Hacker News Reader

Comment by herf | Hacker News Reader

Doing this without the parents on board does not work. Kids can lie about their birthdate by a few years. Facial age estimation has error bars of like 5 years and many teens don't have any ID. Younger kids use a parent's phone. Many are not supervised by parents or have parents who are complicit/encouraging in getting them more access. Oh you could be famous! But it is clear that more persistent identifiers online will make anonymity much more difficult for everyone else.

View on HN

You gotta start somewhere.

If you can iterate quickly, sure, but that’s something governments famously don’t do well. It’ll take five years to assess the results and another five years to change them.

It is certainly better than the status quo. Don't underestimate the effect of simply making something illegal.

100% agree. The 2007 smoking ban in the UK totally transformed the landscape here, and yes people could still go home and smoke or whatever, but that ban has made a huge and significant change to health and thinking about smoking over the last 20 years. We need to do the same with social media and recognise that it's likely to be seen as toxic as smoking in a few years time - if not already.

Yes, the effect of prohibition was enormous. Same with America's War on Drugs, that had a massive impact.

Probably not the impact you're implying though.

Why not? Drugs in Norway are illegal as well, and you are most certainly not allowed alcohol before 18. We can however buy our toothpaste without security locks.

Legislation and law is not the place to just throw shit at the wall and see what sticks.

Social media had been with us for the better part of two decades. It doesn't exactly feel rushed.

Parents are massively on board.

And they are probably moving to a system where you need to link your device with a government issued cryptographic ID (i.e. passport) using zero knowledge proofs. With a system that ensures an identity can only be installed on one device at a time.

This means a parent would have to give up all social media accounts and chat apps on their own phone, in order to give their identity to their kids.

The parents could also check their kids phones and ground them if they find them using social networks.

The parents don't actually need their adult, childless neighbors to show their IDs to protect their kids, but it seems we're going down that exact path.

What part of zero knowledge proofs is problematic for the neighbors?

Needing to have an attested device made by one of two US companies and not even rooted, just to watch a true crime podcast on youtube.

Also, while very hard to implement today, when most people have their digital IDs on their phones, implementing a "real name online" policy will be easy, one software upgrade and you'll need to provide your real identity to every social network or website.

I use at least 4 different devices on a daily basis, sometimes more. Forfeiting access to things deemed not for children, or I want connected to my ID like banking or prescription renewal, on any one of them because my id can only be on one device, is not an acceptable solution. My phone and gaming machine need equal access to content some would object to others (especially children) interacting with, while my personal and work laptops have hard needs for me being able to prove my identity. And backup devices should any one of the systems I rely on fail need to be able to come up and running in no more time than it takes to get a replacement from the store.

Can't read the article, paywalled. But what makes you think the parents would not be on board?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com