Ready or not, age verification is rolling out across the internet
theverge.comDunno, unless it's like, a bank or government service, no one is getting a copy of my ID or CC just so I can view their fkin website. I guess I'll just use the web even less than I already do.
Oh yeah and despite all this BS security theatre to "protect the children", teenagers will still find ways to connect with whoever they want to and find whatever content they want online. Source: I was a 12-year-old with dialup internet and my own computer, once.
Relevant nitpick: everywhere this article says "internet" they mean "web".
> Dunno, unless it's like, a bank or government service, no one is getting a copy of my ID or CC just so I can view their fkin website.
Same, companies underestimate how interested I am in using their websites. Last month I uninstalled instagram because it asked me to pay or get more ads, every other post was already either an ad or a promotional post, I left.
The vast majority of websites are already unusable or full of low value bot content, most search engines are useless, block behind paywalls, subscriptions, &c. Hopefully this will create a new ecosystem of tools for people who want to escape
so it's actually good for society? :) We can go outside and see a sun again
>We can go outside and see a sun again
At least until they figure out how to put ads on it.
Maybe this will finally encourage us to move away from centralized services and create truly decentralized social networks outside of our own governments reach.
They'll just ban those
They probably won't be able to.
There's a legal right to end-to-end encryption and there's nothing preventing you from making a system look like HTTPS.
It'll need to be developed extraterritorially, otherwise they'd just pick up the people developing it. They'll ban the original website, so you'll have to get it through dodgy means, which means they can insert backdoors for you (unless you're able to verify the code and compile it for yourself).
Have you heard of the hush-hush over Chat Control, a recurring theme on this site? It's getting to the point that they could shoehorn that with age verification push.
Yes, but they have to fit it around the judgements of the different European courts, and they really can't do it, so they try to say 'Oh, this is totally voluntary' and then when realise that that won't work they decide to go after companies, etc.
They have some political power, but they don't have all of it and they are quite constrained.
>there's nothing preventing you from making a system look like HTTPS.
Did you hear about the Great Firewall?
And they just have to say it's to protect "the children"/"democracy"/"to fight disinformation"/"hate speech". You can't beat politics with technology.
My theory: Age verification is essentially human verification. It is to stop AI. It's primarily for age of the human but more fundamentally it's about AI.
If that were the motivation I would find it acceptable, but it almost definitely isn't.
AI generated images/video pass verification...
Right, because age verification has totally put a stop to underage drinking and drug use.
Q: If I am a teenager wanting to access content that is prohibited by age verification, who is mostly likely the party that will provide access?
A: The local drug dealer or extremist.
This means a new market is born.
we can obviously use highschool logic for that, or we can see studies.
I don't really have time to go deeply into this, but here is your official government source saying that age limit for alcohol works by limiting deaths etc from alcohol use for people under 21
https://www.cdc.gov/alcohol/underage-drinking/minimum-legal-...
This study says that when you tell young people underage drinking is illegal then underage people report their drinking less.
I love this. I don't think children should be seeing what they can see on the Internet (we limit what movies or games they can buy, but hey - you can go online and watch hardcore porn, or people getting killed on video even when you are 12).
I also love that EU is working on a digital wallet that can facilitate that age check - I would for someone to make a social media with only verified people living in EU. Why do I need to browse russian generated posts that try to pretend they are citizens of my country?
I understand Internet has ideological foundations that are deeply entrenched in Sillicon Valley / American culture, but I don't but those anymore.
> don't think children should be seeing what they can see on the Internet
We’re still on hacker news, right? When did any control function installed by our parents or schools ever limit us?
More importantly: where are the restrictions on addictive social media? Where we have documented evidence of harm being done?
I don't understand how you can see it as okay from the point of view of European culture though.
Age verification requires treating a website, not as some random person, but as a platform which has control of content and some responsibility. Age verification requires giving websites information that they should not have.
Surely the European perspective should be that it is not Reddit's business whether I am 50 or 15. That they are just a website and should not care who I am and should not have that information.
Furthermore, this violent images are reality. It should be possible to discuss war in public, and use first-hand information and discuss horrible pictures in detail.
it is societies business to limit certain illegal activities both online and offline.
Most countries including USA have Indecent Exposure laws, prohibiting women for example from flashing their breasts on the street.
Yet somehow online adult women are able to "flash" homemade videos of them making sex with multiple partners, and you somehow think it's ok for children age 11 to view this with no responsibility on reddit's part?
Also most countries limit what children can do. It's illegal to drink even when you are 20 in USA. Why do we think children are mature enough when they are 11 to view unmoderated usergenerated content on tiktok? Many made by 18+ people driven by commercial interest and many of these videos dangerous for children (for example many challanges, where kids die after trying to do them).
Obviously one can have this kind of naive liberalism view, that anything goes. I personally don't and that's why I shared my comment.
I'm not a liberal, but I believe that democracy requires a free public conversation.
Combat videos are not pornography.
> Obviously one can have this kind of naive liberalism view, that anything goes.
Very few people think this.
The issue isn't "anything goes", the issue is the expansion of surveillance. There is no way that I'm willing to subject myself to that. If that's a requirement for using a web site, then that web site is not suitable for me, so these laws make the web even smaller than it has already become.
How is that digital wallet even going, though? Last time I heard the Digital Euro proposal still faces several hurdles - including privacy.
Didn't know Von der Leyen had an HN account!
Agreed. Now that web access is so readily available, it's about time online service providers started taking more responsibility for what they publish and who can access it. That short-lived era of the Internet being only for tech-savvy adults is long gone. The online world is the real world now.
People often use the phrase "think of the children!" mockingly, but we really do need to think about their welfare and what sort of society we want them to develop and grow up in, and that includes the part of society that is mediated online.
Despite the criticisms people have over some of the detail in these new regulations, I see this as a very positive first step in the right direction.
Is this intended as satire? Even if the position is so blatantly indefensible and ill-informed to be realistic, it's an unfortunate reality that there are people who actually do believe this.
I don't really like articles like this propagating it like it's just an inevitable thing that we should just accept.
How about we don't? Where's the hacker news post of a GitHub repo with easy ways to bypass age verification and multiple mirrors and such so that it can't be wiped away. It'd be a new arms race.
Parents should just be responsible for their kids.
Really sick of the enshittification epidemic.
No thanks. I'm sure I'm not alone when I say that I will just stop using your service if you require age identification from me.
Thats exactly what "they" want.
they also want me to stop using ad blockers.
Probably for the best, the internet is a pretty shitty place now.
It's really important to make sure the 16 year olds that are about to get the vote in the UK remain uninformed about what's going on in the UK and the wider world - we don't want them to start voting the wrong way now, do we?
Why? What do you have against trans people?
I don't.
How is age verification going to make it any better?
The internet is already segregated by age groups. The kids are on tiktok and discord, snapchat. You're not talking to any of them on HN or even Reddit.
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