I'm not a fan of age verification in the first place, but I am extremely not a fan of random third parties doing the verifying.
You can't tell me that these social media companies don't already know exactly how old someone is just based on the enormous data that is collected.
chatgpt basically never sent email and it's regular now - like 2 4 emails per month
so, it doesn't look great for chatgpt
Your solution here has the same flaw, I think. If the algorithm thinks I'm underage, I'm locked out.
it will solve by consumers, don't worry
Do you aware how many people are locked out from access of the bank because the bank think they are too risky by some algorithm and no human review?
And people got rejected for flying because they have same name as somebody on no fly list?
Even literal regulated electricity utilities aren’t expected to provide service to every last marginal customer.
For example, a poor old grandma missing many electricity bill payments usually will see leniency if she is polite, the utility eventually won’t try to collect cash anymore and instead put a lien on the home while continuing to provide service.
But if the billing department receives multiple threats from her, then they may just cut the service.
How does “freedom” relate to an electrical utility deciding whether to cut service?
Even if we take marginalization out of it, this is the same kind of system that let's Healthcare recklessly utilize AI Systems to automatically reject patients' care, with a Herculean effort required to find a human to talk to. Its easy yo shrug until you are hallucinated into their crosshair.
But sure, that's "freedom".
By definition, a billing department of a utility has to be able to “marginalize”… in order to function.
There’s literally no other way I can see for it to work.
Anyway it's generally a tradeoff: is it worth doing it? By adding very strict age verification systems and marginalising people, do we make society globally better or not? Will those age verification systems work to prevent underage people from accessing the stuff we don't want them to access in the first place? Not clear. If they do, will it result in underage people being better? Not clear. And if it does, will it have been worth the damage on the people it marginalised? Not clear.
I really doubt you are genuinely incapable of understanding what “regulated electricity utilities” or “expected to provide service” means.
I didn’t accuse you of downvoting. It’s literally not possible for HN users to downvote the comment they reply to.
Anyone with seemingly over 10k karma would know that.
I can't write more than 5 posts per day and I can have negative karma because people doing more downvoting than upvoting.
So there is no point to wonder, if it's coordinated trolling or not.
If that’s the nearly infinite wiggle room we’re playing with then I’d say what about Adult and Child versions of phones? You have to flash your ID to the clerk to buy an adult one, like buying cigarettes at a gas station, and then you get to do what the internet offers. Child phones - let parents and governments come up with whatever they want to block. The phone autoupdates in the background with the blocklist, the device can’t do those things. There ya go. Each person and family gets to make their own choices and nobody has to give an ID card to PornHub or a company that literally exists to harvest your information. Win-win?
When I was a kid there was no TV in my bedroom nor a computer. Everything I watched or did online was on full display in the family room. What changed in the modern home where that's not the case? Are kids glued to their phones because their parents are too?
Also, if you've ever played with this kind of data, there is immense overlap between how some adults and some kids use the internet. Is this user legally a child, or just emotionally a child? Similar to the problem of "There is overlap between the smartest bears and dumbest tourists" in designing bear proof garbage cans.
So if there is something being done we should choose a solution that has at least some accountability to the general public (through elected representatives).
The alternative is Google, Apple etc where almost anyone has exactly zero influence and the government can still block as they like.
Of all the 3rd parties who could be responsible for this, I trust the government the least.
But really the best solution here is no third party. The device owner (e.g. parents) should be responsible for setting the user's age when setting up the device. Anything that tries to take that responsibility away from parents and give it to a third party is necessarily going to be highly authoritarian; putting that third party in the role of parent for everyone, adults included.
Really? can you name any 3rd party you'd trust with this more than your own government?
Given that you know, the government already has all of this info on us. This isn't a choice between "the government doesn't know how old I am" and "the government has all the info on me". Governments usually already do. They have enough data already to issue such proof just by the virtue of us living in the country. Tax records, birth records, driving licences, council taxes, passport info, medical information - there's more than enough to give me a cryptographic certificate that says "yes, gambiting is definitely 18 years old" without me having to do anything. Compared to literally any third party that cannot do any of this, unless they buy my marketing cookies on the open market or something, or yes - I actually go out of my way to give them my passport/credit card/selfies etc.
If age verification was an open standard, we could hope for competition so that we could jump ship from a bad actor. If one blocks our access, we would have alternatives. In theory.
Not so with a centralized government-mandated service.
What services are those other than p*rn?
And, that public key of yours must be used only on given platforms. You want to participate on Facebook or Reddit, then you use that public key to prove who you are. Which platforms require verification is another issue.
But it should still be legal and allowed to access conventional forums, Usenet , tor accessible discord servers without having to prove who you are.
Otherwise , the right to organize is over and we effectively live in an authoritarian regime .
One not entirely inaccurate definition of government is a loose agglomeration of third parties.
Or, less flatteringly, a stupendously large way too loose agglomeration of way too many third parties welding way too much power way too arbitrarily.
(Now if the people want to tear apart government, democracy delivers that too.)
Although more recently, at least in Australia, it would be difficult to claim the federal government, and the Victorian state government, have done anything good.
By any metric one might care to measure they've made everything worse.
Edit: I just realized that’s exactly what Android is announcing in the article, so that’s pretty neat
I’ll bet that most people are in the same boat - they trust their device manufacturer with information like their credit card number, but not anyone else.
And I think it’s a pragmatic compromise.
The people clutching pearls and screaming “what about the children” can deliver universal healthcare, child care, parental leave, and free education FIRST, and then I will extend a modicum of trust for their overriding “concerns”. Until then, I’m gonna treat this as the bad faith power grab that it very clearly is.
This is problem generated by govt, and they just want to solve it with "children safety" as excuse. This is parents problem, not my problem.