The www became infested with so-called "tech" companies acting as intermediaries (middlemen)

Lots of folks making money from surveillance ad system on the www. Oversized, unmanageable websites calling themselves "platforms"

The www is an ad network. Not a great place for non-commercial activity

Fortunately, the internet is more than the www. The internet was not created to collect behavioral data and deliver advertising as its primary purpose

People pay for an internet subscription, not a www subscription (or now a "social media subscription")

Definitely the 'slippery slope' debate is worth having, but that's way more relevant than the 'should 10-year-olds be able to do whatever' (aka all or nothing internet) which I think, if we took a vote, most people would be fine with nominal age restrictions, on that basis and on that basis alone aka outside the 'scary government' issue, which is again, real and material but nevertheless a separate concept however pragmatically engulfed these things are.

Maybe we need an alternative set of root servers for a free Internet.

Now you’ve given every parent a way to easily mass block all adult/social sites/apps if they want and no one’s privacy need be compromised.

When they were young, you had a choice between YouTube being completely locked down with no option to whitelist channels or letting them watch almost anything (although I think this has changed since but it's too late now for those of us with children that age).

Now, there is no way I can whitelist contact/groups on WhatsApp or Discord servers/friends. Once they hit 13, pretty much any option to restrict anything feels taken away from you as a parent.

Luckily, I have sensible children (I think!) but it's really hard as a parent trying to both be reasonably responsible, but not deny all technology, it's really hard to navigate a sensible course.

I think that this is actually a reasonable approach. It minimizes the information shared and doesn't create any identity tracking regime.

[0] https://media.reclaimthenet.org/docs/california-ab-1043-digi...

- You have to have an approved browser.

- It has to be installed on an approved platform, Google or Apple, for which you have a valid account.

- You have to have an account on the posting platform.

- You have to get past moderation on the posting platform.

That's without age verification.

EDIT: Oh it seems like that’s what the CA bill does? Seems good to me. I have zero problem with age restriction if age verification goes no further than mom buys kid iPhone enters birthdate, Instagram asks phone is user 18.

I wonder if EU law could give every citizen a right to a google or Apple account, including a forced recovery option if the account is 'deactivated'?

If at some point such an account becomes essential to function in society, access to such an account becomes a legal mandate.

For example, with Apple's parental controls, I can blanket-decline access to Social Media apps, or to apps recommended for a specific age or older, and I can also allow exceptions as I see it fit (for example, my kids have no access to WhatsApp but they are allowed to use Signal, both have the same age recommendations)

This moves the responsibility for age verification to me, the parent, and provides me with suitable tools to monitor this. With this, there is no need for my kid or me to upload sensitive data or go through some bad age verification implementation.

Websites are more difficult to control, but not impossible.

Long story short - improve tooling for parents that allow more centralized control instead of mandating social media to do the age verification on their end.

I know that my fascination with computers largely began with creating websites and messing about with HTML. Blog platforms can be considered social media I suppose but what if it is just a page of HTML or text?

Should I worry about having to verify my age/identity if I want to host a page on a vps in the future?

I feel like most politicians and people don't understand privacy and the impact of breaking it. Additionally seems the governments don't consider themselves a thread vector for privacy invasion.

More and more people agree that kids shouldn’t be on modern social media, including me. But most people also agree that mass surveillance is dangerous. The solution is to propose ways to block kids from modern social media (that actually works) without mass surveillance.

Better parental controls, more parental education, and site-specific age verification (Facebook etc. can require whatever PII they want to use their service) backed by incentives (whitelisting in parental controls, promoted as a “safe site” in parental education). Are these enough? Maybe not, but maybe mandatory ID and blocking VPNs aren’t enough as evidenced by people bypassing them. These (first three) are progress, that don’t yet require mass surveillance, and we can first see how effective they are then go from there.

I wish people wouldn’t say “age verification is bad”, it’s like “anti-work” and “defund the police”.

Rule 1 of The Internet hasn't changed, it's: never put your real info into the boxes. Never!

All that you need to know is that I am above 18 years of age.

You don't need to know how old I am, what my birthday is, what state I was born in, my gender, or when my passport expires.

The downside with ZK cryptography is the complexity. Something would have to be insanely inconvenient to justify it.

I told these admins this was immensely irresponsible. They said they just didn't want to get sued by an angry parent whose child joined some porn group. I was mocked endlessly. Now this. I'm not surprised.

Instead, in 10 years I'll probably have to log in with an iris scan to check the (ai-powered) time, and pay for the privilege.

sorry but I don't get this point. If you're on Instagram or Facebook, did you think fifteen different three letter agencies weren't already watching you? It has the word 'face' in the name, the entire point of that site is that people mindlessly share their personal information, it's not some underground space for activists.

You can be perfectly anonymous on the internet, but demanding to be anonymous on Facebook is like trying to start a Das Kapital book club at Goldman Sachs or decrying commercial culture while you're in a Disneyland theme park

The answer is whenever you think your child is ready to view porn.

I sure hope agents don’t swarm social media. But at the same time I think identity verification companies have a tougher problem, ai can produce real looking videos and documents. There’s probably no real way to verify someone purely through the internet at this point.

Internet has become a messy and dangerous place. Anybody with money can access it, that not necessarily means somebody with common sense.

90s, early 2000s, we would go to the internet to have good time.

2020s, people are ditching internet and new techs to afford having an offline life.

Users have been doing this themselves without state coercion for twenty years now by putting their real names all over Facebook and all the other socials. Nobody forced them to use their real names and post countless pictures of their faces alongside, and pour out the totality of their worthless opinions on every issue. Compared to this, when considered sensibly, the verification is almost a trivial step.

the beginning of the freedom of every person to become a developer

They could "protect the children" at will. They simply choose not to.

Why this kabuki?

  "Yes, please, regulate us" while making any formal regulation moot?

  Directing attention away from the bot plague?

  Pushing age verification to protect their algorithmic hate machines?

  Monkey motion to avoid talking about true privacy? (Specifically, all data encrypted *at rest* using translucent database strategies.)

Come on, do people seriously believe this will happen?

on which major social media networks can you post anonymously today? HN is a rare bird in that regard.

None of the social media networks my teens are bugging me to sign up for (IG, TT, Snapchat, etc.) have anonymous registration.

There's this cool new feature that they added to the Mullvad browser extension, which is built into the Browser. It gives you a random different proxy for each site, kind of like the Tor Browser.

Mullvad understands that VPNs overpromise and underdeliver, but if you combine a trustworthy VPN, a fingerprint-resistant browser, and uBlock Origin, you get a damn good internet privacy. The browser is not ideal for daily-driving because it's always incognito so you get signed out on close, but I heard they're working on a persistent version.

The ability to seamlessly record, upload, comment, react on _everything_, _everwhere_, _all the time_ is not natural, and not necessary.

Let them keep the devices, whatever, but remove the internet access.

Or keep the internet access, but remove the display/audio/camera.

It's more enforceable in public than trying to enforce whatever age verification solution they come up with.

And it gives parents the ability to appeal to authority when they ask their children, and the parents of their child's friends, to stop giving kids access to such devices. Right now a lone parent trying to push for better/healthier online activity to their friend group looks like a crazy person.

But of course we know they aren't really interested in helping parents and children. They want the surveillance capabilities.

The internet used to a technology people used to do interesting things, and with that came all its expectations. Now in addition to that, it is how modern live is negotiated. What used an optional thing is now a critical infrastructure upon which a person's life revolves, in most cases without any choice of their own.

When you drive your car on the road, do you complain about not having "a free road like back in the day" for being require to have a driver's license, and a registered car? not too long ago, you didn't need any of that to ride a horse or horse and carriage.

A free internet, as in the internet is like a public square, that isn't what society wants. Ultimately that is the issue, and you can't fault the public either. The public expects change, things to improve, and policy makers need tools with which they can enforce their policies. Telling both parties "um..no, i like my freedoms" won't stop the this train.

Let's take the example of mullvad here, and being able to purchase a VPN with bitcoin/cash (been there, am a customer) and access any site. It is entirely reasonable for governments to not want that. but the real enemy is the acceptance of this false dicthotomy of extremes. one of the things the internet has allowed us to have is to be able to prove entitlements without disclosing our identity. It is possible to prove that meet whatever legal requirements by having a government notarize a certificate of identity which you can present to sites and software as proof, while removing the government's own knowledge of what sites or software you're using, and removing your identity from the sites that are verifying your entitlements.

You're allowed to be in public without having to prove your identity (well.. that used to be the case in the US at least, now if you look like an immigrant, no longer the case). But to sell things, or buy restricted items, you have to show your identity, even in public. Certain businesses are required to verify your identity before engaging in commerce. Even worse, once you're in public everyone can record everything you do an identify you. Facial recognition, license place tracking, etc.. are all very real parts of the physical world today.

Lots of reform is needed, but we're getting the worst end of it because people gravitate to extremes out of laziness. if accessing social media, sensitive sites and commerce could be done in a privacy preserving way, there is no need for (or you can make a strong argument against) silly things like installing ubuntu requiring your ID, or needing to verify visitors IDs to your personal blog.

I hate it and I hate that this is what became popular instead of what the internet was in its heyday. It's sad to see.

But what won't fail is the obligation to provide your id to 'verification providers', who are obligated to provide it to websites, all of which are obligated to hand over your identity to the authorities the moment they ask - the verification provider included.

So it's just mass surveillance, finally sold to the public through 'think of the children!'.

It doesn't really help their case to parrot Musk-level misinformation...

https://www.pragencyone.co.uk/blog/elon-musk-misinformation-...

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/wales-englan...

It's not just kids it's bad for. Too many people don't have the agency or social/emotional insight to take care of themselves.

I just don't like that proponents of age verification are systematically (including in this article) dismissed as authoritarians hiding behind "just another “what about the children” excuse to introduce mass surveillance and censorship". Many people genuinely want to find a solution that is better for the children, and telling them "if you are open to age verification you are either a fascist or a moron" is not constructive.

Also I find the way ZKP is criticised a bit manipulative. It kinda implies that "fundamentally, any kind of ZKP system can be switched off remotely and without anyone realising", and that is wrong. It can be implemented in such a way that people have pretty good guarantees about it preserving their privacy, similar to end-to-end encryption. I find it hypocritical to say "E2EE can be reasonably trusted, but privacy-preserving age verification fundamentally cannot", just because tech people like the former and not the latter.

Porn has always been around (national geographic, anyone), and parents can use screen time to limit access for their children if they want.