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Tell HN: OS-level age indication is the solution

2 points by uyzstvqs ↗ HN
I fully oppose online age verification. It's a terrible idea to link all online activity to a real world ID, especially through companies like Persona or digital ID apps run by governments or big tech. It's all a road to centralized checkpoints and data silos.

OS-level age indication is the perfect solution. You just enter a date-of-birth at initial device/user setup. It gets stored locally. Then there's an OS-native API for apps to read an age bracket from this. This can then be forwarded to websites by web browsers.

Almost all devices used by minors are set up by parents or guardians. That's what makes this effective.

It's private. It's decentralized & offline. It's effective. Children will be safer online, without harming anyone's privacy. In my opinion, we developers should take the lead on standardizing this properly, and we should use it to counter regulators who are still stuck on harmful online age verification requirements.

You can have your cake, and eat it too.

3 comments

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functionmouse
I disagree

This is a regulatory capture attempt by Facezuck and any knee bending to that premise helps him in his evil world domination scheme

Also, if these billionaires cared about keeping kids safe, some very famous people would be in prison right now.

gus_massa
What about another setting for important governmental figures, like president, governor, senators, ... ? It can make a automatic backup for FOIA. If they doing nothing wrong, they have nothing to hide.

We have a somewhat similar field here in Argentina for credits and other big bank transactions. The idea is to be more carefully with them to cut corruption. It looks good on paper.

apothegm
Of course, determining DOB based on when the user graduates age brackets then becomes trivial anyway, if a little slow.