Parental controls remains the right way to do age gating. It works today and has no privacy impacts.
You know who didn't refuse to get involved? Larry Ellison, Peter Thiel, Mark Zuckerberg. They made suggestions to governments about how to solve this problem, and the best proposed solution was adopted and made the law.
Then legally require it to be effective and easy-to-use-if-you-take-a-few-minutes-to-read-the-instructions.
See also [0].
There's apparently information that you didn't read contained in the footnote of the comment you replied to.
Based on this layman's reading of the law, [0] California did literally the opposite. They require major OS vendors to require users to enter their birthdate or indicate in some other way their current age, and then require programs and websites to act on that age information. This is entirely different from requiring major OS vendors to allow a "guardian account" to set fairly-fine-grained restrictions on one or more -er- "ward accounts", and then requiring programs and websites to refuse let the "ward account" do the things that those restrictions say that it isn't permitted to do.
"Restrict by age" neither accounts for precocious under-eighteens, nor does it account for vulnerable elderly or otherwise brain/developmentally-damaged adults who need protected. And because "restrict by age" cares very much about your age, and because it's not going to work nearly as well as promised by those pushing it, it will inevitably require scans of both a photo ID and one's face and/or other biometrics.
A "you don't need to know anything about this account other than that these are the things it's not supposed to be able to do" system gives zero shits about the identity of a person, so there's no plausible path for it to gate access behind submission of any identifying documents to any third party.
[0] <https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billTextClient.xhtm...>
[L]egally require[d] ... to be effective and easy-to-use-if-you-take-a-few-minutes-to-read-the-instructions.
Like, seriously... if "the kids can lie about their age and there are no consequences for lying" is the bar you want to set, just do the 1990's thing where sites and programs have a "Warning! This might not be suitable for kids!" page/screen that has a checkbox that the kids can check or button that they can press that lets them lie that they're over-seventeen and grants them access.
https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2026/07/01/majority-...
https://x.com/PTBwrites/status/2031529878021923118
https://yougov.com/en-us/daily-results/20250502-1e408-1
https://yougov.com/en-us/daily-results/20250502-1e408-2
> Parental controls remains the right way to do age gating. It works today and has no privacy impacts.
This opinion is not grounded in data and facts. If this was true, we would not be here. But we’re here because parental controls are insufficient, the vast majority of parents are just hanging in there getting their kids to adulthood.
More than 3 million college students are raising kids. Most won’t graduate - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48709130 - June 2026
The real single-parent capital of America - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42867716 - January 2025 ("The places with the most single parents tend to be, to put it bluntly, struggling. The strongest predictors of single parenthood are high poverty rates and high shares of the population receiving government assistance." [There are ~13.6M single parents in the U.S. raising over 21M children. This means single parents head roughly one in three households and approximately 34% of all U.S. children live in a single-parent family.])
Parents Under Pressure: The U.S. Surgeon General's Advisory on the Mental Health & Well-Being of Parents - https://www.hhs.gov/sites/default/files/parents-under-pressu... - 2024
> When stress is severe or prolonged, it can have a deleterious effect; 41% of parents say that most days they are so stressed they cannot function and 48% say that most days their stress is completely overwhelming compared to other adults (20% and 26%, respectively).
> Nearly 70% of parents say parenting is now more difficult than it was 20 years ago, with children’s use of technology and social media as the top two cited reasons.
> Recent data from 2021-2022 indicate that among parents, 23.9% (or 20.3 million) had any mental illness and 5.7% (or 4.8 million) of parents had a serious mental illness.
> Lastly, many other caregivers assume primary caregiving responsibility when parents cannot, thus acting as a critical safety net for children. In recent years, there has been a notable increase in such individuals taking on caregiving responsibilities for children, with approximately 2.4 million children being raised by grandparents, other relatives, or family friends, without their biological parent(s) in the household.
U.S. has world’s highest rate of children living in single-parent households - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37628812 - September 2023 (108 comments)
(fertility rates continue to collapse though, so hopefully this problem continues to decline over time, only time will tell; 40% of annual pregnancies in the US and internationally are unintended, per the Guttmacher Institute and the UN, respectively)
Charted: How American Households Have Changed Over Time (1960-2023) - https://www.visualcapitalist.com/how-american-households-hav... ("A record 58.4% of American households now consist of married or single adults without children. Only 25.3% of American households contain children.")
It's a mix of what they can do and what they're likely to do. They just have to be able to go back to voters and say they're doing something.
If you think that the fact that they did the wrong thing is an argument for not doing anything, you clearly are blind to politics & history.
And age verification being the wrong solution to the "privacy problem" doesn't remove privacy from lawmakers' crosshairs.
None of these groups will because they profit too much from disrespecting their privacy. The average child would be far safer if they used the Dark Web. I'm not sure why the "richest country on earth" is engaging in zero-sum behavior, but those are the kinds of contradictions such behavior creates.
[1] https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2023/10/18/key-findi...
Almost all victimization is being done without end to end encryption. This is not a problem caused by privacy.
Also on Discord and Roblox, they are apparently the biggest platforms for this, but they're not E2EE anyway, they're just hiding it because their executives like what's happening.
I don't think it's that encryption was harmful, it's that it wasn't enough, and in a sense I agree with TFA & the Sun Tzu bit: it needed to be complemented by legislation that added decent privacy protections, and it largely wasn't. That was a mistake, I suppose, but the current political situation, esp. in the USA, disfavors privacy regulation getting done, ever. The Democrats are … maybe spiritually for it? … but not terrible effectual at getting it done; Obama's response to Snowden was "meh" at best, and Congresspeople, in particular Feinstein especially, let the DNI walk all over her. The GOP has no interest at all in regulating corporations, at all, ever, so with the House/Senate/POTUS all (R) at the moment, it's going to be until at least Nov before it is possible to even think that these might get addressed, and even that's … generous, and I won't be holding my breath for it to occur.
Stuff like what we saw in another thread today — with LG wantonly installing spyware — and things like Flock would have happened in addition to network intercepts; they are not happening instead of. Corporations and the government will do whatever the People permit them to get away with.
His theory is bunk, there is absolutely no middle ground to be had with the people who want a backdoor. There are no small backdoors.
If we had parental controls that actually worked it would forestall any talk about ID scanning because parents could just enable parental controls.