These discussions remind me so much of the US discussions about federal ID documents as verification.
There's a vocal portion of people which opposes any solution because "privacy, government overreach, surveillance ...". So instead of a solution like e.g. zero-proof age verification, that tries to minimize intrusions on privacy, the result is the worst of all worlds, maximum surveillance (but I guess it's ok if it is not the federal government, but meta), with minimum utility. Just look at the freaking mess that is trying to proof your identity in the US.
For there to be a solution, there needs to be a problem. These bills are not addressing a problem. Assume the online platform has a video feed of my kid, or their SSN, or a zero-knowledge-proof of age, or whatever.
Now, what will the platform do with it? Concretely? As in: Name one bad outcome a reasonable parent would care about that's prohibited under these bills. If the bad thing happens due to willful negligence, then there needs to be some actual material consequence to someone at the platform provider.
Please explain how opposition to privacy invasive solutions result in even more privacy invasive solutions being implemented? Is it purely out of spite from the lawmakers? This logic doesn't follow.
Because we’re currently still in the phase where lawmakers are telling tech companies “please find a solution for this issue.” At some point, as has happened in the past with other issues, this will change to “solve this issue, here’s exactly how you have to do it.”
This seems like a very easy problem. The government has birth records, passports, ssn, phone records, etc. so they could provide an age bracket to anybody that needs it. But instead a private corporation will get to do this and create an absolute mess à la Palantir.
this position assumes the surveillance state or megacorps would be satisfied with a zero knowledge proof based ID/age verification system, which is not at all obvious to me
meta could spend their billions lobbying for that, if they wanted to
Not everyone has (or can have) a driver's license and a social security card literally says it is *not* for identification because it lacks even the most basic aspects. But since the US never managed to come up with an actual system, companies started using SSNs like an identity verifier, because it is the one thing everyone has across every state. But that also makes identity theft or credit fraud trivial in the US compared to other countries.
You must not live in the US or have very odd patterns, I'm positive a majority of the US population have free credit monitoring due to the multiple SSN data leaks.
I think they're talking about proving your identity to a non govt entity. A few things that come to mind are any platform with a KYC, they require you to upload your ID and assure you they're secure with a little lock icon.
The identity issuer - the government - already has the your privacy. If you have a unique identifier from the government which websites can call the government with to verify your identity, you won't lose any privacy. All the websites get is just a unique string, no date of birth, no name, no address. This approach is the cornerstone of oauth/oidc.
> I'm not sure what's a mess about a driver's license, social security card
Neither of those are accepted by various states' voter id laws, nor can you reliably board an airplane with them since RealID.
The only foolproof identity card in the US appears to be a passport (which, you know, global federal identity card... exactly what the folks against universal ids dislike)
My research suggests that all U.S. states that require identification at the polls accept a driving license as a form of valid photo ID. Are you aware of any that don’t?
There are also a bunch of other gotchas: Original birth certificates and all currently-issued military IDs are not acceptable, for instance (even though the bill lists birth certificates and military IDs as acceptable, there are carve-outs to ban the common cases).
Good luck getting a passport between now and then.
To be clear, it's not required to vote. It's required for a new registration to vote. Which is typically done when you get a new ID, which already requires having those documents, more even because you have to show proof of current residence.
Yup. And like the Clipper chip but with much less pushback. It's a weaponized manufacturing consent campaign to fool people into giving up their privacy and anonymity with d/misinformation. It's so disgusting that state and federal legislators are giving them everything they want, well beyond regulatory capture towards absolute corruption and absolute power.
I know most of this affects only the US, but I'm wondering where this will go in the EU if the Age Verification Tech goes ahead in America. There's been lots of efforts to increase surveillance disguised as protection for kids in the EU and UK.
The Swiss implementation of eID may be hint that governments may/will take the responsibility to implement and maintain the tech, but the multiple intrusions and lobbying by Palantir and friends in the EU gives me the ick.
The Swiss eID is open source[1] and it's usage will be limited. Any type of age verification for online service would need go to a vote and would probably loose. "Eigenverantwortung", it is the parents job to look after the kids, not the state.
You can't just push responsibility for the kids to the parents, where is the world going? This is madness.
The next thing you are going to claim kids from young age shouldn't have fully unlocked smart phones, shouldn't install any app and so on. Where is the end of this? Are you telling me parents should spend more time with kids, heck even be their role models although it is much harder compared to just giving up on them and let the glorious internet and various fashionate toxic tribes raise them? Blasphemy!!!
Look, I have a two-year old. But I think it’s possible to do what you want without compromising the privacy of the user. I also don’t think it’s right to require every device to share information that makes my child a target for predators like Meta.
but we always will have bad parents. So any legistlation needs to account for that. Otherwise those children with the worst parents have the greater digital abilities/opportunities/misfortunes.
It is not like parents are the only influential figures in a kid's upbringing, they are not the only role models, they should not be the only ones paying attention and guiding kids to adulthood.
Parental control options as they stand are severely lacking. If you add the actively predatory enshittification efforts conducted by seemingly all larges tech companies, you are left either forbidding your kid from accessing anything (this does not work if the kid's friends have access) or allowing far more than you are comfortable with.
Lets take YouTube as an example. As it stands you have the options of YouTube (with both the most wonderful content available on one hand, and toxicity and brain rot shorts on the other) or YouTube Kids - an app with controls that do not work. How about allowing parents to whitelist content and/or creators instead of letting the algorithms run the show?
Spotify is another example. How about letting parents control whether the kid's account is plastered with videos, podcasts and AI slop?
How about your run of the mill browser, letting parents review and allow websites on a case-by-case basis? Maybe my kid is ready for news sites but not Reddit? Maybe 4chan and 8kun are better reserved for the more adventorous adults as opposed to impressionable kids?
I agree that age verification is a bad solution, but what the hell are parents supposed to reach for? It's not like Silicon Valley are stepping up with any real solutions or even propositions to these problems, it is left for - at best clueless - politicians to navigate the problem space.
Parents shouldn't beat or rape their kids yet many thousands do. Parents should teach their kids about sex yet we still have sex ed in schools. Parents shouldn't deprive their kids of an education yet a minority do for religious our personal reasons; we still have compulsory schooling. Parents shouldn't give cigarretes or alcohol to kids yet we still have laws to prevent their sale to minors.
I'm always unsure what your sort of argument seems to imply. Kids are not property of their parents and the state routinely makes decisions about children's welfare.
Kids are not property of the parents. Because with property rights comes responsibility.
And that's the catch-22 imposed on parents. Society wants to lord over the power as if the child is their property but none of the responsibility. Anything that went wrong is the parent's fault. It's always more and more requirements upon the parent, a nearly one way imposition of power where law or society says what you must do but of course you will bear all the costs. But by god you better not morally outrage someone or they'll have CPS up your ass.
It's largely the cheapest kind of concern. The kind where you mete out punishment out of a sense of smug moral superiority, but never lift a hand to help out for the endeavors you advocate for, only to push them into a sort of moral tragedy of the commons.
These laws only mete out punishment for people failing to obey, not actually provide support, it is essentially theatre of pretending to care about children. Theatre by the most evil of people, those that use kids as political props.
I don’t understand why this sentiment keeps coming up when it’s clear parents are expected to do more than ever now.
Are you going to sit here and tell me your parents were aware of every time you touched a computer or turned on the TV? They vetted everything you consumed? It was a lot easier back then to do. I bet your parents couldn’t even figure out how to block a single channel on their tv, nor did they likely even try. Most of our parents never did.
It helped that, at the time, most video was broadcast over the air and thus subject to FCC regulations relating to content, and that advertisers would pull funds from stations and networks that aired content that was too controversial. Other, non-regulated or less regulated (“adult”) content was for pay and the systems had child lockouts.
It’s much easier to relinquish parental control of media exposure when the system helps you out by moderating the content. But the Internet changed everything. I can’t imagine how difficult it must be as a parent to care for children nowadays without pulling the plug on social media altogether.
Can happen sometimes. I down voted the comment after reading only the first sentence but then corrected it to an upvote after reading the rest. Not sure if many people have an attention span long enough to do something like this.
Even noticing the sarcasm, it just seems a bit... unnecessary?
It interrupts a discussion without adding much, so to me just seems snarky for no good reason.
The EU, unfortunately, has shown to be very susceptible to this kind of lobbying in the past. We regularly see legislation that is being rammed and rushed through in spite of vocal opposition. I would be very, very worried. (EU citizen)
This is because it's not an EU/Canada/US thing as much as some would like to make it. It's a "losing that one election" thing. "What about the Children" always sells. What the EU/Canada have is that the US got hit with this wave first so they can see the results. That's a data point the American Voter only had in theory, not in example form. The recent uptick of nationalism has people thinking there's some essentialism between states and there really isn't - anyone who's travelled in more places than the city knows it.
The EU puts a nice shine on things, but there are systemic and fundamental characteristics of the EU that not only make it more susceptible to "lobbying" and ignoring the electorate; which are also far more difficult to change by that electorate than in the USA where we still have direct elections of individuals not party lists (in most cases) that cause total loyalty to the party, not the constituency.
But the EU also doesn't have the same level of power as the US federal government. It's a loosely federated coalition of seperate nations, not one entity.
They're proposals by a minority. I'd like to see it go to see chat control go to grave permanently, but I'd also rather not that the democratic system allows for the permanent barring an impossible to define class of proposals from even being proposed. Or do you have other solutions?
I'm definitely for creating EU directives that enhances digital privacy rights and sovereignty to block whole classes of privacy-endangering surveillance proposals in the future. That seems like the best solution to me. It's much better than allowing those proposals to be made again and again until they are passed in some shady package deal. Even if such a proposal is struck down by local laws, constitutions, or the ECHR, once they have the foot in the door, they will only be modified minimally to comply with the constitution.
The fact that it has to be repeatedly fended off and that the EU regime still tries to push it is a prime example of lobbying^H corruption. They won't give up until they pass. What more do you need?
> We regularly see legislation that is being rammed and rushed through in spite of vocal opposition.
This implies that regulation is codified. The clear pattern of EU digital regulation doomerism is generally pointing at shitty proposals which aren't approved and codified in law.
Digital omnibus is another proposal.
If "rammed and rushed laws" is legitimately a widespread issue, you should be able to find a good example of something codified which is not just a proposal?
I'm not saying we don't have to fight. But vocal opposition to proposals which ultimately don't make it into law is the system working exactly as intended.
> The clearest example of lobbying (chat control) has repeatedly been struck down.
They can try as often as they want and they only have to win once. We - as in those who don't want this Orwellian monster to be written into law - have to win all the time.
Right but thats just the system working as intended? Gay marriage would still be illegal if unpopular ideas couldn't be reraised. Democracy is a balance, unfortunately you have to put up with fighting against the shit ideas as well as for the good ones.
> Right but thats just the system working as intended?
No, it is a one way street and thus creates an imbalance. EU regimes never push new legislation that gives more rights to their citizens, only try to limit them again and again.
> Gay marriage would still be illegal if unpopular ideas couldn't be reraised.
Gay marriage is a good example. It got passed despite being unpopular. In many countries where it was pushed by force from above, from the EU to the national level, it is still unpopular.
> Democracy is a balance, unfortunately you have to put up with fighting against the shit ideas as well as for the good ones.
The issue with democracy as we have it in the EU is the imbalance of power and responsibility. Given the EU regime's decisions in the last few decades, I consider it just a shell to push unpopular and undemocratic decisions to their member states, so lobbyists don't have to bribe everyone, just the EU regime.
I don't think any EU directive on gay marriage exist, and directives (accompanied by fines) is the main way for the EU to try to push laws on states (the other way if having a citizen go the the EUCJ against his own state, but that almost never ends in law changes).
> I consider it just a shell to push unpopular and undemocratic decisions to their member states, so lobbyists don't have to bribe everyone, just the EU regime.
GDPR is entirely unenforced, it's not worth the paper it's written on, and this is due to lobbying. The situation continues to this day. The DPAs simply throw reports of violations into the trash bin.
It's hilariously transparent - Ireland recently (less than 6 months ago) added a former _Meta lobbyist_ to their DPA board [0].
US Big Tech is now spending a record €151 million per year on lobbying the EU [1], and it's completely implausible to believe they're doing that with 0 RoI. "The number of digital lobbyists has risen from 699 to 890 full-time equivalents (FTEs), surpassing the 720 Members of the European Parliament (MEPs). A total of 437 lobbyists now have continuous access to the European Parliament.
Three meetings per day: Big Tech held an average of three lobbying meetings a day in the first half of 2025, which speaks volumes about their level of access to EU policymakers." It's impossible that this doesn't influence things.
Yep. Sadly the EU is more or less lost, and freedom online will be squashed. I would not be surprised if age verification will tie in with the EU digital wallet, and with the EU democracy shield surveillance project, so that any opposition to Brussels ideological stance will get you disconnected from your bank, money, purchases, and your ability to ID yourself.
Basically, the chinese, through WTO, managed to utilize corona to show politicians, regardless of color, the enormous power of complete digital control of the population.
Our spineless and incompetent EU politicians thought it very erotic, and are now ramming it down our throats.
I don't really see a way to stop this apart from moving to south america or africa, to a small country with a weak government.
Is it stupid or intentional? I believe the latter. There are many layers that these kinds of things go through before they are pushed in that manner and not in a "smart" manner that respects rights of the majority of the population. They are chasing this path for deliberate reasons, regardless of what they may be, or whether you like it or not. Ironically, they can only engage in these "stupid" things because people don't force them to not engage in "stupid things". Silence in consent in these kinds of cases.
I keep emailing my (Labour) MP about this, I suggest you do the same! I get the standard "protecting the children" response. I am not voting Labour again if this madness is still in place (or worse!) at the next GE.
MPs are pretty bad at dealing with anything that doesn't come from the party or the newspapers. I'm donating to the Open Rights Group to care about this on my behalf.
(my MP is SNP, so I benefit from not being in the two party trap)
one hypothesis for why meta wants this is because AI (including its own push for it) has turned much of the internet and its social media platforms into slopfarms and clickbots that advertisers are increasingly moving away from.
The real driver is as always, ad revenue. This time, advertisers want and need to know a real human is engaging the brand and Meta cannot see any other way in sight to assure this fact save for age verification.
this is just the latest evolution of surveillance capitalism.
> ... but I'm wondering where this will go in the EU
There's more money spent in lobbyism in the EU than anywhere else in the world. Lobbyism and downright corruption: like Qatari bribing EU MEPs [1] and police finding 1 million EUR in bills hidden at a MEP's apartment (in this case a bribe to explain publicly that Qatar is a country oh-so-respectful of human rights).
The EU is way more corrupt than the US and in many EU countries there's little private sector compared to the US. In France for example more than 60% of the GDP is public spending and all the big companies are state or partially state-owned or owned by people very close to the state.
And as to american companies bribing EU politicians: it's nothing new. IBM and Microsoft for example are two names everybody in the business knows have been splurging money to buy influence and illegal kickbacks have always been flying. It's just the way things have always been operating. Today you can very likely add Google and Palantir etc. to the list but it's nothing new.
EU politicians are whores. And cheap whores at that: investigative journalists have shown, in the past, the little amount of money that was needed to buy their votes. Most of them go into politics to extract as much taxpayers money as they can for their own benefit. They of course love to get bribes.
Also to try to not get caught, EU politicians voted themselves special powers and it's very difficult for the regular police to enter official EU buildings. I know an police inspector who went and arrested a MEP for possession of child porn: it required a very long procedure, way longer than usual, and the request of special authorization allowing them to enter the EU parliament (or EU commission, don't remember which but I think it was MEP at the EP).
American companies bribing EU politicians should scare you indeed: it's been ongoing since forever.
> The Swiss implementation of eID may be hint that governments may/will take the responsibility
Switzerland is in Europe but it's not in the EU: it's not representative of the insane corruption present in the EU institutions.
I think age verification laws are good in principle - there's a lot of stuff on the internet that people should be protected from. But it's the manner of age verification that is the issue.
The EU has zero knowledge proof age verification systems, e.g. through your bank, which are secure and don't involve sending a copy of your ID and / or face scan to a dodgy US based 3rd party.
I disagree. What if, hear me out, parents actually parent, instead of relegating the parenting to companies, and ruining the internet for the rest of us?
Of course! Age verification laws for buying alcohol, tobacco (and firearms in the US) should be removed! They ruin our experience.
The same way, keeping driver license behind an age gate is unnecessary, parents should parents! I was driving tractors at 12yo, why couldn't I drive a car?
Parents should be the one responsible if they give money or a car to their kid
At least nobody is making a list of who, where and when bought the cigar. Now facebook wants to know at what time, for how much, which brand, from which referrer....
I'm concerned about these laws and their implications for privacy, but as a parent, I'm not sure what you mean to say parents should parent. How? What should the parent do? How would you recommend a parent protect a 13 year old who spends their time in their room and out with their friends on their phones?
They get them from their friends at school. I can’t be with my son every waking moment of every day and it’s a ridiculous stance to tel me to do so. I’m also not the only parent I’ve met who wants to be able to limit my child’s access to garbage like social media and Youtube online.
What you’re proposing is similar to a “Google Free Village.” What we need is something that lets parents have some control by proxy without violating the privacy of the child or anyone else. I believe it’s possible to do so.
The Internet that we grew up on has been totally subsumed by scumbag marketing to the point that it’s unavoidable. It’s an addictive substance now. Stop pretending like the ways of the 90’s and 2000’s are still accessible.
Tell me you don't have children without saying you don't have children.
In many places it is essentially impossible for children (even younger than 13) to have a normal social live without access to a smart phone. Just some examples, many public transport providers are moving to apps as the only way to pay for fares, nearly all communication for sports clubs happens through messenger platforms, school information is typically distributed via apps as well and the list goes on (I have not even touched on the kids own social interactions).
The irony is that the people who say "parents should parent their kids online activities" the loudest, largely grew up with unrestricted computer use, in chat rooms, weird corners of the internet all by working around any restrictions that parents tried to put on them. Mainly because they were much more computer literate then the older generation.
I have a different solution to your other repliers: do nothing, your kid will be fine in all likelihood. If you must satisfy the politician's syllogism, set some time limits and make them touch grass. But a thirteen year old oughtn't be parented like a three year old.
Age verification kind of disgusts me and your kid will probably be fine
Isis did manage to recruit young men in the UK via telegram (OK, you just said “in all likelihood“, maybe I’m tossing you the exception that proves the rule)
My main issue with this argument is that we never applied it to any other age gate created in the past. Why? Maybe part of it was control, but also because we know parents will fail their kids, and there were cases bad enough in the past that society decided to step in and protect kids even when parents fail.
If we really embraced this logic, then should we look at returning to the laws from before the 'protect the children' push of the 20th century. Compare this to some countries where kids can go buy beer. I've read stories from people in less regulated countries who use to buy beer for their parents when they were underage, and nothing was stopping them from buying it from themselves if their parents allowed it (or failed to stop it). Even a concept like child labor, why should we regulate that out to companies to control instead of depending upon parents to parent? When you consider web access as a person having some sort of transaction with a company, it generalizes to a very similar position of if a parent or the government should monitor that relationship for harm.
agree, also they should take into account that their children will be eventually an adult and will be living in such system. Goverments should only focus on educating parents (available tools, recommendations) and maybe provide some open source tooling for parents.
> agree, also they should take into account that their children will be eventually an adult and will be living in such system
We also have to consider that "children" covers anywhere from birth to approximately 18 years old.
It is reasonable to expect a parent or their proxy (e.g. caregivers and teachers) to moderate access to the Internet in the early years. Yet older children and teenagers gradually gain more independence. For example: they are able to go places on their own, get their own phone, etc.. In the physical world, we have laws that recognize this, things like forbidding the sale of alcohol and tobacco to minors. Responsibility is placed on the vendor to check identification when selling such products and the customer's age is suspect. It would be absurd to place responsibility on parents in this case since the most a parent can do is educate their child.
Now I understand the Internet poses problems when it comes to similar transactions. For face to face transactions, appearing old enough is often sufficient (perhaps with a buffer to avoid liability) for access without presenting identification. While it isn't truly anonymous, there are cases where it can be reasonably anonymous. Unfortunately, transactions are mediated by machines on the Internet. You cannot make any assumptions about the other person. Making matters worse: it is extraordinarily difficult to do age verification without disclosing identify information, and to do so in a manner that is easily recorded. Whether that information is provided directly or through a third party is a moot point. It is still being provided.
I don't know how we go about solving this problem, but I do know two things:
- Placing all responsibility into the hands of parents is absurd, and would ultimately prove harmful to adolescents. It is creating a nanny-state where the nanny is the parent. The youth would be unable to gradually gain independence, nor develop an identity independent of their parents' whims.
- We live in a world which is eager to age-gate things that should not be. Sometimes this is for semi-legitimate reasons due to how the Internet is structured. For example: there is no good reasons why children and youth cannot participate in things like discussion forums, but those forums definitely cannot look like the "social media" we have today. Other times it is for despicable reasons, such as making value based judgements based upon ideology. (The left and right are both guilty of this.)
This is a common argument, but the problem is the kids who have deadbeat parents
Or even kids whose parents don't have the technical knowledge needed
Yes I do agree the responsibility is with the parents, but it's these kids who are majoritarily affected by (bad internet actors) AND (bad offline actors)
Anyone should be allowed to buy/do anything at any age, why have any restrictions that's a parent's responsibility! /s
A proper society raises their new generations.
Yes, rights and responsibilities fall mostly to parents, but I see no reason to make licentious activities difficult for parents to inhibit.
What is it you want to do on the internet?
We can have systems that allow anonymity (between client and server), but still put hardcore porn, gore, financial frauds and such out of reach of those without proof they're over 18.
Now, don't get me wrong, Palantir and it's ilk are a danger to society. But just because the military-industrial complex wants to use any excuse to control people, doesn't mean all of those excuses are wrong.
Zero knowledge is not true. All chains rely, ultimately, on a place where ID:s are stored, and from there, they will leak. That place can also be engineered to undo the zero knowledge design. Couple that with the already in place, surveillance by ISP:s within the EU, and it becomes obvious that zero knowledge is a scam, and only valid under unreal conditions that will never apply in the EU, and only in isolation, and not looking at the entire system.
The US has a large unbanked population that is currently fighting the trend of places discovering they can get rid of undesirable poorer customers by refusing to accept cash. These people would then lose access to many services on the Internet now due to parents refusing to parent.
I think these laws are a poor second-best substitute for proper moderation on the big content platforms.
As it stands one should be happy if Meta catches most calls for the extermination of an ethnicity on its platform, that they would provide capabilities that allows a kid to protect themselves from bullying or grooming is just unimaginable.
I expect the internet to be overrun with noise due to bots. So I have a feeling that eIDs are inevitable as a solution in the long run. If that is the case shouldn't we push for zero knowledge solutions?
Apparently most of the “original” report was done by Claude (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47366804). And now paraphrased on various ad-space (and in this case affiliate link) sellers, probably also by Claude. Claude is the only real journalist here.
Personally I’d rather not see reposts of posts this recent, especially LLM posts.
I came to the comments dissatisfied with the writing.
Or maybe more specifically the structure, idk not much of a writer, but many of the sentences are solid journalist quality yet the right background is not being set nor the right transitions being given etc.
My dissatisfaction mode used to be boring high school newspaper sentences but the kids still seem to _assemble_ the details a tiny bit better.
What to Submit
On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.
Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, or celebrities, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.
The question I keep coming back to regarding the recent debate around age verification is "Why now?"
I'm 47, and I started using the internet in my early teens through BBS gateways. I've seen every age of the Internet, and there's always been widely available pornographic materials. Why all of a sudden is this a crisis?
Pornography is a very convenient pretext. The real target is anonymity and pseudonymity. Both have been abundantly available on the early Internet. Both were and are being gradually squeezed out from it.
Various law enforcement agencies would love to know more, always more. The more the users are required to identify themselves, link their online identity (maybe pseudonymous for other users) to their official offline identity, the easier it is to find and catch criminals. Not only criminals, of course, but even if we assume 0% nefarious intent, and only the desire to catch the evildoers who swindle grandmas out of their life's savings, this still holds.
Operators of big sites also would benefit. Easier to ban disruptive users. Many great ways to turn the precise identity into targeted ads.
The internet has become a very serious, consequential space. More like... the "real world", which was considered separate from the internet in 1990s. Now they are inseparable, so the pressures of the "real world" are equally present offline and online.
To add to this, I suspect the data broker industry also has an interest in increasing the legitimacy of the data they sell about anyone they can get their hands on.
incongruent. first you say "pornography is just pretext" then say "it's like real world now". where in "real world" can preteen kids go and see not just porn but people limbs removed and other stuff?
pretending the actual issue doesn't exist will not help you stop laws like this
I'm the same age as you, started when I was maybe 15 on BBSes. The porn was certainly a lot harder to come by, still images that took a while to download, had to do it when family was out of sight on the family computer and clean up history after. Kids have personal devices and can go down a rabbit hole of content in their room. It seems fairly different. Age ranges are different too, 10 year olds have phones and have maybe been using an iPad their whole life.
But even then, I think if adults knew what we were up to, maybe they would have lobbied for stuff then too.
For my 10 year old, we don't allow youtube or any other algorithm doomscrolling feed. And no voice chat in online gaming. We plan on waiting until 13 for a phone, or behind-closed-doors internet, and we use parental controls.
I'm not presenting this as an argument for age verification, but just to say the landscape is very different. And parents who have been making choices for their young kids have to start letting go at some point, and maybe, at whatever point parents stop monitoring, they would like the kids to not be fully in the deep end.
> at whatever point parents stop monitoring, they would like the kids to not be fully in the deep end
Parents want to stop monitoring their kids, but still want their kids' experiences to be catered to their ideals, so the rest of society must now bend towards what you want for your kids specifically?
What about parents who want a different set of guardrails for their kids - more limited or less limited than you? What about people who aren't kids - does their privacy or freedom not matter, just because you don't want to handle it yourselves anymore?
That sounds to me (a non-parent) like a very selfish (and naive) worldview. I'm assuming from your tone that you are in support of this, so would you explain to me why you think its not?
I don't think anyone who still holds up "the dangers of porn" can argue with any credibility anymore. We have a population scale study that lasted 30 years, and millennials turned out fine. Same with violent video games and harsh language music.
What does seem to definitely be having a severe negative impact though is social media.
Have you questioned whether you might have been better off without seeing ISIS decapitation videos when you were a teenager (you might be too old for that though)? Or maybe that you have something that makes you more immune to this stuff?
I think that I'm biased to think "it shouldn't be a crisis" because I saw that stuff as a kid and turned out ok, it's a prime example of survivor bias, maybe someone who saw that stuff didn't turn out that well. Also one thing I've been wondering I'm not sure if that's the beginning of my everlong cynicism. If it is, then I might have been better off without being exposed to that material that early in my life.
> Have you questioned whether you might have been better off without seeing ISIS decapitation videos when you were a teenager (you might be too old for that though)?
See, I have, and I think I am actually a better person for it. Videos like these show how humans are really just apes and can easily fall into doing heinous things. It helped harden my view that religion is a net negative for the world, made me a bit more careful, especially in where I choose to travel, and has given me a wider worldview.
No one is rick-rolling with Isis decapitation videos, you go to those sites, and you know what you are getting into. One of the wonders of the early internet was rotten.com, and I am very sad its gone.
How exactly is seeing what human beings are capable of going to harm anyone? It certainly isn't so "damaging" that it needs to be hidden from anyone.
Nearly everyone I know that saw this stuff turned out just fine
We do not need to turn society into a police state because we're afraid the next generation might not be able to handle what we handled fine for the most part
Edge cases should not dictate the removal of our freedom & rights
These bills are specifically exempting platforms that distributed the ISIS videos (like meta), and including platforms that did not.
apt-get install isis-beheading-vids doesn't work on any Linux distribution I've seen, and it's not like Microsoft or Apple were preloading them on laptops.
These bills have nothing to do with online safety. They exist purely to establish a police state (that will currently be run by a convicted felon with child abusers as deputies -- look at what ICE has been doing to the kids they round up, especially the pregnant ones).
Meta likes this stuff because (a) it's a barrier to entry to new social networks and (b) it heads off the under 16 bans which have happened in other countries.
People often cloak their power grabs behind a move to control some vice. It was just a bunch of us nerds on BBSs back in the day. Now everyone is online. The stakes are completely different.
its because we hired a generation of the greatest minds to build habit forming and addictive products. So now we're seeing signs of how bad that is for children's mental health prior to their ability to consent to that.
Just talked to a long-time friend laughing about the state of things and how we used to have unfettered access to horrific gore photos at 14. Don't ask me what the appeal was, I have no idea, but it was possible.
More studies are being done on the effects of social media. Social media execs have been brought in front of congress multiple times. The US tried to ban tiktok because it showed our military actions in a negative light to millions of teens.
maybe since minors can't enter into a contract they can't agree to TOS and therefore their content is ineligible to be used as LLM training material? just guessing.
This is outlined in Project 2025 (which I have not read).
As I understand it, the age verification laws are part of a three pronged plan to eliminate privacy, freedom of speech and freedom of expression online.
The goals being to expand current police abuses to include LGBTQ++, reporters, democrats, non-whites, non-christians, demonstrators, etc.
It all is predictable and makes perfect sense if you assume the goal is to hold control over the white house in 2029 while being even less popular than they currently are.
> This is outlined in Project 2025 (which I have not read).
Great sentence.
Aside from making me completely doubt everything you're stating, I don't understand why people just take it as a given that Project 2025 is something the current administration gives two shits about.
> I don't understand why people just take it as a given that Project 2025 is something the current administration gives two shits about.
Because if you use project 2025 as a scorecard, the current administration is hitting all the salient points very quickly. With a score that high, inferring that the administration does in fact give two shits about it seems reasonable.
Try to start an ISP and/or become a public Certificate Authority.You will quickly run into steep requirement (admin and financial). To buy IP address space, get peering partners for traffic transit, hosting dns, hosting email (good luck getting mail delivered to the big providers without having your own users verified via mobile number). Try to build a mobile app, or phone or runtime - all the key signing, binary signing involved, the entire security model from hardware/firmware, boot, memory access, runtime safety and on and on. Then there are the intelligence agencies and various countries surveillance laws, information laws.
If you add it all together, we are already monitored 100%. They want to linked and prove the monitored device is linked a certain human beyond a doubt. Email, Mobile, Full names are not enough, they want your biometrics too. They want you serial numbers of devices and mac addresses of networked devices and SIM cards. They want it all.They want your children to have devices with camera, mic and gps trackers in. Your kids will be part of kompromat before they reach adulthood and some of them will be blackmailed by government agents and other bad actors throughout life. Some kids will be trafficked with the help of all these tech solutions, because they know exactly where your kids are at every moment.
Add home assistants, smart tv's with cameras, toys with cameras, outdoor cameras, shopping mall cameras everywhere, in-vehicle cameras and mics. Bluetooth beacons everywhere.
Add it all up and ask yourself, is this truly about child safety? Not at all. I'd argue they would be more exposed. If they wanted children safer, they'd recommend parents and schools to 100% remove kids from the internet or devices with public internet access. Why does a 10 year old need to know how to join a teams meeting and being comfortable on a video call?
Not to mention the access to weird porn and gore sites that WILL traumatize a young mind.
Then contemplate what all this data will be used for in the hands of extremists, nazi's, dictators, the effects on free speech & journalism, the propaganda machines reach on you and your family.
The internet is 10000% cooked and no longer open. It's better to disconnect from it at this point.
They seek monopoly. Startups can’t afford these barriers and can’t convince users to trust them with the safety and value of the verification process without being an established brand.
It's a coordinated psyop to enforce mass surveillance and control. The question we should ask ourselves is "Who are they?". Their agenda is clear already.
Why can't we handle this the same way we handle knives, guns and chainsaws: require adults to secure the device before letting minors near them? All the devices need is the ability to create limited access profiles. A human adult performs age verification by only providing the minor with creditals to a limited profile. Trying to perform that verification so far away from the minor, after they have got to the last gate, seems like the worst way to do it.
I want my kids to grow up in a world where they can install linux themselves. I don't want them to grow up in a world where they can't walk to a neighborhood park without me.
Not sure I see the crossover between activities performed at home and problems of car centric street design and the resulting poor pedestrian traffic safety?
If I have to watch my kids 100% of the time they can't walk to the park.
Nothing to do with street design - most suburbs have a park a safe walk near any house. That kids are not walking there is nothing to do with street design.
I have - he is making huge logic errors. There is good stuff there, but some conclusions don't follow. Others are correct for one area but don't generalize. He isn't as bad as strongtowns but still you need to use care when following him.
(c) "Neglect" does not include:
[...]
(iv) permitting a child, whose basic needs are met and who is of sufficient age and maturity to avoid harm or unreasonable risk of harm, to engage in independent activities, including:
[...]
(B) traveling to and from nearby commercial or recreational facilities;
A handful of other states have followed suit. This page shows a map of states with similar laws: https://letgrow.org/states/
I am empathetic to 99% of this woman's case and the article.
However, the ending though, really feels like they're one step away from anti-vax, anti-education, and pro-hate pro-bigotry.
This case really feels like an over-reach. But to condemn the entire system because they have an interest in making sure the country functions and sets minimum standards of life and care is not a "bad thing". The government represents the collective decision-making of millions, hundreds-of-millions of people.
Don't throw the baby out with the bath water because one cop (in rural Georgia of all places) over-reacted.
I'm pretty sure most kids older than 12 do have access to kitchen knives. And actively use them too.
I generally agree with your point. But at the same time access to the internet resouces and to gun or a chaisaw is not the same.
I have no problem securing a few items if my home, but I have no control over whatever is available on the net.
Sure, I can write some firewall rules or create "kid's account" on a streaming platform, but I can do this for every single known service, chat, IM group etc.
The knife and the knife maker doesn't have intentions to pump propaganda and porn into the childs mind. The internet is not neutral like knife. The internet has an actor on the other end (human or algorithm) that has certain intentions. Thus a child can be intentionally influence via the internet. A knife does not act on its own to influence the child's mind. So, apples and oranges. I'd argue the internet is significantly more dangerous to a child vs a knife. The internet wasn't built for children, it was never child friendly to begin with and we shouldn't mutate the internet to cater to children. Its best to treat the internet like a hostile force for a child's mind and keep children completely off it to begin with. Make it illegal for children to use a device connected to the internet, it is the parents responsibility. Same as guns. Its not the gun smith or gun sellers responsibility to keep the child safe from guns - its the parent's.
Even if you did, you just lower the chances. I've created Netflix kids account specifically for mine. On its own it suggests also various documentaries on top of cartoons. We took the first one it suggested, and IIRC in second episode there was a very gruesome and detailed part with polar bear eating baby seals, one chew at a time.
One way to traumatize 4-year old, I'd say an effective one.
It’s a content issue mostly. Content providers do not want to properly tag and silo their content. And add parental control to kids account. They want to shift that burden to everyone but themselves.
I don't know why you think this will stop page verification requirements. For almost all items where a parent/guardian is responsible for a child's access to the item, third parties are also required to not sell or transfer the item to a child. That gets us right back needing to age verify people.
That is kinda the idea behind the california law that was on the front page a few weeks ago. The parent set up a local account with a age bracket, and the OS verifies that in the app store and maybe webpages if they fit the age bracket.
Not really. It's the difference between a mandatory field and an optional field. And in practice, and its effects on the internet, that difference is huge.
For some of these, we fully disallow company to child transactions or interactions. Wouldn't applying the same logic require the adult to fetch any internet content and give it to the child on a case by case basis?
In this case, it is the data from the website, not the electronic device itself, that is seen as the item being transacted and regulated by age gates, no? The attempts to actually regulate it do feed back into changes on the electronic device, but the real cause of concern (per the protect the kids argument, if that is the real reason is debatable) is a company providing data directly to a child that parents find objectionable. That transaction doesn't have a parent directly involved currently.
Controlling the device itself and saying free game if a parent has allowed them access is a bit like saying that if a parent has allowed a kid to get to the store, there should be no further restrictions on what they can buy, including any of the above three items.
> Why can't we handle this the same way we handle knives, guns and chainsaws: require adults to secure the device before letting minors near them?
Is this a thing?
My 10yo has used all three of those things. If there were some legislation requiring they be "secured" before my son could be in my presence, obviously I'd oppose it, along with every other reasonable parent.
Your website send request to the users for access to private networks. That´s called invasive. Hacker news should not allow posts with this kind of websites.
Has HN really stooped so low that we are upvoting unsourced AI slop? This “article” is sourced to a random Reddit thread and was clearly written by an LLM.
>The technical reality hits harder than policy abstractions.
The zero-knowledge proof angle is interesting but the real barrier
is implementation
most platforms won't voluntarily adopt privacy-preserving verification when the surveillance version gives them
more data. Regulation would need to mandate the privacy-preserving
approach specifically, not just "verify age somehow.
I am curious how this will play out for Linux. I won't accept any code that spies on my owned computer devices. No criminal goverment can force be to surrender my rights here. But it is interesting to see how easy it is to purchase legislation in the USA - well done, Facebook! I predict more people will abandon it though, now that they see that Meta is trying to push out global spying on regular people.
> EU’s eIDAS 2.0 offers privacy-preserving age verification with zero-knowledge proofs that protect personal data.
I'm on a short phone break and this is the first I've heard about this. Commenting to ask if anyone can explain this. If not, it'll be a reminder for me to research later.
I'm not sure I'm on board with age verification, but I'm certainly opposed to all forms of identity linkage and tracking. Maybe this is a middle ground?
I'd still prefer if parents disciplined their own kids by limiting device access and controlling their peer groups instead of putting us all into a rats nest of surveillance.
I tried to read the research when it was posted on Reddit a few days ago, but it’s all AI slop. The person who uploaded it admitted that they just had Claude go out and explore their hypotheses, but they didn’t even spend the time trying to get the real documents into Claude. Claude identified documents it wanted but couldn’t access them, so it just proposed hypothetical connections.
The research has a lot of these:
> LIMITATION: Direct PDF downloads returned 403 errors. ProPublica Schedule I viewer loads data dynamically (JavaScript), preventing extraction via WebFetch. The 2024 public disclosure copy on sixteenthirtyfund.org was also blocked.
> Tech Transparency Project report: The article "Inside Meta's Spin Machine on Kids and Social Media" at techtransparencyproject.org likely contains detailed ConnectSafely/Meta funding analysis but was blocked (403)
So the “research” isn’t some groundbreaking discoveries by a Redditor. It’s an afternoon worth of Claude Code slop where they couldn’t even take the time to get the real documents into the local workspace so Claude Code could access them. It’s now getting repeated by sites like Theo gadgetreview.com because the people posting to these sites aren’t reading the report either.
The way the law is written is so utterly shit that I don't think it does what it's meant to do at all.
Microsoft has a trillion dollars in liability now because every historical OS is illegal, and every adult user of that historical OS (that you don't ask for their age) is a monetary fine.
$2500 fine for Microsoft for letting me continue use Windows 10 in Colorado, cause they never asked my age.
Also hilariously the law openly FORBIDS checking the user's identity to verify age. It says you MUST NOT collect any more information than is necessary to comply with the law. And complying with the law only requires that you ASK the user to TELL YOU their age, so my non-lawyer take is that if you do anything else like checking ID you can and probably will be prosecuted
The Reddit post mentions that DCA does not exist in any official record. It seems to be a ghost organization for the purpose of controlling perceptions.
I think it exists, as an umbrella group. It might only be 3 weeks old. But it seems preoccupied with minors accessing online pharmacies. Very preoccupied with that.
> Meta’s backing of DCA, part of a $70 million fragmented super PAC strategy designed to evade FEC tracking
Why is this never relevant politically? Its the same with the Epstein files, terrible things happen and we just hand-wring. It seems like the US electorate, doesn't know, doesn't care or is otherwise distracted. I don't see how the US is ever going to get shit together if it accepts this sort of corruption.
"But there is an obvious solution: mandate the operating systems (iOS and Android) to share device users' ages when they download apps from the app stores – data the operating systems get as part of the hardware acquisition already. This would be a simple one-step way for parents to control all the different apps that their kids use (in the US, the average teen uses forty different apps per month) and would remedy the fractured app-by-app approach we have today. We should make a societal judgement about whether to set these age limits for smartphones or social media
use at thirteen, fourteen, fifteen or sixteen, then write it into law." in How to Save the Internet by Nick Clegg
Lobbying is literally half of what representative democracy is. First, you elect representatives to office. Then, you try to get them to do what you want. The latter is lobbying.
Of course, when money becomes a significant portion of how the second one happens, things can get complicated.
Everything is complicated by money. I wish we were better about shielding politics from money. So much about society in general is about money, it ain’t easy.
The environmental movement and labor movement are two examples where citizens organize to go up against corporate interests and win pretty regularly and durably.
Most of those folks would not call it lobbying because of the negative associations of the word. “We have activists, our opponents have lobbyists.” But it works the same way.
It is specifically protected in the First Amendment: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”
You might want to look into the industry funding of environmental organizations and the decline of union membership before you decide with your whole heart.
Because freedom, and surveillance capitalism, have different effects depending on which side of the PR apparatus you find yourself on, and the laws that get passed are written by and for the industries and not crabs in the barrel voters who rely on them for income.
I think this is only the first step towards a license for the Internet. The best example I know of is South Korea, where you have a state issued login. I think it's only a matter of time until the U.S. government knows exactly who you are at all times on the Internet, and this effort is completely agnostic of party or doctrine. This has been building across multiple administrations.
This isn't even a hard question. The movie theater is open but movies that are rated R are not. In this case, Reddit.com is a movie theater, subreddits are movies. The website might be open, but not every subreddit is. This is in fact how Reddit already operates, age verification is just a joke right now.
Have you given any movie theaters a permanent and persistent copy of your ID lately? Your phone number? Make them a list of anything and everything you've read about lately?
So meta acts as a government spy actor. Interesting.
When a company such as meta pursues mass-sniffing, is it still a company or is it just a spy-agency? Meta isn't even hiding this anymore. I am glad to finally understand why these "age verification" is pushed globally. Meta pays well.
The article makes one mistake: praising Europe for having a better approach. Governments here are pushing hard to force ID requirements. Sure, they start by pretending it's "for the children" and they "only want age verification". They also claim that e-IDs will be voluntary. Camel. Nose. Tent.
These are the same governments that file criminal charges when you compare lying leader to Pinocchio (Germany). The UK records something like 30 arrests per day for social media posts. Just imagine how much better they could do, if you were not pseudo-anonymous in the Internet!
I quite like the EU approach. It's a decent spec. Most countries already have digital apps to verify identity, like Denmark's MitID (https://www.mitid.dk/en-gb/get-started-with-mitid/). These could be expanded to fully EUDI compliant wallets and deliver encrypted proof-of-age without exposing any other identity.
For example a gambling site could require MitID auth, but only request proof-of-age and nothing else. You can see in the app which information is being requested, like with OAuth.
If there's no information provided beyond proof-of-age, what's stopping my friend's 18 year old brother from lending his ID to every 14 year old at school? IRL that's negated by the liquor store clerk looking at the kid who is obviously underage and seeing that his face doesn't match the borrowed card he just nervously presented.
> what's stopping my friend's 18 year old brother from lending his ID to every 14 year old at school?
MitID is 2fa. You log in with username, then you have to open the app, enter password or scan biometric, then scan the QR code of the screen* and you are logged in.
He would need to be next to you every time you log in. I think that is too high friction to make it feasible on large scale.
* Assuming you open the website on the Desktop, and MitID on phone. If both on phone, skip this step.
If people have to go through OS auth flow each time they open a website, that will drive everyone mad. One of the key motivators for politicians is not making everyone mad, so the polls don't drop.
Also, I reckon most children know the password for their parent's phone or computer, and many more will find out if there is a highly motivational factor for doing so. How many exhausted parents just toss their phone to their child to stop them whining?
I suppose it could be a biometric sign-in with facial recognition or fingerprint, but again, that's a tonne of friction for the whole web.
That's how the user interface works. What is it doing at the protocol level? What stops someone from building a service that mints anonymous verification codes on a massive scale and distributes them to anyone who asks? Maybe with the user interface being an app kids can download to scan any QR code and pass verification.
I don't know. I would assume the account gets blocked if you do it on a larger scale, so you have to rotate account, which gets expensive fast as it's not easy to steal them?
The automated attack setup I'm envisioning is something like:
18 year old buys a cheapo laptop + phone and connects the two over ADB or some purpose built automation app (think appium). 18 year old puts the phone on a tripod pointed at the laptop screen.
14 year olds at school pay $10 a year for use of the service and install a browser extension that forwards the QR codes from whichever service they wanna use to the 18 year old's computer. Changing every couple of seconds is not an issue here, they all live in the same city and have <10ms ping.
The only high friction part of this is that someone needs to write the software for it, but that doesn't seem like all that difficult of a project and open source solutions are likely to appear within weeks of social media requiring it. If there really is no information shared with the other party beyond "yup, user is over the age of maturity" you could even run this as a free public TOR service without fear of ever getting caught.
Mhh, but then the Danish Agency for Digitisation will see that the 18 year old does a lot of age request on all day and night long. And block his account. And then he can't use his own banking, health, postal apps.
High risk, low reward.
If he throttles request to stay under a threshold, if the agency knows about it service they could use it and see which account does age requests at the same time.
Ah, so it does leak your identity through the timing side channel. In other words, your anonymity is only dependent on the govt not coordinating with service providers to de-anonymize users. I assumed the 2fa app just held cryptographic keys and did some 0kp magic to show that the cert belongs to a government-attested adult. Phoning home all the time makes it trivial for the government to abuse people's privacy; they can just compel service providers to provide logs of logins.
Gambling sites already have payment information, which should include real names! (no, you should not be allowed to do non-KYC gambling, that's just money laundering)
I think it's more that proof of identity from the union of {payment information, KYC} also includes both of age verification and name, not that name leads to age.
I don’t mean to be as aggressive as this sounds but the frogs probably liked the increasingly warm water too until it started boiling. How many steps between MitID and a fork that is used to enforce extreme censorship?
MitID is run by the government. How would anyone fork it? Any service implementing MitID auth can verify through signatures that they're connecting to the official service.
I don't want my kids to have access to gambling websites like Stake, but I also want to keep my digital identity anonymous. The eIDAS is a solution that achieves both of these goals.
If you can choose between the discord shitshow with a face scan, or a digital encrypted proof-of-age in a 2FA app you already use, issues and verified only by the government of your country (who have all your personal details anyway), what would you choose?
> During the 19th century, several experiments were performed to observe the reaction of frogs to slowly heated water. In 1869, while doing experiments searching for the location of the soul, German physiologist Friedrich Goltz demonstrated that a frog that has had its brain removed will remain in slowly heated water, but an intact frog attempted to escape the water when it reached 25 °C.
Regarding the Pinocchio thing: Local police said „that‘s probably insult“ and sent it to public prosecutors. Public prosecutors investigated and said „nope, free speech“.
If you can disturb enough people that think differently, independent of the final result, you can end up silencing them. Is the same that happens with bogus DCMA claims in Youtube channels, when they negative reviews of products. For a normal guy, having the police showing up, going to court, lawyer, etc, can be a significant burden. I DO see a problem.
Indeed, police misusing their authority is a problem, and they require constant oversight. But this is true completely independently from if you need to provide an age to order drugs online.
> Prosecution needs to look into all reported cases.
The ramifications of that sentence in terms of cost, effort and possibly other nuances, makes me shiver.
Note how a minimal misbehavior of a relatively small portion of the population could render any police and judicial system totally inoperative. Just 2000 people across the country go doing light insults to random people… again, I can think of much better systems.
The investigation and the threat against your freedom and safety (the implication of prison is always that you'll be harmed in there) WAS the punishment.
Sure, but the fact remains that it was referred for criminal prosecution. They didn't follow through, this time, but the victim still had his "lesson" about insulting his betters.
And Germany really did sentence people for calling Mr. Habeck "Schwachkopf", which is about as mild an insult as you can find.
Weeeeeell .. to counter that argument there is pimmelgate. I know it was not legit, but they searched his house, even after he was at the police station and confessed.
That leads to selv censorship, even if what you did was legal.
Even steelmaning the case for age verification, does anyone really think the state is going to re-institute the innocence of childhood by filtering content and services? Of course not. There is no steelman. If you can do age, you can do identity, and the purpose of identity is recourse for authorities against truth and humor.
Doing ID or this fake age verification with anything other than a physical secure element is a dumb regulation that going to create its own regulatory arbitrages and spawn very powerful and profitable black and grey markets. Poor laws create criminal economic opportunity, and digital id is just creating a massive one.
Between Meta being behind a digital id initiative under the pretext of alleged "age verification" and the Debian project leads pivoting to political objectives, it appears gen Z now has a cause to build tech against and fight for. These are dying organizations that cannot innovate and they've attracted a pestilence that is pivoting them to the easier problem of political maneuvering. as it's easier to militate for what nobody wants than to make something anyone actually wants.
The upside is that people get to be hackers again. Tools to cleanse our networks and systems of Meta and other surveillance companies and the influence of these compromised organizations are an OS install and a vibecoding weekend away.
What do you mean if you can do age you can do identity? If age is self-reported that's not true. Or if you need strong validation, ZKPs are possible where it is also not true.
If Citizens United is not challenged, we will end up being governed by corporate billionaires. Forcing age verification down our throats will be the least of our worries if this continues.
It's an important story, and I'm glad it's getting exposure, but this "article" is some really blatant AI slop. Go and read the original Reddit thread by the human being who did the work instead of this lazy regurgitated shit.
It appears that the original "research" was also pure AI slop--someone just asking Claude and quickly slapping together whatever it said. It's very low quality and should not be getting this much attention.
What makes you think it's "blatant AI slop"? I mean I agree with reading the source over something that went through a journalistic filter but you didn't even link it.
>"Here’s where the lobbying gets surgical. The proposed laws hammer Apple’s App Store and Google Play with compliance requirements but reportedly spare social media platforms—Meta’s core busines
Because social media already has the age info exactly?
I think an OS and a web platform with accounts are different product categories. Not even sure what an interpretation of the bill that would affect meta would be.
age verification is always a backdoor for some nefarious constitutional rights-infringing policy because every child has their parents legally responsible for their well being and all the legal aspects as well. in other words, parents have the responsibility, and authority, to enforce what devices and what websites their kids are allowed to visit, and no silicon valley epstein pedos run by mosad should have any involvement in any of this whatsoever.
This is how bad journalism results in conspiracy theories.
I looked at the original analysis and it was fraught with language that leads to specific conclusions. It was most certainly LLM aided, if not generated.
I am not ascribing malice, but the author seems inexperienced with the repercussions of making assertions out of partial knowledge.
Also: Good grief, this article is also written via LLM! Human+machine comes up with theory that goes viral, and then Humans+machines amplify it? Is this the brilliant future we have to look forward to?
There's a vocal portion of people which opposes any solution because "privacy, government overreach, surveillance ...". So instead of a solution like e.g. zero-proof age verification, that tries to minimize intrusions on privacy, the result is the worst of all worlds, maximum surveillance (but I guess it's ok if it is not the federal government, but meta), with minimum utility. Just look at the freaking mess that is trying to proof your identity in the US.
Now, what will the platform do with it? Concretely? As in: Name one bad outcome a reasonable parent would care about that's prohibited under these bills. If the bad thing happens due to willful negligence, then there needs to be some actual material consequence to someone at the platform provider.
meta could spend their billions lobbying for that, if they wanted to
Care to elaborate? I'm not sure what's a mess about a driver's license, social security card. I've never once had any issue with my identity.
The situation is so bad that the SSA has to explicitly state: "Social Security card is not an identification document" https://www.ssa.gov/blog/en/posts/2023-03-23.html
Neither of those are accepted by various states' voter id laws, nor can you reliably board an airplane with them since RealID.
The only foolproof identity card in the US appears to be a passport (which, you know, global federal identity card... exactly what the folks against universal ids dislike)
https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2025/apr/18/byron-dona...
There are also a bunch of other gotchas: Original birth certificates and all currently-issued military IDs are not acceptable, for instance (even though the bill lists birth certificates and military IDs as acceptable, there are carve-outs to ban the common cases).
Good luck getting a passport between now and then.
The Swiss implementation of eID may be hint that governments may/will take the responsibility to implement and maintain the tech, but the multiple intrusions and lobbying by Palantir and friends in the EU gives me the ick.
[1] https://github.com/swiyu-admin-ch
The next thing you are going to claim kids from young age shouldn't have fully unlocked smart phones, shouldn't install any app and so on. Where is the end of this? Are you telling me parents should spend more time with kids, heck even be their role models although it is much harder compared to just giving up on them and let the glorious internet and various fashionate toxic tribes raise them? Blasphemy!!!
a lot of safer morons? we all are the 'greater moron' in some area at some point, cmon
but we always will have bad parents. So any legistlation needs to account for that. Otherwise those children with the worst parents have the greater digital abilities/opportunities/misfortunes.
It is not like parents are the only influential figures in a kid's upbringing, they are not the only role models, they should not be the only ones paying attention and guiding kids to adulthood.
Parental control options as they stand are severely lacking. If you add the actively predatory enshittification efforts conducted by seemingly all larges tech companies, you are left either forbidding your kid from accessing anything (this does not work if the kid's friends have access) or allowing far more than you are comfortable with.
Lets take YouTube as an example. As it stands you have the options of YouTube (with both the most wonderful content available on one hand, and toxicity and brain rot shorts on the other) or YouTube Kids - an app with controls that do not work. How about allowing parents to whitelist content and/or creators instead of letting the algorithms run the show?
Spotify is another example. How about letting parents control whether the kid's account is plastered with videos, podcasts and AI slop?
How about your run of the mill browser, letting parents review and allow websites on a case-by-case basis? Maybe my kid is ready for news sites but not Reddit? Maybe 4chan and 8kun are better reserved for the more adventorous adults as opposed to impressionable kids?
I agree that age verification is a bad solution, but what the hell are parents supposed to reach for? It's not like Silicon Valley are stepping up with any real solutions or even propositions to these problems, it is left for - at best clueless - politicians to navigate the problem space.
Raising a kid takes a village.
I'm always unsure what your sort of argument seems to imply. Kids are not property of their parents and the state routinely makes decisions about children's welfare.
And that's the catch-22 imposed on parents. Society wants to lord over the power as if the child is their property but none of the responsibility. Anything that went wrong is the parent's fault. It's always more and more requirements upon the parent, a nearly one way imposition of power where law or society says what you must do but of course you will bear all the costs. But by god you better not morally outrage someone or they'll have CPS up your ass.
It's largely the cheapest kind of concern. The kind where you mete out punishment out of a sense of smug moral superiority, but never lift a hand to help out for the endeavors you advocate for, only to push them into a sort of moral tragedy of the commons.
These laws only mete out punishment for people failing to obey, not actually provide support, it is essentially theatre of pretending to care about children. Theatre by the most evil of people, those that use kids as political props.
Are you going to sit here and tell me your parents were aware of every time you touched a computer or turned on the TV? They vetted everything you consumed? It was a lot easier back then to do. I bet your parents couldn’t even figure out how to block a single channel on their tv, nor did they likely even try. Most of our parents never did.
It’s much easier to relinquish parental control of media exposure when the system helps you out by moderating the content. But the Internet changed everything. I can’t imagine how difficult it must be as a parent to care for children nowadays without pulling the plug on social media altogether.
(this one: https://digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu/en/policies/eudi-regul...)
Sorry, what is this "EU regime"? I'm not understanding the logic in your post. The people pushing it are certain elected officials of member nations.
So far. But they’ll keep lobbying and we’ll need to keep fighting.
> What examples of this do you have in recent years (post 2016)?
Digital Omnibus is another.
https://noyb.eu/en/gdpr-omnibus-eu-simplification-far-remove...
https://www.business-humanrights.org/en/latest-news/eu-digit...
This implies that regulation is codified. The clear pattern of EU digital regulation doomerism is generally pointing at shitty proposals which aren't approved and codified in law.
Digital omnibus is another proposal.
If "rammed and rushed laws" is legitimately a widespread issue, you should be able to find a good example of something codified which is not just a proposal?
I'm not saying we don't have to fight. But vocal opposition to proposals which ultimately don't make it into law is the system working exactly as intended.
They can try as often as they want and they only have to win once. We - as in those who don't want this Orwellian monster to be written into law - have to win all the time.
No, it is a one way street and thus creates an imbalance. EU regimes never push new legislation that gives more rights to their citizens, only try to limit them again and again.
> Gay marriage would still be illegal if unpopular ideas couldn't be reraised.
Gay marriage is a good example. It got passed despite being unpopular. In many countries where it was pushed by force from above, from the EU to the national level, it is still unpopular.
> Democracy is a balance, unfortunately you have to put up with fighting against the shit ideas as well as for the good ones.
The issue with democracy as we have it in the EU is the imbalance of power and responsibility. Given the EU regime's decisions in the last few decades, I consider it just a shell to push unpopular and undemocratic decisions to their member states, so lobbyists don't have to bribe everyone, just the EU regime.
> I consider it just a shell to push unpopular and undemocratic decisions to their member states, so lobbyists don't have to bribe everyone, just the EU regime.
Which decisions? GDPR? DMA?
GDPR is entirely unenforced, it's not worth the paper it's written on, and this is due to lobbying. The situation continues to this day. The DPAs simply throw reports of violations into the trash bin.
It's hilariously transparent - Ireland recently (less than 6 months ago) added a former _Meta lobbyist_ to their DPA board [0].
US Big Tech is now spending a record €151 million per year on lobbying the EU [1], and it's completely implausible to believe they're doing that with 0 RoI. "The number of digital lobbyists has risen from 699 to 890 full-time equivalents (FTEs), surpassing the 720 Members of the European Parliament (MEPs). A total of 437 lobbyists now have continuous access to the European Parliament. Three meetings per day: Big Tech held an average of three lobbying meetings a day in the first half of 2025, which speaks volumes about their level of access to EU policymakers." It's impossible that this doesn't influence things.
[0] https://noyb.eu/en/former-meta-lobbyist-named-dpc-commission...
[1] https://corporateeurope.org/en/2025/10/revealed-tech-industr...
The fact that in the UK/EU no reputable company is now sharing data without our explicit opt-in permission suggests you are talking bollocks.
As for disreputable companies.... don't do business with them!
Basically, the chinese, through WTO, managed to utilize corona to show politicians, regardless of color, the enormous power of complete digital control of the population.
Our spineless and incompetent EU politicians thought it very erotic, and are now ramming it down our throats.
I don't really see a way to stop this apart from moving to south america or africa, to a small country with a weak government.
(my MP is SNP, so I benefit from not being in the two party trap)
Of course, that defeats the entire point of the exercise.
The real driver is as always, ad revenue. This time, advertisers want and need to know a real human is engaging the brand and Meta cannot see any other way in sight to assure this fact save for age verification.
this is just the latest evolution of surveillance capitalism.
There's more money spent in lobbyism in the EU than anywhere else in the world. Lobbyism and downright corruption: like Qatari bribing EU MEPs [1] and police finding 1 million EUR in bills hidden at a MEP's apartment (in this case a bribe to explain publicly that Qatar is a country oh-so-respectful of human rights).
The EU is way more corrupt than the US and in many EU countries there's little private sector compared to the US. In France for example more than 60% of the GDP is public spending and all the big companies are state or partially state-owned or owned by people very close to the state.
And as to american companies bribing EU politicians: it's nothing new. IBM and Microsoft for example are two names everybody in the business knows have been splurging money to buy influence and illegal kickbacks have always been flying. It's just the way things have always been operating. Today you can very likely add Google and Palantir etc. to the list but it's nothing new.
EU politicians are whores. And cheap whores at that: investigative journalists have shown, in the past, the little amount of money that was needed to buy their votes. Most of them go into politics to extract as much taxpayers money as they can for their own benefit. They of course love to get bribes.
Also to try to not get caught, EU politicians voted themselves special powers and it's very difficult for the regular police to enter official EU buildings. I know an police inspector who went and arrested a MEP for possession of child porn: it required a very long procedure, way longer than usual, and the request of special authorization allowing them to enter the EU parliament (or EU commission, don't remember which but I think it was MEP at the EP).
American companies bribing EU politicians should scare you indeed: it's been ongoing since forever.
> The Swiss implementation of eID may be hint that governments may/will take the responsibility
Switzerland is in Europe but it's not in the EU: it's not representative of the insane corruption present in the EU institutions.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eva_Kaili
The EU has zero knowledge proof age verification systems, e.g. through your bank, which are secure and don't involve sending a copy of your ID and / or face scan to a dodgy US based 3rd party.
The same way, keeping driver license behind an age gate is unnecessary, parents should parents! I was driving tractors at 12yo, why couldn't I drive a car?
Parents should be the one responsible if they give money or a car to their kid
What you’re proposing is similar to a “Google Free Village.” What we need is something that lets parents have some control by proxy without violating the privacy of the child or anyone else. I believe it’s possible to do so.
The Internet that we grew up on has been totally subsumed by scumbag marketing to the point that it’s unavoidable. It’s an addictive substance now. Stop pretending like the ways of the 90’s and 2000’s are still accessible.
In many places it is essentially impossible for children (even younger than 13) to have a normal social live without access to a smart phone. Just some examples, many public transport providers are moving to apps as the only way to pay for fares, nearly all communication for sports clubs happens through messenger platforms, school information is typically distributed via apps as well and the list goes on (I have not even touched on the kids own social interactions).
The irony is that the people who say "parents should parent their kids online activities" the loudest, largely grew up with unrestricted computer use, in chat rooms, weird corners of the internet all by working around any restrictions that parents tried to put on them. Mainly because they were much more computer literate then the older generation.
Isis did manage to recruit young men in the UK via telegram (OK, you just said “in all likelihood“, maybe I’m tossing you the exception that proves the rule)
If we really embraced this logic, then should we look at returning to the laws from before the 'protect the children' push of the 20th century. Compare this to some countries where kids can go buy beer. I've read stories from people in less regulated countries who use to buy beer for their parents when they were underage, and nothing was stopping them from buying it from themselves if their parents allowed it (or failed to stop it). Even a concept like child labor, why should we regulate that out to companies to control instead of depending upon parents to parent? When you consider web access as a person having some sort of transaction with a company, it generalizes to a very similar position of if a parent or the government should monitor that relationship for harm.
We also have to consider that "children" covers anywhere from birth to approximately 18 years old.
It is reasonable to expect a parent or their proxy (e.g. caregivers and teachers) to moderate access to the Internet in the early years. Yet older children and teenagers gradually gain more independence. For example: they are able to go places on their own, get their own phone, etc.. In the physical world, we have laws that recognize this, things like forbidding the sale of alcohol and tobacco to minors. Responsibility is placed on the vendor to check identification when selling such products and the customer's age is suspect. It would be absurd to place responsibility on parents in this case since the most a parent can do is educate their child.
Now I understand the Internet poses problems when it comes to similar transactions. For face to face transactions, appearing old enough is often sufficient (perhaps with a buffer to avoid liability) for access without presenting identification. While it isn't truly anonymous, there are cases where it can be reasonably anonymous. Unfortunately, transactions are mediated by machines on the Internet. You cannot make any assumptions about the other person. Making matters worse: it is extraordinarily difficult to do age verification without disclosing identify information, and to do so in a manner that is easily recorded. Whether that information is provided directly or through a third party is a moot point. It is still being provided.
I don't know how we go about solving this problem, but I do know two things:
- Placing all responsibility into the hands of parents is absurd, and would ultimately prove harmful to adolescents. It is creating a nanny-state where the nanny is the parent. The youth would be unable to gradually gain independence, nor develop an identity independent of their parents' whims.
- We live in a world which is eager to age-gate things that should not be. Sometimes this is for semi-legitimate reasons due to how the Internet is structured. For example: there is no good reasons why children and youth cannot participate in things like discussion forums, but those forums definitely cannot look like the "social media" we have today. Other times it is for despicable reasons, such as making value based judgements based upon ideology. (The left and right are both guilty of this.)
Or even kids whose parents don't have the technical knowledge needed
Yes I do agree the responsibility is with the parents, but it's these kids who are majoritarily affected by (bad internet actors) AND (bad offline actors)
A proper society raises their new generations.
Yes, rights and responsibilities fall mostly to parents, but I see no reason to make licentious activities difficult for parents to inhibit.
What is it you want to do on the internet?
We can have systems that allow anonymity (between client and server), but still put hardcore porn, gore, financial frauds and such out of reach of those without proof they're over 18.
Now, don't get me wrong, Palantir and it's ilk are a danger to society. But just because the military-industrial complex wants to use any excuse to control people, doesn't mean all of those excuses are wrong.
All of the systems I'm aware of rely on someplace your ID is already stored.
As it stands one should be happy if Meta catches most calls for the extermination of an ethnicity on its platform, that they would provide capabilities that allows a kid to protect themselves from bullying or grooming is just unimaginable.
No, they don't. And they can't.
(But it's a big enough story that I'm glad to see it on front page again.)
Personally I’d rather not see reposts of posts this recent, especially LLM posts.
Or maybe more specifically the structure, idk not much of a writer, but many of the sentences are solid journalist quality yet the right background is not being set nor the right transitions being given etc.
My dissatisfaction mode used to be boring high school newspaper sentences but the kids still seem to _assemble_ the details a tiny bit better.
0: https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/reddit-user-uncovers-beh...
From the Guidelines link at the bottom - https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
I'm 47, and I started using the internet in my early teens through BBS gateways. I've seen every age of the Internet, and there's always been widely available pornographic materials. Why all of a sudden is this a crisis?
Perhaps I'm missing something?
Pornography is a very convenient pretext. The real target is anonymity and pseudonymity. Both have been abundantly available on the early Internet. Both were and are being gradually squeezed out from it.
Various law enforcement agencies would love to know more, always more. The more the users are required to identify themselves, link their online identity (maybe pseudonymous for other users) to their official offline identity, the easier it is to find and catch criminals. Not only criminals, of course, but even if we assume 0% nefarious intent, and only the desire to catch the evildoers who swindle grandmas out of their life's savings, this still holds.
Operators of big sites also would benefit. Easier to ban disruptive users. Many great ways to turn the precise identity into targeted ads.
The internet has become a very serious, consequential space. More like... the "real world", which was considered separate from the internet in 1990s. Now they are inseparable, so the pressures of the "real world" are equally present offline and online.
pretending the actual issue doesn't exist will not help you stop laws like this
But even then, I think if adults knew what we were up to, maybe they would have lobbied for stuff then too.
For my 10 year old, we don't allow youtube or any other algorithm doomscrolling feed. And no voice chat in online gaming. We plan on waiting until 13 for a phone, or behind-closed-doors internet, and we use parental controls.
I'm not presenting this as an argument for age verification, but just to say the landscape is very different. And parents who have been making choices for their young kids have to start letting go at some point, and maybe, at whatever point parents stop monitoring, they would like the kids to not be fully in the deep end.
Parents want to stop monitoring their kids, but still want their kids' experiences to be catered to their ideals, so the rest of society must now bend towards what you want for your kids specifically?
What about parents who want a different set of guardrails for their kids - more limited or less limited than you? What about people who aren't kids - does their privacy or freedom not matter, just because you don't want to handle it yourselves anymore?
That sounds to me (a non-parent) like a very selfish (and naive) worldview. I'm assuming from your tone that you are in support of this, so would you explain to me why you think its not?
What does seem to definitely be having a severe negative impact though is social media.
I think that I'm biased to think "it shouldn't be a crisis" because I saw that stuff as a kid and turned out ok, it's a prime example of survivor bias, maybe someone who saw that stuff didn't turn out that well. Also one thing I've been wondering I'm not sure if that's the beginning of my everlong cynicism. If it is, then I might have been better off without being exposed to that material that early in my life.
See, I have, and I think I am actually a better person for it. Videos like these show how humans are really just apes and can easily fall into doing heinous things. It helped harden my view that religion is a net negative for the world, made me a bit more careful, especially in where I choose to travel, and has given me a wider worldview.
No one is rick-rolling with Isis decapitation videos, you go to those sites, and you know what you are getting into. One of the wonders of the early internet was rotten.com, and I am very sad its gone.
How exactly is seeing what human beings are capable of going to harm anyone? It certainly isn't so "damaging" that it needs to be hidden from anyone.
We do not need to turn society into a police state because we're afraid the next generation might not be able to handle what we handled fine for the most part
Edge cases should not dictate the removal of our freedom & rights
apt-get install isis-beheading-vids doesn't work on any Linux distribution I've seen, and it's not like Microsoft or Apple were preloading them on laptops.
These bills have nothing to do with online safety. They exist purely to establish a police state (that will currently be run by a convicted felon with child abusers as deputies -- look at what ICE has been doing to the kids they round up, especially the pregnant ones).
if you agree that online safety problem exists then suggest better solution. if you disagree then keep on living in a fantasy world
Pushing to turn society into a police state because parents are too tired/lazy/tech-illiterate is simply not the solution
maybe since minors can't enter into a contract they can't agree to TOS and therefore their content is ineligible to be used as LLM training material? just guessing.
As I understand it, the age verification laws are part of a three pronged plan to eliminate privacy, freedom of speech and freedom of expression online.
The goals being to expand current police abuses to include LGBTQ++, reporters, democrats, non-whites, non-christians, demonstrators, etc.
It all is predictable and makes perfect sense if you assume the goal is to hold control over the white house in 2029 while being even less popular than they currently are.
Great sentence.
Aside from making me completely doubt everything you're stating, I don't understand why people just take it as a given that Project 2025 is something the current administration gives two shits about.
Is war in Iran in Project 2025?
Also, this administration has said they are not following project 2025. That means they are definitely following project 2025.
Because if you use project 2025 as a scorecard, the current administration is hitting all the salient points very quickly. With a score that high, inferring that the administration does in fact give two shits about it seems reasonable.
Try to start an ISP and/or become a public Certificate Authority.You will quickly run into steep requirement (admin and financial). To buy IP address space, get peering partners for traffic transit, hosting dns, hosting email (good luck getting mail delivered to the big providers without having your own users verified via mobile number). Try to build a mobile app, or phone or runtime - all the key signing, binary signing involved, the entire security model from hardware/firmware, boot, memory access, runtime safety and on and on. Then there are the intelligence agencies and various countries surveillance laws, information laws.
If you add it all together, we are already monitored 100%. They want to linked and prove the monitored device is linked a certain human beyond a doubt. Email, Mobile, Full names are not enough, they want your biometrics too. They want you serial numbers of devices and mac addresses of networked devices and SIM cards. They want it all.They want your children to have devices with camera, mic and gps trackers in. Your kids will be part of kompromat before they reach adulthood and some of them will be blackmailed by government agents and other bad actors throughout life. Some kids will be trafficked with the help of all these tech solutions, because they know exactly where your kids are at every moment.
Add home assistants, smart tv's with cameras, toys with cameras, outdoor cameras, shopping mall cameras everywhere, in-vehicle cameras and mics. Bluetooth beacons everywhere.
Add it all up and ask yourself, is this truly about child safety? Not at all. I'd argue they would be more exposed. If they wanted children safer, they'd recommend parents and schools to 100% remove kids from the internet or devices with public internet access. Why does a 10 year old need to know how to join a teams meeting and being comfortable on a video call?
Not to mention the access to weird porn and gore sites that WILL traumatize a young mind.
Then contemplate what all this data will be used for in the hands of extremists, nazi's, dictators, the effects on free speech & journalism, the propaganda machines reach on you and your family.
The internet is 10000% cooked and no longer open. It's better to disconnect from it at this point.
What the hell are you talking about? They already know where my kids are! At school which is funded by government.
Are people in that group powerful, influential and wealthy?
Would that group benefit from being able to use state power against individuals who just won't stop shining light on injustice?
Nothing to do with street design - most suburbs have a park a safe walk near any house. That kids are not walking there is nothing to do with street design.
Some state legislatures are pushing back against this. Utah passed a law in 2018 which amends the definition of neglect to exclude this kind of thing.
https://le.utah.gov/~2018/bills/static/SB0065.html
A handful of other states have followed suit. This page shows a map of states with similar laws: https://letgrow.org/states/there's a general issue with rise in protectionism
However, the ending though, really feels like they're one step away from anti-vax, anti-education, and pro-hate pro-bigotry.
This case really feels like an over-reach. But to condemn the entire system because they have an interest in making sure the country functions and sets minimum standards of life and care is not a "bad thing". The government represents the collective decision-making of millions, hundreds-of-millions of people.
Don't throw the baby out with the bath water because one cop (in rural Georgia of all places) over-reacted.
I'm pretty sure most kids older than 12 do have access to kitchen knives. And actively use them too.
I generally agree with your point. But at the same time access to the internet resouces and to gun or a chaisaw is not the same.
I have no problem securing a few items if my home, but I have no control over whatever is available on the net.
Sure, I can write some firewall rules or create "kid's account" on a streaming platform, but I can do this for every single known service, chat, IM group etc.
True, and it's the parents responsibility to ensure that children won't injure themselves with the knives, or take them out or to school or whatever.
One way to traumatize 4-year old, I'd say an effective one.
In this case, it is the data from the website, not the electronic device itself, that is seen as the item being transacted and regulated by age gates, no? The attempts to actually regulate it do feed back into changes on the electronic device, but the real cause of concern (per the protect the kids argument, if that is the real reason is debatable) is a company providing data directly to a child that parents find objectionable. That transaction doesn't have a parent directly involved currently.
Controlling the device itself and saying free game if a parent has allowed them access is a bit like saying that if a parent has allowed a kid to get to the store, there should be no further restrictions on what they can buy, including any of the above three items.
Is this a thing?
My 10yo has used all three of those things. If there were some legislation requiring they be "secured" before my son could be in my presence, obviously I'd oppose it, along with every other reasonable parent.
>The technical reality hits harder than policy abstractions.
> Here’s where the lobbying gets surgical.
most platforms won't voluntarily adopt privacy-preserving verification when the surveillance version gives them more data. Regulation would need to mandate the privacy-preserving approach specifically, not just "verify age somehow.
Every time I point it out, including with actual quotes from the research showing the problems with it, I get downvoted on HN.
This headline is becoming one of those “too good to fact check” clams because the people posting it know it will drive traffic.
I'm on a short phone break and this is the first I've heard about this. Commenting to ask if anyone can explain this. If not, it'll be a reminder for me to research later.
I'm not sure I'm on board with age verification, but I'm certainly opposed to all forms of identity linkage and tracking. Maybe this is a middle ground?
I'd still prefer if parents disciplined their own kids by limiting device access and controlling their peer groups instead of putting us all into a rats nest of surveillance.
The research has a lot of these:
> LIMITATION: Direct PDF downloads returned 403 errors. ProPublica Schedule I viewer loads data dynamically (JavaScript), preventing extraction via WebFetch. The 2024 public disclosure copy on sixteenthirtyfund.org was also blocked.
> Tech Transparency Project report: The article "Inside Meta's Spin Machine on Kids and Social Media" at techtransparencyproject.org likely contains detailed ConnectSafely/Meta funding analysis but was blocked (403)
So the “research” isn’t some groundbreaking discoveries by a Redditor. It’s an afternoon worth of Claude Code slop where they couldn’t even take the time to get the real documents into the local workspace so Claude Code could access them. It’s now getting repeated by sites like Theo gadgetreview.com because the people posting to these sites aren’t reading the report either.
The $2B number was the sum of all the numbers Claude could find, not the money Meta spent.
There is so much AI slop in this article and source that it should be tripping everyone’s clickbait detectors, not being taken as accurate reporting.
‘The “child safety” rhetoric masks a competitive strategy that shifts liability from platforms to operating system makers.’
Microsoft has a trillion dollars in liability now because every historical OS is illegal, and every adult user of that historical OS (that you don't ask for their age) is a monetary fine.
$2500 fine for Microsoft for letting me continue use Windows 10 in Colorado, cause they never asked my age.
Also hilariously the law openly FORBIDS checking the user's identity to verify age. It says you MUST NOT collect any more information than is necessary to comply with the law. And complying with the law only requires that you ASK the user to TELL YOU their age, so my non-lawyer take is that if you do anything else like checking ID you can and probably will be prosecuted
Why is this never relevant politically? Its the same with the Epstein files, terrible things happen and we just hand-wring. It seems like the US electorate, doesn't know, doesn't care or is otherwise distracted. I don't see how the US is ever going to get shit together if it accepts this sort of corruption.
Of course, when money becomes a significant portion of how the second one happens, things can get complicated.
A significant portion of both of your suggested halves are “complicated” by money.
Everything is complicated by money. I wish we were better about shielding politics from money. So much about society in general is about money, it ain’t easy.
Your breakdown was so simple, it was simply wrong.
So in a democratic society where free speech exists there's only so much you can do to prevent that.
Most of those folks would not call it lobbying because of the negative associations of the word. “We have activists, our opponents have lobbyists.” But it works the same way.
It is specifically protected in the First Amendment: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”
Emphasis mine.
The issue that should rather worry you is that people
- don't delete their Meta/Facebook/WhatsApp/Instagram/Threads/... account because of this proposal,
- don't strongly urge friends and colleagues to do the same.
Presidential Candidate Mitt Romney
And for a lawmaker who is considering retirement, "become a lobbyist" is often the most lucrative career option.
Now who are you imagining will pass effective laws against lobbying?
Power corrupts.
A movie is a distinct piece of content. A website and an app can be a container for lots of different content.
When a company such as meta pursues mass-sniffing, is it still a company or is it just a spy-agency? Meta isn't even hiding this anymore. I am glad to finally understand why these "age verification" is pushed globally. Meta pays well.
These are the same governments that file criminal charges when you compare lying leader to Pinocchio (Germany). The UK records something like 30 arrests per day for social media posts. Just imagine how much better they could do, if you were not pseudo-anonymous in the Internet!
For example a gambling site could require MitID auth, but only request proof-of-age and nothing else. You can see in the app which information is being requested, like with OAuth.
MitID is 2fa. You log in with username, then you have to open the app, enter password or scan biometric, then scan the QR code of the screen* and you are logged in.
He would need to be next to you every time you log in. I think that is too high friction to make it feasible on large scale.
* Assuming you open the website on the Desktop, and MitID on phone. If both on phone, skip this step.
Also, I reckon most children know the password for their parent's phone or computer, and many more will find out if there is a highly motivational factor for doing so. How many exhausted parents just toss their phone to their child to stop them whining?
I suppose it could be a biometric sign-in with facial recognition or fingerprint, but again, that's a tonne of friction for the whole web.
It's already the single sign on for government websites, banking, healthcare, digital post, insurance, law (sign contracts) etc.
Shit man, you can get divorced through that. I really hope most parents don't give their kids access to it.
Or you can just text him a screenshot of the QR code. You could probably even automate this.
~Maybe~ you can video call, but again it's adding so much friction. Nothing is 100% secure.
The only high friction part of this is that someone needs to write the software for it, but that doesn't seem like all that difficult of a project and open source solutions are likely to appear within weeks of social media requiring it. If there really is no information shared with the other party beyond "yup, user is over the age of maturity" you could even run this as a free public TOR service without fear of ever getting caught.
High risk, low reward.
If he throttles request to stay under a threshold, if the agency knows about it service they could use it and see which account does age requests at the same time.
I don't want my kids to have access to gambling websites like Stake, but I also want to keep my digital identity anonymous. The eIDAS is a solution that achieves both of these goals.
If you can choose between the discord shitshow with a face scan, or a digital encrypted proof-of-age in a 2FA app you already use, issues and verified only by the government of your country (who have all your personal details anyway), what would you choose?
From wikipedia.
I really don’t see the problem.
But I can not see how the legal framework could be better. Insults are illegal. Prosecution needs to look into all reported cases.
> Prosecution needs to look into all reported cases.
The ramifications of that sentence in terms of cost, effort and possibly other nuances, makes me shiver.
Note how a minimal misbehavior of a relatively small portion of the population could render any police and judicial system totally inoperative. Just 2000 people across the country go doing light insults to random people… again, I can think of much better systems.
And Germany really did sentence people for calling Mr. Habeck "Schwachkopf", which is about as mild an insult as you can find.
Did not know about this, here is the wiki: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schwachkopf-Aff%C3%A4re
His house was searched because of it, but he did not get sentenced for it.
Reminds me of Pimmelgate https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andy_Grote#Umstrittene_Reaktio...
Just calling someone Schwachkopf doesn’t get prosecutors to investigate further.
That leads to selv censorship, even if what you did was legal.
The guy was sentenced for distributing forbidden Nazi materials.
The initial insult investigation was dropped, because of it being insignificant.
Doing ID or this fake age verification with anything other than a physical secure element is a dumb regulation that going to create its own regulatory arbitrages and spawn very powerful and profitable black and grey markets. Poor laws create criminal economic opportunity, and digital id is just creating a massive one.
Between Meta being behind a digital id initiative under the pretext of alleged "age verification" and the Debian project leads pivoting to political objectives, it appears gen Z now has a cause to build tech against and fight for. These are dying organizations that cannot innovate and they've attracted a pestilence that is pivoting them to the easier problem of political maneuvering. as it's easier to militate for what nobody wants than to make something anyone actually wants.
The upside is that people get to be hackers again. Tools to cleanse our networks and systems of Meta and other surveillance companies and the influence of these compromised organizations are an OS install and a vibecoding weekend away.
What does this mean? Free software was always a politics of itself.
Because social media already has the age info exactly?
I think an OS and a web platform with accounts are different product categories. Not even sure what an interpretation of the bill that would affect meta would be.
Then it shouldn't be difficult to comply.
I looked at the original analysis and it was fraught with language that leads to specific conclusions. It was most certainly LLM aided, if not generated.
I am not ascribing malice, but the author seems inexperienced with the repercussions of making assertions out of partial knowledge.
Also: Good grief, this article is also written via LLM! Human+machine comes up with theory that goes viral, and then Humans+machines amplify it? Is this the brilliant future we have to look forward to?