I know a fair number of especially elderly people who want to disable PIN and bio-metrics from their phone, because they view it as a pain to deal with.
PINs can also be guessed or someone might look you over the shoulder and steal it that way. Many phones still doesn't have biometrics, or people don't want to use it.
Our realities might be different, but in my reality a cell phone, which you almost by definition brings with you out in the world, should never be considered a secure device.
I don't think you can guess pins, as the phones locks after a few failed attempts.
You can’t just leave every dangerous thing out in the open because you “view it as a pain to deal with” storing them safely and then blame everyone else for the situation that follows.
Our realities might be different but in my reality if you put 0 (zero) effort to keep some critical things safely away from your child because it’s too much of a hassle to do it, or they’ll get around that anyway, etc. then you’re failing your children.
What do you have on your phone that's dangerous? Phones aren't safety device, and they shouldn't be turned into one.
If you have anything on your phone that should be off limits to your child but make no effort to ensure that (give them the phone, no passwords, no supervision) because it’s too inconvenient you are failing the child. Can I put it in simpler words?
> What do you have on your phone that's dangerous?
I hope you were asking hypothetically.
For one, the phone itself since staring into a small screen at god knows what because supervising them is a chore is bad for anything you can imagine, from eyes, to posture, to brain development. But also a browser that can access anything on the internet (modern Goatse, Rotten, Ogrish, other wholesome sites like that). My credit card numbers. All my passwords. Hardcore porn. Facebook and TikTok. The app that delivers booze to my doorstep. 50 shades of grey (the book and the movie). X (Twitter), I left the worst for last. If you really think a completely open internet connected phone is perfectly safe for a kid at the very least you’re in the wrong conversation.
It doesn’t matter, the discussion is about age verification for things that a child should be kept away from, whatever that is. If you’re trying to protect the kids from anything, especially legitimate concerns, then you can’t expect some mechanism to magically do all that parenting for you. It can help but not be the parent when the parent thinks it’s too inconvenient to actually do some parenting.
Seeing something scary, disturbing, or sexual on the internet as a child does not result in a maladjusted adult. These laws are about one thing and one thing only - furthering the global surveillance network.
Everything else is a smokescreen. Pretending that a phone or any Internet-connected terminal is something that should be kept secured and away from children is a parenting decision, not a policy one, and any attempt to justify it as a policy decision is toxic nonsense at best and astroturfing for the surveillance state at worst.
Well thank God this about a double-blind way to verify your age and not that.
Maybe your argument is that it's not a surveillance state because it is implemented with a 0 knowledge proof. Sure, the age verification is, but that is only part of the system we are talking about. The rest of the system is the demand that every adult play keep-away with their verification, and every host on the internet (that can be adequately threatened) play, too.
The only way for this to be anything else is if every participant can individually decide what should and should not be kept away from children. Such a premise is fundamentally incompatible.
It has the internet on it.
And yes, phones are something parents do "just" share with their kids because nobody is bizarre enough to look at a phone the same way as a gun or a car. It's the YouTube device that can talk to grandma. All you have to do to see proof that it's something people "just" share is to walk into a grocery store and look at parents pushing kids in carts while those kids watch videos. 25 years ago those phones were Game Boys. Nobody is seeing them as a gun. That's the most disconnected from reality take I've seen in my life.
If this is a concept that you can't grasp, then words will never convey it. It's simply a detachment from reality to think people are viewing their phones as a loaded gun and their child as someone hellbent on betraying them and causing massive societal damage.
The phone is the YouTube device. If they get a notification that their kid ordered from Amazon, they'll cancel the order and tell their kid not to do it again. It's seriously that simple. Just go and talk to a parent. They'll think viewing their phones as a WMD is insane.
Okay, so trust them not to access age-gated sites using your credentials then.
In the meantime, I still don't understand why someone with no kids should have their access gated based on what opinions other people have on parenting. I literally don't have any stake in whether you give your kids access to your phone or not, and I don't make any claims that I would have any clue what the correct way to raise a kid is. That doesn't make it reasonable to have a policy that requires literally the exact people who aren't the ones that are ostensibly supposed to be protected by the system tracked by it.
It's pretty normal to treat kids differently to adults in specific areas.
> I still don't understand why someone with no kids should have their access gated based on what opinions other people have on parenting
This argument goes both ways - currently there are no safety rails for kids, and that is imposed on people who want safety rails.
> That doesn't make it reasonable to have a policy that requires literally the exact people who aren't the ones that are ostensibly supposed to be protected by the system tracked by it
And there are definitely situations where adults' experiences are degraded because a place has to accommodate children. I agree that I hate tracking and so forth, but I wouldn't pretend that children using smartphones isn't a pretty well-understood bad idea either.
No, it's imposed on every adult regardless of if they want safety rails, and in a way that literally only affects the people who aren't actually the ones the rails are ostensibly supposed to be protecting.
> I wouldn't pretend that children using smartphones isn't a pretty well-understood bad idea either.
You literally just said that it's "incredibly recent", and now you're claiming that it's well understood. I'd argue that those things are inherently at odds; we literally don't know what a young child who used a smartphone looks like at 30 years old right now because they haven't been around long enough. On top of all of that, there's literally nothing about invading someone's privacy that's needed to stop a child from using a smartphone: just don't give them the smartphone! That's always been an option, and nothing about this policy that will have any effect on whether parents give their kids access to their smartphones.
I don't understand. We're talking about something that hasn't happened yet. The safety rails do not exist, even for those who want them.
> You literally just said that it's "incredibly recent", and now you're claiming that it's well understood
Yes - incredibly recent in the grand scheme of history, but still we have a lot of evidence of the negative aspects of onlineness and phone use over the last 15 years at least. And, as another example, it's far more recent that girls turn 18 and celebrate that on OnlyFans. I would argue that while I haven't waited 30 years to see how they turn out at 50, that it's a bad idea.
> On top of all of that, there's literally nothing about invading someone's privacy that's needed to stop a child from using a smartphone: just don't give them the smartphone! That's always been an option, and nothing about this policy that will have any effect on whether parents give their kids access to their smartphones.
I agree - I think this is a parenting issue, but at least on the left, which the EU tends to, parents should offload their responsibility where possible to the state. But that's my answer to this overall. I'm just arguing specifics.
Not much the government should or could do about that - it’s a parental decision.
That's a solved problem and making an immense vulnerability out of it is silly.
This is a reference app implementation that uses a detailed framework which explicitly has as a core tenet double blindness. The place you prove your age to has no idea about anything other than you being of age, and the thing you use to prove your age has no idea about where you're using that proof.
Right because a child might get online with a phone or computer and see something bad.
I think you should take your own advice: >Stop with the scaremongering.
First, yes, it has been proven that there are things online children accessing is damaging to their development. From social media to porn.
Second, and much more important to me, proof that you are actually a human from an approved location. Bots and spam are a problem in general, but specifically foreign meddling in critical moments like elections and referenda is extremely dangerous for democracies. Being able to gatekeep participation in public forums based on you actually being a human in that country would kneecap foreign interference. It can't do anything against local interference, but at least it restricts its volume/scale, which is better than nothing.
> Being able to gatekeep participation in public forums
And now it becomes clear that what you want is non-anonymity, rather than age.
You should have to prove who you are when voting. Not when participating on the Internet.
(Social media that optimizes for "engagement" (e.g. outrage) needs to die, but that's orthogonal.)
No. Proving your age anonymously is more than enough to prove you're a human and that is all that is needed.
Precise age and general location is already sometimes enough to completely identify a person. That alone would make it far easier to, for instance, track people down based on their social media posts.
Forced proof of identity is damage, and the Internet should route around it. Every last bit of this should be destroyed, along with the political careers of anyone who supports it.
Yes, country. Generally proved enough by the ID being issued by that country, or a neighbouring one.
> Forced proof of identity is damage, and the Internet should route around it. Every last bit of this should be destroyed, along with the political careers of anyone who supports it.
Have you heard of the dead internet? The internet is already damaged beyond repair by hostile corporate and political interetests. The only way it becomes for humans again is by enforcing verification of humanness in critical parts of it.
Again, I'm not talking about identifying people individually, but identifying them as real people over 18. With the planned and starting to exist EU infrastructure around this, with double blind proof of age (and thus humanity), we have that and it's still Anonymous.
> and there will always be places to have discussions without doing so, whether you want there to be or not.
That is actually kind of irrelevant, because people discussing in small numbers is not the problem. Malicious actors twisting public discourse is. So all that's needed is strict guardrails around the big public forums (social media).