I don't configure my child's accounts as minor. I don't tell it is a child. The work I have to do to comply with different weird stuff when some platform knows a user is a child is so much crap that I get a headache! And it often does not work properly (eg try to signup child account for PokemonGo on slow device, or try to allow network play for a child in Minecraft game - microslop family crap will hit you hard)
Claude is only available to people over 18 years
311–320 of 626 posts
Re: Claude is only available to people over 18 years
#312Earlier quoted context omitted.
what's the reason banning minors? Is AI bad for mental health? I simply don't understand how you can ask that question unless you fall into one of these categories: 1. You live in a place with no access to any news source whatsoever. No newspapers. No television. No radio. No internet. 2. You're a child under the age of six. 3. You're an LLM. Every day or two there is another story posted on HN about the harmful effe…
Evidence of risk is not sufficient. It must always be balanced against potential benefits. Children are being unconditionally banned from using major technologies, preventing them from benefiting at all. My life would have turned out very differently if I had been banned from using computers back when I was a kid. I don't want my own kids to grow up without the same freedom I enjoyed.
I feel I would be in a much better place if I had been banned from using computers as a kid. It's all relative.
Re: Claude is only available to people over 18 years
#313Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not "a" bank. You (somewhat) trust your bank, I would imagine. Since you know, they have your money. GP's hypothetical here is that Anthropic or other service provider who wants to do "age verification" could partner with (among others) your bank [1], where bank can answer yes/no to "is this user >= 18?", without revealing any other personal info to the SP. Allegedly. [1] via an intermediary, no doubt. Trying to do a…
> You (somewhat) trust your bank For what reason? > Since you know, they have your money. You may trust them with your money, but does not equate to trusting them with anything else. Principle of least privilege, if you will. Anthropic has your chat data, which in many ways is more valuable than money, so if the only bar for free lying giving out your personal details is trusting a business with something of yours th…
> You may trust them with your money, but does not equate to trusting them with any other PII.
This doesn't really make any sense and it feels like it's just an attempt to be contrarian.
Banks by law require substantial PII in order to even do business with you.
Re: Claude is only available to people over 18 years
#314The day they force me (an existing user) on this is the day I switch to another service. It's been shown time and time again that companies do not secure any of our information.
Re: Claude is only available to people over 18 years
#315Earlier quoted context omitted.
Age verification is not (should not be) the same as ID verification / storage / etc; the US needs laws similar to EU ones where companies can only get the minimum required PII. In the case of age verification that's zero, or a boolean value "yes this person is over 18" that they get from a trusted party like a bank.
Bank? So now you know what bank they use?
Well, they already know your credit card issuer, it's not that wild. Really Visa/MasterCard should offer age verification on their network... They have all the necessary components.
Re: Claude is only available to people over 18 years
#316Need we remind Anthropic of the 153 million drirvers licenses available for sale on the dark web thanks to a 3rd party ID verification service? https://krebsonsecurity.com/2026/09/fbi-probes-service-selli... The fact that Anthropic only receives a result, not the data itself, does not make me feel any better about this. I really wish we could leave these types of decisions up to parents and parents only. Leave the co…
> I really wish we could leave these types of decisions up to parents and parents only. Leave the companies and governments out of it. If you'd like to advocate for this position for a living, the tobacco, alcohol, and gambling industries will all be happy to pay you.
Kids do all of this stuff anyways, making it illegal doesn't stop it from happening.
But we're not talking about a product that kills its users, we're talking about a polymath that can help its users build and create things. Are you intellectually prepared to believe that Claude Code is as dangerous as cigarettes, a product that kills 50% of its users? Do you genuinely believe, as a core belief, that Claude Code will kill 50% of the people that use it?
Re: Claude is only available to people over 18 years
#317Claude Executive: Damn, we hardly know who our users are, can't we just force them to say their full name or ban them? Claude Product Manager: No, that'll piss people off too much, and sadly we can't just ask for ID either... Claude Executive: There must be some way we can force people to link their government IDs with our platform so our analytics get better and more accurate? Claude Product Manager: We could limit…
I'm imagining a future where a bunch of bizarre laws interact oddly (as they do), and now we've got websites with unnecessary nudity pasted in the corner.
"Oh, those? Those are just compliance tits. Ignore those. It's just a thing that came a few years after we finally got rid of the cookie banners. The companies wanted certain protections awarded only to 18+ sites. But you can't just declare yourself an 18+ site, so some sites post the most minimal amount of imagery that constitutes erotic nudity. That's why Google's graphic for the past few months has just been that one with the two dots in the middle of the o's."
Re: Claude is only available to people over 18 years
#318Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not "a" bank. You (somewhat) trust your bank, I would imagine. Since you know, they have your money. GP's hypothetical here is that Anthropic or other service provider who wants to do "age verification" could partner with (among others) your bank [1], where bank can answer yes/no to "is this user >= 18?", without revealing any other personal info to the SP. Allegedly. [1] via an intermediary, no doubt. Trying to do a…
> You (somewhat) trust your bank For what reason? > Since you know, they have your money. You may trust them with your money, but does not equate to trusting them with anything else. Principle of least privilege, if you will. Anthropic has your chat data, which in many ways is more valuable than money, so if the only bar for free lying giving out your personal details is trusting a business with something of yours th…
> You may trust them with your money, but does not equate to trusting them with any other personal information.
How do you expect that they will give you your money when you walk in to a branch and ask for a withdrawal? Or that they'll replace a lost card? Surely you'd expect them to verify your identity.
Re: Claude is only available to people over 18 years
#319Claude Executive: Damn, we hardly know who our users are, can't we just force them to say their full name or ban them? Claude Product Manager: No, that'll piss people off too much, and sadly we can't just ask for ID either... Claude Executive: There must be some way we can force people to link their government IDs with our platform so our analytics get better and more accurate? Claude Product Manager: We could limit…
This seems like a lazy snipe. They clearly state that they receive only an age verification result and none of the personal data. It would take collusion from both sides to silently enable transfer of user data while publicly stating that they don't. I have used these KYC services before. There is the option to get access to all user data - but unless there is evidence to the contrary, we have to take their word for…
Trust them, their totally vetted contracted third-party vendor retains all the good personal data for the taking.
https://krebsonsecurity.com/2026/09/fbi-probes-service-selli...
Re: Claude is only available to people over 18 years
#320Generational hn title