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azhdanova 3 hours ago [-]
The court reasoned sensibly: it's wrong to violate the rights of all citizens just to weed out a small group of violators. This is contrary to data protection regulations. The controversial Chat Control law follows the same logic: to find criminals, they propose monitoring everyone.
The problem is that any age verification system effectively becomes an identity verification system. And such tools rarely remain "just for kids"—they quickly become used for other purposes. The only secure way is to verify not the person's identity, but the device's status (for example, that it's a children's device). This is called age assurance: we confirm age without knowing who exactly is in front of us.
braiamp 1 hours ago [-]
> The problem is that any age verification system effectively becomes an identity verification system. And such tools rarely remain "just for kids"—they quickly become used for other purposes. The only secure way is to verify not the person's identity, but the device's status (for example, that it's a children's device). This is called age assurance: we confirm age without knowing who exactly is in front of us.
Age assurance is still treating the symptom. If the platform is designed to addict and radicalize, a children's device getting in doesn't help the child, it just means the harmful design now has a younger victim. The only fix that actually works is making the platform safe for everyone, which means regulating what these services are allowed to do to users in the first place, not building better gates around them.
RiverCrochet 16 minutes ago [-]
Here's a better fix: If a parent continuously allows their child to go to a known unsafe place, they are negligent and should no longer be a parent. The exception is if the operator of said unsafe place specifically enticed children. I haven't been following closely but weren't there internal emails showing Facebook was specifically trying to addict and hook teens? That's definitely wrong and a bad thing Facebook did, and they should be held accountable for sure.
However, if my platform says on the outside that it's for 18+, identifies itself as such using machine-readable signals, and I don't take specific action to entice children into the service, it's your failure to parent if they access it, and you should shoulder most or all the liability for it.
The slipperly slope here to avoid is this: do you really want to adopt a model where the state is the one who "owns" your child (except financially, of course, you still have to pay everything) and can unilaterally do things to you and your child in the same of child safety without your input or consent? This exists currently to some extent, it can get much worse.
A government body may review a service and determine it is addictive and radicalizing. This is fine, and helpful. Even requiring the service to display a warning is OK. Then, parents who ignore the clear warning and repeatedly fail to control their children from accessing it should lose parental rights.
iamnothere 1 hours ago [-]
What is “harmful behavior” when it comes to words? You may have your own definition, but I guarantee that you can’t get a supermajority to agree with it.
(There are some basic things like fraud and such that are already illegal.)
Most people don’t actually want to ban “harmful” speech except for the speech of their political enemies.
braiamp 48 minutes ago [-]
Nobody mentioned speech. Infinite scroll isn't speech. Engagement-maximizing algorithms that push increasingly extreme content to keep you on the app longer ain't speech. The business model that makes outrage more profitable than accuracy isn't speech. You can have complete freedom of expression and still regulate that a platform isn't designed to psychologically exploit the people using it. These are not the same thing
anramon 42 minutes ago [-]
> and radicalize
It always beautiful how single-word choices like this can reveal the actual intent behind seemingly "reasonable" words.
(Forgive the link source - I can see in hindsight how that might not be perceived as the most objective source - but there are many other sources for those who care to look.)
braiamp 32 minutes ago [-]
So social networks dont benefit from radicalizing people? Abusing their own human nature against them? Thats your argument, really?
pmontra 3 hours ago [-]
Or realize that there is no way to know who is using a device without looking at the device holders for all the time they use the device. It's like ordering alcoholics or cigarettes: the seller looks at you see the white hairs (OK) or see a 16yo face (documents please.) A device registered to an adult can be used by a child. I know, it's a failure of parental control, but how many teenagers managed to get adult magazines in the last 100 years? They will get adult devices too. So there is no way to create a 100% effective system. Kids and teenagers will find workarounds, everybody else will live a worse life.
forgetfreeman 2 hours ago [-]
1990s: ~%36 of all teens smoked
2020s: >%2 of all teens smoke
Kinda suggests that putting limitations in place actually produces results. Crazy innit?
triceratops 2 hours ago [-]
It also means we don't need identity verification. Anonymous scratch-off cards sold in stores to adults, just like cigarettes, can be used to verify age. Or alternatively, device-only attestation. There's no reason to verify age upon every use of the product; only when it's sold.
forgetfreeman 29 minutes ago [-]
Nah, we definitely need identity and age verification, if for no other reason than it strips tech companies and data brokers of plausible deniability. They already know who you are and by extension your age, this fight is very much about tech companies avoiding consequences.
triceratops 18 minutes ago [-]
> we definitely need identity and age verification...it strips tech companies and data brokers of plausible deniability
> this fight is very much about tech companies avoiding consequences.
If I follow your logic, you seem to be saying: tech companies could easily not target kids if they wanted to, but they don't. That may be true, but I don't see why violating everyone's privacy is the only way to prove it.
Aurornis 55 minutes ago [-]
Cigarettes have been age restricted for around 100 years. Not related to your 1990 to 2020 time period at all.
If you weren't aware, smoking became uncool a long time ago. Teens who consume tobacco use vapes or Zyn now.
breezybottom 21 minutes ago [-]
That doesn't mean it was enforced.
seethishat 1 hours ago [-]
They all use Zyn now.
ipsod 57 minutes ago [-]
and vapes
UpsideDownRide 2 hours ago [-]
This logic is sus. Just because we cannot have a oerfect system doesn't mean we shouldn't have it at all. Like alcohol age limitations, they can be worked around and wont ever be 100 percent perfect but I see regularly teens bouncing off the register at my local store.
So the metric should be case by case for each proposed solution. Most of things proposed are no good, but that doesn't mean there is not a sensible solution out there to limit net for teens.
pbkompasz 3 hours ago [-]
> The problem is that any age verification system effectively becomes an identity verification system. And such tools rarely remain "just for kids"—they quickly become used for other purposes.
source?
astrobe_ 2 hours ago [-]
No source but a possible counter-example: SIM card carries the date-of-birth of the user (because, really, part of the problem is that you cannot supervise what a kid does with their phone 24/7), age-restricted websites have a flag in their HTTP headers, browser get age from SIM card through the OS. Same goes with app stores etc.
Like copy-protection there's always a way to circumvent it, the name of the game is to make it difficult enough. And for parents, to make it very easy to set-up.
big85 2 hours ago [-]
XKEYSCORE, the UK system brought in to allow warrantless surveillance for national security purposes and child abuse prevention, ended up being used for such minor offences as catching people dumping rubbish in other people's bin, or parents lying about their child's address to get into a better school district. In the United States, the same system was used for low-level offences like cannabis possession.
jbuhbjlnjbn 3 hours ago [-]
Source for this ever not being the case?
throw-the-towel 41 minutes ago [-]
This user is known to the state of California to post LLM text.
dathinab 2 hours ago [-]
> age verification system effectively becomes an identity verification system.
this is fundamentally wrong and accepting this as an industry will only lead to required identity verification becoming the norm sooner or later
the important realization is age verification is in the end "just" a form of parenting tool
this means
- it doesn't need to be a "perfect", glancing at the age of a passport when buying adult products isn't perfect either, but it's good enough. And it doesn't require seeing the address, name, (in most cases) day and month, gender etc. on a id, nor any form of "noting them down".
- it doesn't need to be attestation based, unhackable or anything like that. It complements parenting, not replaces it.
- in turn it also shouldn't need anyones id, in most places children below 18 don't need any id but 16+ is still a age barrier
or to lay it out in rough design
- require multimedia devices sold to have a child "mode" functionality
- allow setting a age category or age (to auto determine and update the category), require a age set for this purpose to be kept private on the device and not shared, analyzed etc.
- require web sites and apps to have voluntary min age limits, similar to other products, block access _client side_ based on this information. The standard should allow region/country specific limits and reason tags.
- There are a bunch of edge cases omitted, like sites serving dynamic content/platforms in general. Requirements for parents to be allowed to define exceptions (in both directions) and handling of sides not having your countries age gating. Etc.
- properly educate parent about it
this provides sufficient functionality to support parents in parenting without requiring any identity verification or overriding the parents right to parent
yes, it's not perfect in many ways. But it doesn't need to perfect, it's "just fine" for what it tries to archive.
bauldursdev 1 hours ago [-]
If you don't verify identity it's easy to fake.
dathinab 1 hours ago [-]
it doesn't matter!!!
it's a parenting tool, not an online banking system
EDIT: Also the most relevant devices are not laptops, but phones, tablets, gaming consoles. Some of them have such a system already working "good enough" for the use cases of "games"/"game stores" and similar. Yes not browser. But very much extensible to that.
paulsutter 1 hours ago [-]
Giving parents control of child mode is much better than the state deciding. If Parents want to fake the ages of their child, that sounds good to me.
skybrian 4 hours ago [-]
This could have been an http header. It's hard to identify people, but blocking child-locked devices should be easy, since the devices can be built to cooperate.
Then it's up to parents to give their kids child-locked devices and for stores to not sell unlocked devices to kids.
big85 2 hours ago [-]
There is just such a HTTP header, for adult sites. It's not granular enough to set individual age ratings, just to mark a page as 18+.
Is that the "don't put my website into Google Safe search because it's porn" header?
Maybe we need a "it's not for kids but it's not porn either" header.
clickety_clack 3 hours ago [-]
People keep saying it’s the parents responsibility to keep their kids safe, and don’t give them the tools! This is such an obvious one. I should be able to lock down a laptop for a child, and then have the browser limit websites to those that are actually child safe. I don’t care if a government agency is the one issuing “child safety certs”. This gets around the whole “identify everyone no matter what” thing, and it means that parents don’t have to run an entire IT department level of security infrastructure to keep their kids safe online.
marcosdumay 3 hours ago [-]
There's a reason why nobody is giving the parents those tools.
And it's the same reason why everybody keeps pushing the stupidier, most obnoxious and invasive tools to "protect the children".
encoderer 3 hours ago [-]
my kids are not teenagers yet, what am I missing? the iPad I let them use has child safety enabled and it seems to do exactly what the comment above you is suggesting.
marcosdumay 1 hours ago [-]
What you are missing is that it's not enough for a fraction of devices to have parental control.
If you want kids to not access social networks, you need to have most of them out. If only a minority is out, they will just be outcast.
That said, "everybody must do that thing that Apple does" may be a very good example of good regulation. IDK what Apple does, though.
hdgvhicv 3 hours ago [-]
Apple does parental controls right. The easy path is parental controls.
Companies like epic and Microsoft dont. The easy path is just a default install
I suspect this is by design.
throwaway27448 3 hours ago [-]
Child-locked devices can already whitelist/blacklist sites and apps. The issue is not capability.
And before anyone blames the parents, parents will always be shitty. They are an impediment to children's health society must work around.
I wish we would just pull the plug on ad-based social media altogether. The incentives add up to destroying society.
txrx0000 1 hours ago [-]
Parents generally have their own children's best interests in mind. If you personally have kids, feel free to delegate responsibility to someone else, since you believe that you're shitty to your own child. But you do not get to decide how to parent other people's children.
skybrian 2 hours ago [-]
I don't think passively assuming you'll end up on the relevant lists is going to do it for websites that need to keep kids out for whatever reason.
throwaway27448 2 hours ago [-]
Regulating such a list seems like a very backwards and expensive way to do this when kids will just use their parents identity (or make up one wholesale). Surely this is really about trying to hold people liable for speech politicians and lobbyists don't like.
hvb2 20 minutes ago [-]
> parents will always be shitty. They are an impediment to children's health society must work around.
The health of kids with parents is infinitely better than those without. Just saying
wavemode 2 hours ago [-]
> And before anyone blames the parents, parents will always be shitty. They are an impediment to children's health society must work around.
...huh? This is completely backwards. We should be making laws that punish parents for failing to parent properly. Not laws that punish everyone.
If we pass a law that children under a certain age may not use social media, then giving your child a non-child-locked device should be treated the same way we treat giving your child alcohol or cigarettes.
adolph 1 hours ago [-]
> And before anyone blames the parents, parents will always be shitty. They are an impediment to children's health society must work around.
Zuckerberg was not a parent when he conceived of Facebook and "society" as a whole is pushing social media on kids, not parents.
forgetfreeman 2 hours ago [-]
"parents will always be shitty"
Maybe cut nontechnicals a little slack? Their adversaries have invested literally billions of dollars in R&D.
throwaway27448 2 hours ago [-]
This isn't a question of technicality....
adolph 56 minutes ago [-]
Ok, what is your stack? Which MDM did you put on your tween's devices? What about the 15 year old who really wants Graphene OS? Do they VPN back to your home network to ensure your DNS and IP block based filtering applies to their mobile usage? Are you caching the teachers' recommended YouTube videos to Plex from the YTDL container or just monitoring their watch list stats of brain rot shorts?
iamnothere 53 minutes ago [-]
He’s saying that parents will always allow their kids to see, think, learn, and say things that he believes should be off limits, with government stepping in to decide that.
doright 10 minutes ago [-]
Some parents will berate their kids or discipline them inappropriately and instill stress and anxiety in them that causes them to seek out things that should be off limits. It's easier to see a solution for the second issue when the first is not socially acceptable to talk about out loud. Nobody wants to be told they are parenting their own kids inappropriately. But in some cases, that just reality. Tech CEOs are a 100% reliable source of blame; parents - the people who are physically around their children the most - are not. (Source: myself. The best I managed to escape childhood with was C-PTSD, and I have had to get therapy to be able to manage my digital device usage ever since.)
forgetfreeman 26 minutes ago [-]
I mean I think we can all broadly agree that showing snuff and hardcore porn to 11 yr olds is objectively bad. There is a line, we just might not agree on exactly where it should be placed.
forgetfreeman 35 minutes ago [-]
Except technicality absolutely factors in. Sure there's mouthbreathers out there that exercise no oversight at all over the content their kids are exposed to but there's also a large group of well-intentioned parents that would likely do a much better job at this if the bar wasn't set quite so high.
graemep 4 hours ago [-]
The title is unfortunately edited. The courts have blocked it. The government wants it.
awithrow 3 hours ago [-]
The courts are part of the government no?
kergonath 2 hours ago [-]
Cultural tangent: in France, "the government" is the group of ministries (or departments in the US), part of the executive branch. So, the judiciary is not part of the government, and the National Assembly and the Senate (legislative branch) are not either. The head of state is not part of the government either, which is how you can get headlines about disagreements between the President and the Government. It’s quite different from how things are managed in the US. My understanding is that it is somewhat similar in the UK, which would be relevant in a BBC story.
tmp10423288442 3 hours ago [-]
In Western countries, the judiciary and the executive (which contains the day-to-day operations of the government) generally operate independently and can rule against each other. I'm most familiar with the US, and I think its constitution was the first to encode judicial independence - and constitutional review by the Supreme Court was established early on in US history. But all Western countries these days have had judges rule against executive policy and the executive obey it.
The details of how to override a ruling against the executive does differ between countries, and also on whether its considered just an interpretation of law or a constitutional question. Both the US and France have a written constitution that's binding on other branches, while the UK does not.
ChocolateGod 3 hours ago [-]
> The details of how to override a ruling against the executive does differ between countries, and also on whether its considered just an interpretation of law or a constitutional question. Both the US and France have a written constitution that's binding on other branches, while the UK does not.
Yeh. In the UK, the supreme court can not strike down primary legislation. It can rule executive actions are not following the primary legislation or unwritten constitutional rules, but if parliament passes a law that says oranges are now green, the supreme court is in no position to challenge it.
wahern 10 minutes ago [-]
The UK does have the Principle of Legality, which is a way for courts to strike down an application of primary legislation by requiring a clear statement to abrogate common law and constitutional norms: https://ukconstitutionallaw.org/2024/05/20/hayley-hooper-his...
An interesting twist to UK constitutional jurisprudence is that until relatively recently the House of Lords was the highest court, so contrasting constitutional judicial review between the US and UK by gesturing at the principle of Parliamentary Supremacy didn't necessarily prove anything as the House of Lords was, in a sense, Parliament. (This was often a rebuttal for when people brought up the Principle of Legality as contradicting Parliamentary Supremacy, or otherwise interjected in discussions of judicial review in the UK.) Now that the highest court is independent, the next 100 years of constitutional jurisprudence in the UK should prove interesting.
kergonath 2 hours ago [-]
> if parliament passes a law that says oranges are now green, the supreme court is in no position to challenge it.
It’s a good thing MPs are serious people and Parliament would never do that, right? :)
kps 27 minutes ago [-]
If you're worried about MPs doing that, you should be equally worried about judges doing that. The difference is that MPs can be voted out.
pmontra 3 hours ago [-]
I checked your profile and you are cofounder of a company with branches all around Europe. At least the countries in the EU should have separation of powers, and the judicial (the courts) are independent from the government and there is a parliament which is more or less independent from the government too. Of course the government is usually backed by the majority of the parliament so the two of them often act together. The courts apply the law, whatever it is, but if the parliament or the government or the president (for presidential democracies) do something against the law or the constitution (or equivalent chart), there is at least a court that can undo that legislation and send it back for an overhaul. This is what happened in France.
alecbz 2 hours ago [-]
> At least the countries in the EU should have separation of powers, and the judicial (the courts) are independent from the government
In the US "government" generally refers to all three branches; is that not the case in Europe?
kergonath 1 hours ago [-]
I don’t know about the whole of Europe but generally, no. The government is the executive branch or a subset of it.
alecbz 1 hours ago [-]
Interesting -- is there any term referring to the executive, legislative, and judicial functions collectively?
kergonath 1 hours ago [-]
I am not sure. In French that would be the state (L’État). It’s more complicated in the U.K., with its layers of national, devolved country, and local governance. Then, it would be different again in federations like Germany.
psalaun 3 hours ago [-]
No, separation of powers
zug_zug 4 hours ago [-]
Seems like there are many ways to get toward the best of both worlds -- don't allow people to upload pictures of kids who are clearly under 15 to social media would get us a lot of the way there.
Also all of these companies know from advertising data, and location data, that you are at school, who you are, etc. They would also know that all of your friends are also teenagers.
If the law is serious there are many many ways to enforce this without violating privacy.
wizzwizz4 4 hours ago [-]
Without further violating privacy. I would say that the data these companies are already collecting on people (including children, who many believe should be afforded extra protections from such companies) is a major, systematic privacy violation.
philipwhiuk 3 hours ago [-]
> Seems like there are many ways to get toward the best of both worlds -- don't allow people to upload pictures of kids who are clearly under 15 to social media would get us a lot of the way there.
How do you prevent kids uploading photos of themselves?
Cider9986 3 hours ago [-]
YouTube kids is able to do it. They detect kids in regular YouTube and whether they are the account owner and move them to YouTube kids.
seethishat 2 hours ago [-]
The Internet was built for adults. Then, we gave kids tablets and phones. Now, decades later, we have a problem. Kids see things meant for adults.
Maybe we need an adult only portion of the Internet and verify identity only on that (like bars do to keep out kids).
New TLD maybe? .adult
hk1337 4 hours ago [-]
What I find interesting is that Texas did it with just pornography sites, everyone complains. Then California, which included those that complained by Texas' law, says they're going to do it at the OS level, some people were okay with it but some still opposed it and possibly some others opposed it. Yet, they're still pushing forward with both?
nomel 2 hours ago [-]
Just like all the other policies that somehow manage to move at the speed of light across the globe. These politicians are seem to all be influenced by the same thing, with that usually being in opposition to the people that voted for them.
sixthDot 3 hours ago [-]
As french citizen what I can say is: Parliamentary time wasted. During the initial work the deputees that have initiated the project could have figured out that the constitutional court would, in fine, block the text.
kergonath 1 hours ago [-]
Sometimes these things are a prelude to constitutional changes, or at least could be in the minds of the proponents.
mytailorisrich 2 hours ago [-]
Sometimes they do know but do it anyway (or even for that very reason) because it serves their political interests and then the great bill they were supporting is blocked by someone else, which can be blamed as needed.
I think Trump played that game a number of times, for instance.
dgellow 4 hours ago [-]
Oh that’s interesting. Could that potentially be used as a blocker for Chat Control 2.0 at the European level?
paulsutter 1 hours ago [-]
The right implementation is to have parents mark certain devices as "under 18", and then have those devices perform accordingly.
This give parents useful control, and removes the state overreach.
josefritzishere 3 hours ago [-]
This is the correct response. Privacy is a human right.
purplerabbit 3 hours ago [-]
I always find it weird when people declare things “are” rights, as rights are things societies create. “Should be a right” seems like a more appropriate framing
There are. In the constitution, as the court found. There are also reasonable arguments that they are an unavoidable consequence of Human Rights, as described in the declaration of 1789, which is also in the constitution.
The right to privacy is also explicitly in the Code Civil since 1970, in the European Convention on Human Rights and the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union (both are binding to EU member states).
iamnothere 1 hours ago [-]
That’s a simplistic view of rights, and ignores other conceptions of rights like natural rights.
josefritzishere 9 minutes ago [-]
Nuanced, but I don't think you're disagreeing that privacy is a right. Very few people do and most of them would be classified as sociopaths. ex. Zuckerberg, Langley, Altman, et. al. Anti-privacy actions are often immoral, sometimes illegal and almost universally anti-social.
josefritzishere 17 minutes ago [-]
Rights are inalienable. You don't grant them by law. You get them when you're born.
nephihaha 56 minutes ago [-]
Like all those other countries. I'm sure they came up with this idea all by themselves.
2 hours ago [-]
amazingamazing 3 hours ago [-]
It is unclear to me how you can regulate any digital service with respect to any demographic identity without regression to full identity check.
Parental controls are not a solution, either. People are free to use any terminal they wish. If you wanted to change that then it again regresses to the same issue.
owisd 1 hours ago [-]
A few options: (a) load a digital copy of an existing ID into your OS's wallet app then the wallet app can simply attest to any service that the device is owned by someone over 18 (b) sell single-use tokens in grocery stores that require an ID to purchase like alcohol. token can be used to verify you're 18+ for one site. (c) require that any network-enabled device can only be bought by showing ID to prove 18+ and then when set up can be configured at the OS-level as child-owned so a parent can buy a device and do the initial setup so it's locked in child mode.
metalman 3 hours ago [-]
I love how the french can go from bieng, from bieng, French, to making complete rational sensical descions that they will then stick to but refuse to discuss.
Bravo vive la france!
braiamp 43 minutes ago [-]
[dead]
jdw64 27 minutes ago [-]
[dead]
rabfu 3 hours ago [-]
Frankly, the proper solution is to ban social media regardless of age. We are already doing it with heroin and other similar substances and clearly social media are pretty bad for everyone and anyone.
betaby 3 hours ago [-]
Tobacco and alcohol are scientifically proven carcinogens, yet they are sold ubiquitously in the [western] world. I would argue they are more dangerous than social medias. Yet we don't see any push in banning tobacco and alcohol for 'everyone'.
rabfu 3 hours ago [-]
We won't ban any of all these things because there are people with political power that make fortunes out of them. Whether that's alcohol, social media, tobacco or otherwise.
We will not go for the proper solution, not because it's not the proper solution but because powerful people won't allow it.
If you do look at the things we have indeed banned, you will find that they are mostly coming from outside our countries. It's not cut and dry, but it's very geopolitical pretty often.
iamnothere 1 hours ago [-]
I don’t make money off alcohol, in fact I rarely drink it, but I still wouldn’t want to ban it. I don’t know who your “we” is here.
UpsideDownRide 2 hours ago [-]
Alcohol story is a lot more than just it being a good business, in vino veritas and all. There is a huge cultural aspect around it for better or worse.
sajithdilshan 3 hours ago [-]
Funny that you’re saying that in a social media
Cider9986 2 hours ago [-]
What media? I can't upload photos or videos here.
tgv 2 hours ago [-]
I haven't seen children doomscrolling HN lately, have you?
But, whatever it takes. Social media in combination with mobile phones is destroying the latest generations. Add AI in the mix, and we're on the road to Idiocracy.
rabfu 3 hours ago [-]
It's all about politics.
sajithdilshan 3 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
rabfu 3 hours ago [-]
What part of it's all about politics did you fail to understand?
Also, ad hominem are the tool of the really stupid. Be better than them!
The problem is that any age verification system effectively becomes an identity verification system. And such tools rarely remain "just for kids"—they quickly become used for other purposes. The only secure way is to verify not the person's identity, but the device's status (for example, that it's a children's device). This is called age assurance: we confirm age without knowing who exactly is in front of us.
Age assurance is still treating the symptom. If the platform is designed to addict and radicalize, a children's device getting in doesn't help the child, it just means the harmful design now has a younger victim. The only fix that actually works is making the platform safe for everyone, which means regulating what these services are allowed to do to users in the first place, not building better gates around them.
However, if my platform says on the outside that it's for 18+, identifies itself as such using machine-readable signals, and I don't take specific action to entice children into the service, it's your failure to parent if they access it, and you should shoulder most or all the liability for it.
The slipperly slope here to avoid is this: do you really want to adopt a model where the state is the one who "owns" your child (except financially, of course, you still have to pay everything) and can unilaterally do things to you and your child in the same of child safety without your input or consent? This exists currently to some extent, it can get much worse.
A government body may review a service and determine it is addictive and radicalizing. This is fine, and helpful. Even requiring the service to display a warning is OK. Then, parents who ignore the clear warning and repeatedly fail to control their children from accessing it should lose parental rights.
(There are some basic things like fraud and such that are already illegal.)
Most people don’t actually want to ban “harmful” speech except for the speech of their political enemies.
It always beautiful how single-word choices like this can reveal the actual intent behind seemingly "reasonable" words.
(Forgive the link source - I can see in hindsight how that might not be perceived as the most objective source - but there are many other sources for those who care to look.)
2020s: >%2 of all teens smoke
Kinda suggests that putting limitations in place actually produces results. Crazy innit?
> this fight is very much about tech companies avoiding consequences.
If I follow your logic, you seem to be saying: tech companies could easily not target kids if they wanted to, but they don't. That may be true, but I don't see why violating everyone's privacy is the only way to prove it.
If you weren't aware, smoking became uncool a long time ago. Teens who consume tobacco use vapes or Zyn now.
So the metric should be case by case for each proposed solution. Most of things proposed are no good, but that doesn't mean there is not a sensible solution out there to limit net for teens.
source?
Like copy-protection there's always a way to circumvent it, the name of the game is to make it difficult enough. And for parents, to make it very easy to set-up.
this is fundamentally wrong and accepting this as an industry will only lead to required identity verification becoming the norm sooner or later
the important realization is age verification is in the end "just" a form of parenting tool
this means
- it doesn't need to be a "perfect", glancing at the age of a passport when buying adult products isn't perfect either, but it's good enough. And it doesn't require seeing the address, name, (in most cases) day and month, gender etc. on a id, nor any form of "noting them down".
- it doesn't need to be attestation based, unhackable or anything like that. It complements parenting, not replaces it.
- in turn it also shouldn't need anyones id, in most places children below 18 don't need any id but 16+ is still a age barrier
or to lay it out in rough design
- require multimedia devices sold to have a child "mode" functionality
- allow setting a age category or age (to auto determine and update the category), require a age set for this purpose to be kept private on the device and not shared, analyzed etc.
- require web sites and apps to have voluntary min age limits, similar to other products, block access _client side_ based on this information. The standard should allow region/country specific limits and reason tags.
- There are a bunch of edge cases omitted, like sites serving dynamic content/platforms in general. Requirements for parents to be allowed to define exceptions (in both directions) and handling of sides not having your countries age gating. Etc.
- properly educate parent about it
this provides sufficient functionality to support parents in parenting without requiring any identity verification or overriding the parents right to parent
yes, it's not perfect in many ways. But it doesn't need to perfect, it's "just fine" for what it tries to archive.
it's a parenting tool, not an online banking system
EDIT: Also the most relevant devices are not laptops, but phones, tablets, gaming consoles. Some of them have such a system already working "good enough" for the use cases of "games"/"game stores" and similar. Yes not browser. But very much extensible to that.
Then it's up to parents to give their kids child-locked devices and for stores to not sell unlocked devices to kids.
<https://www.rtalabel.org/page.php?content=howtofaq>
Maybe we need a "it's not for kids but it's not porn either" header.
And it's the same reason why everybody keeps pushing the stupidier, most obnoxious and invasive tools to "protect the children".
If you want kids to not access social networks, you need to have most of them out. If only a minority is out, they will just be outcast.
That said, "everybody must do that thing that Apple does" may be a very good example of good regulation. IDK what Apple does, though.
Companies like epic and Microsoft dont. The easy path is just a default install
I suspect this is by design.
And before anyone blames the parents, parents will always be shitty. They are an impediment to children's health society must work around.
I wish we would just pull the plug on ad-based social media altogether. The incentives add up to destroying society.
The health of kids with parents is infinitely better than those without. Just saying
...huh? This is completely backwards. We should be making laws that punish parents for failing to parent properly. Not laws that punish everyone.
If we pass a law that children under a certain age may not use social media, then giving your child a non-child-locked device should be treated the same way we treat giving your child alcohol or cigarettes.
Zuckerberg was not a parent when he conceived of Facebook and "society" as a whole is pushing social media on kids, not parents.
Maybe cut nontechnicals a little slack? Their adversaries have invested literally billions of dollars in R&D.
The details of how to override a ruling against the executive does differ between countries, and also on whether its considered just an interpretation of law or a constitutional question. Both the US and France have a written constitution that's binding on other branches, while the UK does not.
Yeh. In the UK, the supreme court can not strike down primary legislation. It can rule executive actions are not following the primary legislation or unwritten constitutional rules, but if parliament passes a law that says oranges are now green, the supreme court is in no position to challenge it.
An interesting twist to UK constitutional jurisprudence is that until relatively recently the House of Lords was the highest court, so contrasting constitutional judicial review between the US and UK by gesturing at the principle of Parliamentary Supremacy didn't necessarily prove anything as the House of Lords was, in a sense, Parliament. (This was often a rebuttal for when people brought up the Principle of Legality as contradicting Parliamentary Supremacy, or otherwise interjected in discussions of judicial review in the UK.) Now that the highest court is independent, the next 100 years of constitutional jurisprudence in the UK should prove interesting.
It’s a good thing MPs are serious people and Parliament would never do that, right? :)
In the US "government" generally refers to all three branches; is that not the case in Europe?
Also all of these companies know from advertising data, and location data, that you are at school, who you are, etc. They would also know that all of your friends are also teenagers.
If the law is serious there are many many ways to enforce this without violating privacy.
How do you prevent kids uploading photos of themselves?
Maybe we need an adult only portion of the Internet and verify identity only on that (like bars do to keep out kids).
New TLD maybe? .adult
I think Trump played that game a number of times, for instance.
This give parents useful control, and removes the state overreach.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_law
The right to privacy is also explicitly in the Code Civil since 1970, in the European Convention on Human Rights and the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union (both are binding to EU member states).
Parental controls are not a solution, either. People are free to use any terminal they wish. If you wanted to change that then it again regresses to the same issue.
We will not go for the proper solution, not because it's not the proper solution but because powerful people won't allow it.
If you do look at the things we have indeed banned, you will find that they are mostly coming from outside our countries. It's not cut and dry, but it's very geopolitical pretty often.
But, whatever it takes. Social media in combination with mobile phones is destroying the latest generations. Add AI in the mix, and we're on the road to Idiocracy.
Also, ad hominem are the tool of the really stupid. Be better than them!