I feel like all of these laws are being designed backwards. Content providers, like MPAA films, should have to identify what sort of content they are providing. Then I can give my kids a device configured to allow some or all of that at my discretion.

Requiring my kids' devices to advertise their age (or their age "bucket", as if that was a meaningful difference) to protect them is not doing me or my kids any favors.

Having the ability to identify who is watching or saying what on the internet would be immensely useful to the government; the justifications are really meaningless.

Anti-money-laundering is a comparable field, as all the AML regulations and laws are ineffective at identifying money launderers, but they're wonderful for verifying (auditing and prosecuting) tax compliance.

> Content providers, like MPAA films, should have to identify what sort of content they are providing. Then I can give my kids a device configured to allow some or all of that at my discretion.

If the intent were to actually protect children, then this would be what was done.

"Protect the children" is just a subterfuge to get electorate support for voting for the foundation for a "1984 thought crime" style monitoring of the internet.

Can we extend that beyond just parental controls? I'd love to permaban 90% of the internet from ever reaching me. But the laws are designed backwards because they're probably written for someone else's benefit.

If this age verification stuff ever becomes plausible we always have the option of distributing actual Linux ISOs over bittorrent. Failing that, source code in RAR'd archives distributed across IPFS nodes and Tor. I feel like many of us would welcome the challenge if it were under better circumstances.

They're actually designed quite well for the intended purpose: mass surveillance and suppression of speech.

Don't ever for one second pretend this is about anything else.

I'm now pretty convinced that this is the best argument for persuading non-technical and non-internet-privacy minded people why this is a problem. It's hard to explain all the technical factors that make it impossible to implement without compromising privacy... but it's pretty easy to get them to understand the real intent. If you start them thinking through what mechanisms would make sense _if_ the original premise truly was protecting kids from content they aren't ready to see, it's easy to arrive at that answer, and equally easy to see why "everyone must provide their ID so we can verify their age" probably comes from other motivations.

The idea of a 'user agent' where the 'device owner' decides 'what should be displayed and how' is ancient history, grandad.

Modern social media is delivered through 'apps' which are like web browsers, except without ad blockers or privacy settings, and with push notifications to make them more addictive, and they only show one website, and they're each 5x the size of a web browser for some reason.

This is definitely not about "protect the kids" or age verification, this is a stepping stone to full identity verification to use the internet at all.

> I feel like all of these laws are being designed backwards. Content providers, like MPAA films, should have to identify what sort of content they are providing. Then I can give my kids a device configured to allow some or all of that at my discretion.

This was tried in the past:

* https://www.w3.org/2007/powder/

* https://www.w3.org/PICS/

I think the issue is with something like algorithmic feeds — that's not content that can be allowed or blocked at the client-level, that's a setting that needs to be fed back to the service. It would be very difficult (impossible?) to design an API that allows services to identify whether a user should be served an algorithmic feed without also having that service know that the setting change was triggered by local age restrictions.

Like, I can imagine a browser exposing an API that says "wantsAlgorithmicFeeds: boolean", and websites would be required to respect that setting. In theory, anyone can toggle that setting, so the website doesn't know if the user is under 18 or not. But if in practice the vast majority of people with "wantsAlgorithmicFeeds: false" are children, then websites can use that API as a good enough proxy for identifying information in the vast majority of cases. Moreover, the more of these specific APIs you add, the harder it gets to keep things anonymous — especially if different states have different requirements on age-restricted content, you'd end up being able to triangulate not just age brackets, but also potentially location as well.

I agree that age bucket still has the potential for exposing identifying information (e.g. if you can monitor a user as they move from one bucket to another, you can identify their date of birth), but it's harder, and it reduces the amount of side-information that can potentially get leaked.

That said, exposing the information in the other direction as well would be a good step because it would allow websites or apps to enable OS-level age restrictions without requiring that they also read the "age bucket" bit. It would be nice if "read a person's age bracket" were a permission that an app or website would need to request, rather than one that was given by default, and that could be coupled with the fully-privacy-preserving approach you describe, so that different applications with different requirements could mix-and-match.

All that said, I suspect it would be a lot easier to coordinate on good technical solutions like the one you're describing if the default reaction to anything that even smells like age restriction wasn't the sort of abject horror and moral panic that is so clear in this thread. Like, sure, age verification at any level has all sorts of issues. But that isn't the only possible solution to the problem here, and if technical people react to these proposals by pretending the problem doesn't even exist in the first place, then we're never going to find those better solutions.

Did you read the law? It actually imposes very (in my humble opinion) good rules on the content providers, specifically social media. We know why social media is addictive - the personalized feeds are highly optimized to extend usage time, with no amount of time being "good enough." Social media sites would be banned from using this type of feed, limiting it to feeds of content you've subscribed to or requested only. Instead of seeing mainly influencers and viral videos, people might even start seeing their friends' own content.

> Requiring my kids' devices to advertise their age ... to protect them is not doing me or my kids any favors.

Idk about you, but it'd be doing me favors because my kids will not be physically able to use the most addictive platforms that exist today in their current form. It would be a major disruption to the behavioral manipulation that Meta, TikTok, and X do.

Or anyone else!

This isn’t for the protection of kids. It’s for the protection of profits by surveillance capitalism.

I think you’re missing the real purpose vs the stated purpose.

The point is monitoring everyone, age verification requires you to share who you are.

It seems like after Epstein was gone a lot of politicians in many countries suddenly want to identify children, take photos for "age identification", and their ages and what apps they use. Very strange.

How dare you try to use a system that we've used for generations!

Parents already have the ability to do this, at least when it comes to porn. The fact is that most parents aren't doing it. Hence the push for legislation that increase the uptake of content blocks for minors.