Comment by astrobe_ | Hacker News Reader

Comment by astrobe_ | Hacker News Reader

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The question is how this is implemented, in particular age verification.

It's usual to say that MPs are old people that don't understand current technologies, but in law preparation committees they appear to be well aware; in particular, they mentioned a "double-anonymity" system where the site requesting your age wouldn't know your name, and the entity serving age requests wouldn't know which site it is for. They are also aware that people walk-around age verification checks with e.g. fake ID cards, possibly AI generated.

I'm not sure if it is actually doable reliabily, and I'm not sure either that the MPs that will have to vote the law will know the topic as well as the MPs participating in these committees.

I would personally consider other options like a one-button admin config for computers/smartphones/tablets that restricts access according to age (6-14, 15-18) and requiring online service providers to announce their "rating" in HTTP headers. Hackers will certainly object that young hackers could bypass this, but like copy-protection, the mission can be considered complete when the vast majority of people are prevented from doing what they should not do.

Alternatively one could consider the creation of a top-level domain with a "code of content" (which could include things like "chat control") enforced by controlling entity. Then again, an OS-level account config button could restrict all Internet accesses to this domain.

Perhaps an national agency could simply grant a "child safe" label to operating systems that comply to this.

This type of solutions would I think also be useful in schools (e.g. school-provided devices), although they are also talking about severely limiting screen-time at school.

For the french speakers, see:

[1] https://videos.assemblee-nationale.fr/video.17950525_6942684...

[2] https://videos.assemblee-nationale.fr/video.17952051_6942761...

Yes, perhaps the most reasonable approach is to tie these restrictions to the specific device (and, where applicable, account).

The ban doesn’t need to catch every single case, it just needs to add enough friction to stop the most frequent and destroy network effects.

The only way they could successfully implement it is with constant live video surveillance, otherwise parents who oppose the ban can easily get around it. Which is going to be at least a double digit percentage of the population. And the police don't even have the resources to investigate theft and robbery, let alone go after millions of parents for helping their children create social media accounts.

> parents who oppose the ban can easily get around it

Irresponsible parents are irresponsible parents, and they can do much worse than letting their children wander on the Net alone. IFAIK no law at least here forbids parents from giving alcohol or tobacco to their children, even though it is forbidden to sell those products to them. Toxic social media are mostly the same.

Although the topic is a ban, I think the idea is less about forbidding and punishing, and more about helping - albeit in questionably manner according to some - helping parents with "regulating" the access of their children to the Net. Of course, the easy answer is to recommend giving them dumb phones instead of smartphones, but really a smartphone is too useful to be ignored around high-school age.

Give it a rest already, there aren't logically perfect solutions to be had because we don't live in a world of simply binaries, so people compromise on best-fit solutions rather than obsessing over the edge cases and ending up doing nothing at all.

That's fine. Adults can buy their kids beer, too.

Put the onus on the social media companies, then have a 3rd party investigate how much content is bypassing their own protections and then fine them. Give a kickback to those investigators to incentivize them to find more violations. Rinse and repeat.

Here's my proposal: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46447282

It protects privacy while being as robust as any other existing age restriction method.

The second video shows the head of the CNIL (~ the "regulator") mostly repeating platitudes about various topics, but nothing about age restriction for social networks. Did i miss anything?

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