The real reason, of course, is to force people to connect strong real-life identifiers to online activity. Mobile first, then Windows. Then Linux is too weak to oppose on its own, and will adapt or die.
This is worse than that, this paves a way for corporations to shove anti-user crap (adware, spyware, "sideloading" restrictions etc) to devices that are mandatory for you.. and in a way you can't fight it, because now government is protecting that crap without even realizing it.
It's one thing that I can't install a custom OS on my credit card.. but it's a different thing when that device is actively connected to the network, sending my data to some US company, prevents me from removing bloatware / installing my own software.. and on top of that displays ads.
I don't think politicians are _so_ stupid (except some of them, of course). But business is business. See how they "fight" the big tech.
Maybe I'm naive, but I think there's no deeper motivation. There are activists and politicians who really believe this is a cause worth fighting for.
https://europeanpirates.eu/chatcontrol-eu-ministers-want-to-...
Maybe you are not naive. Maybe you are correct
This "real reason for age verification" trope might be just another braindead meme or conspiracy theory
No evidence has been presented to support what these commenters are suggesting
It stands to reeason that anyone who is truly concerned about "connect[ing] real-life identifiers to online activity" would be distancing themselves from using corporate-controlled mobile operating systems like Android or iOS, as opposed to thinking, something like, "I've got a good thing going here with Android and/or iOS and age verification is going to ruin it"
How about NetBSD, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, FreeDOS, Plan9
What's the timeline on this outcome
Anyone willing to place a bet on a prediction market
"Let me be direct about this: the likelihood of any legislature specifically targeting FreeBSD or OpenBSD with age verification mandates is close to zero."
https://freebsd.consulting/freebsd-dispatch-bsd-age-verifica...
Good luck booting those OSs on a system with secure boot enabled
I saved money by opting out of secure boot
If I needed it I could add it later
But I boot NetBSD from USB stick to RAM-based filesystem (e.g., mfs ,tmpfs), there is no internal HDD or SSD
I do not boot with "secure boot enabled" because the computer does not have a secure boot TPM
The same parents who give smartphones to toddlers to keep them quiet? Good luck...
Can't you just enroll your kid's devices in your home corporate and leverage MDM to force the network to call through your proxy, which denies or downgrades all ECH and then can actively filter to an allowlist or screen the material through your personal or contracted LLM?
This seems relatively solved to me.
I’m sorry, but if you don’t have a home computer in your living room for your kids homework, you haven’t put in any effort and I no longer care. Ideally nobody, anywhere, should care. You have to take actual steps. Very basic, easy steps.
Think about what you need technology for. To reach your kid, to do their homework. Okay. Now do you require 24/7 internet access on an arbitrary device for that? No. You can go to Walmart today and pick up a 20 dollar burner phone. But you didn’t, right? So do that first, analyze the landscape, and then I think there can be a conversation to be had.
Demanding a conversation or worse, a law, when the most basic steps have not been taken is frankly disrespectful. That’s how I view it, it’s a time wasting mechanism.
Does that 100% prevent bad things? No, but it’s obvious, cheap, and good enough that everybody stopped trying after that.
If you have a computer in the living room, I can guarantee that the odds that your son or daughter is watching something bad will be very low.
The great thing about these solutions is they require no complex machinery, either literally or politically. But if you look around, people just jump the gun past these solutions. Meaning, they’re not trying.
Which, IMO, if you don’t care about your kids, obviously then I don’t either. Which is fine because as a parent that’s your right, and I support that right.
Really ? Like what ? I never heard about mandated "working parental controls". I only heard about "protect the children" (where are the lawsuits against (church) rapists ?) and "protect about terrorism" ( where they twist the definition of "terrorism" to suit their political interests).
You know what Microsoft did with "parental controls" ?. It disabled Firefox. Of course you can still access ( "educational") porn sites through Edge.
What specific generalized problem would you like to be solved that you advocate for such a generalized solution?
Bad actors can and will steal identifies.
We restrict certain activities and places in the real world from certain people all the time. For example, not allowing people under 18 or 21 (depending on your country) into casinos. What we have now is essentially unrestricted access to pretty much anything and a fair assessment is that there is societal harm from that. We're creating gambling addicts (which is arguably the most harmful form of addiction), allowing predators to interact with children,, manipulating children through advertising and algorithms, flaming harmful behaviors like eating disorders, allowing mass cyberbullying and so on.
So saying "we should allow unfettered access to the internet" or even "it's the parents' responsibility" is naive, dismissive and has failed. The only question from here is what to d we do about it. You can say "nothing" but that's a losing argument.
I personally believe that the easiest thign to attack is advertising to minors. This will take away the financial incentive for these platforms to create addictive behaivors in minors. And most of these tech platforms have already built the infrastructure to do this. You don't allow advertisers to target an audience based on (actual or inferred) ages under 18. You extend that to proxies for age, like an interest in Minecraft. And you make advertising to children illegal.
Arguably, I'd go further and restrict certain features for minors, such as comments on Youtube and an algorithmic feed.
At the moment nobody is solving anything because it's simply a fight to move liability to someone else. Meta wants hardware vendors to be responsible because, guess what?, they have no hardware platform. Apple and Google likely want app to have to deal with it for the complete opposite reason.
I believe we should shift that liability to advertising.
It's as if the government first let businesses install slot machines at every street corner, then suddenly went "I'm shocked, shocked! that we have a massive epidemic of gambling addiction here, we have to mandate anti-gambling shock collars for everyone to tackle this urgent problem! There is no alternative!"
For example, "unfettered Internet access is just a series of tubes (shout out to Ted Stevens for that one) for pedophiles to rape your children." So now what? Is it your hyperbole against mine?
The problem is that people are operating under a myth that they have anonymity. You don't. You're one subpoena away from being unmasked online and individuals can do it (eg [1]). When governments do it, they can do it in secret. National Security Letters, pen registers, FISA warrants, etc.
So the idea that "age verification is the first step to a more comprehensive" is flawed in both logical construction (being a fallacy) and that ship has already sailed.
[1]: https://chambers.com/articles/internet-harassment-lawyer
These are not equivalent. Restricting access to a casino just requires showing an ID to a person. A few seconds later and that person has completely forgotten everything about you. They will not keep a record of your home address, etc. Perfectly privacy preserving. You have no such guarantee when you upload government IDs to a server.
I don't think anyone here minds restricting access, but that doesn't require completely destroying ownership rights over our own devices nor internet and device privacy.
All that really needs to be done is for servers to publish what type of content they show from a parental perspective in a machine-readable format and for devices to have parental controls that only allow access to servers that publish such info and which content is allowed by the parental settings.
This should be even more effective than solutions requiring uploading IDs since there's still going to be servers out there in other jurisdictions that simply don't care for such things.
The problem is that so many people here look at this purely from a USA perspective.
An age check in many European requires no uploading of any ID. It’s an API call toward an ID service, it will tell you which data the service gets access to, and there’s strict regulations and liability around data retention.
I’m not concerned about the government. If they become authoritarian enough to worry, they will impose far tighter surveillance anyway. What we have now is the naive idea that just by not doing ID check, government surveillance is a solved problem in the free democratic world. It’s not. Avoiding ID checks just makes the problem worse because it makes the regular person complacent. The surveillance is implicit and hidden. If we understand that it’s nearly impossible for a non-tech person to avoid being tracked by corporations and governments, then we start working on the things that really help: super tight regulations about what can and can’t be tracked. Requiring audits of large corporations. Solutions that give corporations access to only the data they absolutely need and nothing else (the lack of such things is how we end up by uploading whole ID documents)
We can't get perfect privacy so we should normalize not having any? Leave it to the government we're distrusting to handle our privacy?
> If they become authoritarian enough to worry, they will impose far tighter surveillance anyway.
What is this logic? Let's not worry about creeping there because if they want it they'll force it? That's not how it works. Getting to a surveillance state needs acceptance. To get that, rather than dropping people in boiling water, you slowly heat the pot, which is what this is.
Did every American live in a "surveillance state" back then?
Every remote communication could only be had in the clear. Everyone was fine with that. Was the US in the 80s a surveillance state?
Today, and as things continue to progress with speech-recognition, LLMs, video recognition, etc. surveillance can be automated. It's looking conceivable to be able to process all communication population-wide in real-time. That would have been unimaginable back then.
Now, texts and calls today are only a small role of phones. For many people, it's their primary general computing device. It's how they interact with the world. It contains their entire digital life.
Couldn't look at your photo reels and videos, and diary, and every purchase you've ever made, every opinion you've ever said on a public space, every community you've ever interacted with, every location you've ever been in down to the room, from wiretapping a phone in the 80s.
> Some things are exceptionally hard to track now (like e2ee messages) that were trivial to track back then.
Can be easier than back then if stuff like chat-control comes to pass, because now the message can be obtained, processed and stored indefinitely in an automated fashion for everybody at once. E2EE becomes security theater for the most part.
If citizens still have a capacity to restrict the government via (enforced) laws, it doesn't matter much that the communications are in the clear. You can layer something on top just to be sure, but the foundation is laws and a functioning political system.
If there's no functioning political system, the government will just do whatever, like buying the same data they ostensibly can't collect from commercial providers (who weren't restricted from collecting it because there's no US GDPR).
If a country has a functioning political system, it can just do things like ban gun ownership, introduce mandatory IDs, publish everyone's yearly income, or criminalise calling other people slurs in public and not become an uncontrollable dictatorship. If it doesn't, corruption and democratic backsliding will happen regardless. Hyper-focusing on a few tools and superficial traits of a particular system in a particular moment is myopic.
Restricting the government via laws... The government implements the laws. Trying to restrict the government via laws is mostly just asking "pretty-please don't screw us over." They're not going to make a difference to a corrupt government. Government corruption will become more enticing too because of the added concentration of power it would have. How have laws been working for restricting Trump? He's shown how easily they can be sidestepped and manipulated.
Also, back then implementing end-to-end encryption of all calls wasn't feasible. That would have been the preferred option. It's feasible now. We have it. Why rely on something as fallible as government-restricting laws when we have better options?
It's better for power to be decentralized, as it is with every device owner having sole access to their own devices. As well as being able to communicate anonymously, which is huge for matters of free-speech and democracy.
Digitalization and now AI technology changes this drastically because it makes it drastically cheaper to record and flag human communications.
"Arguably" heroin addiction is the most harmful addiction because heroin is the most addictive substance, clouds judgement and drives the addict to all manners of sociopathic behaviour (not only theft or prostitition)
Heroin addiction was largely created by the criminialization of cannabis (the first so-called War on Drugs under Nixon) as a tool to persecute black people and war protesters and the overprescription of opioids (eg the Sacklers/Purdue).
We can all agree that yeah sure this social media stuff isn't great, but that's the whole point of freedom. Fast food isn't great either but lawmakers aren't pushing for a junk food attestation framework to make sure you don't consume it more than twice a week. In other words, your best interest is not interesting to them at all. They are happy that you think it is somehow self evident that we should subject ourselves to undue surveillance through!
So, wonder why they're pushing for this so hard. I'll take the brainrot if it means criticism and ideas can spread without permanently being associated with a trackable, unchanging identity.
I am not endorsing removing all anonymity from being online, but continuing the status quo with social media is a non starter for humanity. So tell me how we can help kids not get ruined by the internet without a mechanism specifically identifying that they're online in the first place?
But no, that's not what governments are doing. They want control and surveillance.
Regulation, on the other hand, is fine. How? I don't know.
Sure it can. I don't see how being old makes it immune.
- Slandering laws set a limit for what you can say about others
- Copyright laws set a limit on what you can share with others under which circumstances
Both those things seem similarly complicated to implement and yet we have them.
Good.
Added benefit: even adults will be less exposed to addictive material.
What would be the cons of this?
It's going to take a lot more evidence to get me anywhere near consideration that this is a trade worth making. Again, we know that fast food can be attributed to hundreds of thousands of early deaths per anum, but we regulate that not at all. In fact it's sadly a staple of the average kids diet.
Passing laws out of fear is not how any competent legislature should operate.
What if I told you it's very simple? We work at banning the harmful dynamics of corporate social media for everyone [0], rather than beating around the bush about kids. In fact, trying to avoid this is exactly why Faceboot et al are lobbying for this age verification crap in the first place - to escape the one tiny avenue of liability that has managed to exist, so they can keep kicking the can down the road.
Given how wholly top-down these proposals all are, frankly they would be better off being referred to as "give control of what your kids can see to the judgement of corporate attorneys.
[0] antitrust enforcement would go a long way here. Faceboot operates on online hosting service, so they should be prohibited from anticompetitively tying the client software used to access it (which necessarily includes "the algorithm").
There's HUGE demographics of people that would lobby against what you're proposing, sadly.
Pragmatically, what I'm saying could hopefully chip away at the surveillance industry's power without a full-on frontal assault. Maybe forcibly breaking up Faceboot and divesting them of their client software is a bit ambitious, but regulation that forces interoperability of third party clients that represent users' interests would seem to be workable.
Everything, from “anything” to “literally nothing”, has been marched up on stage as the latest thing that’s a danger to children. All of it is true. Existing is dangerous, and that cannot be legislated away. Parents are supposed to be preparing their children for the dangers that life brings with it, not grinding down the tips of forks.
Having a healthy fear of skateboarding saved more broken bones than knee pads, so maybe parents should help their children understand that their peer isn’t as cool as they look on Instagram… or they get bombarded with it when they pass the minimum Facebook age and we’re back here in a few years raising the social media age to 35.
Instead, limiting surveillance (which in this case is only linked to the issue at hand with what's explicitly a conspiracy theory, so the link is quite tenuous) was originally meant to limit the government's powers as a form of control over the government. Control over the government is just a part of the Enlightenment project of societies being able to shape their destinies equitably, which includes shaping political arrangements.
Americans have completely lost the ability to shape their political system (when was the last constitutional amendment passed again?), so instead the discourse turned to fetishising particular tools that might help, but were never the point of having freedom. This is a fallacy.
There are straightforward ways to have age verification without descending into a dictatorship. To use an analogy, most European countries have mandatory IDs, some even have digital IDs; many of those counties are freer than the US.
Freedom is being able to stop kids from accessing pornhub without fearing a dictatorship because you can just prevent the dictatorship through a million other means. Freedom is not paralysing the political system as technology and progress (and multi-billion dollar megacorporations) march on.
Otherwise societies just get superficial "freedoms" (like using slurs in public spaces because "free speech") while their governments, say, run a paramilitary murdering political opponents on the street.
How can we even trust these lawmakers when Blue Waffles, Tub Girl and Goatsee already existed??!
Unless it hasn't. And while it's grosser than finding a copy of Readers Wives in the park, the "think of the children" angle is overhyped.
If one of the most compliant actors is already "virtually unrestricted" then you just want to censor things you don't like and the censorship of porn is just a pretense for the things you actually want to censor.
How has it failed? Whats the measure of a successful freedom vs an unsuccessful one.
>The only question from here is what to d we do about it. You can say "nothing" but that's a losing argument.
No its the positive case for action that remains to be justified.
This is something.
Therefore, we must do this.
The market failure to provide an adequate solution wasn't natural. It was engineered by the tech companies and you are playing right into their hands. There is still a way to fix this from the root with software antitrust: force hardware vendors to ship their devices without an operating system.
Here's a more detailed explanation in a past comment about how the problem came to be in the first place, and why software antitrust can solve it:
Absolute bullshit. This "unfettered access" is the whole reason why I am who I am today, why I am here. Not only did it not fail, it's in fact so successful it threatens the powers that be, and that's the real reason why they want to ban it.
> I personally believe that the easiest thign to attack is advertising to minors.
Now this I agree with. I would be even more radical. It's not just advertising "to minors", all advertising needs to get banned straight up. Advertising is mind rape. Ban it and all the problems with the web will be fixed literally overnight, including the problems "mandated hardware attestation" aims to solve. There is no need whatsoever for this attestation nonsense.
Well then, let's regulate this instead? Advertising companies already make a pretty good guess about a person's age. It doesn't require 3rd parties and age verification.
But we won't — this isn't why identity checks are getting lobbied.
> I believe we should shift that liability to advertising.
I am confused. Are you saying that advertising companies should handle these identity checks? So let's just hand out a unique identifier to the companies who have monetary interest in this? Surely this will end well.