Age assurance is still treating the symptom. If the platform is designed to addict and radicalize, a children's device getting in doesn't help the child, it just means the harmful design now has a younger victim. The only fix that actually works is making the platform safe for everyone, which means regulating what these services are allowed to do to users in the first place, not building better gates around them.
(There are some basic things like fraud and such that are already illegal.)
Most people don’t actually want to ban “harmful” speech except for the speech of their political enemies.
It always beautiful how single-word choices like this can reveal the actual intent behind seemingly "reasonable" words.
(Forgive the link source - I can see in hindsight how that might not be perceived as the most objective source - but there are many other sources for those who care to look.)
2020s: >%2 of all teens smoke
Kinda suggests that putting limitations in place actually produces results. Crazy innit?
If you weren't aware, smoking became uncool a long time ago. Teens who consume tobacco use vapes or Zyn now.
So the metric should be case by case for each proposed solution. Most of things proposed are no good, but that doesn't mean there is not a sensible solution out there to limit net for teens.
source?
Like copy-protection there's always a way to circumvent it, the name of the game is to make it difficult enough. And for parents, to make it very easy to set-up.
this is fundamentally wrong and accepting this as an industry will only lead to required identity verification becoming the norm sooner or later
the important realization is age verification is in the end "just" a form of parenting tool
this means
- it doesn't need to be a "perfect", glancing at the age of a passport when buying adult products isn't perfect either, but it's good enough. And it doesn't require seeing the address, name, (in most cases) day and month, gender etc. on a id, nor any form of "noting them down".
- it doesn't need to be attestation based, unhackable or anything like that. It complements parenting, not replaces it.
- in turn it also shouldn't need anyones id, in most places children below 18 don't need any id but 16+ is still a age barrier
or to lay it out in rough design
- require multimedia devices sold to have a child "mode" functionality
- allow setting a age category or age (to auto determine and update the category), require a age set for this purpose to be kept private on the device and not shared, analyzed etc.
- require web sites and apps to have voluntary min age limits, similar to other products, block access _client side_ based on this information. The standard should allow region/country specific limits and reason tags.
- There are a bunch of edge cases omitted, like sites serving dynamic content/platforms in general. Requirements for parents to be allowed to define exceptions (in both directions) and handling of sides not having your countries age gating. Etc.
- properly educate parent about it
this provides sufficient functionality to support parents in parenting without requiring any identity verification or overriding the parents right to parent
yes, it's not perfect in many ways. But it doesn't need to perfect, it's "just fine" for what it tries to archive.
it's a parenting tool, not an online banking system
EDIT: Also the most relevant devices are not laptops, but phones, tablets, gaming consoles. Some of them have such a system already working "good enough" for the use cases of "games"/"game stores" and similar. Yes not browser. But very much extensible to that.