Congress Shocked to Discover 10 Year Olds Check the ‘I’m over 18’ Box Online | Hacker News Reader

Congress Shocked to Discover 10 Year Olds Check the ‘I’m over 18’ Box Online

vice.com

57 pointspiperswe23 comments

I've had to walk my child through the process of lying about their age on a website at least a dozen times by age 10.

Thank you, Government, for making me have the "it's ok to lie to certain people under certain specific circumstances" conversation with my child far before she was ready.

"Never give out your real birthday online" was the party line when I was a kid... so a whole lot of us were apparently born on January 1st, 1900.

The birthday emails were funny to read.

Hi birthday mate.

We've both passed Jean Calment now!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeanne_Calment

I wondered for years why I was getting so many ads on Facebook directed towards old people. Then I realized that Facebook thinks I was born about 90 years before I was actually born.

Occasionally I'll click on a site, say a brewery, that asks me to put in my birthday, usually though a slider wheel or form. 90% of the time I just go to a different site. If I'm just browsing around I don't care that badly. Same with modal popups.

I suppose if I was a kid who wanted to get to a site, I'd be more likely to make up an age. My point is that asking stupid questions to anonymous users probably turns away more legit users than kids.

The alternative is those third party services that make you take pictures of yourself holding your ID... I absolutely despise these services though, because it's a huge hassle, on top of the privacy concerns attached to it.

And in an ideal world that would be no big deal. Indeed when I buy alcohol at the liquor store the cashier does a brief check of the ID and inputs the DOB in his terminal. There is a good precedent for using my ID to check my age. But I have no illusions of what would happen if we used it for online age check: the picture of the ID would be stored forever. The website would try to collect all the available info and not just the DOB (which includes full name and address as well as height and weight) and try to monetize it. And then of course there is a the risk of data leaks. So in our current world I am afraid that online ID checks are a hard no.

Terrible headline. As the author himself pointed out, this has been discussed by politicians for decades. There just hasn't been a privacy acceptable method. Especially when you can vote without ID. It's just that more recently it's becoming more common to call for real ID checks to access the internet. Didn't the UK introduce a porn block so you have to ask your internet provider to access it..?

What does voting without an id have to do with any of this?

The article is about ID verification to access the internet and by extension, if it's reasonable to require ID verification to visit TikTok when a lot more important aspects in life doesn't require ID. If you're hellbent on not requiring ID for some things, then you need to have the discussion on why you should require it for less important areas.

Well, there is a big difference between using TikTok and voting. You have a constitutional right to vote. And for good, real world reasons, many supreme court cases have been fought over all the obstacles that have been put in place for voters. Any verification method required to vote has to be looked at carefully and gone through with a fine-toothed comb lest we allow the evils of our past to resurface in exactly the same ways.

The UK government attempted to introduce one but the attempt was abandoned (because it was basically unworkable). I'm sure they'll try again when they need to pander to that segment of their base (the current stupidity is another iteration of the 'banning encryption' idiocy which seems to be evergreen).

Great, that means expect more inconvenience for people who are 18+. some people who break the system means we have to operate under the presumption of guilt for all. TSA for example.

I'm surprised we still don't have a standard way of setting birthdate on browsers or OS. If we had, then setting could be given (and locked) by parents..

Seems like such an obvious solution. Almost free to implement for websites, just return a “content-rating” header, instead of having to integrate with a costly ID verification system.

Only downside is that it doesn’t make it easier to track people /s

How would you block all proxies which give access to same website, except replacing the lockable birthdate input with another input that is not lockable?

Just a ‘is this user of age X?’ query would suffice. Obtaining it should require user interaction, and there should be a limit of maybe 3 distinct ages per domain that can be requested.

No need to give out more details than needed.

What would George Carlin say?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u-ryuJDTpEc

his point about soft fruity baby boomers raising a whole generation of even softer fruity baby boomers bore terribly prophetic, fruits, now that we're here in the 2020s.

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