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Comment by akerl_ | Hacker News Reader

This makes me think of how, as a child, every site asked “are you over 13”, and I diligently clicked “yes”. Some more clever sites asked for my birth year… forcing me to do the arduous work of taking the current year and subtracting 14.

Though I suppose the real plan here is to pass the law and then have the government selectively prosecute social media companies for having users under 16.

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I remember my daughter at an astonishingly young age encountering a age-login screen, turning to me and asking "How would they be able to tell?" then merrily telling the system she was 18.

https://fingswotidun.com/images/MelissaQuake3.jpg

A small transaction would cover 99% of cases (e.g., pay a dollar that's immediately refunded). It would stop kids from casually creating accounts. The kids who can do this are already precocious enough to bypass any other verification steps you could come up with.

Maybe if they use a profile pic that you algorithmically determine is someone underage, you could do some additional checks. The smart ones would learn not to utilize a profile pic of themselves, which would ultimately be better.

You could even shave a fraction of a penny off with each transaction and they would never notice!

I understand the point you're trying to make with this (social media will definitely abuse the additional knowledge/opportunities they get by having compulsory credit card info), but chargebacks are actually a pretty effective incentive against this. Given that chargeback fees are ~$20-$100 per incidence, you'd only need 5% or less of users calling out the social media site's false charge for that company to be netting a loss.

I would relish the opportunity to cost Facebook $20 because they gave back a couple cents less than they should have.

I think you completely missed the point of the post you replied to (a reference to the plot of the movie Office Space).

I wonder if it'd really cover anything remotely close to 99% of cases. Even if 100% of parents knew about it and watched their credit cards enough to notice a $1 refunded transaction it just takes something like one friend in high school with a credit card to sign up all their little brother's friends. It may even just cause more credit cards being shared around than kids it stops from getting to the site they want on.

Then there'd be even more unintended consequence. Instead of sites you don't want kids creating accounts on you'd have sites selling 5 minutes of ads to create an account for them or increasingly shady stuff. Preventing this kind of site is the same as the original issue.

Reminds me of a scene in the South Park episode The Scoots where they needed a credit card for those e-scooters.

All the kids had memorized several of their parents CC numbers, including backups if someone didn't accept AmEx

Just a guess .. but I get the feeling the 'law' is more to get this in the mind of the parents.

It gives parents tools and guidelines that can help them direct their children.

Whether this is a good approach or not, is a whole other argument.

It also gives the parents an excuse to limit their children.

"I'm not being mean, it's the law."

Anyone who turned on a dome light in a car during the night knows you don't need an actual law on the books to do that

The legislature is claiming out loud that the law is because parents don’t have the ability to do this on their own.

If the year was a scroll box I was always about a flick and a half old which often ends up in the 60s so they had some odd age metrics.

> have the government selectively prosecute social media companies for having users under 16.

The US government is already legally mandated to prosecute companies known to harbor information, collected online, concerning minors less than 13 years old without consent from their parents or legal guardians.[1]

It's why Youtube blocks comments and doesn't personalize ads on videos published for kids, to pick out a prominent example.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Children's_Online_Privacy_Prot...

Obligatory IANAL.

Laws are getting stricter. Around the world, there is increasing regulatory requirement for businesses to actively investigate user behavior (tracking!) to identify and exclude underage users who are concealing their age.

Yeah, similarly I had just gotten used to entering an elder sibling's birthday whenever asked. Adding these arbitrary age restrictions does nothing but make it increasingly obvious to kids how little our leaders and other supporters of these arbitrary age restrictions actually care.

it was always appropriate to lie and make up a fake age / date of birth on those signup pages.

I think it’s better to give the media companies a requirement and let them figure it out rather than government mandate how they do it.

What if we didn’t give them a mandate and then they didn’t figure it out? The fix for social media is not “wait til 17 to expose kids to it”.

I don't think enforcement actually needs to be very tightly controlled. The barriers that are put in place like the one you describe are already enough to create a social milieu where parents and kids with think twice about these things and understand that there is a recognised harm potential.

There's nothing stopping you pouring your youngsters a glass of wine with dinner, but as a society we've made the dangers of alcohol and similar things so well understood that no parent wants to.

> as a society we've made the dangers of alcohol and similar things so well understood that no parent wants to.

Unfortunately, as a society, we have a much harder time grasping social media threat data. I suppose some of that is due to how news orgs consistently+bizarrely+hugely overstating the actual harms in the data.

https://www.techdirt.com/2024/01/08/leading-save-the-kids-ad...

Oh totally! What I'm saying is that laws like this, even when not enforceable per se, can help move society towards that understanding.

Judging by how many of my kid's friends under 13 have various accounts already, I'm not sure that's the case.

A lot of kids are given alcohol as well but I'm still happy to say that as a society we understand the danger of underage drinking.

Lol I just always added 10 to my birth year

Why would you want to make yourself 10 years younger?

Why would you want to be truthful?

I realized the error after submitting (added ten years to my age/subtracted ten years from my birth year), but I didn't think anyone would be confused by it so didn't bother correcting it

  Some more clever sites asked for my birth year… forcing me to do the arduous work of taking the current year and subtracting 14.

But why? You could have just picked a year that worked, and sticked with it. Obviously, there's no way of telling which year works, but you could have bruteforced that just once.

probably the thrill of living on the edge.

Arithmetic under stress is a helluva drug.

> Obviously, there's no way of telling which year works

Um, it's simple maths. Guessing you're meaning something else though?

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