Comment by JamesLeonis

3 days ago

The elephant in the room is 'unverified' users will overwhelmingly be underage kids, and that absence will be tracked across the internet. This whole thing inadvertently exposes who are the kids vs the adults programmatically.

Second, if all it takes to get into underage spaces is not being verified, predators *will* notice and exploit this hole.

Even the absence of information is information.

> The Roblox games site, which recently launched a new age-estimate system, is already suffering from users selling child-aged accounts to adult predators seeking entry to age-restricted areas, Wired reports.

I rest my case.

  > Second, if all it takes to get into underage spaces is not being verified, predators *will* notice and exploit this hole.

Well the default state is "assume underage". So the default state is be in same location as children. There's nothing for predators to exploit, they get access by default.

Which once people realize that, it all becomes really silly. The only way it would really work is by verifying that people are children, so only children can be in the gated location. But then you need to do mass surveillance on children and I think even the average person realizes this just makes that a great place for predators and the damage caused by a leak is far greater to children. Not to mention the impractical nature of it as children are less likely to able to verify themselves and honestly, you expect kids to jump through extra hoops?

Anyone that believes these systems will keep predators away from children haven't thought about even the most basic aspects of how these systems work. They cannot do what they promise