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Comment by testfrequency | Hacker News Reader

The rhetoric I often see online is forcing children to identify themselves which, obviously leads to adults being required to identify themselves.

How do adults declare themselves as adults without teenagers claiming to be adults also?

It’s all complicated, but I am exhausted from reading doom articles of how the UK wants adults to not exist online while trying to force children offline for their own existence and long term health..

It’s worth me noting that I’m extremely liberal, but I’ve admittedly been failing to see how we keep children safe online without forcing identity of adulthood. We do not allow teens to buy cigarettes or vapes based on vibes either, right?

(please correct or roast me, I really am struggling with this and am tired of reading refutes that are not productive)

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> How do adults declare themselves as adults without teenagers claiming to be adults also?

It's pretty much impossible, so we should stop trying. It's exhausting seeing politicians et al continue to push for age verification despite it being impossible to be even remotely effective. (I hedge because technically we could demand photo ID for every HTTP request, I guess, but I don't think that's ever going to happen.)

The best we can do is ask parents to raise their children themselves and teach children to be mindful online (as we expect them to be IRL).

In real life everything from porn to alcohol to cigarettes, and even movies all require ID. And it's super easy to bypass in endless ways, but those efforts have nonetheless been overwhelmingly successful. And I don't really understand the issue people have with social media and ID. You're already required to link your phone which is a massive invasion of privacy, and the sites themselves not entirely infrequently demand ID from accounts at their own arbitrary and whimsical discretion.

The digital world is not like the real one. When you show your ID once all it's details are saved and can be searched across. When showing your ID to the cigarette vendor they will not notice most data and will have forgotten it a while later. So we need to be more careful with the data we give out digitally.

No ID is needed, just proof that you are above a certain age. There are technological solutions to just give out that data, but politicians seem to not want to go that way. This is the real issue, not age checking. The fear that age-checking means tracking...

Two things on this. The first is that at least in the EU they are actively pursuing reasonable technological solutions. [1] The second is that most of the 'usual suspects', the sites people are seeking to regulate, already require a phone number for an account. That enables tracking to a far greater due to a much larger traceable footprint than ID does, even if prevented directly. Even ID numbers are not particularly useful because most change whereas people usually try to keep the same phone number.

And on top of this those sites also have a tendency of demanding ID at their own whimsical and arbitrary discretion and often in even more invasive ways, like requiring a selfie of a person holding their ID along with a scanned, not even photographed, image of said id with all details clearly visible.

[1] - https://ec.europa.eu/digital-building-blocks/sites/spaces/EU...

>In real life everything from porn to alcohol to cigarettes, and even movies all require ID. And it's super easy to bypass in endless ways, but those efforts have nonetheless been overwhelmingly successful.

By what possible measure have they been overwhelmingly successful? Pornography and alcohol are still used regularly by a double-digit percentage of youth.

In the US more than 20% of kids are obese. Keeping in mind their absurdo high metabolisms, that requires just copious amounts of endless crap, and an excessive intake of sugar in particular. The reason this is the case is largely because this sort of consumption is perfectly normalized. We don't even have terms for addictions to sugar or eating.

By contrast, the rate of alcoholism among youth is extremely low. What do you think it would be if alcohol were completely legal? Prohibition on something doesn't mean it disappears. I fully expect my children to have some drinks when they go to parties, as I did. And I also fully expect they'll try, and fail, to hide their breath/drunkenness from me. And that's fine, I'll also play the role of being tricked. The whole point of the prohibition is that it denormalizes the behavior and keeps it hidden away, which does an overall phenomenal job of minimizing excessive consumption.

In person ID requirements all rely on punishing merchants if a minor fools them with a fake ID which aligns the incentives pretty well. It's hard to imagine how that would work online. Do you go to jail/pay thousands of dollars if someone hands their phone to their kid while logged in to Facebook or Google? You would if you sold beer to a kid who was given their parent's wallet.

Without an enforcement mechanism that punishes site owners the whole system fails. And you can't reasonably expect site owners to be responsible for checking ID on every request. So, it's (practically) impossible.

> And I don't really understand the issue people have with social media and ID. You're already required to link your phone which is a massive invasion of privacy

Yep, and we* lost that argument and "think of the children" hysteria won.

* I would bet the same folks opposed to ID requirements now were opposed to phone number then

Sites don't require phone numbers because of any sort of law or regulation. They started requiring them on their own, likely in an effort to amplify their tracking efforts by being able to a high confidence unique identifier to an account which can be paired and cross-referenced with data from other sources to create ever more detailed and invasive profiles of people. Privacy with anything involving companies like Facebook or Google is just nonexistent. And people are fine with this, until there's actually a motivation that isn't outright dystopic.

The companies that would be punished in this case would be Google/Facebook/etc if found to be willingly complicit in enabling fraudulent underage access. And the poetic thing about this is that this is where their endless datamining comes back to bite them square in the ass. That'll be day 1 discovery in the lawsuits, because Google/Facebook/etc already know full well who's e.g. under 14, with an extremely high degree of accuracy.

In my view, it’s very simple. There are places like schools, or parents buying phone plans, to identify children. Will some children get access outside of that? Sure. But 100% enforcement isn’t possible even if you thought it was worth destroying privacy on the internet.

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