There is no such thing as an "unbiased will of the majority".

That sort of terminology might have flown back in the 18th century with Rousseau and the like speaking of a "general will" but in today's era of social science, it has about as much force as invoking divinity.

Everyone has bias. The idea of a general will is largely fiction and was discredited at the time.

Our system is based on coercion, costs and trade-offs and nothing more. That is human history. You may have some rights (perhaps a right to privacy, it is debatable) but this is really just the three core components dressed up in reverse. The freedom of speech for instance is simply to codify the idea that the state silencing you is intolerable. Intolerable is eventually meaningless unless it is backed up by costs and coercion against the state which they will seek to avoid.

When the state violates such "rights" flagrantly sometimes the people are called to manifest this aspect of "intolerable".

That's what a revolution is.

Failing that you need to convince people. And in so doing if you aim to find some "unbiased will of the majority" you are wasting your time.

You would be better off with a lobbyist. Surely such a person would not so readily engage in such fiction regarding how democracy actually works, and would thus be more effective in achieving your goals.

Lobbyists do not always mean minority. I'm sure it looks like that from the outside.

There are all kinds of laws that people don't like, me included. With every law there will be some winner/loser trade-off (for lack of better word). As OP said, that is society.

If the people here were so passionate about it, they would help come up with a better solution, not a "f* off" comment.

The vast majority wants a parental control setting on the kid's device, and that's what is being imposed in California and Colorado right now.

The vast majority don't want to upload their passports. That's what we should be opposing. Standardized parental controls set by the device owner are a great alternative and not invasive at all.

>But does the majority want that change

This really depends on 1) How you frame the problem/solution and 2) what subset of people you ask.

But to answer your question, I could easily see that yes, people want a "change" based on how you frame the problem.

And if the implications of that aren't clear - that would either be unenforceable or be in effect a government rootkit+DRM on every device.

>The government really shouldn't be telling us how/what we can compute at all.

You could say the same thing about restaurants. "The government really shouldn't be telling us how/what we can cook at all."

When you are selling a product to the public, that is something that people have decided the government can regulate to reduce the harms of such products.

Free software is already mandated to do a lot of things, like not defraud the user. If you make a bitcoin wallet that sends 5% of your money to the developer without asking I'm pretty sure you'll be prosecuted, so the government is compelling you to ask the user for consent to do that.

When you make food you're compelled to write the ingredients. We tolerate these because they are obvious and trivial, but pedantically, food labelling laws also violate the first amendment.

In general, any proposal to use government ID for "age verification" over the internet is going to end in someone using it for mass surveillance, and it's probably not wrong to suspect that as the intention to begin with.

There is no benefit in doing that because parents already know how old their kid is. They don't need the government to certify it to them, and then they can configure the kid's device not to display adult content.

Involving government ID is pointless because the parent, along with the large majority of the general population, has an adult ID, and therefore has the ability to configure the kid's device to display adult content or not even in the presence of an ID requirement if that's what they want to do. At which point an ID requirement is nothing but a footgun to "accidentally" compromise everyone's privacy. Unless that was the point.

It doesn't even need to be that complicated. OS asks you your birthday at setup time. Stores it. Later, an app asks whether the user falls into one of the following brackets:

A) under 13 years of age, or B) at least 13 years of age and under 16 years of age, or C) at least 16 years of age and under 18 years of age or D) at least 18 years of age.

that's it. The OS can decide how it wants to implement that, but personally I'd literally just do get_age_bracket_enum(now() - get_user_birthday());

The bill is here: https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billTextClient.xhtm...

The uproar seems to be extremely overblown.