Comment by mayhemducks
16 hours ago
Need we remind Anthropic of the 153 million drirvers licenses available for sale on the dark web thanks to a 3rd party ID verification service?
https://krebsonsecurity.com/2026/09/fbi-probes-service-selli...
The fact that Anthropic only receives a result, not the data itself, does not make me feel any better about this.
I really wish we could leave these types of decisions up to parents and parents only. Leave the companies and governments out of it.
> I really wish we could leave these types of decisions up to parents and parents only.
I am strongly sympathetic of this point. But, also, children with shitty parents deserve as much safety and support as they can get too.
This is an extremely difficult balancing act. Various laws and organizations get it wrong all the time, but it does require balance because there is no simple solution here that just works. There is a fundamental, unsolvable tension between:
* In a just society, your opportunity in life should not depend on being lucky with who your parents are.
* In a free society, parents should be able to support their children as they see fit.
(Stephen Pinker was the first one I've seen to point out this problem.)
> children with shitty parents deserve as much safety and support as they can get too.
I know my opinion is not popular, but I do not agree that it is the states responsibility to pick up the slack for bad parenting.
To be clear, I made no mention of the state or responsibility.
All I said was a statement of moral values: that all children deserve the best opportunity we as a species can provide for them.
There are many possible mechanisms and social institutions that can participate in that process. Parents are one, the state is another, but there are certainly many more.
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Define bad parenting?
Should the state do nothing about children not being sent to school?
Should they go hungry when not fed?
Should we just throw the kids in jail instead of programs that provide support?
The libertarian "eh whatever" means of government has a lot of negative side effects too.
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> children with shitty parents deserve as much safety and support as they can get too.
I had an abusive caregiver as a child and I can confidently say that age-gating websites wouldn't have done shit to help me.
The way to protect these children is through the family court and foster care systems, which are both seriously under-resourced and overwhelmed.
There's different kinds of shitty and they didn't mean that kind.
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Yeah I agree - it is a very difficult balancing act for sure. Perhaps I have a strong belief that manifests as bias when it comes to access to information - the right to read.
LLM's are an isomorphic distillation of human expression. Writing and knowledge compressed into probability curves. In my view, an LLM is similar to a public library. Public libraries DO have children's sections. But many children also gain knowledge and understanding from the other sections of the library as well. I believe this to be an important part of a well-rounded up-bringing - access to knowledge and the freedom to explore one's own curiosity and interests.
Of course there exists knowledge and information that is age-inappropriate. That's why my parents cared about preventing me from seeing too much violence in movies when I was young! But they certainly weren't ever required to prove that the TV was being used by a minor by submitting their driver's license to the cable company, and if they failed to comply, the service would be cut-off with no explanation at any moment. As far as the balancing act goes - that feels a bit off in my opinion.
I'm tired of giving up privacy in the name of children. Children are were and will be fine even without my access to internet being gated by a gov issued ID thank you very much
> * In a just society, your opportunity in life should not depend on being lucky with who your parents are.
The vast majority of people are raised by their birth parents which means 0 luck was involved. You are here due to their actions and are who you are due to their combined genes and situation.
This is a very cogent observation that I'm afraid is going to go over many heads. Children and parents are intrinsically suited to each other by genetics, shared environment, and other empirical factors. Societal and legal reasoning that asserts a child as a Platonic form cannot in fact benefit the singular development of that child.
i.e., luck
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I want to live in a free society that has some level of justice.
> I really wish we could leave these types of decisions up to parents and parents only. Leave the companies and governments out of it.
If you'd like to advocate for this position for a living, the tobacco, alcohol, and gambling industries will all be happy to pay you.
Kids do all of this stuff anyways, making it illegal doesn't stop it from happening.
But we're not talking about a product that kills its users, we're talking about a polymath that can help its users build and create things. Are you intellectually prepared to believe that Claude Code is as dangerous as cigarettes, a product that kills 50% of its users? Do you genuinely believe, as a core belief, that Claude Code will kill 50% of the people that use it?
> we're not talking about a product that kills its users
Yeah, it just pushes the ones with the tendency to do it themselves.
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> making it illegal doesn't stop it from happening.
Arguing to give kids unfettered access to it but won’t even use it yourself to fact check your own nonsense
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> Kids do all of this stuff anyways, making it illegal doesn't stop it from happening.
This so completely untrue! These things are absolutely effective for the majority of kids. Just because some stand out in a crowd, doesn't mean others are doing it too.
When trying to prevent something, the more friction you add the better.
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> Are you intellectually prepared to believe that Claude Code is as dangerous as cigarettes
Yes. Death is just one of the results. There are many, many other ways this could dangerously impact children.
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The tobacco, alcohol, and gambling industries want a lot of things, but it doesn't make those things bad by default.
I don't have a problem showing an ID, I have a problem with an ID being recorded so it can be leaked.
Unless you think they are outright lying, the press release does say it will be immediately deleted.
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Identify a harm first and then go through the deliberative process. The company deciding it wants this usually means you run the other way, not towards it. Did Big Tobacco volunteer to think of the children?
> I really wish we could leave these types of decisions up to parents and parents only. Leave the companies and governments out of it.
This is the way!
We already tried that. The companies had the option not to exploit kids and chose exploitation, and given trillion-dollar companies they can massively out-resource any parent's individual action - no amount of parental controls will stop a teenager saving up their pocket money and buying an inexpensive second-hand device themselves - the parents' only option to fight back is the ballot box.
> I really wish we could leave these types of decisions up to parents and parents only.
And if your parents suck? (Mine did.)
I think the power for parents to have free reign over everything in a child's life should be reduced if the parents are abusive, but of course there is no way to do this short of infallible and invasive surveillance. All to say, there is no easy solution here.
Abusive parents are not going to "think of the children" either way, no matter what arguments the well-meaning parents give. They will not see a problem with their own behavior. So assuming the parent is a sacrosanct figure that always knows what's best is unworkable.
I understand that no parent wants to be accused of being abusive, but just because it is taboo to say it out loud, does not mean these people do not exist. They're out there. They will fuck up their child's minds and cause long-lasting damage, Internet access or not.
It's no wonder children react poorly to the Internet when the two people they have to depend on for their literal survival don't support them at a good enough level. They seek out comfort when they can't get it elsewhere and now it's supposedly a tech CEO's fault they're addicted. My life could have been different if one single adult I could trust had supported me, but I didn't get one. Not all children will, either.
Everyone's parents "suck"--they're humans, they're learning, they have problems of their own they struggle with, etc. There are no purely good parents. I'm not excusing actually wretched family conditions, but have been noticing almost every young adult now deplores an unfair childhood--and I can't help but think we'd all be healthier if we could recognize that a childhood with some problems is statistically quite "fair."
I'm sorry your parents sucked.
I sincerely hope that your ability to make better choices with your loved ones than your parents did with you brings you some comfort.
In my view, removing access to information from my child would be a sucky thing to do to him. But the choice to do so is not a luxury I enjoy thanks to the billionaire ruling class.
They at least have some sort of a take a selfie and some app guesses your age based on the photo option that I had not heard of.
> Accepted age verification methods
> Yoti offers several ways to confirm you're 18 or over. You can choose whichever works best for you:
> * Facial age estimation: Take a selfie and Yoti's technology estimates your age. No ID document needed.
> * ID verification: Take a photo of your ID (such as a passport, driving license, or national ID card) and upload it from your device. See Yoti's full list of supported documents for country-specific options.
> * Yoti’s Digital ID app: If you already have the Yoti app, share a verified "over 18" attribute from it.
Admittedly it's not as if the government is immune to massive data leaks either
Unfortunately we live in a litigious society. The more you observe, you'll see that companies and government make decisions to reduce culpability and offload risk.
> I really wish we could leave these types of decisions up to parents and parents only. Leave the companies and governments out of it.
You do understand that in order to do that, something or somebody has (a) know that the person being decided about is a minor, (b) know who that minor's parents are, and (c) have some way to get input from the parents.
You get that, right? Right?
"Make it the parents' decision" doesn't solve the privacy problem. It's also probably wrong as a universal answer to anything; parents aren't infallible, incorruptible oracles.
I think they meant it more as
"Let parents decide if their kids can use this tool and have them prevent access to it if not."