The KIDS Act would require age checks to get online
eff.org
eff.org
But we also have years of research about how social media and other internet phenomena are ruining kids' lives.
I don't disagree with the principle of a lot of these laws, but many implementations are too flawed to be a mistake.
That's not the question. Some group is obviously pushing this agenda globally. Who?
It is not Meta working across the globe because they’re too lazy to implement age verification.
Previously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48708278
Also can I see an example of those ads? Google isn’t surfacing anything relevant
can these banks/brokers get hacked?
I'd love to see a way for people to revoke/replace their personal info, kinda like rotating passwords or changing their names - but for street address, birthday, government ID numbers, etc.
Penalties (of any scale) are insufficient to ensure absolute security.
without a meaningful headcount of real users, advertisers will begin to push back on cost or even reduce and eliminate spending on social media altogether.
by proactively identifying real humans, you prevent the collapse of major social media outlets. by tracking their age and location directly, you restore that which AI took away from advertisers in the first place.
age verification makes sure surveillance capitalism continues to function.
No shady agenda about killing public discourse is necessary if you view the push for identify verification in that light. (That doesn't mean it won't kill public discourse, but that's an unintended consequence.)
Besides, major social media platforms can just generate ”verified” profiles to fit a demographic. There is no way for advertisers to verify the audiences are genuine. Even CTR is meaningless unless conversion is tracked. This means Meta et al. will soon be actually buying/scalping advertised products and offloading them onto a secondary market.
Is is an excuse for some, sure. But we will fail at pushing back if we ignore that there are a meaningful number of concerned parents who support solutions like this because they have become aware of the danger that social media presents. For many of them, self-attestation of age at the OS account level is likely sufficient, not to mention much simpler to implement and use.
But others are working hard to shift the narrative away from age attestation towards age verification or even identity verification. Government officials (on both the right and left) want to be able to police speech based on what is acceptable to those who are currently in power. Companies want to verify humans for advertising and training purposes. And some privacy advocates intentionally conflate age attestation (like California AB 1043) with age verification because it is an easier strawman to attack.
From a government perspective, it is a gold mine to know who's on the internet. For advertisers it is another goldmine - you can target at will without having to figure out first some demographics. An probably there are some angles I don't yet see, but the fact that this is a concentrated effort across the world make my spidey sense tingle.
And who doesn't want to protect the children?
Because big players have systems to fill in those information gaps, they have a moat that protects their position in the market.
If the data were instead just handed over, that would weaken those moats.
Now as I've thought this through some, I could see where selected networking could be made kid friendly, you know, like a top level dns where you need to prove yourself to be underage or heavily vetted adult with id verification, and this entire tld could be made kid friendly. I don't doubt that most of today's dns infrastructure is probably not up to the job, but a very tight and heavily vetted registry for .kids for example (or maybe better as kids.<country> as laws vary) would solve all of this. Make a subset of the internet kid safe and serve the kids that.
The fact that all these proposed laws still give kids general tcp/ip access at the physical level means we do conclude exactly what my parent commenter says, its not really about the kids, its about the free and unfettered flow of information that must be stopped. In the US, its getting close to illegal to disseminate information but once factual information does indeed become criminal in nature, you need to catch the perps and thus the IDs attached to packets of fact carrying information.
His words: “the most important purchase going on right now (Tiktok)” alleging its control could be “consequential.” [1]
When kids have alternative news your pointless religious wars or fake democratic freedom wars cannot be fought. [2]
[1] Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said in September "We have to fight with the weapons that apply to the battlefields in which we’re engaged. And the most important ones are on social media. And the most important purchase that is going on right now is TikTok. Number one. Number one.". Jonathan Greenblatt, CEO of the Anti‑Defamation League, warned last year: “TikTok, if you will, is the 24/7 news channel of so many of our young people, and it’s like Al‑Jazeera on steroids. It’s amplifying and intensifying the antisemitism and the anti‑Zionism with no repercussions.”
[2] "There’s an eighth front," he said, describing a struggle "for the hearts and minds of people, especially young people in the West, and for me especially in the United States.
Done. This alternative solves the whole problem and it's been brought up a million times, but it doesn't matter, because this isn't about protecting children or anything about ages. It's about locking down anonymity, and money for a few interests who want to be the verifiers and craft a future where they hold the keys.
You can set age in Google Accounts, but they can access pretty much anything when they reach age 13 (which is about the age a lot of these things start to become a real problem) and as a parent you don't have any way to limit that. They don't even need to ask to install new phone apps.
Children also use computers as well as phones and you don't want to stop them using a web browser! You also obviously can't supervise them every moment they are online even if you wanted to.
And if you're a concerned government, make OS vendors support it and make parents criminally responsible for not setting it.
The question we have to ask ourselves is whether these "protect the children" laws are worth the internet freedoms they are about to erode. I would argue not.
1. It is not the state's responsibility to raise your children. They should ensure that safety is available, they should have some ability to deal with clear cases of abuse - but otherwise you're on your own. Anybody who thinks they want a nanny state just has to imagine the worst possible government abusing this power.
2. On the basis of providing safety, it would be enough for example for mobile phone OSes to provide parent restrictions (as they currently do). Kids can't afford to buy phones, so it's the parents in almost all cases giving them unfiltered access. If you really really want to ensure that all children have filtered access on phones, just spot check kid's phones and confiscate them if they do not have the locks enabled.
It seems insane to me that so many parents believe they have zero responsibility for their children's access to the internet, despite being the source of that access. I'm sorry, parents need to step up.
But that wouldn't come with baked in surveillance, so "what else can you do" sounds a bit unnerving.
It really wouldn't be.
Do that at OSI layer 3, every routed packet would have to have an "was this sent by a kid's device" flag.
Higher levels aren't the ISP's role. Lower levels, you'd need duplicate hardware specifically for kids, which couldn't connect to the adult's internet.
In the real world, we're still arguing about something that was already embarrassingly slow in its roll-out during my degree, and I graduated 20 years ago: IPv6.
This seems very naive to me, to be honest.
children don't tend to object to losing rights they never had in the first place.
get them used to livign with less rights and a lower standard of living and they wont' know what was taken away from them.
Tobacco companies: “CIGARETTES ARE FINE!”
Society: “we should regulate that.”
Social media companies: “SOCIAL MEDIA IS FINE!”
Society: “we should regulate that”
You, apparently: “if the tobacco industry lied, it proves… social media… is being honest???? Or something???”
I suspect that depends on subtle phrasing.
If for the sake of argument I presuppose that film classification ratings are necessary to protect children’s mental health, then the un-filtered contents of shock sites and porn sites will have had an impact even in the early years of the internet.
However, the early years of the internet simply had a much smaller proportion of kids online to experience this.
Until there's a solution that actually addresses the problem without creating more, we should just try to make sure more people also know the problem exists and try to help equip parents to deal with it as best they can for now.
We could recognize the attention economy as inherently destructive to society and ban it altogether.
The default value assigned to a social study from academia should be zero these days, so there merely being a lot of them doesn't mean anything. You really need some very high quality evidence to justify this kind of huge change.
Educate the parents maybe?
No joke our politicians subject us to something stupid, and then travel around telling their foreign peers how amazing and genius they are for doing so. They help write the legislation for other countries. Of course they later return and have to deal with the results of their stupidity, but its already been sold.
https://www.afr.com/technology/australia-takes-social-media-...
I know Aus and NZ are quite authoritarian when it comes to this stuff - I have seen it directly for myself. I was at the Christchurch Call public engagement meeting [1] when they were planning some of these things.
Somehow the US ones always fly under the radar: Bilderberg, Council on Foreign Relations, Jackson Hole banker meetup, Bohemian Grove, etc.
There has been a lot of propaganda since the mid teens targeting the social and psychological impacts of social media. It is certainly plausible that some group or the aforementioned entities had a big part of this. Regulatory capture is a real thing that makes companies or breaks companies.
This is not the first time media consumption has been labeled and targeted in a negative way and it will not be the last. We as a society have to adapt to changing landscapes.
We shouldn't burn books. We shouldn't ban dungeons and dragons. Video games do not make people in general homicidal. History is repeating itself.
Anecdotally, I have not ran into a single person who has suggested we need to age-gate social media. It is on the politicians mind, but not the lay-person, as far as I can tell.
But it's not worth the privacy impacts and chilling of free speech.
I'm really hoping smart people can figure out a good middleground before the government does something stupid. Because right now, their two cannons are either:
- Ban open-weight/open-source models and self-hosted LLMs
- Require internet passports to access any website and have everything recorded and monitored for signs of abuse that can be tied back to an individual and enforced in real life
What does a good middle-ground look like? I can't think of one. Neither of these outcomes is good and neither of them are enforceable. You ban something for law abiding citizens and only criminals will use it, and if you restrict everything behind internet passports then the criminals will just use the millions of stolen identities they already have access to.
Maybe biometrics that generate short-lived tokens that only the government can tie back to an individual? Like a "biometric session". Still though, you can kiss freedoms goodbye. It's no surprise Sam Altman started Orb so long ago, he obviously saw this one coming.
Why do you require some special interest? Ordinary people are seeing the harm and demanding help. Tech companies did themselves no favors by locking down phones and accounts to the point that it's impossible for parents to police and/or check their kids phones.
So now that parents have been blocked from parenting, who else is going to do it?
> So now that parents have been blocked from parenting, who else is going to do it?
I'm a parent. Nobody has been blocked from parenting by tech companies.
> I'm a parent. Nobody has been blocked from parenting by tech companies.
What age? Because they absolutely have. Wait till your kid has instragram and snapchat and WhatsApp and they can talk to random adults, or get bullied and you have no way to know. Wait till they lock their phone, and you have no way to check it. Wait till they get addicted to content that basically blocks them from doing any part of normal life and all they want to do all day is sit and watch a phone.
It's really bad out there. This is the first generation to test as less intelligent than their parents. Read some of the articles on how kids are cheating with AI, and it's not just that AI is available, I think the kids simply can't do the work, and that's because they spend most of their time on the phone.
This doesn't bode well for the future, and something to restrict kids from phone is desperately needed. What it should look like, I'm not sure. I don't care about proving a specific ID for anything, just an age range is enough: Either your above 18, or what's your age when under 18, nothing more is needed.
Then apps can tailor themselves accordingly.
It's so Facebook can prove to advertisers the views are not bots/AI.
How is it impossible? Worst case, parents can make the kids unlock the device and take it away if the kid does not comply. Not that such extreme measures should ever be needed if there aren't significant pre-existing parenting failures.
And at some age the parent's job should be to make sure the kid can act responsibly on its own rather than micromanaging every possible danger.
the harm being us proles being able to communicate and organize. they don't give a fuck about kids, algorithmic feeds, or Russian/Chinese/other villains of the week disseminating propaganda to other bots in Facebook comments. they care exclusively about regaining some degree of control over the flow of information.
consider this: how many people in Europe would be against the ongoing replacement migration if it was still 1999 and 95% of people were still getting news exclusively from the TV and papers, where most incidents of cultural enrichment would never ever be mentioned? and on the other end of the spectrum, consider this: would the BLM protests of 2020 have the same scale and impact if there was no medium for people to spread the video and organize?
TLDR: Arab spring good, American/European spring bad.
Anyway, Meta, really? Just to have more of our data? For the absolutely pedestrian explicit purpose of providing more information to advertisers?
This is why I don't buy into conspiracy theories. The truth is typically really boring and predictable - evil corporations will evily corporate.
I half wish for a more exciting villain that would give people a noticeable reason to stand up against - not just annoying people with intrusive ads.
Giving advertisers demographic information outright would actually weaken Meta’s moat.
yea, you know who they are, I know who they are and we all knoww what they are tryin to hide. but anyone who spells it out will get downvoted to hell here.
But the way it is done is weird for sure.
But how do you do it in a way that it isn’t a burden on the parents or peer pressure the issue that breaks the intent?
Or is your point that the internet should be used by children?
If so how do you propose restricting the harmful content?
From my point of view we are in the digital Middle Ages. We do not yet understand if this global connection is actually being good or bad in the long run. The only thing that starts to crystallize is that it isn’t great for children. Specifically social media, especially especially people gaining access to children on troves to spread ideology.
So how to solve it. And „I don’t like the current approach“ without having a better idea is not a solution.
You make it a burden on the parents, like all parenting always has been.
In my opinion, US culture losing sight of this is part of why our country is spinning down the drain. Combining Ipad kids with "what do you mean my child is failing? Isn't it your job to fix that?" I suspect has lead to a populace that can't think for themselves.
Being willing to give up your online anonymity to be surveiled online and not only beliving it's not a problem, but really thinking it's to protect children is another result of this.
Why should we aim to do that ? Who give internet-enables device to their children? In most cases, who give pay for their internet access?
> So how to solve it. And „I don’t like the current approach“ without having a better idea is not a solution.
Defining the problem, and if it exist altogether should be a good start. I'm not even sure the problem is defined, even less it need a solution so badly that we should kill everyone privacy for it.
As it is all of the parental controls on all devices, apps, and services are extremely lackluster.
So I'd argue legally required, granular, parental controls and empowering parents would be a much better start to resolving this issue compared to blatant government privacy overreach.
It was only after all of that failed, with no measurable effect, that our governments, reluctantly and as a last resort, proposed these privacy-destroying measures. And even then, they respected their citizens' rejection of these proposals [1].
I mean I didn't actually check that this is how it went, but with all the lecturing about "democracy" from our rulers, surely that's how they went about it, right?
Parents will not solve this. They would need to first care and then to be as tech savvy as the people in this forum. And then all the content would need to be attributed correctly. If if if, and here we are
I was raised in am extremely oppressive and abusive religious household. I would not be who I am today if I didn't have access to opinions outside of those shoved down my throat. I couldn't even listen to radio stations that weren't corporate soft rock or Christian music.
The internet was the only free space I had. Without it, I would certainly have killed myself as a child, rather than continue to submit to violent physical and religious abuse.
If we would stop blindly reacting with short-term thinking to each issue in turn that Corpgov presents us, and actually think deeply about what kind of future we'd like to build for those after us, it becomes radically clear that both the problem and solution as presented to us are actually detrimental in the long term.
Without trying to offend you, but you are arguing this as: we don’t need to regulate alcohol or drugs because experiences, for everyone, will be better in the end…
Yea wouldn’t want to have parents be involved and managing what their kids interact with. What?
Find your rep on congress.gov, and write them.
Sponsors: Brett Guthrie (R-KY) CoSponsors: Frank Pallone (D-NJ)
Find and write your congress member: https://www.congress.gov/
Guthrie is sponsored by: (Alpahbit is the biggest) https://www.opensecrets.org/profiles/brett-guthrie /us_congress/summary?mpid=1048046
Frankie: (AIPAC, Anthropic and Comcast) https://www.opensecrets.org/profiles/n00000781/us_congress/s...
Guthrie (4th out of 7): $42k https://www.trackaipac.com/states/kentucky
Pallone (7th out of 10): $241k https://www.trackaipac.com/states/newjersey
Obviously it's difficult to pin a 20-year trend on a single cause. But most parents have the sense their teens spend too much time on their phones; and with social media use as common as it is, almost every kid who commits suicide will have recently used social media. But it's not possible to prove causality in a way that will silence all objections.
I suspect it's particularly easy to convince politicians that social media is bad for mental health because of their lived experience. Consider the experience of being a professional politician on Twitter.
[1] https://www.canada.ca/en/public-health/services/publications... [2] https://www.oecd.org/en/publications/child-adolescent-and-yo...
The research is quite confusing. This is because the strongest version of the argument is not "your child uses social media, and that makes them depressed". The strongest version is more like "when a society mass adopts social media, this irrevocably alters the culture in ways that causes massive changes in mental health, most prominently among young girls, including those exposed to the culture who don't even use social media."
This means you get a weird effect where experimental studies of high quality - which are usually the best evidence, are expected by the strong argument to show zero effect.
Correlational studies usually show either a weak effect (stronger in young girls) or no effect (it's extremely rare to see a study showing a positive correlational effect, though).
And where you get the most juice is looking at population level introduction of social media studies like those discussed here: https://www.afterbabel.com/p/phone-based-childhood-cause-epi...
But even then it's very tricky, as those studies can't exactly be replicated, and we don't know whether changes will actually reverse the cultural artifacts
This procrastination is why my children have 30mins + 1h bonus, if they do their chores, of the phone limit every day. This is done via family link. There is an exemption to music on Spotify, however recently I noticed they are watching (not listening) to podcasts on Spotify too.
But still this is managed by me on our local ecosystem. It's not government thing. That's super creepy when government says (read in your mind or aloud with a sleazy guy's whisper)
"hey, your kids are unsafe, better allow me read all their and yours communication. Ah and please give me your id so I can protect your children more"I'd be very curious what kind of "research" NPR is talking about, and who funded it, because it flies in the face of what all of us at these companies have seen.
In school they still perform ok for what is required there today, but from what happens when you say "oh, wifi doesn't work today in our place" I would argue they behave like addicts... It might be a fun addiction insofar as mental problems are usually not the cause but possibly the result if this runs for years on end.
My pet theory is that these kids will graduate to online-gambling around 12-14 because that's exactly the kind of gameplay they prefer on roblox currently. Even when I was 16 there was a noticable share of classmates gambling online - and this was pre-facebook.
Probably the best way forward would be to make KYC mandatory for large, data-selling public fora like we do with banks. Noone complains there and noone is forced to use platforms.
If you don't want to do KYC (such as on hn or a model train forum) you are liable for any criminal activity you enable (such as pedophiles using your private messages or whatever...).
The NPR bit sounds like what I'd imagine I could expect from people who are very good at pushing junk food -they've got good science behind flavoring and light addiction (like you don't get withdrawals from not eating doritoes) and the same with social media. they have very good science behind getting people to spend more and more time viewing their content not matter what. So I take that bit on NPR with a grain of salt. In my experience, NPR often presents studies based on small samples for whatever reason. Maybe to go against the grain, maybe to get people to think, who knows...
But social media is already non-anonymous (twitter used to be anonymous but those days are long gone) so I don't have any problems with age checks there -- that's very different than requiring age verification to access the internet or the WWW generally.
However, there are publicists like Jonathan Haidt who have observed the link between kids mental health and use of social media. (among other things) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Anxious_Generation
Now it's "present your personal info when demanded or else".
Also, check out the Goomba fallacy. (The way you wrote "the advice was... now it is...")
As far as I can tell, the answer is no, because it doesn't do what's described in Section 201 (E):
"Uses the personal information of the user to advertise, market, or make content recommendations."
Neither does, for example, my bank's website, or someone's personal blog, or many other discussion sites like this one. So from what I can see, while the set of covered platforms is certainly not negligible, it's still a lot smaller than "basically every website on the Internet that anyone cares about". So the title of the EFF article is overstating the case; the thing the bill would require age checks for (in effect, if not by the explicit language of the bill) is not "get online" but something more like "get on social media".
Also, a bank would not satisfy section 201 (B), (C), or (D), so it wouldn't be a covered platform anyway. (I should have left "bank" out of my original post, I was really thinking more about discussion sites like this one, blogs, etc.)
"Uses the personal information of the user to advertise"
Is 99.9% of all websites. So long as websites don't sell things, they will be having ads.
This includes Facebook, Instagram, Reddit, Twitter, Tumblr, Pinterest, Imgur, TikTok, Twitch, Youtube, etc. I think even Steam and other game platforms would fall into this category despite the fact they make money selling products. Naturally search engines also fall into this category.
Websites like HN are the exception, not the norm.
It's also disingenuous to say "a personal blog" would be exempt from this when most people don't have blogs in first place since they start microblogging instead. In fact, most people don't want to go through the trouble of maintaining their own blog, dealing with spam, hosting, hacking attempts, software updates, etc., when they can just use tumblr and pin the responsibility on the platform anytime something bad happens.
Not at all. You named eleven. Even if I'm generous and raise that by a couple of orders of magnitude, it's still a miniscule fraction of all websites.
Of course it's close to all big tech platforms, but that's not the same thing. And if one of the results of this whole kerfluffle is to make more people realize that the big tech platforms are not the same as "the Internet" or "the Web", that would be a good thing.
> Websites like HN are the exception, not the norm.
Which makes it even more important to ask the question of whether "exception" websites like this one can continue to survive if this bill becomes law. Sure, HN users are a tiny fraction of all Internet users. But that's supposed to be one of the things the Internet is for--to give even very small communities a place where they can be a community, and not have to worry about all the other crap that's out there, and not have to be micromanaged by politicians and lobbyists and tech giants.
> It's also disingenuous to say "a personal blog" would be exempt from this when most people don't have blogs in first place since they start microblogging instead
Not all blogging platforms use targeted ads. And if this gives more of them an incentive not to, that would be a good thing.
Which for ordinary people is the same thing, alas.
with respect to which more than one-third of the material made available thereon is sexual material harmful to minors; and (C) with respect to which the provider of such platform knowingly makes available the sexual material harmful to minors described in subparagraph (B).
(look for line 19 to see the covered platform)
Of course, it's a delicious web they're trying to weave - pass it now by casting the think of the children spell, amend and reinterpret later to soften the guardrails until everything is in scope and demands commercial ID checks, driving ID check industry software and adoption, until psuedo-anonymity on the web is virtually gone. Or do it with any combination of other bills.
(HN itself doesn't meet at least one other requirement besides subsection (E): subsection (D), "Uses a design feature to promote user engagement on the platform".)
This is the biggest attack on personal freedom since decades. It is time to crush those lobbyists that push for this.
By the way, even ignoring the propaganda by the lobbyists here, at which point did the "discussion" suddenly become to deny young people access to information? Because this is implied here. Some people were underage when wikipdia first emerged. The age sniffing here tries to undermine and revert all of that.
This is the threat day one. They get both groups' information.
Next, they'll start to purge information they don't like because it has been corralled off from the rest of the internet.
If they get lucky to trap a politician or billionaire in their net (and they will), they'll use that information to control how they vote or fund interests.
Next, they'll start to clamp down of people in the group they don't like. They'll lose jobs, banking, get extra audits, and have friction applied to their lives and chances of success.
Over time the fundamentalist group embraces government monitoring and control. The youth are brought up on it. The oligarchy use it to remove their enemies.
Within two generations we're living in 1984.
That said, it is better than nothing, but that’s about it.
What features are missing that makes everyone giving up their privacy a better option?
This is basic level protection.
How do I do this?
see: recent article about Snap sending pushes to kids during school hours
So pass laws and enact regulations that require them to be made strong.
Not only does this moot the demands for capture of photo ID, beefing up the parental controls that already exist in every major OS means that -say- adults caring for their dementia-damaged parents can restrict those adults' access to things that could be very dangerous to them and/or their finances. A strictly-age-based "protection" scheme absolutely does not do that.
One might argue that one could "merely" require a "This adult is seriously intellectually damaged. [0] Make sure to protect them from scammers and predators!" flag that can be flipped on by a Registered Caretaker. I humbly suggest that that is information you should never disclose to a company that makes its money by trading in dossiers of its users.
[0] Dear downvoters: I understand that this isn't the PC term for the effects of these sorts of ailments. If you've ever had to watch over and care for someone who gets cored out bad by this shit, it's hard to describe it as anything else.
No, please dont. More regulation is not the answer. Any more restriction which is imposed on kids becomes the thing they focus on getting around.
Just dont buy your kids phones until they are older, and send them outside to play. Thats all the parental restriction you need on phones.
Tell me how a parent is supposed to parent their kid when they can do that? Locking down WhatsApp is no solution because then they can't talk to anyone. (Other countries do not use SMS as much as the US does, it's mostly WhatsApp.)
Say you are sure your kid is being bullied or abused and you want to check their phone. You can't. From the password to encrypted apps kids can hide their communications in ways that are impossible for a parent to check.
Apps do not have "child modes" that disable all the secret stuff, although that would be nice.
So the solution to parents deciding to give their kids access to stuff is to make me flash my ID every time I go online on one of my devices that I use in my childless household? And you're confident that there won't be plenty of parents who just put their ID information in for their kids anyhow?
A solution is needed, and I think age verification is a good start - divide apps into kid apps, and adult apps. Kid apps will be made such that parents have full access to them, and they are blocked from social networks, only individual messages, and pre-planned groups.
Other solutions might also work - I'm not stuck on any particular one. But they all start by making it impossible for kids to access the adult internet (and I don't mean porn, I mean unrestricted communication).
Do you have a solution? And again, don't say "just parent the kid", because we've established that as impossible with modern devices.
Lack of practice with face to face communication, near inability to talk on the phone, less quality connection with people in general, craned necks, myopia, hidden bullying, privacy violations, dependency on a US company etc
And what do you mean by "can't talk to anyone"?
Giving a highschool kid a phone is basically mandatory or they will be cut off from activities, and/or rely on a friend to relay messages. In some places even middleschoolers need it.
There are definitely downsides (not to mention WhatsApp is a really badly engineering program), but the network effect is too strong to fight.
Providing access to social media must be met with the same punishment as offering heroin to children. The monopoly on violence must be brought to bear on parents who neglect parental responsibilities.
It was bad and suggesting state violence for lack of compliance with your world view is bad.
1. https://www.macworld.com/article/2305919/apple-parental-cont...
If parents were really concerned about this stuff they'd take the time to set up parental controls, but they don't. Which makes me pretty sure the push for all this isn't coming from parents.
We could lock every kid and adult in a padded cell to prevent kids from being harmed, so why don't we pass a law requiring that? Because its not a proportional response, just like demanding mandatory age verification for every adult is not proportional either.
More technological solutions to social problems.
Please describe how requiring a government ID in order to use a computer prevents an over-seventeen from presenting their ID to unlock their computer and then handing that computer over to an under-eighteen? An over-seventeen handing over control of their unlocked computer to a visiting under-eighteen seems to me to be an under-eighteen "go[ing somewhere] they could access a non-locked-down device".
The only way I can see to even begin to combat that is to constantly surveil the operator of the computer to attempt to detect when its operator changes. Do you have a superior method?
An excellent rider to the KIDS act would be to mandate the installation of age (that is, identity) verification to all firearms in order to disable the safety.
Lock those out too unless you can provide digital ID (and a high enough social credit score) each time you attempt to start them.
It's worth noting OP's proposed technology is impossibly far from existing in practice. Importantly, there are at least half a billion citizen-owned firearms in the USA without this theoretical technology, already. Therefore we should focus on something more effective. Such as better mental health treatment, bullying prevention, gang prevention, or any other precursors to violent behavior.
Though I think it's worth noting that age verification _without_ identity verification is basically as impracticable, and arguably more dangerous.
To stay consistent with my point though, if we mandate that everyone must ID verify to access the internet, I think it's just as reasonable we mandate that all such antiques be forcibly modernized with some sort of 5G-connected ID scanner. For the children of course.
On a related note, if they will require a specific kind of ID to vote, can’t they just make sure everyone can receive that ID?
Of course they can. They don’t want to. And they pretend like they don’t know how to. What this government is lacking, is a distribution system.
To be fair, they will need digital IDs or NFC chips in IDs since deepfakes can now fake the physical IDs next to your face in real time.
[0] https://digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu/en/faqs/eu-age-verific...
We're below replacement rate, so it's not like most people are even having kids, anyway. Yet we have to give up our freedom for other people to raise little Christian tots (or whatever the motivation for this is billed as)?
I grew up in a Deep South Protestant household. Having access to the unfiltered internet got me interested in STEM. Bumping into occasional shock sites and porn as a preteen did not turn me into a satanist cannibal.
Keeping "Kids Safe" is a LIE.
This is about putting collars on every US citizen.
They'll filter you into groups.
They'll control what loans and jobs you can get.
They'll use this information to blackmail you should you ever run for office or gain wealth or power.
This is a threat to democracy and personal liberty.
Child safety is a LIE.
Representative democracy is not adequate to the demands of the information age, where the informational asymmetry between individual and state is unprecedented in history. It's time to explore other models like administrative democracy.
If they are asking you to leave a message, have your kids leave the message.
> The term was coined by Timothy C. May in 1988. May referred to "child pornographers, terrorists, drug dealers, etc.".[1] May used the phrase to express disdain for what he perceived as "think of the children" argumentation by government officials and others seeking to justify limiting the civilian use of cryptography tools.
> The phrase is a play on Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. Digital rights activist Cory Doctorow frequently cites "software pirates, organized crime, child pornographers, and terrorists".[2][3] Other sources use slightly different descriptions, but generally refer to similar activities.
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Horsemen_of_the_Infocalyp...
Giving kids access to social media should have the same criminal penalties as giving them heroin. We have to direct the monopoly on violence against parent who neglect their responsibility. We cannot expect parents to resume their obligations without shifting the incentive landscape to make distribution and access to social media as painful as possible. If parents won't parent, we must force their hand.
It gives the adults the option to be apathetic. In reality, anyone who is a kid now will never know any better.
It just means we're the last generations that had the luxury of a world that remembered what privacy was.
Sounds about right.
I love freedom as a general principle, but internet 2026 is a undefendable cesspool of amorality, scams and worse. We are not in the 90s or early 00s anymore, and never will be again that era is gone.
Once again, the response in places like this pretends everyone is an upper middle class or above tech-savvy nerd.
I'm not a fan of these proposed solutions, which do invade privacy and remove freedom, but the problems are real. These solutions are being pushed because our industry is doing nothing to police itself or provide parents with the tools they need.
In many cases we are doing less than nothing, because the profit motive is to prevent parents from having this control. "Social" media, gambling-adjacent gaming, and other addictionware, which is a huge profit center for our industry, wants to addict kids early. Gotta get those cigarettes into their hands, which means preventing parents from stopping it.
Right now if you are not a tech-savvy parent your choices are: (1) deny children access to devices or severely limit that access, or (2) allow your kids to be raised by super-addictive infinite scroll brain rot feeds, brainwashed by propaganda and influencer bullshit, and placed on an on-ramp to future gambling addiction via mobile games with engineered "compulsion loops."
Now imagine you are a non-tech-savvy household with two parents who work. You can't really limit access since you can't supervise it enough, so your choice is now binary: no access, kids raised by brain rot and propaganda. Pick one. You have no control, no ability to whitelist, because not only do you not have time to deal with this but the tools often cost money and are imperfect and ineffective.
Then you catch your 11 year old son watching extreme fetish porn that he lacks the maturity to contextualize, or hear him spouting off Nazi ideology or talking about how he's an "alpha male" and women should be his slaves. Or your daughter becomes anorexic by following influencers. Or you have a child who is questioning their sexual orientation or identity and is targeted by an online bullying ring. These are the commonplace examples. There's a lot of much worse shit too, like sextortion of kids. Search for "764."
That's why this push exists. It's not a conspiracy. It's because we -- our industry -- is an amoral shitshow that engineers addiction and refuses to police itself or provide parents with good tools to do so.
I'd also like to note that for the non-tech-savvy privacy is dead and has been dead for over ten years at least. If you are not tech-savvy your devices are recording everything about you and transmitting it to two dozen ad networks and data brokers.
Only nerds have privacy today and only if they invest the time to police their tech environment. If you're not a nerd there's nothing to lose. You already lost it long ago. We -- our industry -- took it away.
This is a win/win for big tech. If they don’t get age verification, they can keep getting kids addicted to propaganda and consumerism. If they do get age verification, they get to see what everyone in the world thinks and is interested in, all linked to government ID.
Edit: the one outcome big tech does not want is anonymous age verification. This is technologically extremely possible, but that would be a lose/lose for big tech because they would lose kid (aka future consuming adult) addiction AND lose perfect tracking linked to government IDs.
If there were an organic push by parents, they would be happy to buy and promote products today, without waiting for legislation to catch up. Where are these local parental control products?
Speaking of social media and Youtubes of the world, why can't I, as account owner/parent, totally blacklist some "recommendations"?
Age verification is not a fit tool for content filtering. Users want the latter, but get switcheroo'd into the former.
The main issue with this bill is that it requires a huge cost in civic freedoms, with questionable benefits to societal stability. Not only do most youth extremists first offend past the threshold this age verification would catch, this legislation lets big tech off the hook for designing addictive algorithms in the first place, since "there are no kids on the platform anymore, and if there are, they're breaking the law".
[1]: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/1057610X.2025.2...
It is far more common for that child to be targeted by parents, and maybe by people they know in person, especially because of the lousy social environment their parents have pushed them into, and therefore to have limited offline support systems, and you are now trying to take away all they do have.
I am not disagreeing with you, but the conversation to be had is far, far wider than "think of the children!". Part of any deal would have to be: privacy of citizens is not a business model. But then you are facing the full might of Corp Inc, including their legislative powers.
The public at large have real issues with the current state of the internet and people here don't want to hear it or address it so we get this.
> Right now if you are not a tech-savvy parent your choices are: (1) deny children access to devices or severely limit that access, or (2) allow your kids to be raised by super-addictive infinite scroll brain rot feeds
> Now imagine you are a non-tech-savvy household with two parents who work. You can't really limit access since you can't supervise it enough, so your choice is now binary: no access, kids raised by brain rot and propaganda. Pick one. You have no control, no ability to whitelist, because not only do you not have time to deal with this but the tools often cost money and are imperfect and ineffective.
No access is the solution here. Tools are not expected to be perfect. The railing on a balcony is there for accidents, not to stop you from jumping off headfirst.
> Then you catch your 11 year old son watching extreme fetish porn that he lacks the maturity to contextualize, or hear him spouting off Nazi ideology or talking about how he's an "alpha male" and women should be his slaves. Or your daughter becomes anorexic by following influencers. Or you have a child who is questioning their sexual orientation or identity and is targeted by an online bullying ring. These are the commonplace examples. There's a lot of much worse shit too, like sextortion of kids. Search for "764."
Take away their internet access. If your child spends 90% of their time on phub, _take away their internet access_. If they spend 90% of their free time doomscrolling, _take away their phone_. If they need Internet access for school work, the can either do their school work at school, or you watch them do their schoolwork, or you find someone else to watch them do it. If you cannot do this, then you cannot be responsible for them and they should be removed from your care. This is basic mental health.
> That's why this push exists. It's not a conspiracy. It's because we -- our industry -- is an amoral shitshow that engineers addiction and refuses to police itself or provide parents with good tools to do so.
This isn't a third party policing the industry, this is telling the industry to police itself...by reaching inside my pockets to check my ID. Invasive security like X-ray machines at the airport aren't there for _your_ safety (regardless of what they say), they're there for _everyone else's_ safety: we're making sure you don't kill others.
> I'd also like to note that for the non-tech-savvy privacy is dead and has been dead for over ten years at least. If you are not tech-savvy your devices are recording everything about you and transmitting it to two dozen ad networks and data brokers.
> That's a different issue, and it's also being addressed by legislation in some places that actually care (not in much of the US, unfortunately).
That's a different issue, and it's also being addressed by legislation in some places that actually care (not in much of the US, unfortunately).
Privacy can be taught. We don't anymore. Nobody objected when platforms like Facebook started requiring real identities, but the simple answer to this is to not give out your information.
It’s called the Printing press. And yes, there was a giant moral panic about it at the time that basically split Europe in half.
Yet, today, we would find it absurd to ban children from reading printed words. Book bans are often the most opposed policies by all sides when polled.
The fact we’re looking to block children from the modern equivalent is the most classic example of a moral panic I’ve seen.
The “social media” millennials remember from their youth where they saw all the parties they didn’t get invited to…doesn’t even exist anymore. The social graph is dead, it’s all just short form TV now.
The stupidity of this panic narrative is tremendous. Instead of attacking/regulating the algorithms (the problem) we’re banning children from all information and creating a global surveillance dragnet for all adults.
What kids get to see at home is up to the parents.
btw, what have governments done in the past 2 decades to improve children's mental health?
We all know what this is really about. It's not okay to arm the government against it's own Citizens to prevent any sort of criticism, I don't care what side of the isle you're on.
This gives parents control, and honestly would work great.
Seriously, enough with mandating compliance with the surveillance economy. Build a society where parents can actually take care of their kids instead of hiding a surveillance state behind the guise of “protecting children” and blaming adults who want to preserve privacy or anonymity in the last space it exists within.
Oh, sure, you can imagine a system where they aren't, but is bill isn't going to get us that? Nope! It's going to get us something stupid and ripe for abuse, and the mere presence of what comes next will poison the environment against any better option.
In the end the monopolies will be the big winners.
I'm sure the perspective is something like: If we don't do this, the web just gets flooded with bots and nobody ever knows if they're speaking to a human or not. How do you trust reviews, social media posts, advertiser statistics, and so on?
The issue with this approach, though, is that there's such a large blackmarket for stolen identities that all of the actors who already do this sort of activity will be able to continue doing it anyway.
Doesn't really seem like there are any good solutions to be found. Every solution involves some loss of freedoms.
I’ve already stated who I am when I paid.
We are such a smart species.
They killed Socrates to protect the youth of Athens.
How else do we stop the web becoming a wasteland of deceptive AI bots? Do you use the web to research products, look at reviews? Do you use analytics on your website or products to improve them? When we cannot tell the difference between a human and a bot, none of that is useful anymore. Somehow, we need to filter out the noise.
The other concerning issue is that I don't think this will actually work. There's already a large blackmarket for stolen identities, and unscrupulous actors will have no qualms with using them to carry out the blackhat activity they already conduct.
Fast forward to the 1990s and politicians were clueless about what the internet was doing or would do in future. So what is the correct response when every citizen has the power to, using the archaic term, "broadcast" to the world.
The genie is out of the bottle and needs to be managed for the common good, which is always going to piss off some individuals. It's going to be interesting watching nation states fight over how best to do this.
As others have said, there is a coordinated push to drive this legislation everywhere. There is no fight in nation states. Just capitulation.
There's no big conspiracy here, just a limited amount of the spectrum.
Adults somehow feel that they are excluded from showing papers because the laws "target children"?
I mean it is technically possible to prove things using blind attestation etc. but very few of the world's social problems have so far been solved by first choosing two large prime numbers, so I don't expect it will help here either.
I dont think thats entirely true. There were always horror stories about kids getting seriously troubled by watching beheadings on rotten dot com, 4chan bullying and suicides have been happening for decades etc. It was just easier to ignore when it was a few young freaks that we could label as reclusive anyway. Now its just compounded more because its mainstream and the entire population engages.
What if after "age checks" are put in place many www users stop using these "platforms"
No doubt EFF would try to argue that's somehow bad
But such argument is total nonsense. It's as if EFF has ties to Silicon Valley
Less use of these third party "platforms" is a huge win for internet privacy and privacy in general
The internet isn't going away. By and large, it's financed by internet subscribers paying monthly bills to telecoms. It's provided by those telecoms in return for those fees. It's not provided by so-called "tech" companies in Silicon Valley running "platforms" offering "free services"
There is no "age check" to open an account for internet service.^1 Yet EFF argues there will be an "age check" to "get online"
Would EFF argue that having internet service does not constitute "being online" and that an "account" with a so-called "tech" company performing data collection, surveillance and ad services is necessary to "be online"^1
If so, that's really quite strange considering the issue we are supposedly debating is internet privacy. The "business model" of these "platforms" and the concept of internet privacy are in direct conflict
The ridiculous arguments EFF is making around age verification seem to be aimed at trying to preserve the Silicon Valley status quo, to protect the surveillance "business model" of Silicon Valley, whilst "minimising" its harmful effects, including the effects of these companies relentlesslly challenging peoples' personal boundaries to the point where "age checks" sound reasonable
The legislation is aimed at certain companies in Silicon Valley conducting data collection, mass surveillance and pushing content at kids to drive ad services revenue. It's not aimed at internet service or anyone's ability to "get online". EFF's opposition looks like support for these companies
1. The California bill specifically excludes telecommunications services and broadband internet service
I would love for people to stop using the evilcorp platforms. But what will actually happen is that normal people will just scan their IDs and continue as before and only weird geeks will refuse. Normal people will continue posting valuable information on YouTube, Reddit, Instagram, etc. and it will become increasingly impossible to access any of it without scanning your ID.
> We’ve seen this movie before.
...which one? 1984? The Terminator? The Truman Show? The Matrix? Minority Report? The Social Network?
It's for the kids, you understand - to protect the kids.
There is no more noble purpose than to protect the kids.
Only a monster would not want to protect the kids.
Politicians who want to track everyone all the time.
The rare few politicians who want it to be easier to raise healthy children.
Tech CEOs who don't want to be liable for harming children's development.
Tech CEOs who want to track everyone all the time.
The rare few tech CEOs who want to improve the world (by not harming children's development) and whose business model doesn't require it or who compete with one that does (e.g. operators of edutainment websites if those even still exist).
App coders who don't want to train a neural network to check IDs themselves.
Watch this "regulate 3d printers because of children" hearing: https://youtu.be/sue88CXzPcQ?t=2285
Normal people that call themselves good names like "moms for actions" drag us into this totalitarian hell.
> Pornography should be outlawed. The people who produce and distribute it should be imprisoned. Educators and public librarians who purvey it should be classed as registered sex offenders. And telecommunications and technology firms that facilitate its spread should be shuttered.
https://web.archive.org/web/20241103190346/https://static.pr...
Seriously now, if you give in to demanding people, they will just demand more. Appeasement does not work.
I think opponents to these bills frame it as current state vs complete, invasive third-party identity verification. That's a very unfortunate framing because, as you say, it would be possible to take the wind out of the identity-verification proponents' sails by implementing better on-device controls.
This seems to be a result of what people call the uniparty system, but that's not really an accurate term:
This actually embodies what the establishment on both sides of the aisle want: CONTROL
They want this for many different reasons: they have an unbridled lust for power, or perhaps they are willing to burn down fair elections for the good of all mankind, but actually let's be more generous!!
Most likely because they are afraid, unjustly or not:
* of real terrorists that they think, sometimes correctly, are using E2EE
* of children's immature minds having neural pathways being changed by things they're not quite ready for, or perhaps becoming addicted to the very real and powerful nature of porn)
* or, you know, whatever! Maybe they're parents and want to protect their kids and everyone else's kids.
Really, why doesn't actually matter too much.
The fact is that they just don't understand the technology and the FUNDAMENTAL TRADE-OFF BETWEEN TECHNOLOGY AND FREEDOM, that tension between privacy/human rights/dignity and technological "bad things" that are always in the news.
They get told one simple thing by lobbyists or even well-meaning constituents, and then they form their worldview around it. And THEN they write legislation (or, more likely, get handed ready-made legislation by lobbyists with an axe to grind)
We, the knowledgeable in this area (regardless of our party persuasion -- I'll work on my people, you work on yours!) should start to educate our non-technical legislators. We have to be the trusted voice of reason when it comes to tech, because they're hearing a lot of things from a lot of different voices.
How? By getting involved. Get involved at the LOCAL level, because THOSE people are the ones that serve as the feedramp for national or international politics. After 20 years, your education might percolate upwards to the people who are actually writing new laws. You don't need to be a "crazy" sounding activist or conspiracy theorist: in fact, that works against you (usually). Just be an adult, try to understand what they're trying to accomplish, and explain how they can accomplish it or that it can't be done that way for specific and reasonable reasons.
These are all just my opinions as I see increasing amounts of this sort of legislation being pushed by Meta and other actors. This comment also has a very US-centric bias, so please correct me if you're in another country where things work differently.
Then introduce some new headers the browser sends to servers with some proof that the user was verified and the browser would need a response (like CORS) for it to work.
That's why giving children access to social media must be punished to the same degree as giving children heroin. If it's a parent's responsibility, it must be made a parent's liability. Anything without the full threat of the government's monopoly on violence is just a pretty slogan. We should see access to social media as the neglect that it is.
Your proposal to punish parents does the same.
How about a solution that puts burden on corporations for once?
Meta here is the heroin cartel. They're a publicly traded company, have offices all over the country, and have mountains of evidence sitting in moderately well secured cabinets. Why should the government go after users when it could more easily go after the producers?
Social Media isn't even as bad as Tobacco I'd say let alone Heroin.
And, in many cases, "parent" singular. Putting a single mom in court, in jail, because she works 2-3 jobs and her kids are more knowledgeable than she is about computers? C'mon.
The EFF likes to frame everything that might even slightly rein in online service providers as being a terrible assault on online freedom and therefore, in their view, shouldn't be done. But I don't see them coming up with any better solutions. Just endless complaints, while soliciting donations to keep generating these endless complaints.
That's a much thornier legal issue
You don't wind up in a database for buying alcohol.
This proposal puts your name right next to the category of porn you're into, which will be a great way to coerce all those politicians into voting for the "correct" bill. Would be a shame if they found out a state senator watched porn, so maybe they'd better vote yes on the proposal.
In time, this will be used to shape what people are "allowed" to think. Porn will gradually be purged from the internet and then go away entirely as the US becomes more fundamentalist and Christian.
Then people who are neither of those things will start to be denied jobs and loans. Politicians that don't fit the mold will stop winning.
This is about turning the US to Christianity. (Read: this is really about controlling the massses and using religious fundamentalism as a tool to do so.)
Technology is the perfect tool for control. Just as we were becoming a liberal/libertarian society and letting people live their lives how they wanted, the wrong people started using technology not as an enabler of free minds, but as an inescapable straitjacket.
You've read 1984, right?
The sensors have been widely deployed. The internet will become your Big Brother. You won't be able to buy, sell, or even move between state lines without being in the good graces of the state.
Be a good citizen and comply.
A child might see something they shouldn't walking down the street, strolling thru the park, visiting the local zoo, or visiting an ice cream parlor. Should those places be requiring identification and hiring extra security guards to wander around making sure nobody is saying it doing anything politically objectionable?
Let's not accept creeping digital tyranny with self-assuring complacency... call or write (preferably snail mail) your congresspeople!!