531–540 of 750 posts
There'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.
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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.
That being said, the antiregulatory wonks are not all working for Facebook, and some are indeed manifestly just always opposed to any regulation at all no matter what harm is occurring.
Bear in mind the alternative: Things like Discord collecting personal data to do verification at the website level. A push for a simple "user is over 18" header is incredibly preferable from a privacy standpoint and parents being able to control and monitor it themselves.
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.
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This is exactly the way it should be done. Device with parental controls enabled disables content client-side when the header is detected. As far as I can tell, it's a global optimum, all trade-offs considered.
Well why haven't all the big tech companies done it then? They have only themselves to blame. They had years to fix the problem of inappropriate content being delivered to kids and their response was sticking their fingers in their ears and saying "blah blah blah parenting blah blah blah" And it really should be the opposite. Assume content is not kid-safe by default, and allow sites to declare if they have some othe…
There'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.
I think we should go a step further and log every activity a person takes the blockchains. There will be no ID theft because your DNA will be used to cryptographically authenticate your user.
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.
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…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Well why haven't all the big tech companies done it then? They have only themselves to blame. They had years to fix the problem of inappropriate content being delivered to kids and their response was sticking their fingers in their ears and saying "blah blah blah parenting blah blah blah" And it really should be the opposite. Assume content is not kid-safe by default, and allow sites to declare if they have some othe…
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.
The reason that mainstream politicians are pushing is because the public wants something done to protect their kids.
Are there likely to be bad actors pushing for it for nefarious reasons as well? Sure. Are the 'solutions' inadequate and often tech- and privacy-illiterate? Absolutely. Is the entire impulse to demand that government 'fix' this issue wrong? Maybe.
But the idea that this is all a smoke-screen from top to bottom needs to die. Not just because it's wrong, but because it's also unhelpful. If you wade into the debate saying "It's all a lie, this was never about the kids!" you're easily dismissed as a nut and an absolutist who doesn't appreciate that real people want their real kids to be protected.
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> 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.
Then you recognize that the solution definitely does not require privacy invasion, since presumably Facebook does not want actual proof because they hope teenagers will get around it. That being said, the antiregulatory wonks are not all working for Facebook, and some are indeed manifestly just always opposed to any regulation at all no matter what harm is occurring. Bear in mind the alternative: Things like Discord…
FWIW I personally would be supportive of legislation where the data flow went the proper way of server->client, for the user-agent to decide. Consider: Any website over a certain size must publish an appropriate set of well known tags asserting whether its content is suitable for kids of certain ages, has social aspects, the type of content, etc. Any device preloaded with an operating system over a certain marketshare must include parental control software that uses tags, as an option in the set up flow. The parental control software "fails closed" and doesn't display websites without tags. The long tails of the open web, bespoke devices, new OSes, etc remain completely unaffected.
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This comes up in every thread, but the purpose of the laws is not to verify that someone can access an anonymous token. If we had a true anonymous token system then everyone would just share tokens around. The real world analog would be if you could buy beer at the store with anyone's ID because they didn't make any effort to reasonably check that the ID was yours or discourage people from sharing or copying IDs. The…
Matthew Green talks about this in his blog on the subject: https://blog.cryptographyengineering.com/2026/03/02/anonymou... The two methods that seem feasible are making it hard to copy (putting it in the secure element in your phone, for example, which I don't love) or doing tokens that can only be used a limited number of times per day, like in : https://eprint.iacr.org/2006/454
Finally, a way to use blockchain for good.
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.
Western society, for better or worse, is set up such that parents need to resume work as soon as possible. Saying the government has no responsibility in child rearing ignores the economic reality of parents.