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Rendered at 22:25:19 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
Mandatory age verification may limit some from accessing some types of content, but that's ulikely to actually help with anything other than narrowing perception tunnel for many and maybe stimulating some to hack around like the title suggests.
And that brings costs to society, such as increased security risks (even ZKP - government seeing the data is still a massive point of failure), and infringement of privacy. And populations learn to comply with bs regulations.
While tracking and addictive algos could be blanket banned for everyone regardless of age.
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cn72ydj70g5o
Consequently, we're now discussing VPN bans for under 18 year olds <insert facepalm emoji>.
This "freedom" runs exactly inverse to how many normies know about the internet. The more accessible it's become, the worse it's got for freedom. They weren't regulating what they didn't know about back in the glory days
They must really be scared of the voice and power anonymity gives normal people who wouldn't normally have it.
It's basically the leading reason why quantum computing is being funded. They gotta break your encryption to read your activity.
Pretty sad world.
What? Can you provide any evidence for this claim?
The numerous commercially viable applications of quantum computing. No conspiracy theory needed, you nutjob
Go ahead use metas verifier, give your biometrics to openai, type all your personal and financial information into copilot for advice, email your boss tell him anthropics boris was right you are now redundant, click on all of the ads you see, only engage with your peers on Facebook to let the algorithm decide how that goes, only drive in roads with flock cameras to stay safe, turn off your ad blocker, don't use vpns, etc. it's your life.
Or ... https://www.npr.org/2026/03/25/nx-s1-5752369/ice-surveillanc...
https://www.forbes.com/sites/emmawoollacott/2025/02/27/us-go...
https://www.wired.com/story/dhs-surveillance-phone-tracking-...
What are we doing even?
We forced parents to both work 40 hours and more including commutes and mandatory overtime, which led to an insane demand to have "safe spaces" for children where they do not need a parent.
Let's be realistic here. All this age verification stuff is pseudoscience and more importantly it isn't tested or standardized at all. It's just theater so the creeps get all the data on your children they can.
Meta has made a killing, literally, exploiting children psychology. Social media is the orphan crunching machine for nonorphans or something.
<lightbulb moment>
Abdicating responsibility, standards and government enforcement are three of white collar America's favorite things.
Seems like an opportunity for someone to become a billionaire by creating a standardization and licensing agency and then paying for some shills to get the ball rolling. Give it 5yr and everyone will have to do business with you lest the feds kick in their door. Give it 10yr and the useful idiots will be in the comment section talking about how XYZ age verification mechanism must be good because it's "certified" by your garbage and that the sky will fall if we get rid of it.
I hope I'm too jaded, but frankly I don't think I'm jaded enough.
It tickled her silly that she "got ID'd for the first time in decades."
I didn't have the heart to tell her they HAVE to ID everybody at purchase, here.
She glowed all day, so very happily #RIPmommabear
"Never attribute to stupidity that which is adequately explained by malice."
The Helen Lovejoy argument "will somebody please think of the children" provided for the foot in the door. The intended outcome is that only iris scans will allow for full child protection ... and that was the plan all along.
Logically parents are probably best suited to gate the content for their children how they see it fit.
They’ve wanted total surveillance for quite a while. Now politicians and billionaires are talking about making it happen.
Does else anyone remember the "age verification" on '80s video games? Some of them were hilarious. I think it was Leisure Suit Larry that asked multiple choice history questions that I guess were meant to be impossible for fifth graders to guess. I was the local history nerd, so I remember getting calls from classmates, like "we're trying to get into a game; when was JFK assassinated?" If I didn't know I'd ask my dad, who never knew he was contributing to the delinquency of (other) minors.
I'm from a non-English-speaking country. We didn't understand the questions at all, but all us kids in the neighborhood got into the game just fine with some brute forcing.
Also, coming up with the expected commands in the game was way beyond our skills so we'd only advance to a point where someone had seen and memorized others play. Didn't matter, as it was one of the only games in the system so we'd play it anyway. I still remember how hard it was to type "ken sent me" in the allotted time window.
I did this but inverted. When only pokemon red/blue were out in the US I downloaded a rom for pokemon yellow (discovered on whatever p2p I was using at the time) when searching for pokemon to play in an emulator. I didn't know it existed at the time and it was in Japanese. When I told my friends "pikachu follows you around!" None of them believed me.
Like, I remember someone telling me at one point that the thing in Head over Heels was a Dalek with prince Charles head. I didn't know either of those.
My brother and I had a notepad with all the questions and possible answers, and we'd run the game several times until we got through, then make a note of the answers. Eventually we had all of them.
"Ken sent me" is buried in my brain for that same reason. :)
Thanks for bringing back the memories!
I also remember the joke that was written on the same wall 'it takes leather balls to play rugby'.
I didn't get the joke till much later, but somehow it stuck with me.
Same, our solution was to pirate Softice, then step through the startup to find the checks and replace them with nops or point at the desired location. Sierra games were not that amenable to this though because of the interpreter.
And only then I realised that it was all in English :-).
It could be that that Leisure Suit Larry age verification was actually fairly good, if one put it in relation towards how much of their customer base and revenue came from selling the game to young children.
The vast majority of kids are stuck when you've blocked the first two returns for a google search for "Proxy"
HN is in a crazy bubble. The vast majority of kids live normal lives, and don't spend their time trying to get around filters and things because that's boring to them.
Most children don't have an ocean of free time. They are playing their video game or watching their shows or whatever.
offtopic, I would love remakes of all the old sierra games, with a local llm doing the text interface.
It's the whole "kids are going to drink anyway so I may as well buy them booze" brain rot.
As someone on a tech forum, we’re the only people who can really articulate the issues with the age verification approach.
It’s really the worst solution to these problems with awful tradeoffs.
A lot of people mentioning off-license/booze/tobacco like that was a success story. It isn’t. Outside main/high streets, kids manage to buy stuff just fine. Success requires enforcement, constant vigilance and heavy penalties. Not applicable to Meta at al.
Social media is a drug. Just like crack, making it illegal won’t make it go away. Only education can change this. Unfortunately, we now have multiple generations hooked on it, so I’m not sure this is even possible anymore.
I blocked all social media on my daughter’s phone until she turned 17. I am/was a massive control freak. Guess what happened after that?
I still have control over her apps. I still won’t let install snapchat and every other crap app she asks for. She understands it is for her own good, but none of that matters when “all her friends use it.”
The first iPhone went on sale when she was born. Obama was elected when she was a baby. The world sucks right now.
Rant over.
If you don’t have kids, maybe don’t speak pejoratively about the difficulties in raising children nowadays.
If you do, try to be a bit more empathetic.
At that age I had a half-time job and bought my own shit, except rent. A 17 year old should be doing that if they want their own non-locked-down phone. If they aren't, they should be thankful for whatever they are getting beyond bare necessities.
I believe it is counter-productive, because "not having age verification" is a lost battle. Unlike E2EE (where it is impossible to give access "only to the good guys"), it is possible to implement age verification in a privacy-preserving manner. And look at the ChatControl fight: even though it is not possible, we are still struggling to convince politicians of it. Good luck with age verification where it is actually possible to do something.
It should be a public service: just like the government issues IDs already, it should run the privacy-preserving system that allows citizens to prove their age. We should fight for that, otherwise we will get non-privacy-preserving systems managed by private companies (which is already starting).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dog_whistle_(politics)#
Now go in the street and ask random people: "if there was a safe way to protect your children from accessing XYZ on the internet, do you think it would be a good thing?".
Clearly one very real problem for parents right now is that if all the other kids do it, then it's hard to prevent your kid from doing it ("everybody is on TikTok, they make fun of me because I have no clue what's happening there"). If you can prevent most of them from accessing the service, then suddenly it becomes normal for kids not to use it.
There are a lot of issues with the UK approach. Privacy is a big one. But requiring this on every service is both a tax on the service and requires constantly authorizing stuff. That opens up the possibility for scams, data misuse, etc.
And no, saying we said to only use the data for verification clearly doesn't work. It didn't work for discord, or Persona, or Tea or AU10TIX or any others. Verification now means sharing that data with credit agencies and third party databases. Verification means keeping some data to resolve customer support disputes. There's data leakage for training and creating derived data products like biometric embeddings for future use.
Third party verification is a security nightmare.
I don't know why device based approvals abd controls aren't considered at all. Or really any privacy preserving technique.
And all this for ~54% efficacy?
There most definitely is privacy-protecting age verification. You go to a government office, you show your ID, they give you a piece of paper that officially says "over 18 years old". Now you have a piece of paper that says you're over 18 but doesn't say who you are, and the government won't know where you use it.
On the Internet, the idea is the same, but with cryptography.
Fakeable? Sure. Fakeable by an average 13-16 year old on a parental locked device? No.
It is possible, it just had to be implemented properly. We could complain about politicians not understanding that, of course. But if you spend 5 minutes reading complaints about age verification, you will see that nobody cares about understanding... if the people doesn't care, why would the politicians?
A simple solution to "generate infinite token and hands them out via a rest request" could be one of:
* Rate-limit the token generation. Nobody needs thousands per day, right?
* Make it illegal to distribute tokens. The server sees if you request an abnormal amount of tokens, and... it knows who you are. Not too hard to investigate.
* Make "honeypots" that scare the children when they try to access/buy the token.
I don't think it makes the concept completely useless.
And even if it's illegal to hand them out, it's not hard to set up a tor site to do it. I would be first in line to counter the state with such an implementation of this is the path we tread.
That is, one side knows who you are, but not what you do; the other side knows what you do, not who you are.
> And even if it's illegal to hand them out, it's not hard to set up a tor site to do it.
If a kid can use Tor to get a token, they most certainly can download with torrent or use a VPN to bypass the verification. But again, it doesn't have to be perfect, it just has to be effective for enough kids.
> I would be first in line to counter the state with such an implementation of this is the path we tread.
In a functioning democracy, people should vote instead of vandalising stuff. In a non-functional democracy, I guess don't complain if someone burns your car "to counter the state" some day if you think like this.
My point is that we should fight for privacy-preserving solutions. And the first step is to get informed about whether or not it is possible to verify the age in a privacy-preserving manner. Not to prepare for vandalism.
But how can this be done so that the site and I'd verifier can't collude on a backchannel to unmask you?
> In a non-functional democracy, I guess don't complain if someone burns your car "to counter the state" some day if you think like this.
I don't advocate for destroying private property. Sharing tokens doesn't destroy property or ip/copyright.
Now we're talking :-). Look at Privacy Pass, it's interesting!
If you like RFCs, it's here: https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc9576.html
Kagi has a nice explanation here: https://help.kagi.com/kagi/privacy/how-does-privacy-pass-wor...
Even highly regulated stuff like alcohol sales won't stop kids from grabbing bread yeast and a frozen juice concentrate to make their own if they really want to and the parents aren't parenting.
What if we...now hear me out....what if we didn't try to shoehorn a stupid and unworkable technological solution into this problem space and just...made parents responsible for their kids?
... and we would like to call our generation 'smart'. While knowing deep inside very well what a failure as a parent many of our generation are. The proof for/against are our kids right in front of our eyes and there is no escaping from this basic truth, thats why its so crushing.
Sorry gotta go, need to check some shitty sites who spy on me and try to push in vain on me some primitive ads.
/s
btw, yes, we must not lose the skill of parenting. no any technology give it back to us.
Likewise, when some megacorps capture the government and monopolize a market, the costs go up on both individuals and all the employers in other markets who are now paying monopoly rents with the money they could have otherwise used to hire more people (bidding up wages) or lower the prices workers pay when they buy their products.
Just asking them to pay more doesn't work when the party you want to pay more isn't the party which is extracting the money, and higher costs are just as much of a problem as lower wages.
Stop handing your kids brand new iPads and complaining, especially if you aren't willing to use parental controls.
> what if we didn't try to shoehorn a stupid and unworkable technological solution into this problem space
If you end it with "and make a good easy to use technical solution instead" then you found my stance.
If you end it with "and just...made parents responsible for their kids?" like GP then no that's not my stance at all.
That assumes a good easy to use technical solution is possible. What if classifying user-generated content as safe for kids is enormously subjective, and the labor required to accurately classify it even given a hypothetical objective standard would cost more than users are willing to pay to have it done?
Meanwhile we don't have any sound technical means of verifying age over the internet. The "use government ID" approaches are among the least effective because you have no good way to tell if the person behind the screen is the person on the ID.
...yes, that was my point. My whole argument was that it wasn't a tradeoff between "unworkable technical solution" and "make parents spend time they don't have".
I get a hard tech-bro vibe who like to blame others to deflect from responsibilty of their technology
"Fallacies programmers believe about people"
(you can sort of do this in countries with national ID schemes if you don't care about foreigners; for example, various people have found this in China where random things are gated behind having a WeChat account which requires a Chinese ID. You can't do this in the US or UK, which are big pushers of the ""age verification"" scheme)
I don't look like the other people whose name I share.
Famously, neither does this guy: https://iammarkzuckerberg.com
Yeeeah .. this is not the sort of thing that GDPR ought to allow, though.
Such law would not cause inconvenience to normal Internet users without children, would provide additional source of income for vigilant people and underpaid school staff, and would result in much higher degree of compliance. Why you guys don't elect people like me.
The normal state does include people with children.
As it becomes increasingly apparent having children is a suckers game where everyone piles on the penalties to you while eagerly awaiting the social security payments of your children (you make ~all the investment, then they take the profits), they will have even fewer.
This isn't about kids. It's about control and the people too stupid to give it to policians.
For some reason everyone has something that turns their brain off and makes them happily turn over freedom to people who hate them.
What about liquor shops or strip clubs? They ask for ID, which makes sense; we're not expecting parents to make sure their children don't go into these places. But the liquor shop takes a look at the ID and then doesn't collect the data.
Being entirely against age verification is not a good stance I think, but we should definitely have a hard stance on the privacy issue. There are systems that preserve privacy while still making it possible to verify you're old enough to use a service.
The California bill about setting an age in the OS was another interesting idea. Have the parents police a single setting on the device, then websites and apps can query that setting. Of course that's little more than the parental controls we always had, but apparently everyone forgot about those
I think the problem is that the internet has existed for quite a while without it. I'm sure there were similar complaints from people when you suddenly needed to pass a test to drive a car or when insurance became mandatory.
>> There are systems that preserve privacy while still making it possible to verify you're old enough to use a service.
What are these systems?
We could have a system where I authenticate myself against a government service only, or also licensed third party providers, they then provide me with signed proof-of-age certificates that can also be single use, and then I use them to proof my age with a particular service.
One of these is clearly a very extremely bad thing
It's almost sad this AI age verification bs doesn't even pose too big of a challenge for kid's creativity
https://web.archive.org/web/20220814024158/https://gabrielsi...
I'm not doing it for bloody discord or bsky DMs.