Apple cost Meta billions by cutting off their data pipeline at the OS level, justifying it with a unilateral privacy moral high ground. Now, Meta is returning the favor. By astroturfing the App Store Accountability Act through digital childhood alliance, Meta is forcing Apple to build, maintain and also bear the legal liability for a wildly complex state-by-state identity verification API.
Gotta give it to Zuck. Standing up a fully-fledged advocacy website 24 hours after domain registration and pushing a bill from a godaddy registration to a signed Utah law in just 77 days is terrifyingly efficient lobbying.
if "it" is the middle finger, for sure. "terrifying" is a great choice of word for it.
Plus, Apple gets to be the gatekeeper for Meta and other apps which can't be good for meta, and Apple gets to know the age of its users, which in itself is monetizable.
The CEO has 24h in the day, and he/she is asked to be deposed (laws and legal system has that power), it chips away from grand visions. It isnt just money, you cant just stand up a team and be done with it. Everybody will be coming at you.
Expect to see a lot "Y alleges Apple didnt do enough to protect kids" and the burden of proof will be on Apple to make their executives available.
Overall, that's the reason anti-trust laws must be applied rigorously, otherwise the normal population has no chance.
In the end, all the little people are just collateral damage or occasionally they get some collateral benefits from wherever the munitions land.
In a sane world, no one would have the kind of market power that so much hinges upon their competitive actions.
But no, they had to let collateral damage frag the free software crowd, which is inconsequential to their aims anyway, but 100% a huge concern for those suffering the collateral damage.
The methodology appears to be LLM driven, and the contextual framing which the conclusions are couched in, drive conclusions to a specific direction.
It does not clarify between two readings
1) Meta is driving Age verification efforts
2) Meta is being opportunistic with age verification efforts to further its own goals
The larger macro picture is that voters globally are tired of Tech firms and want something done about it.
The second macro trend is the inability of governments to handle/control tech, and are looking for reasons to bring tech to heel.
That’s context results in a sufficiently different degree of culpability and eventual path to resisting privacy reducing regulations.
I am not skeptical of any of the research, the sources seem to be cited properly. I am skeptical that this researcher has thought through or verified their conclusions in a systematic and reliable fashion. This part gives it away: "Research period: 2026-03-11 to present." This individual dropped his investigative report two days after beginning research!
Yes, AI is an incredibly good research assistant and can help speed up the tasks of finding sources and indexing sources. The person behind this investigation has not actually done their due diligence to grok and analyze this data on their own, and therefore I can't trust that the AI analysis isn't poisoned by the prompters implicit biases.
> LIMITATION: Direct PDF downloads returned 403 errors. ProPublica Schedule I viewer loads data dynamically (JavaScript), preventing extraction via WebFetch. The 2024 public disclosure copy on sixteenthirtyfund.org was also blocked.
> Tech Transparency Project report: The article "Inside Meta's Spin Machine on Kids and Social Media" at techtransparencyproject.org likely contains detailed ConnectSafely/Meta funding analysis but was blocked (403)
The least they could have done is read their own reports and then provided the documents to the LLM. Instead they just let it run and propose connections, asked it to generate some graphs, and then hit publish.
> A Meta employee (Jake Levine, Product Manager) contributed $1,175 to ASAA sponsor Matt Ball's campaign apparatus on June 2, 2025. Source: Colorado TRACER bulk data.
> No direct Meta PAC contributions to any ASAA sponsor across Utah, Louisiana, Texas, or Colorado. Source: FollowTheMoney.org multi-state search.
While it is true that Meta has funded groups that advocate for age verification, a lot of them also appear to have other actors so it's not like this is some pure Meta thing as some of the other commenters are suggesting.
This type of GitHub-based open-source research project will become more common as more people use tools like Claude Code or Codex for research.
_GPT, prioritize truth over comfort, challenge assumptions, and avoid flattery. And analyze the patterns of biases in my prompts, and then don’t do that… or something_
Give it time, we’ll come up with something.
This file does not exactly fill me with confidence: https://github.com/upper-up/meta-lobbying-and-other-findings...
In one part of the report, there seems to be this implicit assumption that Linux and Horizon OS (Meta's VR OS) are somehow comparable and that Meta will be better equipped than Linux if age verification is required.
It doesn't explicitly say "This will allow Horizon OS to become the defacto OS and Linux will die out" but that seems to be the impression I'm getting which uhh... would make zero sense.
More broadly, this entire report (and others like it) are extremely annoying in that I've seen some Reddit comments either taking "lots of text" as a signal of quality or asking "Does anyone have proof that these claims are inaccurate" which is
a) Of course entirely backwards as far as burden of proof
b) Not even the right rubick because it's not facts versus lies, it's manufactured intent/correlations versus real life intent/correlations (ie; bullshit versus not)
All of this could be factually true without Meta being smart enough to play 5D chess
Or of authority, when they're not equipped to evaluate the data first-hand.
The Gish gallop technique in debate overwhelms opponents with so many arguments that they're unable to address them all before the time limit. Reports presented like this are functionally that, but against reader comprehension and attention.
Similarly, being the first, loudest, or only voice claim is unreasonably effective at establishing perception of authority, where being unchallenged is tantamount to correctness. This also goes both ways; censorship in media, for instance, can be used to promote narratives by silencing competing views, like platforms selectively amplifying certain topics to frame them as more proven and widely supported than they might actually be.
It's unfortunate that inexpert execution often positions well-meaning and potentially correct arguments to be discredited and derided by prepared opponents before their merits can be established. In this case, it may be true that Meta may have organized a well-coordinated shadow campaign for legislation using technically legal channels, but I'm sure they've anticipated this at some point, or are relying on the inertia of the system and initial buy-in to force the course.
In this case they have named individuals and firms as well, without the degree of diligence that such call outs should warrant.
In its current state, I would count it as a prelude to witch hunts.
The Swiss implementation of eID may be hint that governments may/will take the responsibility to implement and maintain the tech, but the multiple intrusions and lobbying by Palantir and friends in the EU gives me the ick.
The next thing you are going to claim kids from young age shouldn't have fully unlocked smart phones, shouldn't install any app and so on. Where is the end of this? Are you telling me parents should spend more time with kids, heck even be their role models although it is much harder compared to just giving up on them and let the glorious internet and various fashionate toxic tribes raise them? Blasphemy!!!
a lot of safer morons? we all are the 'greater moron' in some area at some point, cmon
but we always will have bad parents. So any legistlation needs to account for that. Otherwise those children with the worst parents have the greater digital abilities/opportunities/misfortunes.
"we should have good parents and can and should safe devices"
"Can have good parents" is implying we control something that we don't. Kids with the worst parents will always be at a disadvantage.
I'm always unsure what your sort of argument seems to imply. Kids are not property of their parents and the state routinely makes decisions about children's welfare.
And that's the catch-22 imposed on parents. Society wants to lord over the power as if the child is their property but none of the responsibility. Anything that went wrong is the parent's fault. It's always more and more requirements upon the parent, a nearly one way imposition of power where law or society says what you must do but of course you will bear all the costs. But by god you better not morally outrage someone or they'll have CPS up your ass.
It's largely the cheapest kind of concern. The kind where you mete out punishment out of a sense of smug moral superiority, but never lift a hand to help out for the endeavors you advocate for, only to push them into a sort of moral tragedy of the commons.
These laws only mete out punishment for people failing to obey, not actually provide support, it is essentially theatre of pretending to care about children. Theatre by the most evil of people, those that use kids as political props.
Response-ability. The ability to respond. Which you have, if you want it or not, for anything and everything you can respond to.
You see children on the streets getting beat up? Your response-ability. You see someone throwing garbage to the ground? Your response-ability.
What you DO with it, whether you act on it, or you deny to have it, doesn’t matter. It is purely the ability, the capacity to. And not responding is also a response. We typically share response-abilities with others around us who are similarly capable. Ownership doesn’t inherently come with increased response-ability. Power does.
Maybe you are confusing responsibility with (legal) liability?
See also: Duty to rescue https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duty_to_rescue - at least as applied and lived in EU, LatAm, Africa; and some US states on paper
> "fact or condition of being responsible, accountable, or answerable," from 1780s.
and in the mid 1790s it meant "that for which one is responsible; a trust, duty, etc."
i am not sure where you're getting this "ability to respond" idea from. i understand the ideal, it just won't work with humans, unless we go back to being tribal.
The key point in the etymology is "that for which one is responsible" you have to actually be responsible for some "thing" to have any responsibility.
even "Response" comes from re- + Sponsor, which:
> The general sense of "one who binds himself to answer for another and be responsible for his conduct" is by 1670s.
i am not bound by anyone else on this planet, thanks very much.
I don’t consider it to be something that “works” or not, or an ideal, but as fact of reality. The moment you could act on something totally makes it your own responsibility to do so or not. Your action or inaction will have real world consequences. Whether you can or will be held accountable is independent from that, or what framework you apply to evaluate a “good” response.
We don’t have to agree on definitions of words but that’s not the point I’m making here, which is based on reality/fact/capability to react and respond to an external stimulus. And for those (re)actions you and only you are responsible, as a fact of life, whether you want that or not. Which is how those two definitions relate.
have you really, truly, thought this through? There's hundreds if not thousands of things I could act on right now. I'm not responsible for any of them.
is this like a corollary to "being heroic is being selfless and ignoring the consequences" or something? Is it a generalization of "stimulus/response"? "branching multiverses"?
what i am getting at here, is: is this a circular "you have a responsibility because you can act, therefore you can act because there is a responsibility", is it so generalized as to be meaningless? is it just a misrepresentation of "you can only control [are responsible for] your own actions"?
In my eyes, you are! In the classical definition, you will at least have to answer/be held accountable for all of that by your later self. Other people invoke external judges but the internal one is typically the toughest of all.
I am more afraid of the God in me than the god you pray to nightly. —- Jason Molina
If you see a child drowning in a pool in front of you and you do not act, are you responsible for not saving it? I say yes. Now, what difference does it make it you see it happening, or just know about it, and you had the power to stop it? Would it make a difference if you closed your eyes, deliberately, to not see the child drowning that you know is right there in front of you, or would you still be responsible for not saving it but rather looking away? Does it change your responsibility whether you look, or you don’t look, or is it rather the knowing that makes a difference? If you think distance makes a difference, does this mean you running away from the drowning child makes you less responsible than looking right at it?
I may have muddied it.
i think i understand what you mean.
Where is that quote from? Scott Adams? I admit that I didn’t read any of his philosophy, and Scott Alexander’s eulogy doesn’t really inspire me to do so.
Y'know what happens instead? Their friends have unfettered access to smartphones, so my nephews see all the idiotic brainrotting shit on youtube shorts anyways. If not at home, they'll see all the crap we're blocking at school from their friends anyways. Hell, they could just go to the library and access the free public computers there if they wanted to! So my sisters who are responsible and do everything correctly, still suffer, and like any reasonable parent don't want to go to the extreme of locking their children up in cages and not letting them outside of the house.
There's a reason we don't legislate alcohol and tobacco sales to the same tune of "Just police your kids 24/7 and keep them under lock and key", we instead realize that we can't (or, shouldn't) supervise kids 24/7 day in and day out, and have society-wide rules that forces everyone to not sell booze to anyone underage.
I think what your sisters are doing is fine—they’re sending a signal to their kids that this stuff isn’t “good” and though they’ll undoubtedly encounter it in the world, they’re now going to be inherently biased a certain way. And that’s kinda the best you can hope for.
Funnily enough that's how I ended up getting drunk the first time, a friend stole some liquor from their parent's liquor cabinet :p We both ended up in a lot of trouble over it, him more than me obviously.
But that's sort of the point as well, if they go down that route then it's easier to catch them and it's easier to punish them for their actions. It's also much more obvious that what they're doing is the wrong thing because it involves a lot of sneaking around, deception and even stealing from your own parents. It makes kids less willing to do it in the first place (unless you're a dumbass like my friend and I).
With something like a smartphone, your parents might not let you have one but every single other kid around you has one, so at that point it only becomes an arbitrary rule that your parents imposed on you, and not a wider rule that everyone has to adhere to. If we treated smartphones for children similarly to how we treat alcohol or tobacco, the parents would have a much easier time enforcing these rules.
> ...they’re now going to be inherently biased a certain way
Or they could go the complete opposite way as well. I mean it's the most common trope/facet of being a kid, that stage of rebellion against your parents and their rules. You still have that with things like alcohol and tobacco of course, but at that point it becomes rebellion against society et al which is a bigger deal and harder hurdle to get over than rebelling against your parents and their rules.
Are you going to sit here and tell me your parents were aware of every time you touched a computer or turned on the TV? They vetted everything you consumed? It was a lot easier back then to do. I bet your parents couldn’t even figure out how to block a single channel on their tv, nor did they likely even try. Most of our parents never did.
It’s much easier to relinquish parental control of media exposure when the system helps you out by moderating the content. But the Internet changed everything. I can’t imagine how difficult it must be as a parent to oversee media exposure for their children nowadays without pulling the plug on social media altogether.
I am more technoligically literate than most of my peers and even I find I spend a lot of time on this problem. My kids aren't even teens yet, it's going to suck to keep up with this.
It is not like parents are the only influential figures in a kid's upbringing, they are not the only role models, they should not be the only ones paying attention and guiding kids to adulthood.
Parental control options as they stand are severely lacking. If you add the actively predatory enshittification efforts conducted by seemingly all larges tech companies, you are left either forbidding your kid from accessing anything (this does not work if the kid's friends have access) or allowing far more than you are comfortable with.
Lets take YouTube as an example. As it stands you have the options of YouTube (with both the most wonderful content available on one hand, and toxicity and brain rot shorts on the other) or YouTube Kids - an app with controls that do not work. How about allowing parents to whitelist content and/or creators instead of letting the algorithms run the show?
Spotify is another example. How about letting parents control whether the kid's account is plastered with videos, podcasts and AI slop?
How about your run of the mill browser, letting parents review and allow websites on a case-by-case basis? Maybe my kid is ready for news sites but not Reddit? Maybe 4chan and 8kun are better reserved for the more adventorous adults as opposed to impressionable kids?
I agree that age verification is a bad solution, but what the hell are parents supposed to reach for? It's not like Silicon Valley are stepping up with any real solutions or even propositions to these problems, it is left for - at best clueless - politicians to navigate the problem space.
Raising a kid takes a village.
But we are in western 21st century, people leave their places of birth for myriad of reasons, some better than others but all equally good for them, given its almost never easy to lose one's roots and just move on one's own.
I am in this category, we have 2 small kids and any family is at least 1000km away, the actually helpful good one more like 1500km (and no its not just a hop on some local planes, rather full day ordeal at minimum). No nanny. We see how kids and grandparents enjoy each other, grandparents have more... mental capacity? to teach them after our long day at work and so on.
But there are reasons we moved, its complex mix of leaving poor corrupted place with higher criminality where kids would struggle to achieve a good life via moral legal work and just good efforts. Not everybody has the luxury to come from background where the only difference is amount of money earned. So you give kids a better start and environment, while giving them much smaller set of role models and people who have time for them outside school.
At the end its our choices and our responsibility to raise them. No phones for a loooong time, and even after that some dumb nokia. They can screw up their lives on their own once adults, we won't contribute there even if it would be tremendously easier lifestyle.
It’s ridiculous that schools are forcing young children to carry devices for educational work that will also happily serve up brainrot, video games, and porn — with the supposed solution that the parent needs to be watching over their shoulder 24/7. Let’s just give all the kids loaded guns too, and say if anything goes wrong it’s just bad parenting.
"A loosely federated coalition of separate nations, not one entity" is actually a very good description of what the USA was before the Civil War and would technically need to abide by in order to be Constitutionally valid and legitimate; but alas, we have whatever this world dominating empire is that wraps itself in the branding and stolen identity of the United States of America, a literal antithesis of what the founders created. It is why there has always been such an intense and relentless propaganda effort to demonize "states' rights", the equivalent of which legitimate European sovereign countries and people will likely also face if the plans to the powers that are seeking to conquer the whole planet succeed. You will be told, your "loosely federated coalition of separate nations" have no right to claim sovereignty or what we call "state nullification", i.e., "states' rights" to simply nullify and invalidate any federal law that is a violation of the 10th Amendment of the Constitution, i.e., the right of states to anything not explicitly conferred upon the Federal government.
Actually, you don't even have to wait, there have been several examples already that proved without a shadow of a doubt that EU countries are not only no longer sovereign, i.e., "loosely federated coalition of separate states" when certain states disagree or do not wish to go along/vote for what the unelected body of the EU Commission conjures as legislation. You are just visiting the dungeon until you want to leave and the gate has been shut on you.
(this one: https://digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu/en/policies/eudi-regul...)
Sorry, what is this "EU regime"? I'm not understanding the logic in your post. The people pushing it are certain elected officials of member nations.
So far. But they’ll keep lobbying and we’ll need to keep fighting.
> What examples of this do you have in recent years (post 2016)?
Digital Omnibus is another.
https://noyb.eu/en/gdpr-omnibus-eu-simplification-far-remove...
https://www.business-humanrights.org/en/latest-news/eu-digit...
This implies that regulation is codified. The clear pattern of EU digital regulation doomerism is generally pointing at shitty proposals which aren't approved and codified in law.
Digital omnibus is another proposal.
If "rammed and rushed laws" is legitimately a widespread issue, you should be able to find a good example of something codified which is not just a proposal?
I'm not saying we don't have to fight. But vocal opposition to proposals which ultimately don't make it into law is the system working exactly as intended.
GDPR is entirely unenforced, it's not worth the paper it's written on, and this is due to lobbying. The situation continues to this day. The DPAs simply throw reports of violations into the trash bin.
It's hilariously transparent - Ireland recently (less than 6 months ago) added a former _Meta lobbyist_ to their DPA board [0].
US Big Tech is now spending a record €151 million per year on lobbying the EU [1], and it's completely implausible to believe they're doing that with 0 RoI. "The number of digital lobbyists has risen from 699 to 890 full-time equivalents (FTEs), surpassing the 720 Members of the European Parliament (MEPs). A total of 437 lobbyists now have continuous access to the European Parliament. Three meetings per day: Big Tech held an average of three lobbying meetings a day in the first half of 2025, which speaks volumes about their level of access to EU policymakers." It's impossible that this doesn't influence things.
[0] https://noyb.eu/en/former-meta-lobbyist-named-dpc-commission...
[1] https://corporateeurope.org/en/2025/10/revealed-tech-industr...
The fact that in the UK/EU no reputable company is now sharing data without our explicit opt-in permission suggests you are talking bollocks.
As for disreputable companies.... don't do business with them!
They can try as often as they want and they only have to win once. We - as in those who don't want this Orwellian monster to be written into law - have to win all the time.
No, it is a one way street and thus creates an imbalance. EU regimes never push new legislation that gives more rights to their citizens, only try to limit them again and again.
> Gay marriage would still be illegal if unpopular ideas couldn't be reraised.
Gay marriage is a good example. It got passed despite being unpopular. In many countries where it was pushed by force from above, from the EU to the national level, it is still unpopular.
> Democracy is a balance, unfortunately you have to put up with fighting against the shit ideas as well as for the good ones.
The issue with democracy as we have it in the EU is the imbalance of power and responsibility. Given the EU regime's decisions in the last few decades, I consider it just a shell to push unpopular and undemocratic decisions to their member states, so lobbyists don't have to bribe everyone, just the EU regime.
> I consider it just a shell to push unpopular and undemocratic decisions to their member states, so lobbyists don't have to bribe everyone, just the EU regime.
Which decisions? GDPR? DMA?
Not an EU directive. This was more a comment about various EU member states, which pushed it against the will of own citizens.
> Which decisions? GDPR? DMA?
Every directive. There was no single directive that had popular support from all member state populations. But the EU regime decides something and boxes it through the EU Commission and then uses the EuGH to force it upon all members.
Examples?
At least some EU regimes and people are against Russian sanctions and Ukraine support, they get bullied until they yield.
Illegal migration: there's no single EU country where the population supports it, yet they all got bullied to accept and support criminal migrants.
Electric cars, CO2, maybe not the majority but many country populations are against it, yet decisions get forced upon every single state.
Now, for every single topic you may say it's an exception, that it must have been like that, but in the end, if the wish of population is ignored on so many levels on so many topics, EU can be seen only as an illegitimate, corrupt regime trying to mess up everything. To the point, that even the Chinese regime feels less invasive, at least they care about the basic needs of the majority of their people.
No? The only country where you can argue the government disagree with the population on the subject is Slovakia, but their government didn't get bullied. Hungary has kept its economic ties to Russia, and even lobbied the EU to remove a few oligarchs from the sanctions list. It is currently vetoing a EU aid package to Ukraine. I don't see it tbh.
If the country refuses to follow a directive, it can. Sometimes the country get fined for it, if a citizen if the country goes to court and the ECJ judge him correct, and often the fine is directed towards improving the issue (France fine on Brittany rivers water quality was directed towards the fund that pay for water treatment plants across Europe). Also the EU let the country the decision on how to implement the directive, and let _a lot_ of leeway (just look at Spain and Portugal energy market)
Basically, the chinese, through WTO, managed to utilize corona to show politicians, regardless of color, the enormous power of complete digital control of the population.
Our spineless and incompetent EU politicians thought it very erotic, and are now ramming it down our throats.
I don't really see a way to stop this apart from moving to south america or africa, to a small country with a weak government.
Firm: Trilligent (APCO Worldwide subsidiary), EU Role: EUR 680K for AI Act, DMA, DSA. US Connection: APCO offices in DC; Meta VP calls them "integrated members of our Meta team".
Firm: White & Case LLP, EU Role: EUR 50-100K. digital markets/services. US Connection: Lead international outside counsel, 70+ lawyer team.
Firm: FTI Consulting Belgium, EU Role: EUR 10-25K. US Connection: Subsidiary of FTI Consulting Inc (NYSE: FCN, HQ Washington DC).
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20260314074025/https://www.reddi...
[2] https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/1rtd51g/update_i_pul...
This sounds like the mere tip of the iceberg, as it is commented that they maintain two separate networks with no overlap (their age verification lobbying goes through local specialists with no international footprint).
Edit:
https://www.lobbyfacts.eu/datacard/trilligent?rid=5168569461...
Trilligent (APCO Worldwide subsidiary), clients for closed financial year, Jan 2024 - Dec 2024,
- meta platforms ireland limited and its various subsidiaries, 50'000€ - 99'999€: EU Green Deal, EU AI Act, the European strategy for a better internet for kids (BIK+), online safety.
- verifymy limited ( age verification business), 0€ - 10'000€: Digital Services Act; eIDAS Regulation; Strategy for a better Internet for kids (BIK+); EU Artificial Intelligence Act; General Data Protection Regulation.
- user rights gmbh, 0€ - 10'000€: Digital Services Act.
(my MP is SNP, so I benefit from not being in the two party trap)
Of course, that defeats the entire point of the exercise.
There's more money spent in lobbyism in the EU than anywhere else in the world. Lobbyism and downright corruption: like Qatari bribing EU MEPs [1] and police finding 1 million EUR in bills hidden at a MEP's apartment (in this case a bribe to explain publicly that Qatar is a country oh-so-respectful of human rights).
The EU is way more corrupt than the US and in many EU countries there's little private sector compared to the US. In France for example more than 60% of the GDP is public spending and all the big companies are state or partially state-owned or owned by people very close to the state.
And as to american companies bribing EU politicians: it's nothing new. IBM and Microsoft for example are two names everybody in the business knows have been splurging money to buy influence and illegal kickbacks have always been flying. It's just the way things have always been operating. Today you can very likely add Google and Palantir etc. to the list but it's nothing new.
EU politicians are whores. And cheap whores at that: investigative journalists have shown, in the past, the little amount of money that was needed to buy their votes. Most of them go into politics to extract as much taxpayers money as they can for their own benefit. They of course love to get bribes.
Also to try to not get caught, EU politicians voted themselves special powers and it's very difficult for the regular police to enter official EU buildings. I know an police inspector who went and arrested a MEP for possession of child porn: it required a very long procedure, way longer than usual, and the request of special authorization allowing them to enter the EU parliament (or EU commission, don't remember which but I think it was MEP at the EP).
American companies bribing EU politicians should scare you indeed: it's been ongoing since forever.
> The Swiss implementation of eID may be hint that governments may/will take the responsibility
Switzerland is in Europe but it's not in the EU: it's not representative of the insane corruption present in the EU institutions.
https://www.lobbyfacts.eu/datacard/palantir-technologies-inc...
Lobbyists having Palantir as a client:
FTI Consulting Belgium,
https://www.lobbyfacts.eu/datacard/fti-consulting-belgium?ri...
The real driver is as always, ad revenue. This time, advertisers want and need to know a real human is engaging the brand and Meta cannot see any other way in sight to assure this fact save for age verification.
this is just the latest evolution of surveillance capitalism.
The EU has zero knowledge proof age verification systems, e.g. through your bank, which are secure and don't involve sending a copy of your ID and / or face scan to a dodgy US based 3rd party.
The same way, keeping driver license behind an age gate is unnecessary, parents should parents! I was driving tractors at 12yo, why couldn't I drive a car?
Parents should be the one responsible if they give money or a car to their kid
In many places it is essentially impossible for children (even younger than 13) to have a normal social live without access to a smart phone. Just some examples, many public transport providers are moving to apps as the only way to pay for fares, nearly all communication for sports clubs happens through messenger platforms, school information is typically distributed via apps as well and the list goes on (I have not even touched on the kids own social interactions).
The irony is that the people who say "parents should parent their kids online activities" the loudest, largely grew up with unrestricted computer use, in chat rooms, weird corners of the internet all by working around any restrictions that parents tried to put on them. Mainly because they were much more computer literate then the older generation.
What you’re proposing is similar to a “Google Free Village.” What we need is something that lets parents have some control by proxy without violating the privacy of the child or anyone else. I believe it’s possible to do so.
The Internet that we grew up on has been totally subsumed by scumbag marketing to the point that it’s unavoidable. It’s an addictive substance now. Stop pretending like the ways of the 90’s and 2000’s are still accessible.
If they are having sex with people they shouldn't, you've just been a bad parent
Isis did manage to recruit young men in the UK via telegram (OK, you just said “in all likelihood“, maybe I’m tossing you the exception that proves the rule)
> Isis did manage to recruit young men in the UK via telegram
Not sure why this is an age problem, and why it's ok for 18 year olds to be recruited to terrorist organisations but not 17 year olds...
If we really embraced this logic, then should we look at returning to the laws from before the 'protect the children' push of the 20th century. Compare this to some countries where kids can go buy beer. I've read stories from people in less regulated countries who use to buy beer for their parents when they were underage, and nothing was stopping them from buying it from themselves if their parents allowed it (or failed to stop it). Even a concept like child labor, why should we regulate that out to companies to control instead of depending upon parents to parent? When you consider web access as a person having some sort of transaction with a company, it generalizes to a very similar position of if a parent or the government should monitor that relationship for harm.
Or even kids whose parents don't have the technical knowledge needed
Yes I do agree the responsibility is with the parents, but it's these kids who are majoritarily affected by (bad internet actors) AND (bad offline actors)
We also have to consider that "children" covers anywhere from birth to approximately 18 years old.
It is reasonable to expect a parent or their proxy (e.g. caregivers and teachers) to moderate access to the Internet in the early years. Yet older children and teenagers gradually gain more independence. For example: they are able to go places on their own, get their own phone, etc.. In the physical world, we have laws that recognize this, things like forbidding the sale of alcohol and tobacco to minors. Responsibility is placed on the vendor to check identification when selling such products and the customer's age is suspect. It would be absurd to place responsibility on parents in this case since the most a parent can do is educate their child.
Now I understand the Internet poses problems when it comes to similar transactions. For face to face transactions, appearing old enough is often sufficient (perhaps with a buffer to avoid liability) for access without presenting identification. While it isn't truly anonymous, there are cases where it can be reasonably anonymous. Unfortunately, transactions are mediated by machines on the Internet. You cannot make any assumptions about the other person. Making matters worse: it is extraordinarily difficult to do age verification without disclosing identify information, and to do so in a manner that is easily recorded. Whether that information is provided directly or through a third party is a moot point. It is still being provided.
I don't know how we go about solving this problem, but I do know two things:
- Placing all responsibility into the hands of parents is absurd, and would ultimately prove harmful to adolescents. It is creating a nanny-state where the nanny is the parent. The youth would be unable to gradually gain independence, nor develop an identity independent of their parents' whims.
- We live in a world which is eager to age-gate things that should not be. Sometimes this is for semi-legitimate reasons due to how the Internet is structured. For example: there is no good reasons why children and youth cannot participate in things like discussion forums, but those forums definitely cannot look like the "social media" we have today. Other times it is for despicable reasons, such as making value based judgements based upon ideology. (The left and right are both guilty of this.)
Nonsense. What kind of nanny state? Of course parent is a nanny because they growing and taking care of their own children. This has been for this way for centuries. Nanny state is the oppposite when state is reponsible for growing your kids.
You didn't explain how "Placing all responsibility into the hands of parents is absurd," or how "would ultimately prove harmful to adolescents".
> It is reasonable to expect a parent or their proxy (e.g. caregivers and teachers) to moderate access to the Internet in the early years. Yet older children and teenagers gradually gain more independence.
its easy to moderate or at least limit access to internet for kids. - less than 5 years then have no own phone - less than 10 years most likely also don't have own phone if have don't need sim but only wifi (parent control wifi and router) - more than 15 years -> no control anyway and this age limitation trying not to limit above 15 years in most countries anyway - between 10-15 you can just not sell simcards for those ages less than 15. Parents decide if will buy such simcard for their kids. Allow buy kid like simcard that restrict access to social media. You need unrestricted simcard that you can get only if you are >15 years old or your parent will buy for you. Sure it wont restrict everything but will limit access significantly
Other solutios are treating flu with HIV.
A proper society raises their new generations.
Yes, rights and responsibilities fall mostly to parents, but I see no reason to make licentious activities difficult for parents to inhibit.
What is it you want to do on the internet?
We can have systems that allow anonymity (between client and server), but still put hardcore porn, gore, financial frauds and such out of reach of those without proof they're over 18.
Now, don't get me wrong, Palantir and it's ilk are a danger to society. But just because the military-industrial complex wants to use any excuse to control people, doesn't mean all of those excuses are wrong.
All of the systems I'm aware of rely on someplace your ID is already stored.
As it stands one should be happy if Meta catches most calls for the extermination of an ethnicity on its platform, that they would provide capabilities that allows a kid to protect themselves from bullying or grooming is just unimaginable.
No, they don't. And they can't.
Personally I’d rather not see reposts of posts this recent, especially LLM posts.
Or maybe more specifically the structure, idk not much of a writer, but many of the sentences are solid journalist quality yet the right background is not being set nor the right transitions being given etc.
My dissatisfaction mode used to be boring high school newspaper sentences but the kids still seem to _assemble_ the details a tiny bit better.
(This subthread was originally a child of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47411314.)
There's a vocal portion of people which opposes any solution because "privacy, government overreach, surveillance ...". So instead of a solution like e.g. zero-proof age verification, that tries to minimize intrusions on privacy, the result is the worst of all worlds, maximum surveillance (but I guess it's ok if it is not the federal government, but meta), with minimum utility. Just look at the freaking mess that is trying to proof your identity in the US.
Now, what will the platform do with it? Concretely? As in: Name one bad outcome a reasonable parent would care about that's prohibited under these bills. If the bad thing happens due to willful negligence, then there needs to be some actual material consequence to someone at the platform provider.
Will that be bad for "engagement"?
Yes. That's the point.
You aren’t allowed any kind of filtering, or alternative ordering?
Do you always view the ‘new’ feed on hackernews, or do you prefer looking at the front page? I much prefer the front page, for all sorts of reasons. The new feed has all sorts of spam and garbage posts. Reposts, troll bait, etc. The front page usually has much more interesting posts, and definitely posts that have more interesting comments on them.
I don’t want to get rid of the front page, I like the idea of seeing posts ordered by popularity.
Why should you get to decide I am no longer allowed to sort my own feed by popularity, or however I want? I can’t sort things, just because you think I shouldn’t enjoy my feed too much?
I simply said that if I could, that is what I would like to see.
I tried to phrase my comment to convey that I know it is not a popular opinion. I am not surprised that someone would disagree me with, and I am okay with that :)
This whole thread is about attempts to outlaw “addictive” feeds, which is what I take issue with. I don’t like the idea of government having that level of control.
On the other hand, I am also not in the group who says we should make no attempts to help our society deal with the negative effects of addictive feeds. I feel the same way about free speech; I am a huge believer in the absolute necessity for complete free speech, but I also don’t think we can ignore the power and influence of disinformation and/or propaganda. We should absolutely be working on figuring out mitigation tactics that don’t involve prohibiting speech, or prohibiting particular feed algorithms.
This is my usual stance. I have to deal with various regulations (and worse: state-by-state laws) in my business, so I tend to be reflexively anti-regulation.
And yet I find myself saying these things.
the bad outcomes don't need to be prohibited under these bills. it's already illegal to, for example, distribute pornography to minors. which i think is something that a reasonable parent would have a problem with.
but if there is no way to determine who is a minor and who isn't, then it's impossible to determine the difference between "willful negligence" and regular old negligence and enforce any consequences for breaking that law. age verification laws are about mechanisms to make other, already existing laws actually enforceable.
I'm sorry what?
This is not even close to consensus, as you present it.
Also, a thought exercise, just for you:
1. Should stabbing people be illegal? 2. Should we make it impossible to stab people?
Think about those things, and how they relate to eachother. What would the consequences be of #2?
meta could spend their billions lobbying for that, if they wanted to
edit: to be clear, I do think a government developed and maintained ZKP ID/age system is the best possible compromise, I just don't think we have any chance of getting it
Technically, yes, but one party (e.g. USGOV) has many more strands that it can weave together into a larger coherent picture than the other (e.g. Meta).
Also one party has guns and an almost blanket immunity to using them on people it deems it does not like via its privacy violations.
That probably tips the scales for some people.
But at this point, the government is getting the data from private companies. So if the private companies were not gathering the data, the government would not have such easy access. So I'm much more concerned about private companies for that reason. Yes, the government can do more things to you physically, but they are too dependent on what private companies provide
‘Invasion’ is doing a lot of work in your comment, and I don’t think there is a clear and widely agreed upon definition of what constitutes an ‘invasion of privacy’. If you have such a definition, please do share it.
How do you think this came to be?
My question is mostly rhetorical: it is obvious that government & safety institutions are themselves fanning the flames of this ridiculous movement away from privacy and towards a surveillance state of over-protectionism. The world has not significantly changed in 50 years in terms of terrorist threats, (except for, ironically, threats to your identity online), yet suddenly now that we can track people online, we must to combat this non-changing threat factor? It's all security theater.
All intelligence agencies benefit from more data, and will happily use lack of data as a scapegoat for their own incompetence. They instill fear to justify their existence, unlawful behavior, and lack of results.
I'm not on board with any of it, but the last thing I want is the government to control it.
Meta on the other hand is a dictatorship run by Zuck that's only marginally accountable to stockholders (which are only a small subset of the population).
The unfortunate thing about this lobbying effort is that it's making the government accountable to Meta, which is the worst of all worlds.
At least when the government is working, there are controls around what they can collect, what they can do with it, and who they share it with. And what they cannot do with it.
For example, the government cannot silence your speech, but a private company can. The government cannot share your data with others, a private company can.
Unfortunately the government has abdicated their duties and so you think they are worse than a private company.
At least the government shouldn't on a theoretical level?
System A is that way by design . System B is that way despite the intended design.
The government can do none of those things. They can't deplatform you. They can't exploit your data or sell it. They can't block you from it.
At least by design.
By design, having the government responsible for verifying your identity is far superior than having private companies do it, because by design they have to be truthful and forthcoming.
The flaw is that the system is failing and so right now the private system and government system are equally bad.
Its worth remembering how the Nazis so efficiently found Jews in the Netherlands. The Dutch government kept meticulous records, including things like your name, address, and religious affiliation. That wasn't a big deal until the Nazis rolled in, throw in some level of Nazi sympathizers in the Dutch government and it wasn't hard for them to track down anyone they wanted to find.
The government needs our records to collect taxes. So at the minimum the government must have some information. We can argue over the mechanism and trust factor but that’s not the core issue here.
The private companies doing this is the core problem. This is a service that the government could provide for free with the most safeguards.
Or perhaps you have some other proposal? And I’m not interested in the no government anarchy you propose elsewhere.
Some entity has to be trusted with our data anyway, at least government supposed to have some accountability before the citizens, corporations have much higher incentives for profit.
It doesn't require only trusting the government (or another corporation) today, it requires trusting all future iterations of them as well. It may be a different story if the data was periodically purged, say after each administration for example.
Why?
I'm not arguing we don't need a government. But to silently take for granted that everything from income taxes to public roads and travel restrictions are a given jumps ahead here.
We could decide, for example, that the government shouldn't be allowed to centralize certain data and remove some of what we expect them to do instead.
How exactly government manages our data is a valid concern and in the modern world this needs to be reevaluated.
It would be good to clamp down on private companies collecting that data.
Is it actually a crime to upload a fake ID photo to a private company for age verification?
Also fundamentally speaking - this does just take away your right to privacy. do you just let your rights be taken away?
I don't want 'minimization' of intrusion of privacy, i want no intrusion of privacy.
(Which is fine when the problem is bullshit and there is nothing to solve, which actually may be the case here.)
unless you want to argue semantics and go 'actually they're all part of technology', but that makes your argument even less meaningful.
Or, put another way, you cannot "just change culture", not any more than you can make a river flow uphill by pushing water with your hands. You can splash some water around and make a little puddle, but it'll quickly flow back to rejoin the river and continue on its way.
Culture is always seeking a dynamic equilibrium, in a landscape defined by economics and technology constraints. The only way to achieve lasting change is to change the landscape.
then you’re using different definition that everyone else, and bring nothing into discussion other than confusion.
>Or, put another way, you cannot "just change culture"
it isn't shaped just by technology. There are economic factors and cultural exchanges between different cultures.
This is purely tautological line of thinking, that brings nothing to discussion.
Literally repeating what I said.
> and cultural exchanges between different cultures.
What do you think distinguishes exchanges that are forgotten to those that achieve lasting change?
A solution to what, though? I oppose any solution because I disagree with your premise: this is not a real problem. We do not need to do anything about it, and any cost would be too high.
If a kid wants to sneak some porn, he's going to have to hide his digital nudeymag under his digital mattress, and when it's discovered, he'll have to accept his fate as decided by his parents.
These solutions don’t solve anything.
Care to elaborate? I'm not sure what's a mess about a driver's license, social security card. I've never once had any issue with my identity.
It no longer says this, and has not for a long long time. My parent's cards did, but mine does not. Also, I'm old (for this forum at least), so this isn't a recent change.
Don't know about "a long long time" but the feds have been treating Social Security Cards as identification since 1943 (military, some agencies) or 1963 (IRS) (cf [0])
[0] https://www.straightdope.com/21341325/why-does-my-old-social...
conflating the two meanings of identification feels deliberate at this point
Probably because USGOV said it is[0]
"In 1943 a presidential executive order directed the military and other government agencies to use the number for identification purposes, and in 1961 the Internal Revenue Service began using the number for taxpayer identification."
[0] https://www.straightdope.com/21341325/why-does-my-old-social...
> identity theft
Some financial institutions may not have proper fraud prevention policies, but that is a problem both caused by and to be resolved by the financial institution, not the consumer. Pretending it's the consumer's problem may protect the financial institution, but leads to entire categories of new problems far more devastating. Don't pretend some nebulous concept of identity has been stolen. Say it like it is: the financial institution was defrauded due to their own lax policies.
We aren't "pretending" it's a consumer problem. It is a consumer problem. When someone opens up a credit card or loan in my namd, whose life gets messed up? Not the banks! Pretending it's not a consumer problem is dangerous and can lead to a lot of messed up financial lives.
Personally, I freeze my credit with all major bureaux, and I shred any mail that has my name on it. It's annoying, yes, but the alternative is even more annoying.
> the actual illicit act was somebody lying to the bank
Yes, this is known as fraud, and the entire concept of identity theft.
The situation is so bad that the SSA has to explicitly state: "Social Security card is not an identification document" https://www.ssa.gov/blog/en/posts/2023-03-23.html
Baffling.
Neither of those are accepted by various states' voter id laws, nor can you reliably board an airplane with them since RealID.
The only foolproof identity card in the US appears to be a passport (which, you know, global federal identity card... exactly what the folks against universal ids dislike)
For the majority of existing Real IDs, they will not be valid proof of eligibility to vote.[1]
> While your REAL ID would count as a photo ID when voting, in only a few states would it be considered proof of citizenship. Only five states — Michigan, Minnesota, New York, Vermont and Washington — offer the type of enhanced REAL IDs that explicitly indicate U.S. citizenship.
> Outside of those states, you would need another document to prove you were born in the U.S.
[1] https://thehill.com/homenews/nexstar_media_wire/5787733-woul...
This is incorrect. RealID is optional on DLs. Assuming modern DLs are all RealIDs is wrong.
Not today. However, there is a bill in the Senate, that the President is demanding to be passed, that would eliminate this reality.
https://www.usatoday.com/story/graphics/2026/03/17/save-amer...
Seems like this is just one of those "feel-good" laws. A waste of time and money.
You've made this up.
> nor can you reliably board an airplane with them since RealID.
That sounds like a problem that they created, and can choose to uncreate. I don't need to know the identity of people on planes any more than I need to know the identity of people in trains, buses, or taxis. "RealID" itself is dumb, and was the result of wearing down popular resistance for decades.
https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2025/apr/18/byron-dona...
There are also a bunch of other gotchas: Original birth certificates and all currently-issued military IDs are not acceptable, for instance (even though the bill lists birth certificates and military IDs as acceptable, there are carve-outs to ban the common cases).
Good luck getting a passport between now and then.
All of the voter ID requirements in the SAVE Act are conservative wet dreams To deny undesirable populations the right to vote. see: https://fairelectionscenter.org/advocacy/save-act-2025/
Wikipedia has a great list of current and past methods of voter suppression. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voter_suppression_in_the_Unite...
A couple decades ago they used to print the ID then and there, IDs were far more accessible back then. For some god forsaken reason they stopped that most everywhere.
To put it in Godwin's terms: you're the one saying that the people denying the Jewish Question are the people enabling the Nazis. If we would just agree to the moderate compromise (fill in the blank), then the Nazis wouldn't have an excuse.
Most importantly, it's also an attack on a strawman. Nobody is arguing agains zero-proof age verification. It's probably possible, but in reality is absolute nonsense. There is no material proposal anywhere for a zero-proof age verification system that prevents individuals from being tracked. There is mathematical speculation, and proposals that vaguely and dishonestly simulate what people are pretending exists somewhere.
All of them involve individuals giving up their privacy, and insidiously substitute protecting your identity from the providers of "adult" information where protecting your identity from the government and the providers of verification services are actually the important parts. I do not give half of a shit whether some porn site knows who I am; the only reason I care at all is because they may share this information with governments and private entities that will use it to track me, manipulate me, or blackmail me.
The reason for this? Governments would lose all interest in age verification if it were possible to do it without invading my privacy. If it is possible in the abstract (which it may well be, mathematically), governments would prioritize sabotaging any company or proposal that could make it happen.
The fake proposals of zero-proofs are offering me something I don't care about in order to trick me into giving up something I value, and calling me unreasonable for not falling for it. No, I'm just not a fool.
The real solution: a legal requirement for "adult" information services to only reply to requests that declare they're from someone over the legal age to consume that information. People who give their children computers could root them to make sure that that header is stripped, you could install browser extensions to make sure that header is stripped, you could make sure that header was stripped at the router, you could make sure that everyone could make a phone call to their ISP to tell them never to allow a packet across that carried that header unless it also included a key or a password that the adults of the household could add onto their own requests.
The above methods don't take any technical sophistication at all, and would solve the problem better than computers that attested age, the computers that 14-year olds would be operating for their often computer-illiterate parents anyway.
Why aren't they used? Because this is a totalitarian game, not a serious proposal to solve a serious problem, and it is just meant to fool morons long enough to screw us all in a permanent way.
No, the way to stop it is to talk to your representatives.
You have the power. You just have to pick up a phone, and ask your friends, relatives, neighbors, to do the same. (They will, because it affects all of them.) Tell your reps to remove the legislation or you're voting them out. They don't want to lose their jobs. They will change if you tell them to. But only if you tell them. That is your power. Use it or lose it.
I keep seeing this advice, yet whenever it actually matters, it doesn't really work
No amount of talking to representatives stopped the genocide in Gaza, no amount of talking to representatives is stopping what the US is doing now in Iran
Majority of Congress voted to continue war in Iran, despite an overwhelming majority of Americans being opposed to it
Then they just continue with that was already happening.
You have consumer activist brain. Next you're going to suggest that we complain to the manager or start our own government and compete in the marketplace.
> The only thing that talks is money
No, the only thing that is talking is money. Money wants this. You're busy pretending like you're going to do a boycott; they're going to boycott you.
Complain about the internet? They'll just blacklist you from it. Complain about the phone? Well now you can't use one; try smoke signals. Complain about the landlord? They'll settle the case, kick you out on the street, and blacklist you among all private equity landlords and the management companies that service small landlords. You'll just go to a small landlord that doesn't use one of the management companies? Well they won't have access to a bunch of vendors that have exclusive contracts with and share ownership with the management companies; now they can't make any money and have to sell to private equity.
You've been fooled into thinking that being victimized is a moral failure of the victim. The perpetrators taught you that. They taught you that the only appropriate action is to beg and threaten to leave, and they shut down customer service and monopolized the market. But, again, the worst thing they trained you to do is to blame the victim.
What do you mean? They still need people purchasing software and hardware.
You can argue effectiveness, but if enough people say no, then a boycott is extremely effective. The issue is always on awareness and making people take hard actions.
They don’t need you to purchase hardware or software any more. We’re moving to centralized economic planning, where resources for datacenter buildouts are reserved for people with sufficient political loyalty (and come from tax dollars), and the only products are surveillance and collective punishment.
If you don’t want that to happen, then you’ll need to help build an alternative.
Yes, I agree.
>They don’t need you to purchase hardware or software any more.
Need? No. But they still want as much money as possible. That's why a boycott/strike will still be effective. They don't need money anymore but will still bend over backwards for it.
>If you don’t want that to happen, then you’ll need to help build an alternative.
I want to help. Not sure what I can do to help, though. Seems like simply calling my reps is talking to the wind.
Just because you're a pessimist doesn't mean you have to be coy. :)
At the end of the day, this stuff is headed by humans. Humans are fragile, weak even. They like silly things like food and safety.
Look, I'm not saying we need to be killing people. However, I AM saying that just about every single significant rights progression in human history was achieved that way. So, draw whatever conclusions you want.
Ideally, we are above that. Christ, it's not the 20th century anymore. So hold up a sign or something.
Protesting, voting, and civil disobedience are all great, I agree.
Guy with the root of "pessimism" in his moniker: start writing about that in your posts!
And you seem to have been fooled into thinking all victims are powerless.
Or, refuse to participate or use any tech that implements OS age verification (start with communication app Discord).
The reason nothing happened was because Snowden is still a State Dept or CIA asset. He's an actor and/or a limited hangout of some kind to show the US government and claim to be doing absolutely insane bullshit and nobody cares. New Zealand retroactively changed their laws (clearing John Key of any wrong doing for illegally spying on Kim Dotcom), allowing the GCHQ to legally spy on all their citizens.
As far as refusing to work for these companies, I was on Linux at work for over a decade. But after my last job I was forced to take a .NET role and with a $30k/yr paycut. It'd like to get back into a good role again where I can use Linux, but I'm not sure if I'd be willing to stand my ground on this issue, because I also don't want to lose my house and software jobs are incredibly scares right now. Unlike Snowden, I don't have a government paycheck coming in to continue spreading lies.
I think the earth is round. I'm a "globe-head," but I have MAD respect for people who hold such a controversial viewpoint. I think they're wrong, but I've read a lot of their stuff and don't think they're stupid.
I'm 50/50 on the moon landing. You would probably be too if you actually looked into it.
The scientifically learned use to thing leaches and bloodletting was innovative. Many of the things we think of as being scientifically enlightened today will be looked upon with horror 200 years from now.
Flat Earth only has a handful of anecdotal short-range observations of some flat areas of Earth taken from a perspective near ground level. Relative to the size of the Earth, those short-distance observations are dominated by the margins of error in the observation. All of those sight lines are accounted for in LIDAR scans of the Earth as well as the WGS84 model.
For less than $1,000 you can send a high-altitude balloon up to see the slight curvature of the Earth. For a few thousand dollars, you can circumnavigate the Earth in an airplane along a common latitude. For tens of thousands of dollars you can go to Antarctica and see the 24-hour Sun from November to January. Or you could just have all your friends from around the globe point to the Sun and measure that angle. With basic trigonometry, you can see the Sun is about 92 million miles away.
[1] Hsu & Horányi (2012), University of Colorado Boulder - "Ballistic motion of dust particles in the Lunar Roving Vehicle dust trails," American Journal of Physics: https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2012AmJPh..80..452H/abstra...
Turns out they were right
These bills also need to be opposed on a legal/political level.
Something I realized last night is that people who lie about their age to send false signals may inadvertently open themselves up to CFAA liability (a felony). So this is a serious matter for users who want to maintain anonymity.
I do think there is a stronger case against the next under-18 Aaron Swartz, who will get hit with 200 felonies for setting his age wrong (one felony per app/service) after pissing off someone important.
If I get arrested for lying about my age, when I'm of age, then they could probably get me on a whim already anyway. No point in trying to fall in line.
I'm 47, and I started using the internet in my early teens through BBS gateways. I've seen every age of the Internet, and there's always been widely available pornographic materials. Why all of a sudden is this a crisis?
Perhaps I'm missing something?
Pornography is a very convenient pretext. The real target is anonymity and pseudonymity. Both have been abundantly available on the early Internet. Both were and are being gradually squeezed out from it.
Various law enforcement agencies would love to know more, always more. The more the users are required to identify themselves, link their online identity (maybe pseudonymous for other users) to their official offline identity, the easier it is to find and catch criminals. Not only criminals, of course, but even if we assume 0% nefarious intent, and only the desire to catch the evildoers who swindle grandmas out of their life's savings, this still holds.
Operators of big sites also would benefit. Easier to ban disruptive users. Many great ways to turn the precise identity into targeted ads.
The internet has become a very serious, consequential space. More like... the "real world", which was considered separate from the internet in 1990s. Now they are inseparable, so the pressures of the "real world" are equally present offline and online.
pretending the actual issue doesn't exist will not help you stop laws like this
As many people have noted, a different system could delegate the enforcement to parents. Instead of forcing a web site (or an OS!) to collect identifying information and certify the age, we could demand that a web site would send a header stating the legal age boundary. The user's device then would be demanded to honor it, depending on device's settings. Parental controls should work, and parental controls are already there on most devices. Open-source software would have no trouble implementing parental controls, because they leave the responsibility and the choice with the user. No identity info would leak to third parties.
In a more elaborate case, a state identity provider (something that provides birth certificates, passports, etc) would provide an OAuth-like flow that would certify the age of a bearer of a short-lived token to a site which generated the token, without giving any details. This gives the parties more assurance, and gives the state a bit more visibility, but still mostly preserves the user's privacy.
I don't think that these simple ideas never came to the lawmakers' minds, or to their tech experts' minds. But it's less appealing to them, because it results in less control. Why not push for more disclosure when a chance presents itself?
the parents thing doesn't work. it's one thing if parents don't give a shit if their child sees absolutely horrible stuff (in US those parents probably lose custody these days). it's another thing if parents aren't even aware that their child watches it while quiet in the bedroom. which is the problem here.
"we could demand that a web site would send a header stating the legal age boundary" can be interesting. start a petition go talk to your representstive.
For thirty years now, preteens, whether alone or huddled with peers, have peered at computer screens and sought these things on the World Wide Web. In the 1990s, it was porno tapes the cool kid sneaked from her parents' closet and brought to the slumber party. In the 1980s, it was sticky magazines stolen from the newsstand or an older brother's closet. The technologies that made these things possible is part of the real world.
I can't even buy a sandwich in the "real world" without a computer's involvement in the transaction.
This is so wrong I can't even. I recommend you to look some simple things like percentage of preeten internet users in 1996. For rare ones who had it at home think about how they used it. Even in US which was the first it was probably around 2 hours, not per day PER WEEK. Let alone the rest of the world. and on a bulky machine where it's way easier for parents to know when you are doing it.
and this material was very rare. with less people on internet and without total encryption (that was way pre https/tor/vpn) if a psycho criminal posts a video of doing something terrible he can be traced
> In the 1980s, it was sticky magazines stolen from the newsstand or an older brother's closet
The stuff we're talking about is not the stuff of erotic magazines.
What does seem to definitely be having a severe negative impact though is social media.
You can find thousands of years old testament to how the children are being destroyed by modern culture, and each new generation thinks THIS TIME IS DIFFERENT. (and people will agree with this and say this time with these concerns is actually different with a list of reasons)
seems like this time it may actually be different. and peer reviewed.
Because they worked on it for decades, and it's finally showing results.
> I've seen every age of the Internet, and there's always been widely available pornographic materials.
Just because something bad happened in the past, we should stay away from fixing it? Just because you didn't (probably) suffer as much as others, we should continue looking away? And that's leaving out that the world on all levels and corners today has become significant worse than in your youth.
> Why all of a sudden is this a crisis?
It's not all of a sudden. The calls' haven been around for a decade and longer, but research has become better over the years, so it's harder to ignore them. And now there is also AI, which significant speeds up the spreading of fake news, bot messages, sexualized deep fakes, and other very problematic content.
Any reasoning after that is just fluff to get people not looking at it critically to accept it.
I think that I'm biased to think "it shouldn't be a crisis" because I saw that stuff as a kid and turned out ok, it's a prime example of survivor bias, maybe someone who saw that stuff didn't turn out that well. Also one thing I've been wondering I'm not sure if that's the beginning of my everlong cynicism. If it is, then I might have been better off without being exposed to that material that early in my life.
We do not need to turn society into a police state because we're afraid the next generation might not be able to handle what we handled fine for the most part
Edge cases should not dictate the removal of our freedom & rights
apt-get install isis-beheading-vids doesn't work on any Linux distribution I've seen, and it's not like Microsoft or Apple were preloading them on laptops.
These bills have nothing to do with online safety. They exist purely to establish a police state (that will currently be run by a convicted felon with child abusers as deputies -- look at what ICE has been doing to the kids they round up, especially the pregnant ones).
if you agree that online safety problem exists then suggest better solution. if you disagree then keep on living in a fantasy world
And history books present this in different context. They don't show a literal video of this execution and talk about it with a different goal in mind. Like if you get a drug in clean room for necessary medical purpose vs inject yourself dirty needles under the bridge because you like it, different things
See, I have, and I think I am actually a better person for it. Videos like these show how humans are really just apes and can easily fall into doing heinous things. It helped harden my view that religion is a net negative for the world, made me a bit more careful, especially in where I choose to travel, and has given me a wider worldview.
No one is rick-rolling with Isis decapitation videos, you go to those sites, and you know what you are getting into. One of the wonders of the early internet was rotten.com, and I am very sad its gone.
How exactly is seeing what human beings are capable of going to harm anyone? It certainly isn't so "damaging" that it needs to be hidden from anyone.
It might not be harmful on an objectively quantifiable measure, but it will have an effect on people and what that effect is depends on the person.
But even then, I think if adults knew what we were up to, maybe they would have lobbied for stuff then too.
For my 10 year old, we don't allow youtube or any other algorithm doomscrolling feed. And no voice chat in online gaming. We plan on waiting until 13 for a phone, or behind-closed-doors internet, and we use parental controls.
I'm not presenting this as an argument for age verification, I think it's a naive solution that comes with major drawbacks and won't work anyway.
But the landscape is very different and I think we should try to understand where parents who support this are coming from, because lobbying from Meta or whatever isn't the only issue.
There are parents who have been making choices for their young kids and have to start letting go at some point as the kids age, and maybe, at whatever point parents stop monitoring, they would like the kids to not be fully in the deep end. I think we should acknowledge that and explain why age verification isn't a solution, rather than pretend the world is the same and pretend don't have any legitimate concerns by saying "well we turned out okay".
(edit: reworked the tone in response to feedback)
Parents want to stop monitoring their kids, but still want their kids' experiences to be catered to their ideals, so the rest of society must now bend towards what you want for your kids specifically?
What about parents who want a different set of guardrails for their kids - more limited or less limited than you? What about people who aren't kids - does their privacy or freedom not matter, just because you don't want to handle it yourselves anymore?
That sounds to me (a non-parent) like a very selfish and naive worldview. I'm assuming from your tone that you are in support of this, so would you explain to me why you think its not?
I agree with everything you said.
I just think "we turned out fine" is always a garbage argument, and worse, fails to understand what drives people to want stuff like this.
I think it's better to acknowledge the real issues parents have, and then explain why age verification is an extremely naive solution that won't solve the problems and comes with a host of other problems.
I think the solution has to start and end before the internet is even involved in the equation, anything less is harm by shifting the burden.
It's not just targeted advertising, though you can open youtube kids/instagram/tiktok and see plenty of that and age brackets happen to perfectly align with leaked metas' advertising brackets. (5-10, 10-12) (group A), 13-15 (group B), 16-17 (group C), 18-24, 24-30.
I think it's largely driven by the increasing computing power
Pushing to turn society into a police state because parents are too tired/lazy/tech-illiterate is simply not the solution
sure but the bar is low for a reason. On top of that, we're discriminating against people born to bad parents by leaving them vulnerable, arguably furthering inequality. I don't think anything is necessarily out of scope in terms of the solution, what matters is identifying the issue (i.e. the intentionally addictive properties of these platforms) and trying to reduce harm.
Try to start an ISP and/or become a public Certificate Authority.You will quickly run into steep requirement (admin and financial). To buy IP address space, get peering partners for traffic transit, hosting dns, hosting email (good luck getting mail delivered to the big providers without having your own users verified via mobile number). Try to build a mobile app, or phone or runtime - all the key signing, binary signing involved, the entire security model from hardware/firmware, boot, memory access, runtime safety and on and on. Then there are the intelligence agencies and various countries surveillance laws, information laws.
If you add it all together, we are already monitored 100%. They want to linked and prove the monitored device is linked a certain human beyond a doubt. Email, Mobile, Full names are not enough, they want your biometrics too. They want you serial numbers of devices and mac addresses of networked devices and SIM cards. They want it all.They want your children to have devices with camera, mic and gps trackers in. Your kids will be part of kompromat before they reach adulthood and some of them will be blackmailed by government agents and other bad actors throughout life. Some kids will be trafficked with the help of all these tech solutions, because they know exactly where your kids are at every moment.
Add home assistants, smart tv's with cameras, toys with cameras, outdoor cameras, shopping mall cameras everywhere, in-vehicle cameras and mics. Bluetooth beacons everywhere.
Add it all up and ask yourself, is this truly about child safety? Not at all. I'd argue they would be more exposed. If they wanted children safer, they'd recommend parents and schools to 100% remove kids from the internet or devices with public internet access. Why does a 10 year old need to know how to join a teams meeting and being comfortable on a video call?
Not to mention the access to weird porn and gore sites that WILL traumatize a young mind.
Then contemplate what all this data will be used for in the hands of extremists, nazi's, dictators, the effects on free speech & journalism, the propaganda machines reach on you and your family.
The internet is 10000% cooked and no longer open. It's better to disconnect from it at this point.
What the hell are you talking about? They already know where my kids are! At school which is funded by government.
As I understand it, the age verification laws are part of a three pronged plan to eliminate privacy, freedom of speech and freedom of expression online.
The goals being to expand current police abuses to include LGBTQ++, reporters, democrats, non-whites, non-christians, demonstrators, etc.
It all is predictable and makes perfect sense if you assume the goal is to hold control over the white house in 2029 while being even less popular than they currently are.
Great sentence.
Aside from making me completely doubt everything you're stating, I don't understand why people just take it as a given that Project 2025 is something the current administration gives two shits about.
Is war in Iran in Project 2025?
Because if you use project 2025 as a scorecard, the current administration is hitting all the salient points very quickly. With a score that high, inferring that the administration does in fact give two shits about it seems reasonable.
Furthermore, looking through the list of objectives, the "completed" objectives are all fairly middle of the road conservative points, it's no surprise that many of those are marked as completed. The one's that are making headlines are mostly found in the "Not Started" sections. https://www.project2025.observer/en?sort=status-asc
It's not surprising that a conservative think tank and a conservative administration are aligned on a quite a few things but there are plenty of things in this list of objectives that the current administration has either not done or said anything regarding or has actively worked against.
As an exercise, go through all 320 objectives and see how many _you_ agree with. Plenty of them are milquetoast positions. A chunk of them are also just "continue enforcing existing laws", sinister wording for bog standard practices or broad/vague enough that every administration could probably call it completed.
In short, it's a padded list.
Also, this administration has said they are not following project 2025. That means they are definitely following project 2025.
You can ignore anything in the category of immigration enforcement, DEI or gender issues in Project 2025 because Trump has been going on about that stuff long before project 2025 was ever published.
There's also a bunch of "End the Fed" type of libertarian stuff that Trump, showing himself to be a proponent, not opponent, of big government is never going to do.
maybe since minors can't enter into a contract they can't agree to TOS and therefore their content is ineligible to be used as LLM training material? just guessing.
Are people in that group powerful, influential and wealthy?
Would that group benefit from being able to use state power against individuals who just won't stop shining light on injustice?
The political planets have aligned in many nations for private industry to lobby for this power, sating their own goals as advertisers and the state's goals as authoritarians. This is an open conspiracy between every tech giant and every government to perpetually identify every action that every person ever makes online for the sakes of advertising, propagandizing, surveiling, persecuting, and imprisoning people.
It is not a coincidence that this is occurring in all western nations at the same time; these economies are incredibly large and active, and these governments have been under attack from the far-right for decades.
America needs another Zappa.
The push for age verification seems to stem from conservative states trying to appear to care about children through symbolic gestures while cutting other funding and protections for children.
The right has figured out that they can keep queer kids (especially trans kids) in the closet if they don't let them learn what their "difference" actually is. It's "don't say gay" applied to the internet.
Age signals from the OS? Need to provide a channel of information available to applications. Applications already talk to servers with unchecked commonality.
Biometric data? Today it unlocks your private key. Tomorrow it's used to verify you are the same person that was used during sign-up -- the same that was "age-verified".
Next year, the application needs to "double-check" your identity. That missile that's coming to you? Definitely not AI-controlled, definitely not coming to destroy the "verified" person who posted a threatening comment about the AI system's god complex. Nope, it's coming to deliver freedom verification.
Rocket is obvious and spectacular. Those are for amateurs.
A journalist got beaten up to the brink of death and will never walk again by 'unknown perpetrators'? Well, it's a dangerous country, and he had it coming, maybe some concerned citizens went a bit too far, but our dear leader cannot watch over everybody.
Scaling: do you think other journalists will not take notice?
And he will still be alive to reminder them how they may end up.
If you want to see how far imagination can go here, look up Artyom Kamardin and think how would you behave after hearing his story .
And turns out power-tripping men offered raw power over other humans on threat of violence is something they like.
And ICE? Remember J6 and Three Percenter's and all those right wing militias? They ended up in ICE. Same reasons.
Meanwhile, regular cops have been doing the same awful things that they've always been doing, literally at the command of Democratic mayors who are pompously declaring that they won't enforce immigration law in speeches. They'll send cops to throw your shit into the street when your rent suddenly doubles, and won't report an illegal immigrant felon (whose history we know nothing about) to ICE.
Organized white supremacists are nobodies with no power, they're all over the military, the cops, prison guards, and ICE. Meanwhile, Parchman Farm in Mississippi doesn't even report the people who are dying there, and has plastic all over the floors because the roofs are open to the elements. That's just legal American black people who this country actually owes something to, though. That was trendy like five years ago, it's so over now.
Now you obviously shouldn't set social justice aside, and given the choice, I absolutely prefer the capitalist hellscape where my friends and I are not being rounded up and killed, but that's a REMARKABLY low standard I've had to settle on as a voter.
Environmental: Democrats Joe Manchin, Jon Tester, Michael Bennet, Bob Casey, Martin Heinrich, John Hickenlooper, and Ben Ray Lujan all backed the pro-fossil fuel position and blocked the Biden admin's ban on fracking. And that's before you get to the eleven House Democrats who crossed the aisle to vote for gutting NEPA, which is basically the foundational law for environmental review in this country.
Science: Democrats continue to stall on GMO foods despite thousands of studies confirming they're safe, and have pushed heavy restrictions treating them like health hazards with zero scientific basis. This is basically their version of climate change denial and it deserves way more attention than it gets.
Public Health: The entire mess with the ACA, juicing the insurance industry while keeping healthcare gatekept behind financial hooks and ensuring workers MUST stay employed to have any reliable access to it. Yeah they get some points for trying to keep Medicare and Social Security afloat, they don't want all the poor people to just die about it, but those are remarkably low bars.
So, the same? No. That said, NOTHING about ANY of that could be called "Left" by anyone being remotely intellectually honest.
The Democrats and Republicans both are different approaches for the same billionaire class.
They're not "opposite sides of the same coin". Instead, they're more akin to 2 sock puppets. One wears red, and the other blue.
Like the Trump tariffs? They were initially Biden's tariffs that Trump increased and extended. Different clothes, same game.
But I'd be willing to try a good run with democratic socialism, or hell, communism. What we have is the cushy gold-parachute socialism for the elite, and unabashed hardcore capitalism for the poorest. And that fucking sucks. Burn it down.
My argument isn't pro-Republican, I just want Democrats to follow through with the shit they talk, and actually live up to the progressive label they try to retain with actual progressive policies, not just more female oppressors of color. That's nice but it's not a solution to the problems we're having.
For them it was sniffing like a hound for easy votes. And when it didn't pan out, you all get sold down the river.
Even the "Progressives" like Sanders and AOC dont shake certain trees. Like when's the last time Sanders or AOC denounced Israel's genocide.
Even Mamdani basically did a 180 on rent control.
Republicans would heartily see you shoved in a chipper shredder. Democrats would shove you in a chipper shredder owned by a BIPOC woman owned company.
That was from a quick search, no doubt there's more. Now it gets down to trust issues on reporting.
"Disabled spending" already happened to the people in the ICC that acted contrary to Trump's diktats[0], without the need for a digital panopticon, both the banks and the government know who you are.
[0] https://www.irishtimes.com/world/us/2025/12/12/its-surreal-u...
Never stopped people overengineering :P
So, yeah.
But none of that stops Meta wanting to help Trump be more efficient at harassing discontent.
It can always get worse. Always.
> Nobody stops the government from sending goons to your door right now for a snarky comment.
This is just dumb. They literally don't know who wrote it, and have to assign somebody to track you down. The fact that they're putting infrastructure on your computer and on the network to make this one click away for them matters.
I've wondered if FaceID and the Android counterpart are actively creating an extraordinary labeled dataset for facial expressions at the point of sale.
With users trained to scan their face before every transaction, tech companies could correlate transactions to facial expressions, facial expressions to emotions, and emotions to device content. I can imagine algorithms that subtly curate the user experience, selectively showing notifications, content, advertising to coax users towards "retail therapy".
Also keep in mind keystroke dynamics can probably do that too and has been a topic of study in one form or another since the nineteenth century vis-a-vis telegraph operators.
Cpt America in the Winter Soldier
This is a non-issue because it's almost certainly going to be gated behind a permission prompt. There are more invasive things sites/apps can ask for, and we seem to be doing fine, eg. location. Moreover is it really that much of a privacy loss if you go on steam, it asks you to verify you're over 18, and the OS says you're actually over 18?
>Biometric data? Today it unlocks your private key. Tomorrow it's used to verify you are the same person that was used during sign-up -- the same that was "age-verified".
Given touch id was introduced over a decade ago, and the associated doom-mongering predilections did not come to pass, I think it's fair to conclude it's a dud.
Watch as apps refuse to work when you deny them permission. Also the OS (and “privileged apps”) don’t ask for permission, they have full unfettered access to everything already.
If you can't trust the OS, you have bigger issues than it knowing whether you're 18 or not. At the very least it has a camera pointed at you at all moments you're using it, and can eavesdrop in all your conversations.
If your OS prevented encryption, because one of the anti-encryption laws got passed, would you still trust its privacy and security?
lol.
> Moreover is it really that much of a privacy loss if you go on steam, it asks you to verify you're over 18, and the OS says you're actually over 18?
Slippery slope, but an interesting argument. While SteamOS is a thing, Steam isn't my OS.
> Given touch id was introduced over a decade ago, and the associated doom-mongering predilections did not come to pass, I think it's fair to conclude it's a dud.
Really? You think that things built decades ago can't be further built-upon in the now or the future?
You mean non slippery slope?
>Really? You think that things built decades ago can't be further built-upon in the now or the future?
If there's no deadlines for predilections, how can we score them? Should we still be worried about some yet undiscovered way that cell phones are causing cancer, despite decades of apparently no harmful side effects?
If not, who has been paying to lobby for these age verification laws ?
That seems a question that we should have an answer to.
Forcing an age check upon linux install seems anti-competitive, and a violation of freedom of speech allowed by the Constitution.
Also impractical and ineffective, unless they plan on some sort of bio-metric confirmation of age.
Will they outlaw computation itself, or constrain a personal quota so that only corporations can access approved LLMs and certainly not run a local AGI ?
As with the insane "encryption is a weapon and cant be exported" policy of the 80s, this will surely force innovation to migrate outside the US.
Of course they would want this -- as long as the OS reports that the user is over 18 via such a system, then Meta is legally off the hook for any COPPA violations.
Not advocating for this policy but if a critical argument against it is that policymakers can expect an analogous amount of computer innovation migrating out of the US as it saw in the 80s, then I think policymakers won't care remotely. Quite literally I think the lower bound for the proportion of global computer innovation happening in the US is 70%.
This should be easy. Just in one of dialogs ask user to create a file 'me_age.txt' with age inside. No changes to OS at all. This will be the 'interface'. Any program can read the file. As far as I understand that's all California law requires (or will require).
Not sure about other versions. Strict verification would require binding to property software/services. Which is equivalent of reporting every user on every install.
Nothing to do with street design - most suburbs have a park a safe walk near any house. That kids are not walking there is nothing to do with street design.
Some state legislatures are pushing back against this. Utah passed a law in 2018 which amends the definition of neglect to exclude this kind of thing.
https://le.utah.gov/~2018/bills/static/SB0065.html
(c) "Neglect" does not include:
[...]
(iv) permitting a child, whose basic needs are met and who is of sufficient age and maturity to avoid harm or unreasonable risk of harm, to engage in independent activities, including:
[...]
(B) traveling to and from nearby commercial or recreational facilities;
In short the original post was subtly but very opposed to those very laws you are looking at.
Mind you there is nothing about OS level age verification that stops any of the above - which is why I'm against it.
But now I wonder: I doubt the law would actually consider that you let your kids outside and thereby gave them access to the unsecured device they found in a dumpster. From what I understand of the CA law, you would not be the "operating system provider" in that context, because you do not develop, license, nor control the operating system. I think, at that point, a prosecutor would probably be looking at neglect (if they really want to go after the parent) as the most viable charge, which would be protected by the independent kid laws.
Still, to your point, that doesn't mean the OS law in question will be effective at what it's meant to do, so I similarly do not see a reason to support it. (One could assume "what it's meant to do" is remove liability from social media service providers, but that's not the ostensible reason even if it is the likely reason; regardless, I also wouldn't necessarily see that as a reason to support it.)
there's a general issue with rise in protectionism
However, the ending though, really feels like they're one step away from anti-vax, anti-education, and pro-hate pro-bigotry.
This case really feels like an over-reach. But to condemn the entire system because they have an interest in making sure the country functions and sets minimum standards of life and care is not a "bad thing". The government represents the collective decision-making of millions, hundreds-of-millions of people.
Don't throw the baby out with the bath water because one cop (in rural Georgia of all places) over-reacted.
I'm pretty sure most kids older than 12 do have access to kitchen knives. And actively use them too.
I generally agree with your point. But at the same time access to the internet resouces and to gun or a chaisaw is not the same.
I have no problem securing a few items if my home, but I have no control over whatever is available on the net.
Sure, I can write some firewall rules or create "kid's account" on a streaming platform, but I can do this for every single known service, chat, IM group etc.
One way to traumatize 4-year old, I'd say an effective one.
There was one documentary series that apparently appropriate for 7+ and had "motherfucker" within the first 30 seconds of one episode.
I don't know which parallel reality they're from where that is an appropriate word for a 7 year old to learn.
Defines most fathers. Then again, I sincerely say thank you to many "insults".
True, and it's the parents responsibility to ensure that children won't injure themselves with the knives, or take them out or to school or whatever.
In this case, it is the data from the website, not the electronic device itself, that is seen as the item being transacted and regulated by age gates, no? The attempts to actually regulate it do feed back into changes on the electronic device, but the real cause of concern (per the protect the kids argument, if that is the real reason is debatable) is a company providing data directly to a child that parents find objectionable. That transaction doesn't have a parent directly involved currently.
Controlling the device itself and saying free game if a parent has allowed them access is a bit like saying that if a parent has allowed a kid to get to the store, there should be no further restrictions on what they can buy, including any of the above three items.
Is this a thing?
My 10yo has used all three of those things. If there were some legislation requiring they be "secured" before my son could be in my presence, obviously I'd oppose it, along with every other reasonable parent.
That requires cooperation, but since most adult websites don’t want children to be visiting them, cooperation shouldn’t be hard to get. Governments can pass a law and businesses can set a config flag. For uncooperative websites, child-locked devices can check a blacklist.
Then it’s up to parents to make sure their kids only have child-locked devices and for stores to not sell unlocked devices to kids. It’s never going to perfect, but it doesn’t doesn’t have to be to change community norms.
We don't need another one, especially one that inverts the polarity by having the browser proactively send information to the site.
There's no value in sending that bit of information rather than in using what's already readily provided.
There's also "Voluntary Content Rating", and the "RTA" marker.
I think these would be better thought of as attempts to create a web standard rather than an actual web standard?
Some of these are already voluntarily supported by many common/popular sites.
I asked ChatGPT about browser support for the meta tag. It appears to be an experimental feature in Firefox 146 that's turned off by default [1].
So, there's some work on this feature, but it seems like another signal is needed to say "It's not porn but I don't want my website to be visible on devices that have parental controls on," which would be needed for it to get mainstream usage.
Also, often you won't want to drop out, but just redirect kids to more appropriate content. For example, Lego's website has a popup to redirect kids to the "play zone." It might be nice to do that automatically, but the <meta name="rating"> tag isn't going to do the trick.
[1] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Firefox/Exp...
That's good, because those are the only sites that should be saying "we're only for adults".
But mostly, governments are trying to pass such laws because they want control, and kids are just a convenient excuse.
If there’s no society-wide standard for what’s kid appropriate then it’s going to be hard to set up a system that satisfies everyone, but it seems like movie ratings sort of worked?
Another way to look at it: a predator could make a website specifically for children and advertise it as such, while covertly doing something bad. How is that different? If they control the website, they can do what they want.
If you’re concerned about that then I think you need a whitelist of known good websites and you need to vet them by browsing it with the child lock turned on. Even then, it wouldn’t be hard to look harmless at first.
Like, in general, a software change to add an "age class" attribute to user accounts and a syscall "what's this attribute for the current user account" would satisfy the California bill and that's a relatively minor change (the bad part is the NY bill that allegedly requires technical verification of whatever the user claimed).
The weird issue is how should that attribute be filled for the 'root' or 'www-data' user of a linux machine I have on the cloud. Or, to put aside open source for that matter, the Administrator account on a Windows Active Directory system.
Because "user accounts" don't necessarily have any mapping (much less a 1-to-1 mapping) to a person; many user accounts are personal but many are not.
The auth server would lie in Colorado. The FS server, in New Mexico. The CPU server, in Nevada. The terminal (the client), in Alaska. Shut down and repeat at random. Watch the lobbies collapsing down tring to sue that monster.
Thing is, when these “make the websites collect your ID” proposals come up, the overwhelming sentiment here is “this is terrible and we need to do it lower in the stack”. I think the OS is a better place than the website. (Let security conscious folks use a standalone device too if desired.)
The astroturfing stuff is obviously sus, I don’t have a feel for whether this is egregious by the standards of $T companies or just par.
Of course, the EU option of using proper ZK proofs etc sounds way better as portrayed in the OP. But when you actually dig in, doesn’t the EU effectively mandate OS support too, eg https://eudi.dev/1.7.1/architecture-and-reference-framework-..., https://github.com/eu-digital-identity-wallet/eudi-doc-archi... ? Maybe this isn’t set yet but it seems a likely direction at least.
Perhaps the "overwhelming" sentiment is paid actors? Or people whose jobs depend on not having that risk assigned to their employers?
Those concerns are amplified when it's done even lower in the stack. You don't want a website to collect your ID? Neither do I. I also don't want my OS to collect anything about me either.
Centralization at the major corporations allows (in principle, if regulators act) tight monitoring, high standards, and you are always free to mandate privacy-preserving solutions like the EU did.
I can’t tell if you’re just anti- any age verification, or if you legitimately think that conditional on age verification happening, you’d rather that every website starts collecting ID as part of signup. Can you help me understand why you think it’s better for every single website (eg porn, chat sites, forums, etc) to be required to collect photos of your ID?
We should also update all FOSS license terms to explicitly exclude Meta or any affilites from using any software licensed under them.
Heck, Linus Torvalds should just add an amendment to the next release of the Linux Kernel that makes it illegal to use in any jurisdiction that requires age verification laws.
This would obviously cause such a massive disruption (especially in California) that the age laws would have to be rolled back immediately.
This seems like a no-brainer to me but I am admittedly ignorant on this situation. I'm sure there's a good reason why this isn't happening if anyone cares to explain.
If it's not (fully) your code, you aren't free to set the licence conditions; Linus can't do that without getting approval from 100% (not 99% or so) of authors who contributed code.
What one can do is add an informative disclaimer saying "To the best of our knowledge, installing or running this thing in California is prohibited - we permit to do whatever you want with it, but how you'll comply with that law is your business".
It also helps when you take an offender to court. If I contribute to a project but don't assign copyright, then they cannot take offenders to court if my code was copied illegally. The burden is on me to do so.
Of course, all code released prior to the change still remains on the original license.
A "Linux distro" is not the Linux kernel. It's possible for some distros to add such license terms to their distribution media, but others like Debian and Debian-based ones adhere to the GPL so no go.
"Every OS provider must then: provide an interface at account setup collecting a birth date or age, and expose a real-time API that broadcasts the user's age bracket (under 13, 13 to 15, 16 to 17, 18+) to any application running on the system."
You can call what's happening in this thread a hissy fit, but how does that compare to $70 million in lobbying to get this added to operating systems? Isn't that a bit more of a fit? When you look at who is behind the bills, do you look at their history and wonder whose best interest they might have at heart?
Debian, Ubuntu, etc., they'll all fall right in line because the clear and immediate losses will outweigh any PR issue.
The issue is obviously not with adults needing to click a drop-down.
Some of the main issues with this legislation are:
1) Makes it much easier for predators of all kinds to identify and target children on their computers
2) Impossible to implement (i.e., servers don't have a person)
3) The infrastructure this bill introduces will be used by the state and corporations to destroy our last vestiges of privacy and anonymity
6. Each time you redistribute the Program (or any work based on the Program), the recipient automatically receives a license from the original licensor to copy, distribute or modify the Program subject to these terms and conditions. You may not impose any further restrictions on the recipients' exercise of the rights granted herein. You are not responsible for enforcing compliance by third parties to this License.
5. No Discrimination Against Persons or Groups
The license must not discriminate against any person or group of persons.If this was somehow introduced without anyone noticing and deployed, imagine the damage it would cause.
If we're fantasizing here, I like to imagine two major OS makers trying to comply these laws, fail miserably, and let FOSS OSes and kernels more recognition in the desktop market.
Ideally, getting these servers to auto turn off the day this goes into effect ("In compliance with this new law, Linux is now temporarily unusable. Please <call to action>.") would be glorious for getting the bill staved off, or killed.
It would hurt some productivity, but that is a risk these lawmakers taking donations are probably willing to make.
I know. That's exactly the point.
In such situations where one party (Meta) has enough money to lobby and is playing dirty, it's a massively asymmetric situation. In such cases, if you really want to make sure you're heard (which I'm not sure distributers want or care about tbh), you've got to play the game too.
Malicious compliance, if you will.
PS: For a "practical" variant, simply a warning might be sufficient - given how many hospitals/critical infra uses linux. For eg "There is a chance this server will fail to work on x date due to this y law. Not as glamorous/all-guns-blazing, but probably much more sensible and practical.
PPS: For an even more "safer" variant, one could go "Post x, please note that using linux/this server is a violation of law y. Please turn off the server yourself manually. Failure to comply with these instructions and violating the law will be borne entirely by the (no informed) sysadmin/manglement.
What exactly do you think Linux is? I would say that Linux would be forked in like 2 seconds, a bunch of different companies would start offering "attested Linux," and all you'd have to do was change your repos and update.
I would say that, but what would really happen is that we'd find out that Canonical, Red Hat, and a bunch of other distributions had been talking to the government for a year behind closed doors and they're already ready to roll out attested Linux. Debian would argue about it for six months, and then do the same thing. Hell, systemd will require age attestation as a dependency. Devuan and any other stubborn distribution would face 9000 federal lawsuits, while having domain names blocked, and the Chinese hardware necessary to run them seized at the ports with the receivers locked up on terrorism charges.
I have no idea where the confidence of the IT tech comes from. You (we) are something between a mechanic and a highly-skilled janitor.
Update the terms to indicate that you can do what you want, but this OS is probably not compliant with states run by evil dipshits.
Arguably they would be more materially advantaged if they were forced to KYC/validate ages, not the platform; because sure, there's a cost to doing it, but presumably having hard data on who your customer actually is, with age and address and everything, is worth a lot more than the verification cost. And being able to say "We're legally required to gather this" gives a lot of PR cover (even though it'd be followed with "but we're giddy to do so and we will abuse this data and you every way we possibly can. No one at Meta believes you are human. We hate you as much as you hate us, but we're stuck in this together, endlessly loathing the supernatural force that keeps us working together.")
But, On the flip side: I also don't doubt that Meta is doing this, because the purpose of a system is what it does, and the leadership at Meta has done nothing in the past four years to demonstrate that they're capable of cogent thought and execution. We want to believe there's some evil plan, and maybe there is, but in all likelihood one day we'll learn that they're just... unintelligent.
These laws, that attempt to move "age verification" into the OS, 100% absolve Meta (and all the Meta owned "properties") from any legal liability so long as all of Meta's app's follow the law's required "ask the OS for the age signal of the user".
Any "bad stuff" which then gets shown to "underage users" then becomes "not Meta's fault, they followed the legally proscribed way to check the age of the user, and the OS said this user was 'old enough'" and Apple/Google then get to shoulder the liability (and pay out for the class action lawsuits) for failing to provide a proper age signal.
That's the "material advantage" gained by Meta by pushing these laws.
I don't think absolution of legal liability has ever crossed any of these fools' empty heads. The threat of being fined & punished by the USG for doing something bad hasn't been a factor in corporate decision-making for decades.
> Meta spent a record $26.3 million on federal lobbying in 2025, deployed 86+ lobbyists across 45 states, and covertly funded a "grassroots" child safety group called the Digital Childhood Alliance (DCA) to advocate for the App Store Accountability Act (ASAA). The ASAA requires app stores to verify user ages before downloads but imposes no requirements on social media platforms. If it becomes law, Apple and Google absorb the compliance cost while Meta's apps face zero new mandates.
Not saying I think it's a good idea to provide the year of birth to all sites, but (session ID, year of birth) is the only information they would need. The problem is proving who's behind the keyboard at the time of asking, which would require challenge-response, and is why I think this should be an online platform, not a hardware PKI gadget with keys inevitably tied to individuals.
No, enforcing privacy is not hard, all it takes is imposing penalties _much greater than_ those financial incentives.
It seems dead though...
Anthropic donated $20 million to Public First Action, a PAC that promotes Republican Senator Marsha Blackburn and her sponsored Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA), a bill that will force everyone to scan their faces and IDs to use the internet under the guise of saving the children.
The legislative angle taken by companies like Anthropic is that they will provide the censorship gatekeeping infrastructure to scan all user-generated content that gets posted online for "appropriateness", guaranteeing AI providers a constant firehose of novel content they can train on and get paid for the free training. AI companies will also get paid to train on videos of everyone's faces and IDs.
As for why Blackburn supports KOSA:
Asked what conservatives’ top priorities should be right now, Senator Blackburn answered, “protecting minor children from the transgender [sic] in this culture and that influence.” She then talked about how KOSA could address this problem, and named social media platforms as places “where children are being indoctrinated.”
If Anthropic, the PACs it supports and Blackburn get their way with KOSA, the end result will be that anything posted on the internet will be able to be traced back to you.
Every time I point it out, including with actual quotes from the research showing the problems with it, I get downvoted on HN.
This headline is becoming one of those “too good to fact check” clams because the people posting it know it will drive traffic.
Doing ID or this fake age verification with anything other than a physical secure element is a dumb regulation that going to create its own regulatory arbitrages and spawn very powerful and profitable black and grey markets. Poor laws create criminal economic opportunity, and digital id is just creating a massive one.
Between Meta being behind a digital id initiative under the pretext of alleged "age verification" and the Debian project leads pivoting to political objectives, it appears gen Z now has a cause to build tech against and fight for. These are dying organizations that cannot innovate and they've attracted a pestilence that is pivoting them to the easier problem of political maneuvering. as it's easier to militate for what nobody wants than to make something anyone actually wants.
The upside is that people get to be hackers again. Tools to cleanse our networks and systems of Meta and other surveillance companies and the influence of these compromised organizations are an OS install and a vibecoding weekend away.
what is most likely in play, as we have seen in other identity schemes, is that the cryptography will be sufficiently opaque that experts won't be able to reason about it until after the products are forced on people, or, they will just accept junk protocols and use the law to shift liability to the user to comply with identifying themselves truthfully on the internet. the other scenario is if the protocol provides strong anonymity, it will use a bunch of new primitives without mature standards that happen to have escrow access built in.
What does this mean? Free software was always a politics of itself.
However this is the kind of investigation that Reddit is famous for, which ends up causing more harm than good, like the Boston bombing investigation.
Age verification, for example, is coming no matter what - there’s a big enough chunk of voters tired of tech globally.
Governments are also tired of dealing with tech and want to bring them to heel.
These macro forces are far more significant than the amounts identified on lobbying in this investigation (~$63 mn iirc)
Given the title, the reading of the article implies Meta is driving age verification.
The content of the investigation, reads more as meta taking advantage of the push for age verification to move it to the OS layers.
https://web.archive.org/web/20260313125244/https://old.reddi...
EDIT: why is it deleted now?
In the real world, professional media organizations regularly expose corruption. More often than not? No idea. But to pretend they only engage in cover-ups is cynical fatalism.
most platforms won't voluntarily adopt privacy-preserving verification when the surveillance version gives them more data. Regulation would need to mandate the privacy-preserving approach specifically, not just "verify age somehow.
Of course, when money becomes a significant portion of how the second one happens, things can get complicated.
A significant portion of both of your suggested halves are “complicated” by money.
Everything is complicated by money. I wish we were better about shielding politics from money. So much about society in general is about money, it ain’t easy.
Your breakdown was so simple, it was simply wrong.
So in a democratic society where free speech exists there's only so much you can do to prevent that.
Most of those folks would not call it lobbying because of the negative associations of the word. “We have activists, our opponents have lobbyists.” But it works the same way.
It is specifically protected in the First Amendment: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”
Emphasis mine.
The issue that should rather worry you is that people
- don't delete their Meta/Facebook/WhatsApp/Instagram/Threads/... account because of this proposal,
- don't strongly urge friends and colleagues to do the same.
And for a lawmaker who is considering retirement, "become a lobbyist" is often the most lucrative career option.
Now who are you imagining will pass effective laws against lobbying?
Presidential Candidate Mitt Romney
Power corrupts.
The research has a lot of these:
> LIMITATION: Direct PDF downloads returned 403 errors. ProPublica Schedule I viewer loads data dynamically (JavaScript), preventing extraction via WebFetch. The 2024 public disclosure copy on sixteenthirtyfund.org was also blocked.
> Tech Transparency Project report: The article "Inside Meta's Spin Machine on Kids and Social Media" at techtransparencyproject.org likely contains detailed ConnectSafely/Meta funding analysis but was blocked (403)
So the “research” isn’t some groundbreaking discoveries by a Redditor. It’s an afternoon worth of Claude Code slop where they couldn’t even take the time to get the real documents into the local workspace so Claude Code could access them. It’s now getting repeated by sites like Theo gadgetreview.com because the people posting to these sites aren’t reading the report either.
The $2B number was the sum of all the numbers Claude could find, not the money Meta spent.
There is so much AI slop in this article and source that it should be tripping everyone’s clickbait detectors, not being taken as accurate reporting.
The fallacy starts with an extreme argument to hook people (the $2B number in the headline) but then retreats to a different argument when the hook is shown to be questionable or wrong.
I do not support this law and I’ve been a spoken critic of age verification on HN. However I think articles like this are not helping the cause. They’re so easy to disprove that they become strawman arguments for the other side. Opponents can dismiss their critics are liars because headlines like this $2B number are so easily shown to be false.
The reason is that europeans have nothing to win from those "winner-take-all" platforms the US has built in the past decades. Europe has built zero of them.
It contributes very little to Europe's GDP or the overall being of the european. And in some cases, it eats Europe's GDP, moving economic activity back to the US. This is different than for Americans which big tech is a net-positive contributor to society in my POV, mainly because how much economic activity $ it generates.
Big techs provide huge paychecks and made a lot of people rich in the US, and most of its GDP growth in the last decade. But it's a double-edged sword.
They will make laws in favor of them in detriment of the average American, while minting more billionaries than Europe could ever dream of.
Europe will take a long time to get the digital revolution the US already did, but it'll mostly come from regulations and government initiatives. And will be net-positive for humans living in Euope, not for owners of corporations.
Which "most of Europe" would that be? Switzerland and handful of northern countries? Because it is definitely not Germany or several "you can't access half of the internet during times when twenty men kicking a ball on a field" southern states.
I’d write my senator but they won’t do shit. Is there anything that can seriously be done?
Do you know how democracy works? There are these people called representatives. They are hired by you. They pass laws. They only get to continue having a job if people like you vote for them. When you tell them "I don't like the law you are passing", they are hearing "the people who hire me are angry with me". The more people that are angry at what they're doing, the more their job is at risk.
They do what the lobbyists say because somebody else is doing the work, and they get paid (by the lobbyist). But they won't have a job to get paid for if the voters don't vote for them again. So your entire defense against tyranny and bad laws is you speaking out. If you never talk to your reps (or vote), you're telling them you don't care what kind of government it is, and they really will do whatever they want.
You have to tell them how you feel, along with all the rest of us. That's the only power we have.
In addition to that, tell everyone you know. Your friends, family, coworkers, the dude running the local gas station. Explain to them why government-mandated surveillance of everything they do on a computer is a bad idea. Ask them to talk to their reps.
Ideas? Time to spin up a local LLM for some editing advice.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47361235
https://github.com/upper-up/meta-lobbying-and-other-findings...
The linked post talks about the effectiveness of AIPAC but fails to mention how much is spent by say, Palestinian interest groups. Perhaps there's a good reason for this: do Palestinian groups have any money to spend on US elections? Try fundraising in Gaza right now.
Likewise, business interest groups have a lot more money to spend on elections than, say, environmental groups. The latter have to beg for small donations from individuals just to stay afloat. Thus, it's relatively easy for business groups to outspend environmental groups. To win an auction, you just have to be the highest bidder.
They may on paper, but of course a lot of money goes to dividing us up come election time. What you are suggesting is no shortcut - it would rather be almost like inventing an alternative political party.
I think there might be a way to make it work, however you would have to be very aware and plan for a way to not reinvent the same losing dynamics. It might not be possible.
Gulf states have little to nothing in common with Palestinians. Citizens of most gulf states are born into relative wealth merely by the fact their countries are rich in petrodollars. They build lavish cities and have standards of living (for their citizens) that increasingly put the West to shame. They are "diversifying" from oil by building massive AI datacenters and essentially catering to Westerners who want to live unencumbered by Western pretensions of civic duty, avoid taxes in their home countries, etc. They make deals with the Israelis and have for over a decade now, even if under the table. They buy American weapons, their elites have frequently been educated at the most exclusive British or American universities. They like expensive Italian cars. Money is money.
Meanwhile Palestinians are born poor, in a failed state with no autonomy. Some UAE crypto influencer is yolo gambling away more money than most Palestinian kids will see in their lifetimes. They live under an occupation and have basically no rights in that regard. They are poor. Just google image a picture of Gaza vs the UAE. It just doesn't even compare. Maybe on some level they are both Arabs. But the same rule applies. Money is money.
The gulf state governments gave up on trying to care about them many many decades ago. They realized it was cheaper (and more prosperous) to go along to get along with the United States and Israel. If they hadn't, their capitals might look like Tehran right now. Over the years it became easy to blame other people for the problem - Iran, even the Palestinians themselves. They have long since washed their hands of caring.
Don't conflate the Gulf States with Palestinians, or associate them with anyone on the losing side of anything when it comes to money and power. They are as corrupt and bought-in to this system of wealth/might makes right as anyone.
The biggest shocker to me has been just how "cheap" a lot of people are to buy off. Mandelson is complaining about air miles FFS. So much of this is a few thousand here, some fancy tickets there, a jet ride elsewhere, etc. In my mind it was always much, much bigger sums that people were selling their countries & souls out for, sadly, it turns out a lot of people, even in really high positions, are shockingly cheap.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relationship_of_Peter_Mandelso...
That's a wildly low sum of money for a 5 minute personal call, let alone even a modest intervention.
Instead of just creating a course that explains how to child-proof a device, we have to surveil everyone.
It's to save the kids.
We care about the kids. We don't bomb them.
Your 4 year old doesn't need a tablet any more than they need a lighter. Neither does your 14 year old. (If they "need" one for school, the school can provide it and monitor their use). If you give your child a computer, it's your responsibility to make sure they're using it properly, not the government's and not the device manufacturer's. The government's job is to make sure that you're not endangering your child and split you up if necessary. The device manufacturer's responsibility is to make sure it works and doesn't hurt you or anyone else in the course of ordinary use. Your responsibility is to not use it in such a way that it causes harm.
Allowing your child to go online is much like allowing them to go outside; you tell them what they're allowed to do, and if you don't trust them to listen to you then you don't allow them to do it. The act of having a child is taking on a full-time 24/7 job of ensuring they stay alive and unharmed until they're old enough to do it themselves. If you aren't up to that challenge, then you can't have that job and it should be passed on to someone else. You can't just shove your responsibility off to Google and Apple because you're too busy to be a parent any more than you could push it off on Sony (what you watched on TV growing up) or Macy's (what products you chose to buy). Being tech companies doesn't make them magically responsible for what you do.
If you insist on providing your child with a cellphone so you can contact them in seconds at any time of day, get them a feature phone. They offer numerous advantages: they cost less to buy, they don't break when you drop them, the battery lasts longer and charges faster, and the bill costs less (the phone is for you, not them. You don't need an unlimited plan).
The best part? This is cheaper and easier. You're literally doing less. Locking down a smartphone is hard? Great, so don't do that. Problem solved, you're welcome, I'll send you my invoice.
No offline devices. Commercial vendors get your biometric data (and the equivalent of your driver's license / SSN). Every application on the OS can query your data.
If you think it stops with one bill, after they get all the infrastructure for this in place? You're fooling yourself. The whole point of this is to identify you, on every web page you visit, every app you open, on every device you own. Once bills are passed, it's very hard to get them revoked or nullified.
This is the most aggregious, authoritarian, Big Brother government surveillance system ever devised, and it's already law. I am fucking terrified.
(Yes, the EU has a less horrifying version of this. But Google, Apple, and Microsoft still control most of the devices in the world, and they are US companies.)
Because it's hopeless? It's been proven time and time again there's nothing the average person can do to fight this sort of thing.
It's just better to sit back and watch as everything gets ruined.
You literally live in a Democracy. There's 5.8 billion people on this planet who wish they had the kind of power you have. If you give up your rights without a fight, you don't deserve them.
The SAVE Act the orange dude's admin is trying to pass? Requiring ID to vote is popular among every race (eg. over 70% of blacks are in favour), among both Democrat and Republican voters. Its overall support among people is undeniable, and the ID demand itself commonsense. Somehow Congress can't pass a piece of common sense that's wildly popular among both parties' voters.
Sure, democracy can and does give the ordinary man more influence than in many places, but some things will still simply just happen and people's opinions will have very little sway.
I have never once voted for a winner at any level of government and parties are whipped. It's really working for me, eh?
Compare this to what the EU built. The EU Digital Identity Wallet under eIDAS 2.0 is open-source, self-hostable, and uses zero-knowledge proofs. You can prove you're over 18 without revealing your birth date, your name, or anything else. No per-check fees, no proprietary SDKs, no data going to a vendor's cloud. The EU's Digital Services Act puts age verification obligations on Very Large Online Platforms (45M+ monthly users), not on operating systems. FOSS projects that don't act as intermediary services are explicitly outside scope. Micro and small enterprises get additional exemptions.
The US bills assume every operating system is built by a corporation with the infrastructure and revenue to absorb these costs. The EU started from the opposite assumption and built accordingly.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qualified_website_authenticati...
QWAC certs are only for "high value" sites: banks, government services, etc. They can only be issued by "Qualified Trust Service Providers" (e.g. digisign, D-TRUST, etc -- not governments), and cost many hundreds of euros. Your blog and mastodon instance and 98% of businesses just aren't affected.
People operating in "high risk" sectors that need access to payment infra (porn, drugs, etc) are, as always, going to have a hard time. That's a worthy conversation, but nothing about QWAC or eIDAS is about "the government not issuing certs to people they don't like".
Secure Boot is just a technology for those that need it, until Microsoft decides it's mandatory for everyone.
What you have in the EU is this: https://noyb.eu/en/project/dpa/dpc-ireland
> Now that the mask has fully fallen, we have to take every step possible to root out American influence.
You have literal rogue states in your union that neutralize the entirety of it, as the above shows. It's a joke. The EU is a joke. A single country is enough to mean US tech can do whatever it wants, similarly a single other country is enough to mean Russia can largely do what it wants.
The others are of course in on it too. Which is why for all the empty EU talk on US big tech you've never heard them talk about the Irish DPA and what they all enable. Strange right? Would think that this would be a priority. But it shows that even if the rest weren't in on it, just one country would be enough. And it could even be a tiny place like Luxembourg.
Laws and regulations aren't worth the paper they're written on if they're not enforced. The current ones aren't enforced at all, why would any new ones be? Did you know that there was a long period where hosting European citizens' PII on US-controlled servers (like Amazon instances in Europe) was illegal, after the "Privacy Shield" was deemed unlawful? No one cared. Did you know that this is currently the case again, because the thing that replaced it has once again had its basis ripped out from under it by Trump? Once again, no one cares, and indeed EU governments and corporations are _still_ making migrations _to_ US clouds.
Not that it matters, within a few years RN will be running France and AfD will be running Germany and you don't have to pretend any more as the "mask will have fallen" just as much.
When a company such as meta pursues mass-sniffing, is it still a company or is it just a spy-agency? Meta isn't even hiding this anymore. I am glad to finally understand why these "age verification" is pushed globally. Meta pays well.
Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?
"You implemented a law that enables vibe-coding pedophiles to deploy apps that find all the children. Please resign."
0: https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/reddit-user-uncovers-beh...
I'm on a short phone break and this is the first I've heard about this. Commenting to ask if anyone can explain this. If not, it'll be a reminder for me to research later.
I'm not sure I'm on board with age verification, but I'm certainly opposed to all forms of identity linkage and tracking. Maybe this is a middle ground?
I'd still prefer if parents disciplined their own kids by limiting device access and controlling their peer groups instead of putting us all into a rats nest of surveillance.
Its like they want to keep being seen as the bad guys.
Please feel free to verify your own age with anyone you like. If you mean "I want other people to", then no.
And responses to some common criticisms of the idea: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46459959
I also forgot to mention in my original post that the token issuer is not a monopoly. Any company that wants to participate can do so, just like there are many brands of tobacco and alcohol. Require websites to accept at least 5 providers to ensure competition.
To be clear though if it's being used as wedge for privacy violation then it should not exist at all. And from reading TFA preventing that may need a similarly coordinated counter-effort.
On a spectrum of options, no verification is the least privacy intrusive. Baking it in at the OS level or forcing passport uploads are the most intrusive. My proposal is in the middle.
A determined actor could maybe follow you to the store when you purchase your verification code, take a quick picture with a powerful camera (or bribe the store to do it sneakily) and unmask you online. But there's no way to do it at scale. And if you buy the code from a reseller (ask a panhandler to buy one for you, perhaps) then it's even more robust.
Why?
Are you serious? Because this comment doesn't make it sound like you're serious.
EULAs and the like allow adults to simply click "I accept". That's apparently the way contracts work these days. Speaking of contracts: children aren't allowed to sign contracts. So those apps that children are using with EULAs? It's absurd to allow adults to simply click "I accept". We need to have "acceptance verification" laws to prevent this kind of abuse.
It's also absurd to allow children to simply enter a church. Churches teach dangerous thoughts. Have you read their books?! Those books have sex, murder, theft! Think of the children! There's many kinds of religions and we need to track the religion bracket of our children. It's absurd to allow a child to simply click "I am Christian." Nowhere else works like this. We need to have "religious verification" laws to prevent this kind of abuse.
What you want isn't conducive to a "high trust" society [0].
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-trust_and_low-trust_socie...
The absurdity here comes from the fact that this is only illegal when one convinces a group of wetware about the dangers of porn addiction and LGBT, even more absurd this can only be done through misinformation since neither LGBT grooming rings nor porn addiction are real.
I see the absurdity in pushing for laws in the hope of preventing a disease that only exists in your mind? Can you? I believe you can if you step out of idpol and look at the cold data/dollars.
The patches on top of this are really bad. For instance, we are seeing "AI" biometric video detectors with a margin-of-error of 5-7 years (meaning the validation studies say when the AI says you're 23-25 you can be considered 18+), totally inadequate to do the job this new legislation demands.
one scary observation is that each year, less and less people care. at least, this is true among my students. plenty of them believe the 'protect the children' line and are more than willing to do whatever the government/big tech suggests. or they just shrug ("what difference would i make?").
for context, i teach at a college level, in tech. a few of my classes are from the cybersec program, one of the programs that should understand and care about the implications of bills like these, and even the majority of them do not care about this stuff anymore. they grew up with instagram and facebook and cameras everywhere. they grew up knowing that any little fuck up they have is recorded and posted online. they know that by the time they go to college, all of their data has already been leaked a few times. they never really had an expectation of privacy in the first place, so it just isnt a big deal.
as someone who interacts with this next generation of "hackers" on a daily basis... the concept of cypherpunk is gone. i got into this field because of my beliefs. they are going into this field because they want a chance at buying a house some day, and know that big tech has big bucks.
i am tired. and i recognize that this is exactly what they (lobbyists, meta, etc.) want! but i am tired and discouraged. more and more i find myself having to actively fight the urge to give up. i am not ready to give up just yet... but, i am sorry to say that as someone closer to retirement than i am comfortable admitting, i only have so much energy left.
But sometimes very few people can make a difference.
Because social media already has the age info exactly?
I think an OS and a web platform with accounts are different product categories. Not even sure what an interpretation of the bill that would affect meta would be.
Then it shouldn't be difficult to comply.
It is like in the novel 1984. But stupid. Probably more like minority report - but also stupid. All aided by Meta bribing lobbyists to do their bidding.
"Do such breaches make it trivial to lie to age and identity verification systems?"
"1B identity records exposed in ID verification data leak" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47348440#
$70 million is chump change for Meta, yet is far more money than I’ll ever have and does so much to influence state legislation.
I remember from peak net neutrality discussions during trump 1 maybe around 2017-2018 ant saw an article on theverge.com (that cannot find now) and biggest sum to individual politician was around $200k, when median values were much much lower.
Politicians are selling tens of billions of dollars (if not hundreds of billions) worth of revenue to ISPs for couple or dozen million. Literally 1000x return on investment (if successful).
I remember local politician (I am not from US) got caught taking 100k bribe from a company for helping with alleged highway construction procurement. Project was valued ~1B - 10 000x return on investment (if they wouldn't have been caught).
[1] I am sorry, not "corruption", but "lobbying".
she ended up resigning in a scandal caused by her husband accepting a boat (or work on the boat..i don't remember). the scandal was caused by the amount of the bribe. it was too low. the Turkish people could understand some corruption, but to be able to bribe the top leader for $50k. Unacceptable. If it would have been $100 million, it would not have been a scandal.
Rinse and repeat. Unless, politicians band together and say "we need the full ROI of your project, and NONE of us will even talk to you unless we get half the profits, and you can't primary all of us at once"
It says apps must use the age signal as proof the user is a minor, and then behave according to all California laws regarding that. (I'm not a lawyer, but that's my read.)
So, does this apply to applications that run locally? What if an under 13 year old tries to read a text file with lots of swear words or ascii b00bs? Does emacs need to stop them? cat? xterm?
Microsoft has a trillion dollars in liability now because every historical OS is illegal, and every adult user of that historical OS (that you don't ask for their age) is a monetary fine.
$2500 fine for Microsoft for letting me continue use Windows 10 in Colorado, cause they never asked my age.
Also hilariously the law openly FORBIDS checking the user's identity to verify age. It says you MUST NOT collect any more information than is necessary to comply with the law. And complying with the law only requires that you ASK the user to TELL YOU their age, so my non-lawyer take is that if you do anything else like checking ID you can and probably will be prosecuted
‘The “child safety” rhetoric masks a competitive strategy that shifts liability from platforms to operating system makers.’
https://www.robpanico.com/articles/display/presence-derived-...
(posting link because it would be too much for a comment)
I don't see it as coincidence that with all these laws passing, suddenly he announces a secure, "controlled", "locked down" version of systemd. Why, RedHat and Ubuntu can simply drop in this new variant, pay a small fee, and be done with compliance.
Or perhaps they are envisioning a "hardware acquisition" process where the purchaser is forced to take some oath and sign an attestation about all future users of the device...
I think it’s more about setting a norm and precedent that “Age verification is not our responsibility; the App Store layer does that and it’s an established truth now”.
Which itself conveniently helps as a defence in lawsuits when a teenager kills themselves over harmful content etc.
Psychology has a higher success rate...just tell them that their parents use it....
There are many systems where accuracy is loose and that is its core feature...for example postal addresses worldwide...I can a mistake in the address but the letter or package will still get there...
The very last people you should trust when it comes to "protecting the children."
(Maybe some unspoken element of concern over social media bots, too - as they evolve from spamming copy+pasted comments to being near-indistinguisable from actual human accounts?)
But generally speaking, online age verification is one of those issues where the left-right ideological divide doesn't map neatly. People support and oppose it for various different reasons. Much like the assisted suicide issue.
And a serious question: with deepest respect to the author for their extraordinarily impressive time and effort in this investigation... Why was this not already flagged by political reporters or investigative journalists? I'm not American so maybe I don't understand the media structure over there but it feels like SOMEONE should have been all over this way before it's gotten to the point described in this post.
Corporations literally buy the laws they want and Silicon Valley is the newest lobbying monster. Genuinely terrifying.
Have at it Meta, you broke it you most certainly bought it!
I looked at the original analysis and it was fraught with language that leads to specific conclusions. It was most certainly LLM aided, if not generated.
I am not ascribing malice, but the author seems inexperienced with the repercussions of making assertions out of partial knowledge.
Also: Good grief, this article is also written via LLM! Human+machine comes up with theory that goes viral, and then Humans+machines amplify it? Is this the brilliant future we have to look forward to?
A movie is a distinct piece of content. A website and an app can be a container for lots of different content.
But other apps entirely like dating apps? or only fans? can probably be entirely restricted to some age.
I think I'm beginning to realize, however, that the onus should be on both sides of the issue to find a reasonable common ground.
Clicking through to the "findings" shows that they didn't even try to feed proper data into Claude when the AI bot was blocked or couldn't access the documents. Some examples:
> LIMITATION: Direct PDF downloads returned 403 errors. ProPublica Schedule I viewer loads data dynamically (JavaScript), preventing extraction via WebFetch. The 2024 public disclosure copy on sixteenthirtyfund.org was also blocked.
> Tech Transparency Project report: The article "Inside Meta's Spin Machine on Kids and Social Media" at techtransparencyproject.org likely contains detailed ConnectSafely/Meta funding analysis but was blocked (403)
So Claude then goes on to propose "Potential Role" that postulates connections might exist, but then caveats it by saying that no evidence was found:
> This negative finding is inconclusive due to inability to access Schedule I grant detail data in the actual 990 filings (PDF downloads returned 403 errors, and ProPublica's filing viewer loads data dynamically).
This is what happens when you try to lead an LLM toward a conclusion and it behaves as if your conclusion is true. Hacker News is usually quick to dismiss incomplete and lazy LLM content. I assume this is getting upvotes because it's easy to turn a blind eye to the obvious LLM problems when the output is agreeing with something you believe.
And it snowballs, the more favorable laws someone buys, the more favorable their position, and the more they can buy in the future. The transition from "democratic facade" to "outright oligarchy" will be swift and seamless.
Digital-ID (Aadhar) was heavily pushed by USAID and other US-deepstate associates; the same with digital-money and the "demonetization". Bill Gates's org actively tests out things on actual humans like guinea pigs, before globalizing the "solutions". These days all of this is kind of redundant since the phone-number + verification has become essentially a necessity to live in the city in any part of world today.
The prev. Govt. had considered doing this "login with your ID or no internet" scheme (to "protect" people no doubt) back in 2012s - there were explicit statements about disallowing people who would not authenticate with Aadhar, but it was shelved (likely because of their unpopularity).
If our current "Dear Leader" were to propose this, I think a significant population would opt-in simply because of a sense of belonging to a hero-worship-cult.
The state is determined to ensure that every human be their slave.
In history we had four media revolutions (printing press, radio, television, Internet), each greatly disrupting and reshaping society. This is the fifth (social media and maybe AI).
All these revolutions had the same theme: increased reach of information, increased speed of transmission, increased density (information amount per unit of time), and centralization of information sources. Now we seem to reach the limits of change. No more reach, since our information networks span the entire globe. No more speed, since transmission times are close to how fast we can perceive things. The only things left to change are even more centralization and tighter feedback loops (changing the information based on how the recipient reacts).
Given all that, this media revolution might be the last one, so there is a gold rush among the elites to come out on top.
These are the same governments that file criminal charges when you compare lying leader to Pinocchio (Germany). The UK records something like 30 arrests per day for social media posts. Just imagine how much better they could do, if you were not pseudo-anonymous in the Internet!
For example a gambling site could require MitID auth, but only request proof-of-age and nothing else. You can see in the app which information is being requested, like with OAuth.
MitID is 2fa. You log in with username, then you have to open the app, enter password or scan biometric, then scan the QR code of the screen* and you are logged in.
He would need to be next to you every time you log in. I think that is too high friction to make it feasible on large scale.
* Assuming you open the website on the Desktop, and MitID on phone. If both on phone, skip this step.
Also, I reckon most children know the password for their parent's phone or computer, and many more will find out if there is a highly motivational factor for doing so. How many exhausted parents just toss their phone to their child to stop them whining?
I suppose it could be a biometric sign-in with facial recognition or fingerprint, but again, that's a tonne of friction for the whole web.
It's already the single sign on for government websites, banking, healthcare, digital post, insurance, law (sign contracts) etc.
Shit man, you can get divorced through that. I really hope most parents don't give their kids access to it.
Or you can just text him a screenshot of the QR code. You could probably even automate this.
~Maybe~ you can video call, but again it's adding so much friction. Nothing is 100% secure.
The only high friction part of this is that someone needs to write the software for it, but that doesn't seem like all that difficult of a project and open source solutions are likely to appear within weeks of social media requiring it. If there really is no information shared with the other party beyond "yup, user is over the age of maturity" you could even run this as a free public TOR service without fear of ever getting caught.
High risk, low reward.
If he throttles request to stay under a threshold, if the agency knows about it service they could use it and see which account does age requests at the same time.
I don't want my kids to have access to gambling websites like Stake, but I also want to keep my digital identity anonymous. The eIDAS is a solution that achieves both of these goals.
If you can choose between the discord shitshow with a face scan, or a digital encrypted proof-of-age in a 2FA app you already use, issues and verified only by the government of your country (who have all your personal details anyway), what would you choose?
From wikipedia.
As in, if you're not matching the payment info to your customer info, you (which may be the company or the government passing the laws the company is following just fine) did it wrong.
Because, as pjc50 wrote, failing to do that is an obvious exploit for money laundering.
If I'm underage, but already have a payment card, the identity of the card matches my name.
That is why dreadnip suggested the MitID approach.
And if a gambling site stops there and goes "LGTM", it's not the "union of {payment information, KYC}".
Union, as in combination of both.
KYC, as in "Know Your Customer". Looks like MitID is a thing that would be one way to do KYC? But I've only just heard of it, so belief is weakly held.
I really don’t see the problem.
But I can not see how the legal framework could be better. Insults are illegal. Prosecution needs to look into all reported cases.
> Prosecution needs to look into all reported cases.
The ramifications of that sentence in terms of cost, effort and possibly other nuances, makes me shiver.
Note how a minimal misbehavior of a relatively small portion of the population could render any police and judicial system totally inoperative. Just 2000 people across the country go doing light insults to random people… again, I can think of much better systems.
And probably also tell it to some lawmakers. But start with me.
And Germany really did sentence people for calling Mr. Habeck "Schwachkopf", which is about as mild an insult as you can find.
Did not know about this, here is the wiki: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schwachkopf-Aff%C3%A4re
His house was searched because of it, but he did not get sentenced for it.
Reminds me of Pimmelgate https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andy_Grote#Umstrittene_Reaktio...
Just calling someone Schwachkopf doesn’t get prosecutors to investigate further.
That leads to selv censorship, even if what you did was legal.
I hope (but do not know) that in the Schwachkopf-case, they just took the shortcut via insult instead of opening an investigation for the Nazi stuff.
But we don’t know that.
I believe, that we can express our opinions and discuss them without insulting people (in the legal sense). And I hope, that prosecutors do not lightly investigate each Schwachkopf they find on the internet.
And for all the other cases, the courts need to be involved.
The guy was sentenced for distributing forbidden Nazi materials.
The initial insult investigation was dropped, because of it being insignificant.
You're not missing anything. It's just an AI generated summary of the original GitHub link https://github.com/upper-up/meta-lobbying-and-other-findings
I found the original article much easier to read anyways
AutoModerator on /r/linux is set up to automatically remove posts after a set amount of reports.
Fuck Reddit
Why is this never relevant politically? Its the same with the Epstein files, terrible things happen and we just hand-wring. It seems like the US electorate, doesn't know, doesn't care or is otherwise distracted. I don't see how the US is ever going to get shit together if it accepts this sort of corruption.
> A Reddit researcher just exposed
>The technical reality hits harder than policy abstractions.
> Here’s where the lobbying gets surgical.
>If it’s clearly wrong then demonstrate.
Sorry, this does not work in the age of AI. If you don't bother writing your own words, then no one should bother responding to them.
The original report was AI slop from Claude Code. If you go to the repo it doesn’t even claim that Meta spent $2B, that’s just a sum of a lot of numbers Claude could find, not the number that Meta spent on lobbying this.
At least the author posted a link to the dataset in a comment so it survived:
https://github.com/upper-up/meta-lobbying-and-other-findings
I want to open my wallet. It should be the top comment.
If everybody who cared to and lived in the affected districts called they would kill the bill just to clear their phone-lines.
I think it's a little late for that.
That's when you know the new world has begun.
Zero-knowledge proofs are the way to go for this type of thing, I find it mind-boggling that the US lets itself be bamboozled into complete lack of privacy.
My stance is that if somebody is a minor, his/her/their parents/tutors/legal guardian are responsible for what they can/cannot do online, and that the mechanism to enforce that is parental control on devices.
Having said that, open-source zero-knowledge proofs are infinitely less evil (I refuse to say "better") than commercial cloud-based age monitoring baked into every OS
To be honest, I worry that the framing of this legislation and ZKP generally presents a false dichotomy, where second-option bias[1] prevails because of the draconian first option.
There's always another option: don't implement age verification laws at all.
App and website developers shouldn't be burdened with extra costly liability to make sure someone's kids don't read a curse word, parents can use the plethora of parental controls on the market if they're that worried.
[1] https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Appeal_to_the_minority#Second-...
Why not? Physical businesses have liability if they provide age restricted items to children. As far as I know, strip clubs are liable for who enters. Selling alcohol to a child carries personal criminal liability for store clerks. Assuming society decides to restrict something from children, why should online businesses be exempt?
On who should be responsible, parents or businesses, historically the answer has been both. Parents have decision making authority. Businesses must not undermine that by providing service to minors.
This implies the creation of an infrastructure for the total surveillance of citizens, unlike age verification by physical businesses.
How do you reconcile porn sites as a line in the sand with things like banking or online real estate transactions or applying for an apartment already performing ID checks? The verification infrastructure is already in place. It's mundane. In fact the apartment one is probably more offensive because they'll likely make you do their online thing even if you could just walk in and show ID.
I mean, we're talking about age verification in the OS itself in some of these laws, so tell me how it doesn't.
Quantity is a quality. We're not just seeing it for porn, it's moving to social media in general. Politicians are already talking about it for all sites that allow posts, that would include this site.
So you tell me.
California is also stupid for creating liability for service/app providers that don't even deal in age restricted apps, like calculators or maps. It's playing right into the "this affects the whole Internet/all of computing" narrative when in fact it's really a small set of businesses that are causing issues and should be subject to regulation.
There is also the problem of mission creep. Once the infrastructure is in place, to control access to age-restricted content, other services might become out of reach. In particular, anonymous usage of online forums might no longer be possible.
OS-level ability to verify the age of the person using it absolutely provides infrastructure for the OS to verify all sorts of other things. Citizenship, identity, you name it. When it's at the OS level there's no way to do anything privately on that machine ever again.
Ok, suppose the strip club is the website, and the club's door is the OS.
Would you fine the door's manufacturer for teens getting into the strip club?
How do we fight? It seems like agree or disagree, this isn't going to stop. There's so much money behind it in a time where the have nots can barely survive as is.
These are often clear cut. They're physical controlled items. Tobacco, alcohol, guns, physical porn, and sometimes things like spray paint.
The internet is not. There are people who believe discussions about human sexuality (ie "how do I know if I'm gay?") should be age restricted. There are people who believe any discussion about the human form should be age restricted. What about discussions of other forms of government? Plenty would prefer their children not be able to learn about communism from anywhere other than the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation.
The landscape of age restricting information is infinitely more complex than age restricting physical items. This complexity enables certain actors to censor wide swaths of information due to a provider's fear of liability.
This is closer to a law that says "if a store sells an item that is used to damage property whatsoever, they are liable", so now the store owner must fear the full can of soda could be used to break a window.
So again, assuming we have decided to restrict something (and there are clear lines online too like commercial porn sites, or sites that sell alcohol (which already comes with an ID check!)), why isn't liability for online providers the obvious conclusion?
The crux is we cannot decide what is protected speech, and even things that are protected speech are still considered adult content.
> why isn't liability for online providers the obvious conclusion?
We tried. The providers with power and money(Meta) are funding these bills. They want to avoid all liability while continuing to design platforms that degrade society.
This may be a little tin-foil hat of me, but I don't think these bills are about porn at all. They're about how the last few years people were able to see all the gory details of the conflict in Gaza.
The US stopped letting a majority of journalists embed with the military. In the last few decades it's been easier for journalists to embed with the Taliban than the US Military.
The US Gov learned from Vietnam that showing people what they're doing cuts the domestic support. I've seen people suggesting it's bad for Bellingcat to report on the US strike of the girls school because it would hurt morale at home.
The end goal is labeling content covering wars/conflicts as "adult content". Removing any teenagers from the material reality of international affairs, while also creating a barrier for adults to see this content. Those who pass the barrier will then be more accurately tracked via these measures.
Anatomical reference material for artists with real nude models?
What about Sexual education materials? Medical textbooks?
Women baring their breasts in NYC where it's legal?
Where is the clear cut line of Pornography? At what point do we say any depiction of a human body is pornographic?
Plenty of people would prefer that children not learn about scientology from pro-scientology cultists too. It's not that they can't know about scientology (they probably should, in fact, because knowledge can have an immunizing effect against cults)...
And it's not that they can't know about communism (they probably should, in fact, because knowledge can have an immunizing effect against cults)...
This is a comment section about large corporations lobbying against our ability to freely use computers and you break out the 80's cold war propaganda edition of understanding a complicated economic system that intertwines with methodology for historical analysis with various levels of implementations from a governmental level.
You're either a mark or trying to find a mark.
Physical businesses nominally aren't selling their items to people across state or country borders.
Of course, we threw that out when we decided people could buy things online. How'd that tax loophole turn out?
It turned out we pretty much closed the tax loophole. I don't remember an online purchase with no sales tax since the mid 00s.
The real answer to the problem is for websites/appstores to publish tags that are legally binding assertions of age appropriateness, and then browsers/systems can be configured to use those tags to only show appropriate content to their intended user.
This also gives parents the ability to additionally decide other types of websites are not suitable for their children, rather than trusting websites themselves to make that decision within the context of their regulatory capture. For example imagine a Facebook4Kidz website that vets posts as being age appropriate, but does nothing to alleviate the dopamine drip mechanics.
There has been a market failure here, so it wouldn't be unreasonable for legislation to dictate that large websites must implement these tags (over a certain number of users), and that popular mobile operating systems / browsers implement the parental controls functionality. But there would be no need to cover all websites and operating systems - untagged websites fail as unavailable in the kid-appropriate browsers, and parents would only give devices with parental controls enabled to their kids.
Agreed, recycling a comment: on reasons for it to be that way:
___________
1. Most of the dollar costs of making it all happen will be paid by the people who actually need/use the feature.
2. No toxic Orwellian panopticon.
3. Key enforcement falls into a realm non-technical parents can actually observe and act upon: What device is little Timmy holding?
4. Every site in the world will not need a monthly update to handle Elbonia's rite of manhood on the 17th lunar year to make it permitted to see bare ankles. Instead, parents of that region/religion can download their own damn plugin.
To expand on your #3, it also gives parents a way to have different policies on different devices for the same child. Perhaps absolutely no social media on their phone (which is always drawing them, and can be used in private when they're supposed to be doing something else), but allowing it on a desktop computer in an observable area (ie accountability).
The way the proposed legislation is made, once companies have cleared the hurdle of what the law requires, parents are then left up to the mercy of whatever the companies deem appropriate for their kids. Which isn't terribly surprising for regulatory capture legislation! But since it's branded with protecting kids and helping parents, we need to be shouting about all the ways it actually undermines those goals.
Where do you go to vote for this option?
App and website operators should add one static header. [1] That's it, nothing more. Site operators could do this in their sleep.
User-agents must look for said header [1] and activate parental controls if they were enabled on the device by a parent. That's it, nothing more. No signalling to a website, no leaking data, no tracking, no identifying. A junior developer could do this in their sleep.
None of this will happen of course as bribery (lobbying) is involved.
Surely you can find a rationalwiki article for your fallacy too.
In fact, I suspect adults, and not just children, would also appreciate it if the pervasive surveillance was simply banned, instead of trying to age gate it. Why should bad actors be allowed to prey on adults?
The 2 billion dollars are the one twisting it.
Also, I heard the same thing about video games, TV shows, D&D, texting and even youth novels. It's yet another moral panic.
From the Guardian[1]:
> Social media time does not increase teenagers’ mental health problems – study
> Research finds no evidence heavier social media use or more gaming increases symptoms of anxiety or depression
> Screen time spent gaming or on social media does not cause mental health problems in teenagers, according to a large-scale study.
> With ministers in the UK considering whether to follow Australia’s example by banning social media use for under-16s, the findings challenge concerns that long periods spent gaming or scrolling TikTok or Instagram are driving an increase in teenagers’ depression, anxiety and other mental health conditions.
> Researchers at the University of Manchester followed 25,000 11- to 14-year-olds over three school years, tracking their self-reported social media habits, gaming frequency and emotional difficulties to find out whether technology use genuinely predicted later mental health difficulties.
From Nature[2]:
> Time spent on social media among the least influential factors in adolescent mental health
From the Atlantic[3] with citations in the article:
> The Panic Over Smartphones Doesn’t Help Teens, It may only make things worse.
> I am a developmental psychologist[4], and for the past 20 years, I have worked to identify how children develop mental illnesses. Since 2008, I have studied 10-to-15-year-olds using their mobile phones, with the goal of testing how a wide range of their daily experiences, including their digital-technology use, influences their mental health. My colleagues and I have repeatedly failed to find[5] compelling support for the claim that digital-technology use is a major contributor to adolescent depression and other mental-health symptoms.
> Many other researchers have found the same[6]. In fact, a recent[6] study and a review of research[7] on social media and depression concluded that social media is one of the least influential factors in predicting adolescents’ mental health. The most influential factors include a family history of mental disorder; early exposure to adversity, such as violence and discrimination; and school- and family-related stressors, among others. At the end of last year, the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine released a report[8] concluding, “Available research that links social media to health shows small effects and weak associations, which may be influenced by a combination of good and bad experiences. Contrary to the current cultural narrative that social media is universally harmful to adolescents, the reality is more complicated.”
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/media/2026/jan/14/social-media-t...
[2] https://www.nature.com/articles/s44220-023-00063-7
[3] https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2024/05/candi...
[5] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31929951/
[6] https://www.nature.com/articles/s44220-023-00063-7#:~:text=G...
[7] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32734903/
[8] https://nap.nationalacademies.org/resource/27396/Highlights_...
Recent posters here are clear that porn sites are setting every available signal that they are serving adult-only content.
According to them, you are targeting the wrong audience.
Facebook/Instagram studying how to get young users addicted should be of greater concern. I have my doubts about the effectiveness of age-based blocking there, though.
Yeah quite the opposite. Once they have that formalized attestation they will move in like sharks.
> give parents the ABILITY to advertise the users age to browsers, apps and everything in between.
Accounts and Applications to services that provide countent are set to a country-specific age rating restrictions (PG, 12+, 18+, whatever). That's it.
None of the things you mentioned have any point to concern themself with the age or age-bracket of the user in front of the device. This can and will be abused. This is very obvious. Think about it.
Clarification: "are set to" means by the parent. "Accounts and Applications to services that provide countent" like media content providing apps like discord, netflix, etc. that ARE able and/or bound to rate their content.
Package Manager and Software Installation in general are usually locked behind root/admin passwords anyway. Especially on kids' devices their user should be non-admin, no?
So, when any piece of software is installed, it is by choice of the parent.
That's not unreasonable then?
So on the Sony consoles I created an account for my child and guess what they have implemented some stuff to block children from adult content on some stuff.
So if Big Tech would actually want to prevent laws to be created could make it easy for a parent to setup the account for a child (most children this days have mobile stuff and consoles so they could start with those), we just need the browsers to read the age flag from the OS and put it in a header, then the websites owners can respect that flag.
I know that someone would say that some clever teen would crack their locked down windows/linux to change the flag but this is a super rare case, we should start with the 99% cases, mobile phones and consoles are already locked down so an OS API that tells the browser if this is an child account and a browser header would solve the issue, most porn websites or similar adult sites would have no reason not to respect this header , it would make their job easier then say Steam having to always popup a birth date thing when a game is mature.
Let's go back to parenting: yes, world is a scary place if you get into it unprepared.
> Nearly 75% of 12th grade students...have consumed alcohol in their lifetimes.
> 85 percent of 12th graders ... say it would be “fairly easy” or “very easy” for them to get alcohol.
Permission restricted registry entry (already exists) and a syscall that reads it (already exists) for windows and a file that requires sudo to edit (already exists) and a syscall to read it (already exists). Works on every distro automatically as well including android phones since they run the linux kernel anyway. Apple can figure it out and they already have appleid.
Responsibility should be on the website to not provide the content if the header is sent with an inappropriate age, and for the parent to set it up on the device, or to not provide a child a device without child-safe restrictions.
It seems very obviously simple to me, and I don't see why any of these other systems have gained steam everywhere all of a sudden (apart from a desire to enhance tracking).
(if there are further restrictions then it gets messy, but I feel like that's the current state of things anyways? at least for online services which I'm mostly speaking about here.)
Mostly my point is I don't think attestation is required. I think that responsibility should fall upon parents, and I don't want to have to give my ID to any online sites, because I don't remotely trust them to keep that safe. I'm less worried about them storing a number I send them about how old I am.
And 50 US states.
Having no restrictions would be great, but since a bunch of countries are passing these laws I'd appreciate having a minimally invasive version instead.
Morals like owning slaves, right?
A moral system that requires everyone to be white Christian males isn't a moral system, it's a theocracy.
Meh, I use it, but it's super annoying and I think that with my Daughter I'll take a different approach (but it will be some years before that is relevant).
On Android: The kid can easily go on Snapchat (after approval of install of course, and then you can just see their "friends") before Pokemon Go (just a pain to get working, it keeps presenting some borked version which led to a lot of confusion at first). I just lied about his age in a bunch of places at some point. Snapchat is horrible and sick from our experiences in the first week.
On Windows: It's a curated set of websites (and no FireFox) or access to everything. It's not even workable for just school. Granting kids access to our own minercraft servers: My god, I felt dirty about what the other parents had to go through to enable that.
This is a hobby horse of mine to the point that coworkers probably wish I'd just stfu about Minecraft - but holy shit is it crazy how many different things you need to get right to get kids playing together.
I genuinely have no idea how parents without years of "navigating technical bullshit" experience ever manage to make it happen. Juggling Microsoft accounts, Nintendo accounts, menu-diving through one of 37 different account details pages , Xbox accounts, GamePass subscriptions - it's just fucking crazy!
Getting an actual kids account to work online with minecraft involves setting the right permissions across 2-4 websites and 1-3 companies. I think it took me around 4 hours of trial and error to get it working.
I'm essentially the maintainer of a series of accounts for each kid, these days. Woe unto anyone without a password manager!
Imho there is a place for regulation in that, actually. Devices that parents are managing as child devices could include an OS API and browser HTTP header for "hey is this a child?" These devices are functionally adminned by the parent so the owner of the device is still in control, just not the user.
Just like the cookie thing - these things should all be HTTP headers.
"This site is requesting your something, do you want to send it?
Y/N [X] remember my choice."
Do that for GPS, browser fingerprint, off-domain tracking cookies (not the stupid cookie banner), adulthood information, etc.
It would be perfectly reasonable for the EU to legislate that. "OS and browsers are required to offer an API to expose age verification status of the client, and the device is required to let an administrative user set it, and provide instructions to parents on how to lock down a device such that their child user's device will be marked as a child without the ability for the child to change it".
Either way, though, I'm far more worried about children being radicalized online by political extremists than I am about them occasionally seeing a penis. And a lot of radicalizing content is not considered "adult".
"You‘re reading about evolution! Not in my house"
Examples: most children believe in the same religion as their parents, and can visit friends and places only if/when allowed by their parents.
This is simply extending the same level of control to the internet.
Government-mandated restrictions are completely another level.
Who controls your age if you want to see an R-rated movie?
This is simply extending the same level of control to the internet.
More control for parents is a completely different level.
They rarely enforce it, but if it gets out of hand, the city will start getting on your case about it.
Does the US have a zero-knowledge proof system that is mentioned in the discussion?
> Having said that, open-source zero-knowledge proofs are infinitely less evil (I refuse to say "better") than commercial cloud-based age monitoring baked into every OS
Parent prefers more control by parents over zero-knowledge proof
I do think parental controls can be and are abused for evil, but they're still better than the alternative. Zero-knowledge proof is not an alternative, and to suggest that it is is misunderstanding the situation. These laws are proposed and funded by people who want complete surveillance of the population. Zero-knowledge proof is, therefore, explicitly contrary to the goal and will never be implemented under any circumstances. Suggesting that it can be muddies the issue and tricks people into supporting legislation that exists only to be used against them.
In a benevolent dictatorship, sure, go for a zero-knowledge proof verification as your solution. In the reality of democracy, where politicians are corporate puppets who cloak surveillance laws in "think of the children" to rally support from the masses, we need to convince people to see through the lie and reject the proposals outright while reassuring them that they can protect the children themselves via parental controls. You will never be able to sufficiently inform 50.1% of the population of any country of what zero-knowledge proof even means, let alone convince them to support age verification laws but strictly conditional on ZKP requirements. That level of nuance is far too much to ask of millions of people who are not technically-informed, and idealism needs to give way to pragmatism if we wish to avoid the worst-case scenario.
As a parent, sure, that is my stance as well. What... what other stances are there even? How would they work?
But the implementation matters, and almost all of these bills internationally are being done in bad faith by coordinated big-money groups against technologically illiterate and reactionary populist governments.
(if we really want to get into an argument, there's what the UK calls "Gillick competence": the ability of children to seek medical treatment without the knowledge and against the will of their parents)
I would personally favour allowing parents to buy drinks for children below the current limits (18 without a meal, 16 for wine, beer and cider with a meal).
The alternative to this is empowering parents by regulating SIM cards (child safe cards already exist) and allowing parents to control internet connectivity either through the ISP or at the router - far better than regulating general purpose devices. The devices come with sensible defaults that parents can change.
It is not a new or novel concept. There are legal adults taking part in these conversations that are simply too young to have ever experienced internet connections that weren't restricted and filtered mandated by legislation, and they would have been teenagers that were old enough to have a say in the conversation when the Conservatives were debating the OSA in parliament.
Mobile internet connections have been filtered since 2004 even, so it's entirely likely that this would also be true for some people that are pushing 30 today. The debate on whether it's appropriate for internet filters to block access to Childline, the NSPCC, the Police, the BBC, Parliament, etc, is 15 years old at this point. Fifteen.
The false dichotomy that exists between the entirely authoritarian measures of the OSA and the still fairly authoritarian measures of mandatory filtering serves only the interests of borderline monopolistic American tech companies who are in a position to weather such regulations as they stifle and snuff out any possibility of a less harmful web ecosystem, and people will cheer it on as they believe the social media platforms they blame for causing harm will themselves be harmed by the very laws they are writing.
The real alternative is not having mandatory filtering but instead voluntary filtering by the parents themselves, which is what everybody seems to think they are arguing for, and that conversation is long since dead. It is entirely beside the point, but contrast it with alcohol laws. The UK is one of the few countries in Europe that has consumption laws both in private(+) and in public, whereas half of Europe only has consumption laws in public while the other half has no consumption laws in either private or public. America on the other hand has many states that prohibit under-21s from drinking alcohol even in private. A better comparison may be content ratings, which are largely entirely voluntary and not a legal requirement.
(+) It's 5+ so there may as well be no laws on private consumption.
Maybe a majority of people today agree with that, but I know I don't and I never hear that assumption debated directly.
The idea of the "nanny state" has been debated a lot, and this seems like a very literal example of that. But once some status quo is firmly entrenched, debate about it tends to die down because the majority of people no longer care enough about it.
TBH many parents done exactly that by giving phones/tablet already to kids in strollers
I owe everything about who I am today to learning how to circumvent firewalls and other forms of restriction. I would almost certainly be dead if I hadn't learned to socialize and program on the web despite it being strictly forbidden at home. Most of my interests, politics and personality were forged at 2am, as quiet as possible, browsing the web on live discs. I now support myself through those interests.
We're so quick to forget that kids are people, too. And today, they often know how to safely navigate the internet better than their aging caretakers who have allowed editorial "news" and social media to warp their minds.
Even for people who think they're really doing a good thing by supporting these kinds of insane laws that are designed to restrict our 1A rights: the road to hell is paved with good intentions.
With no proof it will protect anyone from proven harm.
Why is this such a sticking point in US politics? If the "undocumented" people aren't supposed to be in the country in the first place, why should rest of society cater to them? Even if you're against age verification for other reasons, dragging in the immigration angle is just going to alienate the other half of the population who don't share your view on undocumented people, and is a great way to turn a non-partisan issue into a partisan one. It's kind of like campaigning for medicare for all, and then listing "free abortions and gender affirming surgery" as one of the arguments for it.
Great, frame it as "poor people without IDs" or whatever, not "undocumented", which in the current political discourse is basically the left's version of the term "illegal immigrant".
>You might be in the country temporarily for business or as a tourist. The constitution applies to all of these people.
The constitutional right to... watch 18+ videos on youtube while in the US?
We _do not want_ the government to have the capability to enforce laws of this nature.
Because these undocumented people are still humans. They deserve access to information services. It's as simple as that.
"Undocumented" doesn't mean "residing illegally" anyway, it just means "lacking documents", which is a state that many perfectly legitimate US citizens find themselves in. But we should want people who are here illegally and everyone else to be able to use the world wide web and computers regardless of their legal status, just like everyone should be allowed to eat and buy food regardless of their legal status, because that's just basic humanity.
Which is kind of my point. Don't say it's a bad idea because "undocumented people" won't be able to get food, say it's bad because it'll be a pain for everyone.
>"Undocumented" doesn't mean "residing illegally" anyway, it just means "lacking documents", which is a state that many perfectly legitimate US citizens find themselves in. But we should want people who are here illegally and everyone else to be able to use the world wide web and computers regardless of their legal status, just like everyone should be allowed to eat and buy food regardless of their legal status, because that's just basic humanity.
But if you're undocumented, it's already a massive pain to participate in society. You can't get a bank account or any other sort of financial product, can't get a job (Form I-9, or want to do background checks), can't buy real estate (who are you going to register it to?), or even drive (yes, I know some states issue drivers licenses to "undocumented" migrants, but that makes them documented and irrelevant to this discussion). Therefore you're going to have a hard time garnering sympathy from voters. An analogy to this would be all the government forms that require a telephone number or an address. Is it illegal to not have a telephone number or an address? No. Do many people not have a phone number or address? Also yes. Is "let's abolish phone numbers and addresses on government forms" a good issue to run on? No.
Good thing I'm not running for office, and instead am merely having a conversation on the internet. I would vote for someone running on that issue, though!
> But if you're undocumented, it's already a massive pain to participate in society.
So I should be fine with any changes that embiggens that pain? I am not.
I'm not "fine" with it, but when there are trade-offs to be made, I'm definitely going to weigh that side less. Some people browse the web with javascript disabled. It's already a huge pain to browse the web with javascript disabled. With those two factors in mind, if I'm deciding whether to add javascript fallbacks (eg. SSR) on for my next project, I'm going to weigh the interests of the "javascript disabled" people very low. I don't have any animus against them, but at the same time I'm not going out of my way to cater to them either.
This means "not having documents". It's not a synonym for "illegal immigrant".
That said, government agencies have been doing a terrible job at keeping the private information of citizens safe. But it is nowhere nearly as bad as the US. My best childhood friend died in very questionable circumstances in 2009 in the US in very questionable circumstances. He had a US citizenship and we never really found out what had happened(to the point where we never really got any definitive proof that he had died). But that didn't stop me from trying and I was blown away by the fact that I could log into a US government website, register with a burner mail, pay 2 bucks with an anonymous gift credit/debit card and get a scanned copy of his death certificate in my email. And I didn't even have to provide his passport/id/anything. Just his name.
Point is, the US has been terrible at privacy for as long as I can remember. It is probably worse now with Facebook and Ellison holding TikTok.
The key question is whether AIPAC is taking actions at "the direction or control” of Israel, but the money is pretty clearly not being sourced from Israel.
I don't mean to be the average gloating US citizen, but I'm pretty sure we're the largest threat to the Earth.
The root of the problem is Russia, always has been.
So, I suppose if they could somehow use money and influence to determine election results, they would use it in Russia, no?
So, I think the civilizational threat from Russia is about the same as from North Korea: nearly zero.
Surely you meant this as hyperbole, right? If not, I would love your reasoning as to why its a bigger threat than literally anything and anyone else.
Reasoning: experience.
But they invest large amounts of money to propaganda channels everywhere, have direct military influence in large parts of Africa, are known to poison people in the UK and elsewhere, etc.
> its relative strength has only lessened over the decades Russia is not a _physical_ threat outside of its immediate proximity.
But they invest large amounts of money to propaganda channels everywhere, have direct military influence in large parts of Africa, are known to poison people in the UK and elsewhere, etc.
> Is it not?
No, and no part of your comment really seems to argue otherwise? I know about current world events. Your argument was that "experience" is a good enough reason to make a blanket statement about a country and all its people, and you doubled down on it, so it's not even like I'm constructing a strawman here or anything.
It's just wild to me how far this kind of blind hate goes. If "experience" is enough to say that a country is a bigger threat to civilization(!) than, lets say, pandemics, natural disasters, global nuclear war, etc., then there really remains no basis for any kind of healthy discussion. At that point it's just blind hatred.
I'm trying to steer the conversation to stay factual, because I usually appreciate HN for its clear communication style. Sorry for offending you and I'm sorry if I've caused you further suffering. Let's not continue this conversation.
I keep hearing this but I struggle to find any sources, beyond articles like [1] which are... not particularly good sources, even a reddit comment would be a better primary source than that.
I'm not trying to be combative, I just genuinely struggle to find primary sources, probably because I'm using the wrong keywords or something.
I understand the reasoning, but I would love to actually see/read/hear/whatever where Putin "states" this desire explicitly!
[1] https://gppreview.com/2015/02/12/putins-dream-reborn-ussr-un...
Surely I'm missing something here. Putin's 2023 "The Concept of the Foreign Policy of the Russian Federation" also does not state conquering back former USSR states. Where is it? If he states it so clearly that people keep quoting it, surely there must be a source for it? Sorry if I'm a PITA.
To be clear, I'm interested in this because this would be a fantastic argument to bring to discussions, but without having seen a source, I don't think I could.
I think Dugin's book is like that. Sure, Dugin said it, not Putin. But IIRC Putin did some things to make Dugin's book more influential. I forget the specifics - making it required reading in the Russian military academies, maybe?
There have been other statements by Russian politicians who are widely regarded as Putin's mouthpieces. Medvedev, certain key figures in the Russian parliament. I know I've seen that, though I don't recall the specifics.
So Putin maybe didn't say it. And yet, his endorsed mouthpieces (more than one) do say it.
You said "without having seen a source". Well, I didn't give you one. But if you want to look, I have given some places to start.
> making it required reading in the Russian military academies, maybe
Yeah, I think he did.
> So Putin maybe didn't say it.
That's my concern. When people make the statement that he did, when he didn't, they essentially preempt any reasonably discussion and start it off on the entirely wrong foot.
If I want to have a discussion with my neighbor about him not cleaning up his own trash, surely I would not start the discussion with "you LOVE living in trash, don't you", even if I can reasonably deduce that he does. It just turns the entire discussion hostile to make claims that aren't supported, and it weakens all subsequent arguments!
So I don't think it's the entirely wrong foot. It's a shortcut and an imprecision, but the point (that Putin actually thinks this) seems to be valid. (Though one should have less than 100% certainty that it represents his position - but with Putin, that should apply to a direct quote as well.)
You have to remember how political communication works in Russia. They rarely state goals outright, and always juggle several narratives at the same time. To make it hard to pin them down to any position and achieve exactly what is happening here.
[0] https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/On_the_Historical_Unity_of_Ru...
Death certificates become public record after a period of time, depending on the state. In some states it’s 25 years after death, some more, some less.
https://www.usa.gov/death-certificate#:~:text=Can%20anyone%2...
As far as I can tell this is the same as in the EU: Death certificates can be publicly accessed for a fee after a period of time defined by member states.
I found some comments saying death certificates in the UK could be accessed as early as 6 months in some locations.
So I don’t see this as the US being uniquely terrible on privacy. This is how most of the western world does it. You just had experience with the US and assumed EU was different.
> we never really found out what had happened(to the point where we never really got any definitive proof that he had died).
I’m sorry for your loss, but doesn’t this imply that the US did do a good job of protecting his privacy? It wasn’t until the time limit had passed that you were able to find the death certificate.
I don't know about elsewhere but in the UK anyone can apply for any death certificate going back to 1837.
When we hear about “zero knowledge” ID checks in real proposals they’re not actually zero knowledge altogether. They have built in limits or authorities to prevent these obvious attacks, like requiring them to interact with government servers and then pinky promising that those government servers won’t log your requests.
In a true zero-knowledge system sharing falsely shared credentials becomes easy because it’s untraceable. If the proof has no knowledge attached, you can’t conclude who used their credentials on a website that generates proof-of-age tokens on demand for visitors.
Its billions of lobbying for state surveillance under a smokescreen you bypass with basic human interaction.
(Note, this is why they won’t stop at the CA bill.)
And according to the EU Identity Wallet's documentation, the EU's planned system requires highly invasive age verification to obtain 30 single use, easily trackable tokens that expire after 3 months. It also bans jailbreaking/rooting your device, and requires GooglePlay Services/IOS equivalent be installed to "prevent tampering". You have to blindly trust that the tokens will not be tracked, which is a total no-go for privacy.
These massive privacy issues have all been raised on their Github, and the team behind the wallet have been ignoring them.
Not exactly a good moment for this particular caste of politicians/elites to pretend they care about children's well-being!
The benefit of zero-knowledge proofs is that the hide information about the ID and who it belongs to.
That’s also a limitation for how useful they are as an ID check mechanism. At the extreme, it reduces to “this user has access to an ID of someone 18+”. If there is truly a zero-knowledge construction using cryptographic primitives then the obvious next step is for someone to create an ad-supported web site where you click a button and they generate a zero-knowledge token from their ID for you to use. Zero knowledge means it can’t be traced back to them. The entire system is defeated.
This always attracts the rebuttal of “there will always be abuse, so what?” but when abuse becomes 1-click and accessible to every child who can Google, it’s not a little bit of abuse. It’s just security theater.
So the real cryptographic ID implementations make compromises to try to prevent this abuse. You might be limited to 3 tokens at a time and you have to request them from a central government mechanism which can log requests for rate limiting purposes. That’s better but the zero-knowledge part is starting to be weakened and now your interactions with private services require an interaction with a government server.
It’s just not a simple problem that can be solved with cryptographic primitives while also achieving the actual ID goals of these laws.
once you get this you stop asking why the tech details are the way they are.
Other states are even worse, creating another way to have your buddy buddy lobbyist folks fire up a new business opportunity to make money as a verification service.
Judges in other countries (Texas) found out this kind of law was a violation of the Free Speech.
Since when Free Speech do not apply to -16y old?
Made laws are made, then killed by courts later one.
The only authority that can be trusted to do age verification is the government.
You know, those people who give you birth certificates, passports, SSNs, driver's licenses, etc.
The idea that parental supervision here is sufficient has been shown to be wholly inadequate. I'm sorry but that train has sailed. Age verification is coming. It's just a question of who does it and what form it takes.
Take Youtube, for example. I think it should work like this:
1. If you're not of sufficient age, you simply don't see comments. At all;
2. Minors shouldn't see ads. At all;
3. Videos deemed to have age-restricted content should be visible;
4. If you're not logged in, you're treated as an age-restricted user; and
5. Viewing via a VPN means you need age verification regardless of your country of origin.
It's not perfect. It doesn't have to be.
https://github.com/upper-up/meta-lobbying-and-other-findings
This (an end to general purpose computing) isn't anything that people can prevent through civil channels. It will happen with or without public approval. You will have as much control over it as you had over the decision to go to war with Iran. It will never be on any ballot. People who help will get rich, people who don't, won't. Eventually, people who help will barely be middle class, and people who don't, won't. Their kids will own your kids.
If anything, Meta’s utility would seem to shrink if the OS handles proof of being a real person.
It also gives them more information on users as a bonus. Further, verification with a real ID is also a quite effective barrier against excessive bots.
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2025/12/congresss-crusade-age-...
Why does Apple always get a free pass?