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The Age Verification Trap: Verifying age undermines everyone's data protection

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671–680 of 1001 posts

Re: The Age Verification Trap: Verifying age undermines everyone's data protection

#671

parents: won't somebody else put some rules and safeguards in place to protect my children?

Most of them probably don't even have kids of their own, they just hate social media for exposing children to conservative ideas and want to ban it to prevent that.

More like fear of exposing their children to anything other than carefully curated "conservative" ideas.

Re: The Age Verification Trap: Verifying age undermines everyone's data protection

#672

We'll try everything, it seems, other than holding parents accountable for what their children consume. In the United States, you can get in trouble if you recklessly leave around or provide alcohol/guns/cigarettes for a minor to start using, yet somehow, the same social responsibility seems thrown out the window for parents and the web. Yes, children are clever - I was one once. If you want to actually protect child…

I know this is weird, but I'm in some ways not really sure who is on the side of freedom here. I get your position, but like. The whole idea of the promise of the internet has been destroyed by newsfeeds and mega-corps. There is almost literally documented examples of Facebook executives twirling their mustaches wondering how they can get kids more addicted. This isn't a few bands with swear words, and in fact, I thi…

> I just like, can't help but start with fuck these companies. All other arguments are downstream of that. Better the nanny state than Nanny Zuck.

Wild times when we're seeing highest voted Hacker News commenters call for the nanny state.

If you're thinking these regulations will be limited to singular companies or platforms you don't use, there is no reason to believe that's true.

There was already outrage on Hacker News when Discord voluntarily introduced limited ID checks for certain features. The invitations to bring on the nanny state reverse course very quickly when people realize those regulations might impact the sites they use, too.

A lot of the comments I'm seeing assume that only Facebook or other platforms will be impacted, but there's now way that would be the case.

Re: The Age Verification Trap: Verifying age undermines everyone's data protection

#673

Most of this debate makes more sense if the actual goal is liability reduction, not child safety. If it were genuinely about protecting kids, you'd regulate infinite scroll and algorithmic engagement optimization, not who can log in.

I think this would be good for everybody, not just kids. It doesn't even have to be complicated: Just that after a certain amount of time scrolling/watching, put in a message asking if it's maybe time to stop with some information about how these algorithms try to keep you for as long as possible. Maybe a link to a government page with more information. It doesn't have to be perfect and there will of course be easy w…

Some platforms did display notices like this for a while, but I noticed that they stopped the practice after a few months.

Re: The Age Verification Trap: Verifying age undermines everyone's data protection

#674

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is there any production ready implementation out there?

ZKP is integrated in Google Wallet and has been running in production for a few months. We (Google) released the ZKP library as open source last year (this is the library used in production). Announcement: https://blog.google/innovation-and-ai/technology/safety-secu... Library: https://github.com/google/longfellow-zk Paper: https://eprint.iacr.org/2024/2010 Afterwards, folks from ISRG produced an independent implemen…

Thanks. I'll have a look.

Re: The Age Verification Trap: Verifying age undermines everyone's data protection

#676

We'll try everything, it seems, other than holding parents accountable for what their children consume. In the United States, you can get in trouble if you recklessly leave around or provide alcohol/guns/cigarettes for a minor to start using, yet somehow, the same social responsibility seems thrown out the window for parents and the web. Yes, children are clever - I was one once. If you want to actually protect child…

We'll do everything, it seems, other than holding billionairs accountable for what their businesses consume.

Re: The Age Verification Trap: Verifying age undermines everyone's data protection

#677

We'll try everything, it seems, other than holding parents accountable for what their children consume. In the United States, you can get in trouble if you recklessly leave around or provide alcohol/guns/cigarettes for a minor to start using, yet somehow, the same social responsibility seems thrown out the window for parents and the web. Yes, children are clever - I was one once. If you want to actually protect child…

> give parents strong monitoring and restriction tools

The problem is that it's bloody hard to actually do this. I'm in a war with my 7yo about youtube; the terms of engagement are, I can block it however I want from the network side, and if he can get around it, he can watch.

Well, after many successful months of DNS block, he discovered proxies. After blocking enough of those to dissuade him, he discovered Firefox DNS-over-HTTPS, making it basically impossible to block him without blocking every Cloudflare IP or something. Would love to be wrong about that, but it seems like even just blocking a site is basically impossible without putting nanny-ware right on his machine; and that's only a bootable Linux USB stick away from being removed unless I lock down the BIOS and all that, and at that point it's not his computer and the rules of engagement have been voided.

For now I'm just using "policy" to stop him, but IMO the tools that parents have are weak unless you just want your kid to be an iPad user and never learn how a computer works at all.

Re: The Age Verification Trap: Verifying age undermines everyone's data protection

#678

We'll try everything, it seems, other than holding parents accountable for what their children consume. In the United States, you can get in trouble if you recklessly leave around or provide alcohol/guns/cigarettes for a minor to start using, yet somehow, the same social responsibility seems thrown out the window for parents and the web. Yes, children are clever - I was one once. If you want to actually protect child…

> give parents strong monitoring and restriction tools The problem is that it's bloody hard to actually do this. I'm in a war with my 7yo about youtube; the terms of engagement are, I can block it however I want from the network side, and if he can get around it, he can watch. Well, after many successful months of DNS block, he discovered proxies. After blocking enough of those to dissuade him, he discovered Firefox…

As a parent of young children, this is your entire problem:

> the terms of engagement are, I can block it however I want from the network side, and if he can get around it, he can watch.

You're treating this as a technical problem, not a parental rules problem. Your own rules say he's allowed to watch!

You have to set the expectations and enforce it as a parent.

Re: The Age Verification Trap: Verifying age undermines everyone's data protection

#679

We'll try everything, it seems, other than holding parents accountable for what their children consume. In the United States, you can get in trouble if you recklessly leave around or provide alcohol/guns/cigarettes for a minor to start using, yet somehow, the same social responsibility seems thrown out the window for parents and the web. Yes, children are clever - I was one once. If you want to actually protect child…

> give parents strong monitoring and restriction tools The problem is that it's bloody hard to actually do this. I'm in a war with my 7yo about youtube; the terms of engagement are, I can block it however I want from the network side, and if he can get around it, he can watch. Well, after many successful months of DNS block, he discovered proxies. After blocking enough of those to dissuade him, he discovered Firefox…

Putting controls on the machine you want to restrict is pretty normal. While I agree with your first sentence that it's hard for parents to get proper monitoring tools, the rest of this sounds like a self-imposed problem. If you don't want to mess with the actual machine then run a proxy it has to use.

Re: The Age Verification Trap: Verifying age undermines everyone's data protection

#680

We'll try everything, it seems, other than holding parents accountable for what their children consume. In the United States, you can get in trouble if you recklessly leave around or provide alcohol/guns/cigarettes for a minor to start using, yet somehow, the same social responsibility seems thrown out the window for parents and the web. Yes, children are clever - I was one once. If you want to actually protect child…

The speech that worked (mostly) on the children in my life involved the concept of 'cannot unsee', which they seemed to understand. There are some parallels to gun safety here because there are things that even the adults in your life try not to do and it seems perfectly reasonable to expect the same from children.

In fact being held to a standard that adults hold themselves to is frequently seen as a rite of passage. I'm a big girl now and I put on my big girl pants to prove it.

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