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Comment by LooseMarmoset | Hacker News Reader

An outstanding idea. Those lobbying for age verification hate it though, because they want to be the arbiters of age, and all that juicy PII that they can analyze and resell.

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I'm not so sure. I think the push is from the government actually. But companies are not exactly opposed to it. Quite the contrary. Big corporations see compliance as a moat. Tobacco companies supported stricter regulations on tobacco advertisements, because they had the deep pockets required to follow the changing laws. Mr. Altman is all-in on AI regulation, because it will mire down competitors while OpnAI has already "slipped past the wire" and done all their training pre-crackdown. When given a choice between regulating their industry (platforms and operating systems) vs regulating someone else's (porn sites and the like) they'll always helpfully "volunteer" to be the first to be regulated. It's just good business.

"The government" is the same as those lobbying the government. The people in the government get paid to push it, so they push it, and get paid more when it goes through, by the people who want that PII to analyze.

What PII? They get a boolean "old enough"

Think about how they validate how old you are. Meta and Google, who are lobbying in support of this legislation,will force you to sign up with your real ID, and be the arbiter for questions like “are you old enough for this website”. For every request that you make through some third-party website that needs to know your age, Meta and Google will know where you tried to login, and for which content. They will then resell this data to the highest bidder. Additionally, through all their ad networks and tracking, they will follow your session and have verified ID to match your entire browsing history. This is the end of anonymity and privacy on the Internet.

None of this is true. The fact that there are many, many companies out here today that are doing exactly what you are claiming for the non-CA age verification laws (like in TN and TX), yet you went down the conspiracy route for Meta and Google shows how much you are being played like a fiddle.

They can feed you an conspiracy and you'll eat it up because you were primed to have a cognitive bias, and will ignore the actual, real-world harms going on.

Rupert loves people like you

Age verification companies literally require your personal information to function. They don't want you to be able to send them a simple boolean over Tor in exchange for whatever trackable token you need to access something.

Are you a collaborator, or just stupid?

If technically competent people specify and build this system, sure. But it’ll be specified by complete idiot politicians, influenced by Google and Meta, who 100% DO want to know your government name, DOB, etc., so we’ll end up flashing our IDs at the camera, turning around to be scanned, etc. The platform owners will tell us they “deeply care about our privacy.”

Old enough for the 13yr content, the 15yr content, or the 18yr content?

And on what date does that change?

If your web site requires that a visitor be 18, then that's the "old enough?" question it will pose to the IdP.

I didn't understand your second question.

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