being locked out = less profit = firing management by shareholders

it will solve by consumers, don't worry

chatgpt began to spam me pretty hard for last a few months.

chatgpt basically never sent email and it's regular now - like 2 4 emails per month

so, it doesn't look great for chatgpt

Well these kind of laws are trying to legislate technology into existence; we don’t have a means to do it, yet “we demand for the technology to exist through ‘reasonable methods’, now get to work.”

If that’s the nearly infinite wiggle room we’re playing with then I’d say what about Adult and Child versions of phones? You have to flash your ID to the clerk to buy an adult one, like buying cigarettes at a gas station, and then you get to do what the internet offers. Child phones - let parents and governments come up with whatever they want to block. The phone autoupdates in the background with the blocklist, the device can’t do those things. There ya go. Each person and family gets to make their own choices and nobody has to give an ID card to PornHub or a company that literally exists to harvest your information. Win-win?

If all alternatives are bad you should do none of them, not squabble about which one is slightly less bad.

Either the app will get the id, you will be prevented from running arbitrary software on your device, or the whole thing will not work because it becomes trivial to sell your age verification tokens.

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It’s not really about the info but restricting access to people. Imagine they restrict access to social medial to people with different political opinions as the ruling party in the government

Maybe? I'm not sure since the UK is no longer part of the EU; we're running quite a bit behind on this kind of thing now.

It's not supposed to. Just one more way to limit our freedom to control our own devices.

> How does it prevent fingerprinting if you get access to both logs and try to time it? Even more so if you include already present tracking infrastructure, which as a government you can just request data from.

True, but as this problem exists without any ID at all*, I don't see how the addition of the ID cards makes any difference?

> It is possible to de-anonymize people based on aggregate data already, and this proposed solution just adds extra data points.

This is why I specified a "UUID specifically for that [app/domain + device]". Can't aggregate when each app/domain gets a different signed UUID.

> Legal systems aren't computer systems. This isn't a technical problem but a social/political one.

While true, the reverse also applies: computer systems are not legal systems.

I think many lawmakers' ignorance of this is to the detriment of everyone.

In this case, the social/political problem is: we want to stop kids accessing age-inappropriate material.

The options-space for doing this appears to be:

(0) give up

(1) require parents to limit their kids' behaviour (to which I say: "Have you met a kid? Do you remember being one?")

(2) require websites to age-rank appropriately (to which I say in a sarcastic tone of voice: "Gee, that worked soooooo well for GDPR")

(3) require operating systems to intermediate. Will this suck? Yes. Will it be buggy? Also yes. Will there be false positives and false negatives? Yes to both. Will it be a constant fight as kids keep finding loopholes? Indeed.

But you know what else? All that psych testing Facebook have used for evil, can also catch bugs and loopholes faster than kids can figure them out. A school full of kids can beat their parents at the security game because they have more time to spend on finding exploits than the parents have to spend keeping up, the reverse is true of the difference between kids and Google LLC etc.

It doesn't need to be perfect, the kids aren't a computer program.

What does need to be held to a high standard is making sure the OSes don't leak all over the place.

* to be specific, the Investigatory Powers Act 2016 is one of two reasons I left the UK, just look at how over-broad the "Internet connection records without a warrant" list is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Investigatory_Powers_Act_2016#...

It cannot work *perfectly*, but unlike most crypto stuff, it doesn't have to (at least, that part doesn't need to). It's a social/political problem, not a technical one.

The goal doesn't even need to be to make a completely perfect, impossible to circumvent, barrier for all minors; all this needs to do is just make it equally difficult for a minor to get adult (for whatever definition thereof) content online as it is to get tobacco or alcohol or gambling in real life, the hard part being to do so without compromising privacy, privacy being the bit which has to be done perfectly.

And the verification systems rushing at us are immune to this?

> But then the government knows your location at any point of time and how often you use websites requiring the age check.

Not as described. There's no location info in that path, and the signed statement of that UUID passing the age check does not need to be re-signed because I've not given any consideration to expiry.

(Should I consider expiry? It's not like people age backwards?)

> Also, if your device is configured to do it automatically, a child can also follow this verification.

Yes, if that device has been associated with a government ID and also the government ID signing process fails to make use the things we've already got on-device like how my phone reads my fingerprint to know I'm me and can store copies of some forms of government ID (in some places but not where I live, Apple Wallet apparently only supports some US states, Japan, Greece, and UAE).

Google and Verizon sell that data to the government right now. The US's official position is that buying info they aren't legally allowed to collect is perfectly fine, as if you were given a privacy right in the constitution only to enable an info broker economy, and not because of the obvious and understood harms of the government having whatever info about you they want.

If you want the US government to not know something about you, unfortunately there's a lot of changes that need to happen, including entirely new political parties and making changes to the Supreme Court, and popular support for taking the privacy rights you already have much more seriously.

They're not ZK if they can do that

Hang on... Hacker News very clearly has a complex, opaque [1] algorithm that orders stuff. Maybe it's not user-specific, and maybe that's a good dividing line, but these are the kinds of factors we're going to have to think about if we want to introduce regulation around 'algorithms'.

Infinite scrolling is a very different issue (although it's definitely a contributor to the harm, I agree).

([1] Unless I'm being unfair here; maybe the algorithm is available somewhere, I just don't see it obviously linked anywhere)

You know you can also just not use Instagram...

Oh but you enabled the setting "don't use infinite scroll" and we've deprecated infinite scroll so that isn't a setting anymore. While improving service for our customers we have introduced "unrolling pages" which prefetches the next page and attaches it to the end of the previous page to provide a smooth reading experience, and of course we've given that its own setting which you haven't set, and it defaults to enabled to provide the best seamless reading experience for most people.

Next we're thinking about spatial pages, an innovation which considers the app as a viewport flying over the pages laid out in a line. In consideration we have database-views which presents the unpaged tables of content in the database directly to the end user, completely bypassing outdated 'page' skeuomorphisms from the olden days of printers and books. Further out, our researchers are working on Shepherd Tone-inspired viewing, where technically legally it is paged, but it looks and feels like it isn't!

This is a reasonable perspective, but don't you think the internet has the potential to do good as well as evil? I remember seeing some interactive lever applet as a kid where you could move the fulcrum. (Slightly) educational stuff. Shouldn't that be allowed?

In many schools in the US now, kids are issued mandatory iPads from age 5 and are required to use them to complete school assignments.

This is reasonable up to the point of lawmakers suddenly deeming rainbow flags just as bad as drugs (Russia as an example). Your example may work in well intended countries but completely ignores that a country can VERY easily shift into a regime that does not have good ethics abusing these kinda laws.

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Parental controls have been part of mobile devices for years, but so have bypasses. For instance, you can bypass Google's parental control settings by opening the help page in the Google settings and clicking links until you get to the Google homepage.

I doubt it matters because nobody seems to configure the parental controls that are there, anyway. Only schools seem to try, and only because they're legally held responsible for what kids do on their computers.

And what happens when those representatives decide things like rainbow flags being a crime or so much as mentioning the existence of trans people in front of a kid is equivalent to a sex crime. The US has states pushing legislation to make abortion a crime punishable by the death penalty while also using flock cameras to track people traveling across the country to places it's complete legal to do so. But yeah let's give those people a way to tie every website that woman may view while searching for a safe option now directly linked to her I.D. or that adult searching for gender affirming care is now outed because their ID is linked to the site. So when states like Kansas legislate all trans people's drivers licenses be revoked they can just say okay who in the state has looked at transgender healthcare related websites and have a list of people to go after.