Mastodawn

RE: https://mastodon.social/@sarahjamielewis/116161459299855467

Something I want to make clear:

The "age verification" bit of the CA/CO laws are not the bit I care about i.e. a law that requires an operating systems to implement some kind of parental control feature is...whatever.

The bits I care about are the obligations on developers to call APIs and then that invocation being taken as evidence of knowledge.

Specifically, I think a -legal- requirement to:

- make any kind of call is an attack on speech
- know a users age (bracket) is a privacy violation

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David Chisnall (*Now with 50% more sarcasm!*)Mar 5

@sarahjamielewis

My reading of the law was that this is bad wording and was not the intent. The rest of it reads is if it means to say that if age verification is required for other legal purposes then you must use this 2-bit signal unless you already have some other information that you know is more accurate.

It should be easy to fix, it’s a shame they went through a load of revisions without fixing it (I didn’t look at the text of the old drafts, the error may have been introduced in editing).

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Sarah Jamie Lewis Mar 5

@david_chisnall

I don't think the addition of such a prerequisite requirement meaningfully changes the issues with mandating an API call (it might however weaken the implied knowledge objection)

Requiring operating systems to provide a way to block applications based on age profiles would more than suffice, and not create the speech/privacy issues that the legislation currently does.

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David Chisnall (*Now with 50% more sarcasm!*)Mar 5

@sarahjamielewis That assumes that blocking an app is the desired thing, rather than age-gating some of the content (for example, consider a video streaming client that has age restrictions. These are currently implemented in a very ad-hoc way).

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Sarah Jamie Lewis

@david_chisnall

Sure, but blocking achieves the goal of creating market conditions such that applications are encouraged to support different age profiles / content preferences without mandating an API call or obligate developers into implied knowledge.