Ready or not, age verification is rolling out across the internet
theverge.com
theverge.com
Oh yeah and despite all this BS security theatre to "protect the children", teenagers will still find ways to connect with whoever they want to and find whatever content they want online. Source: I was a 12-year-old with dialup internet and my own computer, once.
Relevant nitpick: everywhere this article says "internet" they mean "web".
Same, companies underestimate how interested I am in using their websites. Last month I uninstalled instagram because it asked me to pay or get more ads, every other post was already either an ad or a promotional post, I left.
The vast majority of websites are already unusable or full of low value bot content, most search engines are useless, block behind paywalls, subscriptions, &c. Hopefully this will create a new ecosystem of tools for people who want to escape
At least until they figure out how to put ads on it.
There's a legal right to end-to-end encryption and there's nothing preventing you from making a system look like HTTPS.
Did you hear about the Great Firewall?
And they just have to say it's to protect "the children"/"democracy"/"to fight disinformation"/"hate speech". You can't beat politics with technology.
They have some political power, but they don't have all of it and they are quite constrained.
Q: If I am a teenager wanting to access content that is prohibited by age verification, who is mostly likely the party that will provide access?
A: The local drug dealer or extremist.
This means a new market is born.
I don't really have time to go deeply into this, but here is your official government source saying that age limit for alcohol works by limiting deaths etc from alcohol use for people under 21
https://www.cdc.gov/alcohol/underage-drinking/minimum-legal-...
I also love that EU is working on a digital wallet that can facilitate that age check - I would for someone to make a social media with only verified people living in EU. Why do I need to browse russian generated posts that try to pretend they are citizens of my country?
I understand Internet has ideological foundations that are deeply entrenched in Sillicon Valley / American culture, but I don't but those anymore.
Age verification requires treating a website, not as some random person, but as a platform which has control of content and some responsibility. Age verification requires giving websites information that they should not have.
Surely the European perspective should be that it is not Reddit's business whether I am 50 or 15. That they are just a website and should not care who I am and should not have that information.
Furthermore, this violent images are reality. It should be possible to discuss war in public, and use first-hand information and discuss horrible pictures in detail.
Most countries including USA have Indecent Exposure laws, prohibiting women for example from flashing their breasts on the street.
Yet somehow online adult women are able to "flash" homemade videos of them making sex with multiple partners, and you somehow think it's ok for children age 11 to view this with no responsibility on reddit's part?
Also most countries limit what children can do. It's illegal to drink even when you are 20 in USA. Why do we think children are mature enough when they are 11 to view unmoderated usergenerated content on tiktok? Many made by 18+ people driven by commercial interest and many of these videos dangerous for children (for example many challanges, where kids die after trying to do them).
Obviously one can have this kind of naive liberalism view, that anything goes. I personally don't and that's why I shared my comment.
Very few people think this.
The issue isn't "anything goes", the issue is the expansion of surveillance. There is no way that I'm willing to subject myself to that. If that's a requirement for using a web site, then that web site is not suitable for me, so these laws make the web even smaller than it has already become.
Combat videos are not pornography.
We’re still on hacker news, right? When did any control function installed by our parents or schools ever limit us?
More importantly: where are the restrictions on addictive social media? Where we have documented evidence of harm being done?
People often use the phrase "think of the children!" mockingly, but we really do need to think about their welfare and what sort of society we want them to develop and grow up in, and that includes the part of society that is mediated online.
Despite the criticisms people have over some of the detail in these new regulations, I see this as a very positive first step in the right direction.
How about we don't? Where's the hacker news post of a GitHub repo with easy ways to bypass age verification and multiple mirrors and such so that it can't be wiped away. It'd be a new arms race.
Parents should just be responsible for their kids.
Really sick of the enshittification epidemic.
The internet is already segregated by age groups. The kids are on tiktok and discord, snapchat. You're not talking to any of them on HN or even Reddit.