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Online age verification is the hill to die on

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Re: Online age verification is the hill to die on

#251

Post by nonethewiser »

kaboomshebang wrote: post #172

Kids will always find ways around regulation. Look at cigarettes, vapes, alcohol, weed; they will just get it from their dealers. Pornography? I expect something like: download a Torrent, get it from a classmate, share HardDrives in school, get it through an older brother.

>Kids will always find ways around regulation.

And porn companies should always be held responsible for not doing their due diligence and freely distributing porn to minors. Which is already illegal in teh US and most places.

Re: Online age verification is the hill to die on

#252

Post by anigbrowl »

tim333 wrote: post #138

>age verification requires identity verification. Identity verification requires digital IDs. Digital IDs require everyone — not just children — to prove who they are before they can speak... Not if it's done in a half arsed way. I'm in the UK and so far my age verification has involved doing a selfie with the webcam for Reddit. That's it. No one needing my name, ID number etc. (Apart from banks of course). Really th…

doing a selfie with the webcam

First, that's easily enough to identify you from biometric data, and it's naive to assume it won't be resold. Second, I kept getting asked for ID into my 40s because I looked young. People don't all age in the same way, so this system will fail for people at the tails of a normal distribution - some 15 year olds will easily pass for 25 and vice versa.

Re: Online age verification is the hill to die on

#253

Post by nonethewiser »

IAmBroom wrote: post #177
kaboomshebang wrote: post #172

Kids will always find ways around regulation. Look at cigarettes, vapes, alcohol, weed; they will just get it from their dealers. Pornography? I expect something like: download a Torrent, get it from a classmate, share HardDrives in school, get it through an older brother.

And bootleggers will always bootleg, and smugglers will always smuggle. For that matter, murderers will find ways to murder. Shall we just abolish all laws? None of them have any effect whatsoever, if they are even slightly imperfect... by your rule.

Yeah his point suggests we should stop ID'ing at liquor stores, physical porn stores, etc.

Re: Online age verification is the hill to die on

#254

Post by nirava »

nonethewiser wrote: post #242

Im completely OK with verifying someone's age before distributing age-restricted services to them. That's what an age restricted service is, and obviously we shouldnt let porn companies distribute porn to minors (its already illegal most place). Just dont use porn, facebook, online gambling etc. if you dont want to share your identity. I can see why it's unfortunate but the idea posited that that it's somehow illegal…

Private companies now can link all your online activities to you. Not an advertisement ID, but directly to you and your loans and your health data and whatever they're selling in the black market. Every data breach is a 100 times. It was already almost possible to directly know about you by buying data, now it's easier.

The point of this is not to verify age really. It is to verify identity. There's no way to prove someone is some age without presenting a legal ID.

Also, it's not just porn, facebook, online gambling etc. It is the OS based on some bills. So ALL your activities.

Re: Online age verification is the hill to die on

#256

Post by NoMoreNicksLeft »

Bender wrote: post #228
hooverlabs wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Servers can then infer user’s ages by whether or not the client renders pages given those headers or not no? See if secondary page requests (e.g images, scripts) are made or not from a client? A bad actor could use this to glean age information from the client and see whether the person viewing the page is a small child. That should be scary

I disagree. The ability to render a page could simply mean that parental controls were not enabled on the device. Some parents have assessed the situation and trust their children to be psychologically ready for adult situations. The client could be literally any age. Today devices do not default to accounts being child accounts. Some day this may change and may require an initial administrator password or something…

>I disagree. The ability to render a page could simply mean that parental controls were not enabled on the device.

Not being able to detect all children doesn't mean that being able to detect 80% of them is somehow less disturbing.

Re: Online age verification is the hill to die on

#257

Post by DontBreakAlex »

cooper_ganglia wrote: post #211

THe government shouldn't be raising anyone's children, that's what parents are for. If you're a bad parent, your kids will get access to bad things and could become an adult failure. The future of your family and your legacy is up to you, not the government. We don't need age verification to restrict the social darwinism of raising children.

I wish I could upvote this comment harder. I started having unsupervised internet access (with the family computer in the living room) when I was 8. I'm a functional and successful adult because I trusted my parents. When my mother forbade me from registering on online forums I complied. When I read "fellation" in some minecraft chat (albeit somewhat later) I asked my mom what it was and understood that "sex" was something for the grown-ups and that I shouldn't worry about it. All because I would never even conceive that my parents wouldn't do what's best for me, and was unconditionally loved (even though I didn't know about this concept).

I would rather have parenting licenses than online age verification

Re: Online age verification is the hill to die on

#258

Post by nonethewiser »

shevy-java wrote: post #206

I agree. I don't call it "age verification" though - it is age sniffing. And it has nothing to do with children - that is the lie. What is fascinating is to see how governments ALL fall for it. There is zero resistance. This is fascinating to me. It shows how little real effort is necessary once you have the lobbyists in place. Kind of scary to witness too. It is an apartheid system. All apartheid slavery systems wil…

>And it has nothing to do with children - that is the lie.

You're not qualified to say that because you aren't a proponent of age verification. That's just imputing motives.

As a proponent of age verification and can tell you it's absolutely about protecting kid from damaging services like porn. It's a common sense control and that's why it has bi-partisan support in the US during a time where there is nearly 0 bi partisan support.

Re: Online age verification is the hill to die on

#259

Post by basisword »

chimeracoder wrote: post #218
dylan604 wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not so sure about that. Handing an ID to a bouncer at a bar or similar is not logging anything. Mainly it's some big man that you can see gears turning to see if the date is correct and a cursory glance to see if the photo matches. Sophisticated places might have a scanner that does what ever validation it does, but again, it's just another cursory check of the photo. Most of these people really don't care. A tech co…

> Not so sure about that. Handing an ID to a bouncer at a bar or similar is not logging anything. > Sophisticated places might have a scanner that does what ever validation it does, but again, it's just another cursory check of the photo. Many/most bars do scan IDs now. Ostensibly it's to verify that it's real, but they do use those systems to keep a log of everyone who enters.

They also use them to flag people who've been previously banned and the systems work across venues. The idea that verification in the real world is cursory is not accurate.
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