Online age verification is the hill to die on • Hacker News Board

Re: Online age verification is the hill to die on

#521

Post by HerbManic » Thu, Apr 30, 2026, 2:37 AM UTC

dev_l1x_be wrote: post #309

We need a truly distributed point-to-point internet asap. Politicians going to do everything to limit free speech and free ideas in the name of protecting children while they already got all the powers to investigate and stop child abuse. https://meshtastic.org/

Alas it is the great contradiction. Federated technologies are brilliant for peer-to-peer but many struggle to scale because the designed redundancy tends to crush their efficiency.

Really depends on the context. Email works because of its limits. Remove those limits and weaknesses start to appear.

Re: Online age verification is the hill to die on

#522

Post by HerbManic » Thu, Apr 30, 2026, 2:42 AM UTC

EmbarrassedHelp wrote: post #344

ericmay wrote: post #161

Just 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.

Shows what my gaming preferences are when I have never come across these restrictions here. Sonic Mania is not exactly risque stuff.

Re: Online age verification is the hill to die on

#523

Post by mindslight » Thu, Apr 30, 2026, 2:44 AM UTC

tzs wrote: post #497

jonplackett wrote: post #412

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The reason is that this whole push for age verification is nothing to do with actually stopping kids seeing the content. If it was then this kind of solution would be being legislated for. It’s just about making everyone identifiable.

If it is about making everyone identifiable how come California's version doesn't require providing any identifying information when setting it up on a child's device?

Because "making everyone identifiable" isn't an explicit design goal. Rather it is merely an implicit imperative (of Facebook et al, who are pushing these laws) that casts its shadow over the design. That shadow is what results in a design based around sending identifying information from the client to the server. Once this dynamic is normalized, servers will demand ever-more identifying information and evidence that it is correct.

Note that this design does the exact opposite of giving parents control to protect their own children - rather it puts the ultimate decision making ability into the hands of corporate attorneys! For example, we can easily imagine a "Facebook4Kidz" site that does the bare legal minimum to avoid liability for addicting kids to dopamine drips, and no more. Client side software based around RTA headers would allow parents to choose to filter things like that out, whereas when the server is making the decision its anything goes as long as the corporate attorneys have given it the green light.

Re: Online age verification is the hill to die on

#524

Post by mindslight » Thu, Apr 30, 2026, 2:49 AM UTC

ocdtrekkie wrote: post #471

jonplackett wrote: post #412

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The reason is that this whole push for age verification is nothing to do with actually stopping kids seeing the content. If it was then this kind of solution would be being legislated for. It’s just about making everyone identifiable.

Your lack of understanding why age verification does not constitute it being a conspiracy for another reason. There is a antiregulatory crowd that will invent any possible excuse to suggest tech companies shouldn't be accountable and we should just leave the Internet be. Those people make a lot of money exploiting everyone, as it happens, and they also pay for journalists to tell you that it's all about violating pri…

> any possible excuse to suggest tech companies shouldn't be accountable

The entire impetus for these bills is for Facebook (the sponsor of these bills) to escape liability for how they're currently harming kids. Facebook's only goal here is to be receiving headers that say the user is over 18, so they can continue business as usual under the assertion that any users must be adults.

Re: Online age verification is the hill to die on

#525

Post by slg » Thu, Apr 30, 2026, 2:50 AM UTC

cooper_ganglia wrote: post #503

slg wrote: post #468

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>If it was then this kind of solution would be being legislated for. What's more likely a global conspiracy to get age verification passed to allow these unnamed groups to identify everyone for some unknown purpose or politicians just not understanding tech? The way people try to pretend that there can't be any organic desire for these proposals is so bizarre and is a major cause for all these proposed solutions bein…

The politicians that want to identify everyone capitalize on organic desire for these proposals in the form of fear-mongering and "Think of the children!" Citizens that want these laws are unthinking drones who don't want to raise their children, and instead want legislators to do it for them. Politicians that want these laws are the people who, ideally, want to track your every move online for a multitude of reasons…

>organic desire for these proposals

Even if everything you said was true and there was a global conspiracy among the politicians, the tech crowd consistently denies and demeans these organic desires. We could cut the legs out from under these politicians if we listened to these people's concerns, considered actual solutions like OP did at the top of this thread, and turned these people into allies against those politicians. But instead we deny the actual desire to protect children and accuse them of either having ulterior motives or being sheep, turning them into permanent enemies thereby empowering those (hypothetically) conspiratorial politicians.

Re: Online age verification is the hill to die on

#526

Post by negura » Thu, Apr 30, 2026, 2:52 AM UTC

cooper_ganglia wrote: post #211

THe government shouldn't be raising anyone's children, that's what parents are for. If you're a bad parent, your kids will get access to bad things and could become an adult failure. The future of your family and your legacy is up to you, not the government. We don't need age verification to restrict the social darwinism of raising children.

but no parent actually keeps the government out of it. don't you go to the police when your child is harmed?

Re: Online age verification is the hill to die on

#527

Post by techblueberry » Thu, Apr 30, 2026, 2:53 AM UTC

abustamam wrote: post #398

DontBreakAlex wrote: post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wish I could upvote this comment harder. I started having unsupervised internet access (with the family computer in the living room) when I was 8. I'm a functional and successful adult because I trusted my parents. When my mother forbade me from registering on online forums I complied. When I read "fellation" in some minecraft chat (albeit somewhat later) I asked my mom what it was and understood that "sex" was som…

Yeah I'm not sure why the govt or any other 3rd party needs to get involved. If I don't want my kids to look at porno online I will educate them on porn. If I don't trust my kids to listen to me then I will install an open source monitoring software and educate them on trust. Letting the govt dictate what is age restricted is an easy way for the govt to control speech and narrative. For example, children's books that…

“If I don't want my kids to look at porno online I will educate them on porn“

I can’t tell if this is a joke, is this a joke?

Re: Online age verification is the hill to die on

#528

Post by marcosdumay » Thu, Apr 30, 2026, 2:53 AM UTC

Bender wrote: post #8

The one and only method I will participate in is server operators setting a RTA header [1] for URL's that may contain adult or user-generated or user-contributed content and the clients having the option to detect that header and trigger parental controls if they are enabled by the device owner. That should suffice to protect most small children. Teens will always get around anything anyone implements as they are alr…

The header should be the other way around. It should inform your site will not contain adult material. The local government should scan sites participating.

Anyway, yes, that would just solve the problem and not destroy anything. What is the reason why nobody is talking about it.

Re: Online age verification is the hill to die on

#529

Post by snek_case » Thu, Apr 30, 2026, 2:55 AM UTC

ketamine wrote: post #494

An anecdote: I am 40 years old and I have an Onlyfans account. I enjoy some hippie chick that makes pottery and takes pics of herself without clothes on. I went on vacation to Tennessee and tried to log in and it said I needed to verify with their identity verification provider. Of course I refused. Now I am home in a different state and still cannot log in. I contacted support and because I was detected in TN once i…

> it's just making it harder for honest people to pay for what they like.

I have a female friend who creates that kind of content. Her take is that this is very much intentional. There is a general crackdown on porn in the US. They're not just trying to make it difficult for the clients, but also difficult for people to make this kind of content, distribute it and get paid for it.

Of course none of this makes sense. There are VPNs and there is bittorrent. All of this is just making this kind of stuff more underground. In China porn is fully illegal, but people still share bootleg porn on thumb drives.

Re: Online age verification is the hill to die on

#530

Post by dlcarrier » Thu, Apr 30, 2026, 2:56 AM UTC

ketamine wrote: post #494

An anecdote: I am 40 years old and I have an Onlyfans account. I enjoy some hippie chick that makes pottery and takes pics of herself without clothes on. I went on vacation to Tennessee and tried to log in and it said I needed to verify with their identity verification provider. Of course I refused. Now I am home in a different state and still cannot log in. I contacted support and because I was detected in TN once i…

New man-in-the-middle attack: proxy the request through an IP address tagged as a prohibited location, and you can permanently deny access without ever needing to modify or even decided SSL/TLS.