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

android-developers.googleblog.com

271–280 of 549 posts

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

#271

I'm fundamentally opposed to age verification because it usually leads to mandatory account creation no matter how privacy friendly the age verification process itself may be. It's already extremely annoying that, for example, on YouTube, you can no longer watch many videos without an account. Furthermore, the whole thing also reinforces monopolies. Once you've verified your age on one platform, the barrier to switch…

>YouTube, you can no longer watch many videos without an account.

What YouTube video can I not watch via yt-dlp without an account?

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

#272
post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The answer is quite simple. You just don't verify it. The point isn’t to verify the age but to set the age on the device itself. If the parents set the age on the cell phone or computer, that setting is then used as the basis. The operating systems can be configured so that only the device administrator can change the age. Systemd already has a field for storing the age, which programs can read. If the child doesn’t…

Are you a parent? I have personally used the parental controls on Android, iOS and ChromeOS and to be honest they are terrible. Issues with syncing changes, the terrible UX for parental access control (iOS...), issues around audit/access logs, issues around prompting the parent for access. I am honestly shocked that Apple known for its polished experience hasn't been forced by angry parents. My daughter's school actu…

> my daughter was caught playing web games in class

Hilarious to me. The biggest game of whack-a-mole ever. I would love to know if this lockdown was successful (and if so, how it worked).

In my city, there is a district that is so “locked down” that the images from Wikipedia don’t even load. But guess what? Kids still find ways to play games.

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

#273
post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you a parent? I have personally used the parental controls on Android, iOS and ChromeOS and to be honest they are terrible. Issues with syncing changes, the terrible UX for parental access control (iOS...), issues around audit/access logs, issues around prompting the parent for access. I am honestly shocked that Apple known for its polished experience hasn't been forced by angry parents. My daughter's school actu…

Being parent is not supposed to be easy

[flagged]

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

#274
post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Big tech wants this, so they can continue on with business as usual abusing adults' psyche and personal information. I've said before and I'll say again that this approach (strict age gating) also is going to produce a slew of really vulnerable 18 year olds. If I were a sports gambling site, I'd be salivating at getting a fresh crop of 18 year old boys each year who have had zero opportunity to learn how to navigat…

Yes! And this dovetails into a point I really should have made as well. The thing about "age verification" (ie identity verification) is that it puts the decision of what kids should access wholly in the hands of corporate attorneys . For example we can easily imagine a "Facebook4Kidz" website that has many of the same terrible dynamics as regular Faceboot, but that Faceboot's attorneys can justify as being legally c…

Yes!

And you want them to learn in a situation where the stakes are lower: at 18, someone can put themselves into a ton of debt or put nudes in the wrong place and just nuke their life in a way that they can't fix for a decade and everyone shrugs and is like 'you're a grown up!'

Think of all the kids who back in the day got scammed out of their Neopoints, or lost all of their in game currency in GTA, etc. That's a way, way better way to learn about account security and who to trust than their first experience with scammers involving real money.

Is the problem that we're exploiting kids, or is the problem that we're exploiting people? We're not going to be able to protect kids from exploitation in a society/culture that explicitly condones exploitation. If we think exploiting people is fine, actually, as long as they're over 18, then your kids will never be safe, because they will grow up.

Even setting aside the obvious examples I listed, binge drinking used to be a huge problem amongst college aged kids. Who's to say that the Internet/social media wouldn't be similar? How many kids are going to flunk out of school because they can't stop watching digital crack and now mom and dad aren't around to stop them? And unlike binge drinking, your body won't eventually revolt against you, and with the addiction consultants The Machine employs, there will always be new content. People grow out of binge drinking because eventually it grows stale and hangovers when you're 35 are far worse than ones when you're 21, but that's not true of social media use.

To tie this to other issues, we're already seeing issues with relationship and family formation amongst young people. I'm not sure flash banging them with addictive content when they're in their prime years is the call. If all it took for the Internet to be healthy was holding off until adulthood, we'd expect people who were adults when they started to have a healthy relationship with social media. They very much do not.

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

#275

I'm fundamentally opposed to age verification because it usually leads to mandatory account creation no matter how privacy friendly the age verification process itself may be. It's already extremely annoying that, for example, on YouTube, you can no longer watch many videos without an account. Furthermore, the whole thing also reinforces monopolies. Once you've verified your age on one platform, the barrier to switch…

>YouTube, you can no longer watch many videos without an account. What YouTube video can I not watch via yt-dlp without an account?

Anything age-restricted.

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

#276

Doesn't seem like most of the people on this thread actually read what they're planning. It seems like a very good solution to me. It gives parents a simple solution to define the age of the phones user and a mechanism to allow apps to get an age range and tailor usage appropriately. It does all this while leaving everyone else undisturbed. Put the age range into http headers and you solve children accessing content…

Through a Google account. It's not some device check.

Well it's google and google does everything through their accounts.

But the principle of this can work on everything.

Own an iphone, apple can do the same tied to the apple account.

On a windows machine you can do the same tied the user account login for the child.

People will no doubt pick holes in something like this, but it's the least intrusive, least effort solution to the problem that will actually work.

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

#277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>YouTube, you can no longer watch many videos without an account. What YouTube video can I not watch via yt-dlp without an account?

Anything age-restricted.

FreeTube can.

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

#278
post #255

It's not like children can buy overpriced phones or tablets. You can force the stores to help setup up restrictions for their devices for parents that don't know how or want to. Then start doing massive fines and restrictions on websites or app stores that host unregulated apps. If they can afford to buy them on their own, good for them. You don't use age to decide what's appropriate; I don't mind if my kids see nake…

Who decides who's regulating these apps and what would classify an app as regulated? This sounds like what googles doing with their current monopolistic attempt to force users to only download apps from the play store and force any dev who wants to post their apps there register with Google, hand over ID, and pay Google a fee to be allowed the classification that they're regulated. Meanwhile the play store itself is full of malware riddled apps and even googles own apps are spyware used by them to aggregate as much data on each user as possible in order to sell that data to ad companies and governments

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

#279
post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The part I'm most opposed to is requiring a full KYC, using "verifying age" as an excuse. My Gmail account has been active for >18 years, that should be enough proof.

… but how many people really believe that will happen? Fight together with everyone else, or when stage 2 (“full KYC”) is implemented you won’t have any leverage.

It won’t because KYC is a legal process and you don’t want to prophets that across the entire system with bypasses for it. That’s legal trouble waiting to happen.

Yes, Google also wants to tie back to legal identities to sell ads. I’m not saying they’re doing this in good faith, but proxies like this get messy and dangerous for legal/compliance.

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

#280
post #248

I'm fundamentally opposed to age verification because it usually leads to mandatory account creation no matter how privacy friendly the age verification process itself may be. It's already extremely annoying that, for example, on YouTube, you can no longer watch many videos without an account. Furthermore, the whole thing also reinforces monopolies. Once you've verified your age on one platform, the barrier to switch…

> for example, on YouTube, you can no longer watch many videos without an account. I do not like this argument. Does an adult theater let anyone in without an ID? Do movie theaters let kids under 18 into an R rated movie without ID? Why do we think this should be different on the internet? IMHO, they should have Youtube 18+ (Adult book store) where you need an ID and YouTube I think it is evil that YouTube enables ki…

The problem is that digital IDs get recorded. The physical examples you give are generally not. The clerk at the ticket counter or entrance doesn't give a shit who you are, they just need the picture to match you and the DOB to 18+ years ago. If you're old enough, they dont even card you.
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