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Comment by wilde | Hacker News Reader

CA literally just passed the bill you want.

That said, the problem is that sites don’t know for sure who is over and who is under 13. And more robust age proofs have lots of problems: https://www.techdirt.com/2022/06/29/california-legislators-s...

Even if they did, many parents strongly disagree about what content is age-appropriate. When I was growing up my mom was shocked that other 10yo were allowed to view James Bond films.

So while you might be able to set some baselines, parents still need to do a lot of the legwork to make sure kids are ingesting media that’s aligned with their values. This was true on older media and it’s still true today.

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I’ve always wondered how feasible it would be for a government contractor to run some type of SSO system using “pins” mailed to every citizen over 18. That way, sites could authenticate users without knowledge of the users true identity. The site would just get some type of response code indicating the user’s age. This would also allow sites to reject signups for underage users. IIRC, this is how it’s done in South Korea.

What stops me from using the first over-18 pin I can find? It only relates to age so there’s hardly any incentive to keep it secret.

Are all non-citizens banned from services now? As a tourist in your country, how do I access services?

Like I said, lots of problems. :)

Or kids using their parents' pins?

I was raised by 2 hackers/information should be free types and they knew I had an email address and a website when I was 7. They didn't have a problem with it, and they wouldn't have had a problem if I'd been making content in the era of social media either. Likewise, our library system at the time let parents choose whether their kids could privately check out books from the adult section and they gave me full access when I was 5.

My parents would have probably copied the pins and given 5-6 year old me (and later my siblings) their own copies and bitched about our recommendations/accounts being all mixed up. (That's why I had my own email address; they were sick of me tugging at their sleeve and saying 'mom/dad, I need to send an email, can you log in to your account with me?')

Is that how Canada's epost system kinda works? Edit:The costs of the us gov running everyone through kyc isn’t going to happen, didn’t they outsource part of that to private sector already? These companies know the age range of their users. It’s no doubt one of their most lucrative.

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