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- Hacker News
- The moral panic is about harm to children, when the harm to everybody is apparent
These companies are vulnerable to regulation because they must sell advertising in every market they operate in.
We could make them open their algorithms.
by worik - The Internet was built for adults. Then, we gave kids tablets and phones. Now, decades later, we have a problem. Kids see things meant for adults.
Maybe we need an adult only portion of the Internet and verify identity only on that (like bars do to keep out kids).
New TLD maybe? .adult
by seethishat - .xxx has been a thing since 2011, .adult and .porn since 2014, and .sex since 2015.by ElementW
- Mandatory verification is an unacceptable attack on privacy. A device level whitelist of kid safe areas that is disabled by default and enabled by parents is a better idea.
- It is unclear to me how you can regulate any digital service with respect to any demographic identity without regression to full identity check.
Parental controls are not a solution, either. People are free to use any terminal they wish. If you wanted to change that then it again regresses to the same issue.
- By making the thing that is unsafe to use safe to use?by braiamp
- A few options: (a) load a digital copy of an existing ID into your OS's wallet app then the wallet app can simply attest to any service that the device is owned by someone over 18 (b) sell single-use tokens in grocery stores that require an ID to purchase like alcohol. token can be used to verify you're 18+ for one site. (c) require that any network-enabled device can only be bought by showing ID to prove 18+ and then when set up can be configured at the OS-level as child-owned so a parent can buy a device and do the initial setup so it's locked in child mode.by owisd
- What I find interesting is that Texas did it with just pornography sites, everyone complains. Then California, which included those that complained by Texas' law, says they're going to do it at the OS level, some people were okay with it but some still opposed it and possibly some others opposed it. Yet, they're still pushing forward with both?by hk1337
- Just like all the other policies that somehow manage to move at the speed of light across the globe. These politicians are seem to all be influenced by the same thing, with that usually being in opposition to the people that voted for them.by nomel
- Good - the lobbyists are losing the war.
Now it is time to disband Facebook - companies leveraging lobbyists to try to destroy democracies, must be disbanded.
by shevy-java - Seems like there are many ways to get toward the best of both worlds -- don't allow people to upload pictures of kids who are clearly under 15 to social media would get us a lot of the way there.
Also all of these companies know from advertising data, and location data, that you are at school, who you are, etc. They would also know that all of your friends are also teenagers.
If the law is serious there are many many ways to enforce this without violating privacy.
by zug_zug - > Seems like there are many ways to get toward the best of both worlds -- don't allow people to upload pictures of kids who are clearly under 15 to social media would get us a lot of the way there.
How do you prevent kids uploading photos of themselves?
by philipwhiuk - Without further violating privacy. I would say that the data these companies are already collecting on people (including children, who many believe should be afforded extra protections from such companies) is a major, systematic privacy violation.by wizzwizz4
- As french citizen what I can say is: Parliamentary time wasted. During the initial work the deputees that have initiated the project could have figured out that the constitutional court would, in fine, block the text.by sixthDot
- Sometimes they do know but do it anyway (or even for that very reason) because it serves their political interests and then the great bill they were supporting is blocked by someone else, which can be blamed as needed.
I think Trump played that game a number of times, for instance.
- Sometimes these things are a prelude to constitutional changes, or at least could be in the minds of the proponents.by kergonath
- The right implementation is to have parents mark certain devices as "under 18", and then have those devices perform accordingly.
This give parents useful control, and removes the state overreach.
by paulsutter - This is very binary. A 11y old and a 17y old are very different.by prmoustache
- This is the correct response. Privacy is a human right.
- I always find it weird when people declare things “are” rights, as rights are things societies create. “Should be a right” seems like a more appropriate framingby purplerabbit
- The title is unfortunately edited. The courts have blocked it. The government wants it.by graemep
- The courts are part of the government no?by awithrow
- This could have been an http header. It's hard to identify people, but blocking child-locked devices should be easy, since the devices can be built to cooperate.
Then it's up to parents to give their kids child-locked devices and for stores to not sell unlocked devices to kids.
by skybrian - Child-locked devices can already whitelist/blacklist sites and apps. The issue is not capability.
And before anyone blames the parents, parents will always be shitty. They are an impediment to children's health society must work around.
I wish we would just pull the plug on ad-based social media altogether. The incentives add up to destroying society.
- People keep saying it’s the parents responsibility to keep their kids safe, and don’t give them the tools! This is such an obvious one. I should be able to lock down a laptop for a child, and then have the browser limit websites to those that are actually child safe. I don’t care if a government agency is the one issuing “child safety certs”. This gets around the whole “identify everyone no matter what” thing, and it means that parents don’t have to run an entire IT department level of security infrastructure to keep their kids safe online.
- There is just such a HTTP header, for adult sites. It's not granular enough to set individual age ratings, just to mark a page as 18+.by big85
- The court reasoned sensibly: it's wrong to violate the rights of all citizens just to weed out a small group of violators. This is contrary to data protection regulations. The controversial Chat Control law follows the same logic: to find criminals, they propose monitoring everyone.
The problem is that any age verification system effectively becomes an identity verification system. And such tools rarely remain "just for kids"—they quickly become used for other purposes. The only secure way is to verify not the person's identity, but the device's status (for example, that it's a children's device). This is called age assurance: we confirm age without knowing who exactly is in front of us.
by azhdanova - > age verification system effectively becomes an identity verification system.
this is fundamentally wrong and accepting this as an industry will only lead to required identity verification becoming the norm sooner or later
the important realization is age verification is in the end "just" a form of parenting tool
this means
- it doesn't need to be a "perfect", glancing at the age of a passport when buying adult products isn't perfect either, but it's good enough. And it doesn't require seeing the address, name, (in most cases) day and month, gender etc. on a id, nor any form of "noting them down".
- it doesn't need to be attestation based, unhackable or anything like that. It complements parenting, not replaces it.
- in turn it also shouldn't need anyones id, in most places children below 18 don't need any id but 16+ is still a age barrier
or to lay it out in rough design
- require multimedia devices sold to have a child "mode" functionality
- allow setting a age category or age (to auto determine and update the category), require a age set for this purpose to be kept private on the device and not shared, analyzed etc.
- require web sites and apps to have voluntary min age limits, similar to other products, block access _client side_ based on this information. The standard should allow region/country specific limits and reason tags.
- There are a bunch of edge cases omitted, like sites serving dynamic content/platforms in general. Requirements for parents to be allowed to define exceptions (in both directions) and handling of sides not having your countries age gating. Etc.
- properly educate parent about it
this provides sufficient functionality to support parents in parenting without requiring any identity verification or overriding the parents right to parent
yes, it's not perfect in many ways. But it doesn't need to perfect, it's "just fine" for what it tries to archive.
by dathinab - > The problem is that any age verification system effectively becomes an identity verification system. And such tools rarely remain "just for kids"—they quickly become used for other purposes.
source?
by pbkompasz - This user is known to the state of California to post LLM text.