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Comment by deminature | Hacker News Reader

As an Australian experiencing this first hand and considerably older than 16, absolutely nothing has changed. It seems like all the social networks are doing age estimation of accounts and only taking action on those that fail and are detected as underage. The change is otherwise completely invisible if you're an adult user. Obviously I'm only a sample size of 1, but I've not heard of any other adults being adversely affected by this, so it seems the estimation is accurate.

Pretty well executed - I'm impressed. Given how seamlessly this occurred, it will undoubtedly be rolled out in Europe next year, as the EU has expressed an interest in doing so, but was waiting to see how the implementation went in Australia.

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Apropos social media and age, I have some relatives with the last name of Aam. (Åm or Aam is an old farm in the Volda area of Sunnmøre, Norway).

If you try searching them in Facebook, you get a message telling you your search has been stopped and you should seek help you sicko, searching for... "Age abuse material" maybe? I don't know why it freaks out on those three letters, but it does.

This was in the news a year ago, and they still haven't changed it. Go and try if you want.

So allow me to doubt that the implementation is going to be smooth. For you maybe. If you instead end up in some algorithmic Kafka nightmare, don't count on your social media friends to notice.

You have to see if it's in a corporation's interest for false positives or false negatives. For you and AAM, it costs Facebook almost nothing for a false positive on "age abuse material" so I would expect them to continue to flag your family name as a false positive.

With snap and others, I would expect them to focus on reducing false negatives and give the benefit of the doubt to the kid who is under 16. Worst case, you say "Mea Culpa" and update your algorithm accordingly to any cases that you missed but the state has found.

Nothing has changed for my 15 year old either. It’s business as usual today for her.

She says only one of her friends has been challenged by a platform so far, and that was by Snapchat. That friend got another 14 year old friend to pass the facial age detection check on her behalf.

> pass the facial age detection

Are you kidding me? So the answer is let's let some random vendors used by said corporation scan her face? This feels like using DNA sequencing to confirm you're tall enough to ride the rollercoaster.

It’s just as reliable as you’d expect from a system that relies on shitty cellphone camera pics.

They’re trying to guess the age of someone who could pass for 11 or for 22, and who with careful use of makeup could push that figure in either direction.

For some reason (and this is one reason people think there's a conspiracy), that is the "preferred" form of age verification. It certainly saves the government from having to do IT.

Interesting, was she unable to pass the test just didn't even risk it, thinking the algo is good and can reliably detect reality?

She failed on the first attempt, handed her phone to the friend to try, and then the friend passed.

It'd be funny if suddenly a lot of adult Asian women could no longer use social media

I'm an adult, not living in Australia, and yet my backup Roblox account has been barred from using any form of in-app chat unless I send my face and ID to some third party service.

All of my (adult) friends living in AU had to perform various forms of age checks on almost all platforms they used, which seems to be very far from invisible.

I'd much prefer anonymous, safe, reliable age checks (that can be done!) that don't require me to spray my personal data at the dozens of companies either in the weird jurisdictions or with dubious privacy commitments records (like Bluesky using Epic Games services, famously fined over half of billion dollars for violating children's privacy laws and deceptive practices). Yeah, that's doable. No, won't happen because it's a out the control.

Can you give examples of what your friends had to do for each platform? No one I know has been affected, so it does seem “invisible” to me. However I’ve also been an adult for quite some time now. If you don’t mind me asking, are your friends young adults?

One is young adult (20-ish), graduate, another is 40-ish "professional". They live in the opposite parts of the continent, have completely "normal" /mundane interests (we bonded over a specific book series and share one more hobby).

It did not affect them too much, but they had to use either their government issued id or consent to biometric scan (age estimate via camera).

Nothing particularly problematic, but nevertheless irritating and may become a deal breaker.

As an Australian the only platforms I have that asked for an age check were Discord and Bluesky. Which is funny as neither came under this legislation, they're implementing this because they chose to.

Nothing from Reddit or any of the Meta platforms which have to comply with this legislation.

> but I've not heard of any other adults being adversely affected by this

I’m a 40 year old man and I’ve been impacted. A huge circle of people I know have been impacted. A number of companies now want to scan my license or my face, which will be fantastic when they keep it (despite saying they don’t) and then get breached in 6 months.

>Pretty well executed - I'm impressed.

It seems like a handful of sites havent even switched over. Most are just estimating. Theres no clear indication that the execution has been anything but botched, unless convenience for older people was the only metric.

The government have previously stated they won’t pursue breaches unless they’re particularly egregious anyway so this is basically shameless political theatre.

ABC did a poll of a large number of kids affected by this, and only 6% estimated the legislation would be successful.

ABC polled a cohort that's going through the most rebellious period in their lives and asked them whether they think authority figures can effectively prevent them from doing something they want to do. Had I been asked the same question as a teenager, I would've answered no every single time, regardless of the actual circumstances.

Yes but theres also no data to suggest that they are incorrect.

The execution didn't finish; it started. Big policy changes typically take time to solidify, and it'll probably take a bit to get a reliable read on its trajectory. But there is international momentum on this, so making predictions based on whatever percentage of people that were supposed to have their accounts deactivated actually did the day of (if we even have that data, and I doubt that we do), is probably not going to be useful.

Pretty much aligns with how I have felt it here in Aus as well

> Pretty well executed

There's a long way still to go on this. It's one of those changes where positive effects are experienced early but many if not most of the negative effects will surface over weeks, months or years.

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