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Comment by llui85 | Hacker News Reader

Some notes:

* It is illegal for a platform to provide children with a social media account, not for the child to create an account. Circumvention of this by the child is not illegal.

* No grandfathering - all accounts under 16 once this takes effect (which won't be until this time next year at earliest) must be deactivated.

* Maximum fine (per instance?) is 50 million AUD (about 32 million USD)

* The legislation is vague on the technical details, although it does specifically mandate that platforms cannot use government-issued ID of any kind (including digital ID).

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I don't have a horse in this race but in my opinion a more graceful way to deal with this is to freeze the account until the under-16 is over-16 so they don't lose their friend connections, history, etc... The under 16 should have time to add a comment saying how to contact them otherwise. Discord group, etc... There must be a reason to remove the account that I can not see.

Ideally they do lose all of that. That’s the root of the problem.

> Ideally they do lose all of that. That’s the root of the problem.

Where is the problem with this?

The problem rather is that the user did not create a private backup of the data that he wants to keep.

Possible contact with pedophiles, groomers, etc.

Once the child is over 16, they can add all their real-world friends again.

Could a possible solution there be to use the same language detection platforms used for detecting terrorist activity to also flag possible grooming for human moderator review? Or might that be too subjective for current language models leading to many false positives?

AKA stupid paranoia.

This is far too pat a dismissal of something which happens regularly. You can argue that it’s not frequent enough to justify this action or would happen anyway through other means but it’s a real problem which isn’t so freakishly rare that we can dismiss it.

Discord is for people over 13 years of age in many countries, yet there are many minors there. It is not working.

I’m not saying anything about specific services, only that there is a legitimate concern which can’t simply be dismissed without reason.

I am not sure I meant to reply to you, to be honest. It is an issue but so far the solutions are terrible. Outsourcing parenting to the Government or companies is also meh. I am sure there are parents who know of ways to reduce screen time for their children, it ranges from installing a program that does not let you on a website or start another program until and unless this and that, or take the phone from the kid's hand and go for a walk or study, whatever.

It may include all my friends from primary school and a photos of my late grandma.

(Disclaimer: I'm so old that at 16 I didn't ever had email. Please don't delete all my old stuff.)

I thought the problem was the addictive nature of the feed

Leisure Suit Larry was ahead of its time with its age verification system.

For those of us who weren’t around at the time, could you d on what made it good? Thanks!

They asked questions grown ups would know but likely not kids. I remember one questions about The Beatles for example.

https://allowe.com/games/larry/tips-manuals/lsl1-age-quiz.ht...

Edit: Added link

what made it good?

Less good, more fun. To 'prove' that you were over 18 you had answer a series of multiple choice questions [1] about pop culture that most kids almost certainly wouldn't know. Pre internet, finding the answer was surprisingly hard without asking an adult. The main result was that 10 year old me knew a surprisingly large number of obscure facts of about US culture, like who Spiro Agnew was and that Ronald Reagan once starred in a movie with a monkey.

Eventually we found out that you could press some magic key combination to skip the question all together.

[1] https://allowe.com/games/larry/tips-manuals/lsl1-age-quiz.ht...

LLM knows, thus the children know. Parents know, thus the children may easily know. It sounds fun but its practical value is questionable.

> The legislation is vague on the technical details, although it does specifically mandate that platforms cannot use government-issued ID of any kind (including digital ID).

That's unexpectedly sane from a law like this. Hopefully they can figure out some zero-knowledge proof of age. (But then there's nothing stopping adults from creating and selling proof values to kids.)

That wasn't in the original bill and it was only amended to add that yesterday, because it wouldn't get past the Conservative (Liberal/National Party) whose votes they needed to ram it through Parliament with almost no scrutiny otherwise (the hastily drafted bill only having been introduced the Friday before the final sitting week of the year).

That's more of the sort of behavior one expects from legislators making broad surveillance apparatuses under guise of protecting children on the internet.

> But then there's nothing stopping adults from creating and selling proof values to kids

That's also true for alcohol and tobacco.

How do they plan on verifying age without using a government id?

They have something called “myID” (a digital ID), which is available to anyone 15 or older.

I believe that myID is also explicitly excluded as part of the bill.

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