I’m in the UK and we recently got the Online Safety Act. We failed, this legislation is very popular with voters and not getting rolled back. Those that dislike it use a VPN and aren’t interested in fighting. I’d say most of the public here is exhausted with cost of living and internet freedom just isn’t relevant to their voting habits. I grew up around a lot of the hacker ethos, open internet, Information Wants To B…
Online age verification is the hill to die on
361–370 of 750 posts
Re: Online age verification is the hill to die on
#362Earlier quoted context omitted.
Plenty European countries have eID without these issues.
You use eID when explicitly interacting with a govt entity or bank or otherwise similar institution because you have to and want to prove who you are. Yes, I do want to prove who I am when I file taxes, vote or want to start a business... You don't use it when just browsing randomly on the internet. You don't use it to buy games on steam. Your computer isn't forced to store it because a law arbitrarily says so.
Re: Online age verification is the hill to die on
#363Earlier quoted context omitted.
Moderation is like law enforcement, it doesn't prevent crimes from happening it just punishes the people they can catch. There exist severe punishments for the kinds of behavior I'm talking about, but unsurprisingly, this does not stop kids from being harmed and it doesn't undo it. This isn't hypothetical, by the way. There are adults catfishing kids into producing CSAM [0], kidnapping and assaulting minors [1], [2],…
I am only interesting in protected the majority of children which I believe my proposal more than covers. There will always be exceptions. Today teens share porn, warez, pirated movies and music with small children in rated-G video games. I am not proposing anything for that. It is up to businesses to detect and block such things. Point being, there will be a myriad of exceptions. I am not looking to address the exce…
> It is up to businesses to detect and block such things.
Which is exactly why age verification legislation is hitting the books. No one (serious) cares about whether kids can download porn and R rated movies. Parental controls already exist if the threat model is preventing access to specific content that is able to report itself as _being_ that content.
Your proposal also doesn't address the other domain that these legislators are targeting, which is addictive content. They define specifically what classifies as an addictive stream and put the onus on service providers to assert that they're not delivering addictive streams of media to kids. An HTTP header isn't enough, because it's not about the content being shown to kids but the design patterns of how it's accessed.
Essentially: age verification isn't about porn. 18+ content stirs the pot a bit with the evangelical crowd but it's really not what people are worried about when it comes to controlling digital media access with age gates.
Re: Online age verification is the hill to die on
#364Earlier quoted context omitted.
What is adult content? I know parents who have no problem with their kids seeing porn. I know parents who give their kids a beer. I know parents who take their kids to violent movies. I used to know parents who will give their kids cigarettes. Most parents I know will disagree with their kids doing one of the above. I know songs that were played on the radio in 1960 that would not be allowed today, even though today…
> I know parents who have no problem with their kids seeing porn. I don't agree with showing actual children porn, but I also totally expect teenagers to find some way to get access to it in the age of the Internet. Part of the challenge with this is cultural. Different places in the world think about sex, sexuality, and even the concept of what is a child differently. In the US, showing a woman's bare breasts to a p…
> These age verification laws in many ways are trying to use the most heavy-handed mechanism possible to enforce American cultural norms on the entire planet. That's clearly wrong to do.
Yes there's a chance our rules spill over there naturally, and I don't consider that wrong either.
Re: Online age verification is the hill to die on
#365Earlier quoted context omitted.
The vast majority of places I frequent do not even have a person at the door checking IDs. If the bar tender/server thinks you look young, they ask for ID. I clearly do not look to be too young, so there's that. The last place I went to with an actual scanner was more of a nightclub that had a cover charge.
Anecdotal evidence is weak (not) evidence.
Re: Online age verification is the hill to die on
#366Re: Online age verification is the hill to die on
#367Re: Online age verification is the hill to die on
#368Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not so sure about that. Handing an ID to a bouncer at a bar or similar is not logging anything. Mainly it's some big man that you can see gears turning to see if the date is correct and a cursory glance to see if the photo matches. Sophisticated places might have a scanner that does what ever validation it does, but again, it's just another cursory check of the photo. Most of these people really don't care. A tech co…
The tech companies care even less than the bouncers do. They just want a plausible defence should it ever end up in court.
Re: Online age verification is the hill to die on
#369Just requiring it for social media companies is probably enough of a win to not have to pursue any further. We require age verification for sports betting and things like that, I'm not sure why we wouldn't do the same or some variation of that for other massively addicting products that we know as a matter of scientific study have a very bad impact on some number of kids.
It will spread to everywhere else if we allow it for social media. In Australia for example, mandatory age verification has already spread to video games.
In the US for buying games online we've had age verification for a long time. For in-store purchases you see that too. Same with movies.
Re: Online age verification is the hill to die on
#370There's an angle everyone misses. Mandatory age surveillance everywhere is only going to result in massive, normalized ID fraud. You thought fake and stolen IDs were a problem before? You haven't seen anything yet. And half of it will be from adults trying to avoid privacy invasion.
ID system should be based on commercial bank. If you need to prove your identity or whatever about yourself just tell them to ask your bank and bank will ask you which information about yourself you are willing to share with whoever requested to confirm something about you. When ID is tied to your bank account you guard it like you guard your bank account. Because it is the same thing. This will drastically lower the…