You can have age gating or you can have privacy. Same as you can have porn filtering or you can have privacy.
(NB: I am firmly opposed to any of this. The solution for parents concerned about their kids is parenting and parental controls, not giving authoritarians of all stripes the means to snoop and ban whatever they decide is obscene or troubling.)
Only with that attitude will it be.
I'm still against age verification in general, but I don't think this particular bill warrants the massive outrage similarly being made lately about more serious age verification laws, as it does not require any facilities for actually verifying, well, anything.
https://trackbill.com/bill/california-assembly-bill-1043-age...
Summary reads to me as this bill requiring calls to an API to verify the user's age.
And it still gives no consequences for wrong/fake information.
Interestingly, they also define a "developer" simply as "a person that owns, maintains, or controls an application". Wouldn't that inherently include all users of a computer in general?
>MPA urged state lawmakers to reject Wicks’ bill this week in a letter, obtained by POLITICO, claiming device-based age checks may sow confusion; for example, if parents and kids had separate Netflix profiles under one account that’s logged in on multiple devices.
To the point where I'm asking if someone needs some token opposition to frame this obvious bill a political win?
This seems... not terrible? The typical counter-argument to any "think of the children!" hand-wringing is that parents should instead install parental controls or generally monitor what their own kids are up to. Having a standardized way to actually do that, without getting into the weirdness of third-party content controls (which are themselves a privacy/security nightmare), is not an awful idea. It's also limited to installed applications, so doesn't break the web.
This is basically just going to require all smartphones to have a "don't let this device download rated-M apps" mode. There's no actual data being provided - and the bill explicitly says so; it just wants a box to enter a birth date or age, not link it to an actual ID. I'm not clear on how you stop the kid from just flipping the switch back to the other mode; maybe the big manufacturers would have a lock such that changing the user's birthdate when they're a minor requires approval from a parent's linked account?
That said, on things like this I'm never certain whether to consider it a win that a reasonable step was taken instead of an extreme step, or to be worried that it's the first toe in the door that will lead to insanity.
anenefan•1h ago
klysm•1h ago