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Comments (139)

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  CrzyLngPwd
  "with nine out of 10 parents saying they are in favour of a ban in response to a government consultation"I wonder why those 90% of parents don't cut their children off from social media right now.They have the power to do it.
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  big85
  If you make law-abiding sites like Pornhub hard to access, consumers will move to black markets like the Dark Web, which hosts illegal content.As the article mentions, kids are able to bypass the age verification with ease, so it doesn't even fulfil its stated purpose. We didn't even need age verification, because parental controls have been an option the entire time.
• its-summertime
  https://fipr.org/20260526-GrowingUpInTheOnlineWorld.pdf Actual response, instead of an article reporting on an article reporting on a response.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foundation_for_Information_Pol... Context of FIPR
• someonehere
  Bad parenting wins again while everyone else suffers.
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  garbawarb
  Obviously? I'm shocked that lawmakers are so okay with giving up their sons' and daughters' personal information.
• 1vuio0pswjnm7
  "The think tank warns that no age verification system, however technically secure, can prevent a motivated user from bypassing age restrictions.The Tor Network, which is widely used by journalists, whistleblowers, NGOs, security researchers and dissidents in repressive countries to protect their privacy and security, makes blocking or age-gating virtual private networks (VPNs) a pointless and harmful exercise, FIPR argued."If true, then how do we explain comments on HN that oppose age restrictions if these commenters are supposedly "technical" (cf. "non-technical") and understand how to use TorAnother possibility is the opposition to age verification is not based on the opponent's own social media use, it's based on the effect that age restrictions would have on a social media _audiences_ comprised of "non-technical" people, "normies", that are the _targets_ of the opponent's activitiesThe arguments made by this "think tank" (read: advocacy group), similar to aforementioned HN comments, lack originality and insight and are thus not persuasivePerhaps there are entities and/or individuals that stand to lose from age verification who not mentioned in this "study" nor in HN comments that oppose age verification who are not necessarily social media users but are engaged in _exploiting social media users_ for profit, e.g., targeting them with surveillance and ads, and taking a percentage of any revenue derived from users' work ("content creation")Those entities and/or individuals, namely the entities running oversized "social media" websites to attract large audiences for advertising, and others who profit from this flawed "business model", must be considered in any analysis of the _potential_ effects of age restrictions
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  monooso
  Disclaimer: not a parent, as will soon become apparent.Several people have made the argument that individual parents can't simply cut their children off from social media, as said offspring may be ostracised (or simply look at their friends' phones, assuming they still have any).That argument makes sense to me, to an extent.What I don't quite understand is the conclusion that this leaves parents with only two (equally unpalatable) options.Parents don't have to act individually. They could act as a collective, especially within the context of a small social group.Is that really such a naive suggestion?
• Havoc
  UK: sounds good let’s do it
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  M95D
  The nice solution would be <adult age="18"> content </adult> tags, standardized by w3c.
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  Scroll_Swe
  It's not about the children, never was.The goal is to use one ID system for everything.I sound like Alex Jones, but we already have a system for bank login, and other trusted identity login. They want to use this for everything.
• dismalaf
  If websites can block or restrict underage users based on data they receive, bad actor websites can target underage users specifically.To say nothing of the fact kids will obviously bypass it as well.
• dkuntz2
  it's only like everybody who isn't a rube who always falls for "think of the children" has been saying this since all these new proposals and laws started coming back
• trashb
  > system akin to film classification age ratingsI am pretty sure that most parents let their kids watch movies that are rated for a higher age group then their current age.For example a lot of marvel movies, harry potter or pirates of the caribbean are usually in this category.My conclusion the parents are not lazy they care to be breaking the age restriction. A lot of parents even go out of their way or get aggressive to make sure they can age rated movies to their kids as they think the age ratings are bullshit.I would suspect age verification to have similar effects in practice, and there is the additional hurtful factors as well leading to a net negative. Not just for minors but also for adults that now have to deal with this crap.
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  iso1631
  If you wanted to actually empower parents in helping their kids, you'd make sites emit some form of standard as TXT, SRV, /.well-known, whatever end pointsThen you'd make sure that the owner of the device has the ability to enable this, factoring in some tags for the categoryus-min-age:21:drinking gb-min-age:18:drinking au-min-age:16:socialmedia us-min-age:13:socialmediaThen I can use my existing parental controls (including on a linux laptop if I don't give my 13 year old root) to apply or not apply rulesIf I don't want social media regardless, then I apply a rule "no scoial media". Or I can apply "1 hour max" per day for the categoryIf I'm happy with my 16 year old spending half an hour on playboy.com or whatever, then that's fine too -- I'd rather they went somewhere like that then some of the shadier sitesThis gives no power to large companies, but helps the parents, who can apply "default" profiles -- hell you can distribute default profiles as part of the onboarding process.
• anon
  undefined
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  0xbadcafebee
  "Think of the children!" - Say the 40-year-old millennials who were exposed to the Wild West of internet content as children and are still fine."We can't censor the internet on their devices!" - There's a $2.5B market in parental censorship software. You can censor their devices."Our child will become a pariah without the internet!" - In what way, exactly? They still go to school, still play sports, still go to chess club/band/theater/etc, still ride bikes around the neighborhood, still hang out at friends' houses, etc. All the kids will not hate them because their parents refused to give them a smartphone. (How do I know? I know a kid who grew up without one. Has plenty of friends.)"But they need to be able to contact us!" - Dumbphones work fine. Teach them how to text and make calls. I guarantee they will use them.Parents are lazy and want us to do parenting for them, not really a newsflash. But none of that is the point. "Age Verification" laws are stupid because 1) the kids will get around the verification, 2) plenty of the internet does not abide by the law, 3) it is government mass-surveillance in a "think of the children" disguise, 4) it makes privacy (surfing the web without a Government-issued ID) illegal, 5) if it's taken seriously, the only way to actually enforce it is a Great Firewall of America.These laws are the gravest threat to personal liberty in the history of mankind. It cannot be understated how pervasive it is. At no other time in history has it been possible to not only track one's movements 24/7, but also the content of everything they read, everyone they talk to, etc, even in the privacy of their home. These laws don't work without that.
• shevy-java
  They are right, but this is the end goal anyway - age sniffing is all about spying on people. Children are the excuse. Usually it is either children or terrorists; these are the buzzword bingo memes used by lobbyists.
• lloydatkinson
  It was never about the children
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  jmyeet
  I believe we could solve a lot of these problems by making it illegal to advertise to minors.I'm reminded of the settlement with Facebook where it was illegally allowing racial targeting in ads for housing, which is illegal [1]. If platforms were suddenly liable for allowing or failing to stop the targeting of minors, they'd suddenly have a lot of incentive to figure this out.The beauty of this is that they already do it. Your profile with FB, Google, etc has a lot of implied demographic information based on your activity because they want to sell audiences with certain demographics.As an aside, whenever I see "think tank" my first question is "who is funding this?" and I learned something I didn't know previously. In the UK, these bodies often aren't legal charities. Instead they are non-profit companies limited by guarantee [2]. One consequence of that is that they don't have to reveal their funding like a 501(c)(3) would (and, yes, US think tanks are generally 501(c)(3)s).I didn't see any obvious red flags in the trustees for Foundation for Information Policy Research for what it's worth and it's an almost 30 year old organization.[1]: https://www.justice.gov/archives/opa/pr/justice-department-s...[2]: https://www.funded.team/advice/charity-vs-cic-vs-clg
• popcorncowboy
  I am shocked, shocked to hear that there are ulterior motives behind age verification and that the stated benefit is in fact exactly the opposite of what happens irl. Shocked!
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  musha68k
  Another instance of pure power games if you track the political "reasonings" and technological "solutions".It's the same fight with yet another face; we must keep pushing back at the hydra.
• aloaha
  [flagged]
• fxj
  [flagged]
• ameypandey
  [dead]