Michigan 'digital age' bills pulled after privacy concerns raised • Hacker News Board

Re: Michigan 'digital age' bills pulled after privacy concerns raised

#101

Post by nonethewiser » Mon, Apr 13, 2026, 7:57 PM UTC

xboxnolifes wrote: post #93

nonethewiser wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It is not illegal to ask a user's age in the US online. Note that this is not what I said. You overgeneralized it - I will assume without bad intention. The question is if it's illegal to require porn companies to verify the age of their users. > Can you let us know what your source is? The Free Speech Coalition and Kagan, Sotomayor, and Jackson of the Supreme Court, to start. That was their minority opinion in the…

Fwiw, you did not say the same thing here and in your first post. Your words are meaningfully different.

You should try to engage with the substance of the post.

The claim made by some is that its illegal to require porn companies to do age verification due to the first amendment. It's really the only legal theory I've seen that supports the claim that the Texas law and others are unconstitutional. The rest just amounts to "it's bad so they should rule against Texas and others."

If his comment was based on some different understanding lets state it so we can clarify, but I think I already have. Of course its not illegal to ask someone's age on the internet. Is that truly what you believed I was saying?

Re: Michigan 'digital age' bills pulled after privacy concerns raised

#102

Post by nonethewiser » Mon, Apr 13, 2026, 8:04 PM UTC

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #100

nonethewiser wrote: post #78

If it's illegal in the United States to ask someone's age before distributing porn to them online because of the first amendment, why can physical porn stores ask for id? Is that also unconstitutional?

> If it's illegal in the United States to ask someone's age before distributing porn to them online because of the first amendment, why can physical porn stores ask for id? Is that also unconstitutional? The laws typically don't require them to check ID but instead punish them for selling to minors. You then have several major differences from the online case: In a physical store where they're neither de facto nor de…

> In a physical store they're neither de facto nor de jure required to check your ID when you're clearly an adult, and many of them don't. There is no feasible way to do the same thing on the internet so instead it effectively becomes requirement to ID everyone, which is different.

1) Not true. The burden is on the seller to verify age. Sure, they can try to do it visually but if they fail they are still liable.

2) Even if true, nothing changes in a legal sense if they lose the ability to informally verify age because thats not a legal right of the consumer. It's just an incidental feature of buying in store which some people value. There may be a difference there, but its not a legal one.

3) Texas law didn't mandate age verification by ID specifically.

Re: Michigan 'digital age' bills pulled after privacy concerns raised

#103

Post by ramgine » Mon, Apr 13, 2026, 8:04 PM UTC

noir_lord wrote: post #46

al_borland wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The phone backup is one toggle. The 30 individual ones are for syncing data for apps. If you aren’t using iCloud for any of this, why use it at all? I believe you can still use an iPhone without an iCloud account, can’t you? Without any cloud sync, I’m not sure what the value is, just sign out. I’m sure you’d lose the ability to download apps, but most of those are also using iCloud to sync data. For what it’s worth,…

> If you aren’t using iCloud for any of this, why use it at all? I believe you can still use an iPhone without an iCloud account, can’t you? Nope, You have to have an apple account tied to a physical phone number or you can't sign in on the device or use it at all and they opt you in to the 5GB free plan and yes, the 30 sliders is apps but that doesn't alter the fact that I want to be asked before they exfiltrate my…

I daily my work MacBook without an Apple account or phone number. And no, it’s not in ABM, or any other MDE. App Store is unavailable because of the missing account, but it does not prevent me from using the device like you’re claiming.

Re: Michigan 'digital age' bills pulled after privacy concerns raised

#104

Post by EmbarrassedHelp » Mon, Apr 13, 2026, 8:14 PM UTC

pessimizer wrote: post #83

lioeters wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's an international coordinated effort to undermine every single citizen's privacy, an agenda being pushed for years, again and again in every country and state, by a coalition including Google, Facebook, Microsoft, etc., corporations that profit greatly from mandatory identity verification online. It's only a matter of time until they buy out enough politicians to push it through and force future generations to li…

> a coalition including Google, Facebook, Microsoft, etc., corporations that profit greatly from mandatory identity verification online. This is not being pushed by private companies. There is no money in it. It is being pushed by governments, and those governments use those private companies as (willing) vehicles to do things that it is illegal for them to do directly. And it is not being pushed by the democratic po…

Age verification isn't free. If you sell age verification services then you can get obscenely rich off the government forcing people to use services like yours.

Sam Altman owns an identity verification company for example.

Re: Michigan 'digital age' bills pulled after privacy concerns raised

#105

Post by EmbarrassedHelp » Mon, Apr 13, 2026, 8:15 PM UTC

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #99

Aurornis wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It has reached the level of moral panic, so it’s the current topic everywhere. Even on Hacker News, threads about children and social media or short form video will draw a lot of comments supporting harsh age restrictions, including an alarming number of extremist comments in favor banning under-18s from using the internet or phones. It’s not until the discussion turns to implantation details that the sentiment swing…

> threads about children and social media or short form video will draw a lot of comments supporting harsh age restrictions I think there should be age restrictions. I prefer to do it in a privacy-preserving way. But I’m also not happy about conditioning the former on the existence of the latter.

Outside of better parental controls and restricting accounts based on self declared age, there isn't a way to perform age verification anonymously or privately.

Re: Michigan 'digital age' bills pulled after privacy concerns raised

#106

Post by hackable_sand » Mon, Apr 13, 2026, 8:35 PM UTC

EvanAnderson wrote: post #68

bee_rider wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can see why people fall into the trap of calling for an equitable torment nexus: it is both cynical (it supposes everyone in power is corrupt and everyone at the top would oppose an equitable torment nexus) and also naive/optimistic (it supposes that we have any hope to actually impose an equitable torment nexus). But I think the latter factor wins out, so we should just oppose obviously bad things in a non-clever…

I don't see it as cynical. I'm just accepting the obvious reality. I have no power to stop what's happening. I might as well make the best of it for myself and my family, and hope it becomes so bad that people who actually do have the power to stop it do something about it. Maybe it'll rise to the level that enough individual citizens will call out for change, but I continue to be amazed at what people will put up wi…

That's called cynicism

Re: Michigan 'digital age' bills pulled after privacy concerns raised

#107

Post by array_key_first » Mon, Apr 13, 2026, 8:35 PM UTC

bee_rider wrote: post #58

trollbridge wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google Sheets is slower/has enough usability issues it's not an option and OpenOffice is missing a few features too, not to mention neither really can do VBA at all, nor do they have PowerQuery. So Excel it is.

Is this stuff… like, good? I don’t know anything about the MS ecosystem. If you could start from scratch, would using something more like Python, pandas, that sort of stuff, be viable?

No, none of it is good, excel is basically a bad tool for almost any job. There almost always exist a better thing for everything people use excel for.

But excel has inertia, and it's the only programming non-programmers are able, or rather willing, to do. So we're basically stuck with it.

And yes, I consider crafting and maintaining excel workbooks programming, even if no VBA is involved.

Re: Michigan 'digital age' bills pulled after privacy concerns raised

#108

Post by stronglikedan » Mon, Apr 13, 2026, 8:39 PM UTC

al_borland wrote: post #33

trollbridge wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Microsoft likes to do the "opt out for the next 30 days", including uploading all my spreadsheets to Copilot to be training data.

That would be enough to get me to spend those 30 days migrating all my spreadsheets to a new format.

Sure, if you never have to collaborate on them with anyone else.

Re: Michigan 'digital age' bills pulled after privacy concerns raised

#109

Post by hackable_sand » Mon, Apr 13, 2026, 8:39 PM UTC

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #99

Aurornis wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It has reached the level of moral panic, so it’s the current topic everywhere. Even on Hacker News, threads about children and social media or short form video will draw a lot of comments supporting harsh age restrictions, including an alarming number of extremist comments in favor banning under-18s from using the internet or phones. It’s not until the discussion turns to implantation details that the sentiment swing…

> threads about children and social media or short form video will draw a lot of comments supporting harsh age restrictions I think there should be age restrictions. I prefer to do it in a privacy-preserving way. But I’m also not happy about conditioning the former on the existence of the latter.

One component is to stop building tools that exploit impressionable minds.

Re: Michigan 'digital age' bills pulled after privacy concerns raised

#110

Post by xboxnolifes » Mon, Apr 13, 2026, 8:41 PM UTC

nonethewiser wrote: post #101

xboxnolifes wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fwiw, you did not say the same thing here and in your first post. Your words are meaningfully different.

You should try to engage with the substance of the post. The claim made by some is that its illegal to require porn companies to do age verification due to the first amendment. It's really the only legal theory I've seen that supports the claim that the Texas law and others are unconstitutional. The rest just amounts to "it's bad so they should rule against Texas and others." If his comment was based on some differen…

I was just trying to explain the confusion of the original response, I'm not interested in the topic. They originally said "it's illegal for a company to verify someone's age", but their follow up post was "it's illegal for the government to force companies to verify age"