Ask Lemmy

You aren't setting up your childrens accounts. You're setting up your accounts to show that you're not a child. And suddenly, every single thing you use, from apps to websites, is gatekept behind an API that is controlled by the government. If checking age on social media is all it ever does, then sure, whatever. But that isn't all it will ever do. It will creep further and further, and the details you need to provide will increase, one shitty government term at a time. And then one day, they'll able able to decide that people in your country shouldn't be able to see safe sex information, or abortion information, and the framework to deny the whole country access is already there, and just one small tweak away from locking you out of information that is deemed inappropriate.

Because they don't care about your age. They want to tie you to your ID, so everything you say and do online can be tracked and tied to you as a person.

Meanwhile the leader of one of their countries has raped women and teenagers and even a couple of children, but they don't do anything about it. But you can be jailed for decades for seeing a picture or video of it. But the actual act? They don't care about that. (I'm saying you can be jailed for simply seeing CSAM online, but if you're a billionaire actually doing the things, you won't be tried for the actual CSA being recorded.)

So as you can see, it's not your age, but your identity.

Most people think the Nazis only locked up Jews. Some realise they also locked up minorities. Historians know it was also anyone who disagreed with them. Anyone who spoke out against them. Anyone who wouldn't wear the armband. And they're afraid history will repeat. And they're right to be afraid.

But between setting up the birthdate when creating my children's local account on their computers, and having to send a copy of their ID to every platform under the sun, I'd easily chose the former.

This is how they move the goalpost. They changed the argument.

You currently can just create a local account - period. It's yours. No tracking. No personal info.

But now you're accepting that you're willing to give a third party information, even just a little.

The next argument is: "If giving your age is okay, why not your home address?"

This is what police do to fish information out of you.

I'd even agree to a simple protocol (HTTP X-Over-18 / X-Over-21 headers?) to that.

In a era where privacy conscious people don't even connect their TV to the internet... This is okay to you?

You went from "Why do they want my information?"

To

"I'm not concerned with sharing my age. But how should we do it?"

And that itself is the root issue.

My calculator doesn't need to know how old anyone is. Nor does my refrigerator. I suppose a case could be made for a router if you are all onboard for age gating everything privacy and freedom be damned. An OS isn't just Mac or Windows... the CA law is just so so dumb as written that I have zero faith in anything from Silicon valley.

Will you be allowed to lie about the age? If yes, then it's a pointless law. If no, then whoever is checking needs to have more control over your device than you do, DRM style. That's gives them an entry point through which they can put whatever they want without you being able to control it.

But between setting up the birthdate when creating my children’s local account on their computers, and having to send a copy of their ID to every platform under the sun, I’d easily chose the former.

That's your decision. The rest of us shouldn't be forced into it just because you're to lazy to watch what your kids are doing online. If a website thinks they need to my my age they can ask me and I'll decide if I want to provide it or not. I don't want my OS just handing it out to anyone who asks.

because its designed to feed surveillance data to Palintir, which allows governments all over the west to monitor any dissident movements, or relatives of "dissidents" against right wing governments. dont know of any computer system requiring your ID/ or birthday, you can always fake a birthday.

right now the biggest threat to conservative governments is anyone "left" of them.

What is a computer? My microwave has a computer in it. My car. My printer. My smartwatch. My TV. My treadmill. My security cameras. Many many things have little embedded systems running linux. Some are Internet connected, some aren't. This feels terribly invasive for something that allegedly protects kids (doubtful). What if i don't have any kids in my household? Would this have stopped Trump and his friends? How about the government focus on real problems instead of requiring cameras be installed on my toaster and a credit card to be able to watch TV.

Because I don't give a shit what your kids do on the Internet, and there are already plenty of tools for you to curate the experience for them.

As others have said

It has nothing to do with age checking, protecting the children, or security. NOTHING.

Because it has little to do with protecting anyone and is another gross violation of privacy to serve corporate interests.

the problem is that it's not going to stop there. kids will obviously still get porn, and fascists will say "seeeeee!!??! we need even more personal data to protect the kids!!! OS age verification isn't enough!!!"

steps in the wrong direction are exactly that, and exactly what this OS bullshit is. everyone having to pay the price for parents who can't be assed to raise their own kids

edit: i need to add--it's not actually about the kids. it never was. it's about collecting every 1 and every 0 that exists about you, for profit, but also for surveillance. every dissenting comment, post, photo, etc will be linked to a unique human being via dozens (or hundreds. thousands?) of data points. before you say "no way," remember the ridiculous percentage of 1/6 insurrectionists they rooted out, based on social media posts. and that was before AI blew up

Wrong technical solution to a made up problem.

Governments have commissioned enough studies to know that education, training, and parental controls filtering content at the receiving end are more effective & less infringing of civil rights than laws imposing restrictions & penalties on website operators to comply with online age verification. Laws could instead allocate resources to promote the former in a major way, setup independent evaluations reporting the effectiveness of child protection technologies to the public, promote standards & the development of better standards in the industry. Laws of the latter kind simply aren't needed & also suffer technical defects.

The most fatal technical defect is they lack enforceability on websites outside their jurisdiction. They're limited to HTTP (or successor). They practically rule out dynamic content (chat, fora) for minors unless that content is dynamically prescreened. Parental control filters lack all these defects, and they don't adversely impact privacy, fundamental rights, and law enforcement.

Governments know better & choose worse, because it's not about promoting the public good, it's about imposing control.

Having a gatekeeper behind what you can use on your own hardware is always bad.

On the one hand, it is a privacy nightmare.

On the other hand, those laws are so badly written, they will apply to things you would never consider an issue. E.g. a security camera, a router, a NAS. For each of them, the law applies, because they have an OS, they are attached to a network, and they have logins. Think about it, and it basically applies to any network enabled device.

So

1. Unenforceable
2. Inaccurate
3. Over-reaching
4. PII not protected

What's wrong with it then? By the numbers, it seems everything is wrong with it.

When you go order something from Amazon, you're using about 15-20 computers in a row; probably more. PROVE you have the right. Yes, the server farm you're using to make an order is included, and it's a lot of machines.

Who pays to make sure Ticketmaster server farm is 'used' by age-appropriate customers and the code to check that is installed and maintained? Why, you, of course. The order panel at the burger joint? You, eventually. Toll ticket at Airport Parking? You're gonna love this. Guess what's in your cable box? Guess how often you'll have to have your face scanned just to turn on the TV? TV too. Fancy thermostat? There's a computer Nesting in there. Scan that face, bucko; on the new unit you have to buy because, dude, that and your microwave just became e-waste.

The list is unending. The implementation is shit. The data leak has already been shown with .. discord, right?

Because parents are responsible for stuff their off-spring does and the government should not be needed to do that.
At the very most, provide tools to help parents (e.g. on device filtering etc. or require companies to provide APIs to facilitate the same goal)

Other than that: Fuck off of my phone.

Show us your ID, then. Or even just your age. Now your children too.

Don't want to? That's why.

No. As soon as you're sending in your official ID your entire online presence will be tracked to your ID by the government, Google, Meta and the likes. Privacy is totally gone by then...

Lots of people are about to be born on 01-01-1900. I guess 01-01-2000 works now though. Man, I'm old.

While an international cabal of rich white men participate in a pedophile club run by america/israeli rich white other men, we need to ensure that the youth of today don't prematurely access "racy" pictures. Make it make sense.

OS age verification would effectively make some, if not most, linux distributions (or other less-popular operating systems) illegal. Because many linux distributions are made by small team of volunteers. In some cases a linux distribution might be maintained by literally one person. So these people likely do not have the time or money to include something like age verification into the operating system.

That said, there are some technically possible ways where this could be done to reduce the load on developers (perhaps with access codes, and a government maintained database) but the way age verification had is being done right now (face scanning, etc) would be a real headache to implement and quite possibly cost or time prohibitive.

It would be a shame if age verification laws effectively made open source operating systems illegal. It would suck if these laws inadvertently made it legally required that we need to support big tech companies like Apple or Microsoft in order to use a computer.

Tools should be provided if you want to do that but shouldn't be standard. People should have freedom of choice on how to use their own property, in terms of computers, and how they manage/raise their children.

Because I should not have to. Im fine with them selling specially child computers that are listed as under 18 you can buy for your kids but I don't want that crap on mine.

This is a bad idea for privacy: Slippery Slope. @VitoRobbles@lemmy.today has explained this perfectly. It also gives you more data that you can use to fingerprint your users. 1 new data point that might enable better targeting and deanonymization

This is also a bad idea for security: The mere presence of this signal exists allows it to be used for nefarious purposes, such as giving u-18 or u-21 signal to enter "protected space".

This is also a bad idea for the non mega corps. It allows the platforms (like FB, YT, Twitch, etc.) to throw away their moderation teams and ask for OS level fixes because of the age reporting mechanism worked, then this would have never happened.

It's a slippery slope and also regulatory capture as the only ones with the means to actually pull this off are the Big Tech companies.

The issue with "children" local accounts (assuming they ever remained 100% local anyway) is that for it to be effective, you would have to control who install the OS for it to be effective.

I have been managing my own OS install since I was a teen, so I could have just created an adult account for me. But, okay, you could say that you could just regularly check your child hasn't reinstalled the machine.

Well, see, they could just install a Virtual Machine. There is plenty of Virtual Machine software out there, and then we're back at whoever installs it being responsible for filling in that information. And Virtual Machines are very useful for a bunch of things: from running software not made for your hardware (see Android emulators, WSL), to being safer around dodgy software.

You could counter that by not letting them install things with your permissions... but there are portable versions of software that people make for a bunch of reasons which don't recall an installation. And I am not talking about hypotheticals: back when I was in school people would carry portable versions of games in USB sticks to copy around school machines so they could play video games during IT class.

Never mind that it means that whenever they want to install something, they will poke you about it, and now you're on the hook for reviewing that. Which you should already be doing because you care about what your child does and they don't have the years of experience to not break their OS.

But if you are doing that, why not use proper parental control software that let's you have much finer-grained control over what they can see or not online, along with other controls around how much time they can spend on the machine and a few nicer things?

There is a difference between providing the capability, and requiring that capability.

Under this law, something as simple as sharing a Google Drive could make you an "app store" and potentially liable for penalties.

These laws are specifically designed to be broadly interpreted. We have no idea just how widely the nets will be cast, either tomorrow, or 10 years from now. It is prudent to assume the absolute worst case.

It's techno-fascism

most homes don't run their computers in multi-user mode. Even when they do most kids will learn the admin password because parents don't select good passwords.

Kids are not stupid. Even if some are, there are many kids in school and so any bypass will spread kid to kid fast. For each of the following reread this paraghraph to remind yourself all kids will know this.

kids can install linux /bsd on a raspberry pi or old/cheap computer - this is something I want to encourage. that of course means they are root and can claim whatever age. They can likewise do it in a vm.

if there is any security flaw kids can use it to change their age.

many programs will not check when they should. Kids will install/use these instead. this is a likely exploit vector of actors (in foriegn counties) that target kids - release a new program that does what the kids wants while also doing what they want. (Websites have done bitcoin in javascript while you read them)

who will check? onlyfans probably will, but small web sites spring up all the time, and they won't bother - many are already illegal (either copyright or illegal content).

Meanwhile many programs that we want kids to use won't bother to check. why would things autocad check - they target professionals but kids can use them and may even have to.

the above is not a complete list!

Age is useful for 'buy cigerettes' that is illegal for kids in some way.

However most of what parents care about isn't automatically bad and I know plenty of panents who are frusterated because we can't controll things how we need to without being a helicopter parent (bad). Playing video games is fine in moderation - AFTER YOUR HOMEWORK IS DONE - but we don't get an easy way to enforce that. My teens are old enough to stay home alone and do homework - but they will not do their homework when they can do something else (this problem has been around since school)

my kids phones have parental controls that I turn on. However they lack a way to enforce homework vs play vs sleep time. There is likely more, this is just what frusterated me yesterday. some things are not gated - my kids have got up at 3am, and connected their school device (under school control not me) to their phone hotspot (turned on who knows when - I can't block that at all) to play a game that the school will block next week when they figure out it is one kids are playing but they shouldn't.

people are proposing age verification because they have no idea what else they can do and are frusterated at how bad things are.

let's follow the argument this is to protect children: why does is seem like a good idea to let everybody on the internet know what age your child is?

so if it is not to protect the children, what else could it be?

What would you say if, to be allowed to open your fridge (the one you own and purchased with your money) in order to pick something to eat out of it, you were required to make a blood test (say through some mechanism included in the door handle) to prove that you don't have any serious disease preventing you from, say, eating a slice of that delicious cake, or whatever?

The idea might not be completely stupid (one with some serious disease should not not eat what can harm them) but the implementation is not right. It's considering 100% of the population as suspects by default; just because they exist and have a fridge.

Replace 'fridge' with computer, 'cake' with online content, and 'disease' with 'being a minor'. That's how sad that is.