Comment by mothballed
8 hours ago
A few things you can legally do online without ID or age verification in the US
1) buy cigars and pipe tobacco (but not cigarettes!)
2) Buy "CBD" by the pound
3) Buy ammunition, a barrel and the rest of gun parts for a glock, except a frame/receiver that can be 3d printed in a few hours to complete it.
4) Order and have delivered wine
But there are people arguing to skip all that and go to straight to ID for social media. It isn't about the children. It's about keeping tabs on who says what.
Usually the delivery person asks for ID when delivering the wine?
They absolutely don't. They ask for your date of birth to fill it on their app and that's it.
In most US states, they require the delivery driver to recheck the ID in person. Depends on the state though.
5 replies →
For the purpose of the argument, they don't.
#1 isn't entirely true. It's a soft-gate but you are legally required to verify age on your site before completing the purchase (I run a boutique cigar brand [1]).
[1] https://philosophercigars.com
Is teens ordering wine a big issue in the US? Bigger than social media?
Of course not. But literally any excuse that comes to hand will be deployed if it helps the tech industry continue to avoid meaningful consequences. The same handful of companies that have engineered a global surveillance suite that rivals the most tyrannical sovereign governments wildest dreams (and can trivially detect the approximate age of a user) will without a shred of irony deploy legions of paid influencers and other astroturf to decry age verification as an assault on privacy.
But it is an assault on privacy. If "protecting kids" was the goal here they'd push for regulation that forces websites to return standardized metadata that then gets interpreted by the user agent which can be configured by the parent.
3 replies →