Requiring my kids' devices to advertise their age (or their age "bucket", as if that was a meaningful difference) to protect them is not doing me or my kids any favors.
Anti-money-laundering is a comparable field, as all the AML regulations and laws are ineffective at identifying money launderers, but they're wonderful for verifying (auditing and prosecuting) tax compliance.
As someone who’s implemented AML, KYC, and tax reporting functions in a bank. I think you would be very surprised at how shit they are for tax auditing at scale. Unless the tax man is specifically auditing you, and basically requesting all your transaction details, the reporting that banks do would only allow tax agencies to catch the most brazen and incompetent tax dodgers.
All of the tools however do make much harder to perform money laundering, forcing criminals to recruit and pay huge numbers of naive bank customers to allow criminals to launder money via their personal accounts, using them as money mules. Which then gets flagged and shutdown pretty quick by banks because the behaviour is generally pretty obvious.
Unfortunately (or fortunately depending on your perspective) banks can’t/don’t coordinate on identified money mules or know launderers, so criminals just move on to other banks and repeat.
There is a huge international criminal industry that exists to find and hire money mules, and launder eye watering amounts of cash. Where I worked, we broadly assumed that the police weren’t interested in fraud or money laundering unless it was measured in 10s of millions. We reported everything, of course, but we only got call backs for really big schemes.
If you’re just committing fraud measured in $100ks, the odd of anyone bothering to investigate, and attempt to bring criminal charges, was basically zero.
The larger-scale money laundering in my area is a but more complicated, involving import/export schemes, real estate transactions, and property developments. I'm not in a mega-city, so I assume these schemes are taking place at a larger scale in those. I have only ever heard of very basic and stupid schemes (which didn't provide any tax revenue to my goverment) being detected or prosecuted.
Or criminals just get a bank like HSBC to do the money laundering for them.
This sounds unconstitutional.
If the intent were to actually protect children, then this would be what was done.
"Protect the children" is just a subterfuge to get electorate support for voting for the foundation for a "1984 thought crime" style monitoring of the internet.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/reddit-user-uncovers-beh...
As an example: Decades ago CPUID and a machine readable processor serial number was massively controversial. Today burned-in device IDs being sent to websites is status quo.
Not many.
> Maybe some people actually want to do good and are just misguided
Yes. That's why it doesn't take many to be part of this conspiracy. You can just get people to play a part in the conspiracy by rallying supporters under the guise of good intentions.
> And responding to those people as if they are evil government stooges certainly isn’t going to help them find the light
Most of those people will probably die not finding the light. They are people who won't have to live with the long term consequences. Most of the Illinois House (~70%) is 46+ [1]. The senate statistic is even worse sitting at almost 75% for individuals 46+. If life expectancy in the US is around 80, that means people who are in the first half of their expected life are drastically underrepresented (especially considering Illinois's 46+ demographic only occupies around ~45% [2])
[1] https://cypp.rutgers.edu/age-in-the-2025-illinois-general-as...
[2] https://www.impactdupage.org/demographicdata?id=16§ionId...
If this age verification stuff ever becomes plausible we always have the option of distributing actual Linux ISOs over bittorrent. Failing that, source code in RAR'd archives distributed across IPFS nodes and Tor. I feel like many of us would welcome the challenge if it were under better circumstances.
> source code in RAR
It is more reliable than most other archives in my experience though I prefer ZIP for general compatibility. Compressed TAR is not great for random access though I think you can create indexed tarballs which helps.
Don't ever for one second pretend this is about anything else.
Any parents who are pathetically absent from parenting their kids, well, they can just go right on ignoring their kids and letting the kid themselves put in 9/9/99, and consume all kinds of inappropriate crap.
This particular law is respecting everyone's rights.
Step 1: get easily passed, simple looking laws passed to 'protect the children' Step 2: 'oh look at all these people bypassing the law. It's so simple for a child to watch porn with this.' Step 3: increase the requirements bit by bit on the verification
By letting something simple pass, they can claim it's not thst bad, and anyone who argues against it is being hyperbolic.
> Step 2: 'oh look at all these people bypassing the law. It's so simple for a child to watch porn with this.'
This would be a demonstrably stupid argument. A parent who simply opens the box and does 5 minutes of setup before giving their child a new $300-2000 device, and maintains the most basic awareness of any rogue devices (i.e. ask questions if a new phone appears) is all it takes to make sure no "bypassing" takes place in your home.
Anyone claiming "all these kids are bypassing it" would be lying, unless the law isn't even being enforced or sites aren't cooperating. And no law can overcome those problems.
This is going to be one hell of a slippery slope. And the actual publisher-driven proposal in this thread is so much more useful; I would love to filter out anything with excess violence and generally NSFW content from my view of the Internet -- and I am over 18.
but that's not this law. This law requires self-declaration by whoever creates the accounts on the device.
this is a way to get something legal on paper, the rest of the stuff (patches, if you will) comes later. This asserts that age is important enough to force an operating system to comply, this opens the door.
No OS I'm aware of allows non-admin users to add new users to the system. Parents that care about these sorts of things don't give their kids admin access to their computers.
> the rest of the stuff (patches, if you will) comes later.
Unless the legislation allows for such patches through non-legislative process, patches to legislation generally happens on a ~20 year cycle in my experience.
A determined kid will find a weakness in the pursuit of freedom.
also nintendo's OS lets users add users to their heart's content. At least i haven't found a way to stop a toddler from adding 6 avatars....
Modern social media is delivered through 'apps' which are like web browsers, except without ad blockers or privacy settings, and with push notifications to make them more addictive, and they only show one website, and they're each 5x the size of a web browser for some reason.
If the political willpower for a better solution exists, the technical side is readily solved.
This was tried in the past:
Most parents can't be bothered, especially if they are non-technical and intimidated by settings. And so they give their kids unrestricted devices. I think I read the average first exposure to pornography is now age 7. I'm speaking from experience as many parents I've talked to have thrown up their hands because they can't keep their elementary aged kid from using the ipad all night, despite there being an extremely easy screen time fix for that very problem.
I am technical enough to understand how to do all this, but even then I encounter many bugs in the parental controls, for example one kid is able to use Safari despite my blocking, even though they are on an identical device to another child who is successfully blocked.
There are infinite content sources now, and it's not possible to manage them all 1-by-1.
All that being said, broadcasting device user age should be completely opt-in for those who want it, and not mandated for every customer.
Like, I can imagine a browser exposing an API that says "wantsAlgorithmicFeeds: boolean", and websites would be required to respect that setting. In theory, anyone can toggle that setting, so the website doesn't know if the user is under 18 or not. But if in practice the vast majority of people with "wantsAlgorithmicFeeds: false" are children, then websites can use that API as a good enough proxy for identifying information in the vast majority of cases. Moreover, the more of these specific APIs you add, the harder it gets to keep things anonymous — especially if different states have different requirements on age-restricted content, you'd end up being able to triangulate not just age brackets, but also potentially location as well.
I agree that age bucket still has the potential for exposing identifying information (e.g. if you can monitor a user as they move from one bucket to another, you can identify their date of birth), but it's harder, and it reduces the amount of side-information that can potentially get leaked.
That said, exposing the information in the other direction as well would be a good step because it would allow websites or apps to enable OS-level age restrictions without requiring that they also read the "age bucket" bit. It would be nice if "read a person's age bracket" were a permission that an app or website would need to request, rather than one that was given by default, and that could be coupled with the fully-privacy-preserving approach you describe, so that different applications with different requirements could mix-and-match.
All that said, I suspect it would be a lot easier to coordinate on good technical solutions like the one you're describing if the default reaction to anything that even smells like age restriction wasn't the sort of abject horror and moral panic that is so clear in this thread. Like, sure, age verification at any level has all sorts of issues. But that isn't the only possible solution to the problem here, and if technical people react to these proposals by pretending the problem doesn't even exist in the first place, then we're never going to find those better solutions.
The point is monitoring everyone, age verification requires you to share who you are.
> Requiring my kids' devices to advertise their age ... to protect them is not doing me or my kids any favors.
Idk about you, but it'd be doing me favors because my kids will not be physically able to use the most addictive platforms that exist today in their current form. It would be a major disruption to the behavioral manipulation that Meta, TikTok, and X do.
What you calling "addictive" is just revealed preferences of the populace.
In this case, unless you're a child, nobody's trying to control what content you consume. And if you are a parent and want to make sure your children can continue to consume the most addictive possible social media, by all means lie about their age. The law does nothing to stop you from doing so.
By contrast, having zero mechanism for the rest of the parents to control this, as is the current case, does impose your "do whatever feels good" values on the rest of the world.
Parental controls? They take 5mins to setup.
I think the theory behind the law is that experimenting on children to optimize (without any ceiling) for increasing watch hours, which 100% of the social media sites are doing at all times and have been for over a decade, is unethical and should be illegal.
If adults want to subject themselves to that, it's their business, but for children, we restrict all kinds of things from even being marketed towards children. Things (especially addictive ones) that are very obviously bad for humans, like cigarettes and liquor. Why? Because otherwise there's a huge incentive for the makers of those things to do so, because of how naïve kids are.
A wildcard here is how if at all to address careless, negligent parents of course. For the things so obviously harmful like drugs, it becomes criminal to give those to your kids. But perhaps social media falls into about the same category as R-rated movies, where we just say "it's bad parenting to take a 6-year-old to one, but not illegal." Another area where we have 'censored' things for children for decades - without any kind of scary police-state regime materializing and forcing biometrics and recordkeeping at the box office.
> I think the theory behind the law is that experimenting on children to optimize (without any ceiling) for increasing watch hours, which 100% of the social media sites are doing at all times and have been for over a decade, is unethical and should be illegal.
I agree, and I think this is where the focus should be. It places no burden on any regular consumer to do anything and all the burden on the platform providers.
If you're going to operate from that point of view there's really no point to further explaining how a bill like this would adversely affect people. One only needs to look as far as the 'temporary' measures in the patriot act to understand that slippery slope arguments are often not so silly. The Overton window moves with laws like this.
C'mon. We all know parents are far more likely to tap "OK" for "Allow personalized social feeds?" than they are to knowingly falsify their kids' age. The kids will be begging them to and saying "It's just to personalize it, Dad! There's nothing scary or bad on Tiktok - all my friends are using the personalized feed and mine is BORING!"
> The decision should be happening in my house on the devices I control, not in a Meta data center. The current law just gives Meta a way to start building a shadow profile early.
The decision would still be in your hand. If you want them to be using all the max addictive crap, just fake their age on the device that you bought them.
> The current law just gives Meta a way to start building a shadow profile early.
Whether or not they can start building a profile to start using at 18 is unrelated to this, and depends on data protection laws. There's no use tying the two together.
I know lots of parents and lots of kids, and I don't think this is accurate. In my experience the breakdown is parents who care what their kids are doing online, and parents who assume it will all turn out fine because they had AOL or even Facebook as teenagers and didn't get into too much trouble. The first group is already keeping an eye on their kids and might even have decent parental controls set up, and the second group doesn't care what happens as long as charges don't show up on the credit card.
These bills punish the first group of parents and OS/device makers for the transgressions of social media companies. The uninvolved parents won't even be in the room when the age question comes up.
And there is also the group of parents that at the moment have decided no device is safe enough to be given to a child or adolescent.
They are a good litmus test of the bill; would they be happy to provide devices if there was age verification built in?
I am in this group and I wouldn't.
well, actual verification isn't even on the table in Illinois so that's quite a hypothetical.
But anyway, since you'll always retain the right to not give a device (which, btw I cheer and support that decision with or without the age declaration law existing) why does your lack of trusting devices with kids have to do with anything? This scheme can exist and not affect you at all, and will benefit the many "moderate" parents who do give carefully-supervised devices, and don't carelessly just throw brand-new devices at the kids.
If I'm that parent who did decide to start giving access because this bill came to be, I'd still be limiting "the internet" to a small allow-list of sites whose compliance, and exact manner of compliance, I was satisfied with.
Or are you waiting for some science-fiction proposal that will be completely perfect, which you know will never happen.
> The uninvolved parents won't even be in the room when the age question comes up.
We agree that idiot parents (and therefore their kids) can't be helped. So let's just not even consider them in deciding what to do.
Having to take an action is the opposite of no impact to me.
The problem is caused by social media companies designing their products to be addictive. This law puts a lot of requirements on parties other than the social media companies.
If you want to sell alcohol, it is your responsibility to check the age of the person consuming the alcohol. If you want to sell tobacco, it is your responsibility to check the age of the person consuming the tobacco. But if you want to push addictive social media feeds, it is apparently now the job of device manufacturers, operating system developers, and parents to do the verification work for you.
Don't you think it's a little odd that Meta is spending money pushing these bills that shift responsibility onto other parties?
>Or are you waiting for some science-fiction proposal that will be completely perfect, which you know will never happen.
Yes, I'm waiting for a sci-fi proposal like "companies should be responsible for their actions and shouldn't require other companies to do their work for them".
This isn’t for the protection of kids. It’s for the protection of profits by surveillance capitalism.