There is almost literally documented examples of Facebook executives twirling their mustaches wondering how they can get kids more addicted. This isn't a few bands with swear words, and in fact, I think that the damage these social media companies are doing is in fact, reducing the independence teens and kids that have that were the fears parents originally had.

I dunno, are you uncertain about your case at all or just like. I just like, can't help but start with fuck these companies. All other arguments are downstream of that. Better the nanny state than Nanny Zuck.

It is plausible that the same applies to the digital realm.

May the best legal person win!

It's obviously not a 1/1 comparison here, because providing ID to access the internet is not analogous to providing ID to purchase a pack of Cowboy Killers but we can extrapolate to a certain extent.

(inb4 DAE REGULATING FOR-PROFIT CORPORATIONS == NANNY STATE?!?!?!?!?)

But I didn't have emotionally mature parents, and I'm sure so many children growing up now don't either. They're going to read arguments like these and say they're already doing enough. Maybe they truly believe they are, even if they're mistaken. Or maybe they won't read arguments like these at all. Parenting methods are diverse but smartphones are ubiquitous.

So yes, I agree that parents need to be held accountable, but I'm torn on if the legal avenue is feasible compared to the cultural one. Children also need more social support if they can't rely on their parents like in my case, or tech is going to eat them alive. Social solutions/public works are kind of boring compared to technology solutions, but society has been around longer than smartphones.

The positives and negatives of Internet usage are more extreme than broadcast media but less than alcohol/guns. The majority of people lack the skills to properly censor Internet without hovering over the child's shoulder full-time as you would with a gun. Best you can do is keep their PC near you, but it's not enough.

We agree that a creepy surveillance nanny state is not the solution, but training parents to do the censorship seems unattainable. As we do for guns/alcohol/cigarettes, mass education about the dangers is a good baseline.

EDIT: And some might disagree about never having access to alcohol!

The mistake in this reasoning is assuming that they are actually interested in protecting the children.

Politicians' whole basis for nearly every campaign is "you're helpless, let us fix it for you."

For the vast majority of problems plaguing society, the answer isn't government, it's for people changing their behavior. Same goes for parenting.

But unfortunately, "you're an adult, figure it out" isn't the greatest campaign slogan (if you want to win).

A counterargument to your point that children are clever - I was also one once.

We live in a shared world with shared responsibilities. If you are working on a product, or ever did work on a product, that made the internet worse rather than better, you have a shared responsibility to right that wrong. And parents do have to protect their kids, but they can't do it alone with how systematically children are targeted today by predatory tech companies.

The only real solution is to keep children off of the internet and any internet connected device until they are older. The problem there is that everything is done on-line now and it is practically impossible to avoid it without penalizing your child.

If social media and its astroturfers want to avoid outright age bans, they need to stop actively exploiting children and accept other forms of regulation, and it needs to come with teeth.

So anyone can walk into a shop and purchase these things unrestricted? It's not the responsibility of the seller too?

There is most definitely a cult that is obsessed with the book of revelation and seeing Biblical prophecy fulfilled, and if that isn't readily obvious to folks at this juncture in time, I'm not sure what it will take. I guess they'll have to roll out the mark of the beast before people will be willing to admit it.

The government took over most parenting functions, one at a time, until the actual parent does or is capable of doing very little parenting at all. If the government doesn't like the fact that it has become the parent of these children, perhaps it shouldn't have undermined the actual parents these last 80 years. At the very least, it should refrain from usurping ever more of the parental role (not that there is much left to take).

You yourself seem to be insulated from this phenomena, maybe you're unaware that it is occurring. Maybe it wouldn't change your opinions even if you were aware.

>If you want to actually protect children

What if I don't want to protect children (other than my own) at all? Why would you want to be these children's parents (you suggest you or at least others want to "protect" them), which strongly implies that you will act in your capacity as government, but then get all grumpy that other people are wanting to protect children by acting in their capacity of government?

Because parents don’t abuse massive surveillance tools.

Given that most abuse happens in the family and by parents maybe it’s a bad idea to give them so much power

The way to keep kids from eating (yummy) lead-based paint chips was not holding parents accountable to what their kids ate, but banning lead-based paint.

Why this utter drivel is the top comment is beyond me, unbelievable.

We've never properly acted upon reports of predators grooming children by investigating them, charging them, holding trials, and handing down sentences on any sort of large scale. There's a patchwork of LEOs that have to handle things and they have to do it right. Once the packets are sent over state lines, we have to involve the feds, and that's another layer.

Previously, I would have said it's up to platforms like Discord to organize internal resources to make sure that the proper authorities received reports, because it felt like there were instances of people being reported and nothing happening on the platform's side. Now, given recent developments, I'm not sure we can count upon authorities to actually do the job.

There is a local dive bar down the street. I haven't expressly told my kids that entering and ordering an alcoholic drink is forbidden. In fact, that place has a hamburger stand out front on weekends and I wouldn't discourage my kids from trying it out if they were out exploring. I still expect that the bartender would check their ID before pulling a pint for them.

It takes a village to raise a child. There are no panopticons for sale the next isle over from car seats. We are doing our best with very limited tooling from the client to across the network (of which the tremendously incompetent schools make a mockery with an endless parade of new services and cross dependencies). It will take a whole of society effort to lower risks.

When you say “We‘ll try everything” that is simply not true, in particular what we do not try is strict consumer protection laws which prohibits targeting children. Europe used to have such laws in the 1980s and the 1990s, but by the mid-1990s authorities had all but stopped enforcing them.

We have tried consumer protection, and we know it works, but we are not trying it now. And I think there is exactly one reason for that, the tech lobby has an outsized influence on western legislators and regulators, and the tech industry does not want to be regulated.

You've missed the point. No legislator or politician cares about what the parents are doing.

What they care about is gaining greater control of people's data to then coerce them endlessly (with the assitance of technology) into acting as they would liike. To do that, they need all that info.

"The children" is the sugar on the pill of de-anonymised internet.

With LLMs and paid actors wreaking havoc on social media I do think that social media needs pivot towards allowing only human users on it. I wrote about this here: https://blog.picheta.me/post/the-future-of-social-media-is-h...

Switzerland is working on a system that does the former, but if Government really wants to identify users, they can still ask the company to provide the age verification tokens they collected, since the Government hosts a centralized database that associates people with their issued tokens.

Someone brought up the need for device attestation for trust purposes (to avoid token smuggling for example). That would surely defeat the purpose (and make things much much worse for freedom overall). If you have a solution that doesn't require device attestation, how does that solve the smuggling issue (are tokens time-gated, is there a limit to token generation, other things)?

It's my job as a parent (and I have several kids...) to monitor the things they consume and talk with them about it.

I don't want some blanket ban on content unless it's "age appropriate", because I don't approve that content being banned. (honestly - the idea of "age appropriate" is insulting in the first place)

Fuck man, I can even legally give my kids alcohol - I don't see why it's appropriate to enforce what content I allow them to see.

And I have absolutely all of the same tools you just discussed today. I can lock devices down just fine.

Age verification is a scam to increase corporate/governmental control. Period.

More simply: If ID checks are fully anonymous (as many here propose when the topic comes up) then every kid will just have their friends’ older sibling ID verify their account one afternoon. Or they’ll steal their parents’ ID when they’re not looking.

Discussions about kids and technology on HN are very weird to me these days because so many commenters have seemingly forgotten what it’s like to be a kid with technology. Before this current wave of ID check discussions it was common to proudly share stories of evading content controls or restrictions as a kid. Yet once the ID check topic comes up we’re supposed to imagine kids will just give up and go with the law? Yeah right.

My kid logs out of this account so he can watch restricted content. I wonder - what is PG rating for logged out experience?

You mean this culture shift is needed for the masses but I don't think that's the case. In my widest social circle I am not aware of anyone giving alcohol to young kids (yes by the time they are 16ish yes but even that's rare). Most guardians would willingly do similar with locked devices.

The real problem is that the governments/companies won't get to spy on you if locked devices are given to children only. They want to spy on us all. That's the missing cultural shift.

Any parent can be reckless and give their children all kinds of things - poison, weapons, pornographic magazines ... at some point the device has enough protective features and it is the parents responsibility.

I think either is better than the staus quo. In the first case the parent is waiving away the protections, and in the second the kid is.

Even if a kid buys alcohol, I think it's healthier that they do it by breaking rules and faking ids and knowing that they are doing something wrong, than just doing it and having no way to know it's wrong (except a popup that we have been trained by UX to close without reading (fuck cookie legislation))

Of course no personal details should be provided to the site that requests age confirmation. Just "barer of this token" is an adult.

SOME parents give their children access to their ID. That is NOT the same as ALL parents, and therefore is not a reason not to give those parents a helping hand.

Even just informing children that they're entering an adult space has some value, and if they then have to go ask their parents to borrow their wallet, that's good enough for me.

Ridiculous take.

Stronger punishment creates more of an incentive to age verify. Which is basically why it's happening now.

Gee, I wonder if the executives who are suspected of doing such things haven't spent the last 100 years building the infrastructure necessary to avoid charges, let alone jail time? Large corporate legal departments, wink-wink-nudge-nudge command and control hierarchies where nothing incriminating is ever put into writing, voluminous intra-office communications that bury even the circumstantial evidence so deeply no jury could understand it even if the plaintiffs/state could uncover it, etc.

Anyone over the age of 12 that thinks corporate entities can be made to be accountable in a meaningful way is more than naive. They are cognitively defective. Or is it that you realize they can't be held accountable but you'd rather maintain the status quo than contemplate a country which abolished them and enforced that all business was the conducted by sole proprietorships and (small-n) partnerships?

It would allow someone with an mDL on their device to present only their age instead of other identifying information.

The only reasonable way to deal with children on the Internet is to treat Internet access like access to alcohol/drugs. There is no need for children to access the Internet full stop.

Internet is a network in which everything can connect to everything, and every connected machine can run clients, servers, p2p nodes and what not. Controlling every possible endpoint your child might connect to is not feasible. Shutting the entire network down because "won't somebody please think of the children" is not acceptable.

And, don't let them trick you. This is the endgoal. An unprecedented level of control over the flow of information.

and there is nothing I or the few (in terms of power) well-meaning government and corporate actors can do to change that.

It doesn't have to be perfect and there will of course be easy workarounds to hid the warnings for people that want. The goal is to improve the situation though, not solve it perfectly. Like putting information about the dangers of smoking on packages of smokes; it doesn't stop people from smoking but it does make the danger very easy to learn.

Better than muddying the waters trying to make it less addictive but then letting them on there when their brains aren't ready.

In china there are places to scan you device and get coupons. usually at elevators in residential buildings so they can track also if you're arriving or leaving easily.

In the US every store tracks and report to ad networks your Bluetooth ids. and we know what happens to ad networks.

US now requires cars to report data, which was optional before (e.g. onstar) and china joined on this since the ev boom.

the public id space is booming.

Children shouldn't be associating with other children, except in small groups. Even the typical classroom count is far too large. They become the nastiest, most horrible versions of themselves when they congregate. A good 90% of the pathology of public schools can be blamed on the fact that, by definition, public schools require large numbers of children to congregate.

They are bothered that you were taught such things and have made sure that your children will never be exposed to such information.

Another example where this plays a role are voter registration and ID requirements for voting in the US. It is entirely bizarre to me how these discussions just accept it as a law of nature that it's expensive and a lot of effort to get an ID. This is something that could be changed.

(This is a genuine question) please could you describe the underlying problem that age verification is attempting to solve?

There are options that don't involve any ID uploads whatsoever.

You could buy 19 gallons of milk for that money (80 liters).

If that happened in the US, Republicans would then:

1. Insist that non-white children carry ID at all times

2. Operationalize DHS and ICE to deport non-white children to foreign concentration camps.

like most proposed solutions, this just seems overcomplicated. we don't need "accessible cryptographic infrastructure for human identity". society has had age-restricted products forever. just piggy-back on that infrastructure.

1) government makes a database of valid "over 18" unique identifiers (UUIDs)

2) government provides tokens with a unique identifier on it to various stores that already sell age-restricted products (e.g. gas stations, liquor stores)

3) people buy a token from the store, only having to show their ID to the store clerk that they already show their ID to for smokes (no peter thiel required)

4) website accepts the token and queries the government database and sees "yep, over 18"

easy. all the laws are in place already. all the infrastructure is in place. no need for fancy zero-knowledge proofs or on-device whatevers.

Your crypto nerd dream is vulnerable to the fact that someone under 18 can just ask someone over 18 to make an account for them. All age verification is broken in this way.

There is a similar problem for people using apps like Ubereats to work illegally by buying an account from someone else. However much verification you put in, you don't know who is pressing the buttons on the screen unless you make the process very invasive.

They don't care whether you are 14 or not. They want your biometrics and identification. "Think of the children" is just a pretense.

A service provider of adult content now cannot serve a child, regardless of the involvement or lack thereof of a parent.

Governments (and a few companies) really want this.

- Governments benefit from easier monitoring and enforcement.

- The advertising industry prefers verified identities for better targeting.

- Social media companies gain more reliable data and engagement.

- Online shopping companies can reduce fraud and increase tracking.

- Many SaaS companies would also welcome stronger identity verification.

In short, anonymity is not very profitable, and governments often favor identification because it increases oversight and control.

Of course, this leads to political debate. Some point out that voting often does not require ID, while accessing online services does. The usual argument is that voting is a constitutional right. However, one could argue that access to the internet has become a fundamental part of modern life as well. It may not be explicitly written into the Constitution, but in practice it functions as an essential right in today’s society.

Realizing that much of the internet is totally toxic to children now and should have a means of keeping them out is distinct from agreeing to upload ID to everything.

A better implementation would be to have a device/login level parental control setting that passed age restriction signals via browsers and App Stores. This is both a simpler design and privacy friendly.

That being said, this is a 1 bit information, adult in current legislation yes/no.

From what I’ve seen, most of the pro-ID commenters are coming from positions where they assume ID checks will only apply to other people, not them. They want services they don’t use like TikTok and Facebook to become strict, but they have their own definitions of social media that exclude platforms they use like Discord and Hacker News. When the ID checks arrive and impact them they’re outraged.

Regulation for thee, not for me.

So we should probably get ahead of this debate and push for good ways to do part-of-identity-checks. Because I don't see any good way to avoid them.

We could potentially do ID checks that only show exactly what the receiver needs to know and nothing else.

I think a lot of the younger generation supports it, actually. They didn't really grow up with a culture of internet anonymity and some degree of privacy.

Actually, yes, it seems to have shifted quite a bit. As far as I can tell, it seems correlated with the amount of mis/disinformation on the web, and acceptance of more fringe views, that seems to make one group more vocal about wanting to ensure only "real people" share what they think on the internet, and a sub-section of that group wanting to enforce this "real name" policy too.

It in itself used to be fringe, but really been catching on in mainstream circles, where people tend to ask themselves "But I don't have anything to hide, and I already use my real name, why cannot everyone do so too?"

The average tech literate person keep seeing their data breached over and over again. Not because THEY did anything wrong, but because these Corpos can't help themselves. No matter how well the tech literate person secures their privacy it has become clear that some Corpo will eventually release everything in an "accident" that causes their efforts to become meaningless.

After a while it's only human for fatigue to build up. You can't stop your information from getting out there. And once it's out there it's out there forever.

Meanwhile every Corpo out there in tech is deliberately creating ways to track you and extract your personal information. Taking steps to secure your information ironically just makes you stand out more and narrows the pool you're in to make it easier to find you and your information. And again you're always just one "bug" from having it all be for nothing.

I still take some steps to secure my privacy, I'm not out there shouting my social security information or real name. But that's habit. I no longer believe that privacy exists.

To the extent we ever had it in the past was simply the insurmountable restrictions on tracking and pooling the information into some kind of organization and easy lookup. Now that it is easier and easier to build profiles on mass numbers of people and to organize those and rank them the illusion is gone. Privacy is dead. Murdered.

And people are tired of pretending otherwise.

Do you think strip clubs and bars should stop IDing people at the door? I don't. Why should porn sites be any different?

It's never fucking safety, or protecting children, or preventing fraud, or preventing terrorism, or preventing drugs or money laundering or gang activities. It's always, 100% of the time, inevitably, without exception, a tool used by petty bureaucrats and power hungry politicians to exert power and control over the citizens they are supposed to represent.

They might use it on a couple of token examples for propaganda purposes, but if you look throughout the world where laws like this are implemented, authoritarian countries and western "democracies" alike, these laws are used to control locals. It's almost refreshingly straightforward and honest when a country just does the authoritarian things, instead of doing all the weaselly mental gymnastics to justify their power grabs.

People who support this are ignorant or ideologically aligned with authoritarianism. There's no middle ground; anonymity and privacy are liberty and freedom. If you can't have the former you won't have the latter.

HN comments sentiment seems to shift over the age of the thread and time of day.

My suspicion is that the initial comments are from people in the immediate social circle of the poster. They share IRC or Slack or Discord or some other community which is likely to be engaged and have already formed strong opinions. Then if the story gains traction and reaches the front page a more diverse and thoughtful group weighs in. Finally the story moves to EU or US and gets a whole new fresh take.

I’m not surprised that people who support something are the ones most tuned in to the discussion because for anyone opposed they also have their own unrelated thing they care about. So the supporters will be first since they’re the originators.

HN has largely shifted away from tech literacy and towards business literacy in recent years.

Needless to say that an internet where every user's real identity is easily verifiable at all times is very beneficial for most businesses, so it's natural to see that stance here.

These are not the same people from 30 years ago. The new generation has come to love big brother. All it took to sell their soul was karma points.

I dont think they want to figure it out. They think the internet should be stagnant unchanging and eternal as it currently exists because it makes the most money. If you disagree you're either a normie, bot, or need to parent harder or something. There is nothing you can do don't dare try to change it.

Cui bono?

The short version is that voters want government to bring tech to heel.

From what I see, people are tired of tech, social media, and enshittified apps. AI hype, talk of the singularity, and fears about job loss have pushed things well past grim.

Recent social media bans indicate how far voter tolerance for control and regulation has shifted.

This is problematic because government is also looking for reasons to do so. Partly because big tech is simply dominant, and partly because governments are trending toward authoritarianism.

The solution would have been research that helped create targeted and effective policy. Unfortunately, tech (especially social media) is naturally hostile to research that may paint its work as unhealthy or harmful.

Tech firms are burned by exposés, user apathy, and a desire to keep getting paid.

The lack of open research and access to data blocks the creation of knowledge and empirical evidence, which are the cornerstones of nuanced, narrowly tailored policy.

The only things left on the table are blunt instruments, such as age verification.

Yes.

Or more honestly, there was always an undercurrent of paternalistic thought and tech regulation from the Columbine Massacre days [0] to today.

Also for those of us who are younger (below 35) we grew up in an era where anonymized cyberbullying was normalized [1] and amongst whom support for regulating social media and the internet is stronger [2].

The reality is, younger Americans on both sides of the aisle now support a more expansive government, but for their party.

There is a second order impact of course, but most Americans (younger and older) don't realize that, and frankly, using the same kind of rhetoric from the Assange/Wikileaks, SOPA, and the GPG days just doesn't resonate and is out of touch.

Gen X Techno-libertarianism isn't counterculture anymore, it's the status quo. And the modern "tech-literate" uses GitHub, LinkedIn, Venmo, Discord, TikTok, Netflix, and other services that are already attached to their identity.

[0] - https://www.nytimes.com/1999/05/02/weekinreview/the-nation-a...

[1] - https://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/14/us/suicide-of-girl-after-...

[2] - https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/06/09/why-young...

This conflicts with my concerns about government crackdowns and the importance of anonymity when discussing topics that cover people who have a monopoly on violence and a tendency to use it.

So it's not entirely a black/white discussion to me.

Tons of data also showing higher suicide rates, depression rates, eating disorders etc. so it's not as if there is no good side to this.

When you’re older and have children—especially preteens and teenagers—you want those barriers up, because you’ve seen just how fucked up some children can get after overexposure to unhealthy materials and people who want to exploit or harm them.

It’s a matter of perspective and experience. As adults age, their natural curiosity evolves into a desire to protect their children from harm.

The reason you don’t see it in policy discussion from the officials pushing these laws is because removal of anonymity is the point. It’s nit about protecting kids, it never was. It’s about surveillance and a chilling effect on speech.

LOL.

Of course these technologies keep existing, and you end up with the worst, most wretched people implementing them, and we're all worse off. Concretely, few people are working on ZKPs for age verification because the hive mind of "good people" who know what ZKPs are make working on age verification social anathema.

Identification fixes nothing here, you log with your account, plug in the AI.

The problems with social media have nothing to do with ID and everything to do with godawful incentives, the argument seems to be that it's a large price to pay but that it's worth it. Worth it for what? The end result is absolutely terrible either way

2) Your point is valid. I too want to know whether I am engaging with a bot or a person. This is impossible now and it will be impossible once ID check becomes ubiquitous.

3) I will be happy to see (or not) a blue checkmark by the profile name. Just like in Twitter. That's enough.

Look at the facebook real name policy.

Like everything else in society, there are tradeoffs here, I'm much more concerned with the damage done to children's developing brains than I am to violations of data privacy, so I'm okay with age verification, however draconian it may be.

No we do not.

>I don’t want to live in a world where the average person unknowingly interacts with bots more than other individuals and where black market actors can sway public opinion with armies of bots.

That is not the argument for identification on many places on the internet. It's not even the argument that the gov reps pushing it typically make. And why would it be. The companies that go along with all this don't want to get rid of all bots and public opinion campaigns. They make money off of many of those.

At any point they can tell a real human what they can and can't say, and if they go against their masters, their "real human" status is revoked, because you trust the platform and not the person.

If we want to go full conspiritard, we could accuse those of wanting to control speech to be the financial backers of those flooding social media with AI slop: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-gGLvg0n-uY -- this fictional video thematically marries Metal Gear Solid 2's plot with current events: "perfect AI speech, audio and video synthesis will drown out reality [...] That is when we will present our solution: mandatory digital identity verification for all humans at all times"

Why don't we have PKI built in to our birth certificates and drivers licenses? Why hasn't a group of engineers and experts formed a consortium to try and solve this problem in the least draconian and most privacy friendly way possible?

Plus what you're asking would require international id verification for everyone, which would first mostly make those IDs a lot cheaper. But there's a second negative effect. The organizations issuing those IDs, governments, are the ones making the bot armies. Just try to discuss anything about Russia, or how bad some specific decision of the Chinese CCP is. Or, if you're so inclined: think about how having this in the US would mean Trump would be authorizing bot armies.

This exists within China, by the way, and I guarantee you: it did not result in honest online discussion about goods, services or politics. Anonymity is required.

1) Person signs up with discord with fake name and fake email.

2) Discord asks (state system) for an age validation.

3) In pop up window, state validates the persons age with ID matching with face recognition.

3) State system sends token to discord with yes or no with zero data retention in the state records.

4) Discord takes action on the account.

What is so hard about this?

I'm not for these draconian age verification nonsense, but this isn't a valid argument.

Is it bypassable by a sufficiently determined child? Yes, but so it is the current age verification nonsense.

No, that's not the case.

Uh. I could check in the back of my parents' closet (hidden under some fabric) for at least a decade's worth of dirty magazines. It's true that that's less than a lifetime's worth of pictures and articles, but I'd say that that's effectively equivalent.

> That can't be healthy.

The only thing that's unhealthy is not being able to talk frankly and honestly about sex and sexuality with your peers, parents, and other important adults in your life. Well, that and never being told that sex leads to pregnancy, or how to recognize common STDs... but you're likely to get that "for free" if you're able to talk frankly and honestly about sex and sexuality.

We should focus on teaching parents how to educate their children properly, and teach children how to safely browse the internet and how to avoid common scams and pitfalls.

I played Roblox when I was a teenager and all the time my aunt told me to be careful of who I talked to online, as they could be a pedo. Even though there wasn't a constant monitoring from my parents or family, her words were repeated many times that I actually thought 5 times before sharing any kind of personal information online, back then.

nope, they are going after dissenters, not bad guys. It's how it always ends up.

I was initially exposed to pornography at 8 years old, by finding a disgarded magazine in a hedge. However this was pretty soft.

I was exposed to serious pornography at 10 years by finding a hidden VHS tape in the back of a drawer at a friends house and getting curious. This was hardcore German stuff with explicit violence. This has caused me to have therapy in my lifetime.

This was all in the 80s by the way.

Therefore anything you are mentioning happened long before the internet, and is totally possible in a completely offline world as well. So how do these new digital laws 'protect children' again?

I don't think a bulletproof age verification system can be implemented on the server side without serious privacy implications. It would be quite easy to build it on the client side (child mode) but the ones pushing for these systems (usually politicians) don't seem to care about that.