271–280 of 1001 posts
Device based attestation seems like the way to go largely; it doesn't solve the problem, but it's good enough that it would cover most cases.
> And the only way to prove that you checked is to keep the data indefinitely. This is a false premise already; the company can check the age (or have a third party like iDIN [0] do it), then set a marker "this person is 18+" and "we verified it using this method at this date". That should be enough. [0] https://www.idin.nl/en/
and there is nothing I or the few (in terms of power) well-meaning government and corporate actors can do to change that.
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There’s some nuance here. Realizing that much of the internet is totally toxic to children now and should have a means of keeping them out is distinct from agreeing to upload ID to everything. A better implementation would be to have a device/login level parental control setting that passed age restriction signals via browsers and App Stores. This is both a simpler design and privacy friendly.
It doesn't sound simple. Now there needs to be some kind of pipeline that can route a new kind of information from the OS (perhaps from a physical device) to the process, through the network, to the remote process. Every part of the system needs to be updated in order to support this new functionality.
parents need to start parenting by taking responsibility on what their kids are doing, and government should start governing with regulations on ad tech, addictive social media platforms, instead of using easily hackable platforms for de anonymization, which in turn enable mass identity theft.
Most of this debate makes more sense if the actual goal is liability reduction, not child safety. If it were genuinely about protecting kids, you'd regulate infinite scroll and algorithmic engagement optimization, not who can log in.
Better than muddying the waters trying to make it less addictive but then letting them on there when their brains aren't ready.
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Completely agree. The internet works differently than how people want it to, and filtering services are notoriously easy to bypass. Even if these age-verification laws passed with resounding scope and support, what would stop anyone from merely hosting porn in Romania or some country that didn't care about US age-verification laws. The leads to run down would be legion. I think you could seriously degrade the porn in…
> what would stop anyone from merely hosting porn in Romania or some country that didn't care about US age-verification laws A government could implement the equivalent of China's great firewall. Even if it doesn't stop everyone, it would stop most people. The main problem I suspect is that it would be widely unpopular in the US or Europe, because (especially younger) people have become addicted to porn and brainrot,…
>"None of this is an argument against protecting children online. It is an argument against pretending there is no tradeoff" Tradeoff acknowledged, and this runs both sides, there's hundreds of risks that these policies are addressing. To mention a specific one, I was exposed to pornography online at age 9 which is obviously an issue, the incumbent system allowed this to happen and will continue to do so. So to what…
I was initially exposed to pornography at 8 years old, by finding a disgarded magazine in a hedge. However this was pretty soft.
I was exposed to serious pornography at 10 years by finding a hidden VHS tape in the back of a drawer at a friends house and getting curious. This was hardcore German stuff with explicit violence. This has caused me to have therapy in my lifetime.
This was all in the 80s by the way.
Therefore anything you are mentioning happened long before the internet, and is totally possible in a completely offline world as well. So how do these new digital laws 'protect children' again?
There is missing a solution. Give our personal devices have the ability to verify our age and identity securely and store on device like they do our fingerprint or face data. Services that need access only verify it cryptographically. So my iPhone can confirm I’m over 21 for my DoorDash app in the same way it stores my biometric data. The challenge here is the adoption of these encryption services and whether compani…
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There are better and there are really really bad ways to do ID checks. In a world that is increasingly overwhelmed by bots I don't see how we can avoid proof-of-humanity and proof-of-adulthood checks in a lot of contexts. So we should probably get ahead of this debate and push for good ways to do part-of-identity-checks. Because I don't see any good way to avoid them. We could potentially do ID checks that only show…
> We could potentially do ID checks that only show exactly what the receiver needs to know and nothing else. A stronger statement: we know how to build zero-knowledge proofs over government-issued identification, cf. https://zkpassport.id/ The services that use these proofs then need to implement that only one device can be logged in with a given identity at a time, plus some basic rate limiting on logins, and the pr…