Just me, or age verification at the OS level is like software companies making a coup to offload themselves of this burden ?

#ageverification #linux

@petitcoeur age verification by itself is not a problem... Parental control is meant to protect children from inappropriate content.

Removing this responsibility from parents and requesting OSes to share private data (age, or worse proof of real id) with platforms or authorities is.

1st is child caring 2nd is centralized control of everyone.

@petitcoeur let me detail the problem.
With Firefox you can go on your children website, open a safe website dedicated to children entertainment... or browse pr0n or even worse...
Just storing the user age then won't be enough to satisfy those data gluttons... it will then be required that user age is shared with local apps and that local apps apps share it with online services... which in turn will either share it willingly with authorites or UNwillingly with pirats.

@petitcoeur by the way they will share it with authorities even if it's not legal. We've seen that case recently and it will get worse with time.

by the way 2, those hiding behind "age ranges" thinking that it will protect nicely children's real ages, they think out of reality.
Let's take an example: tiktok, that a child uses every day from a specific terminal.
Every day they will get [10-12], till the range changes and gives [12-14] => that day tiktok will know precisely child's birth date.

@petitcoeur a better approach would be for remote services (tiktok, x.com, instagram, pr0nf*ck, whatever...) to tag content including legal perimeter of restictions.
for example : this x.com post shall not be viewed by :
- child < 17 in brasil,
- child <16 in california
- child < 14 in colorado
=> then the app (let's say #firefox) provides the content restriction to the underlying OS who will just answer yes or no -> the app can then obfuscate the content if the answer was no.
@petitcoeur and it can also cache the question and then answer for performances during the session (and in call case less than a day).
This way the remote service does not know the age range of the person browsing the page and not even if the content has been viewed or not.
and even the app does not know the age range of the user...
A malicious app installed could bruteforce the system with a loop but the system can detect that and kill the app (and it could also prevent it from running again).
@petitcoeur that would be a far more protective approach than for example what #systemd guys are heading to...
Of course that would need a patch to #firefox, #chrome, #webkit to be able to spot protected areas and age constraints... but that would definitely be a better way for our children and our privacy.
poke @mmstick @system76
@maat sometime it seems like governments taking these kind of decisions do so without creating an experts group knowing all these issues. Don't know if it's too late for counter proposals.
@petitcoeur governments and those who vote laws (they are not the same) are in a maelstrom of lobbying + opinions polls + probably a lot of exotic mind pollution.
They try to create groups of experts... but the risk is that those experts are taken from lists given to them by lobbyists or other influence groups...