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Why isn't online age verification just like showing your ID in person?

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Re: Why isn't online age verification just like showing your ID in person?

#51
post #24

In my opinion, access to internet should always be behind a device controlled by an adult. And it should be this adult's responsibility to set appropriate restrictions for minors.

I'm not sure why we don't just make a law that parents must set parental controls on their kids' devices. We do this for most other things.

It's harder than you think to manage all the devices especially if you aren't especially tech savvy.

There are also a ton of tricks and workarounds it's super frustrating.

Re: Why isn't online age verification just like showing your ID in person?

#52

In my opinion, access to internet should always be behind a device controlled by an adult. And it should be this adult's responsibility to set appropriate restrictions for minors.

In theory that sounds right; but as a parent with two young teens I can tell you that in practice this is really really hard -- your teens can get around whatever restrictions you might set, bringing you down to either 1) taking away their phone altogether, 2) turning off the internet altogether (while at home), 3) trying some parental control app (none of which work that well or are inconvenient to use in practice). The only thing I've successfully managed to set up is a blocker on the router that shuts off access to their devices at night (so they go to sleep at a reasonable hour). During the day is just way too complicated.

So we talk about it and try to get them to manage it themselves. They're not unwilling, but the addiction of continuous scrolling is really hard to break. It's not even that the content is terrible, it's more just the mindless zombies -- like sitting all day on the couch watching TV. And they don't even have an IG or TT account (and won't be getting one for a long time) -- this is YouTube (which now has endless scrolling like TT) which I don't want to block altogether because there's other helpful resources on there.

I've always been an early adopter, and was on BBS and IRC and all that back in the day, love the fact that the Internet is a place you can easily set up your own blog and all that, but recently I've honestly come to f*ing hate the internet in general and social media in particular.

Re: Why isn't online age verification just like showing your ID in person?

#54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They get blacklisted from being able to have internet

How do they work find and keep a job keep up with their kids school and keep government benefits. It doesn't matter that you could do those things before the internet the normal and often only or only practical flow involves the net. Counter offer we keep letting people manage their own kids' shit and they can control access to the degree they deem appropriate

Whilst I do kinda agree, I was just replying to the parent about what the punishment would probably be :)

But the problem is that people are NOT managing their own kids' shit, and now we have to have things put in place to try and counter that - and end up overreaching.

I'm more than happy to educate mine on how to be safe online, and to come and talk to us about stuff, other aren't, or are not aware they need to.

Perhaps buying internet means you have to sign a waiver saying that if anything happens because of the internet then that is on the parent(s)...

Re: Why isn't online age verification just like showing your ID in person?

#55
post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure why we don't just make a law that parents must set parental controls on their kids' devices. We do this for most other things.

We should then make laws that parents must tell their kids to clean their room. Next we can make laws that parents must tell their children to eat their veggies. What about chore laws? Teeth brushing laws? Stop arguing with your sister laws! More laws!

[deleted]

Re: Why isn't online age verification just like showing your ID in person?

#56

In my opinion, access to internet should always be behind a device controlled by an adult. And it should be this adult's responsibility to set appropriate restrictions for minors.

How does that work in practice? I've tried to do this at home. It doesn't work at all. It's not the 90s any more- there isn't one PC sitting on a desk with a modem attached to a phone line that you need to wait for 30 seconds to dial up and establish a connection before you're online...

Now you have ubiquitous WiFi and cellular connectivity across dozens of devices in a typical household. Even refrigerators have built in web browsers now. Parental controls are a joke, treated as an afterthought at best - nonexistent at worst. Oh, and the school system provides your kids with a Chromebook with Internet access starting in elementary school.

It's victim blaming at its finest IMO. Yeah, we can all point fingers at the parents who sit their kids down with an iPad. But there's many of us who struggle to limit screen time, working against the profit motive of trillions of dollars of corporations. It's a losing battle.

Edit: crazy. Instead of providing an answer to my question of "how do you do this in practice" I get downvoted. Goes to show that there are no real solutions, just a bunch of morality police and victim blaming. Yes, parents are the victims here. The tools are inadequate and trillions of dollars of incentives are lined up against them.

Re: Why isn't online age verification just like showing your ID in person?

#57
post #50
post #25

Cryptographically there are techniques that let you prove you're one of the several hundred million adults in the US that don't reveal anything about which adult you are. It's much less complicated than bitcoin. I'm bringing this up because it's the perfect litmus test to show whether you really care about age verification, or if you want personal trackability for all internet behavior. I'd be okay with this for cert…

Not really. There are ways to prove ownership of one of several hundred million tokens. If you give out this many tokens, the odds that some will be stolen or sold must be fairly close to 1.

Agreed. But obtaining such a token/proof would still be an additional barrier kids would have to actively bypass, so while I don't think that's the best implementation I don't think it's correct to say there's no value there.

My bigger concern would be who gets to issue these tokens. If it's limited to a particular government, then that doesn't work very well on a global internet. And making the internet not global (blocking adults from accessing foreign websites that don't adhere to your scheme) is kinda authoritarian IMO.

If we're going to do age verification and blocking of adult sites, it needs to be local to the user's device (and thus under the control of parents, not governments).

E.g. Instead of mandating sites verify users, we mandate internet-capable devices sold to kids have certain content restrictions, the same way we mandate you can't sell alcohol to kids. To make this more effective than existing content filtering, implement some kind of legally-enforced content-labeling standards websites have to follow to be whitelisted on these devices. This way the rights, freedoms, and privacy of adults using adult devices is unaffected.

Re: Why isn't online age verification just like showing your ID in person?

#59

I don’t like this article. Irrelevant technical nuance is comingled with a philosophical opposition. The technical issues are all solvable. The free speech argument is foolish too: if limiting who can jerk off to pornography is an issue of free speech, surely so is limiting who can enter a bar and converse with the patrons. Opposition to ID checks because you believe the internet should be open and free is reasonable…

I am not that fond of stores scanning my ID data either. I’m over 21, there’s no question about it. Per policy, they’ll have my name and address in some log too, and with my photos and gait on camera and probably my license plates. What does all of that do for me? Are you safer because I am being recorded?

I like the (disputed) comment elsewhere on this page, requiring parents to parent. They aren’t my kids.

Re: Why isn't online age verification just like showing your ID in person?

#60
post #24

In my opinion, access to internet should always be behind a device controlled by an adult. And it should be this adult's responsibility to set appropriate restrictions for minors.

I'm not sure why we don't just make a law that parents must set parental controls on their kids' devices. We do this for most other things.

I'm really glad you're not in charge of making laws. The one thing you can do as a parent is override most age restrictions. You can give your child alcohol, you can take them to R rated movies, you can let them watch NC-17 movies at home, you can buy them M video games, you can just straight up buy them porn. But then parents have a legal requirement to restrict their child's internet access to whatever the government happens to approve of—utter nonsense.
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