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Age verification tech could put children at greater risk, says think tank

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Re: Age verification tech could put children at greater risk, says think tank

#21

Post by SoftTalker »

fc417fc802 wrote: post #13
Scaled wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FYI for adult content, there's a standard called RTA-Label that already integrates with all parental controls and is already deployed on all major adult sites.

Yes but isn't that limited to only tagging adult sites? That's great and it works but it only applies to a small piece of the stated problem. It seems to be largely social media that's driving popular support for this latest go round. RTA is an excellent demonstration that a self categorization system can be expected to work provided it's standardized and service operators make use of it. What's missing then is granu…

Simple, sites without a rating are not viewable if parental controls are enabled. That will be motivation for site publishers to get their ratings in order.

Re: Age verification tech could put children at greater risk, says think tank

#22

Post by SoftTalker »

blockmarker wrote: post #10
stavros wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can't offer a workable solution to an excuse. Nobody pushing this wants to protect the children, therefore offering a solution that will protect the children is irrelevant.

While the powers pushing this aren't doing it for protecting children, there are many people who want restricting the internet to protect children. This is why it's a good cover instead of an obvious power grab, because parents want to stop their ten year old children from seeing porn or getting addicted to social media, but they don't know much about how to do it, the technology involved or who is pushing it. You mi…

Yep, and the social media and other tech companies could have solved this 10 or 15 years ago on their own terms but chose to pretend that it was all just a "parenting" issue and not their responsibility. Now they are facing the heavy and clumsy hand of government regulation.

Re: Age verification tech could put children at greater risk, says think tank

#24

Post by fc417fc802 »

SoftTalker wrote: post #21
fc417fc802 wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes but isn't that limited to only tagging adult sites? That's great and it works but it only applies to a small piece of the stated problem. It seems to be largely social media that's driving popular support for this latest go round. RTA is an excellent demonstration that a self categorization system can be expected to work provided it's standardized and service operators make use of it. What's missing then is granu…

Simple, sites without a rating are not viewable if parental controls are enabled. That will be motivation for site publishers to get their ratings in order.

No, the browsers would need to reject the sites unconditionally since no one is going to enable parental controls if it breaks everything. Otherwise I expect the current situation of parental controls not working and thus everyone avoiding them and complaining would continue.

Recall that this is exactly what happened with TLS. When browsers started gating all new features behind TLS being active suddenly all the mainstream sites had it working across the board in record time.

The first step is to get Google and Apple to set a date after which adoption is mandated. Provide an easy out for site operators, such as placing a text file at "/.well-known/content-rating" with "tag:all ages" inside to opt the entire site out rather than sending a header per resource or tagging html elements or whatever.

The second step is to approach legislators with this standard and a now very high compliance rate in hand and suggest that they enact a law requiring that such ratings are accurate for certain specific categories (presumably porn, gambling, social media, and user generated content).

The third step is getting governments to do spot enforcement often enough to prevent the system from falling apart.

Re: Age verification tech could put children at greater risk, says think tank

#25

Post by hnlmorg »

its-summertime wrote: post #15
iso1631 wrote: post #2

If you wanted to actually empower parents in helping their kids, you'd make sites emit some form of standard as TXT, SRV, /.well-known, whatever end points Then you'd make sure that the owner of the device has the ability to enable this, factoring in some tags for the category us-min-age:21:drinking gb-min-age:18:drinking au-min-age:16:socialmedia us-min-age:13:socialmedia Then I can use my existing parental controls…

There is an unfortunate lack of unity for such things. It would work if governments made it easily understandable how to categorize content, but the vast majority is handled by closed boards of people, so no "case law" exists for the difficult edge cases. Additionally, some jurisdictions have laws based around religious and cultural values which are not immediately obvious, I'm sure many webmasters would be happy to…

> There is an unfortunate lack of unity for such things. It would work if governments made it easily understandable how to categorize content, but the vast majority is handled by closed boards of people, so no "case law" exists for the difficult edge cases.

Who cares if some sites get it wrong? It would still be a better scenario than we have now where people either announce who they are, or they hunt for some other site that doesn't enforce age verification. At least if some sites get it wrong, then they're still better than sites that presently out-right refuse to follow all the different laws of the different lands.

> Additionally, some jurisdictions have laws based around religious and cultural values which are not immediately obvious,

The beauty of the GPs suggestion is that site owns don't need to learn that. They just submit what the site content roughly is, and parents get to chose what they want to expose their children to.

Also we already have a jurisdiction problem here were some countries, or even sub-division of such as US states, are passing law that affect the websites and software of people worldwide.

Re: Age verification tech could put children at greater risk, says think tank

#28

Post by phatfish »

blockmarker wrote: post #10
stavros wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can't offer a workable solution to an excuse. Nobody pushing this wants to protect the children, therefore offering a solution that will protect the children is irrelevant.

While the powers pushing this aren't doing it for protecting children, there are many people who want restricting the internet to protect children. This is why it's a good cover instead of an obvious power grab, because parents want to stop their ten year old children from seeing porn or getting addicted to social media, but they don't know much about how to do it, the technology involved or who is pushing it. You mi…

I'm a parent and will take the second option in a heartbeat.

But it's not because I'm cool with my government "[not] doing it for protecting children" or any other conspiracy theory nonsense.

It's because governments ALREADY have all this information if they want it. Most people freely log in to their favourite services, and corporations will hand over data when asked. There are vast amounts of hacked data available, which any government with a competent intelligence service has a copy of. Then there are all the existing laws and intelligence apparatus that can track people.

Age gates wont help the government find out what porn you watch, or who you message on WhatsApp, they already know if they really wanted. But they will create a social contract that letting your kids loose on social media and unfiltered internet is unacceptable. At the moment bad parents have all the power, drawing the line somewhere and enforcing it will give power back to parents that want to raise their children responsibly.

Raising a generation of kids not addicted to internet brainrot is the real way to make sure democratic governments don't overreach with the data they have.

Re: Age verification tech could put children at greater risk, says think tank

#29

Post by Hugsbox »

CrzyLngPwd wrote: post #27

"with nine out of 10 parents saying they are in favour of a ban in response to a government consultation" I wonder why those 90% of parents don't cut their children off from social media right now. They have the power to do it.

Yeah, this I will seriously never understand. When I was a kid, if my mother didn't want me doing something then she would make sure I couldn't do it. Is nobody parenting their children anymore? Do they just let them do whatever they want these days? I've got a 2 year old of my own and can't imagine just handing him an iPad and ignoring him all day like I see other parents do. I can't tell if it's laziness, or ignorance, or some combination of the two.

Re: Age verification tech could put children at greater risk, says think tank

#30

Post by kneel25 »

iso1631 wrote: post #2

If you wanted to actually empower parents in helping their kids, you'd make sites emit some form of standard as TXT, SRV, /.well-known, whatever end points Then you'd make sure that the owner of the device has the ability to enable this, factoring in some tags for the category us-min-age:21:drinking gb-min-age:18:drinking au-min-age:16:socialmedia us-min-age:13:socialmedia Then I can use my existing parental controls…

This would do nothing to prevent sending explicit content within chat apps, which appears to be a big focus at the moment.
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