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Comment by mothballed | Hacker News Reader

A few things you can legally do online without ID or age verification in the US

1) buy cigars and pipe tobacco (but not cigarettes!)

2) Buy "CBD" by the pound

3) Buy ammunition, a barrel and the rest of gun parts for a glock, except a frame/receiver that can be 3d printed in a few hours to complete it.

4) Order and have delivered wine

But there are people arguing to skip all that and go to straight to ID for social media. It isn't about the children. It's about keeping tabs on who says what.

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Usually the delivery person asks for ID when delivering the wine?

For the purpose of the argument, they don't.

They absolutely don't. They ask for your date of birth to fill it on their app and that's it.

In most US states, they require the delivery driver to recheck the ID in person. Depends on the state though.

Not for wine, not usually. Wine can be mail ordered, the carrier has no idea what it even is. They might require signature on delivey, but anyone who's dealt with UPS and fedex know they will essentially never look at ID. In high school I used to order wine and they had me sign but I was under 18, the box was non-descript and the delivery man had no idea what it was so a kid signing for it made no difference. It's different than beer or liquor sales where it's under the more recent COVID era exceptions that require checking ID and the delivery person actually knows what it is.

The mail order wine stuff is way older and under way different rules than most other alcohol delivery services.

As I said, it depends on the state. I've had to sign for wine before.

Did you order it under mail order delivery rules or under alcohol retailer rules? They're quite different. If the person you bought it from offered beer and alcohol as well, you were probably ordering under the retailer paradigm which requires an ID check. If you ordered it straight from a wine producer or exclusive wine seller then it was probably under the mail order framework. The point isn't that all wine purchases aren't ID'd, it's that there is a framework under which you can legally order wine online without an ID check happening -- if you pursue the alcohol retailer delivery rather than wine mail order route you might not be able to do that though.

Not in all states. In my home state of Pennsylvania, it's only legal to have alcohol delivered by the Pennsylvania Liquor Control Board. It is not legal to order directly from producers.

The laws do indeed vary by state.

> it's only legal to have alcohol delivered by the Pennsylvania Liquor Control Board. It is not legal to order directly from producers.

You are full of shit. Opinion safely discarded.

https://www.pa.gov/agencies/lcb/shop-wine-spirits/direct-win...

>The laws do indeed vary by state.

I am not disputing that. I am disputing that "most US states, they require the delivery driver to recheck the ID in person" (the original comment I was replying to). "UPS or fedex has to check" is meaningless since they have no idea what it is and essentially no historical nor practical route to prosecution of a common-carrier deliveryman who has no idea what is in the package and no mens rea for wittingly transmitting alcohol to a minor. The states that require adult signature on common carrier delivery essentially have zero legally binding requirement as the deliveryman in most states can't be successfully prosecuted unless there is mens rea that they had prior knowledge the non-descript package was alcohol and the economics of common carrier delivery practically guarantee they will not check IDs when requested to. Thus the "requirement to check at delivery" for mail order wine is actually just a weakest of suggestions with a wink and a nod with no teeth.

While I admit I was wrong, I can say that I didn't actually express any opinion, so there was nothing for you to discard. I do appreciate the rude reply though, thank you for making the environment here so pleasant.

#1 isn't entirely true. It's a soft-gate but you are legally required to verify age on your site before completing the purchase (I run a boutique cigar brand [1]).

[1] https://philosophercigars.com

Is teens ordering wine a big issue in the US? Bigger than social media?

Of course not. But literally any excuse that comes to hand will be deployed if it helps the tech industry continue to avoid meaningful consequences. The same handful of companies that have engineered a global surveillance suite that rivals the most tyrannical sovereign governments wildest dreams (and can trivially detect the approximate age of a user) will without a shred of irony deploy legions of paid influencers and other astroturf to decry age verification as an assault on privacy.

But it is an assault on privacy. If "protecting kids" was the goal here they'd push for regulation that forces websites to return standardized metadata that then gets interpreted by the user agent which can be configured by the parent.

Nah, that's a perfectly fine technical solution. Powers that be don't think like that. They understand pulling someone over to check their license, so something like that will do.

sigh If data brokerages, Meta, Google, and Palantir are all staring at you how is it possible to claim privacy is even possible? Like, you have to have a thing before it's possible to assault it.

OHTTP, VPNs, proxies, tor, privacy hardened browsers at least attempt to hide you, if providers are "required" to ID you that all becomes moot.

So having established one would have to institute I'm-hiding-from-at-least-two-sovereign-governments-that-are-actively-hunting-me levels of OPSEC to even stand a chance of avoiding being thoroughly fingerprinted I'm fairly confident in my point is proven here. I don't see anyone proposing to gut Meta and Google's business models, ban data brokerages, or any of a myriad other possible things that would at least in theory result in the possibility of actual online privacy. What I'm seeing is folks screeching at the prospect of a legal framework by which these companies negative impacts on kids might be managed. And of course literally no alternatives are proposed to address said harms in lieu of requiring ID so here we are.

You're attacking a strawman, there are definitely alternatives such as mandating a protocol for describing content that parent-controlled content policies in user agents would key off of. I mean even today you can just ban instagram on your kid's phone. Regarding futility of trying to preserve privacy, I'm not sure if you're aware that Apple doesn't have much of a standalone service business and it's widely deploying OHTTP, anti-fingerprinting, etc. Obviously they moderate their efforts to not push too far, too fast, yet fingerpriting a mobile user on iOS is not trivial.

Your brand loyalty might be clouding your vision here:

https://www.inc.com/jason-aten/apple-just-traded-your-privac...

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