A) 18+ content is behind a pinky swear
B) 18+ content is behind a parental control (what this bill would do)
C) The internet can't have 18+ content anymore
D) Some other system? Please describe it.
You might think you can keep 16 year olds from looking at porn, if they want to. You can't. You have never been able to. All you can do is teach them that the law is stupid and pointless, and they should treat rules with contempt. But they'll still be able to look at porn.
What you can do is allow the government and private companies to track everyone, everywhere, all the time. And you can create more gatekeepers that hold personal identity data, misuse it, and leak it.
"Google's data harvesting operation became a load bearing piece of the Internet before the public understood digital privacy. And now we can't get rid of it."
The public has been conditioned to expect web services free at point of use. Legitimately it's hard to monetize things like YouTube without ads, and I get that. But turning our entire ecosystem of tech into a massive surveillance mini-state seems like an astonishingly shitty idea compared to just... finding a way to do advertising that DOESN'T involve 30 shadowy ad companies knowing your resting blood pressure. My otherwise creative and amazing industry seems utterly unwilling to confront this.
Edit: Like, I don't know, am I crazy for thinking that simply because we can target ads this granularity, that it simply must be that? I get that the ad-tech companies do not want to go back to blind-firing ads into the digital ether on the hope that they'll be seen, but that's also plus or minus the entirety of the history of advertising as an industry, with the last 20 or so years being a weird blip where you could show your add to INCREDIBLY specific demographics. And I wouldn't give a shit except the tech permitting those functions seems to be socially corrosive and is requiring even further erosion of already pretty porous user privacy to keep being legally tenable.
However it appears that it takes pretty disasterous consequences for us to be able to walk anything back.
Why?
We don't externalize age verification when buying alcohol or visiting the strip club. It's on the responsibility of those establishments to verify age.
I think that main goal would be to keep the ability to have accounts be anonymous or pseudo anonymous.
If social mean company has to verify an accounts age themselves they then have to use some for of official government identification and with that any chance of anonymous or pseudo anonymous access.
My comment was not about what I knew/know about facebook or not. I was answering the question of why age verification should be externalized to a degree and in this case externalized means the power stays with the user and parents rather than being in the hands of say facebook/meta.
I was not talking about why facebook/meta would want it or not want it. Large companies want lots of different things. Sometimes it is required to know their motivations to discuss or decide on something. I think it can be detrimental to do that though without discussing/analyzing a topic/idea on its own merits first or at least parallel. My comment was focused on the merits not the motivations or desires of companies like facebook.
It works for the in-person context because it's a physical object, making it easier to control access to it. A high resolution picture of the same ID is a privacy problem as it can be copied, shared, transferred, etc without the knowledge of the ID holder.
Meta Apps can have age verification but it should be at the point of service, not the supply chain.
And even if we were to agree to this, uploading your IDs to an untrusted third party is asking too much.
So have the government do it? They already know who we are and when we were born.
I think this is a reasonable balance without being invasive as there's now a defined path to do reasonable parenting without being a sysadmin and operators cannot claim ignorance because the user input a random birthday. The information leaked is also fairly minimal so even assuming ads are using that as signal, it doesn't add too many bits to tracking compared to everything else. I think the California bill needs a bit of work to clarify what exactly this applies to (e.g. exclude servers) but I also think this is a reasonable framework to satisfy this debate.
I've seen the argument that this could lead to actual age verification but I think that's a line that's clearly definable and could be fought separately.
Right now, it's not even clear how to create parental controls at a reasonable level so there's no clear path for what to do or how to respond.
Basically unsolveable, so why worry about that edge case? Kids will always get through to some adult content somewhere. A token system will make parents feel better in the meantime.
Its trivially easy to see if the user (child) has indeed created multiple OS level user accounts with different permission levels if you want to spot check the computer.
You'll see it on first startup and then you can have "a chat". With Guest account access disabled, spawning a new account on a computer takes 2-3 minutes, will send emails and dashboard notices to the parent.
Its very much near impossible to verify that the child is not just going to Facebook etc. and using separate accounts and just logging out religiously.
That said I wish Apple/Microsoft/Google had more aggressively advertised their Parental Control features for Mac/Windows/ChromeOS as a key differentiator to avoid Ubuntu/Open Source distros from having to implement them.
I think this is a sensible compromise. It gives parents more control than before without relying on shady third-party software or without turning every platform into a cop. Yeah, it also aligns with Meta's interests, but so what?
The age attestation solutions pursued by the EU are far more invasive in this respect, even though they notionally protect identity. They mean that the "default" internet experience is going to be nerfed until you can present a cryptographic proof that you're worthy.
And cheat devices can be taken away as soon as the parent notices them.
There is software that does this already. Concerned parents do not actually lack for options in any sense.
> It's effectively just standardizing parental controls.
You could _literally_ just standardize parental controls instead.
So we have to pay some 3rd party service to hoard information about Children? Why we want to set that up? Why would we want to take that power from the parents and give it to some company?
No, there shouldn't be any such thing; everyone pushing for any shape of this should just bugger off.
I pay the company to verify me, I am their customer. They take on the liability of the OS makers and app makers of age verification.
If you have a valid token signed by a licensed IDS that verified your age in your OS, that's all anyone needs to know.
So, they want to profit off children, but do nothing to protect them?
> but there should be a trusted 3rd party service that does that
Gee, if only Facebook would use their incredible might to create this, rather than trying to rob our representative government from underneath us.
> It abso-fucking-lutely should not be at the OS level though
It's not my problem. It shouldn't involve me at all. I don't use social media and I think if you let your kids on there unsupervised you have a screw loose.
As there has been a market failure for decades at this point, it would be reasonable to give this a legislative nudge - spelling out the specific labels, requiring large websites to publish the appropriate labels, and requiring large device manufacturers to include parental controls functionality. The labels would be defined such that a website not declaring labels (small, foreign, configuration mistake, etc) would simply not be shown by software configured with parental controls, preserving the basic permissionless nature of the Internet we take for granted.
But as it stands, this mandate being pushed is horribly broken - both for subjecting all users to the age verification regime, and also for being highly inflexible for parents who have opinions about what their kids should be seeing that differ from corporate attorneys!