Ask Lemmy

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?

Well, the problem is less setting up the birthdate and more whether the birthdate needs to be verified.

Plenty of OSs already query for a birthdate, particularly on gaming devices. And yes, they will provide age-based protections already.

The question is, does the parent/account creator need to enter an accurate birthdate or not, and how does the system know?

If they don't, then whatever, it's the same self-declaration we already have all over the Internet. No biggie. Everybody was born in 1901 and we're all chill about it. It still makes for an absurd situation where you HAVE to have a personal profile for every user on every computer, which a ton of computers aren't expecting, so it's still dumb on top of being useless, but it's a solvable problem.

If they do, then you know have one of the biggest cryptographic and data management challenges in computing history. How do you have every single device across the entire planet interface with every single piece of software and server to authenticate a piece of personal data and safely store it so you don't have to constantly re-check? It's insane. Plus it removes a parent's ability to enable their children to engage with content at whatever speed they see fit. And there are potentially different regulations in different areas, where both the server and user location may change the required behavior, so the whole thing is an absolute mess from the concept up.

The issue in general is that there is no organization that can be trusted to verify the age, but not find a way to leverage that into gathering some info about the child and selling it.

That aside. Age is mostly meaningless. Everyone matures at different rates. The difference in rate between girls and boys results in effectively several years meaningful difference. Like a 10 year old female muturity is more similar to a 13 years old boy than a 10 year old boy. And 18 is just an arbitrary number that happens to coincide with finishing high school. And has no actual association to maturity. This is why car rental places won't rent to under 21s most of the time. Some hotels won't let you have a room until 25. So trying to decide what content should be available based on age is pointless. And they know that. So they aren't tryi g to protect anyone. They are trying to extract information they can sell.

OS defined does seem the best way, but I would prefer it wasn't legislated. The people writing these rules have no clue about the real world, so they end up doing stupid things.

Lots of the criticisms will eventually start sounding like seatbelt law opponents. Lots of “it should be optional, if you want to do it that’s fine but don’t force me to, I feel safer without it, it’s each individual’s responsibility and shouldn’t be mandated, etc” types of arguments.

The problem with the current implementation is that it isn’t done privately. There are several ways to do secure and private age verifications, where your device never passes your browsing history off to the government, and the individual sites never get your personal info. But lawmakers have been lobbied by companies who want to insert themselves as the age verifiers to skim your data. So the current laws being passed are written in such a way that they’ll result in massive privacy violations.

If opponents truly wanted to prevent privacy violations, they would be devising ways to get lawmakers on board with secure age verification. That way the laws would actually reflect best practices, and wouldn’t just result in less privacy. But they’re still trapped in the knee jerk “but my privacy” reactions, which shuts down any further discussion and leaves the door wide open for lobbyists to write and pass whatever legislation they want.

Just because one option is better than another, doesn't mean it's good.

OS level age check applies to everyone, not just children. Some legislations require strong age checking, which means you need to send some identification to some service. You won't be able to know how the information is handled, for how long it's stored and for what purposes it's used beside age checking. And because this applies to everyone, and is required to be able to use your computer, everything you do with your computer and phone is tied to your user account, and as such to you as an individual and identifiable human being.

Some of these legislations uses age ranges, and the OS is required to inform applications, and such, whether the user is, for example, below 13 years old, or 13 to 16 years old, etc. Consider this simple scenario: Some user uses some application, and the OS reports the user's age as below 13. The user uses the same app the next day, but now the OS reports the user's age as 13 to 16 years old. Can you figure out the user's exact birthday and age? If that application is part of some kind of larger network of advertisers and whatnots, they will now forever know the user's exact age without the OS reporting anything else.

These can also be used to make some software illegal, especially free and open source software. If you can replace Windows with Linux, Photoshop with Gimp, etc. it hurts the bottom line of those companies. Those companies can't prevent you from using the open source alternative, but it would be in their interest if those pieces of software becomes illegal to use and distribute. If age checking functionality is added to some open source software, the age checking can simply be removed by the user. You only need to correctly form the age checking law and that entire software is now illegal, and must be removed from the internet.

While the intention of these laws might to be to protect children, they cause too much harm for little good. The age checking can be circumvented in some situations, meaning the children aren't protected. And the entire thing is a huge privacy mess (data leaks, etc.) for every single computer user.

Because it will only be a simple birthdate until they decide to use those laws to go even further.

Slightly off topic, but I used DansGuardian when my kids were young. Works great.

Its the principle for me

What I'm really confused about is how are we going to confirm at account creation that the age is correct? Or that the person using the computer is who the account is for?