Glyph2d ago
while I have a level of sympathy for the california/colorado style of age-verification law, and I think many reactions against it are overheated, at the end of the day we still have to oppose stuff like this because society's ideas of what ought to be age-gated are just wrong on the merits. the goal is to ban access to perfectly normal healthy things like queer communities and still allow kids access to fucked-up dangerous adults-only stuff like catholicism and the president of the united states
Show threadGlyph2d ago
like I have a young child and nothing would please me more than to put their birthday into the OS and then let them go nuts on the internet doing whatever they want, but my values (no child should be allowed to access a chatbot under any circumstances, roblox should be a crime, but children should be allowed to read wikipedia pages about human anatomy if they want) are just not reflected in our social fabric because all age-related internet stuff is just a series of very frustrating moral panics
Show threadaeva2d ago
@glyph it's amazing to me that the discourse about age attestation assumes that nobody is going to use that information in a predatory way.
Show threadGlyph2d ago
@aeva I am such a fan of tech companies getting told that socially important aspects of their platform designs are simply not their call, but I would really like the people telling them that not to be the most pitiable simpletons on earth
Show threadbrennen2d ago
@glyph @aeva having just glanced at the CO legislation and having noticed that it has bipartisan sponsors, i think i'm going to skip right over "profoundly stupid" in my assessment of the people trying to enact this stuff and go directly to "actively malicious".
Show threadGlyph2d ago
@brennen @aeva unfortunately this might still be the "good ending" of age gating legislation, because right now the choice we seem to be facing is either CA style (you tell the OS, only the OS knows, the OS only discloses age ranges) or UK style (you tell every online service provider individually, they all keep high-resolution depth-mapped scans of your face, your passport, and your fingerprints on file forever)
Show threadbrennen2d ago
@glyph @aeva i need to do some digging here into what's actually proposed, but isn't the end game here pretty much "the OS knows whether the state has given you permission"?
Show threadGlyph

@brennen @aeva No. The CA/CO law is basically this:

On an OS with an app store, the OS must be able to tell apps from that store what age-range the user says they're in. During setup of the user account, the OS has to ask the user "what is your birthday?" and then the OS stores that somewhere.

Mar 19 at 8:01pmWeb
Show threadGlyph2d ago
@brennen @aeva Calling this an age "verification" law is a little misleading, because the only "verification" taking place is that app "verifying" an age range with the OS. The user themselves does not have to "verify" anything; there's actually some language in the bill ("Send only the minimum amount of information necessary to comply with this title") forbidding gratuitous surveillance.
Show threadGlyph2d ago
@brennen @aeva I also guess maybe it's a little unfair just blaming this on the UK, Texas and Utah also have the bad version of this with "verification" services hoovering up user data.
Show threadbrennen2d ago
@glyph @aeva thanks for clarification! like i said, i have some reading to do.
Show threadGlyph2d ago
@brennen @aeva if you want to get it straight from the source: https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billTextClient.xhtml?bill_id=202520260AB1043
Bill Text - AB-1043 Age verification signals: software applications and online services.

AB 1043 Age verification signals: software applications and online services.