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Comment by inigyou | Hacker News Reader

Half the laws we're complaining about (e.g. California, Illinois) are literally just regulating parental controls, and I can no longer give the benefit of the doubt to people who act as if this is the same as forcing internet users to scan their ID. People who conflate these two things are paid lobbyists of Meta to make sure Meta won't have to be safe for children even when the parental controls checkbox is turned on.

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Regulating parental controls by making you scan an ID to use a computer is even worse than doing it to access a website. I understand that today's laws are not doing that, but do you genuinely, truly believe in your heart of hearts that once every OS has mandatory age fields, that nobody is going to start proposing legislation to attempt to enforce its validity by ID verification + hardware attestation? You're not willing to give the benefit of doubt to people with concerns about this, but you are willing to give the benefit of doubt to the surveillance states that have been pushing us down a slippery slope for 25+ years, sliding further and further down every single year without reprieve?

Of course that is not parental controls. That's 3rd party controls. Parental controls means you create a child account for children and when a site is detected as being adult ideally using RTA headers [1] then a password prompt asks for the parents approval. That is parental controls.

[1] - https://nochan.net/b/Internet-Crap/20230829-Think-Of-The-Chi...

Indeed, that's a reasonable approach. Just to clarify that we're agreeing, the comment I was replying to was strongly defending California and Illinois' laws that require the OS record an age field for the primary user of the device, which while currently self-declared is at least an obvious path for future, more invasive legislation.

The problem with a self declared approach is that puts a signalling mechanism in place. Once in place the laws can easily scope creep year over year to add more information or require putting in ID information or some future nation-wide digital ID and Trump coin digital wallet which could easily be the plan all along. All they need is the API that will interface with websites using some agreed upon standard and then it can easily be extended line by line. Give them an inch, they will take a mile.

With proper parental controls there is no signalling.

They can do that with or without an existing law.

Without signaling nothing would happen. There's always signaling.

Ensure system does not have this information:

    loginctl show-user $USER 2>/dev/null
    userdbctl user $USER --json=pretty 2>/dev/null | grep -i birth

Confirm field is not set

    homectl inspect $USER | grep -i birth

If it is set, unset it

    sudo homectl update $USER --birthday=""

Tell your favorite AI what OS, kernel version (matters if using a locked down kernel) and browser is being used. Ask for a systemd service that uses bubblewrap to prevent access to systemd, set whatever other limits like memory and CPU usage.

If in the future the browser gets passive / aggressive updates if they mimic Microsoft and refuses to run if there is no age set or if they can not call systemd commands or libraries then script a random age or age range on each login so that it is not used for tracking. pseudo super-cookie

What law anywhere in the US is specifically forcing the physical scanning of an ID to use a computer?

> I understand that today's laws are not doing that,

Come on. Like 80% of my entire post was devoted to pointing out a gradual erosion of rights over time, and I explicitly stated that it's not the case today.

Sorry, I didn't read that far. I do think this is a classic slippery slope though.

But don't underestimate human adaptability. Slippery slope arguments assume that once a technology introduces a specific risk, society lacks the agency to create counter-measures, new norms, or alternative uses for that technology.

I haven't found that to be the case throughout most of history.

You're doing the thing. The half I'm talking about, they don't make you scan your ID to use a computer. Actually I don't think even the worst ones make you do that.

You're doing the slippery slope fallacy by saying "well if there are not terrible laws now that just means there will be terrible laws later." A law against murder doesn't mean there will later be a law against farting.

It's not a fallacy to point out the slope is slippery when you are actually, actively sliding down the slope.

And that you're defending dumping a bucket of lubricant on the slope with the pinky promise that it's just for aesthetics, you just like the look of a slippery slope, there's no way we'll ever slide down your lubed slope that we are already sliding down.

There's a slope from making murder illegal to making farting illegal. We are already some distance down that slope because murder and burglary are illegal. But is the slope slippery?

But the other half are. UK, Brazil, Texas, Virginia.

I seem to recall the bad part of the UK OSA was the requirement to write a plan about how you'd protect minors and submit it to the government, not anything to do with ID verification directly (although that's one way to design such a plan)?

> Half the laws

If you forgive the slight exaggeration in my use of "always", then I am half right - in fully half the cases, deanonymization is the first thing they try.

But let's look at those "just regulating parental controls" laws, the California one [1]. What does it do? Does it give parents/the owner the tools needed to limit child access? Does it require vendors to include such tools? No, neither of those. It just establishes how to collect (but not verify) and send age data, so someone else can act on it.

It does nothing to empower parents, but does lay the groundwork to grow an age control ecosystem that can later have verification easily added - all the apps and websites will already support it. Not all "regulation" is the same.

> People who conflate these two things are paid lobbyists of Meta

Meta is the most privacy-hostile company there is, despite fierce competition for that title, and nearly all their services are behind a login-wall, even read-only access, and they don't let you make an account without a phone number [2,3,4]. I avoid them like the plague, and they already go above and beyond what you would want of them.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_Digital_Age_Assuran...

[2] https://www.local3news.com/local-news/what-the-tech/what-the...

[3] Facebook now treats a phone number like a near-requirement - https://quackr.io/blog/facebook-account-without-phone-number

[4] https://www.reddit.com/r/privacy/comments/tyrs6c/so_i_had_to...

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