Hacker News Reader

Comment by philip1209 | Hacker News Reader

We should really just raise the age of COPPA from 13. It’s a robust legal framework and we can amend one line in it to regulate this industry without excessive bloat or bickering.

It’s crazy that Americans can be on Instagram 8 years before having a sip of alcohol.

We should raise the COPPA consent age at least 16, but probably 18.

View on HN

I see it now: "Please submit a photo ID or driving license in order to access this service. All IDs will be logged and tied permanently to your account."

Barring some kind of effective globally enforced age verification system, good luck.

I don't see how changing the age limit would have any effect on how effective enforcement would be.

We can’t even keep the eight year olds off. Raising the age likely just means more hassle and near-zero beneficial impact.

> We can’t even keep the eight year olds off

Because there's not really a service for that. However, there are turnkey plugins for keeping <18 year olds off your site.

> Raising the age likely just means more hassle

It either increases the hassle, or increases the effectiveness- not both. If you're not verifying ages, then who cares what the number is?

Why does it need to be global?

Because the social media companies are? I wonder if there would be a noticeable increase in VPN adoption if there were strictly enforced age restrictions targeting the US only. There certainly has been an uptick in VPN literacy among people I know after PornHub blocked my state...

A solution doesn’t need to be bulletproof to have a meaningful and worthwhile effect.

How often do you see 14 year olds joyriding cars?

How often do you see 14 year olds evading internet restrictions?

(Allllll the time. My kids figured out how to bypass the pihole within a day, without even knowing I’d installed it.)

Use a firewall and/or screen time, aka whitelist. Yes, it really sucks for a few days, but then it gets easier.

It’s almost like the most important stakeholders have no interest in preventing them from evading those restrictions…

We have some fairly strict rules on devices - it’s not a lack of will.

Same for the school; they don’t want kids YouTubing in class, but “a laptop for everyone” is the standard now, the teachers do a lot on Teams, etc. Kids are smart and motivated, and they share techniques. They find ways.

The key stakeholders here are the services themselves. If they placed “keep children off the network” anywhere near “keep growing DAU” on their list of priorities, all those highly paid engineers (likewise smart and motivated) would find ways too.

I’m a deeply technical well-motivated person who works with stuff like DNS and VPNs for a job and I find it quite challenging, despite physical access to the devices and the users.

Yet somehow these platforms figure out how to reliably market kid stuff to kids, and adult stuff to adults.

The piss-poor relevance of my Facebook ads and recommendations is a pretty clear counterpoint to this idea.

The revenue of Facebook is a pretty clear counterpoint to this counterpoint.

Sure, just like the Twilight novels are empirically good writing because they sold a lot of copies.

Because other countries can host websites too?

And their citizens can sign up for Instagram. “Oh, I’m Russian, we don’t have that.”

Having to download a VPN and do some evasion would probably be a substantial enough deterrent for… [checks notes]… 14 year olds… that it’d be worth doing.

And realistically, if Meta et al wanted to stop harming entire generations of developing minds, they could obviously use their immense data infrastructure to separate actual Russian from allegedly-Russian children.

So all you really need is corporate buy-in (and toothsome regulations is a perfectly fine way to produce buy-in where markets fail to do so)

Edit: realized you’re talking about the case of Russian services being marketed to American children. That too seems straightforward to produce meaningful obstacles, with sufficient appetite from regulators.

My 10 year old kid is smart enough to bypass the various blocking mechanisms in place at school. A VPN is nothing. All they’d need to do is buy a pre paid credit card at the local Walgreens.

My 10 year old kid is smart enough to bypass the ignition key on a car therefore licensure requirements and car keys are stupid.

In reality, your smart 10 year old isn’t powering the toxic social dynamics of social media. It’s the armies of average intelligence kids seeking engineered dopamine hits.

Network effects work for network dissolution just the same as they work for network growth, which is of course why Meta would never voluntarily do anything that could kick off the popular kids, even if your prodigy could bypass it with no problem.

Note: “All those kids are already addicted and so they’ll be highly motivated too!” is a call to action, not to inaction.

Yeah with a "default yes" approach it'll be easily bypassed. With a "default no" it would work, ie you simply don't get an account at all until you prove your age.

I disagree. Defaults matter. “It’s illegal” is a firm line parents can hold. And, you don’t need to deter 100% - just taking a chunk out will reverse network effects and cause population collapse.

Plus, expect more services to verify IDs in an effort to combat AI spam.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com