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So, you’ve hit an age gate. What now?

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Re: So, you’ve hit an age gate. What now?

#211

Post by arkadiytehgraet »

mystifyingpoi wrote: post #101
dakiol wrote: post #65

I’ve noticed that many people struggle to simply let things go. Take a hypothetical case where HN requires ID verification. I'd just stop using HN, even if that meant giving up checking tech news. Sometimes things end, and that's fine. I used to watch good soccer matches on public TV. When services like DAZN appeared, only one major match was available each weekend on public TV. Later, none were free to watch unless…

> I’ve noticed that many people struggle to simply let things go Because it's not always about their entertainment. I know churches that post info about events only on WhatsApp groups, if you don't use it - you're screwed. I know kindergardens which use Facebook Messenger groups to send announcements to their parents' children - if you don't use it, you will miss important info. For most people, letting go such thing…

It's probably a good idea to let church go in 2026 too.

Re: So, you’ve hit an age gate. What now?

#212

Post by iamnothere »

bhelkey wrote: post #210
iamnothere wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Care to share more details about this? Which account? What do you mean by “suspicious”? What specific effects does this have? I use a VPN 24/7 on one machine. Zero issues even with banking, although sometimes I have to answer CAPTCHAs.

Some sites block or offer a degraded experience for VPN traffic. This happens occasionally when I use Mullvad. Some examples: Imgur loads but does not display any content. USPS's website does not load.

Now that I think about it USPS is the one place I get blocked. Still, it seems like people facing an age gate should be able to circumvent it without much hassle on a regular basis.

Re: So, you’ve hit an age gate. What now?

#213

Post by cloudfudge »

enahs-sf wrote: post #87
cloudfudge wrote: post #60

This makes me wonder if there's a business case for a privacy-preserving identity service which does age verification. Say you have a strong identity provider that you have proven your age to. Just as the 3rd party site could use SSO login from your identity provider, perhaps the identity provider could provide signed evidence to the 3rd party site that asserts "I have verified that this person is age X" but not divu…

I’ve been noodling on this idea for a while but I think getting commercial acceptance would be hard. People have tried it with crypto albeit with lukewarm results. I think to have the network effects required to be successful in such an endeavor, it would have to come from a vendor like apple or google unfortunately. You kind of want an mTLS for the masses with a chain of trust that makes sense.

mTLS is no good because the target service could then uniquely identify you. I think you explicitly want a three-party scheme where the target service just accepts the idp's assertion about your age in a cryptographically secure way.

Re: So, you’ve hit an age gate. What now?

#214

Post by phatfish »

immibis wrote: post #193
kspacewalk2 wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The fundamental question that needs answering is: should we actually prevent minors below the age of X from accessing social media site Y? Is the harm done significant enough to warrant providing parents with a technical solution for giving them control over which sites their X-aged child signs up, and a solution that like actually works? Obviously pinky-swear "over 13?" checkboxes don't work, so this currently does…

Can we actually prevent children under 16 from buying beer?

If they are persistent enough, no. But then everyone knows it's not going to stop every child in every situation. It sets a president for what society thinks is a sensible limit though, and society raises children not just individual families or parents.

Do we want kids becoming alcoholics? Do we want them turning up drunk to school and disrupting classes? Do we want to give parents trying to do the right thing some backup? So they know that when their kid is alone they can expect that other adults set a similar example.

Sure, you can't stop a kid determined to consume alcohol. But I think the societal norm is an overall good thing.

The same should be applied to the online space, kids spend more and more time there. Porn, social media, gambling etc. should be just a much of a concern as alcohol.

Re: So, you’ve hit an age gate. What now?

#215

Post by WhyNotHugo »

ryandrake wrote: post #27

My kid has recently just quit playing Roblox because of the sketchy facial age check process. She said that her and all her friends know not to ever upload a picture of themselves to the Internet (good job, fellow Other Parents!!) so they're either moving on to other games or just downloading stock photos of people from the internet and uploading those (which apparently works). What a total joke. These companies need…

> These companies need to stop normalizing the sharing of personal private photos. It's literally the opposite direction from good Internet hygiene, especially for kids!

While I agree with you entirely, it's important to remember that these companies want to mis-educate the masses (and especially children) against their own interest. It's not just unfortunate that they're normalising uploading a photo just to play a videogame: it's an intentional choice to de-normalise privacy and normalise deeper and more in-grained online stalking.

Re: So, you’ve hit an age gate. What now?

#216

Post by luke727 »

JoshTriplett wrote: post #131
luke727 wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While I agree with this in spirit, here in the UK both major parties along with the public at large generally support these types of laws.

Two of the major parties support it, but it's not entirely obvious how much public support there is; it's not most people's top issue, and it's easy to make polls say what you want depending on the question you ask. You'd get different answers if, for instance, you ask "do you want to have to show ID or submit a picture of your face in order to access many sites on the Internet".

I'm not sure there'd be much of a difference because the British people are broadly speaking a rather paternalistic society.

Re: So, you’ve hit an age gate. What now?

#217

Post by crab_galaxy »

jvanderbot wrote: post #162
array_key_first wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The real solution, IMO, is a second internet. Domain names will be whitelisted, not blacklisted, and you must submit an application to some body or something.

I dont see why phones can't come with a browser that does this. Parents could curate a whitelist like people curate playlists, and share it, and the browser would honor that. Combined with some blacklisted apps (e.g., all other browsers), this would be a passable opt-in solution. I'm sure there's either a subscription or a small incentive for someone to build this that hopefully isn't "Scam children". It's not like k…

They do, don’t they? Apple devices have had a robust whitelisting/blacklisting feature for at least a couple of years. I use it to block websites and apps to lessen my phone addiction. I’m sure Android offers similar features

Re: So, you’ve hit an age gate. What now?

#218

Post by owisd »

benbristow wrote: post #175
mlinster wrote: post #48

I think that age verification is important. While its not perfect, it is one tool to help protect kids.

In an ideal world, parents would be good parents, know what their kids are up to, install parental controls on their digital devices (software solutions out there range from free/bundled to not expensive), have conversations with kids about what's on the internet and what to avoid. Government overreach is not the answer, it's a plaster (and an excuse for more surveillance which is arguably the primary factor) over ba…

You roll out the ‘bad parents’ trope then immediately admit bypassing parental controls is trivial.

Re: So, you’ve hit an age gate. What now?

#219

Post by bsder »

Aurornis wrote: post #161
kspacewalk2 wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The fundamental question that needs answering is: should we actually prevent minors below the age of X from accessing social media site Y? Is the harm done significant enough to warrant providing parents with a technical solution for giving them control over which sites their X-aged child signs up, and a solution that like actually works? Obviously pinky-swear "over 13?" checkboxes don't work, so this currently does…

> The fundamental question that needs answering is: should we actually prevent minors below the age of X from accessing social media site Y? I suspect if you ask Hacker News commenters if we should put up any obstacles to accessing social media sites for anyone, a lot of people will tell you yes. The details don't matter. Bashing "social media" is popular here and anything that makes it harder for other people to use…

> The details don't matter.

The details very much DO matter.

You can look at all manner of posts here on HN that explain exactly how you should do age verification without uploading IDs or giving central authority to some untrustworthy entity.

The fact that neither the governments proposing these laws nor the social media sites want to implement them those ways tells you that what these entities want isn't "verification" but "control".

And, yes, most of us object to that.

Re: So, you’ve hit an age gate. What now?

#220

Post by crooked-v »

ryandrake wrote: post #27

My kid has recently just quit playing Roblox because of the sketchy facial age check process. She said that her and all her friends know not to ever upload a picture of themselves to the Internet (good job, fellow Other Parents!!) so they're either moving on to other games or just downloading stock photos of people from the internet and uploading those (which apparently works). What a total joke. These companies need…

The funniest case I've seen was somebody fooling one of these tools using Gmod by playing with the face sliders of those stock Half-Life characters.
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