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Comment by nimbius | Hacker News Reader

im always chuffed and fascinated when tech companies cloister themselves in the robes of moral arbiter. Twitter does this now, albeit it seems like a cheap excuse to pump user numbers by forcing authentication.

Why 18? why not 21? or 23? What qualifies as explicitly "adult" content? violence perhaps could disqualify most military recruiting sites from my vodaphone. Alcohol? its certainly a moral vice in the UAE but in germany even a fourteen year old can order a bier with their parents. Sex? its a sensitive subject for even the most conservative among us until we touch upon religious texts, which seem to enjoy free reign.

what i wonder most is...what is the altruistic moral source of truth used as litmus by Voda and others? or is it driven largely by a small but vocal minority or is the board pushing this as some sort of nineteenth century neo-victorian purity charge.

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These content filtering schemes are usually legally mandated, and the age of 18 is set by law.

More likely than not, this got caught up in a regular job that scans DNS zones for new domains to "filter". It's just a matter of time before this catches anything related to Scunthorpe[0].

[0]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scunthorpe_problem

> These content filtering schemes are usually legally mandated, and the age of 18 is set by law.

It's also worth adding that 18 is typically the age when someone is considered legally accountable for their actions as an adult. We shouldn't be surprised that this age pops up in so many laws because of that, even though it is an arbitrary line in most cases.

The odd thing is that in most countries the age of consent is below (sometimes significantly below) 18. So we’ve got strange mixed signals.

Yeah it's kinda funny that I can legally have sex but not look at porn or send nudes, both of which are arguably less risky.

> pump user numbers by forcing authentication

Pump, how? Wouldn't forcing ID tank the numbers when all the bots are excluded?

It makes users who previously accessed a site anonymously create accounts or leave. For some sites, the increase in users signed-in may be worth the loss of other users (and bots).

I thought these restrictions were set by UK goverment, not by individual operators.

Edit: I am not sure if age restriction check is responsibility of sites themselves or service providers according to UK law.

Parents want parental controls on their children’s devices, and that becomes part of their decision on which provider to choose for their children’s phone contracts. Vodafone is reacting to market desire for an optional feature, there isn’t some evil spooky ulterior motive at play.

The people responsible for making and distributing this type of software and filters for it are mediocre minds, it's as simple as that. It gives them (usually an overzealous IT person) power and thus identity over smarter engineers, turning it a sadistic spectacle sport for them. The only answer is to remove their power by using end-to-end encryption with programs like Tor and simply laugh at their pathetic antics.

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