I am not a fan of the rise of mandatory age verification in apps and websites.

But if that’s the direction we’re going to go in then it makes the most sense for this to be supported at the operating system level than every random website or app collecting your government ID.

https://www.ft.com/content/c36dc645-8cd4-4e69-a9ce-3a0ac4071264?syn-25a6b1a6=1

Apple rolls out UK age checks for iPhone users

Move follows pressure from government on smartphone makers to do more to protect children online

Financial Times

@carnage4life
But then how do the websites trust that the operating system did it "properly"?

It's the age old problem that the client is inherently untrustworthy from the point of view of the server. Anything could be running there, including a version of Linux that just lets any user say "I'm 36" without checking anything.

I mean, I say problem. It's very much their problem more than ours.

@petealexharris @carnage4life I'm going to say (perhaps hope) that the goal of the California bill is not ironclad compliance. Instead it is about satisfying a social concern, while minimizing overhead and protecting privacy.

As far as I'm concerned, if a parent can just say a kid is 16, that's good enough. It would be a much worse world if a parent actually had to prove it.

And if a kid admins his own system, that's on him too.

@buckfiftyseven @carnage4life
I'm all in favour of things that encourage kids to learn technical circumvention measures, so they'll know how when they really need them in a survival situation. Which shouldn't be looming on the horizon but definitely is.
@petealexharris @carnage4life You just need to create a user on your OS saying you are 100 years old, such a big skills hacking, I'm sure kids wanting to play games just needs to change that and I hope they don't try to download apps that promisses a bypass of this age verification, it just makes it worse, parents needs to activate the parental control on their kids devices which is a thing that already exist and block their games or websites, again, it already exist and it's just the parents choice to not activate it. This OS API is the most absurd thing I ever saw in my life.