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Illinois Introducing Operating System Account Age Bill

ilga.gov

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Re: Illinois Introducing Operating System Account Age Bill

#351

Post by marcus_holmes »

Dylan16807 wrote: post #277
ekidd wrote: post #267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(A), honestly. You might think you can keep 16 year olds from looking at porn, if they want to. You can't. You have never been able to. All you can do is teach them that the law is stupid and pointless, and they should treat rules with contempt. But they'll still be able to look at porn. What you can do is allow the government and private companies to track everyone, everywhere, all the time. And you can create more…

I'm not overly concerned with 16 year olds. But the tools for protecting younger children suck. A consistent account setting and header would do a lot to improve parental controls. > What you can do is allow the government and private companies to track everyone, everywhere, all the time. And you can create more gatekeepers that hold personal identity data, misuse it, and leak it. This is already happening. A central…

> A central setting would improve privacy over the way things are right now.

What? How? What improvement are you seeing that I'm not?

Putting all our PII into one huge repository and then letting corps and govts access it sounds like a dystopian nightmare. This is why we don't like Palantir.

What happens if a bad guy steals that data and your identity? They go and look at CSAM using your ID? The police turn up at your door and cart you off to prison? Are you really going to be able to argue that it wasn't you? If so, what is the point of the system? If we're relying on IP addresses and other evidence for access (so you can fight these charges) can't we just use them in the first place?

Re: Illinois Introducing Operating System Account Age Bill

#352

Post by dangus »

mgfist wrote: post #78
Slow_Hand wrote: post #7

If I’m not mistaken, Meta has been lobbying heavily for all of these age-verification bills lately. It seems their strategy is to externalize their responsibility to verify age themselves, and thus reduce their exposure to liabilities when child protection acts like COPPA are violated.

It should be externalized to a degree. Facebook shouldn't be the ones verifying age, but there should be a trusted 3rd party service that does that, which just tells facebook "yes this user is old enough to use your service" or "no they're not old enough". It abso-fucking-lutely should not be at the OS level though, for so many reasons. Even the implementation alone would be a nightmare. Do I need to input my ID to u…

The porn industry already figured this out and it’s super simple. Requires zero personal information.

https://www.rtalabel.org/index.html

Re: Illinois Introducing Operating System Account Age Bill

#353

Post by fcarraldo »

roenxi wrote: post #258
Dylan16807 wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So which situation do you want instead of anonymous age verification: A) 18+ content is behind a pinky swear B) 18+ content is behind a parental control (what this bill would do) C) The internet can't have 18+ content anymore D) Some other system? Please describe it.

Does "the government doesn't get to decide what people can look at on the internet" count as C or D to you? It is the situation we've been in technically for 20 years now anyway; the world hasn't ended and it generally seems to be pretty workable. The status quo isn't an especially radical one.

20 years ago was only 2006. The internet has been around for much longer. The first consumer focused ISPs launched in the early 90’s, 35 years ago, but CompuServe and others were providing access to chat and BBS’s in the 80s.

I’d say nearly 50 years is precedent enough that government intervention is unnecessary.

Re: Illinois Introducing Operating System Account Age Bill

#354

Post by bloppe »

pizzathyme wrote: post #209
bloppe wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are basically 2 possibilities with the outcome of this law: It's rather so full of holes as to be meaningless, or it's so invasive as to force open source projects to try to geofence Illinois (which wouldn't be effective either, but might be the kind of compliance theatre we'll see from maintainers worried about liability). Linux distros always have a "root" user. Does that user have to be asked its age before…

"so full of holes as to be meaningless" what is the solution then to age gating apps that the public feels should be age gated? (TikTok, Instagram, etc). it seems like every app implementing its own guessing system would have even more holes, right? this is one where I am sympathetic. the moment when someone, with their parent, is setting up a device seems like the best point to check age. right? am I missing somethi…

The companies you mentioned are the ones profiting handsomely off their intentionally addictive platforms. They're the ones with massive legal departments. Obviously they should be the ones liable to make sure the kids aren't getting abused on their platforms, not a bunch of volunteer Linux developers who couldn't care less about social media or monetization.

They could've written these laws to go after Apple and Microsoft specifically, and assume that most kids wouldn't have the wherewithal to install Linux themselves. That may or may not be effective. But no, the way the law is written, any hobbyist OS dev is now legally liable for the abuse kids might suffer on massive social networks that are completely unrelated to the OS.

The funny thing is that Estonia actually already figured this all out. Their national ID system allows any platform to reliably verify anybody's age without gaining access to any other information about them. It's the perfect system for reliable checking age while maintaining perfect privacy about all other personal data. But I don't think we'll see that in the US in my lifetime, so we'll just have to keep fighting over all these ineffective privacy nightmares instead.

Re: Illinois Introducing Operating System Account Age Bill

#356

Post by monksy »

inetknght wrote: post #151
mgfist wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It should be externalized to a degree. Facebook shouldn't be the ones verifying age, but there should be a trusted 3rd party service that does that, which just tells facebook "yes this user is old enough to use your service" or "no they're not old enough". It abso-fucking-lutely should not be at the OS level though, for so many reasons. Even the implementation alone would be a nightmare. Do I need to input my ID to u…

> It should be externalized to a degree. Why? We don't externalize age verification when buying alcohol or visiting the strip club. It's on the responsibility of those establishments to verify age.

Very good point. But there are businesses that are via the barcode on the back of the license. They're using machines to validate and do who knows what with that data.

Re: Illinois Introducing Operating System Account Age Bill

#357

Post by Dylan16807 »

newdee wrote: post #340
Dylan16807 wrote: post #312

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think parents should have access to easy to operate parental controls to help them do their parenting.

Yes, parental controls already exist. You’re up and down this thread advocating for this particular bill, but what does the technical solution actually look like to you beyond the controls already available? And with regards to account creation specifically, what do you see as a workable solution that isn’t defeated by a “pinky swear”?

Can you name a piece of parental control software that tells relevant apps and sites whether I'm above 13/18?

I'm sure there's plenty of software that can block sites entirely, but that's a lot less useful.

And how much should I trust the popular products on a scale of 1-10? An OS setting doesn't need much trust.

> And with regards to account creation specifically, what do you see as a workable solution that isn’t defeated by a “pinky swear”?

I'll copy a different reply: "It's set by the administrator of the computer, so a parent can set it for their child instead of hoping their child is honest to every single individual site. That's the difference between a parental control and a pinky swear."

The idea of something like this isn't to replace parents, it's to give them a simple centralized tool. The parent has the admin account.

Re: Illinois Introducing Operating System Account Age Bill

#358

Post by [deleted] »

edgyquant wrote: post #73
firtoz wrote: post #46

It's kinda convenient because every service needs to ask you for the age now because they can't serve under 13s in a lot of cases. Having it be a simple API would be a decent convenience, no? If you connect it with a permission system where you can choose whether to provide this information (e.g. >13 as a bool or age as an integer or the birthday as a date) that can't be too bad I guess? I haven't read the whole thin…

What if someone else is using the computer/phone/etc?

[deleted]

Re: Illinois Introducing Operating System Account Age Bill

#359

Post by carefulfungi »

Dylan16807 wrote: post #251
pianoben wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or, and hear me out, _maybe our computers shouldn't spy on us in the first place_?

So which situation do you want instead of anonymous age verification: A) 18+ content is behind a pinky swear B) 18+ content is behind a parental control (what this bill would do) C) The internet can't have 18+ content anymore D) Some other system? Please describe it.

E. Platforms that want to serve violent, sexual, predatory, scammy, snake oil content in the most addictive way possible to exploit minors and other vulnerable populations for profit should save some of their revenue for lawsuits when they hurt people. Hold products that cause harm responsible.

Re: Illinois Introducing Operating System Account Age Bill

#360

Post by Dylan16807 »

marcus_holmes wrote: post #351
Dylan16807 wrote: post #277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not overly concerned with 16 year olds. But the tools for protecting younger children suck. A consistent account setting and header would do a lot to improve parental controls. > What you can do is allow the government and private companies to track everyone, everywhere, all the time. And you can create more gatekeepers that hold personal identity data, misuse it, and leak it. This is already happening. A central…

> A central setting would improve privacy over the way things are right now. What? How? What improvement are you seeing that I'm not? Putting all our PII into one huge repository and then letting corps and govts access it sounds like a dystopian nightmare. This is why we don't like Palantir. What happens if a bad guy steals that data and your identity? They go and look at CSAM using your ID? The police turn up at you…

I don't know what you're talking about, but it's not what this kind of bill is about.

This kind of bill is about the OS telling things whether you're: 0-12, 13-15, 16-17, 18+

No databases, no stealable identity, only the barest sliver of 2 bits of PII.

As for how it's an improvement, we already have sites asking to see your driver's license or pictures of your face for much worse age verification paradigms. If most of those changed to a local age setting, privacy would go up.

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