Hacker News Reader

Comment by edoceo | Hacker News Reader

There has got to be a way to assert that a user is human, and over some age, without having to identify which specific human that is.

View on HN

There were proposals to do this, using encrypted containers of data that would let users authorize apps to use just the data they needed, but the idea got tied to Web3, which got some intense public blowback between the Crypto and NFT hype cycles.

https://www.w3.org/2023/Talks/0727-wearedevelopers-tbl/solid...

Now we’re onto AI, so we have suboptimal age verification, with implementations in law written by politicians

This is an impossible task. If a certain business wants to make human id required, let them. It should not be enforced by government.

You have full control over your router and kid's devices so start there. Not anyone else's responsibility.

Parents are the main ones begging for this change. They are losing the war against Zuckerberg

They need to be informed there are options that do not involve giving their information and their children's information to shady vendors.

Are there? Because we have had the last 15 years to see it isn’t working. Theres also the issue of peer pressure, it’s incredibly hard for one parent to say no to social media when every other kid has it and all the parties are arranged on Facebook. Right now telling your child they can’t have social media is crippling their ability to have a normal social life.

Banning it outright means parents have a strong foundation of “no you can’t have it, it’s illegal” and all of their peers will instead organise on private messaging apps instead.

That's why I suggest starting with really small children, kids that will be 13 by 2032. Starting with teens is a non starter regardless of how it is attempted in my opinion. It was a very long time ago but I recall being a teen. I could not be locked out of anything. Starting with small children is much easier and when they prove that they are mature and responsible enough then the floodgates open.

You are advocating parenting kids. So many others seem to want "policy" to raise peoples kids for them. That is a fools errand. And personally, I could not care less what some bureaucrat thinks is alright for my children or any others. Simply not their decision to make.

> and all the parties are arranged on Facebook

Bro… it’s joever for you

It's a collective action problem.

The psychological impacts come from secondary network effects. The studies suggest that taking social media away from just your kid doesn't do anything, because the culture wherever they go will still be driven by it.

So the only way I can protect my kids from it is to pass laws to force other parents' hands.

It is not necessary to dump our kids into institutions to be raised by their peers. It is necessary that you don't make decisions for other peoples kids.

Whether you legalize social media or not (or smoking, or drinking, or riding in a car without a seatbelt), that's making a decision for other people's kids. Choosing parental liberty is still choosing.

I sympathize with the libertarian impulse but for me, protecting my kids from other parents' poor decisions comes first.

Parenting your child is not a political ideology. What a world we live in.

Turning the entire thing into a doomed panopticon to "own the Zuck" is not going to end the way they think it will.

Farewell to freedom on the Internet and the days of wild abandon.

There are other options, it's not binary.

You mean TikTok? Kids aren't on FB

They are on Instagram which is a Meta product.

They're outsourcing their babysitting lol there is no war against Zuckerburg unless you buy your brat a smartphone

Its not a war because children arent combatants. It's instead a one sided slaughter where Meta and Google are destroying the minds of a whole generation of children who cannot and cannot be expected to defend themselves against the claws of trillion dollar corporations, all in the name of profit.

One individual cannot meaningfully fight back. The only way forward is through collective action and legislation, just like what was done to the Tobacco industry a few decades ago.

Confirmation someone is human is harder. Over some age could be accomplished with time should most of the devices and browsers children have access to were to check for RTA/adult headers and activate parental controls. It would not be solved over night thus not perfect but perfect is the enemy of good.

At the moment what we have is no good in my opinion. What we have at the moment will put the identification information of both children and adults at risk. Children can not even consent to sharing this data thus the only people that could protect them are their parents.

I suspect something like this is on the way, in the long term. Every site has some Cloudflare captcha or the like to guard against the AI scraper bots. Eventually, we may need some kind of token which is only issued to real humans.

that's what Apple gives behind the scenes to Cloudflare, and people learn about it from Hacker News for the first time over and over again.

https://zkpassport.id/

Reply on news.ycombinator.com