331–340 of 549 posts
> The Play Age Signals API is a privacy-preserving tool that puts parents in the driver's seat allowing them to share their child's age range (e.g. 16-17) directly with apps. Sounds like an adtech targeting demographic, not protecting children.
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Well these kind of laws are trying to legislate technology into existence; we don’t have a means to do it, yet “we demand for the technology to exist through ‘reasonable methods’, now get to work.” If that’s the nearly infinite wiggle room we’re playing with then I’d say what about Adult and Child versions of phones? You have to flash your ID to the clerk to buy an adult one, like buying cigarettes at a gas station,…
We already have a version of the child phone: it's parental supervision. When I was a kid there was no TV in my bedroom nor a computer. Everything I watched or did online was on full display in the family room. What changed in the modern home where that's not the case? Are kids glued to their phones because their parents are too?
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The whole idea is that the government gives you a cryptographic token that proves you are over 18, but that token can be used anywhere. They don't get to say what websites can look at it, because...how would they.
The concern isn't that an authoritarian government locks you out of some age-restricted sites, it's that it locks you out of them all.
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If we had a "Safe for everyone" public internet and a locked down "Prove you are an adult" internet beside it, nothing prevents wikipedia from being on the Safe for Everyone internet. Also, Encarta was a thing. Expensive though. Some states would legislate wikipedia onto the "Adults only" web though because they don't like what it says about things like abortion and trans people. A lot of ecommerce companies would pr…
Well... Wikipedia has content that some would consider offensive or unsuitable for children. I'm not in favor of limiting any access to Wikipedia, but I'd consider it a certainty that the day would come when Wikipedia had to decide whether to implement age restrictions or try to police content. I believe that event would change it's governance and social structure in a negative way and significantly degrade it as a p…
>I believe that event would change it's governance and social structure in a negative way and significantly degrade it as a public resource.
This can and has already been doing even without age verification. We're way beyond government survellaince in many countries.
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The number of people who are marginalised is... marginal. By definition it doesn't have a sensible impact on profit. That's precisely why it is a problem to be marginalised.
Isn’t that… life? Even literal regulated electricity utilities aren’t expected to provide service to every last marginal customer. For example, a poor old grandma missing many electricity bill payments usually will see leniency if she is polite, the utility eventually won’t try to collect cash anymore and instead put a lien on the home while continuing to provide service. But if the billing department receives multip…
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The commercial value of a ten year old smartphone in a wealthy country is approximately $0. It's probably not terribly hard for a determined child who goes to school and has friends to obtain one.
And I bet I'd struggle to install almost all modern popular apps on a 10 year old phone. No Youtube, no Roblox, etc. They simply wouldn't update nor connect. That's one problem solved by the fact that phones operate on a deprecation model, as opposed to Windows OS.
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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…
I want the market solving this but I don’t want to give any information to anyone who asks. I want Apple to verify me once, and then others to trust Apple that the device accessing their service is owned by someone over 18. I’ll bet that most people are in the same boat - they trust their device manufacturer with information like their credit card number, but not anyone else. And I think it’s a pragmatic compromise.
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And instead of an age you could even make the indication about what is potentially objectionable so that parents can choose when to allow their kids to see what - and adults can also choose to avoid certain things.
Force a PEGI-like system for every apps please. It would be awesome.
One spot where it's a bit weird is for utility apps that don't have any "mature" content but that obviously isn't intended for kids, so e.g. your tax prep app gets rated as "Ages 4+".