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Comment by orangeoxidation | Hacker News Reader

The article makes a decent point: Websites will have an incentive to prove their visitors are not children.

> It is virtually impossible to identify and segment your user base and apply the bill's protections to only those you can 100% confirm are under 18.

Doing this might be(come) possible by completely destroying anonymous web browsing.

How? Idk and it wasn't mentioned, but you could imagine Credit card checking, Electronic IDs, post-ident maybe backed into the browser for a one-click identification.

Though it's all a hypothetical on unwanted side-effects. I don't think it too concerning as people value random websites less than their personal data and I'd expect websites using the "everyone is a child" approach to have the advantage.

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> people value random websites less than their personal data

That's debatable. People would balk at the friction and invasiveness of typing in their cc details on every search result, but an automatic tool integrated into a browser could see wide adoption. Virtually everyone just accepts whatever privacy policy and cookie notice is blocking the content on random websites.

It could be done by requiring client side certificates and creating issuing authorities for them.

This is a fascinating idea. The only way to preserve a modicum of privacy would be if the certificates are issued by a privacy-regulated authority, are not directly attached to your identity, and are trivial to renew / replace, but seems doable

Yeah I agree, but doubt the senate's ability to understand the concept, much less draft regulations that enact it.

The how isn’t the point - the point is that the what means the end of anonymous casual web browsing.

No more firing up incognito mode to view some YouTube video you’d rather not feed your algorithm. No more browsing the ‘other side’ on twitter privately. No googling for information about embarrassing rashes without Google and webmd knowing exactly who you are.

This is not cool.

In my humble opinion, children should be prevented from browsing much of the horrific content and/or pornographic content on the internet, and I think it is worth thinking about how to prevent it.

> No more firing up incognito mode to view some YouTube video you’d rather not feed your algorithm. No more browsing the ‘other side’ on twitter privately. No googling for information about embarrassing rashes without Google and webmd knowing exactly who you are.

I agree with you on principal and don’t mean to sound dismissive but they’re all doing this already.

When I’m trying to look at anything on Twitter it shortly launches a full screen thing demanding I login (I refuse to sign up).

YouTube requires sign-in for age restricted content.

Google, most annoyingly, makes me complete several captchas for using incognito+private relay

Instagram won’t open in safari with incognito+private relay; I have a throwaway account for just looking at the odd link someone sends me in a meme group-chat; I have to use another browser.

I often have to replace “www.whatever.reddit” to “old.reddit” on my phone to be able to see an “age restricted” post, most of the time they aren’t anything a kid shouldn’t be see either, not sure how they’re determining that.

It could also be done by requiring you to submit a photograph of yourself and your state-issued ID with intact image metadata. I wonder which would be less expensive to implement, and which would be simpler for a customer base to adopt.

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