Comment by triceratops
14 days ago
I'm going to restate my proposed age verification system here. I've posted it several times as a comment on this website. It works as follows:
1. A private company, let's call it AgeVerify, issues scratch-off cards with unique tokens on them. They are basically like gift cards.
2. AgeVerify's scratch-off cards are sold exclusively in IRL stores. Preferably liquor stores, adult stores, and/or tobacco/vape shops. Places that are licensed and check ID.
3. Anyone who wants to verify their age online can purchase a token at a store. The store must only demand ID if the buyer appears to be a minor (similar to alcohol or tobacco purchases). The store must never store the ID in any form whatsoever.
4. Giving or selling these tokens to a minor is a criminal offense. If a store does it, they lose their liquor or tobacco license. Treat it just like giving a minor alcohol or tobacco.
4a. Run public service announcement campaigns to communicate that giving an AgeVerify token to a child is like handing them a cigarette. There should be a clear social taboo associated with the legal ban.
5. The buyer of the AgeVerify token enters it into their account on whatever social media or adult website they want to use. The website validates the code with AgeVerify.
6. Once validated, the code is good for 1 year (or 6 months or 3 months, adjust based on how stringent you want to make it) - then it expires and a new one must be purchased.
7. A separate token is required for each website/each account.
8. The website is responsible for enforcing no account sharing.
No identifying information is stored anywhere. Kids find it very hard to access age-restricted materials online, just like the vast majority of kids don't easily have access to alcohol or cigarettes.
And I am going to restate how it’s an absolutely terrible idea, and will always fail with its perverse incentives. This does not solve any problems and creates many more.
Your idea will create a massive black market for “adult validation tokens”, handing billions of dollars to criminal groups reselling these things.
And then where such a system goes in 5-10y. Sure it’s sorta anonymous today, but then new government decides - “let’s make it mandatory to be sold with a binding identity and credit card.” Suddenly you need that token to log in to any public website. And Chinese, European and American authorities demand realtime access to the global logs.
Every censorship system you build, even if it seems “good”, will eventually censor you and the things you care about. Don't design or build oppression technology.
The very idea that you can realistically enforce Point of Sales age checks at scale is not sensible.
> Your idea will create a massive black market for “adult validation tokens”,
No bigger than the current black market for beer and cigs for kids. Adults have no need to resort to black markets. They can buy this stuff legitimately.
> Sure it’s sorta anonymous today, but then new government decides - “let’s make it mandatory to be sold with a binding identity and credit card.”
They're already trying to do that right now! If we can head them off with a system that's as robust as age verification for alcohol we take away the moderate voter's support for making everyone upload passports to access FaceTok.
> Every censorship system you build, even if it seems “good”, will eventually censor you and the things you care about
Hasn't happened to cigs or booze so far. How long is "eventually"?
> The very idea that you can realistically enforce Point of Sales age checks at scale is not sensible.
This needs strong evidence. My evidence is that we already do it for many products.
> Suddenly you need that token to log in to any public website. And Chinese, European and American authorities demand realtime access to the global logs
If you treat everything as a potential slippery slope you won't get anything done. Right now the threat is governments mandating actual ID and destroying everyone's anonymity under the guise of protecting the children. I fear they have the votes to ram it through. Unless we find a good enough alternative that preserves privacy.
> No bigger than the current black market for beer and cigs for kids.
I don't think this part is true. Kids are currently used to having access to all of these services. And there is a lot more utility to having access to the whole internet, than having a a few packs.
To say nothing of the fact that these codes can be distributed digitally once they have been purchased. So it's harder to deter.
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Everything is a slippery slope. Better nothing be done than keep inventing new ways to oppress humanity. Why does something need to be done anyway?
You can’t nerd harder and solve this problem. You have to fight these ideas at the root, and you my friend are being the so called “useful idiot” by raising and supporting such oppression and censorship.
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Some other near-term negatives of the planned idea:
- forces people to go to stores that primarily sell addictive substances
- prices out poor people, who can't afford adult websites, _or_
- even more money meant for bills / food is spent on addictions
- will have a stigma attached (why is that preacher in the liquor store? For porn or whisky?)
I'm already going to the tobacco store on nearly a daily basis because they're also my main parcel point.
And I don't think these cards would have to be significantly expensive?
> why is that preacher in the liquor store? For porn or whisky?)
Or Instagram?
I think your objection regarding future governments is valid. The others I don't think are valid. For the record I agree with your conclusion that any effort like this is doomed to fail. But we already enforce point of sale age checks at scale across multiple domains. And as for perverse incentives, part of the proposal is more or less identical to how scratch cards for gambling work. There probably is a black market for these and there probably have been attempts at fraud. But they aren't very large, not enough to tank the system anyway.
> Every censorship system you build, even if it seems “good”, will eventually censor you and the things you care about
Nobody is being censored. We regulate who can buy alcohol or tobacco, gamble at casinos, or operate a motor vehicle without it turning into a slippery slope.
Politically, the free speech argument might have had a point if Silicon Valley’s most-visible “free speech” advocates hadn’t lined up behind an authoritarian who’s creating diplomatic tension (and thus domestic political capital) the world over.
Accessing information is not a harmful substance or a dangerous activity that requires training.
The problem is that you are drawing the parallels in the first place. These are not the same things. This is precisely what a totalitarian regime espouses: information so dangerous it must be selectively distributed and access must be accounted for. Today it's pornography. Tomorrow LGBTQ materials are labeled as pornography. And soon thereafter you're putting in age verification to access non-state sponsored news, wondering "why is this required? should I be looking at this?"
I have no doubt that these are well-intentioned attempts by concerned citizens and civil servants to preserve some semblance of a decent society. The problem is that it's _always_ coopted. _Always._ Yet we can't seem to help ourselves but clamber towards more consolidation of power in the face of some new hysteria.
Your final point... _these supposed free speech advocates have supported an authoritarian, therefore they have no credibility_, _the only free speech advocates are in silicon valley_, _this is the only defense of free speech_. I have no idea what your point is.
That a few capitalists used free speech as a shield to make more money, we should throw the baby out with the bathwater?
I refuse.
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No disrespect but paying to verify age feels absurd, let alone putting a private company in charge of what should be an essential function of the government.
How about when you turn 18 or whatever the government gives you a signed JWT that contains your DOB? Anyone who needs to verify your age can check that and simply validate the signature via a public key published by the government.
Simply grab a new JWT when you need it, to ensure privacy.
And sure, sprinkle in some laws that make it illegal to store or share JWTs for clearly fraudulent intents.
> the vast majority of kids don't easily have access to alcohol or cigarettes
This feels like it comes from an affluent perspective, where I grew up it was trivial to acquire these things and much worse, there will always be someone’s older brother etc who will do this for $20 because he’s got nothing to lose.
> where I grew up it was trivial to acquire these things and much worse
So you think we shouldn't card for cigarettes or alcohol either? I'm confused.
If kids can get the card from the liquor store, then they can get physical pornography there as well.
And they can get porn from all those sites that don't obey laws anyway, like a gazillion torrent sites. So yeah what's the point really. You're not preventing anything.
Also I'm pretty sure we all watched porn when we were under age and didn't get anything from it.
When I was young internet wasn't accessible for consumers yet but I built a pay TV decoder so I could watch their porn at night. It was easy enough. Only did black and white and no audio but it didn't really matter for that purpose :)
Still, I never got the idea that this was normal sex and I've always treated women with the utmost respect.
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So they give you their jwt for 20 instead
> The store must only demand ID if the buyer appears to be a minor (similar to alcohol or tobacco purchases). The store must never store the ID in any form whatsoever.
Your plan requires nuanced implementation details which the general public is ill equipped to understand let alone independently verify. In particular, it is already normalized (in America at least) that liquor and weed stores will ID even the elderly, and scan the barcode on the ID into their computer. Let's say you want to ban the computer part outright; the public won't understand why, because it's already normal to them. So maybe you permit scanning IDs but regulate the way businesses can store/use that data; the public can't see into the computer, they have no idea if the law is being followed or not. This leads to lax attitudes towards compliance and enforcement both, and furthermore, likely results in public cynicism aka low expectations, which will give way to complacency. This is why I don't think your plan will work well, it's doomed to degenerate into surveillance.
> it is already normalized (in America at least) that liquor and weed stores will ID even the elderly, and scan the barcode on the ID into their computer
Then why are y'all so against Digital ID? We don't make you do that in Canada, it's just the clerk eyeballing your ID if you don't look old enough. I can't believe people are letting their ID get scanned and associated with vice purchases. Is it mandatory? Land of the free, eh?
I dunno where the OP lives but in my part of the US I only get carded at the one store that cards literally everyone as a matter of policy, regardless of how obviously old they are.
Other than that, I’m under 40 and I can probably count on one hand the number of times I’ve been carded in the last 10 years on one hand. The fact my beard is mostly grey and I inherited male pattern baldness probably helps. Never had my driver’s license scanned, ever, for alcohol.
My wife on the other hand, who looks much younger than her age, gets carded all the time.
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OP is wrong. Most places don’t do ID scans in my city. There was one place that did and I do not patronize them anymore.
I think there are some places where vendors have attempted to sell scanning systems as a way to identify fakes and banned patrons. It probably depends on the area how common it is.
Federal IDs are a political landmine for reasons mostly unrelated to privacy. The American public doesn't understand privacy issues, unless maybe you frame it as "ThE NUmBer OF ThE BeASt" oooo-oo spooky! Otherwise, most Americans just get stupified and say they have nothing to hide.
My point in all of this is that we should not delude ourselves by theorizing about ways this could be implemented in a privacy preserving way, because even if that's technically possible, its unlikely for things to work out that way.
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I didn't even think about the ID scanning that already takes place. States that have legalized weed still have people who avoid the legal stores because of the scanning. You don't know who has access to that data and how it could implicate you because weed is still illegal on the federal level (e.g. gun owners may be wary of buying from these stores)
In the three states I've lived in, nobody scanned IDs. They eye balled it and maybe enter birthday into a system.
This is how it should be. If you happen to be 16 and look 19, well, fuck's sake, your body's old enough to drink now. People get so hung up on this kind of think-of-the-children crap like as though every generation before now didn't have plenty of underage drinking and debauchery. I'm more worried about people being shutins and not having any fun than I am about some kid having a beer.
I don’t even get asked for mine
I've bought alcohol in many countries, including the US. Never had my ID stored. I am not ID-ed anymore.
But in any case, my proposal would ban ID scanning altogether. There's no good reason to do it for any purchase.
You can do the same thing with online payments combined with a ZKP token system.
The issue is and will always remain reselling the age verification tokens. The entire system is pretty pointless. Kids will just have some hoops to jump through, and they will be very motivated to do so. Criminals will be eager to aid them for some change too.
Either you forget age verification, or you can forget about privacy. Because identity theft is the only hoop big enough for most kids not to make the jump - and even that may not hold, typically identity theft is carried out for financial returns, the age verification requirement will change the calculus on that and will likely expand that particular black market to both kids and people valuing their privacy.
In my opinion it should be the parent's job to police their kid's access to an internet terminal. It's not even that hard. Mitigating the mistakes of parents at the expense of everyone's privacy is a poor trade.
Just because something can and will be circumvented doesn't make it useless.
People will continue to murder other people. That doesn't mean that criminalizing and punishing murder is pointless.
Now, whether the above scheme is prudent or workable, that's a separate question. But the counterargument to the scheme cannot be "It's all or nothing".
Murder is all but impossible to prevent, the reason the murder rate is kept low is because it's difficult to evade attribution after the fact.
In this instance we are talking about a technology that is impossible to attribute by design, the only way attribution will happen is if the reseller makes a serious mistake. There will be resellers that don't make serious mistakes. And unlike murder, very few successful resellers are sufficient to serve everyone.
> The issue is and will always remain reselling the age verification tokens. The entire system is pretty pointless.
I forgot to mention in my original post. I'd also rate limit purchases. Maybe only allow purchasing one per visit.
> Kids will just have some hoops to jump through, and they will be very motivated to do so.
Maybe? Kids can just buy alcohol or cigs or drugs from criminals today. But most can't or don't. Some do, and we accept that as a society. And we punish the criminals who enable it.
This isn't like illegal drugs, where criminals have a massive market (adults with cash). A black market catering to only minors isn't very lucrative.
Moreover social media's network effects work in our favor. If most kids can't join, their friends are less motivated to get in.
> "I forgot to mention in my original post. I'd also rate limit purchases. Maybe only allow purchasing one per visit."
I assume these scratch cards would be available everywhere Lotto scratchcards are - supermarkets, gas stations, convenience stores, tobacconists, newsagents - because it needs to be available and convenient for everyone to agree to it.
Since the ID is not recorded anywhere during purchase, some bored person can drive around and buy dozens of them on the same day for non-valid use cases.
But rate-limiting one per site means a valid use cases are blocked - adult kid wants their parents and grandparents to sign up to a new social network (Signal-style) and mom says she will get everyone a token while doing the shopping. She can't. Adult carer tries to buy a token for themselves and the person they care for in one visit. They can't. Small business employer wants employees to use a new WhatsApp style chat app and buy tokens for their employees. They can't.
None of the design stops mom-who-doesn't-care from buying a token and giving it to whiny-kid-who-wont-shut-up for their "FortnighTik thingy", or kid from asking grandma for a "scratch off token" for Christmas, or whatever.
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> Once validated, the code is good for 1 year (or 6 months or 3 months, adjust based on how stringent you want to make it) - then it expires and a new one must be purchased.
That sounds fantastic, were just one step away from making social media entirely controlled by one single party
Perfect to push anyone you don't like into irrelevancy, politicians will love this
Journalists too, finally they can be rid of these pesky YouTubers that show how politically captured they're! Just need to get someone with admin permission in that company and you're golden
Politicians wouldn't know who has which "adult code", so they wouldn't be able to get a singular "adult code" banned/early expired by the (supposedly corrupt) code-keeping company. To know which code a particular Youtuber has, they'd need to be able to get that info from Youtube, and if they "have a man on the inside" of Youtube then they can just ask that person to ban the Youtuber in question.
> entirely controlled by one single party
Why? Multiple companies could compete in the market of age verification tokens.
Right now we have actual partisans buying actual social media companies (Twitter, TikTok) to control them. That's a much bigger threat vector.
> Multiple companies could compete in the market of age verification tokens
Why do we want this?
The entire proposal sounds designed to tank popularity for keeping kids off Instagram.
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Once you're selling them, put a bounty where kids can turn in the cards for money. Then you'll both set a price floor and know which stores are selling them and you can find out who's doing it. Nothing says that a token has to last for a constant amount of time. If kids turn in more than a certain percentage, then that location would have theirs expire early.
What I like here is that you've turned a digital problem into a physical one where we already have solutions and intuition for how to enforce rules.
A private monopoly sounds like a great idea. A profit incentive for access to social media definitely won't result in the price of these tokens skyrocketing to extract as much money as possible.
It doesn't even have to be a private monopoly, it can be a public service.
For example in Quebec, liquor stores are managed by the government, called "Société des alcools du Québec (SAQ)" or legal cannabis is managed by "Société québécoise du cannabis (SQDC)".
I don't see why other restrictions can't follow the same pattern?
Other than the criminalization, I like the idea. I'm purely criticizing the privatization.
Generally these kinds of private monopolies also have public-set prices.
Which is a huge disaster for expensive things (like your power bill), but is much less of one for a token that takes 50 cents of human labour and 0.5 cents of computing to produce.
I never said "monopoly". There isn't just one alcohol company or one gift card company.
Japan has a similar system for payments. If you prefer to buy things online with cash they give you a barcode you take to any convenience store. The store scans it and you pay with cash.
No need for separate company. Banks know your age. I'd imagine CC companies know or at very least can get age data from the banks they trade.
So it would be
1. Site let's you pick your "age provider"
2. You log to you bank/govt site
3. They only get age as response.
Even easier with CC, shops could just send payment request with minimal age, if it doesn't pass, no sell
> Banks know your age
They also know who you are. This rules them out of a privacy-forward age verification system.
Can't it be implemented such that the banks give out the age information without knowing the ID of the person on the platform?
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> Banks know your age
Why are we pretending Facebook and X don’t?
Start with liability. The age gates will erect themselves.
I had a very similar idea with a few differences:
1. You can go to the mayor's house to get the token. No need to associate tobacco/alcohol to it.
2. It's free.
3. It's culturally enforced to exchange tokens with other people. This way users themselves help make sure it's truly impossible to trace their activity.
4. It's illegal to publish your or someone else's token. It's like a paper ID, with a QR code.
5. Can be reused. Expires after 5 years .
This way if you want 5 pornhub accounts you don't have to buy 5 stamps. You are also extra sure that the tokens cannot be linked to you because you can exchange it with anyone.
My proposal doesn't prohibit exchanges or buying tokens for other people. Just like it's legal to buy or give someone of legal age a beer.
What happens with point 7 when you verify your age to Google Plus and then you go to Reddit and “sign in with Google?”. If your verification doesn’t transfer, that would be silly because you aren’t a different age.
Trying to start a new social network in your world either has “every new signup must go to a store and spend money” or every new social network becomes tied to “sign in with Google”.
Your plan locks us into the current social networking forever?
A good point that I hadn't thought about. You are correct that the choices are "accept lock-in" or "new site, new card". I lean to the latter.
Perhaps we should drop age verification and just ban sites that use AI to scam attention for everyone? I would be happy enough if X and FB were banned outright.
Sounds good. Except the reverify thing. The whole reverification is becoming a bit of a disease lately.
I've already had my bank AND my mobile provider demanding an updated scan of my ID. Which is completely BS, after all I'm still the same person. I didn't suddenly become someone else. It's ridiculous they demand it.
But these cards sound like a better solution than using government ID yes.
Not only this but every age verification system will create an immense motive for the kids to obtain an "adult pass". Money, uncles, "family engineering" on parents or obscure paths will be used by the kid to become a hero to their peers. In a few months/years the system will degenerate and become abandoned.
That (mostly) doesn't happen for booze or cigs today. You're alleging that kids will behave like heroin junkies in order to access social media. If that's true, social media is more dangerous than we thought, and we should be having a very different conversation.
Electronic screens are "audiovisual drugs" delivered in hour-dosages through the sensory organs. After any type of ban there will be a craze by spoiled kids and/or spoiling parents to get a pass. And these are the people that the ban targets in the first place. Results from Australia's expirement are coming mediocre.
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>6. Once validated, the code is good for 1 year (or 6 months or 3 months, adjust based on how stringent you want to make it) - then it expires and a new one must be purchased.
> 7. A separate token is required for each website/each account.
I propose instead:
A single code valid for 10 packets sent to a single IP address, or 30 seconds, whichever expires first.
So a kid just has to get their hands on a token then access is open to restricted websites for a year (or whatever time period) while adults are inconvenienced? The black markets for these things would pop up instantly and you'd deal with secondary effects of that (scams, fraud, etc.)
I think the whole idea of age verification on the internet is dystopian and should be tossed in the garbage.
> I think the whole idea of age verification on the internet is dystopian and should be tossed in the garbage.
You may think so. I have sympathy for that viewpoint. But the idea isn't going away. Public opinion is going the opposite direction. So what now?
I'm half convinced it's satire but I'll answer sincerely anyway.
As an adult I just couldn't be bothered buying this again year over year, let alone even once. I'm dropping the site instead of going to the store to buy this. Guess I'd just go fully offline.
Why would you need to buy it over and over again? Your age verification isn't going to become invalid as if you magically aged backwards. The time limit is (presumably) so the tokens can't be stored and resold on the black market indefinitely.
> The time limit is (presumably) so the tokens can't be stored and resold on the black market indefinitely.
Correct.
> I'm dropping the site instead of going to the store to buy this
Umm...good? You'll have better mental health.
Why do you need a private monopoly or physical tokens?
This is trivially solved with national IDs and strict liability.
I didn't say "monopoly" anywhere in my post. Strangely you're the second commenter who assumed that. Probably a communication error on my part, because I only named AgeVerify in my example and didn't enumerate their competitors.
I don't believe the goal of 'age verification' has anything to do with children. Politicians have been very explicit objecting to anonymous people online complaining about them including calling them 'fat'.
> I don't believe the goal of 'age verification' has anything to do with children.
Some people pushing for it are sincere. I believe keeping children away from social media or adult content online is good. But I also believe most of the existing proposals to do it dangerously erode adults' privacy. And that's the real end goal for many politicians.
Implementing a fully anonymous, pretty-good-but-not-perfect age verification system can cut the legs out from all the demands to upload ID to "protect the children". I've proposed a relatively simple one that doesn't rely on zero knowledge proofs or something else the general public can't understand.,
Yeah like those politicians that are calling a slim female journalist "piggy". One rule for me and one for thee.
As long as there is an anonymous internet I could not care less what words are used by politicians.
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Nah, EIDAS2 got you covered - you use your european identity wallet.
I absolutely don't want to log in with an id everywhere I go online. Even when it's zero knowledge blah blah.
I'll just circumvent with a vpn which gives me more privacy not less.
Even with a VPN I assume you'll eventually run out of jurisdictions that don't have these laws.
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The beauty of my proposal is you don't need that.
But instead, you need this other thing, which requires elaborate infrastructure and new standards and regulations
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Instead you give control over chilren to a private company like a silly american.
While this can work I just don’t want any bans on speech for any age. These social media bans are going to next lead to porn restrictions and ultimately they will mainstream Christian theocratic values in public policy through an ever shifting morality goal post. That’s how it always goes. Enabling it through such solutions feels like a risk.
It's arguable, even if you're right, that the net loss to humanity is still far greater without these restrictions than with. Modern social media is leading to multiple generations of emotionally stunted, non-verbal children. Many of whom literally struggle to read.
If you haven't seen it in person, it is now incredibly common for children as young as 1 or 2 to be handed an iPad and driven down an algorithmic tunnel of AI generated content with multiple videos overlaid on top. I've seen multiple examples of children scrolling rapidly through videos of Disney characters getting their heads chopped off to Five Nights at Freddy's music while laughing hysterically. They do this for hours. Every day. It's truly horrifying.
Parents are just as poorly equipped at dealing with this as the children are, the difference being that at least their brains have already fully developed so that there is no lasting permanent damage.
Anti Israel speech will be the first to be banned
It already is. Comments are shadow banned across social media, videos across Tiktok are shadow banned if they include certain mix of words.
There are cases of UK police turning up to homes for anti-zionist comments.
We're already there.
I am sure that they will not lead to “Christian theocratic values in public policy” in France. That value system is fringe in France, one of the most irreligious and historically anti-clerical cultures in the world.
Among people who identify as Christian in France, the ones who could be described as radical or fundamentalist are a very small minority.
My observation is that there is a big resurgence in supremacist politics and the main identity involved is white Christian male. Maybe it’s not yet big in France but that’s what I see gaining momentum in many parts of Europe and North America.
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I’m in my 40’s and I’d rather just use a VPN, I can’t imagine that young people will feel any differently. Governments should feel free to take performative measures, and we’re free to circumvent them.
Leave people to their fantasies of digital control and let them learn lessons the hard way. This is not a technical issue anyway.
I was going to be mean, but here we are in 2026, so let me be nice.
Your idea is garbage.
It's ok to be mean if you're constructive. You aren't. Your comment violates site guidelines. But here we are in 2026 so instead of flagging you, let me be nice.
Give me a reason why my idea is "garbage" that hasn't already been covered in the comments. I'll summarize the current comments and my responses:
1. "Age verification is censorship and evil"/"This is the parents' job, not the state's" - That's a valid point of view, and I understand where it's coming from. But IMO it's increasingly a losing one.
2. "It's not perfect/it can be circumvented by ..." - All of the same circumventions also apply to tobacco and alcohol. Everyone accepts that and the world goes on. We prosecute people who break those laws. Whatever the harms of social media and adult content, they aren't worse than literal poisons that cause car accidents and cancer.
3. "It doesn't preserve privacy because they record ID where I live" - Fix the law. Ban scanning ID where you live. I can't believe you ever accepted that for tobacco or alcohol but now's your chance.
4. "Why do I have to pay? This should be provided by the government" - Then we're back to ZKPs (not comprehensible to laypeople) and paranoia that governments are tracking you anyway. But hey, I'm not a policy or crypto expert, so I'll defer to people who are. Maybe this aspect can be improved.
5. "This requires a lot of new legislation" - Yes. Governments are already at work writing legislation for age verification. Do you want to be proactive to make it privacy forward or sit passively while they decide for us?
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Regardless of any laws pushing for age verification, this is pretty smart.
So who do you give the private monopoly to? The next lottery winner?
I didn't say "monopoly" anywhere in my post. Weirdly a lot of people assumed that, which means I didn't communicate well.
In case it wasn't clear: multiple companies can issue tokens. Sites can choose the issuers they accept.
Or we have devices attest user age. On setup, the device has the option to store a root ("guardian"?) email address. Whenever "adult mode" is activated or the root email is changed, a notification must first be sent to the prior root email. That notification may optionally contain a code that must be used to proceed with the relevant action, though the user should be warned of the potential device-crippling consequences.
This setting is stored in a secure enclave and survives factory resets.
I will note that these two systems are not mutually exclusive. There are plenty of ways to "think of the children" that don't trample on everybody's freedom.
Yeah, not doing this on my Linux devices.
You don't have to, that's the point.
EDIT: or to rephrase, this proposal is opt-in (device attests the user is a minor) not mandatory (device is required to attest the user is an adult)
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A very important part of the system is a nationwide program of sending homeless people to concentration camps so that teenagers wouldn't bribe them to buy TittyTokens.
Like seriously, do you really think that if currently minors can buy tobacco and alcohol using unlawful means, then your TittyTokens will somehow be magically immune to the same problem because you really really wish they would?
You can't patch this without creating some form of a central database of who exactly buys how many TittyTokens.
> do you really think that if currently minors can buy tobacco and alcohol using unlawful means, then your TittyTokens will somehow be magically immune
No I fully admit some minors will still get access to FaceTok. We accept this failure for alcohol and tobacco. We don't have internet connected beer cans phoning home when you open them, asking to scan your face.
But at least where I live, most kids aren't falling over drunk or puffing away at school bus stops. So if the system is good enough for selling actual poisons, it's good enough to limit most minors' access to online vices.
Moreover social media has network effects. If most kids aren't on it, the rest will likely not bother either.
So basically you've designed an expensive solution that is very complicated to roll out and has obvious cases where it doesn't work, but you still think it's a good idea, rather than explore alternatives.
Are you a politician?
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You underestimate the average American teenager’s shell-buying game (honed for decades by our asinine alcohol laws.) I’m sure kids elsewhere would pick it up pretty fast too.
Plus, this would spawn massive online black markets for the codes, fueled by crypto/gift cards/other shady means of money transmission.
The comparison to alcohol is apt. Some motivated teenagers succeed in getting beer. Most don't. All the adults consider that enough of a success (which it is) that any proposed legislation to require internet-connected beer cans with facial verification is dead-on-arrival.
Step 9 i buy my kids this card because this law is dumb
Some parents give their kids cigarettes and booze. I feel sorry for those children but what can I do?
Some people compare kids having TikTok on their phone with smoking cigarettes and drinking booze. I feel sorry for those people, but what can I do?
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This is a typical technical solution to a sociopolitical problem. The powers-that-be are not comfortable with the free-for-all that exists on the internet. All these laws are meant to fix that squeaky wheel, one ball-bearing at a time.
"Children" gets the Right to march behind you unquestioningly. "Misinformation/Nazis" does the same for the Left. This is now a perfect recipe for a shit sandwich.
I agree. But if you find a different way to protect the children, that normal people can understand and relate to ("It's like buying beer"), and still maintain privacy, you take away at least one leg of support for what a lot of states really want to do (remove anonymity).
It's better than the fatalism in your comment IMO.