If you connect it with a permission system where you can choose whether to provide this information (e.g. >13 as a bool or age as an integer or the birthday as a date) that can't be too bad I guess?
I haven't read the whole thing of course.
Not to mention that computing is a global thing, and in order for this to be useful it would definitely have to be providing more specific information than just a bool. Maybe chats require 13+, but pornography requires 18+. Maybe those ages are different based on location. All advertisers would need to do is ping the various different checks to get your actual or at least very approximate age.
This kind of thing is a slippery slope, and its ripe for abuse by doxxers, advertisers and big brother himself. Burn this with fire. I'm totally in agreement with the others that suggest stuff like this should b just get banned from getting introduced and reintroduced constantly trying to sneak it in as a rider or hidden provision. The people DON'T want it.
1. Creates a protocol with desired signals (country and a variable list of whatever others i.e. age,state) that clients (including browsers) CAN choose to use and forward.
2. Create an api OSs CAN implement to inform clients of those signals and if they can be overidden in the client. (Possibly even create an OS or service to run on OSs that implements it, parents can choose to install specific OS or service)
3. A open source server for governments to specify common classes of content and what to do when a specific SIGNAL (from the protocol in 1) is recieved (Serve content to SIGNAL group/serve content to everyone/never serve content). And what to do if content isn't in a class it recognizes(Serve content/not serve content). Association could also be extend it's duties to coordinate a list of types of content.
4. Maintain an authoritative list of servers by country so that those hosting services can reach the servers hosted in 3. So that webservers can visit those servers to find what they can serve if they wish to apply the law for that jurisdiction.
Horrible because it does codify less freedom and censorship. The advantages are that for a jurisdiction liability can fall on the right actor.
If you run a website/app you worry only if your in a jurisdiction that mandates you use the protocol and can easily geoblock crazy countries by using that signal and choose if a jurisdiction you want to deal with is worth the effort of coding for or whether you want to ignore that countries laws.
If you are a user you can choose to install the API or use an OS that implements it or an OS that spoofs it with only the liability of your jurisdiction. If you are a parent you can use an OS(or install a service) to implement it on your kids accounts.
If you are a country you can specify what signals you use/require and can specify required signals (i.e. US may request the State signal so it can decide if it needs other signals to evaluate whether to serve "Social Media" content (i.e. age in the case of state=california)).
Not perfect but actually keeps punishment/enforcement to appropriate jurisdiction and means you can actually gracefully avoid liability for sites in broken jurisdictions rather than either kowtowing or being in breach. Also means it can be implemented in client if you don't want it on your OS or want the convenience of not being asked age without the ridiculous other stuff.
Accordingly, it is never too late to lobby against these things.
It's not an accident that this appeared within a month or two of the California one. I would bet good money that there's someone shopping this bill around.
If you do a frequency analysis of when these bills are being introduced, you'll notice an odd cluster internationally. Less charitably, they're coordinating / talking / being pushed by someone. More charitably, the "idea" is spreading.
It's a very odd idea to spread though. Age "verification" isn't something people are truly passionate about.
I suspect that, long-term, this is about surveillance. The powers that be would rather kill the golden genie that's general purpose compute than have teens and radical youth with compute.
This is going to get bad.
How is this a counter-argument? I often read this, as if there's some international trusted organization of logical thinkers that has approved inclusion of slippery slope to a list of logical fallacies that must never be invoked in a conversation.
Every single time five years later it turns out that the slope actually was slippery.
Putting aside the real possibility that the ability to lobby against certain things is already actively under attack, it isn't speech alone that is being addressed, it's political and cultural momentum.
Would you call it a fallacy that making incremental rather than sudden movement in a specific direction makes it politically easier to accomplish?
We have already seen the federal government use facial recognition data to create an app that tells ICE goons who's legal. We should not tolerate the government forcing more data tracking and privacy violations just because you are not "sliding" today.
First they came for the Communists
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a Communist
Then they came for the Socialists
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a Socialist
Then they came for the trade unionists
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a trade unionist
Then they came for the Jews
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a Jew
Then they came for me
And there was no one left
To speak out for meOne way is that you log in under a guest account and the guest account requires you to indicate your age. After your session is over, guest account logs out.
Another way is that the library has two sets of computers, ones set for adults, ones set for minors. You need access card to use computer and the librarian will give you the age-appropriate access card.
Another way is computers are set for restrictive (child) account by default. If you need adult access you have to ask librarian to unlock it.
Surely I'm missing something? Is the backlash due to fear of a slippery slope?
Linux distros always have a "root" user. Does that user have to be asked its age before being usable? What about docker containers, which often come with a non-root user? What about installation media, which is often a perfectly usable OS? It would either have to be so easy to get around this law that most kids could do it easily, or so overzealously enforced as to disrupt the entire cloud industry.
what is the solution then to age gating apps that the public feels should be age gated? (TikTok, Instagram, etc). it seems like every app implementing its own guessing system would have even more holes, right?
this is one where I am sympathetic. the moment when someone, with their parent, is setting up a device seems like the best point to check age. right?
am I missing something?
My guess reading the law as linked is that it's much closer to the former than the latter. That being said, you're right that it does bring a bunch of headache alongside with it for little-to-no benefits.
There are so many ways for this to go badly or simply be annoying.
I’m a guy in my 40s with no kids. I shouldn’t need to deal with all of this. Let the parents turn on parental controls for their kids; don’t force it on everyone.
If Meta needs to find a way to verify age, then that is also their problem. They are trying to make it the world’s problem. I don’t use any Meta products, so again I would question why I need to care about this… why will it become my problem?
The slippery slope then comes in addition to all of this.
It seems Apple already implemented their age verification API. I got prompted for it when opening the MyChart app a few weeks ago. The API used in that case only sends a Boolean if the user is over 18 or not, this is the best of the bad options. However, they have other APIs to get other data from a digital ID. The user is at the whim of the API the developer chooses to use. They can say no, but then they can’t use the app. I’m not sure how Apple validated my age, as I hadn’t loaded an ID into my wallet, but my Apple account is nearly 18 years old, so that might be good enough? If I were to get a Mac and just want to use a local account, then what happens? Can I not verify my age? Will I be able to use the computer or be locked out of the browser? These are some of the fears I have if they take this too far. Maybe some of them are unfounded, but I guess time will tell.
While laws that target engineering decisions are sometimes reasonable, they are always accompanied with specific guidance from a credible academic based institution (e.g. mechanical and civil engineering use private licensing bodies and develop specific curriculum and best practices).
The only time this law will ever be enforced is punitively for other crimes against major actors who are extremely limited in number. It is unenforceable for Linux, trivial for Apple, Microsoft, and Google to add to their OS. Presumably easy to spoof, the law describes it as minimal but once again, there isn't a specification so who knows. Websites won't be liable, they're getting a sweetheart deal here.
In practice what this law does is absolve abusive platforms an from any responsibility. It adds extra meaningless work and overhead for legitimate adult platforms while opening themselves up to new potential legal challenges, and ultimately doesn't replace the responsibility its removing.
This doesn't make children safer. This doesn't make the internet safer. This kind of legislation makes it easier to abuse children online by removing responsibility from platforms that are known to be dangerous to them yet profit from their presence the most.
How are you not outraged? People are missing the above forest for the "oh but it's a tiny little easy API and I don't see any downsides" trees.
User account creation wizards could just create the dot files for the App Store. These weird laws ban OS.
The bill itself sort of goes against its "purpose". If the purpose is to make a convenient API for stores to know their user, and avoid showing them certain content then why did the bill state: "If an operator has internal clear and convincing information that a user's age is different than the age indicated by a signal received in accordance with this Section, the operator shall use that information as the primary indicator of the user's age."
because many people lie in those forms. Many people on steam will select they were born in 1900, including myself. So how will this API help? the only way for it to be useful is if they later require full verification.
That being said, I don't think this bill was that well thought out as the implication are far reaching (will I need to enter an age when provisioning a VM?).
I mostly see it as a clumsy attempt to provide a mechanism for age-category attestation in a way that is more privacy-friendly than Texas's "upload-your-id" law.
The slippery slope isn't a fallacy in this case as we've seen the pot slowly come to a boil after 9/11 with various laws like the Patriot Act, FISA, etc. and classified programs within the NSA (and I'm sure all the three letters) which violate the rights of Americans everyday. Now it's a coordinated effort across multiple western countries all of a sudden to introduce laws around verifying your age. It's clear where this is going.
Meta and TikTok (and YouTube shorts to an extent) are the new Sackler family and Purdue pharma. They will hold on to these profit and power engines as long and hard as possible. They will not stop causing the harm unless forced to with regulation.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sackler_family
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opioid_epidemic_in_the_United_...
Do you mind expanding on why that is? Is it because it allows them to say "well the API told us they're adults so we're all good"?
Let us not blame humans for suboptimal brain chemistry taken advantage of by malicious torment nexus threat actors. Fix the policy, bug fix the human, disempower the threat actors. Defend and empower the human. My pattern matching in the comment you replied to stands imho, and while it is admittedly imperfect (as you point out), I believe it remains directionally accurate.
[1] Why Ozempic Beats Free Will - https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/hot-thought/202410/w... - October 4th, 2024
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45907422 (additional citations)
(think in systems)
Umm isn’t that what we want? Or are you suggesting there should be some other legislation in place?
[1] Tracking Efforts To Restrict Or Ban Teens from Social Media Across the Globe - https://www.techpolicy.press/tracking-efforts-to-restrict-or... - February 23rd, 2026
They want to abolish anonymous use of internet services, because anonymous publishing at scale is powerful and dangerous to incumbents when they can’t retaliate with malicious prosecution, police harassment, or assassination.
This is not a theory. Laws requiring this are going through the state and federal level right now.
i'm from illinois, worked in california, and no longer live in either. from afar, it seems that whatever california bureaucrats propose, after a short delay, gets proposed by their little sibling bureaucrats in illinois.
>"Operating system provider" means a person or entity that develops, licenses, or controls the operating system software on a computer, mobile device, or any other general purpose computing device.
I.e Linux will most likely to be immune, since its not tied to a particular computer.
Which just means Linux stay winning. It already made big headway in the video game space, so its prime to take over personal computing too.
Sounds like there actually would be some benefit commenting about it on HN.
So they are right in that sense - commenting on HN is cathartic but ultimately useless.
And the people who matter and are against this also don't use HN because they view this platform as toxic and reactionary.
HN is basically slashdot now.
People have been worried about that on HN for years, but I still see the same culture. There do seem to be more bots and astroturfing, but that's a systemic issue with all social media platforms today.
And that's the crux of the issue - the industry and people have changed, but HN hasn't changed discourse wise and is growing increasingly disconnected demographically speaking.
A large portion of HNers are men in their late 30s to 50s, and no longer located in the Bay Area or NYC.
No one's who matters is having these kinds of conversations on HN - they're meeting IRL with Luma invites or in signal/imessage/discord group chats.
> the Children's Social Media Safety Act
>
> provide an accessible interface at account setup that requires an account holder to indicate the birth date, age, or both
> provide an operator who has requested a signal with respect to a particular user a signal that identifies the user's age by category
Answer: they don't want to be liable and get fined $400 Million, like Meta got fined, for letting kids on social media. (https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/05/business/meta-children-da...)
This is why Meta is forcing this legislation through nation-wide. They are forcing Google/Apple to take the liability, despite it not actually being Google or Apple that's providing the "harmful" social media. Meta are doing this state-by-state so nobody can track that it's them. Easier than pushing at a federal level, and raises fewer red flags from news media.
Since Google and Apple won't want to accept this liability either, the next step is requiring digital IDs and third-party verification to prove the user is of age. This will enable tracking of all users, whatever app or website they go to. Bills requiring this are already being passed at state and federal level.
What I expected was that we'd end up with the OS vendors actually being mandated to really do age verification, and then submitting that using Web Credentials and Secure Attestation so that the far end could trust the whole thing, locking open-source OS's out of the mix and creating more of a walled garden online than we already have. I was guessing it would become a simple checkbox on e.g. Cloudflare - "[ ] allow adult users only" or whatever - and that it would end up with vast swathes of the internet going off limits for anyone not on closed-source systems.
Now, it looks like this is just a way for parents to tell the OS "this is a kid account" and have it flow through to websites so they can easily proactively block kids from connecting without having to implement any of that crap. Yes, it's much potentially easier for a child to circumvent; but any kid who can get around that sort of thing from within an OS could probably just wipe/reinstall anyway, so who cares?
As a parent whose kids are continually trying to see what trouble they can get into, I appreciate that I will get one more potential weapon in the fight.
Can someone tell me whether I am being a fool by actually being a bit relieved it's going this way?
You're being a fool by actually being a bit relieved it's going this way.
These bills are meant to nudge the overton window[0] of digital politics in the direction of mandating realtime identity verification for all forms of computing. Advertisers want it, governments want it, _bad people and bad governments want it_. By pushing a very small and "weak" legally-required form of user identification on everything under the guise of "saving the kids", all involved parties can point at those who disagree and say "Look, if you disagree you must want to hurt children!" And so the bills pass, and a weak form of identity verification passes and is enforced. Then it'll be shown it doesn't work, and the proposed solution will be to make these identity verification laws more intrusive and more restrictive. Repeat ad-nauseum.
Time to start throwing up hobby BBS sites... and I think in this case text mode interfaces over web might be an advantage.
There is no verification beyond that in these sorts of bills (CA, CO, IL). It's the parent's responsibility to watch their kids when they set up an account.
> Legitimate adult websites will not show the content.
This is a big problem (that won't necessarily be solved by this particular legislation, granted). There are already voluntary rating HTML tags websites can add to indicate parental control software should block them, but they're voluntary and non-standardized. Websites can choose not to comply with no real-world consequences. And I don't think platforms like Reddit or X, which are ostensibly all-ages social media but also have an abundance of adult content, are properly set up to serve tags like that on NSFW posts but not other ones.
It's a tricky problem to solve, and, imo, it's one the tech industry has demonstrated it doesn't have any desire to solve itself, hence legislation starting to get involved.
> Websites can send down a single header indicating adult content.
It sounds at first glance like a no-brainer that websites shouldn't have access to any information and the enforcement should be done at a local level (like the current voluntary HTML tags that locally installed parental control software can sometimes read). But some websites might want to display alternate content to minors-- e.g. a Wikipedia article with some images withheld, or Reddit sending a user back to an all-ages subreddit instead of just fully breaking or failing to load when the user stumbles upon something 18+. For anything like that, the website will need to know in some form that the user isn't able to see 18+ content.
Detractors will say parents should just install existing parental control software, even though it's existed in its current form for decades and is obviously not effective. And they'll say it should be the parents' responsibility to enforce what their kids are doing with computers, while ignoring the fact that these laws provide tools allowing parents to do just that (the parents are the ones responsible for supervising their kids when they create accounts to ensure they're not lying about their age-- if the kids lie during setup, it's on the parents).
Anyone with kids will probably acknowledge that it's much easier supervising your kid once when they first set up an account on a new device than it would be to supervise them 24/7 when they're using the internet. But for some reason, lots of people without kids are in a panic about having to type in any date older than 18 years ago. The arguments I've heard against it are almost all slippery-slope (e.g. "they're gonna do this first, and then add ID requirements next year, because that's what I fear will happen.")
Because that's exactly what will happen. This is battlespace preparation for the destruction of anonymity on the internet, because politicians find this inconvenient.
> if the kids lie during setup, it's on the parents
Pretty much a "Yes, and?" scenario. See above.
> The arguments I've heard against it are almost all slippery-slope (e.g. "they're gonna do this first, and then add ID requirements next year, because that's what I fear will happen.")
I get where you're going, but precisely this. These things always start slow... then fast. The old adage "first they came for x, then y" is not a joke or an exaggeration. It is pretty much historic observation. I've lived long enough to know that whenever someone invokes the "think of the children" defense, there's always a catch.
These tools are called "parental controls" and already exist - we don't need laws to compel their production.
...unless, of course, the true aim is to use this as a beachhead for further expansion of privacy-violating requirements.
You write this off as a "slippery-slope" argument, but given that there are already quite a few tools that do what this law aims for, what's the point?
Would you prefer to inform each movie theater in town which movies your child is permitted to watch? Or just rely on the rating system that applies to most movies and is honored by most theatres?
Parents want one setting that says "this is a child" and then expect online platforms to respond appropriately. As we expect and mostly have in the real world.
Don’t say this too loud please, I don’t honestly think we’re too far from this reality, at least from an “Overton Window” point of view.
Unless your specifically calling out accounts that require online registration for the OS. I'm vehemently against that requirement.
Haiku could just run an automatic dialog asking you if you are minor, in Illinois or California and write a text file with the corresponding age category of said person.
These bills do not mandate that the user cannot modify that information AFAIK.
Is the government going to require some sort of automated checks that verify every person who connects to the internet has this API on their OS and go after individuals that aren't in compliance?
https://le.utah.gov/~2025/bills/static/SB0142.html
https://capitol.texas.gov/tlodocs/89R/billtext/html/SB02420S...
1 10 0000
or even better
1 10 -2000
This will turn into most useless set of laws ever
Red states: paternalism over your body, liberty for your property
Blue states were paternalistic over both your property (business and social gathering shutdowns) and your body (masking, social distancing enforcement), while red states (particularly Texas, Florida) were very laissez-faire for both.
What's perplexing about this is that research has generally correlated higher amygdala activity (fear/worry) with political conservatism, and lower amygdala activity with political progressivism, but in this case, the effect seemed almost inverted.
Richard Stallman advised us about it long ago.
Thank god Plan9 got relicensed into GPL. 9front might not totally free, but it's a step in case GNU+Linux gets utterly broken.
And, yes, please, go try Trisquel (novice users), GUIX (experts) and Hyperbola (experts and protocol purists).
Avoid every Google, Amazon, Facebook, Apple, Netflix service with nonfree JS.
It seems their strategy is to externalize their responsibility to verify age themselves, and thus reduce their exposure to liabilities when child protection acts like COPPA are violated.
It abso-fucking-lutely should not be at the OS level though, for so many reasons. Even the implementation alone would be a nightmare. Do I need to input my ID to use a fridge or toaster oven? Ridiculous.
"Google's data harvesting operation became a load bearing piece of the Internet before the public understood digital privacy. And now we can't get rid of it."
The public has been conditioned to expect web services free at point of use. Legitimately it's hard to monetize things like YouTube without ads, and I get that. But turning our entire ecosystem of tech into a massive surveillance mini-state seems like an astonishingly shitty idea compared to just... finding a way to do advertising that DOESN'T involve 30 shadowy ad companies knowing your resting blood pressure. My otherwise creative and amazing industry seems utterly unwilling to confront this.
Edit: Like, I don't know, am I crazy for thinking that simply because we can target ads this granularity, that it simply must be that? I get that the ad-tech companies do not want to go back to blind-firing ads into the digital ether on the hope that they'll be seen, but that's also plus or minus the entirety of the history of advertising as an industry, with the last 20 or so years being a weird blip where you could show your add to INCREDIBLY specific demographics. And I wouldn't give a shit except the tech permitting those functions seems to be socially corrosive and is requiring even further erosion of already pretty porous user privacy to keep being legally tenable.
However it appears that it takes pretty disasterous consequences for us to be able to walk anything back.
Why?
We don't externalize age verification when buying alcohol or visiting the strip club. It's on the responsibility of those establishments to verify age.
I think that main goal would be to keep the ability to have accounts be anonymous or pseudo anonymous.
If social mean company has to verify an accounts age themselves they then have to use some for of official government identification and with that any chance of anonymous or pseudo anonymous access.
It works for the in-person context because it's a physical object, making it easier to control access to it. A high resolution picture of the same ID is a privacy problem as it can be copied, shared, transferred, etc without the knowledge of the ID holder.
Meta Apps can have age verification but it should be at the point of service, not the supply chain.
And even if we were to agree to this, uploading your IDs to an untrusted third party is asking too much.
So have the government do it? They already know who we are and when we were born.
So we have to pay some 3rd party service to hoard information about Children? Why we want to set that up? Why would we want to take that power from the parents and give it to some company?
I think this is a reasonable balance without being invasive as there's now a defined path to do reasonable parenting without being a sysadmin and operators cannot claim ignorance because the user input a random birthday. The information leaked is also fairly minimal so even assuming ads are using that as signal, it doesn't add too many bits to tracking compared to everything else. I think the California bill needs a bit of work to clarify what exactly this applies to (e.g. exclude servers) but I also think this is a reasonable framework to satisfy this debate.
I've seen the argument that this could lead to actual age verification but I think that's a line that's clearly definable and could be fought separately.
Right now, it's not even clear how to create parental controls at a reasonable level so there's no clear path for what to do or how to respond.
Basically unsolveable, so why worry about that edge case? Kids will always get through to some adult content somewhere. A token system will make parents feel better in the meantime.
I think this is a sensible compromise. It gives parents more control than before without relying on shady third-party software or without turning every platform into a cop. Yeah, it also aligns with Meta's interests, but so what?
The age attestation solutions pursued by the EU are far more invasive in this respect, even though they notionally protect identity. They mean that the "default" internet experience is going to be nerfed until you can present a cryptographic proof that you're worthy.
Its trivially easy to see if the user (child) has indeed created multiple OS level user accounts with different permission levels if you want to spot check the computer.
You'll see it on first startup and then you can have "a chat". With Guest account access disabled, spawning a new account on a computer takes 2-3 minutes, will send emails and dashboard notices to the parent.
Its very much near impossible to verify that the child is not just going to Facebook etc. and using separate accounts and just logging out religiously.
That said I wish Apple/Microsoft/Google had more aggressively advertised their Parental Control features for Mac/Windows/ChromeOS as a key differentiator to avoid Ubuntu/Open Source distros from having to implement them.
There is software that does this already. Concerned parents do not actually lack for options in any sense.
> It's effectively just standardizing parental controls.
You could _literally_ just standardize parental controls instead.
No, there shouldn't be any such thing; everyone pushing for any shape of this should just bugger off.
I pay the company to verify me, I am their customer. They take on the liability of the OS makers and app makers of age verification.
If you have a valid token signed by a licensed IDS that verified your age in your OS, that's all anyone needs to know.
So, they want to profit off children, but do nothing to protect them?
> but there should be a trusted 3rd party service that does that
Gee, if only Facebook would use their incredible might to create this, rather than trying to rob our representative government from underneath us.
> It abso-fucking-lutely should not be at the OS level though
It's not my problem. It shouldn't involve me at all. I don't use social media and I think if you let your kids on there unsupervised you have a screw loose.
It would be reasonable to give this a legislative nudge - spelling out the specific labels, requiring large websites to publish the appropriate labels, and requiring large device manufacturers to include parental controls functionality. The labels would be defined such that a website not declaring labels (small, foreign, configuration mistake, etc) would not be shown by software configured with parental controls, preserving the basic permissionless nature of the Internet we take for granted.
But as it stands, the setup is horribly broken - both for subjecting all users to the age verification regime, and also for being highly inflexible for parents who have opinions about what their kids should be seeing that differ from corporate attorneys!
For the record, I'm against age verification laws. But I think companies are pushing for them because of liabilities they face under other laws, not because they would actually like to have the data.
At some level I don't blame him. It is also a bit strange how in that act alone he showed more accountability than most of the politicians that were questioning him, never mind most executives. I suppose Josh Hawley wants to be liable for personal lawsuits for his acts of Congress too... people cringe at his "robotic" demeanor but I can't remember the last time someone turned and faced people and apologized like this. Most people asked to do the same (even in front of the same body) never do.
https://youtu.be/yUAfRod2xgI
It legally mandates the existence of a required "age" field in user account records, a user interface to populate it during account setup, a mechanism for service providers to read this field, and that providers act as if it has been populated accurately.
As someone who has been the de facto "system administrator" for my family's computer systems since kindergarten, this has to be one of the stupidest policies I've ever seen gain traction.
There have been numerous cases in history where governments have attempted to legislate the outcome they want without regard to how that might be done or if it was possible in the first place. Obviously it can never deliver the results they want.
It would be like passing a law to say every company must operate an office on the moon, and then saying that companies lobbying for an advanced NASA space program is them externalising their responsibility.
It would be a mess, but solve the problem. It’s not that we don’t have the technology, we just don’t want to because the friction would decimate user numbers and engagement; it would be much simpler to regulate (e.g. usage limits on minors); and minors are less monetizable, which would lead to lower CPM on ads.
Then there’s the legal liability if you know someone is a minor and they’re sending nudes, for example. And the privacy concerns of tying that back to de-anonymized individuals.
But obviously I wouldn’t believe that social media companies care about user privacy on behalf of people.
Requiring all online account creation to go through some government vouching system sounds far worse for privacy than OS doing age verification.
Source? Another commenter claims the opposite: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47416653
Even if they used an open source zero knowledge proof, HN will still immediately dismiss it as an attempt to steal your data. The proposal here and the similar bill that passed in California doesn't require any validation that you enter you age correctly.
It's not about protecting children. It's about increasing adtech intrusion, protecting revenue from liability, pushing against anonymity, and for all the various apparatus of power, it's about increasing leverage and control over speech.
https://www.reddit.com/r/LinusTechTips/comments/1rsn1tm/it_a...
HN is also much less representative of the demographics within the American tech industry now as well - almost all the references I see on here are stuff only men in their late 30s to 50s would recognize, and an increasing amount of users appear to be based in Western and Central Europe.
Heck, I'm on the younger end by HN standards (early/mid 30s) and when I introduced HN to my peers over a decade ago (this is my throwaway) even back then they complained that it was "toxic", "snooty", and "unhelpful". And it's reputation amongst the younger generation has only gotten worse.
HN has "SlashDot"ified, because most people are either in private groupchats on signal/imessage/discord or meeting each other with Luma invites.
Don't get me wrong, it's good to know but it's not earth shattering information.
How does getting the OS to do age verification "get rid of anonymity online" or help "sell ads"? Assuming the verification is implemented in a competent way (ie. it's not just providing an id scan for any app to read), it's probably one of the more privacy friendly ways to implement age verification, that's also more secure than an "are you over 18" prompt on every website.
> implemented in a competent way (ie. it's not just providing an id scan for any app to read)
What if there are vulnerabilities? You're inherently introducing more attack surface and providing more data than you would without these laws.
If you're trying to imply Meta is behind the "overton window shift", that's plainly not the case. The popular sentiment that smartphones and social networks are harming kids (thereby necessitating bans/verification) has been boiling over for a while now (eg. "The Anxious Generation, 2024", and the recent social media bans in Australia), and meta is just trying to get ahead of this with laws that favor them.
>What if there are vulnerabilities? You're inherently introducing more attack surface and providing more data than you would without these laws.
Probably less likely to cause vulnerabilities than web usb or web bluetooth , both of which gets some pushback here but nowhere as much an API that returns a number.
No, I'm saying the exact opposite: Meta is just one player in a campaign from intelligence agencies and other tech companies who want to normalize mandated prompts in your OS that collect information. Right now it's "just a DOB field bro" turns into "well... people can lie with the DOB field, let's just add a ID check step in that dialog" and build on it from there. Of course the pot has been boiling for a while and it's not just Meta looking for regulatory capture.
> Probably less likely to cause vulnerabilities
I don't care about likelihoods, this "feature" inherently introduces more risk and for something I don't even want on my computer. Even a small chance that this can be abused is unacceptable.
Their entire top leadership has shown a multi-year tendency towards psychopathy and lying. Knowing Meta is pushing this bill makes me want to understand why my views and theirs randomly agree as well as carefully read the bill text for any signs Adam Mosseri was within 500 feet of it.
That's probably a sign that you should reevaluate your views.
Which has led some to suspect much is LLM generated and not properly human-reviewed, in addition to the very short timeframe from initial self-disclosed start of the research to publishing it online (mere 2-3 days) despite the confident tone the author uses.
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20260317184359/https://lobste.rs...
Millennials had their hippie era in their 20s (same stuff their parents did rebranded as "hipster" instead of "hippie," where instead of building a lifestyle of free love and bong hits in the Haight-Ashbury, they built a lifestyle of free love and bong hits in Williamsburg Brooklyn).
Now in their 30s-40s they've moved to the suburbs, they're voting Reagan, and are falling for hysterical media-driven moral panics about "what kids these days are up to" just like their Boomer parents did in the 80s-90s.
What's even more funny about all these "social media is evil" legislative proposals, they're motivated by the idea of what social media used to be when millennials were in college...which doesn't even exist anymore.
The classic narrative that teens are depressed because they're seeing what parties they didn't get invited to is wildly outdated now. Social media isn't social anymore (see Tiktok), it's just algorithmic short form TV. Nobody is seeing content from their peers anymore.
In reality, most modern research on social media finds little to no affect on teen mental health. But of course, if you have ulterior motives to undermine privacy or shirk corporate responsibility under the cover of "saving the kids," this moral panic is an already burning flame waiting to be stoked.