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Comment by areoform

6 days ago

Not if you're being pushed down the slope.

It's not an accident that this appeared within a month or two of the California one. I would bet good money that there's someone shopping this bill around.

If you do a frequency analysis of when these bills are being introduced, you'll notice an odd cluster internationally. Less charitably, they're coordinating / talking / being pushed by someone. More charitably, the "idea" is spreading.

It's a very odd idea to spread though. Age "verification" isn't something people are truly passionate about.

I suspect that, long-term, this is about surveillance. The powers that be would rather kill the golden genie that's general purpose compute than have teens and radical youth with compute.

This is going to get bad.

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areoform

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tzs  5 days ago

What you have overlooked is that this type of bill is being introduced in states that have the strongest data protection and privacy laws, such as California and Colorado, and now Illinois.

This is happening after several other states have introduced age verification laws that actually require age verification which typically involves uploading your identity documents to each website that is required to verify your age.

Apply Occam's razor. Which do you think is more likely?

1. These states that have a record of concern for privacy are now introducing an age verification law that relies entirely on the age that the administrator enters when configuring a user account in order to give a push down a slippery slope toward their nefarious secret goal...even though it would be a complete waste of time since as the examples from numerous other states shows it is not hard to pass a law that starts with making people upload their ID documents to any social media they want to use.

2. These states that have a record of concern for privacy are doing age verification in the way that many privacy advocates said it should be done when they were objecting to those bills in those other states that required uploading ID documents, because those states do not want to go down the slippery slop that those other state approaches risk going down. Namely, through parental controls on the devices that children use that put the parents in control and leave the government out of it (other than requiring that such controls be included with the OS).