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Comment by pmontra | Hacker News Reader

Or realize that there is no way to know who is using a device without looking at the device holders for all the time they use the device. It's like ordering alcoholics or cigarettes: the seller looks at you see the white hairs (OK) or see a 16yo face (documents please.) A device registered to an adult can be used by a child. I know, it's a failure of parental control, but how many teenagers managed to get adult magazines in the last 100 years? They will get adult devices too. So there is no way to create a 100% effective system. Kids and teenagers will find workarounds, everybody else will live a worse life.

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1990s: ~%36 of all teens smoked

2020s: >%2 of all teens smoke

Kinda suggests that putting limitations in place actually produces results. Crazy innit?

Cigarettes have been age restricted for around 100 years. Not related to your 1990 to 2020 time period at all.

If you weren't aware, smoking became uncool a long time ago. Teens who consume tobacco use vapes or Zyn now.

Smoking is becoming cool again because lets face it, vaping makes you look like a bit of a nonce. Nicotine pouches are good too, but I think it's mostly men who use them.

But yeah, smoking is on the rise. I'm a youngish person and whenever I go out and meet others, it's quite rare for someone to turn down a cig.

That doesn't mean it was enforced.

Was it? Are you just saying throwing manure, or do you think that children were regularly buying cigarettes in stores until just a decade ago?

Do you think that pornographers and social networks are desperate for child users, and that they provide a significant amount of income? Do you think that rooting everyone's computer so the sites can comply by flipping a switch and never have to hear about this again will bother them in the slightest, except for pornographers being afraid that adults afraid to lose their anonymity will stop visiting?

Social media has been trying to deanonymize users since Facebook's real name policy and G+. Deanonymized users are worth more. They love this idea, and don't give a shit about losing 17 year olds. It's proof that governments will do anything, even reinterpret their constitutions, in order to preserve the right of online multinationals to algorithmically manipulate adults for money.

Yes. Child porn was commercially sold in Europe and Japan until the late 2000s. There is no line that people won't cross for money.

I think that by "Child users" parent meant children buying porn or selling porn to children. It probably happened but I think that it was much less common than children getting a porn magazine from an older brother that got it from an older friend and again and again until a legit sale to some adult.

It also means we don't need identity verification. Anonymous scratch-off cards sold in stores to adults, just like cigarettes, can be used to verify age. Or alternatively, device-only attestation. There's no reason to verify age upon every use of the product; only when it's sold.

Nah, we definitely need identity and age verification, if for no other reason than it strips tech companies and data brokers of plausible deniability. They already know who you are and by extension your age, this fight is very much about tech companies avoiding consequences.

> we definitely need identity and age verification...it strips tech companies and data brokers of plausible deniability

> this fight is very much about tech companies avoiding consequences.

If I follow your logic, you seem to be saying: tech companies could easily not target kids if they wanted to, but they don't. That may be true, but I don't see why violating everyone's privacy is the only way to prove it.

As Stated Elsewhere you have to have a thing before it can be violated. Given the comprehensive scope of digital surveillance performed by tech companies, you can't claim to have privacy online. And before you "but but the government" they can already subpoena your entire digital existence at will, assuming Palantir or some data broker hasn't already sold it to them. So yeah, may as well make life more difficult for the companies that make all of this possible, that would at least present a modest improvement on the status quo.

Absolutely we do not. You just ASSUME anyone needs that other than the big mega-corporations dreaming up of identifying everyone at all times, without a warrant.

> Kinda suggests that putting limitations in place actually produces results.

Are you sure this doesn't have more to do with social stigma?

They all use Zyn now.

and vapes

This logic is sus. Just because we cannot have a oerfect system doesn't mean we shouldn't have it at all. Like alcohol age limitations, they can be worked around and wont ever be 100 percent perfect but I see regularly teens bouncing off the register at my local store.

So the metric should be case by case for each proposed solution. Most of things proposed are no good, but that doesn't mean there is not a sensible solution out there to limit net for teens.

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