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Comment by amarant | Hacker News Reader

I... Kinda think this will work out ok? Hear me out: Linux is open source. Someone's gonna make an application/kernelmodule that lets you configure your reported age on a application/website basis.

In some jurisdictions it's illegal to target kids with advertisement, and I believe also to track them? Reporting your age as 8-12 is gonna be the new, but actually functional "no tracking" header.

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8-12 will be used to argue that age verification isn't enough. They are pushing this stuff to track everyone, especially children.

For what it's worth, the California law, though definitely a result of Meta-funded lobbying, is fairly explicitly anti-tracking: it requires that the OS accept whatever the user enters for their age, and that it tells apps the user's age bracket (under 13, 13-16, 16-18, 18+) and nothing else, and that apps use that and only that for any kind of age-related functionality.

That last part actively pre-empts apps from any of the ID collection/biometrics stuff like Discord's been trying to pull, though don't ask me how that's supposed to work when it conflicts with other state laws that want to mandate collecting ID info.

Setting your age 8-12 probably bans you from using Gmail and other online services

That's why you give different ages to different sites.

Can minors really not have email accounts?

Depends on the jurisdiction I guess, now that we’re Balkanizing the internet.

https://support.google.com/families/answer/7103338?hl=en Google's policy is that under 13 you can have a supervised Gmail account. I think that's fairly standard for major providers

"configure your reported age on a application/website basis."

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