5 ms·

Age verification is not the will of the voters. It is the will of large political donors (specifically tech companies and religious censorship groups). It is

by Scaled 2mo ago

Age verification is not the will of the voters. It is the will of large political donors (specifically tech companies and religious censorship groups). It is certainly not the will of adult citizens who use adult websites, who have overwhelming shown in their usage patterns they will abandon any website that tries to do age verification. Parental controls remains the right way to do age gating. It works today and has no privacy impacts.

SoftTalker 2mo ago
Parental control does not work today, it's too fragmented and too difficult.
- simoncion 2mo ago
  > Parental control does not work today, it's too fragmented and too difficult. Then legally require it to be effective and easy-to-use-if-you-take-a-few-minutes-to-read-the-instructions. See also [0]. [0] <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48911863 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48911863>
  - inigyou 2mo ago
    This is literally what California did with the Digital Age Assurance Act, AB1043.
    - simoncion 2mo ago
      > This is literally what California did with the Digital Age Assurance Act, AB1043. There's apparently information that you didn't read contained in the footnote of the comment you replied to. Based on this layman's reading of the law, [0] California did literally the opposite. They require major OS vendors to require users to enter their birthdate or indicate in some other way their current age, and then require programs and websites to act on that age information. This is entirely different from requiring major OS vendors to allow a "guardian account" to set fairly-fine-grained restrictions on one or more -er- "ward accounts", and then requiring programs and websites to refuse let the "ward account" do the things that those restrictions say that it isn't permitted to do. "Restrict by age" neither accounts for precocious under-eighteens, nor does it account for vulnerable elderly or otherwise brain/developmentally-damaged adults who need protected. And because "restrict by age" cares very much about your age, and because it's not going to work nearly as well as promised by those pushing it, it will inevitably require scans of both a photo ID and one's face and/or other biometrics. A "you don't need to know anything about this account other than that these are the things it's not supposed to be able to do" system gives zero shits about the identity of a person, so there's no plausible path for it to gate access behind submission of any identifying documents to any third party. [0] <https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billTextClient.xhtml?bill_id=202520260AB1043 https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billTextClient.xhtm...>
      - inigyou 2mo ago
        It requires you to enter a birth date which is not required to be your birth date. In case of a conflict between the age verification birth date and any other birth date, only the age verification birth date may be used for age appropriateness checks.
        simoncion 2mo ago
        Okay? That is not parental controls that are [L]egally require[d] ... to be effective and easy-to-use-if-you-take-a-few-minutes-to-read-the-instructions. Additionally, I expect that -due to kids lying about their ages- within five or ten years, the regs will have "graduated" from self-attestation to ID and biometrics collection. It's likely that other states will require that sort of collection much sooner, causing every US-based company to do that regardless of the existence of less-invasive regs. Like, seriously... if "the kids can lie about their age and there are no consequences for lying" is the bar you want to set, just do the 1990's thing where sites and programs have a "Warning! This might not be suitable for kids!" page/screen that has a checkbox that the kids can check or button that they can press that lets them lie that they're over-seventeen and grants them access.
        deleted 2mo ago
        [deleted]
        inkysigma 2mo ago
        I'm not the biggest fan of the current age verification schemes, but I don't think the idea kids can lie about their age differs in the threat model posed under either system. Presumably, under the law, parents would be the ones to create a child account with a non-editable-by-the-child-account age fields which would then be used as a legal source of reference. If you assume the child can create an account without such features or can edit the age themselves, then I don't see why the equivalent threat model in the parental control system would be giving the child control over the parental control toggles rendering it meaningless by simply disabling it. That being said, age based restrictions isn't a fine grained control over the system as perhaps one would like but that also would be inherently more complicated to think about from a legislative perspective (e.g. how fine grained and how to categorize possible dangers) and user control perspective when it looks like a lot of parents are looking for a blunt generic button that basically goes "this is agreeable with general practices". This seems more or less how real systems are gated. The other issue is that both present privacy challenges but this just a little more so from a fingerprinting perspective. Presumably you need quite a few bits to completely specify the filter whereas age is only a ~1.58 bit field in the CA model. Not really sure how much this matters when there are so many other signals for fingerprinting and we should probably make fingerprinting from it illegal but just some thought. > Instead, what we get proposed is a system that cares very much about how old you are, and not one bit about the things that one's guardian understands one needs to be protected from. Regarding your linked comment, I think it's a bit strange to say that if legislators really did care about child safety they would mandate fine grained controls instead. I'm not sure what additional fine grained factors you may be thinking of precisely, but we already use age as a gate in real life for many things we consider dangerous so it's quite natural for legislators to transpose those. Our laws already very much care about how old you are.
- ETH_start 2mo ago
  So instead of instituting restrictions that will probably cost society hundreds of billions if not trillions of dollars in lost economic efficiency, publicly fund development of better parental control software, and publicly fund its adoption to make it the market standard.
mapontosevenths 2mo ago
Just for those who aren't aware, most of the recent push for these laws has been bankrolled by Meta. They wish to avoid legal responsibility for their attacks on democracy and human health by convincing governments that people don't need any right to anonymous speech, and thusly free speech, as much as Meta needs to not have to pay moderators.
toomuchtodo 2mo ago
Please provide citations regarding public support for age verification. Surveys show majority support, for dating sites, social media, adult content, and sports betting. https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2026/07/01/majority-of-americans-support-banning-social-media-for-kids-under-16/ https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2026/07/01/majority-... https://x.com/PTBwrites/status/2031529878021923118 https://x.com/PTBwrites/status/2031529878021923118 https://yougov.com/en-us/daily-results/20250502-1e408-1 https://yougov.com/en-us/daily-results/20250502-1e408-1 https://yougov.com/en-us/daily-results/20250502-1e408-2 https://yougov.com/en-us/daily-results/20250502-1e408-2 > Parental controls remains the right way to do age gating. It works today and has no privacy impacts. This opinion is not grounded in data and facts. If this was true, we would not be here. But we’re here because parental controls are insufficient, the vast majority of parents are just hanging in there getting their kids to adulthood. More than 3 million college students are raising kids. Most won’t graduate - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48709130 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48709130 - June 2026 The real single-parent capital of America - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42867716 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42867716 - January 2025 ("The places with the most single parents tend to be, to put it bluntly, struggling. The strongest predictors of single parenthood are high poverty rates and high shares of the population receiving government assistance." [There are ~13.6M single parents in the U.S. raising over 21M children. This means single parents head roughly one in three households and approximately 34% of all U.S. children live in a single-parent family.]) Parents Under Pressure: The U.S. Surgeon General's Advisory on the Mental Health & Well-Being of Parents - https://www.hhs.gov/sites/default/files/parents-under-pressure.pdf https://www.hhs.gov/sites/default/files/parents-under-pressu... - 2024 > When stress is severe or prolonged, it can have a deleterious effect; 41% of parents say that most days they are so stressed they cannot function and 48% say that most days their stress is completely overwhelming compared to other adults (20% and 26%, respectively). > Nearly 70% of parents say parenting is now more difficult than it was 20 years ago, with children’s use of technology and social media as the top two cited reasons. > Recent data from 2021-2022 indicate that among parents, 23.9% (or 20.3 million) had any mental illness and 5.7% (or 4.8 million) of parents had a serious mental illness. > Lastly, many other caregivers assume primary caregiving responsibility when parents cannot, thus acting as a critical safety net for children. In recent years, there has been a notable increase in such individuals taking on caregiving responsibilities for children, with approximately 2.4 million children being raised by grandparents, other relatives, or family friends, without their biological parent(s) in the household. U.S. has world’s highest rate of children living in single-parent households - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37628812 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37628812 - September 2023 (108 comments) (fertility rates continue to collapse though, so hopefully this problem continues to decline over time, only time will tell; 40% of annual pregnancies in the US and internationally are unintended, per the Guttmacher Institute and the UN, respectively) Charted: How American Households Have Changed Over Time (1960-2023) - https://www.visualcapitalist.com/how-american-households-have-changed-over-time/ https://www.visualcapitalist.com/how-american-households-hav... ("A record 58.4% of American households now consist of married or single adults without children. Only 25.3% of American households contain children.")
inigyou 2mo ago
Nobody wants age verification (except Zuck), but most people want children kept away from social media, and nobody's suggested a better option. Why haven't we suggested a better option? Well it's because we called the whole thing authoritarianism and refused to get involved. You know who didn't refuse to get involved? Larry Ellison, Peter Thiel, Mark Zuckerberg. They made suggestions to governments about how to solve this problem, and the best proposed solution was adopted and made the law.

by Scaled 2mo ago

SoftTalker 2mo ago

Parental control does not work today, it's too fragmented and too difficult.

simoncion 2mo ago
> Parental control does not work today, it's too fragmented and too difficult. Then legally require it to be effective and easy-to-use-if-you-take-a-few-minutes-to-read-the-instructions. See also [0]. [0] <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48911863 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48911863>
- inigyou 2mo ago
  This is literally what California did with the Digital Age Assurance Act, AB1043.
  - simoncion 2mo ago
    > This is literally what California did with the Digital Age Assurance Act, AB1043. There's apparently information that you didn't read contained in the footnote of the comment you replied to. Based on this layman's reading of the law, [0] California did literally the opposite. They require major OS vendors to require users to enter their birthdate or indicate in some other way their current age, and then require programs and websites to act on that age information. This is entirely different from requiring major OS vendors to allow a "guardian account" to set fairly-fine-grained restrictions on one or more -er- "ward accounts", and then requiring programs and websites to refuse let the "ward account" do the things that those restrictions say that it isn't permitted to do. "Restrict by age" neither accounts for precocious under-eighteens, nor does it account for vulnerable elderly or otherwise brain/developmentally-damaged adults who need protected. And because "restrict by age" cares very much about your age, and because it's not going to work nearly as well as promised by those pushing it, it will inevitably require scans of both a photo ID and one's face and/or other biometrics. A "you don't need to know anything about this account other than that these are the things it's not supposed to be able to do" system gives zero shits about the identity of a person, so there's no plausible path for it to gate access behind submission of any identifying documents to any third party. [0] <https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billTextClient.xhtml?bill_id=202520260AB1043 https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billTextClient.xhtm...>
    - inigyou 2mo ago
      It requires you to enter a birth date which is not required to be your birth date. In case of a conflict between the age verification birth date and any other birth date, only the age verification birth date may be used for age appropriateness checks.
      - simoncion 2mo ago
        Okay? That is not parental controls that are [L]egally require[d] ... to be effective and easy-to-use-if-you-take-a-few-minutes-to-read-the-instructions. Additionally, I expect that -due to kids lying about their ages- within five or ten years, the regs will have "graduated" from self-attestation to ID and biometrics collection. It's likely that other states will require that sort of collection much sooner, causing every US-based company to do that regardless of the existence of less-invasive regs. Like, seriously... if "the kids can lie about their age and there are no consequences for lying" is the bar you want to set, just do the 1990's thing where sites and programs have a "Warning! This might not be suitable for kids!" page/screen that has a checkbox that the kids can check or button that they can press that lets them lie that they're over-seventeen and grants them access.
        deleted 2mo ago
        [deleted]
        inkysigma 2mo ago
        I'm not the biggest fan of the current age verification schemes, but I don't think the idea kids can lie about their age differs in the threat model posed under either system. Presumably, under the law, parents would be the ones to create a child account with a non-editable-by-the-child-account age fields which would then be used as a legal source of reference. If you assume the child can create an account without such features or can edit the age themselves, then I don't see why the equivalent threat model in the parental control system would be giving the child control over the parental control toggles rendering it meaningless by simply disabling it. That being said, age based restrictions isn't a fine grained control over the system as perhaps one would like but that also would be inherently more complicated to think about from a legislative perspective (e.g. how fine grained and how to categorize possible dangers) and user control perspective when it looks like a lot of parents are looking for a blunt generic button that basically goes "this is agreeable with general practices". This seems more or less how real systems are gated. The other issue is that both present privacy challenges but this just a little more so from a fingerprinting perspective. Presumably you need quite a few bits to completely specify the filter whereas age is only a ~1.58 bit field in the CA model. Not really sure how much this matters when there are so many other signals for fingerprinting and we should probably make fingerprinting from it illegal but just some thought. > Instead, what we get proposed is a system that cares very much about how old you are, and not one bit about the things that one's guardian understands one needs to be protected from. Regarding your linked comment, I think it's a bit strange to say that if legislators really did care about child safety they would mandate fine grained controls instead. I'm not sure what additional fine grained factors you may be thinking of precisely, but we already use age as a gate in real life for many things we consider dangerous so it's quite natural for legislators to transpose those. Our laws already very much care about how old you are.
ETH_start 2mo ago
So instead of instituting restrictions that will probably cost society hundreds of billions if not trillions of dollars in lost economic efficiency, publicly fund development of better parental control software, and publicly fund its adoption to make it the market standard.

mapontosevenths 2mo ago

Just for those who aren't aware, most of the recent push for these laws has been bankrolled by Meta. They wish to avoid legal responsibility for their attacks on democracy and human health by convincing governments that people don't need any right to anonymous speech, and thusly free speech, as much as Meta needs to not have to pay moderators.

toomuchtodo 2mo ago

Please provide citations regarding public support for age verification. Surveys show majority support, for dating sites, social media, adult content, and sports betting. https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2026/07/01/majority-of-americans-support-banning-social-media-for-kids-under-16/ https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2026/07/01/majority-... https://x.com/PTBwrites/status/2031529878021923118 https://x.com/PTBwrites/status/2031529878021923118 https://yougov.com/en-us/daily-results/20250502-1e408-1 https://yougov.com/en-us/daily-results/20250502-1e408-1 https://yougov.com/en-us/daily-results/20250502-1e408-2 https://yougov.com/en-us/daily-results/20250502-1e408-2 > Parental controls remains the right way to do age gating. It works today and has no privacy impacts. This opinion is not grounded in data and facts. If this was true, we would not be here. But we’re here because parental controls are insufficient, the vast majority of parents are just hanging in there getting their kids to adulthood. More than 3 million college students are raising kids. Most won’t graduate - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48709130 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48709130 - June 2026 The real single-parent capital of America - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42867716 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42867716 - January 2025 ("The places with the most single parents tend to be, to put it bluntly, struggling. The strongest predictors of single parenthood are high poverty rates and high shares of the population receiving government assistance." [There are ~13.6M single parents in the U.S. raising over 21M children. This means single parents head roughly one in three households and approximately 34% of all U.S. children live in a single-parent family.]) Parents Under Pressure: The U.S. Surgeon General's Advisory on the Mental Health & Well-Being of Parents - https://www.hhs.gov/sites/default/files/parents-under-pressure.pdf https://www.hhs.gov/sites/default/files/parents-under-pressu... - 2024 > When stress is severe or prolonged, it can have a deleterious effect; 41% of parents say that most days they are so stressed they cannot function and 48% say that most days their stress is completely overwhelming compared to other adults (20% and 26%, respectively). > Nearly 70% of parents say parenting is now more difficult than it was 20 years ago, with children’s use of technology and social media as the top two cited reasons. > Recent data from 2021-2022 indicate that among parents, 23.9% (or 20.3 million) had any mental illness and 5.7% (or 4.8 million) of parents had a serious mental illness. > Lastly, many other caregivers assume primary caregiving responsibility when parents cannot, thus acting as a critical safety net for children. In recent years, there has been a notable increase in such individuals taking on caregiving responsibilities for children, with approximately 2.4 million children being raised by grandparents, other relatives, or family friends, without their biological parent(s) in the household. U.S. has world’s highest rate of children living in single-parent households - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37628812 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37628812 - September 2023 (108 comments) (fertility rates continue to collapse though, so hopefully this problem continues to decline over time, only time will tell; 40% of annual pregnancies in the US and internationally are unintended, per the Guttmacher Institute and the UN, respectively) Charted: How American Households Have Changed Over Time (1960-2023) - https://www.visualcapitalist.com/how-american-households-have-changed-over-time/ https://www.visualcapitalist.com/how-american-households-hav... ("A record 58.4% of American households now consist of married or single adults without children. Only 25.3% of American households contain children.")

inigyou 2mo ago

Nobody wants age verification (except Zuck), but most people want children kept away from social media, and nobody's suggested a better option. Why haven't we suggested a better option? Well it's because we called the whole thing authoritarianism and refused to get involved. You know who didn't refuse to get involved? Larry Ellison, Peter Thiel, Mark Zuckerberg. They made suggestions to governments about how to solve this problem, and the best proposed solution was adopted and made the law.