Comment by mjevans
13 hours ago
I'm fine with this, as long as they DO NOT require any form of ID or 'age' verification.
Instead this should be attacked from the profit side, by banning any form of advertising which might target children. If there's no profit to be made in servicing said demographic and a law requesting at least end user 'agreement' that they are an adult, this should be sufficient.
> If there's no profit to be made in servicing said demographic and a law requesting at least end user 'agreement' that they are an adult, this should be sufficient.
Is it still advertising if an "influencer" takes money on the down low to sip a Pepsi not too obviously in the middle of a video?
Is it still advertising if an attractive and young person provides news that happens to be colored in a way that supports the narratives of a particular political faction?
Is it still advertising if you can't prove that a foreign power encouraged a popular yoga enthusiast or makeup artist to post some whispered ideas that weaken citizens' faith in your institutions? Does that foreign power ever care about profit?
Advertising and propaganda love to explore the grey spaces around definitions, so your bans will end up being a whack-a-mole game. Cutting off kids with an ID check is much easier. Implementing age verification the Apple way would even protect privacy by simply registering whether Apple can attest that the user is over or under the age limit, without handing the ID over to third parties.
There's no profit for the platform. As of now, both the "influencer" and platform are aligned in that they want children to consume more slop. If the platform doesn't have any incentive anymore, maybe most of those "influencers" will fall away, if the algorithm starts deprioritising content geared toward children. As you say, policing the "influencers" is difficult, but at least it is quite easy and simple to target the platform. Better than nothing.
Who decides whether an ad is targeting children or not?
I’m not playing devil’s advocate, I’m curious what the SOTA is for ad moderation. I’m sure it’s relatively easy to tell a kid’s toy ad from adult ones like alcohol, but how do you differentiate toy ads targeting parents vs toy ads targeting kids?
>Who decides whether an ad is targeting children or not?
Much simpler than that, you just ban all targeted ads full stop end of story. The ad-funded internet existed in the 90s before ad targeting was a thing.
You went on a car forum, you'd get ads about car parts. You went on a PC forum, you'd get ads about PC parts. Pretty simple stuff that didn't need to know your age, gender, political affiliation, ovulation status, etc so it's not like the web will go bust without ad targeting.
Targeted ads are exploitative and manipulative, and a crime against humanity, or at least on society.
None of that attacks the motivation of FB to look the other way to kids clicking the "I'm an adult" button and pocketing money from advertisers buying un-targeted ads for snacks, clothes, makeup, computers/gaming, and a million other things that are equally as aimed at kids as they are at anyone else.
(Remember how many kids bought car magazines before they even had drivers' licenses? Advertising has never been "oh, ads for things adults will buy will be completely boring to children.")
Ads and media are generally exploitative and manipulative, even if not targeted specifically at anybody.
3 years after the nation of Fiji received its first television broadcasts in 1995, dieting and disordered eating went from unheard of to double digit percentages among teenage girls.
https://www.nytimes.com/1999/05/20/world/study-finds-tv-alte...
> Before 1995, Dr. Becker said, there was little talk of dieting in Fiji. ''The idea of calories was very foreign to them.'' But in the 1998 survey, 69 percent said that at some time they had been on a diet. In fact, preliminary data suggest more teen-age girls in Fiji diet than their American counterparts.
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Honestly this is better than covering half of every website with a cookie banner that very few people understand.
We should ban all ads.
Since platforms know the users age, any ad shown to them should be considered as such.
So basically, no ads on underage accounts at all should be the norm.
Instead of banning social media for teenagers, regulate it in ways that actively reduce addictive design.
For example: after 15 minutes of short-form content, show an unskippable timer every third video, displaying today’s, this week’s, and total watch time. The same principle should apply to endless scrolling, make usage visible and interruptible.
Base it on actual screen time. This would protect teenagers and benefit adults.
Any kind of zero knowledge verification should be ok.
But with minors it often goes a long way to just make the law. It’s a good instruction to parents who should be able to control this. Laws on bike helmets for minors are followed nearly 100% not because they are enforced by authorities but because the law gives parents guidance.
There is no such thing in practice.
Anything with zero knowledge is never going to be considered robust enough by a government. Zero knowledge protocols really have no functional revocation mechanism.
The EU has been working on a zero knowledge system as part of the EU Digital Identity Wallet project for a few years now. It is currently undergoing large scale field tests in several countries with expected release late this year. All member states are required to provide at least one free secure interoperable implementation to their citizens, and regulated industries such as banks and telecoms, are required to accept it. If a member state passes a law requiring age verification on social media it must include the EU Digital Identity Wallet as one of the verification methods the site must support.
What was that about no government would consider zero knowledge to be robust enough?
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(Without accepting the premise that it should be acceptable to have to provide any kind of proof...)
> Zero knowledge protocols really have no functional revocation mechanism.
None would be needed, you (sadly) only age in one direction, so valid proof would never become invalid proof.
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expiry
Bike helmets are for safety but reading the article the ban is more for some kind of societal change. I don’t know if it’s really comparable.
I think parent's _want_ to keep kids in helmets and away from social media. But the pressure is some times high when Joe can ride without helmet, or can use TikTok. A law really helped the bike helmet thing at least. That they are fundamentally different I think doesn't matter since the peer pressure thing and what parents want is the same.
There is still a financial incentive to loop in teenagers that would stay on a platform and spend money there later.
Why not device-side headers? Kids' devices should always include a header saying "I'm a kid, don't show me adult content.
You can tell these proposals are made in bad faith because we can do age verification in an anonymous way using zero-knowledge proofs but regulators demand linkable IDs instead.
It's not about protecting the kids. It's about managing the public's information diet. The latter is not a legitimate function of any state.
The goal is to ban anonymous internet for everyone. You won't be able to post anything without verifying your id. All these similar efforts in different countries seem coordinated and synchronous, suddenly after 35 years since the advent of the web.
I disagree, we should have age verification but maybe it can be done in a mostly anonymous way like a central arbiter of identity from the government or something.
> like a central arbiter of identity from the government or something
This comes up in every ID thread on Hacker News, usually with suggestion that we do it via zero-knowledge cryptographic primitives
However, all of those proposals miss the point. These ID verification laws aren't simply designed to confirm that someone has access to an >= 18yo ID. They are identity verification to try to confirm that the person presenting the ID is the same person who is using the site.
This concept is obvious with in-person ID checks: You can't go to the liquor store and show them any random ID, they have to check that it's your ID.
For some reason when we talk about internet ID verification that part is forgotten and we get these proposals to use cryptographic primitives to anonymously check something without linking the person to the ID. It doesn't work, and doesn't satisfy the way these laws are usually written.
I'm also surprised that people of this website even think it might work in the first place. Did everyone forget what it's like to be a kid trying to out-maneuver rules to access something? How long do you think it would take before the first enterprising kid figures out that if they can get access to their mom or older brother's ID, they can charge their friends $5 to use it for this totally anonymous one-time cryptographic ID check for their social media accounts?
These ID verification laws aren't simply designed to confirm that someone has access to an >= 18yo ID. They are identity verification to try to confirm that the person presenting the ID is the same person who is using the site.
This makes no sense. This is exactly like asking someone older to buy you beer. Will there be rule breakers? Sure but they will be in the overwhelming minority.
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That's exactly the opposite of anonymous. You cannot have anonymity & age verification that actually guarantees anything. It's a contradiction. Either the chain exists, or it doesn't.
Are you saying it would be impossible to have a service where the site (social media, say) would issue some sort of random token and ask me to sign it using a centralized ID service. Then I log in to the centralized id service and use it to sign the random token and bring it back to the service.
The centralized service see who I am, but not what I'm proving my age for. The social media or other site see that I have signed their token so would have the appropriate age, but not who I am.
What's impossible about this?
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Without age verification this is obviously an unenforceable ban... I think Finland already has schemes for age verification.
Yeah.
Zero knowledge proof and you're good to go.
That's not how ID checking works, though.
A key part of ID verification laws is that you're confirming the ID presented also belongs to the user.
They can't just check for "This person currently has an adult ID in their possession" and nothing more, otherwise one kid at school would borrow their older brothers' ID and then use it to register all of their friends' accounts one day.
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How would a zero knowledge proof of my age work?
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