Rep. Finke Was Right: Age-Gating Isn't About Kids, It's About Control

eff.org

27 points·iamnothere··5 comments

As always, it's hard to implement child protection measures that don't impact the general population in any way. Either it doesn't need to know the age of the person and hides the contents by default (thus leaving the general population without access and serving as a way of censoring contents) or it resorts to privacy-invasive methodologies to try to know the age (which often involve behavioral analysis or personal data).

What politicians should be promoting are campaigns and tools that help educate children and their parents.

Age verification by uploading your ID photo might be about government control. A parental controls setting, mandated by law to exist and be respected but completely optional to use, is about parental control. People keep mixing these up.

Somehow none of the government proposals are about the latter though. They're probably just unaware of the possibility - I'm sure that as soon as someone tells them about it, they'll abandon all the surveillance-type proposals and switch to parental controls :)

The new law in California and Colorado and the proposed law in Illinois are the latter.

Whatever euphemism you use, these bills are attempting to force FOSS devs into doing poorly defined and often contradictory work FOR FREE while accepting legal liability for that same work. At the same time they are opening the door for legislatures to specify how FOSS OSes should work, a truly terrifying and unprecedented event that likely violates the first amendment. The bills must be crushed, and after we crush them we must salt the earth.

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