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.)
Which makes sense- since exposing minors to pornography was a crime, and got even more illegal somewhere in that time frame, along with the web becoming "professional" (whitehouse top level domain mixup stories anyone?), the honest pornography sites all started self-regulating and asking if somebody is an adult before anything naughty gets shown.
Push from the different generation? Late boomers got very puritan with age, also see themselves as more moral, again with age.
Here's an easy explanation.
Someone you don't like somehow gets voted into power and begins trying to enact changes towards a social group you belong to.
Building anonymous systems is one way to avoid Bad Actor X from having Big List Y, leading to Atrocity Z.
Having a really successful social network isn't a goal post, it's just a result.
Great -- it made a zillion dollars, meanwhile we've built the biggest leakiest information trove on individuals, for individuals to be exploited, ever imagined.
Yes, they just give megaphones to, and make bank on, the propagandists that are responsible for the current moral panic that's resulted in the US government discriminating against LGBT people.
These are the same companies that facilitated propaganda that led to hate and violence like this[1]. A deeper look with plentiful citations is here[2] from the Harvard Systemic Justice Project.
To give you an example that happened here in the US, a friend recently moved back to the city because his neighbors felt emboldened to constantly call him slurs on Facebook when they disagreed with him. He couldn't use local Facebook groups without bigots following him around and calling him slurs. They felt emboldened after this[3], knowing Facebook would do nothing about it. Discriminatory harassment over Facebook after their policy shift drove him from his own home. Facebook's policies allowed a community to successfully rid itself of a minority it didn't want to see or hear.
[1] https://www.pbs.org/newshour/world/amnesty-report-finds-face...
[2] https://systemicjustice.org/article/facebook-and-genocide-ho...
[3] https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/social-media/meta-new-hate-spee...
Tech platforms are valued at billions of dollars because they found ways of convincing their users to give up anonymity. That has nothing to do with whether the anonymity was important.
A huge issue with the modern web is that everything is seen as a profit motive. I don't care how many billions of dollars tracking everything we do and tying it to our person is worth. I don't want it.
I live next to idiots with gigabit and guns, that’s why.
And anyway, they created a library (https://blog.google/technology/safety-security/opening-up-ze...) to make age verification not useful for identification but still real.
So… I’m sure you meant fingerprinting but presumably porn sites already do that?
If you are under 18 there is no checking to stop you from saying you are are 18+
The only people it seems might have their privacy slightly reduced are people under 18 who are using a computer or smartphone/tablet that had parental controls set up by presumably a parent or guardian before giving the minor access.
The bill requires that the parent be able to enter the minor's birthday or age in one place, and then provide a way that the age range (under 5, 5-10, 10-13, 13-16, 16-18, 18+) can be given to apps/sites if they ask for it.
Thus, if you are a minor using a device that was set up with parental controls and you try to use an app or site that is restricted, that app or site will find out your age range.
Only with that attitude will it be.
What could possibly make it inevitable? We are either okay with those with authority forcing us to ID ourselves in some form or we aren't.
Although, a much more sensible alternative, would be to have parents (that do want the control) give their sons devices that send the "minor alert" signal, and have the services detect that.
(A) Under five years of age.
(B) At least 5 years of age and under 10 years of age.
(C) At least 10 years of age and under 13 years of age.
(D) At least 13 years of age and under 16 years of age.
It seems a menu, I wonder what could go wrong....
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.
By simply asking for their age. There's nothing about requiring that the age is actually attempted to be verified as accurate at all. And the "age bracket" is specifically defined as nonpersonally identifiable information.
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?
To quote: requires a business that provides an online service, product, or feature likely to be accessed by children to do certain things, including estimate the age of child users with a reasonable level of certainty appropriate to the risks
"Reasonable level of certainty" requires some kind of attempt at verification. In Australia for example they allow facial estimation software (which I agree is not good, but it provides some kind of estimate the government is happy with)
> And it still gives no consequences for wrong/fake information.
Where are you seeing that?
To quote the bill:
> This bill would punish noncompliance with a civil penalty to be enforced by the Attorney General, as prescribed.
And:
line 17 A person that violates this title shall be subject
line 18 to an injunction and liable for a civil penalty of not more than two
line 19 thousand five hundred dollars ($2,500) per affected child for each
line 20 negligent violation or not more than seven thousand five hundred
line 21 dollars ($7,500) per affected child for each intentional violation,
line 22 which shall be assessed and recovered only in a civil action brought
line 23 in the name of the people of the State of California by the Attorney
line 24 General.> (2)(A) A developer that receives a signal pursuant to this title shall be deemed to have actual knowledge of the age range of the user to whom that signal pertains across all platforms of the application and points of access of the application even if the developer willfully disregards the signal.
> (B) A developer shall not willfully disregard internal clear and convincing information otherwise available to the developer that indicates that a user’s age is different than the age bracket data indicated by a signal provided by an operating system provider or a covered application store.
> (3)(A) Except as provided in subparagraph (B), a developer shall treat a signal received pursuant to this title as the primary indicator of a user’s age range for purposes of determining the user’s age.
> (B) If a developer has internal clear and convincing information that a user’s age is different than the age indicated by a signal received pursuant to this title, the developer shall use that information as the primary indicator of the user’s age.
https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billTextClient.xhtm...
>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?
However, any system that just uses age is useless. They’re always excessively cautious, so you may as well just not provide access at all for kids between the ages of 6 and 12 or so, if that’s all you have.
No, block all + allow lists are still where it’s at. Please make those work better.
(If anyone knows the magic to make Minecraft [java] work with macOS allowlist-only network access, I’d love to know what it is. The fucking launcher wants to talk to a half-dozen bare IP addresses to work, and the addresses change seemingly every single launch, from a pool of what must be many hundreds, at least, it’s completely unusable)
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.
Notably, a "covered app store" doesn't seem to need to be... a store. Any website or application that allows users to download software is covered. There's no exemption for non-commercial activity. So every FOSS repo and programs like apt are covered? The requirement is also that developers will request the signal. No scoping to developers that have a reason to care? So vim is covered? Sort? Uniq?
Honestly I can't believe big tech would go along with it. Most of their infrastructure seems like it would clearly be illegal under this bill. Either there's something extremely obvious I'm missing or every lawyer looking at this bill is completely asleep at the wheel.
"We can't allow side loading because that would be illegal in terms of age verification".
I would love to be wrong about this though.
anenefan•4h ago
klysm•4h ago