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Google will expand age checks on Android worldwide till the end of the year

android-developers.googleblog.com

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Re: Google will expand age checks on Android worldwide till the end of the year

#91
post #90
post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ZKPs may as well just be unencrypted HTTP headers which would be way simpler and easier to implement. All a ZKP proves is that at least one person in the world is over 18.

This is not completely true. With ZKP, if you make a business out of reselling tokens you get with your own identity, eventually they will see that you use orders of magnitude more tokens than normal people. So with ZKP it's more difficult to cheat. Not impossible, just less accessible.

They're not ZK if they can do that

Re: Google will expand age checks on Android worldwide till the end of the year

#92
post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah. And if a kid drinks beer only the parents should be liable. Why are we all so horny to transfer unlimited liability to parents?

Because raising children is unequivocally the parents' responsibility. It's, like, their main job.

But we don't put barbed wire on random sidewalks and then blame parents if a kid walks over it and gets hurt. There is the attractive nuisance doctrine, among other things.

Re: Google will expand age checks on Android worldwide till the end of the year

#93

I think it's the old that need to be protected more on the Internet since they disproportionately fall prey to online scams. So let's age-gate their access to online services too. If you are old and want to send money to someone, you get age-gating and second-factor authorization from a competent young person. If you want to watch porn online, believe it or not, age-gating and second-factor authorization.

Honestly, I wouldn't be opposed to that either. If we're protecting kids, we should also protect the old and feeble. Old people, people with developmental handicaps, you name it: they're being exposed to a world that can and will abuse you if you have any faith in humanity left and don't have the technical skills to identify things like fake domains and scam sites.

For some reason we're making sure no 12 year old can drive or run for any government positions, but a 90 year old can keep the driver's license that they've had since before the start of colour television, or make critical decisions affecting millions. We can't have it both ways.

Re: Google will expand age checks on Android worldwide till the end of the year

#94
post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah. And if a kid drinks beer only the parents should be liable. Why are we all so horny to transfer unlimited liability to parents?

You have a kid, you have responsibility for that kid. In Germany we have a term "Aufsichtspflicht" for this, which roughly translates to duty of supervision. Up to a certain age of the kid parents will be made responsible for damages your kid caused. One pretty funny example of that was a kid spending 1000s of Euros on a MMORPG because the MMO offered a payment option that allowed people to pay through their phone bi…

¿What are those ways?

Re: Google will expand age checks on Android worldwide till the end of the year

#95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Its the same thing with Europe allowing scans of private chats now. Nobody would tolerate a person opening the letters from ur physical mail box and reading through each of them just to see if you do [insert illegal activity]. But once this stuff happens digitally, people seem to simply tolerate it. If I remember correctly, in 2019 there were huge protests against upload filters were people actually protested on the…

The authorities open letters all the time. Try sending a letter to prison without it getting scanned. The problem with this comparison is that the authorities can open a letter if they need to for various well-intended reasons, but they cannot open an encrypted message. Either the authorities can scan all messages, or they can scan no messages, there's no inbetween. The mandate to verify age before selling alcohol ha…

Communicating via PGP encrypted snail mail seems an attractive option.

Re: Google will expand age checks on Android worldwide till the end of the year

#97
post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't want the market solving this. If we are going to do age checks it should be based on public key cryptography, be open source, and handled by the government. You verify with the government (or don't since they already know your age), you get some form of cryptographic attestation, present said attestation to websites/apps. I'm not a fan of age verification in the first place, but I am extremely not a fan of ra…

This is scary though too. If the gov managed a key server like this, almost all companies would start requiring it. But this effectively gives the gov a very easy way to lock you out of everything.

This will be possible if done by third parties anyway, it will just be apple, google and maybe meta, a single phone call is enough to cut you off. At least if the government is doing it, the app doesn't get your id.

Re: Google will expand age checks on Android worldwide till the end of the year

#98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> No one would tolerate “adult” services and goods rendered directly to children without age check I don't think it's fair to say that parents who don't care to use parental control measures already available to them have no tolerance for that.

Parental controls don’t solve all of the issues. The same way telling your kids not to do drugs is not a solution to vaping use.

If you don't even try to use simple available measures to prevent your own child from vaping then it's unfair to say you have zero tolerance for children vaping.

Re: Google will expand age checks on Android worldwide till the end of the year

#99
Why is this part of Play Services? It should be something on-device as part of AOSP, not something that further entrenches Google.

(In case it's not obvious: rethorical question, Google just wants to do platform lock-in with Android and sees this as a useful means to bludgeon it.)

Re: Google will expand age checks on Android worldwide till the end of the year

#100

Can't we build a gateway in the internet that detects if someone is a influential CEO or something and just bar access to the internet?

What does this have to do with age verification?

We've already decided to do verification of users, now we can look into which groups of users should be limited or barred entirely.
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