Which isn't to suggest that it's a good law, just not really "age verification".
[1]: https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billTextClient.xhtm...
> good faith effort to comply with this title, taking into consideration available technology and any reasonable technical limitations or outages
could easily be read as meaning "facial recognition technology exists and is available, not using it is a business decision, failure to use it removes the good faith protection".
If the lawmakers didn't intend this, then they didn't need to add all the wiggle words that'll let the courts expand the scope of this law.
* The signal has to be made available to both apps and websites
* So if you dutifully input valid ages for your computer users, now any groomer with a website or an app can find out who's a kid and who isn't. You just put a target on your kid's back.
* A fair share of parents will realize this, and in order to protect their children, will willfully noncomply. So now we'll have a bunch of kids surfing the net with a flag saying they're an adult and it's okay to show them adult content.
* Some apps/websites will end up relying on this signal instead of some real age verification, which means that in places like porn sites where there's a decent argument for blocking access from kids, it'll get harder. Or your kid will get random porn ads on websites or something.
So basically unless this thing is thrown out by the courts, California lawmakers have just increased the number of kids who get groomed and the number of kids who get shown porn.
Mind boggling that something this bad passed.
Then, software on the user's computer can filter without revealing any information about the user.
Since I do not see a solution, and you see identifying children as a risk, what do you see as a solution for kids being in the same spaces as adults? Do you see a reasonable implementation to separate them, that doesn't have the "we know which accounts are children" problem? Maybe there's something in between?
Also, I think it's important to understand the life of a modern child, who's in front of a screen 7.5 hours a day on average [1], with that increasingly being social media, half having unrestricted access to the internet [2].
I hate government control/nanny state, but I think 5 year olds watching gore websites, watching other children die for fun, is probably not ok (I saw this at the dentist). People are really stupid, and many parents are really shitty. What do you do? Maybe nothing is the answer?
[1] https://www.aacap.org/AACAP/Families_and_Youth/Facts_for_Fam...
[2] https://fosi.org/parental-controls-for-online-safety-are-und...
It's ironic that people supposedly care about this when there's also a child rapist/murderer being kept safe as President without being held accountable for his crimes.
I suppose this law could be used as a defense against getting caught grooming minors - "I thought they were adult as surely a kid wouldn't be able to access that chat group"
How, exactly, does one accomplish "robust detection of a child"? I assume your answer would include complete surveillance of all internet communication? Could you expand on your idea of the implementation?
What I propose is rather than putting all the effort into preventing children from entering dangerous adult spaces, it's better to put the effort into ensuring that sex criminals are prosecuted and trying to make adult spaces less dangerous.
How is it detected? A police report is for after it's detected.
Preventing the crime from happening is out of scope of the government, as it should be.
The affected parties are unsupervised children, who are accessing adult spaces and content. Are you saying the children will tell on themselves?
Maybe take a moment to re-read this comment chain.
I'm not going to say that's impossible but the number of sites that do the right thing and reduce risk are going to vastly outnumber that. And 90% of those kids already have targets on their backs by virtue of the sites they visit.
This smells strongly of I just made it harder for those that do the right thing and did nothing to solve any problem.
To be clear, I'm talking about sites for adults that are doing their best right now, but have no idea who is 18 and who is 8. If they have communication between users, it's not set up to be filtered and moderated in a way that protects an 8 year old. If they could cut out a big majority of 8 year olds with the flip of a switch, that would be a good thing.
That's a lot of risk that exists right now and could be reduced.
> This smells strongly of I just made it harder for those that do the right thing and did nothing to solve any problem.
There is no meaningful difficulty in storing two bytes of extra data on the OS account and turning it into a two bit flag that programs can access and pass on to websites. And for most websites that let users communicate it makes their job a lot easier, even if the flag isn't always right.