Hacker News Reader

Comment by pstuart | Hacker News Reader

Do we make contractors do age verification on their supplies when building a liquor store or strip club? The OS is a tool used by Meta, just like the utilities and the compute itself.

Meta Apps can have age verification but it should be at the point of service, not the supply chain.

And even if we were to agree to this, uploading your IDs to an untrusted third party is asking too much.

View on HN

uploading your IDs to an untrusted third party is asking too much.

So have the government do it? They already know who we are and when we were born.

That requires trusting a government with a power that is likely to be abused.

The power to tell people how old someone is?

The power of correlating your real ID with your browsing activity on the internet.

I mean, as much as I don't want the Government to be able to do that, I don't want private industry to be able to do that even more tbh. Though both options are pretty horrendous privacy-wise.

Until recently I felt the opposite way -- what they could do with that was more targeted advertising. The government currently in power is demonstrating that they can do far worse, and plans to.

But they already know my age (and my address, and my SS#, and my income, and a whole bunch of other stuff).

They don't know your full behavioral profile. They also may be willing to sell that data to third parties who use it for nefarious purposes.

They absolutely do. Anything you can get from data brokers doesn't require a warrant.

It's not enough for the government to know. Platforms, websites, and advertisers want to know. That's why the law facebook has been pushing for doesn't have a simple "is 18+" flag but instead has a long list of age buckets so that advertisers and platforms can target specific demographics even when they are minors.

Isn't that necessary because different levels of protection will be applied to each bracket?

The law doesn't require any protection levels at all. It just requires your OS to tell every website you visit which bucket your children fall into. Every website and platform can use that information in whatever ways they want, even if it's just to adjust how best to groom a victim or to decide which ads to push at a child. They could also use it to say that a 9 year old can't watch a certain video that a 13 year old can, but that would be entirely their choice.

I'd much rather a third party ID that I can easily bypass because they're lazy and cost saving every step of the way, than a governmental ID which will be x100 harder to bypass and can be abused by the goverment whenever there's a man-child in power who likes going after groups of people who don't agree with him.

But in a perfect world it would be parents doing their job and parenting. You can grab your child's pad, phone, laptop, whatever, and black list the entire internet allowing only a few select white lists of your choice. But it's too hard to educate parents on how to do that I guess, assuming this was ever about children and not data collection, which it is that.

And then the government gets official, explicit, intimate knowledge of everything we do online. With our express permission now.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com