I'm fundamentally opposed to age verification because it usually leads to mandatory account creation no matter how privacy friendly the age verification process itself may be. It's already extremely annoying that, for example, on YouTube, you can no longer watch many videos without an account. Furthermore, the whole thing also reinforces monopolies. Once you've verified your age on one platform, the barrier to switching to another is even higher than before.

The only acceptable solution would be for apps and websites to simply include a recommended age. Allowing parents to configure their children’s devices to block services that require users to be older than the specified age or that do not provide an age rating. Once this were established, websites targeting all age groups would have a strong incentive to participate. Otherwise, they would suddenly become invisible to a large portion of their underage users.

▲ skybrian 8 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

Attempting to prevent websites from learning about their audience is difficult. For example, Lego has a "play zone" and it has other pages geared towards adults. You get an immediate popup asking if you want to go to the play zone or not. If a user clicks on play zone, that's a good signal (but not guaranteed) that they're probably a child.

Preventing this would be difficult. If there are any behavioral differences between children and adults, that's a signal. And it would mean websites couldn't build experiences tailored to their audiences. Do we really want to try to suppress all behavioral cues that can be used to distinguish children from adults? Is it worth it?

A reasonable compromise is that websites and apps should be able to learn about devices, not people. It should be trivial to figure out whether a visit is from a child-locked device or not, no account needed. Much like clicking on "kids zone," it doesn't mean you know for sure who's really using the device. For example, it could be an parent who turned the child lock on to see what happens, because parents should know these things.

It's another bit that could be used distinguish users, but giving away zero bits of information isn't practical.

▲ autoexec 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> The only acceptable solution would be for apps and websites to simply include a recommended age. Allowing parents to configure their children’s devices to block services that require users to be older than the specified age or that do not provide an age rating.

That just entertains the false justification for what is ultimately about surveillance and control. There are privacy preserving alternatives to accounts and ID/face scans but no one in power is interested in them because the loss of privacy is the entire point.

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bigstrat2003 18 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

If indeed the push for age verification is being done under false pretenses as you suggest, then one should propose solutions that accomplish the stated goals while preserving privacy. Either the solutions will be accepted, or the people advancing false pretenses will be forced to come up with new false pretenses, which will weaken their arguments. Either way is a win.

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giantg2 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

What might those be? Everything I've seen is ineffective or can be compromised. I think letting parents parent is probably the best option, but will require better/easier/free tools and education to help lock down different categories of harm.

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wongarsu an hour ago | parent | next [-]

Website generates a random nounce, the government offers to sign the json { over_18: true, nounce: [inserted_here] }. That signing is coupled to you being signed in, or scanning your passport via nfc or whatever

That significantly reduces the leaked information: the service doesn't receive any information who you are, and the government doesn't know what service you use. They can collude, but that does not reveal more to them than most current age-verification methods. Children can get another adult to sign their request, but that's a working attack on nearly any age verification (including in-person purchases)

Of course this doesn't replace parenting

	▲	giantg2 an hour ago \| parent [-]
		"They can collude, but that does not reveal more to them than most current age-verification methods." Or just correlate the IP.

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autoexec 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

There's nothing that can't be worked around or compromised in some way. Even the face scans and ID scans being used today are being circumvented.

In the end we do need parents to parent, but websites should help. The easiest way would be for websites to send an HTTP header to the client so that censorware can know to block or allow it accordingly.

	▲	Gander5739 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		> The easiest way would be for websites to send an HTTP header to the client so that censorware can know to block or allow it accordingly. That sounds very similar to the suggestion of the original commenter, that you responded to with >> That just entertains the false justification for what is ultimately about surveillance and control.

▲ account42 9 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

And instead of an age you could even make the indication about what is potentially objectionable so that parents can choose when to allow their kids to see what - and adults can also choose to avoid certain things.

▲ 1dom 6 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I might be being overly cynical here, but I think part of the problem is parents expect to give their kids the internet so they don't have to spend so much time/attention with them.

I think this means any solution which involves active parent participation is going to get shunned by a vocal subset.

I'm in my mid 30's. When I was very young I remember my Dad semi-regularly having to email or even fax off permission slips to websites aimed at kids before they would create an account for me.

	▲	thewebguyd an hour ago \| parent \| next [-]
		> any solution which involves active parent participation is going to get shunned by a vocal subset Then we certainly shouldn't be passing laws mandating age verification. If parents want to abdicate their responsibility over their children, it's not the role of government to enshrine that abdication into law and take over the duty of parenting from them. If regulation is to be had, then it should take the form of mandating websites and services provide privacy preserving tools for parents to use, if they want to use them. If they don't, that's on them. Everyone else needn't suffer because a subset of the population has chosen to offload their responsibility into the government and web services.
	▲	forshaper 5 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		It's what I see happening. None of this would be a big deal if parents were present, but we give our attention to work & entertainment, and find it easier to continue doing that if the kids are also being entertained instead of playing, which caused problems in the physical world.

▲ iamnothere 8 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Exactly, without this you’re handing the power to decide what is “appropriate” to someone else.

▲ godelski 6 hours ago | parent [-]

  > you’re handing the power to

The user?

	▲	iamnothere 6 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		I’m in favor of voluntarily giving the user (device owner) full control over what categories of content they want to allow. Age buckets don’t do that. (This includes giving the option for “everything is allowed” without any kind of verification. You bought it, you own it.)
	▲	johnnyanmac 6 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		The server owner. If your parent won't curate the content, they will.

▲ LelouBil 7 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Force a PEGI-like system for every apps please.

It would be awesome.

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Marsymars 5 hours ago | parent | next [-]

The App/Play stores already basically have that, you can't submit apps without age ratings.

One spot where it's a bit weird is for utility apps that don't have any "mature" content but that obviously isn't intended for kids, so e.g. your tax prep app gets rated as "Ages 4+".

	▲	giantg2 2 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Is exposure to a tax app going to cause harm to a 5yo? This doesn't seem like a real problem.
	▲	LelouBil 5 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Yes, that's why the system should be a bit different. It should indicate notable features that influence the rating, like PEGI includes "online content" "gambling" and so on

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dredmorbius 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

PEGI: Pan-European Game Information, a video game content rating system.

<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PEGI>

▲ qurren 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

The part I'm most opposed to is requiring a full KYC, using "verifying age" as an excuse. My Gmail account has been active for >18 years, that should be enough proof.

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fn-mote 7 hours ago | parent [-]

… but how many people really believe that will happen?

Fight together with everyone else, or when stage 2 (“full KYC”) is implemented you won’t have any leverage.

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tyre 7 hours ago | parent [-]

It won’t because KYC is a legal process and you don’t want to prophets that across the entire system with bypasses for it. That’s legal trouble waiting to happen.

Yes, Google also wants to tie back to legal identities to sell ads. I’m not saying they’re doing this in good faith, but proxies like this get messy and dangerous for legal/compliance.

	▲	dredmorbius 6 hours ago \| parent [-]
		"you don’t want to prophets that across the entire system"? Typo? But it's hard to tell what.

▲ mrtksn 9 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

At glance this looks reasonable but how do you enforce that kids connection always goes through the parents control?

You are just moving the verification point to another gate, it means that no anonymous connections are possible anymore to the entire Internet because we want to allow parents to control their kids.

You want to use your friends Wi-Fi? Now that requires full identification so that we know that its not some kid trying to look at stuff their parents don't allow.

Want to connect your cat toilet to the internet? Well, we will need to either cryptographically identify the device or attach its ID to your real ID because we don't want to allow kids look at stuff their parents did not allow and this might just be a proxy device for some nerdy 14 y/o.

Want to use your old PC? Sorry that's not possible, now all devices that connect to the internet require biometric identification because we can't tell if this is an adult or just some kid using a legacy device to look at stuff their parents don't allow.

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RandomGerm4n 8 hours ago | parent | next [-]

The answer is quite simple. You just don't verify it. The point isn’t to verify the age but to set the age on the device itself. If the parents set the age on the cell phone or computer, that setting is then used as the basis. The operating systems can be configured so that only the device administrator can change the age. Systemd already has a field for storing the age, which programs can read. If the child doesn’t know the root password for the laptop, they can’t change the age. If they do manage to get around that, well, so be it. The solution doesn’t have to be perfect because it would still be an improvement over the current situation without restricting adults in any way.

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izend 8 hours ago | parent [-]

Are you a parent?

I have personally used the parental controls on Android, iOS and ChromeOS and to be honest they are terrible. Issues with syncing changes, the terrible UX for parental access control (iOS...), issues around audit/access logs, issues around prompting the parent for access.

I am honestly shocked that Apple known for its polished experience hasn't been forced by angry parents.

My daughter's school actually advised parents to not enable parental controls on her ChromeBook because it would interfere with the school's education websites but my daughter was caught playing web games in class so we decided to lock her down anyways.

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ingvay7 29 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

Cross-platform support is very poor (iOS/Android/Windows/Mac)if ur trying to use family link. After trying to make FL work for weeks, i moved to another service that has morel granular features than FL and detailed activity reports with web filtering rules but its paid but it atleast works instead of those unusable knobs on FL.

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fn-mote 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> my daughter was caught playing web games in class

Hilarious to me. The biggest game of whack-a-mole ever. I would love to know if this lockdown was successful (and if so, how it worked).

In my city, there is a district that is so “locked down” that the images from Wikipedia don’t even load. But guess what? Kids still find ways to play games.

	▲	saltcured 6 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Of course, that whack-a-mole is an intrinsic part youth and adolescence too. I think back to my mostly analogue school days. We found ways to disobey and amuse ourselves in the classroom. Imagine pusing for locked down paper so kids can't pass notes nor make spit-wads and airplanes. Or locked down pens to prevent tic-tac-toe, doodling, lewd drawings, or scrawling graffiti on those old desks. Some kind of KYC rules so that the older kids at school cannot pass their broader understanding of the world and cussing vocabulary down to the impressionable younger kids. Age restrictions on the trail to the woods, where kids somehow always knew about that stash of dirty magazines...
	▲	sellmesoap 5 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		I liken this process to a losing game played by authoritarians all over, normalizing a game of "subvert the man" I see the battle fought over sex, drugs, piracy, probably many other topics. Take drugs (for example) "drugs are bad m'kay" but then there are mind expanding opportunities tucked in there as well, yes most have some risk or delayed consequences associated but the lack of nuance (hard to impart on young minds granted) leads to the drugs are bad talk from someone authoritive, and those that dabble bring amazing tales that refute the earlier information that drugs are bad, and survivorship bias and a "new way the authorities were wrong" takes over and undermines the good intentions of those that see the negative impact drugs can bring. Chances are kids seeking a less locked down experience may dabble in much darker places on the net and it may be that this new "KYC" push actually widens that devide instead of protecting the children (which is merely the story used to push for this enhanced customer identity goldmine.)

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jvvw 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I do feel that if there were actually decent parental controls on the most used systems out there then we might not have got to this point in the first place! It is either a nightmare or impossible to set any sort of sensible controls on internet and social media access for children and teenagers.

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eli 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

This is the improved iOS parental controls. When they shipped it (and for years afterward) it simply did not work https://www.wsj.com/tech/personal-tech/apples-parental-contr...

It really is surprising given Apple's reputation for UX and safety.

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hamper653 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Why does your daughter have a Chromebook in the first place?

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jolmg an hour ago | parent [-]

Schools in some places seem to require them.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5kpHaYze8kI&t=90

> We are being Forced to Buy Chromebooks [...] The school sent a list of requirements for the specs and functionality

	▲	hamper653 21 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		Shameful.

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miohtama 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Being parent is not supposed to be easy

	▲	dnbfbfhf 7 hours ago \| parent [-]
		[flagged]

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tempfile 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Parental controls on devices are not hard because they are intrinsically hard. The companies just do not care about them, because nobody has forced them to be implemented sensibly. There is absolutely zero reason an Android device could not have a shiny button saying "Kid's device" when you set it up and never need configuring again. So this is not a criticism of the approach, and only a criticism of the companies.

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aceazzameen 7 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

[dead]

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1718627440 9 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

No, the point was that the actual decision happens client side and under the control of the sysadmin (the parent).

> You are just moving the verification point to another gate

Yeah, the gate being the decision of legal entities of age, aka. adults.

> You want to use your friends, Wi-Fi?

That would still do whatever your parent decided for you.

> Want to connect your can toilet to the internet?

Whether the toilet can connect to the network, is the decision of the network administrator, and toilets don't contain UAs, so that wouldn't even have software on them, where you could configure such behaviour.

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trollbridge 8 hours ago | parent | next [-]

There are definitely toilets that have UAs.

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mrtksn 9 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

You're making the mistake of assuming that every kid has access to identified device and that device is under parent control. You can't make this assumption because that's not true.

It might be true for some middle class helicopter parents that have iPhones and time to manage and keep it under strict control but there are non-middle class kids out there who just use whatever device they can get their hands on and their parens neither have time nor ability to control that.

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1718627440 8 hours ago | parent | next [-]

How many children, actually have the money to buy themself another smartphone, or get a smartphone gifted by random people? I bet that's very rare.

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Zak 6 hours ago | parent | next [-]

The commercial value of a ten year old smartphone in a wealthy country is approximately $0. It's probably not terribly hard for a determined child who goes to school and has friends to obtain one.

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johnnyanmac 6 hours ago | parent [-]

And I bet I'd struggle to install almost all modern popular apps on a 10 year old phone. No Youtube, no Roblox, etc. They simply wouldn't update nor connect. That's one problem solved by the fact that phones operate on a deprecation model, as opposed to Windows OS.

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epihelix 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I'm writing this on a seven year old phone (an S10e), running a community ROM with A15, and I have no issues at all in installing any apps. This device is my daily driver (it has a headphone jack and SD card support, and a relatively easily replaceable battery, and is small and light - so it's better than most modern flagships for my needs). A pixel would have much better community ROM support still. These old flagship phones are still plenty powerful for anything other than (useless) on device AI or intense 3D gaming.

There is only a "depreciation" model if you don't unlock your bootloader - and even then, a seven year support cycle makes it very easy to obtain cheap, old, fully supported phones, if that's your jam.

	▲	johnnyanmac 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		>There is only a "depreciation" model if you don't unlock your bootloader That's fair. I also think most kids won't know how to unlock a bootloader (and if Google has its way, that won't be an option anyway). > a seven year support cycle makes it very easy to obtain cheap, old, fully supported phones, if that's your jam. Is that iphone support? I think only the biggest flagships get 7 years of official support (and can maybe run 2-3 more years before app version itself out, without external intervention). From what I saw, most budget phones are lucky to get 5 years of support, and will break down well before than anyways.

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Zak 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

That may be, but quite a few of the things that people want to keep kids out of are entirely usable from a browser.

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mrtksn 8 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

In real life, it doesn't work like this for most people. In real life, kids want something and either the parents agree to buy that and then they no longer bother with that device or the kid saves its money trades something and get that device.

The idea that a kid gets an expensive device that can't buy by itself and the parents have control or what device the kid gets is a very middle-class assumption. Life isn't that perfect for most people.

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johnnyanmac 6 hours ago | parent [-]

With all due respect, this just sounds like justification for lazy parenting. We're 2 generations into the digital era: parents of such an era should have enough digital literacy to make sure their kids do not get in danger.

Let's use another analog: Kids want sweets and parents either agree to buy that and no longer bother with their diet, or saves money to go to the candy store. Yet if a kid gets too unhealthy we (IMO, rightfully) have CPS sent to their house to investigate their home life.

Kids were never meant to be a convenience. And parents talked about here aren't rich enough to delegate their parenting off to someone else. Take a few hours to research what you give to your kid and monitor what they might get outside of your vision.

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subscribed 5 hours ago | parent [-]

It's okay that it doesn't match your experience but it's also a case that you shouldn't extrapolate your expectations and experience onto others.

There's plenty of overworked, stressed or ignorant parents who really wish they could care or they don't at all.

"should have enough digital literacy" doesn't survive reality check - reportedly 12-26% adults in the UK (% depending on the country) is reported to have very poor/lack of basic literacy skills. 25% approximately are functionally illiterate.

Reportedly (I'm not an American), 36 million of US adults are functionally illiterate; 43% cannot read a simple job application; 41% of low-income households lack digital literacy skills.

Those are only two prominent examples. More developed countries (especially in Europe) will fare better, many countries will fare much worse.

I think your heart is in the right place but the reality stays in disagreement.

	▲	johnnyanmac 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Maybe it's a cultural issue here, but my country is very resistant to the government coming in to course correct how people live their lives. Many times to its detriment (diet, guns, social media), but the boon of this is that it makes it really hard for anyone to incorporate a surveillance state. "Those who sacrifice freedom for security..." And all that. The sad fact is many kids are already falling under the cracks. Failing to mind their kids internet usage is just one way, and having companies sneak in to try and fix this patch won't suddenly lead to success. The needle won't be moved in terms of progress, but privacy will take a near fatal blow. I fail to see why we should accept such measures when this is just yet another bald face power grab by greedy corporations. I might have been more accommodating if this was in good faith, but we've been past the BOTD for at least 7 years now.

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mrguyorama 7 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Walmart has sold android smartphones of okay functionality that poor people depend on for decades.

Like, less than $100. Nowadays they have $20 ones that are locked to pay as you go monthly purchases, which is definitely worse than the old tracfone days but about the same price if you had to top up every month anyway. That's ignoring used phones.

Even poor kids get christmas money sometimes.

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vorpalhex 9 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

That's a parent issue, the same as if their kid has a secret stash of cocaine or enjoys dancing in traffic.

No technical measure can fix stupid.

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sharperguy 8 hours ago | parent | next [-]

No obviously we can just require that drug dealers make sure they distribute cocaine in packets that only open for adults.

	▲	kelseyfrog 4 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Child resistant pill bottles are not shown to reduce accidental overdose[1]. 1. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6124998/

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mrtksn 8 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

That's not parents issue. That's why we go after people who sell or give drugs to kids. Is a serious offense, we don't wave our hands and say its parents problem and not drugging kids is a popular policy unlike drug enforcement for adults.

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1718627440 8 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Yeah, but that assumes, that there are people out there, selling smartphones to children at scale. First the price for one is way to large for the financial budget of a child, and second that gets even more price-intensive, after the first one got confiscated by the parent.

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mrtksn 8 hours ago | parent [-]

There are literally people out there selling smartphones to children at scale. A smartphone these days can be bought for as cheap as a burger because 2nd hand market exist and its not limited to iPhones.

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1718627440 8 hours ago | parent [-]

And the child can also go and buy a porn magazin, which is likely to be eventually found by the parent, just like the burner phone you suggest. The former is also going to be cheaper.

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mrtksn 8 hours ago | parent [-]

Guess what they check before they sell the kid a porn magazine

	▲	johnnyanmac 5 hours ago \| parent [-]
		So you're suggesting resellers require ID's to sell smartphones? I completely agree. Not much difference between a porn magazine and a portal to infinite porn magazines.

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vorpalhex 8 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Everything is a parents issue.

If you are depending on the police to keep your kid from doing drugs, you have failed as a parent. I promise you, your kid can locate drugs better than the cops can arrest low level dealers.

You as a parent need to teach your kid how to behave (mostly through things like teaching ethics and morals) not by running a safe prison until your kid is 18.

And yes, I am a parent of multiple kids.

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mrtksn 8 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I agree, however the problem is that large number of parents can't do that and it becomes a societal issue. That's why we are talking about that, otherwise it would have been private family issue.

Drugs, alcohol, teen pregnancy and now social media has become societal issue as enough parents failed to control their kids actions or development.

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wowyouredumb 6 hours ago | parent [-]

I think Darwin had a solution to that.

	▲	DANmode 6 hours ago \| parent [-]
		We walked away from it.

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1718627440 8 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> not by running a safe prison until your kid is 18.

And in addition, such an approach, will not lead to a child magically becoming an adult all of a sudden when they turn 18.

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kelseyfrog 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

If we want parental behavior to change, we have to change the incentives. Parents must be held criminally liable for exposing their children to social media. Until we change the incentives, 'parents need to parent' is just an empty slogan.

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mindslight 8 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

So sure, we go after anybody who gives or sells devices without basic parental controls directly to kids. So you need to be 18 to buy a phone, which we're 90% of the way to anyway with the way credit cards work.

The fundamental point is that the Internet is not a daycare. All of these attempts to put the burden on sites boil down to changing this dynamic, recasting the Internet as if it should be appropriate to use as a daycare. Today it's big tech and porn. Tomorrow it's any writing that the the religious reich dislikes. Monday it's technical sites as they can help kids bypass restrictions. Tuesday it's international sites being blocked at the ISP-level because they don't bother with any of this crap.

We also need to remember the context here, lest we carry water for big tech's continued abuse. The main reason the surveillance industry is reaching for age verification (ie identity verification) is that harm to children is so far the only regulatory cause of action that has been found to stick. Big tech wants this, so they can continue on with business as usual abusing adults' psyche and personal information. Where what we actually need is to stop their abuse for adults as well - eg data privacy, anti-trust regulation to open up their services to competing clients, and at this point probably straight up regulation of purposely-addictive "algorithmic" feeds.

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Mezzie 8 hours ago | parent [-]

> Big tech wants this, so they can continue on with business as usual abusing adults' psyche and personal information.

I've said before and I'll say again that this approach (strict age gating) also is going to produce a slew of really vulnerable 18 year olds. If I were a sports gambling site, I'd be salivating at getting a fresh crop of 18 year old boys each year who have had zero opportunity to learn how to navigate the Internet and who are legally on the hook for everything they do.

OnlyFans, likewise, is going to work out great! Now the 17 year old girls turning 18 won't have access to things like the social media of former OF performers or access to any communities where sex workers discuss the downsides of their job or how to stay safe.

Have to protect the children, don't you know. That way they can be perfectly pure and innocent when they turn 18 and are ready to be exploited. Like fattening up cattle.

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mindslight 7 hours ago | parent [-]

Yes! And this dovetails into a point I really should have made as well. The thing about "age verification" (ie identity verification) is that it puts the decision of what kids should access wholly in the hands of corporate attorneys. For example we can easily imagine a "Facebook4Kidz" website that has many of the same terrible dynamics as regular Faceboot, but that Faceboot's attorneys can justify as being legally compliant. As a parent, you would really want to block this too - while all of these proposals for identity verification and site-based-control claim to solve the problem but leave you with no way to do that!

This ties into your comment because as a kid approaches adulthood, as a parent you also want to loosen those restrictions so that they can develop these skills - gradually while under your supervision. Whereas the corporate attorneys will just say that they're strictly off limits, right up until it's then open season as you're pointing out.

	▲	Mezzie 7 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Yes! And you want them to learn in a situation where the stakes are lower: at 18, someone can put themselves into a ton of debt or put nudes in the wrong place and just nuke their life in a way that they can't fix for a decade and everyone shrugs and is like 'you're a grown up!' Think of all the kids who back in the day got scammed out of their Neopoints, or lost all of their in game currency in GTA, etc. That's a way, way better way to learn about account security and who to trust than their first experience with scammers involving real money. Is the problem that we're exploiting kids, or is the problem that we're exploiting people? We're not going to be able to protect kids from exploitation in a society/culture that explicitly condones exploitation. If we think exploiting people is fine, actually, as long as they're over 18, then your kids will never be safe, because they will grow up. Even setting aside the obvious examples I listed, binge drinking used to be a huge problem amongst college aged kids. Who's to say that the Internet/social media wouldn't be similar? How many kids are going to flunk out of school because they can't stop watching digital crack and now mom and dad aren't around to stop them? And unlike binge drinking, your body won't eventually revolt against you, and with the addiction consultants The Machine employs, there will always be new content. People grow out of binge drinking because eventually it grows stale and hangovers when you're 35 are far worse than ones when you're 21, but that's not true of social media use. To tie this to other issues, we're already seeing issues with relationship and family formation amongst young people. I'm not sure flash banging them with addictive content when they're in their prime years is the call. If all it took for the Internet to be healthy was holding off until adulthood, we'd expect people who were adults when they started to have a healthy relationship with social media. They very much do not.

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jolmg 23 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> but how do you enforce that kids connection always goes through the parents control?

Because the devices they're given by their parents should be administered by their parents. The minors wouldn't have administrative control over their devices at all.

> You want to use your friends Wi-Fi? Now that requires full identification so that we know that its not some kid

The device wouldn't care how the connection to the internet is made. It ultimately obeys the parents' settings.

The Wi-Fi doesn't need to care either way.

> You are just moving the verification point to another gate, it means that no anonymous connections are possible anymore to the entire Internet because we want to allow parents to control their kids.

Not at all. This wouldn't affect people without parental controls on their device at all. They'd be able to have anonymous connections as they do now.

The only difference from the server-side is adding some special path /.well-known/parental-info.json or an HTTP header to responses that would indicate what's on the page from a parental perspective, so the device can make a decision whether to display based on its parental settings.

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newsoftheday 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> At glance this looks reasonable but how do you enforce that kids connection always goes through the parents control?

YouTube doesn't, the parent does.

> no anonymous connections are possible anymore to the entire Internet

Adults would not be blocked if I understand the GP comment. It's an age recommendation and it's up to the parent's to control it for their kids.

> we want to allow parents to control their kids.

Yes. Google, YouTube, AI in general will never be a replacement for parenting and they should drop the charade now.

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wowyouredumb 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> At glance this looks reasonable but how do you enforce that kids connection always goes through the parents control?

Because the parent is there to parent them?

Somehow I (and presumably almost everyone here) grew up with unfettered access to the Internet until now. Your kid isn't my kid, and someone relying on a computer to parent their children shouldn't ruin computers for everyone.

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patmorgan23 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

"how do you enforce that kids connection always goes to the parents"

That's the thing. You don't.

It's the parents job to monitor how their children use the Internet.

▲ alightsoul an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I am not sure creating an account is seen as an issue anymore given that the vast majority already have one. However yes as you say it helps create a monopoly. Combine that with a doomscrolling algorithmic feed on like YouTube and that's how you create a moat: age verification and doomscrolling.

▲ xg15 an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I think sites and app developers don't really need external reasons to force account creation, they all seem to want to do it anyway. And at least this API would - in theory - enable age verification without needing an account.

▲ kevin_thibedeau 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

The sensible solution doesn't build a consumer profile for resale and government surveillance.

	▲	go_elmo 6 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Imagine, starts much earlier, everyone has a birth certificate. /s

▲ stronglikedan 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> Allowing parents to ...

That's the crux of the issue - the state (pick one) wants to be "the parent".

▲ QuadmasterXLII 9 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I wonder if it would work to make it illegal to sell ad impressions of underage people. Do whatever you want as long as you can prove its being done to adults, or prove you have no economic incentive to algorithmically engagement bait

▲ azernik 10 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Your second paragraph describes the approach in the blog post almost exactly.

▲ Steltek 9 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I'm afraid you'd get the cookie banner problem but way worse. Everyone that's not Meta/Google/Apple would immediately add a legal CYA "18+" age rating and stop thinking any more about it.

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grumbel 9 hours ago | parent [-]

That's how it should be. Make the Internet 18+ by default and sites targeted at younger audiences can add a more detailed rating. Let people configure their devices however they like it.

The whole problem with the regulation we have right now is that it assumes the Internet is for kids, and everything for adults must be hidden. When we really just should declare the whole Internet as 18+ and the sites for kids should be the specially marked exceptions.

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johen8 9 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I never thought about that and I find it might actually be the right way for a solution... I was just looking into the Google Play Store now: in Brazil apps need to have an age rating, facebook and instagram for example are 16+, but browsers like firefox, chrome, etc are rated for 'all ages', even though you can access the whole internet through them. If we actually did what you said and inverted the logic: restrict everything to 18+ and specifically mark what is allowed to under-18s it would make parental controls much more effective.

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goda90 9 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Someone would complain that without ID verification kids would be able to sneak onto the regular Internet and therefore we should eliminate privacy on the regular Internet, just like they're doing now.

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kelvinjps10 7 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

So kids shouldn’t have access to sites like Wikipedia? Banning the internet is not the correct solution many kids depend on the internet to have access to education.

The argument could be made for banning social media but the whole internet I don’t think it’s the correct approach

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johnnyanmac 5 hours ago | parent | next [-]

If Wikipedia can't put in the effort with those millions in donations to get an age rating? I guess not. We know Youtube will.

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mrguyorama 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

If we had a "Safe for everyone" public internet and a locked down "Prove you are an adult" internet beside it, nothing prevents wikipedia from being on the Safe for Everyone internet.

Also, Encarta was a thing. Expensive though.

Some states would legislate wikipedia onto the "Adults only" web though because they don't like what it says about things like abortion and trans people.

A lot of ecommerce companies would probably be happy with a locked down adults only internet, because it would kick bot protection up a level, and would require a fairly robust solution to it.

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adiabatichottub 6 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Well... Wikipedia has content that some would consider offensive or unsuitable for children. I'm not in favor of limiting any access to Wikipedia, but I'd consider it a certainty that the day would come when Wikipedia had to decide whether to implement age restrictions or try to police content. I believe that event would change it's governance and social structure in a negative way and significantly degrade it as a public resource.

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johnnyanmac 5 hours ago | parent [-]

Likewise, some old history documentaries have gore or nudity. I think our current content ratings systems are not as obtuse as "nipple? R rating".

>I believe that event would change it's governance and social structure in a negative way and significantly degrade it as a public resource.

This can and has already been doing even without age verification. We're way beyond government survellaince in many countries.

	▲	mrguyorama 4 hours ago \| parent [-]
		In the US, our content rating systems are absolutely as obtuse as "Nipple? R" You traditionally can say one "Fuck" in a PG-13 movie, which will be about brutally displayed murder and violence and how awesome vigilante justice is. But if you have even a couple frames of a single (female, but like, that's its own insane can of worms) nipple, you cannot get lower than an R rating. This is all well publicized, despite there not being public standards for the process, and the specific wording of the PG-13 advisory is "Some content may be unsuitable for children under 13", which is weird language to describe what actually happens in practice. This is because the rating system is a weird club of "Parents of children in school" in los angeles. It's about as corruptible and sketchy as a system can get. The ESRB is similar. Shooting lots of people? Well there's no blood so that can be for everyone. Oh, now you added some red particle effects? Sorry, now it's Mature. GTA 3 had an M rating, but a person found that if you hacked the game and changed the code you could play a sex minigame. That caused the game to have an Adults Only rating. Even though it's not something you could do, see, or activate in game at all. And also the game already had functionality to have sex with a hooker and then murder them to get your money back. It exists because the dumbest parents went apeshit over yet another fake controversy (Oh my god, D&D has demons!!!. OH MY GOD. This game about saving teenage girls from creatures in a crazy amount of costume who harm them with a 2 foot long grabby arm because the developers wanted to avoid unfortunate implications is JUST TOO SEXY FOR LITTLE TIMMY and we need to make congress bitch and moan about it for an entire week and ban anything that could ever be entertainment) They are purposely arbitrary because their purpose is to make the crazy people who write letters to the FTC to arrest someone for daring to have a low cut shirt go the hell away. Those people have absurd and arbitrary triggers.

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masfuerte 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

[dead]

▲ ajsnigrutin 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> Allowing parents to configure their children’s devices to block services that require users to be older than the specified age or that do not provide an age rating.

This could be done with setting the age too. Kids don't have their own money and can't sign their own cell contracts, their parents do, and during the phone setup process, the parent could set "the owner of this phone is a minor" checkmark, set the age of birth (so it auto "unlocks" at 18), add a parental password to manually unlock for whatever app needed (or reset or change the setting). Then the phone would just send "user_is_a_minor" flag to whatever and/or filter the 18+ stuff.

▲ cute_boi 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Exactly. In the future, to view a youtube video we will need create a Gmail account, we'll need a phone, SMS verification, an ID card, and we'll probably have to rotate your head two or three times and talk to some AI.

	▲	twothreeone 6 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Eventually they make you fill out some paper work, or pick up some boxes from somewhere and bring them to another place. You know quick human tasks, just to verify you're really human. It's just a verification check, nothing else.

▲ SirMaster 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

>YouTube, you can no longer watch many videos without an account.

What YouTube video can I not watch via yt-dlp without an account?

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jamesnorden 7 hours ago | parent [-]

Anything age-restricted.

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anthk 7 hours ago | parent [-]

FreeTube can.

	▲	Scaled 5 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I love free tube, but in my experience it cannot get around the login requirement for mature-flagged videos.

▲ Eldt 9 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Many years ago I worked a technical support job for Xbox services, and the amount of calls about "unauthorized charges" was obscene. Xbox provided parental controls, but it required the parent to set up their child's account themselves, and many couldn't be bothered.

I imagine the same thing will happen here...

	▲	1718627440 9 hours ago \| parent [-]
		And people give their children cigarettes and liquor, that's bad as well. But that's the responsibility of being an adult. If the adult is deemed not worthy of raising children, society has already established a process of dealing with that too.

▲ 10 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

[deleted]

▲ mmooss 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Agreed, just make age controls available to parents, optional, and keep the user age data on the local device. External hosts can verify against it in obvious ways. But isn't that what California's law said, that commenters on HN opposed so strongly?

▲ Noaidi 7 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> for example, on YouTube, you can no longer watch many videos without an account.

I do not like this argument. Does an adult theater let anyone in without an ID? Do movie theaters let kids under 18 into an R rated movie without ID? Why do we think this should be different on the internet?

IMHO, they should have Youtube 18+ (Adult book store) where you need an ID and YouTube <18 where you do not (Barnes and Nobles), and they can filter the content as apporpriate.

I think it is evil that YouTube enables kids access to both grooming and violent material.

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arielcostas 7 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> I do not like this argument. Does an adult theater let anyone in without an ID? Do movie theaters let kids under 18 into an R rated movie without ID? Why do we think this should be different on the internet?

I don't like this one either. Does the cinema store the ID (or information extracted from said ID) of every single user visiting, along with what they've watched, on electronic records that can and will eventually be breached? Do they ask a third party (like Persona) for said verification providing the user's information?

On the cinema you show your ID to the person in front of you, they check the birth date, if it's valid (and not an obvious forgery) and if the photo matches the person providing it.

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Noaidi 7 hours ago | parent [-]

> On the cinema you show your ID to the person in front of you, they check the birth date, if it's valid (and not an obvious forgery) and if the photo matches the person providing it.

This is something that can be done online as well. Capitalism is controllable.

	▲	MyMemoryfails 6 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Governments aren't clearly willing to regulate the companies. They just let them do whatever they want once they're too big to regulate. Internet Companies has 20 years of history of datamining for sake advertising. Still nothing is done about, why even allow them obtain even more leverage?

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Ukv 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> Why do we think this should be different on the internet?

Because when applied to the internet, the age gating model that works okayish for brick-and-mortar locations is ineffective (children can use a friend's older brother's ID or account, websites outside of the relevant jurisdiction can just decide not to verify age, etc.) and invasive (sending private and sensitive information off to US companies that have been breached or linked to mass surveillance). Lack of efficacy is then used to justify crack-downs on privacy tools and the need for broad content-blocking powers with no due process.

Preferable IMO would be with filtering on the local network level, like schools have been doing for decades. Parents typically own the router/mobile data plan, so it'd pretty much just be a change of defaults and maybe some new interoperability standards. A lot less invasive, and arguably more effective.

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giantg2 7 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

The problem is that digital IDs get recorded. The physical examples you give are generally not. The clerk at the ticket counter or entrance doesn't give a shit who you are, they just need the picture to match you and the DOB to 18+ years ago. If you're old enough, they dont even card you.