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The Age Verification Trap: Verifying age undermines everyone's data protection

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Re: The Age Verification Trap: Verifying age undermines everyone's data protection

#161

Post by armchairhacker »

everdrive wrote: post #97
armchairhacker wrote: post #55

Age verification is very hard, because parents will give their children their unlocked account, and children will steal their parents' unlocked account. If that's criminalized (like alcohol), it will happen too often to prosecute (much more frequently than alcohol, which is rarely prosecuted anyways). I don't see a solution that isn't a fundamental culture shift. If there's a fundamental culture shift, there's an eas…

Completely agree. The internet works differently than how people want it to, and filtering services are notoriously easy to bypass. Even if these age-verification laws passed with resounding scope and support, what would stop anyone from merely hosting porn in Romania or some country that didn't care about US age-verification laws. The leads to run down would be legion. I think you could seriously degrade the porn in…

> what would stop anyone from merely hosting porn in Romania or some country that didn't care about US age-verification laws

A government could implement the equivalent of China's great firewall. Even if it doesn't stop everyone, it would stop most people. The main problem I suspect is that it would be widely unpopular in the US or Europe, because (especially younger) people have become addicted to porn and brainrot, and these governments are still democracies.

Re: The Age Verification Trap: Verifying age undermines everyone's data protection

#162

Post by delusional »

armchairhacker wrote: post #55

Age verification is very hard, because parents will give their children their unlocked account, and children will steal their parents' unlocked account. If that's criminalized (like alcohol), it will happen too often to prosecute (much more frequently than alcohol, which is rarely prosecuted anyways). I don't see a solution that isn't a fundamental culture shift. If there's a fundamental culture shift, there's an eas…

How does this solve the problem at all? You're just making more problems. Now you have to deal with a black market of "unlocked" phones. You're having to deal with kids sharing unlocked phone. Would police have to wal around trying to buy unlocked phones to catch people selling them to minors? What about selling phones on the internet, would they check ID now?

SOME parents give their children access to their ID. That is NOT the same as ALL parents, and therefore is not a reason not to give those parents a helping hand.

Even just informing children that they're entering an adult space has some value, and if they then have to go ask their parents to borrow their wallet, that's good enough for me.

Re: The Age Verification Trap: Verifying age undermines everyone's data protection

#163

Post by EarlKing »

iamnothere wrote: post #44
bondarchuk wrote: post #34

It's kind of weird to me how every article on this topic here has people rushing to comment within a couple minutes with some generic "yes I too support ID checks for internet use!". Has the vibe really shifted so much among tech-literate people?

Although there is some organic support, there is a lot of coordinated astroturfing. It’s apparent if you watch the discussions across platforms, there are obvious shared talking points that come in waves. Governments (and a few companies) really want this.

More than a few companies. Nothing would allow advertisers to justify raising ad rates quite like being able to point out that their users are real rather than bots.

Re: The Age Verification Trap: Verifying age undermines everyone's data protection

#164

Post by bilbo0s »

iamnothere wrote: post #44
bondarchuk wrote: post #34

It's kind of weird to me how every article on this topic here has people rushing to comment within a couple minutes with some generic "yes I too support ID checks for internet use!". Has the vibe really shifted so much among tech-literate people?

Although there is some organic support, there is a lot of coordinated astroturfing. It’s apparent if you watch the discussions across platforms, there are obvious shared talking points that come in waves. Governments (and a few companies) really want this.

I think we should be careful of writing off this sea change as simple professional influence campaigns. That kind of thinking is just what got Trump to the Whitehouse, and is currently getting the immigrants rounded up.

Things that didn't seem likely to have broad support previously, now are seen as acceptable. In the 90's no one could envision rounding up immigrants. No one could envision uploading an ID card to use ICQ. No one could envision the concept of DE-naturalization or getting rid of birthright citizenship.

Today, in the US for instance, there are entire new generations of people alive. And many, many people who were alive in the 90's are gone. Well these new people very much can envision these things. And they seem to have stocked the Supreme Court to make all these kinds of things a reality.

All because the rest of us keep dismissing all of this as just harmless extreme positions that no one in society really supports. We have to start fighting things like this with more than, "It's not real."

Re: The Age Verification Trap: Verifying age undermines everyone's data protection

#165

Post by anon_shill »

From the second paragraph:

> And the only way to prove that you checked is to keep the data indefinitely.

This is not true and made me immediately stop reading. If a social media app uses a third party vendor to do facial/ID age estimation, the vendor can (and in many cases does) only send an estimated age range back to the caller. Some of the more privacy invasive KYC vendors like Persona persist and optionally pass back entire government IDs, but there are other age verifiers (k-ID, PRIVO, among others) who don't. Regulators are happy with apps using these less invasive ones and making a best effort based on an estimated age, and that doesn't require storing any additional PII. We really need to deconflate age verification from KYC to have productive conversations about this stuff. You can do one thing without doing the other.

Re: The Age Verification Trap: Verifying age undermines everyone's data protection

#166

Post by varenc »

agentultra wrote: post #101

There are alternatives to ID verification if the goal is protecting children. You could, for example, make it illegal to target children with targeted advertising campaigns and addictive content. Then throw the executives who authorized such programs in jail. Punish the people causing the harm.

If targeting children with advertising got corporate execs thrown in jail, wouldn't the companies just roll out age verification for users like they do now? How would this rule change their behavior? They have to know who the children are to not target them.

Stronger punishment creates more of an incentive to age verify. Which is basically why it's happening now.

Re: The Age Verification Trap: Verifying age undermines everyone's data protection

#167

Post by zer00eyz »

jraby3 wrote: post #76
bondarchuk wrote: post #34

It's kind of weird to me how every article on this topic here has people rushing to comment within a couple minutes with some generic "yes I too support ID checks for internet use!". Has the vibe really shifted so much among tech-literate people?

I used to be so against this but after the never ending cat and mouse game with my kids (especially my son) I don't think the tech crowd really appreciates how frustrating it is and how many different screens there are. Tons of data also showing higher suicide rates, depression rates, eating disorders etc. so it's not as if there is no good side to this.

> Tons of data also showing higher suicide rates

Here is the data:

https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/66/wr/mm6630a6.htm

and the more recent data:

https://afsp.org/suicide-statistics/

I was a child of the 90's, where the numbers were higher, where we had peak PMRC.

> depression rates

Have these changed? Or have we changed the criteria for what qualifies as "depression"? We keep changing how we collect data, and then dont renormalized when that collection skews the stats. This is another case of it, honestly.

> eating disorders

Any sort of accurate data collection here is a recent development:

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7575017/

> never ending cat and mouse game with my kids (especially my son)

Having lived this with my own, I get it. Kids are gonna be kids, and they are going to break the rules and push limits. When I think back to the things I did as a kid at their age, they are candidly doing MUCH better than I, or my peer group was. Drug use, Drinking, ( https://usafacts.org/articles/is-teen-drug-and-alcohol-use-d... ) teen pregnancy are all down ( https://www.congress.gov/crs-product/R45184 )

Re: The Age Verification Trap: Verifying age undermines everyone's data protection

#169

Post by DeathArrow »

armchairhacker wrote: post #55

Age verification is very hard, because parents will give their children their unlocked account, and children will steal their parents' unlocked account. If that's criminalized (like alcohol), it will happen too often to prosecute (much more frequently than alcohol, which is rarely prosecuted anyways). I don't see a solution that isn't a fundamental culture shift. If there's a fundamental culture shift, there's an eas…

That is actually a very good solution that is respecting privacy. And is much more effective than asking everyone for ID when opening a website or app.

Re: The Age Verification Trap: Verifying age undermines everyone's data protection

#170

Post by Noaidi »

TimPC wrote: post #102

Big tech likes this because there are a lot more face recognition technologies in the wild in real life and being able to connect all real life data to online data is quite valuable. It's also quite possibly the largest training set ever for face recognition if ids are stored and given how ids and images are sold across many companies it seems very high probability that some company will retain the data rather than d…

So don't use big tech. No one needs discord, or porn, or social media. But this is not the answer. The answer is fighting to change the laws. And we can start changing the laws by boycotting big tech. Laws are changed by money flows, not ideology.
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