Comment by NoPicklez
13 hours ago
I think you can look at all things pessimistically, like this article does but at the end of the day we all agree that there are things online we don't want our kids seeing or engaging with and it takes regulators to push how we protect them from those online places. What other options to regulators have?
Age restriction has been around for longer than the internet itself, so its regulators applying that logic to the online world.
Whilst I think age verification has its issues, I don't see what other options they actually have. I'll also make the point that in Australia, our regulations explicitly require that Government ID verification CANNOT be the only way and that companies must adopt an additional approach.
Almost everything in technology used to protect us can be used against us by those want or choosing to do the wrong thing, does that mean we don't do anything?
Why do you or anyone besides me (and my partner) get to decide what is ok for my kid to see?
If you want your kids to not see porn on the internet, cool. Don't give them Internet access. You don't need to make the internet worse for me and my family to make that rule for your family.
And maybe if you are parenting your child well, at some point you will be able to trust them to use the internet in a responsible way.
I like the California law where the device owner sets the parental controls and apps have to obey them or get fined.
This is the best solution I've seen, and it's also the simplest. No authority is involved other than the parent. No complicated protocols, or heavy CS theory about privacy preserving algorithms. Just one setting, "this device belongs to a minor" and apps either honor it or they are not allowed in the App store. Will some parents turn it off for their 14 year old? Yes, but some parents buy beer for their 14 year olds. That's a different problem.
Apple, Google, and the social media companies could have done this 10 years ago and we would not even be having this debate today. But they decided they didn't have any social responsibility for what their devices and software did, so here we are.
Exactly! We - the tech industry - decided not to do it in a sensible way, so now we have clueless politicians saying something must be done, and mandating the stupid ways because they are clueless.
Yep, there are all sorts of technically interesting ways in which age can be proven without identity being compromised, this link has a good exploration of anonymous credentials, for a start - https://blog.cryptographyengineering.com/2026/03/02/anonymou...
And there are all sorts of reasons governments want to do this, up to and including the stated-on-the-surface reasons they give; a lot of people don't want their kids exposed to internet harms, be that extreme material or addictive services and doom-scrolling, and don't have the technical know-how to effect that themselves.
The insistence by so many in tech that there is no honest intent and that there is no way to practically provide age verification in a thoughtful, anonymous way is frustrating.
It's frustrating to see so many people engaged in effective conspiratorial thinking and it's frustrating because there are many good arguments to be had here, but they won't land if the 'anti' side doesn't address the real concerns that real people have about the safety and mental health of their kids.
> The insistence by so many in tech that there is no honest intent...
If there were honest intent, then the regs would be beefing up the "Parental Controls" mechanisms present in every major OS and commanding that there be fines for not respecting those settings. Not only does this mechanism require zero involvement of an unrelated third party, it allows a guardian to protect both a child too ignorant of the dangers of the world to be trusted to competently handle them and an adult whose mind has been so damaged by age and/or disease that they can no longer handle those same dangers.
Instead, the systems that we're getting are ones in which computer users are -when it's not mandatory- very, very strongly encouraged to present photo ID to a third party. While all the US regs I can find currently "only" require adding mechanisms for punching in a birth date, it's all but certain that continued evidence of minors lying about their age will cause those laws to be "upgraded" to require a photo ID.
> If there were honest intent, then the regs would be beefing up the "Parental Controls" mechanisms present in every major OS
Not everyone knows they exist, and there's a huge install base of older and/or cheaper devices that may not be getting updates that could be strengthened like this.
> Not only does this mechanism require zero involvement of an unrelated third party
But what if we do want to regulate the behaviour of those third parties? We know they've been cognisant of the harms and addictive behaviours their stuff promotes (see internal Meta research), and in fact seem to have designed for that. If the controls are only at the consumer side, are we not likely to see an arms race where they continue to try to addict kids around the controls?
You're also assuming a level of technical sophistication on the part of parents, voters and politicians that would necessarily lead them to come to the same conclusions as yourself about solutions. This may simply not be present.
This is what I mean by "good arguments that won't land". We can talk about how solutions should work, whether solutions can possibly work, and even make strong arguments that regulation in this area is wrong in and of itself. Jumping straight to "they're all liars and only want to spy on me" makes the entire thing look like a group of fringe nutters unable to take onboard how people (particularly non-tech people) feel.
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