I think, the best way to keep children from dangerous content is large fines for parents, for example, $4000 for every adult video their child was traumatized by. 50% of the fine is shared with the person who reported the violation (including site operators). After all being a parent is a responsibility.
Such law would not cause inconvenience to normal Internet users without children, and would result in much higher degree of compliance. Why you guys don't elect people like me.
Of course they do. Only fools expected anything else.
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 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'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 learned to read very early because I really wanted to be able to start the games on the family computer (instead of having to ask an adult to do it for me).
And only then I realised that it was all in English :-).
That wasn’t the era of global releases via the internet. You had to either buy it in person or, order by mail or get a copy from a BBS. It was an American game made for Americans.
Well, the main hurdle was that we were 7-9 years old iirc and didn't know any English at all, beyond the memorized "knock knock" etc. So the topic of the questions wasn't on the table :-)
I love this story. I remember seeing two pre-literate kindergarten kids playing on a gameboy or similar handheld, one of them teaching the other strings of button presses for things like “save game” - just navigating through all the menus by memory.
I played through the entire Pokemon Yellow without understanding a lick of english. You just remembered what the commands did, and you learnt by experimenting.
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. :)
There is one thing I do not remember, and that is if Leisure Suit Larry was advertised toward children and how much of Leisure Suit Larry revenue sales came from 0–12 years old, adolescent of 13–17 years old, and then adult customers.
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.
Of course rules are circumvented. Maybe even frequently. But that doesn't mean on the margin none of this stuff has an impact and is not worth the effort.
It's the whole "kids are going to drink anyway so I may as well buy them booze" brain rot.
In a similar vein: A while ago, Chinese adolescents were bypassing age restrictions for playtime in Mainland China by using the published national ID numbers of insolvent debtors (which are apparently published online to ensure that no financial institutions extend credit to them) to sign up for accounts. From what I understand, they started partially masking these national ID numbers in response to that.
The next age verification tech will involve checking tallness so we'll have kids standing on eachother's shoulders in a big trenchcoat to do the very adult act of installing linux.
My 12yo son is already significantly taller than me! We had to use his passport to prove he’s much younger than these systems report because they were locking him out from chatting to his friends (said the age gap was too big)
And when they need to find a way to circumvent this, they will ask for the full height picture without clothes on. Instead of addressing the problem of this entire idea and implementation they will continue to double down on it.
Lol. Or standing next to a dollhouse or something.
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.
>All this age verification stuff is pseudoscience and more importantly it isn't tested or standardized at all. It's just theater
<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.
They are trying for it that's for sure. It reminds me of the us war on drugs for some reason. Obviously I don't want kids doing drugs but it had ludicrous takes that were terrible for society. I guess there aren't enough wars going on? Have to go to war against the Internet or something now.
And this will then be used by the Apple and Google to make "security" on the OS "stronger" so that "we can protect the children" better (i.e. lock down the OS even more and take control away from us consumers). In this new idiocracy, this this is how corporates and government work together to take away our rights ...
Already a thing for a lot of services (like financial), but still. There's better ways that don't involve sending your ID or facial scans to a first or third party.
Yeah, I set up a trading212 account lately and they wanted ID scan + live video. I mind that a bit less for finance: identity theft is real, and there are significant disadvantages to me if someone can set up a bank account in my name without getting ID checked.
I don't want to give my ID to every service I interact online. But I also don't think it's reasonable to ask of parents to ensure their children aren't accessing age restricted content online.
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.
People like to make fun of and poke holes in the EU's planned implementation of this, but so far they seem to be the only ones trying to implement this in a way that doesn't give my name to every online service or some identity provider full knowledge which services I sign up to
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
>> Being entirely against age verification is not a good stance I think
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.
Collectively we have fought long and hard for internet freedom, it's depressing that all it takes is a generation and some bureaucratic idiocy for all that to be undone.
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
Why do you think Google, the world's largest ad company, is paying money out of its ears to research those topics? The sooner people realize all major us tech companies are contractors for the us department of war the better.
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.
I process the manual ID reviews for a small system. I don't get many, but I have seen some funny stuff. Last week a kid tried to use a still from a Spiderman movie.
"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.
The only good justification of it can be that the companies can claim that the age verification was done as per Terms of Service, so in the future no parent or parent group can come after them for the content. Along with better targeted advertising by identifying the target audiences.
Logically parents are probably best suited to gate the content for their children how they see it fit.
One big problem is that the verification is trying to estimate your age instead of looking up who is the actual person and then checking what the age is of that person. If the lookup returns that the face is that of a video game character it should reject as opposed to trying to estimate the age of that character.
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?
Nono too radical, parents dont have time, they need it to scroll some shitty social media cash grab to feel themselves even more shitty about their lives.
... 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.
Most of a "living wage" is from the cost of living. We make living space artificially scarce and then your rent is high but so is the rent on the small businesses that employ people. The restaurant can't pay the waitress more when their own costs have gone up, and the money is going to the landlords rather than the employers.
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.
Says a lot about the state of society when parenting is outsourced to technology, so that the parents can be further enslaved (because almost no one chooses to work two jobs).
> If you end it with "and make a good easy to use technical solution instead" then you found my stance.
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?
(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)
You don't need an Id. For example, you can crawl the internet for selfies and then try and tie that face with the person it belongs to. With enough datasets you can start to put together a database of relevant people enough that it's okay to do deeper validation for the people you did not collect a face for.