There is a big difference between: Government demands every website to have age verification, and government supported scheme by which service can opt into age verification.
As of now, American private spyware is actively filling the demand.
I get the feeling some privacy advocates are approaching the choice as a tier system, with government being the worst case.
I don't see it.
The only viable solution for the future of privacy is to not be dependent on the giant platforms in the first place.
Nah. Parental Controls are baked into every major consumer OS. If government cared about giving guardians the tools needed to care for the vulnerable ones they're responsible for, they'd require those parental controls to be beefed up [0] and that it be a requirement that online services and both local and remote software be required to honor the restrictions required by those Parental Controls.
Instead, what we get proposed is a system that cares very much about how old you are, and not one bit about the things that one's guardian understands one needs to be protected from. This system will work for some under-eighteens, but it will fail for many others, as well as every single dementia-damaged elder or brain-damaged/developmentally-stunted adult.
What's being proposed is absolutely not about protecting people... if it were, the mandate would be to beef up the existing fully-anonymous systems, rather than requiring identifying information from users.
[0] ...I mention this because I often hear in Internet discussion that these controls are insufficient, not because I have personal knowledge that they're inadequate.
Even the parental controls that are there are a train wreck. Our kid has an iPhone and the parental controls have all kinds of weird issues like, you give them 15 minutes of WhatsApp daily. First time on a day they start WhatsApp it says that all their time is up. Or suddenly they cannot run an application that was permitted by a parent. Then you uninstall and install the app again and suddenly it works.
It is unusable.
There web is also a huge hole in all of this. A lot of services you can also use as a website. A whitelist is too limiting and a blacklist is a daily task to maintain (and would require spying on your kid).
I also prefer to avoid age attestation altogether, but I am also not sure what the solution is. I think many people do not realize how much social pressure there is to use certain apps/games and how bad parental controls are. Yes, we say "no" to a lot of things, but you cannot say "no" to everything. Missing certain cultural touchstones (certain TV shows, certain games) makes your child an outsider.
As I said:
If government cared about giving guardians the tools needed to care for the vulnerable ones they're responsible for, they'd require those parental controls to be beefed up...
and as I went on to say:
...and that it be a requirement that online services and both local and remote software be required to honor the restrictions required by those Parental Controls.
Nope.
Privacy advocacy is losing the battle, because it is being framed as a choice between privacy and the status quo, and people vehemently dislike the status quo.
But cellphone access is different; it's assumed to be perfect, but it's increasingly being moderated by machine learning heuristics that serve as judge, jury, and executioner, severing your services if a couple of your actions trigger a fuzzy approximation to some of the training data.
AI moderation helps suppress spammers, but it's also punishing false positives, and there is just no recourse. Any ID system that piggybacks on "Apple | Google" is effectively shunning some non trivial portion of society. Governments of the people need to provision their own tech systems that are accessible to all citizens, even those who have run afoul of an AI moderation system.
It started when he signed up at a new bank, giving them his phone number. Somehow the bank enrolled his in their online banking system, which notified Samsung, who remotely initiated the "let's give your phone a pin" flow, presumably to protect him during online banking. (This happened without his knowledge -- he had not installed the bank's phone app.)
Later that day, when his phone went into a modal "let's setup a pin" screen, he panicked, assuming an attacker had gained control of his phone, since this was not something he initiated. No button would let him exit the screen, so he powered it down. Now, when he powers it up, it demands a pin, but he doesn't know what pin that would be. The only way to get the phone back would be to factory reset it, meaning he'd be wiping his data. He had the money to replace his phone, but that may not be true of every citizen, especially at his age.
People assume digital auth systems are perfect. But you don't hear from consumers who can't get online to tell you "I've lost access."
I've shared some other similar stories: a widow who got banned for life from facebook within minutes of making an account from an apple device on a consumer ISP with her real cell phone number.
A coworker attempted to sell his son's sporting goods on facebook marketplace and was banned for life with no appeal because AI thought it was "weapons."
Some high school students each made a gmail address from the same laptop one afternoon, only to be banned the next day. Each supplied their own cellphone number, but the accounts got shut down, presumably because multiple accounts were being created from the same device too rapidly.
AI moderation means there are a ton of unwritten rules, and private companies will keep you out of their platforms if you break them. That's fine, but it means governments have no business serving their citizens from these exclusive platforms.
> e signed up at a new bank, giving them his phone number. Somehow
Do you have a proof that this actually a thing? I don't see what mechanism exists to do this and I don't see why Samsung would even bother to do this.