Lee DunaOnline age-verification tools spread across U.S. for child safety, but adults are being surveilled
KraidenI’m going to copy and paste a comment I made elsewhere:
The problem with age verification is VERY much in the implementation. It IS possible to do age verification without having to identify yourself to Meta/PornHub/Whoever. It IS possible to maintain privacy, AND restrict things like porn and social media to those who are of age. Look at how the Estonian system works, it’s brilliant. The problem isn’t age verification, it’s the blatant data grab that is currently trying to destroy your online anonymity…
lmmarsanoStill unnecessary & less effective than less invasive alternatives that already exist & the government could promote. To quote another comment
Governments have commissioned enough studies to know that education, training, and parental controls filtering content at the receiving end are more effective & less infringing of civil rights than laws imposing restrictions & penalties on website operators to comply with online age verification. Laws could instead allocate resources to promote the former in a major way, setup independent evaluations reporting the effectiveness of child protection technologies to the public, promote standards & the development of better standards in the industry. Laws of the latter kind simply aren’t needed & also suffer technical defects.
The most fatal technical defect is they lack enforceability on websites outside their jurisdiction. They’re limited to HTTP (or successor). They practically rule out dynamic content (chat, fora) for minors unless that content is dynamically prescreened. Parental control filters lack all these defects, and they don’t adversely impact privacy, fundamental rights, and law enforcement.
Governments know better & choose worse, because it’s not about promoting the public good, it’s about imposing control.
Why is checking age at os-level that bad? - Internet burnout
Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for privacy. But between setting up the birthdate when creating my children’s local account on their computers, and having to send a copy of their ID to every platform under the sun, I’d easily chose the former. I’d even agree to a simple protocol (HTTP X-Over-18 / X-Over-21 headers?) to that.
As I’ve said elsewhere, yes in a perfect world it would be on the parents to enforce this, but that doesn’t mean we should do nothing on the social media side. It’s also the parents responsibility to prevent underage drinking and smoking, yet we still restrict those at the point of sale.
I’m for age restrictions on social media, and yes there are arguments against it, but I’m not really interested in having that conversation.
less invasive alternatives
This is exactly what I take issue with. It’s a false dilemma. The assertion that you can’t have age verification without the invasion of privacy and destroying online anonymity in the process IS FALSE. You CAN have both. THIS is the grift in my opinion.