Particularly as more of society moves from physical to virtual.
This whole premise is absurd. There is tons of research and empirical and historical evidence that living in a surveillance state stifled free expression and thus narrows the richness of human creation and experimentation.
How old are you that you think constant surveillance is any kind of way to live? It's a thin gruel of a life.
There appears to be no formidable organized resistance against the recent decades of surveillance boom.
With tech and many tech employees actively accelerating surveillance.
Horrible? yes. And extremely unlikely to be rolled back anytime soon. (Disagree? I'd love to believe you are right!)
Defeatist attitudes and throwing in the towel almost never makes sense, engaging at a lower degree of time commitment is sensible for some, the meta commentary about it being hopeless is one of the worst types of self defeating comments a person can make, especially if they aren't in opposition, whose time are you trying to optimize with the comment? To what point and purpose are you saying this except to further deflate sails on an already still day?
The zeitgeist isn't purely rational or stable, change is often non linear, I've seen small subcultures with "impossible" headwinds completely own the space within my lifetime, we're just at the heel turn now and it's not universally popular, many people don't speak up because they are just getting vpns or moving to other forms of non-violent non-compliance.
Anyway, it's a waste of time.
...
Or is it?
However, I'm not against the concept of age verification, and believe it can be done well.
How old are you, to make that last comment just because you need your ID to buy a beer?
You keep making this comparison, but it's not appropriate. The closest real-world analogy: in order to buy alcohol, you need to wear a tracking bracelet at all times, and be identified at every store you enter, even you you choose to purchase nothing. If our automated systems can't identify you with certainty, you'll be limited to only being able to do things a child could do.
And the real world has a huge gap between a child and an adult. If an 8-year old walked into Home Depot and bought a circular saw, there's no law against it, but the store might have questions. If a 14-year old did it, you might get a different result. At 17, they'd almost certainly let you.
The real world has people that are observing things and using judgement. Submitting to automated age checks online is not that.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44801851
Just extremely clear that the implementation is an afterthought.
Why did you not tell the stranger on the internet how old you are?
> How old are you
You obviously didn’t miss the question. You saw it and threw it back at them.
Why did you do that instead of answering with your age when somebody asked for it?
Apropos of nothing I’m going to include a link in my post
I'm 44. It's not a secret, my name is on my 'about me', then a quick Google would find my age.
But it’s the only one they will ever know.
When you show a bartender your ID to buy a beer they generally don’t photocopy it and store it along with your picture next to an itemized list of every beer you’ve ever drank
If you take a step back, they are _very_ different, in myriad ways. But to answer your question very concretely: because we're turning the web into a "Paper's Please" scenario and the analogy with "I'm 12 but I can't walk into this smoke shop" doesn't hold. I shared a story on HN that didn't take off about how Google is now scanning _all_ YouTube accounts with AI, and if their AI thinks you're underage, your only recourse after the "kid limit" your account is to submit a government-issued ID to get your account back.
This has nothing to do with buying cigarettes and alcohol. This is about identifying everyone online (which advertisers would be thrilled about), and censoring speech. In short, the mechanisms being used online are significantly more intrusive than anything in the real world.
However, I think tech people risk losing this battle by saying (it seems to me, and in the post I originally replied to) "any attempt at any age checking on the internet is basically 1984", rather than "we need some way of checking some things, keeping people's privacy safe, this current system is awful."
Of course, if some people believe the internet should be 100% uncensored, no restrictions, they can have that viewpoint. But honestly, I don't agree.
This doesn't require any of the draconian 1984 measures that folks are insisting upon. The problem is there is no real incentive to implement true age-verification in this manner (this is why nobody has deployed ZKP), but rather to identify everyone. So while it would be ultra easy to imagine an onboarding scenario during device setup that asks:
1. Will this device be assigned to a child?
2. Supply the age so we can track when they cross over 18
3. Automatically reject responses with the adult header and lock down this setting
But Google and Apple won't do that, because they don't care, and the politicians won't bake it into their laws, because they don't are either: their goal is to alter culture, and protecting children is just an excuse.
So next, we better make the devices age gate their users with attestation and destroy people's ability to use open operating systems on the web. Maybe for good measure we tell ISPs to block any traffic to foreign sites unless the OS reports that attestation.
But people are using VPNs to bounce traffic to other countries anyway, so now we need to ban those. But people still send each other porn over encrypted channels so we need to make sure encrypted platforms implement our backdoor so we can read it all, on top of on-device scanning which further edges out any open source players left in the game.
At what point do we stop chasing the rabbit?