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Comment by manfredo | Hacker News Reader

Age requirements for any web app always struck me as a joke. I'm sure everyone is telling the truth when they click "I am over 13/18 years old".

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Somehow I'm reminded of the Leisure Suit Larry age check [0]... which for a young teenager all those years ago was quite hard. You need to be a certain age to get quite a lot of the answers.

[0] Sample questions here: http://allowe.com/games/larry/tips-manuals/lsl1-age-quiz.htm...

For a young teenager back then those were hard. For a mid-late 20 year old today they're still hard.

I wonder what sort of questions one would ask to implement such a age verification scheme these days. Ask, "what does AOL stand for?" or, "which one of the following audio clips is 'the dial-up tone'?". Or how about "what is a 'hanging-chad'?". Heck that last one doesn't even work anymore, there are 18 years today born after the 2000 election... I'm getting old.

Although I guess Google and widespread internet adoption has rendered this kind of age verification useless.

I know the answer to the first two of those, but I have never heard about a “hanging-chad”. Is that something people from outside of the US (as I myself am) would be likely to know?

Even AOL, which I happen to know about is something I think few people in my country would be likely to know.

These questions strike me then as not purely relating to age but also to culture.

And even the dial-up tone question could be difficult for some people to answer. We had dialup at my child home but not everyone did.

And like you said, most questions can be Googled anyway.

Hanging chad is a reference to disputed ballots in to 2000 presidential election, Hence my reference to the year 2000 [1]. Definitely yes, these are questions about culture rather than age and is more specific to Americans. The same applies to the original Leisure Suite Larry age questions [2]. My post was intended to be more humorous than practical.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chad_(paper)

2. http://allowe.com/games/larry/tips-manuals/lsl1-age-quiz.htm...

That was the first time I had heard the name Nixon and prompted me to learn about Watergate from the dead-tree encyclopedia in first grade.

I've always pondered whether this could be an effective way of tricking children into learning bits of history like trying to understand jokes from The Simpsons or the little bits of trivia that used to pop up on the loading screens in Call of Duty single player modes.

Nah it wasn't that hard. You just guessed till you got five right, while recording the ones you got right and wrong so you could change your guess. It didn't have that many questions, and some of them you could look up in the encyclopedia, or just yell down the hall and hope your parents didn't wonder why you were asking about Nixon. :)

"Peter Piper picked..."? Was that an adults-only tongue twister at some point? How is that supposed to distinguish an 18-year-old from a four-year-old?

It takes it from 'we didn't even bother asking' to 'the person actively lied to us when we tried to do the right thing'. Seems like a big difference in responsibility to me.

I don't deny that TikTok made a mistake. I'm pointing out that in practice throwing up an age gate changes nothing. Sure, it's a dirt simple way of avoiding responsibility and TikTok should have at least done that much (doubly so since a whole story arc about this was aired on Silicon Valley). But if we really care about keeping under 13-year-olds from using these web apps or having their data collected then a more robust system of verification should be implemented.

I think the point is nobody really cares about stopping 12 year olds using the service.

The 12 year old themselves wants to use the service. The service wants to be used. Most parents want their child to be able to do what they think is fun.

The only people against it are the people who don't want to properly supervise their children online, but also don't want them disadvantaged, so want the entire online service banned so nobody gets access.

COPPA isn't about preventing children accessing the service, it's about protecting their right not to have their personal data gathered and sold. Wikipedia has a reasonable summary: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Children%27s_Online_Privacy_Pr...

isnt that all out of the gate once the kids press the "Im over 13 y.o"(or input false d.o.b) button to use their app/site?

If yes, then Im not sure what it protects except false sense of security

Yeah, like what was the lowest age their ad targeting tools would go?

It is very strange, but either the government just wanted to pretend it cared (back when they introduced the law), or it doesn't care and accepts that this implementation is good enough.

Interestingly with all the cameras on devices and AI/ML to recognize age and gender from a face, if this law came around nowadays they'd probably mandate face scanning to determine that you're of age...

> but either the government just wanted to pretend it cared (back when they introduced the law), or it doesn't care and accepts that this implementation is good enough.

It's all about responsibility transfer, I think.

If you've ticked some box that you should not have, then it's YOU who is responsible for whatever bad may happen.

It's not far off:

> When a UK IP address attempts to access a website with pornographic content, the person browsing the web will have to verify themselves. It's up to each individual porn website to implement the technology that allows people to prove they're old enough to view the material.[..]

> The first [option from Yoti] is using your face. There will be the option to use the camera on a phone, tablet or computer and Yoti's "age estimation technology" will determine whether the person is old enough to access the explicit material.

https://www.wired.co.uk/article/uk-porn-age-verification

When customs asks you to check off off that you aren't a murderer or drug smuggler or terrorist, they aren't expecting you to confess on that scrap of paper, they want to be able to go back if they later suspect you and say "here is the form where you lied to the U.S. government."

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