Their stated reason? Child safety.
Their actual reason? You can figure that out.
They don't care about child safety as long as it doesn't become so bad as to impact their revenue negatively. But they see that governments all over the world push for some kinds of age restrictions, and they know they are a prime target and it is hard for them to push back against that.
The reason they are (not so secretly) lobbying for requiring us to ID ourselves at the device level is that they don't want to be the gatekeepers. They want to make creating an account as effortless as possible and having to prove your age is a barrier that make turn off some people, including adults, and they may instead turn to services that don't require age verification. By moving the age verification in the OS, not only the responsibility shifts to the OS or hardware vendor, but it also removes the disadvantage they have against services that don't require age verification.
For a similar issue, PornHub is currently blocked in France, because they don't want to comply with the law related to age verification. Here is their argument: https://www.aylo.com/newsroom/aylo-suspends-access-to-pornhu...
If you read between the lines, you will see that they have the same stance: "put age verification at the OS level, so that people don't discriminate against us". They know they are not in a position to argue against "child safety" laws, so instead, they lobby for making it worse for everyone instead of just themselves.
[1]: I could be wrong thinking those are benign.
Cancer is a great metaphor because its a perversion of natural, healthy processes. So called social media is nearly that, but actually grotesquely unhealthy.
People are dramatically unwell when they are not social, but that unregulated process is also negative up to and including being lethal.
No it didn’t. That was just like the first free sample from the drug dealer. Give a “good” free service to rope them in, always with the next steps in mind.
I feel like the Myspace/Friendster and early Facebook were nowhere near as harmful (albeit for addiction, those sites were still vulnerable to grooming) as where we are today.
I call it _anti_social media.
The internet was not a calm and well behaved place before Facebook arrived. The original “Eternal September” was in the early 90s. Usenet, forums, Reddit, comment sections, and every other social part of the internet have been full of bad behavior long before Facebook came along.
Source: I was a bad, bad, boi, on UseNet.
That's the whole point: the word exists precisely as a testament to something that used to exist but now doesn't.
Anybody old enough to remember the word when it was common use should realize that it would have been impossible for the term to be coined in 2026.
If you missed that part of the Internet (maybe you were too young or maybe you were focused on other things, like the vast majority of people in the 90s), that's totally fine, but plenty of us did experience it and remember it pretty clearly.
> Usenet, forums, Reddit, comment sections, and every other social part of the internet have been full of bad behavior long before Facebook came along.
You can tell approximately how old someone is by whether they have reached the "everything sucks" part of life yet or not.
It gets continually worse. Agentic AI is another Eternal September. For example, we now have dimwits sending dozens of unsolicited and unreviewed slop PRs to open source projects. Every search result is an affiliate marketing listicle obviously written by a robot.
LLMs are now heralding the Eternal September of even software engineering, and now I am wondering where to hang up my Techpriest robes in search of more elite pastures.
I wonder if this is how the clergy felt once the vulgar were allowed to study scripture not in the original spiritual programming languages of Hebrew or Latin, but English.
I disagree. I'm of the Neopets/Pokemon forums generation. Elitism and selectivity were not what made that era a good balance between the caustic free-for-all we have now and the rich kid's playground from before. It was the technical and practical restrictions on what you could put in and get out of a web experience.
You couldn't upload thousands of thirst traps every month, because storage was limited. You couldn't summon another head of the dropshipping or affiliate marketing hydras with a few clicks, because the infrastructure didn't exist. You couldn't inundate users with dark patterns designed to extract every ounce of attention, data, and cash possible, because the rich web wasn't that rich yet.
You had to deal in text and reasonably-sized images on a CRT with a limited-bandwidth pipe feeding it all. Because of this, many of the techniques developed to transform so many other forms of media and so many other institutions into Capitalist hellscapes and high school, respectively, didn't work online. Until they did.
You meant the "vulgus". "Vulgar" has the same root, but a very different meaning.
This random thought is kinda disconnected from actual human history. "Not allowed to study Scripture" was not a thing: Illiteracy was. There were people that knew how to read and people who didn't, that's it.
I'm trying hard (and failing) to visualize your mental image.
"Dear Father: it looks like the Bible has been translated to English by my dear brothers up at the monastery. I'm sure you understand why I can no longer be a priest"
Remember that you're living in the actual earth timeline, not the 40k one.
-emacs user
Capital and tech improvement will beat anyone chasing that.
FWIW, I like the analogy despite seeing a benefit to knowing the original languages to studying scripture.
Anyways, is there a "just use vue" effort like there is with postgres :)
In the UK, you cannot use App Store and iPhone (your own phone) without verifying your identity:
and makes more sense, Apple and Google have your credit card , or if you are a parent that bought soem phone for you child then at first boot up as a parent should be your job to setup a child account.
They don't have mine.
Even if they did, having a credit card is not proof of age.
> if you are a parent that bought soem phone for you child then at first boot up as a parent should be your job to setup a child account
Setting up a "child account" shouldn't involve setting some age field. Setting up a "child account" should involve restricting permissions.
Why leave it to the OS or a company to decide what is "age appropriate"? Leave it to the parent to decide what the child should or should not have access to. Extra bonus: that same "child account" can then also be used for other restricted purposes. Want a guest account which limits activity? Want an incognito account? Want a sandbox account? None of these should require setting some age.
I am not paid by a trilion dollar company to decide if it should be a birthday input, or a dropdown where you select your political and religious conviction about what your child should see. Sony figured it out, if Apple pays me I will spend more time to write for them a UX flow so average people could sert the accpunts up and the rest could ask their priest, cousins or other person that can follow instructions to setup the account for them.
The giants shoudl have solved this decades ago and not wait for the fanatic religious to push for this as laws and get the goverments involved, now you will get 25 different laws about this.
Something I would be 100% OK with is some regulation that at first boot, you have to present information about what parental controls are available on the device and ask if you'd like them enabled.
I haven't set up a phone in a hot minute, I only do it once every few years, is this something they already do?
I'd imagine there's a lot of cases where a parent buys a new phone and hands down the old one to their kid without enabling safety features. I don't know if there's a good way to help with that - maybe something like, whenever you go to set a new password, prompt "hey is this for a kid?" and go through the safety features again?
Just spitballing, that last one may not be a good idea, not really sure.
Seems such a simple solution rather then each appa nd website having to figure out a way to do it.
Why else would they want to sneakily add facial recognition to smart glasses?! /s https://www.businessinsider.com/meta-ray-ban-smart-glasses-f...
As more and more people essentially lock themselves in with these identitybrokers tho I imagine it has a very stifling effect on speech tho. Imagine getting banned from those.
This is unfalsifiable. Just say what you think it is explicitly.
If so, it is customarily permissible to use rhetoric and sarcasm to more strongly emphasize a point. Or, to leave the conclusion as an exercise for the reader.
There are many interesting ways that the conversation could have been carried forward but there is no way to continue the conservation as the OP doesn't make it clear what they think.
The only thing I can say is: No I cannot figure it out, please tell me what you're trying to say here.
On the contrary, looks like you can:
> (…) sell the user's data (…) use this information to train AI models (…) use this information to serve Ads
They are taking a position that cannot be argued against or even discussed because they don’t make that position clear.
So one of your suggestions of what the OP could mean was something you explicitly don’t think is true and would argue against? That sounds like a bad faith straw man set up.
Perhaps it’s just as well that the OP didn’t provide one specific reason to be nitpicked ad nauseam by an army of “well ackshually” missing the forest for the trees.
You could, as the HN guidelines suggest, argue in good faith and steel man. The distinction between “selling your data” and “profiting from your data” isn’t important for a high level discussion.
Can you truly not see through Meta’s intentions? There are entire published books, investigations, and whistleblowers to reference. Zuckerberg called people “dumb fucks” for trusting him with their data and has time and again proven to be a hypocrite who doesn’t care about anyone but himself.
What prevents you from saying "Yes, and Xyz!!" and another poster "Yup, and Pdq, and Foo too!"
Or, maybe OP is just being a bit lazy, but again, it seems the context is conversation, not formal scientific inquiry where everything must be falsifiable?
The other one was the time I was speaking to my brother in law, who had just paved his driveway, he said "I could have used airport grade tar, but thought it was too much" and we were in front of his Nest security cam is the only thing I can think of, but the very next morning, I'm scrolling through Facebook, and sure enough, someone local is advertising airport grade tar. Why? I didn't google this, I only heard it from them.
There's some serious shenanigans going on with ad companies, and we just seem to handwave it around.
Coincidentally, I remember both experiences very very vividly, because this was the last time I used either platform in any meaningful capacity.
Option A: The Nest camera not only listened to the conversation and picked out "Airport Grade Tar" and decided it needed to show adverts about it to people, but the camera also identified you to the point it could isolate your FB account in order to serve you those adverts.
(I'm making some assumptions but...)
Option B: Your brother had done various searches for airport grade tar from his home (in order to know how expensive it was). You, whilst visiting his home, were on his Wifi and therefore shared the same external IP address, your phone did enough activity whilst at his house (FB app checked in to their servers in the background, or used Messenger, etc) to get the "thinking of buying airport grade tar" associated with his external IP address associated with your FB account that was temporarily on that IP.
I had a friend who was convinced that some device in his house was listening in on his conversations with his wife as he kept on getting adverts for things they'd been talking about buying the day before but he hadn't searched for. (But she was searching for it from their home wifi, which is why it appeared in his adverts afterwards.)
That is, BiL was marked as 'spreader for airport grade tar' based on recent activity, marked as having been in contact with spreadee, and then spreadee was marked as having received the spreading. P(conversion) high, so the ad is shown.
It's just contact tracing, it works well and is really easy even without literally watching what goes on in interactions.
Currently, websites and apps are supposed to ensure they don't have kids under 13, or if they do - that they have the parents permission. That's federal law in the US.
These laws make the operating system or app store (depends on the particular law) responsible for being the age gate.
This doesn't stop the federal law from being enforced or anything, but the idea is apps/websites don't handle it directly, that's handled by the operating system or app store.
So now - companies like Meta can throw up their hands and say "hey, the operating system told us they were of age, not our fault." It also makes some things murkier. Now if Meta gets sued, can they bring Google/Apple/Microsoft in as some kind of co-defendent?
I think that murkiness is the point. They don't need to create the most bullet-proof set of regulations that 100% absolves them of all responsibility, they just need to create enough to save some money next time they get sued.
I can think of a ton of regulations we could create to better help protect kids. We could mandate that mobile phones, upon first setup, tell the user about parental controls that are available on the device and ask if they'd like to be enabled. Establish a baseline set of parental controls that need to be implemented and available by phone manufacturers, like an approval process that you need to go through to hit store shelves.
We could create educational programs. Remember being in school and having anti-drug shit come through the school? It could be like that but about social media (and also not like that because it wouldn't just be "social media is bad," hopefully).
Again all these laws do is take what should be Meta's burden, and make it everybody else's burden.
Now the easiest law change - that wouldn't required anyone to change anything - would be to revoke Section 230. This would make service providers liable. Everything else is a band-aid. I doubt that this verdict will survive appeal (due to Section 230). But if it does, then again there is no need for any new regulations. The tort lawyers will solve the problem for us.
If we do have device age verification, then it still doesn't shield Meta. The lawyers will sue everyone involved, and disclosure will show if Meta had data that will have shown that user should have been blocked.
The purpose of age verification is to avoid all this. Of course the current proposals suck and won't achieve this. The market will not accept an approach that would work - which would be for anything with a screen or speaker to be permanently tied to an individual user. "OS verification" cannot succeed - it must be one-time hardware attestation. Even a factory reset wouldn't remove the user assignment.
You’re conflating different things. The OS-level age setting proposals are not the same as scanning IDs and faces.
I’m anti age check legislation, too, but the misinformation is getting so bad that it’s starting to weaken the counter-arguments.
> Their stated reason? Child safety.
> Their actual reason? You can figure that out.
We’re commenting under an article about one $375M lawsuit over child safety and many more on the way. They are obviously being pressured for child safety by over zealous prosecutors. This is why they reversed course and removed end-to-end encryption from Instagram because it was brought up as a threat to child safety.
Also your “you can figure that out” implication doesn’t even make sense. The proposal to move age verification to the OS level would give Meta less information about the user, because the OS, not Meta apps, would be responsible for gating age content. I’m not agreeing with the proposal, but it’s easy to see that it would be more privacy-preserving than having to submit your ID to Meta.
I find it hard to believe that meta doesn't already have a pretty good age estimate for 95%+ of their users.
What offloading the responsibility to the app stores (or OS vendors) gives Meta is exactly that, offloading responsibility. In a future lawsuit, they can say that someone else provided them with incorrect information.