Alternative take: The fact that twitter / facebook / whatever allow arbitrary, unverified posting enables large-scale misinformation that led to, among other things, Russia's manipulation the US electorate and ultimate impacting the presidential election.
This one-sided view has some good points, but for goodness sake, don't pretend that the alternative has no downsides.
How are folks recommended to get involved? Contact your local Congress member? I feel this thread has a lot of passion but is missing concrete, actionable steps.
I've contacted my congressmen and I would also advocate for telling/explaining this to non technical people you know. They either won't have heard of this or won't know whats bad about it.
Let them pry ID from our cold dead hands. If a site requires ID, it doesn't get my business.
Example, Discord wanted my ID to enable certain features, I declined, I now can't use those features, fine by me. If they started asking for ID anyway, I'd say no and see what happens, even if that means they lock me out entirely. There's no universe where they get my ID.
It's worth pointing out that full digital identity verification ("doxxing" yourself to an untrustworthy, unauditable, legally unconstrained private company) is NOT the only way to verify adulthood. We have had a system in place which enables adulthood validation without enabling digital surveillance infrastructure, with a degree of false negative risk that society has deemed acceptable for nearly 100 years now. This idea is not my own, but I'm happy to share a reasonable proposal for it.
The Cashier Standard – Age Verification Without Surveillance
> If you love your family, you must stop online age verification.
> If you want the best for your children, you must stop online age verification.
> Your children are being targeted. The infrastructure being built under the cover of child safety is designed to enslave them for the rest of their lives.
Jumped the shark on that one, and really off-color. I'm less inclined to listen to guy, not because of his actual points, but because of how unreasonable he sounds when articulating them. A great lesson in how not to do rhetoric.
The kids are our future adults. It should be pretty obvious that getting them used to the state yanking access is a future problem. I don’t see anything off-color or unreasonable.
Ironic that he's relying on the same ridiculous "think of the children" rhetoric that's being used to promote age verification. Really says a thing or two about online discourse in our day and age.
I’ve been noticing a trend among a lot of HN members where instead of contending with the arguments made in an article, they focus on the “off putting rhetoric” used by the author.
Make no mistake you are engaging in your own form of rhetoric when you respond like this. You are in effect moving the discussion away from the subject at hand, and towards the perceived faults in the author’s communication style. This is a rhetorical slight of hand and it’s highly disingenuous.
It's important to remember that they're targeting your children. You grew up with freedom from surveillance and constant identification. You were able to communicate anonymously and without the content of your speech being sold to Walmart and the cops. They are putting in effort to make sure that your children will never have that reality as a reference point. The idea of the government and a dozen corporations not knowing everything that they are doing at all times, and not using and selling that information freely, will sound like the ramblings of a delusional old fool.
It's important that you engage with that. Denial is not something to brag about.
The one and only method I will participate in is server operators setting a RTA header [1] for URL's that may contain adult or user-generated or user-contributed content and the clients having the option to detect that header and trigger parental controls if they are enabled by the device owner. That should suffice to protect most small children. Teens will always get around anything anyone implements as they are already doing. RTA headers are not perfect, nothing is nor ever will be but there is absolutely no tracking or leaking data involved. Governments could easily hire contractors to scan sites for the lack of that header and fine sites not participating into oblivion.
I a small server operator and a client of the internet will not participate in any other methods period, full-stop. Make simple logical and rational laws around RTA headers and I will participate. Many sites already voluntarily add this header. It is trivial to implement. Many questions and a lengthy discussion occurred here [1]. I doubt my little private and semi-private sites would be noticed but one day it may come to that at which point it's back into semi-private Tinc open source VPN meshes for my friends and I.
Back in the late 90s or so, there was a proposal to have sites voluntarily set an age header, so parents/employers/etc could use to block the site if they wish. People said it would never work, because adult sites had a financial incentive not to opt in to reduce their own traffic.
This doesn't address the wider array of age-verification related problems that people want to solve, like social media where age verification is needed to police interactions between users.
Servers can then infer user’s ages by whether or not the client renders pages given those headers or not no? See if secondary page requests (e.g images, scripts) are made or not from a client? A bad actor could use this to glean age information from the client and see whether the person viewing the page is a small child. That should be scary
How would this work with sites like YouTube which allow sharing of content, potentially not appropriate for children, but the content is generated by the site's users? Who will be fined for "violations"? And how would such a fine be levied, especially internationally?
Interesting, I've never heard of this. I see an example that involves an HTTP response header "Rating: RTA-5042-1996-1400-1577-RTA". But does this actually still get used by parental controls? I didn't run into a lot of documentation about this, including on the very badly designed RTA web site https://www.rtalabel.org/
For anyone curious about the value, the numbering on the value is just a fixed number everybody decided to use for some reason that isn't clear to me.
I would deeply prefer to do it this way, but my goodness the RTA org needs a serious brush up of their web site and information on how to use this.
This is exactly the way it should be done. Device with parental controls enabled disables content client-side when the header is detected. As far as I can tell, it's a global optimum, all trade-offs considered.
An outstanding idea. Those lobbying for age verification hate it though, because they want to be the arbiters of age, and all that juicy PII that they can analyze and resell.
I have probably never met anyone that is not committing at least three (3) felonies per day. That is at least how legal theory is applied. It's a fun topic to research. As a side note it would be interesting to see how far down the totem pole they venture in terms of verification of what sites are using age/ID verification and tracking.
I agree with the general idea, but I would like this header to be more fine grained than just a binary "adult" or not. For example, so that you can distinguish between content that is age appropriate for teenagers and older from content that is suitable for all ages.
Yeah this seems like the best tradeoff. You avoid the central control infrastructure and you provide information to clients. It's also a great match with free computing devices, which can then utilize the new information, empowering users (eg parents -> parental control on device, or individuals who want to skip some kinds of content).
There are issues today with this approach such as lacking granular information for sites that have many kinds of context, but if you stop investing in the central control infra and invest in this instead that could be remedied.
The header should be the other way around. It should inform your site will not contain adult material. The local government should scan sites participating.
Anyway, yes, that would just solve the problem and not destroy anything. What is the reason why nobody is talking about it.
There is a suddenconcerted international push for online age verification, and we do not know where this push originates from. That is the scariest thing about it.
It's not _completely_ shrouded in mystery - it started after Facebook got slapped by the EU for irresponsible handling of underage users, and since began a heavily funded lobbying push to drag competitors down with them. https://github.com/upper-up/meta-lobbying-and-other-findings...
Of course, it's probably also been coopted by the neverending stream of nanny-state political power grabs in both the US and EU.
And people should be free to pick and choose whether they want to use sites that do that or not. Whatever hacker news does seems to be fine for me, and I did not need to verify my ID in any way (even though it's very easy to figure out who I am from this profile)
I think it's because, without further context, it's so hard to argue against. Pretty much every person in every culture cares deeply about their children. So if you can successfully hitch your position to that idea, it too becomes hard to argue against.
It's the same with tough on crime. "What, you want criminals to keep getting away with it?!"
Because adults remain children. As in, their parent’s kids and therefore property. [edit: I should mention also property of the state beyond that] It’s less explicit in US I guess but in some places that’s very blunt - if you don’t support your parents enough you can be sued for abuse. And there are situations where an adult in us has been declared too irresponsible and forced into conversion camps by parents in the US. It’s insane, yes, and if you’re lucky enough this might be entirely invisible to you. But if you’re gray or trans or autistic and get a but unlucky this can become a very harsh reality.
Protect the children refers to a type of property, not a type of human.
Because it's very easy for the creeps already thinking of your children to paint these rejecting this type of the laws as those who want to see children hurt.
Regardless how stupid this argument is, rags will always pounce on it.
This is just a dirty trick of the creeps to make the resistance harder.
Because it is the moral responsibility of adults to care for not just their children but all our children. Occasional surrendering of rights is appropriate in that endeavor.
Basically every article on this site has a comment complaining that the article is AI. Who knows. Maybe “complaining about AI” is the new AI way of fitting in.
The argument being made seems plausible but it’s complete fear mongering. The surveillance mechanisms already exist and are in play and people can be identified in endless ways.
States have broad power to do what is being feared in the thread and haven’t already and to think that they’re waiting for this final piece of the puzzle to enact some insane regime is laughable. They could do that right now without the internet at all.
Social media is probably not healthy and kids should probably not be on social media. Age verification and age limits for social media will be a good thing for kids.
Instead of fear mongering, finding a middle ground, like governments adding some rules and protections on how this information or system is used is probably a better response.
I might be in the minority, but I think incorporating an identity layer into the internet itself should happen with the right protections for users and should have happened at the beginning of the net and is probably a result of lack of foresight by the creators of ARPANET.
Age verification on Australian social media has loopholes. Underage influencers use an agency to manage their social media for them. So anyone with enough followers or money can continue using social media under the age of 16.
If you are going to implement age controls, you should implement a ban on underage influencers as well.
Age verification can be achieved without destroying anonymity and privacy online using anonymous credential systems, but it has to be designed that way from the ground up, and no one pushing age verification is interested in preserving privacy.
Seriously, who cares this much about the internet? I for one will be happy if my kids spend less time online than me. Similar to what a smoker would feel seeing cigarettes finally be banned, I suppose.
It's also ironic that this guy is so adamant about protecting the children on xitter. It's like preaching against racism on 4chan.
"But age verification requires identity verification. Identity verification requires digital IDs."
Um, no? iOS is doing age verification just by your credit card. I never saw people all that upset about giving their credit card info to their phone wallet app or even to a bunch of websites.
If it was the hill to die on, then we should have done a better job of stopping pervasive fraud, abuse and harm to everyone so that we wouldn't have been a need to bring in age verification.
The reason we are up shit creek is because large companies didn't want to spend 2-5% of profits on decent editorial controls to stop bad actors making money from bending societal red lines (ie pile ons, snuff videos, the spectrum of grift, culture of abusing the "other side")
They also didn't want to stop the "viral" factor that allows their networks to grow so fucking fast.
This isn't really about freedom of speech, its about large media companies not wanting to take responsibility for their own shit.
meta desperately want kids to sign up. There are no penalties for them pushing shit on them. If an FCC registered corp had done half the shit facebook did, they'd have been kicked off air and restructured.
So frankly its too fucking late. Meta, google and tiktok will still find ways to push low quality rage bate to all of us, and divide us all for advertising revenue.
Mandatory age surveillance everywhere is only going to result in massive, normalized ID fraud. You thought fake and stolen IDs were a problem before? You haven't seen anything yet.
And half of it will be from adults trying to avoid privacy invasion.
It would be a good market, I would like to pay for an ID in my or compatible countries. As far as the systems work that I have seen, this is more or less a permanent pass.
But the real problem is that governments again try to censor online content, nothing else.
My country doesn't even run children's homes without many incidents and nobody cares for that. But it tries to track citizens through things like corona apps. It cannot propose any trusted entity that could verify and ID information about me.
So many pieces of law are flawed today, and the reason why should be concerning to all.
I find it disgusting that most laws today are based on creating a perfect world instead of addressing harms in the least intrusive way. There is no balancing of interests, even when they state that there are. Every side complains about the others and potential future abuses, except when it is their plan. Nobody tries to design the law with a devil's advocate perspective to make as effective as reasonably possible (not perfect!) while limiting overreach.
The real problem is the pursuit of perfection. A perfect world does not exist, nor will it ever (laws of nature, physics, etc). One person's view of perfect is not the same as another's. We've lost the capacity for legislative empathy through are impatience and self importance. It's no longer about restricting government and providing people with rights. It's about how we can use government to shove the desires of a majority or plurality onto the total population.
There are ways to do age verification with reasonable anonymity, but they aren't perfect and can create underground markets (see gaming in China). At a certain point, we need to step back and put the responsibilities where they belong - with parents, instead of causing massive negative externalities on everyone else.
132 comments
[ 4.9 ms ] story [ 148 ms ] threadThis one-sided view has some good points, but for goodness sake, don't pretend that the alternative has no downsides.
https://www.eff.org/pages/help-us-fight-back#main-content
Example, Discord wanted my ID to enable certain features, I declined, I now can't use those features, fine by me. If they started asking for ID anyway, I'd say no and see what happens, even if that means they lock me out entirely. There's no universe where they get my ID.
The Cashier Standard – Age Verification Without Surveillance
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47809795
https://claude.ai/public/artifacts/7fe74381-a683-4f49-9c2b-1...
> If you want the best for your children, you must stop online age verification.
> Your children are being targeted. The infrastructure being built under the cover of child safety is designed to enslave them for the rest of their lives.
Jumped the shark on that one, and really off-color. I'm less inclined to listen to guy, not because of his actual points, but because of how unreasonable he sounds when articulating them. A great lesson in how not to do rhetoric.
Make no mistake you are engaging in your own form of rhetoric when you respond like this. You are in effect moving the discussion away from the subject at hand, and towards the perceived faults in the author’s communication style. This is a rhetorical slight of hand and it’s highly disingenuous.
I haven't heard too many people say these extreme-sounding, yet at least arguably true points out loud.
Someone should be saying them, and the fact that it's not your particular cup of tea may not be the biggest issue here.
It's important to remember that they're targeting your children. You grew up with freedom from surveillance and constant identification. You were able to communicate anonymously and without the content of your speech being sold to Walmart and the cops. They are putting in effort to make sure that your children will never have that reality as a reference point. The idea of the government and a dozen corporations not knowing everything that they are doing at all times, and not using and selling that information freely, will sound like the ramblings of a delusional old fool.
It's important that you engage with that. Denial is not something to brag about.
1: https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
I a small server operator and a client of the internet will not participate in any other methods period, full-stop. Make simple logical and rational laws around RTA headers and I will participate. Many sites already voluntarily add this header. It is trivial to implement. Many questions and a lengthy discussion occurred here [1]. I doubt my little private and semi-private sites would be noticed but one day it may come to that at which point it's back into semi-private Tinc open source VPN meshes for my friends and I.
[1] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46152074
That would also amount to compelled speech.
For anyone curious about the value, the numbering on the value is just a fixed number everybody decided to use for some reason that isn't clear to me.
I would deeply prefer to do it this way, but my goodness the RTA org needs a serious brush up of their web site and information on how to use this.
You will however follow the law if it mandates you to do else.
Which is we "age verification" should be stopped before it's too late.
There are issues today with this approach such as lacking granular information for sites that have many kinds of context, but if you stop investing in the central control infra and invest in this instead that could be remedied.
the goal is eradicating anonymous publishing. the goal is making strong government ID mandatory to use the internet.
any privacy preserving age gating system is useless toward that goal, so it is irrelevant.
Anyway, yes, that would just solve the problem and not destroy anything. What is the reason why nobody is talking about it.
Of course, it's probably also been coopted by the neverending stream of nanny-state political power grabs in both the US and EU.
Evident when the fight against "hate" was suddenly everywhere, and also during covid.
The writing style of the author is very annoying.
It's the same with tough on crime. "What, you want criminals to keep getting away with it?!"
Protect the children refers to a type of property, not a type of human.
Regardless how stupid this argument is, rags will always pounce on it.
This is just a dirty trick of the creeps to make the resistance harder.
States have broad power to do what is being feared in the thread and haven’t already and to think that they’re waiting for this final piece of the puzzle to enact some insane regime is laughable. They could do that right now without the internet at all.
Social media is probably not healthy and kids should probably not be on social media. Age verification and age limits for social media will be a good thing for kids.
Instead of fear mongering, finding a middle ground, like governments adding some rules and protections on how this information or system is used is probably a better response.
I might be in the minority, but I think incorporating an identity layer into the internet itself should happen with the right protections for users and should have happened at the beginning of the net and is probably a result of lack of foresight by the creators of ARPANET.
> Our freedom is already being eroded, saying that it is being eroded more is just fear mongering.
> They want to hurt you, instead of fear mongering, find a middle ground where they're hurting you differently.
If you are going to implement age controls, you should implement a ban on underage influencers as well.
It's also ironic that this guy is so adamant about protecting the children on xitter. It's like preaching against racism on 4chan.
When you set up kids devices in your family they ask you to provide the birthday anyway.
I’m keen to see the arguments against this.
Um, no? iOS is doing age verification just by your credit card. I never saw people all that upset about giving their credit card info to their phone wallet app or even to a bunch of websites.
Responsible parents don't have separate OS accounts for their children.
The reason we are up shit creek is because large companies didn't want to spend 2-5% of profits on decent editorial controls to stop bad actors making money from bending societal red lines (ie pile ons, snuff videos, the spectrum of grift, culture of abusing the "other side")
They also didn't want to stop the "viral" factor that allows their networks to grow so fucking fast.
This isn't really about freedom of speech, its about large media companies not wanting to take responsibility for their own shit.
meta desperately want kids to sign up. There are no penalties for them pushing shit on them. If an FCC registered corp had done half the shit facebook did, they'd have been kicked off air and restructured.
So frankly its too fucking late. Meta, google and tiktok will still find ways to push low quality rage bate to all of us, and divide us all for advertising revenue.
People will show what they are made of.
Mandatory age surveillance everywhere is only going to result in massive, normalized ID fraud. You thought fake and stolen IDs were a problem before? You haven't seen anything yet.
And half of it will be from adults trying to avoid privacy invasion.
But the real problem is that governments again try to censor online content, nothing else.
My country doesn't even run children's homes without many incidents and nobody cares for that. But it tries to track citizens through things like corona apps. It cannot propose any trusted entity that could verify and ID information about me.
I find it disgusting that most laws today are based on creating a perfect world instead of addressing harms in the least intrusive way. There is no balancing of interests, even when they state that there are. Every side complains about the others and potential future abuses, except when it is their plan. Nobody tries to design the law with a devil's advocate perspective to make as effective as reasonably possible (not perfect!) while limiting overreach.
The real problem is the pursuit of perfection. A perfect world does not exist, nor will it ever (laws of nature, physics, etc). One person's view of perfect is not the same as another's. We've lost the capacity for legislative empathy through are impatience and self importance. It's no longer about restricting government and providing people with rights. It's about how we can use government to shove the desires of a majority or plurality onto the total population.
There are ways to do age verification with reasonable anonymity, but they aren't perfect and can create underground markets (see gaming in China). At a certain point, we need to step back and put the responsibilities where they belong - with parents, instead of causing massive negative externalities on everyone else.
Yeah, yeah, but the children...