What if we...now hear me out....what if we paid people a living wage?
Most of a "living wage" is from the cost of living. We make living space artificially scarce and then your rent is high but so is the rent on the small businesses that employ people. The restaurant can't pay the waitress more when their own costs have gone up, and the money is going to the landlords rather than the employers.
Likewise, when some megacorps capture the government and monopolize a market, the costs go up on both individuals and all the employers in other markets who are now paying monopoly rents with the money they could have otherwise used to hire more people (bidding up wages) or lower the prices workers pay when they buy their products.
Just asking them to pay more doesn't work when the party you want to pay more isn't the party which is extracting the money, and higher costs are just as much of a problem as lower wages.
There are computing and communication devices designed for kids to use.
Stop handing your kids brand new iPads and complaining, especially if you aren't willing to use parental controls.
I'm not saying you're wrong, but Apple's parental controls just don't work.
It's possible to design something parents can control without using lots of their time to do so.
So you are back to
> what if we didn't try to shoehorn a stupid and unworkable technological solution into this problem space
Depends on how you end that sentence.
If you end it with "and make a good easy to use technical solution instead" then you found my stance.
If you end it with "and just...made parents responsible for their kids?" like GP then no that's not my stance at all.
> If you end it with "and make a good easy to use technical solution instead" then you found my stance.
That assumes a good easy to use technical solution is possible. What if classifying user-generated content as safe for kids is enormously subjective, and the labor required to accurately classify it even given a hypothetical objective standard would cost more than users are willing to pay to have it done?
So you could say the same for original echnical solution. > make a good easy to use technical solution instead
ok, now you've identified the real problem, how can we solve that?
well, everyone need to clarify their priorities.
Food and shelter vs children?
Massive downvote because I don't want to blame hard working parents?
I get a hard tech-bro vibe who like to blame others to deflect from responsibilty of their technology
whaaat? parents?? being responsible? let alone to their kids? what are you? some kind of backward medieval luddite?
btw, yes, we must not lose the skill of parenting. no any technology give it back to us.
Right they didnt put enough panopticon in. Got it.
> looking up who is the actual person
"Fallacies programmers believe about people"
(you can sort of do this in countries with national ID schemes if you don't care about foreigners; for example, various people have found this in China where random things are gated behind having a WeChat account which requires a Chinese ID. You can't do this in the US or UK, which are big pushers of the ""age verification"" scheme)
You don't need an Id. For example, you can crawl the internet for selfies and then try and tie that face with the person it belongs to. With enough datasets you can start to put together a database of relevant people enough that it's okay to do deeper validation for the people you did not collect a face for.
In addition to being illegal under GDPR, that's not going to work very well.
I don't look like the other people whose name I share.
Famously, neither does this guy: https://iammarkzuckerberg.com
> you can crawl the internet for selfies and then try and tie that face with the person it belongs to
Yeeeah .. this is not the sort of thing that GDPR ought to allow, though.