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Comment by smhenderson | Hacker News Reader

Well the article says: To ensure its success, the Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) says that online services must also adopt "robust" age-verification systems.

My guess is they'll ask for a valid credit card before allowing users to access the interface for likes and such. Which, IMO anyway, means many less people will be liking things in the UK, not just under-18's. Then some clever kid will find a way to get around it and before you know it the only people liking anything will be kids under 18.

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Credit cards aren't really used for age verification purposes in the UK so I'm not sure why it would be accepted for this.

Also, "All adults own a credit card" is far from a good assumption in general and credit card ownership is actually in decline in the UK so it would be bizarre to tie credit card ownership into this.

Oh I agree it’s a terrible way to do it. I live in the US where it’s used a lot for age verification.

Didn’t realize it wasn’t more universal. It will be interesting to see what they come up with.

It's terrible.

It's also the only thing which is possible.

It's the streetlight fallacy, in other words: The drunk doesn't know where those damn car keys have gotten to, but they know that the only place the light's good enough to look is under the streetlight, so the keys must be under the streetlight.

Good spot - this reeks of the same issue that the anti-porn bill [0] has, going straight for the "please, think of the children" approach.

[0] https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2019/mar/16/uk-online-po...

Not sure about the UK, but in the US you can get a bank account and debit card when your parents co-sign as early as age 14 (Bank of America). Is age something merchants get back from Visa/MC when you make a transaction?

Banks will often have multiple BIN's[1] assigned to them. When I was last in the industry ~10 years ago, it was typical to use the BIN to identify specific types of card within an institution, so it wasn't uncommon to see a single institution with multiple BINs.

Something like that could be used to filter out such cards, if they were assigned a unique BIN by the bank. As to whether anyone actually _does_ that, I don't know.

[1] The BIN is the first six digits of your card number. It identifies the originating bank, among other things: https://www.investopedia.com/terms/b/bank-identification-num...

I don't think the age verification systems used online will accept a debit card though and I don't think you can get a real credit card under 18 even with a parent authorizing or co-signing.

Even though a debit card acts like a credit card under most circumstances where your available balance is effectively your "credit" limit but there are ways of telling the difference between a debit/check card and a real credit card.

The merchant can definitely see whether a card is a debit card or a credit card. The charge structure and chargeback rules are different. A debit card is to spend money you already own, hence why a 14 year old or younger can have one. A credit card creates a debt - and in the UK debts incurred below the age of 18 are unenforceable in court. So no one will issue a credit card to a person under 18.

Everyone will just sneak their parents' cards. I know I would have.

Or they can just ask? I would have no trouble helping my son work around dumb rules. "Here's another one of those situations where lying is appropriate. I hope you're learning to be a good judge of when it is and isn't. Yes, adults are pretty stupid sometimes."

As his guardian you limit your son's ability to legally retaliate in the future against possible coercive actions offered by said corporations, with its sole intention to form an addictive dependency to its users.

It's like buying your son cigarettes. This shifts the responsibility from the supplier to the enabler (you).

Will we in the near future reflect on this digital period, similar to how we now reflect on the era of dominance of cigarette manufacturers?

No one said being a parent is easy, but taking responsibility for these types of decisions is part of the job.

I triggered on "work around dumb rules". Large institutions consulted by legal and behavioural experts, backed by decades of research come to the conclusion to severely restrict the effects of persuasive design on children. Taking the time to reflect on both sides of the argument without dismissing it as 'dumb rules', would be my interpretation of responsible guardianship.

As we speak, persuasive design experts, applying behavioural psychology are having wreaking measureable, wide-scale deleterious effects on our youngest generation.

Yes, I agree we should teach our children about these systems of control. At the same time, we should acknowledge that the effects are spanning wide ranges of our population, regardless of age, sex, income class and education level. Our society needs stronger controls to counter decades of psychological and sociological research, designed and funded for offensive purposes (psy-ops).

There’s never been anything like the mass psyops of the past 100 years, and it’s not clear that such toxic memetic behavior can coexist with society. We’ve only seen three generations of impact, but it seems the deleterious effects are outpacing our ability to adapt.

It’s possible PR will trigger a memetic mass extinction event.

I’d encourage people here who work in marketing, public relations, or social media to seriously consider the systemic effects of what they’re doing.

I hear you.

On the one side we have corporate interests looking to exploit everything they are not barred from exploiting and piously declaring that not exploiting things they are not barred from exploiting is failing in their mission.

On the other side we have governments trying with varying degrees of success to add regulations on this stuff that most lawmakers do not understand.

As a parent, you cannot just rely on the government. Some regulations are good. Some don't go far enough. Some are kind of dumb.

This is how I was raised, and exactly what I would do if I were a parent.

At least one of the age verification services being tested just validates the card number is formatted correctly (Twitter users have found out of date cards work very well). No need to sneak the cards when you can just google one tbh.

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