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Comment by Aurornis | Hacker News Reader

> Age verification is very hard, because parents will give their children their unlocked account, and children will steal their parents' unlocked account

More simply: If ID checks are fully anonymous (as many here propose when the topic comes up) then every kid will just have their friends’ older sibling ID verify their account one afternoon. Or they’ll steal their parents’ ID when they’re not looking.

Discussions about kids and technology on HN are very weird to me these days because so many commenters have seemingly forgotten what it’s like to be a kid with technology. Before this current wave of ID check discussions it was common to proudly share stories of evading content controls or restrictions as a kid. Yet once the ID check topic comes up we’re supposed to imagine kids will just give up and go with the law? Yeah right.

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Circumventing controls as a kid is what taught me enough about computers to get the job that made college affordable (in those days you could just boot windows to a livecd Linux distro and have your way with the filesystem, first you feel like a hacker, later the adults are paying you to recover data).

If we must have controls, I hope the process of circumventing them continues to teach skills that are useful for other things.

The older sibling should be old enough to know better. Or if they're still a kid, they can have their privileges temporarily revoked.

This problem probably can't be solved entirely technologically, but technology can definitely be a part of solving it. I'm sure it's possible to make parental controls that most kids can't bypass, because companies can make DRM that most adults can't bypass.

> The older sibling should be old enough to know better.

This is exactly what I meant by my above comment: It’s like the pro-ID check commenters have become completely disconnected from how young people work.

Someone’s 18 year old sibling isn’t going to be stopped by “should know better”. They probably disagree with the law on principal and think it’s dumb, so they’re just helping out.

True, hence the culture shift is necessary.

But imagine if a locked device was treated like alcohol. Most kids get access to alcohol at some point despite it being illegal, often from older siblings, and rarely with legal consequences for the adult. But it's much less of an issue, because most kids don't get it consistently. Furthermore, "good" kids understand that it's bad, and even some "bad" kids understand that they must limit themselves.

> "culture shift is necessary"

Is it though? When older sibling helps younger sibling with "accessing Steam", or something reasonable like that, even the most sensible and thoughtful older sibling won't be interested in "culture shifts" that block gaming fun.

The alcohol and seatbelt analogies try to elevate equivalence, but miss the mark by a lot. Even one drop of alcohol is obviously not suitable for underage. No seatbelt increases risk no matter your age. "Social media" exposure for the young person is often completely fine and full of "young person" content and activity.

>Or if they're still a kid, they can have their privileges temporarily revoked.

Since people are already talking about using the law instead of parenting this needs clarification. Are the parents the one that would revoke their privileges or the government?

The parents. They're the ones who configure the parental controls. e.g. if their 15-year old gets caught sharing his device with their 7-year old, they can temporarily give him 7-year old permissions as punishment.

> If ID checks are fully anonymous (as many here propose when the topic comes up) then every kid will just have their friends’ older sibling ID verify their account one afternoon.

Exactly the same way that kids used in former days to get cigarettes or alcohol: simply ask a friend or a sibling.

By the way: the owners of the "well-known" beverage shops made their own rules, which were in some sense more strict, but in other ways less strict than the laws:

For example some small shop in Germany sold beverages with little alcohol to basically everybody who did not look suspicious, but was insanely strict on selling cigarettes: even if the buyer was sufficiently old (which was in doubt strictly checked), the owner made serious attempts to refuse selling cigarettes if he had the slightest suspicion that the cigarettes were actually bought for some younger person. In other words: if you attempted to buy cigarettes, you were treated like a suspect if the owner knew that you had younger friends (and the owner knew this very well).

Probably will limit to one device per person, to save the children, so we won’t share with others.

(So you need to keep all your stuff into one device to be fully tracked easily. And have no control over your device, share your location… )

Digital ID with binary assertion in the device is an API call that Apple's app store curation can ensure is called on app launch or switch. Just checking on launch or focus resolves that problem. It's no longer the account being verified per se, it's the account and the use.

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