Comment by AnthonyMouse
3 days ago
> they refer to "device-based" age verification, where you verify your identity once to say, Google or whoever. Then your device proves your age. Fewer middlemen. One source of truth.
This is still an absurdity. You don't need the device to prove the age of the user to the service, you need the service to provide the age restriction of the content to the device. Then the device knows if the user is an adult or a kid and thereby knows whether to display the content, and you don't need Google to know that.
Major porn sites already send an RTA header. Social media could be required to do similar. However I think part of the concern here is that many parents don't bother to restrict things. So the question is if we want filtering similar to alcohol where minors aren't permitted to possess it, or similar to porn where the decision is left up to parents.
In many states it's perfectly legal for parents to provide their kids with alcohol. Only stores can't do it. And many religious rites involve wine, for example. Moreover, it would be up to parents either way, because even in the ID case, if parents want to allow their kids to access everything they could just provide them with a device configured under the parent's ID.
At which point there is no reason to invade everyone's privacy with IDs because parents can just make their choice when configuring the device their kids use and have the device rather than the service choose what to display.
Yeah that's a good point that I certainly didn't think about it that way, but it's something that the ID verification people never quite address.
When I was a kid, I played neopets. For whatever reason, they age gated some content (maybe messaging or other social features) because when you sign up you have to specify your age. I was young, so I didn't know I could lie on the internet, so I said I was 10 or something. And then my friend who did lie and say he was 18+ wanted to be my friend on neopets, but I couldn't be his friend because I needed to get parent permission to access that feature.
Anyway, I printed out a permission slip, asked my mom to sign it, and she signed it without looking at it. I mailed it to neopets (we didn't have a scanner) and soon enough I was playing with the big kids!
Anyway, one could say that my mom was neglectful for having not read it before signing it, or one could say that she merely trusted me that I wasn't asking her for permission to watch porn. But it's not a stretch to think that even with ID laws, parents can still let their kids access whatever they want by giving them access to accounts or devices that have already verified identity. Granted, I don't see parents giving their kids their PornHub password, but kids can be crafty, if they want to access adult content, they'll find a way. I don't know if this is true, but someone on discord said they just uploaded an AI generated license and got age verified.