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These solutions will never be viable, and I'll explain why. Fundamentally, there's three sets of the population: 1) Those who are clamoring for age verificati

by Scaled 25d ago

These solutions will never be viable, and I'll explain why. Fundamentally, there's three sets of the population: 1) Those who are clamoring for age verification (generally on sites they never interact with themselves.) 2) People arguing fiercely against age verification and won't engage with any site who uses it 3) Most significantly, the large majority of people in the middle who can't be bothered to do AV and will just use another overseas website instead. Even if the privacy can be solved (and I don't believe it can as someone fundamentally unwilling to upload my ID even once), that balance is basically the problem with trying to outsource the work to people who don't want to do it. We can already see that even privacy preserving solutions will not be used by adult site visitors in multiple adult site attempts to roll it out. The ONLY viable solution is parental filters on device. Anything that pushes the work to people who don't want it fails because the sites will just move overseas instead of losing the vast majority of their actual users. Or they roll it out and the traffic moves overseas, like data analysis has shown happened in UK. You just can't solve the problem by pushing the work onto everyone instead of tackling it at its source. Rather than try to lock down the entire Internet, which will never happen, lock down child devices.

mikeysight 25d ago
I obviously totally disagree (otherwise there'd be no reason for me to keep building), and I'll explain why. Working backwards, I think the device is exactly the wrong place for enforcement. Devices are not individuals and individuals are not their devices. Devices are tools for interacting with the open internet. Multiple people can share one and most persons own multiple. Additionally, we don't treat any aspect of our society with this attitude. Would it be preferable for 16 year olds to be provisioned cars that were unable to turn into the parking lot of a liquor store so that the work of verifying the customer's age would not be "outsourced to people who don't want to do it"? I like the real world, and I think we have done a pretty good job at organizing ourselves as a society, and it's my sincere belief that our interactions online would benefit by closer reflecting those that happen in the material world. I wrote about this at length in the essay in comments below. Second, while it is admittedly a very difficult challenge, the privacy can be solved, and I'm very excited to be working on it. I don't accept that the status quo or a dystopian alternative are the only two outcomes, but I do sincerely respect those in bucket 2 and their prerogative to avoid any site utilizing age verification technology. That being said, I do plan to earn the trust of many in that bucket with a bit of integrity, transparency and cryptography :) As for bucket 3, that's exactly who this was made for.
- skybrian 25d ago
  Giving kids a computing device isn’t much like giving them a car so that analogy fails for me. Instead, think of it like a portal to a child’s view of the Internet. Child-locked devices get one view of the Internet and unlocked devices get a different view. The view you get depends on whether the lock is on or not. It’s true that devices aren’t people, but I think that’s a strength of taking a device-based approach. Parents (or anyone who is curious) should easily be able to see for themselves what the child-locked Internet looks like. Search engines should be able to crawl the Internet in child-locked mode to see what’s there. This would make it easier to do things like enforcing laws against advertising to children. Maybe some features like cookies cookies could be disabled? It’s okay for people to share devices. Parents (or anyone else who is curious) can use a child-locked device to see what the Internet looks like for kids. Kids can use a parents’ device with supervision to see the adult view.
  - mikeysight 24d ago
    I think we just hold a different mental model of the problem, and that's fine. I view the internet as a digital world of destinations, and devices as the vehicles we use to visit those destinations. In the physical world, children share the same environment that we do. A school, casino and a liquor store can all be found on the same street, and we would never suppose that the latter two establishments have no responsibility to verify their customers are of age simply because they were able to drive themselves there. This model works shockingly well in the physical world, and I believe it's the most intuitive for the digital world as well. I do actually think there's still a role for device-based parental controls in certain contexts for many of the reasons you mentioned (the portal is a cool analogy for this), and I like both your ad and cookie blocking ideas. Thanks for taking the time to share your thoughts.
mikeysight 25d ago
I forgot to include this but sincerely, thank you for the comments and for giving me an opportunity to answer some very important questions that motivate me.

by Scaled 25d ago

mikeysight 25d ago

I obviously totally disagree (otherwise there'd be no reason for me to keep building), and I'll explain why. Working backwards, I think the device is exactly the wrong place for enforcement. Devices are not individuals and individuals are not their devices. Devices are tools for interacting with the open internet. Multiple people can share one and most persons own multiple. Additionally, we don't treat any aspect of our society with this attitude. Would it be preferable for 16 year olds to be provisioned cars that were unable to turn into the parking lot of a liquor store so that the work of verifying the customer's age would not be "outsourced to people who don't want to do it"? I like the real world, and I think we have done a pretty good job at organizing ourselves as a society, and it's my sincere belief that our interactions online would benefit by closer reflecting those that happen in the material world. I wrote about this at length in the essay in comments below. Second, while it is admittedly a very difficult challenge, the privacy can be solved, and I'm very excited to be working on it. I don't accept that the status quo or a dystopian alternative are the only two outcomes, but I do sincerely respect those in bucket 2 and their prerogative to avoid any site utilizing age verification technology. That being said, I do plan to earn the trust of many in that bucket with a bit of integrity, transparency and cryptography :) As for bucket 3, that's exactly who this was made for.

skybrian 25d ago
Giving kids a computing device isn’t much like giving them a car so that analogy fails for me. Instead, think of it like a portal to a child’s view of the Internet. Child-locked devices get one view of the Internet and unlocked devices get a different view. The view you get depends on whether the lock is on or not. It’s true that devices aren’t people, but I think that’s a strength of taking a device-based approach. Parents (or anyone who is curious) should easily be able to see for themselves what the child-locked Internet looks like. Search engines should be able to crawl the Internet in child-locked mode to see what’s there. This would make it easier to do things like enforcing laws against advertising to children. Maybe some features like cookies cookies could be disabled? It’s okay for people to share devices. Parents (or anyone else who is curious) can use a child-locked device to see what the Internet looks like for kids. Kids can use a parents’ device with supervision to see the adult view.
- mikeysight 24d ago
  I think we just hold a different mental model of the problem, and that's fine. I view the internet as a digital world of destinations, and devices as the vehicles we use to visit those destinations. In the physical world, children share the same environment that we do. A school, casino and a liquor store can all be found on the same street, and we would never suppose that the latter two establishments have no responsibility to verify their customers are of age simply because they were able to drive themselves there. This model works shockingly well in the physical world, and I believe it's the most intuitive for the digital world as well. I do actually think there's still a role for device-based parental controls in certain contexts for many of the reasons you mentioned (the portal is a cool analogy for this), and I like both your ad and cookie blocking ideas. Thanks for taking the time to share your thoughts.

mikeysight 25d ago

I forgot to include this but sincerely, thank you for the comments and for giving me an opportunity to answer some very important questions that motivate me.