New U.S laws designed to protect minors are pulling millions of adult Americans into mandatory age-verification gates to access online content, leading to backlash from users and criticism from privacy advocates that a free and open internet is at stake. Roughly half of U.S. states have enacted or are advancing laws requiring platforms — including adult content sites, online gaming services, and social media apps — to block underage users, forcing companies to screen everyone who approaches these digital gates.
What I like about the convenience store idea, is that the certification process is decentralized. An app wouldn’t be.
The store won’t keep a copy of your ID on a database to be inevitably hacked
There is no technical reason it couldn’t be decentralized. It’s a file handed to you by a trusted issuer, like (not American, so guessing:) the dmv. From that point on it should all be local processing to generate the child certs. It doesn’t need to phone home until the credentials expire.
Again, the implementation is the problem
ETA: Also, phone “home” here is wrong. The app should be a completely independent, 3rd party entity, not built or owned by the dmv (in this scenario) in any way. I believe in Estonia there’s a bunch of different options for the 3rd parties, and they’re heavily vetted and certified, but still independent from the state (who issue the certs).
Now that we see groups pushing for age verification are third parties like Palantir and the US government having demanded account info on those who were critical of ICE I don’t think third party entities going forward can be trusted anymore to be unaffiliated with the state.
Maybe when Estonia got their program implemented. But, now such a system being put in place for other countries is going to be untrustworthy in their motives and methods.
Yep, you’re not wrong. The people currently pushing for age verification are specifically doing it to destroy online anonymity, because they realise what a threat it is to them. I just want people to understand that they are peddling a false necessity. You do NOT need to give up privacy or anonymity to have a viable age verification system. Like I said in another comment:
At some point, I sincerely hope that the current regime will end and be replaced by something more sane. At that point, I don’t want people to immediately think “age verification = bad”
I think easiest method is one that has already existed before. Just do a blanket parental internet block for ISPs and mobile providers.
Account holders who want it lifted can contact the company providing them their Internet access to do it. Or leave it in place and use a login whenever they attempt to access blocked sites.
But, there’s a reason that’s not the method proposed or used as an example with it already existing. Government wants surveillance like 1984 over their citizens and companies want to collect and sell data like Meta.
What you’re describing is essentially the Great Firewall with an exemption form. It wouldn’t solve the problem of underage access to social media, and it would cause a whole slew of other, worse problems in it’s place. For so many reasons I don’t even know where to start, no!! Don’t do this!!
Just starting it at the ISP level than a site by site basis handing over info for every site seems better to me. Its already a utility to begin with where people have to give their info, address, and payment method when they sign up. Its already a verification system to begin with. Instead of logging into your ISP account to toggle on parental block its just enabled by default.
Let households themselves decide if they want parental lock or not, and ISPs already offer parental block. Only change now it is just enabled by default when you sign up for a ISP.
And I dont care about the social media justifications for verification anymore. You, me, and many other people accessed the Internet at a young age and turned out fine. And those sites would be on the block list or parents themselves able to add or remove sites from the block list.
This hysteria of parents not wanting to take responsibility for raising and monitoring their own kids and demanding the government remove everything seems like boomers back in the day wanting games banned.
Ok, lets start from an age verification POV: What you’re suggesting is at the account level. If YOU want to access social media, then everyone in your household gets access to is as well. Even if YOU decide you don’t want it, nothing stops your kid from connecting to your neighbours wifi, or going to their friends house, or even public library/cafe wifi. It will not address the core issue.
On the flip side, you’ve now given your ISP permission to decide what information you are allowed to see. Sure they may block porn, and social media, but hey, maybe “kids” shouldn’t be allowed to access information on LGBT issues, or political ideologies, or “upsetting” news about unrest at home or abroad. If YOU want to access that information, well that’s ok, we’ll just add you, along with the address of service, and all your contact information to our “whitelist”
Believe me, it’s the wrong approach
Actually there’s mountains of evidence to the contrary here. It’s pretty widely accepted now that social media is not a place for children.
In an ideal world, you’re right, parents would be responsible for protecting their kids, but we’re not in anything remotely like an ideal world. You could say the same about anything. It’s the parents responsibility to prevent underage drinking or smoking too, yet we still do what we can to restrict those at the point of sale, rather than just shrugging and going “Not my problem”
People will find a way around verification. I definitely would when I was little. To have a perfect system you’d need an authoritarian approach of complete surveillance.
You either accept that system isn’t perfect or push for complete surveillance.
You seem willing to risk what will turn out to be surveillance in hopes of a perfect verification system. While I’m more skeptical and not trusting of those in charge that trying to protect people is even the goal.
Maybe it’s the difference between how much someone trusts their government and corporations.
Your arguments seem more founded on an ideal government and corporate landscape to trust handing over oversight to them than what we actually have. Biggest red flag being some European countries making deals with Palantir.
If that ID is only verified by an underpaid store clerk, that means the system is already a nonstarter. That person is ripe for corruption.
This sort of idea always rolls back up to the government being directly involved if you game it out. Be it federal or state or province or whatever.
The underpaid clerk already sells booze and cigarettes.
The age token would be free at the time of acquisition (paid by taxes of course).
Yes, you’d get the “buy me a porn token please!” request behind the 7-11, but I’d bet it would be far less frequent than requests to buy booze.
No system is perfect. The “show us your face so we can guess your age” thing we have in the UK (i think its an American company anyway) can be tricked by showing it the guy from Death Stranding, and i assume any other sufficiently realistic game.