[vorpalhex]

Can age assurance be done privately and anonymously? Absolutely.

But the entire point of age laws is to stifle free speech and ruin privacy. Thus why every age law requires uploading an ID.

If it was just age, just require a credit charge of a $1 through an intermediary. Good for a year or whatever.

[Nextgrid]

> the entire point of age laws is to stifle free speech and ruin privacy

Does it? I mean sure, it's a side-effect that some (most?) politicians might find desirable, but there's also people who just want to restrict access to adult material (not taking a position on whether it's a good or bad thing here). Most parents would probably agree with the latter even if they don't with the former.

[JoshTriplett]

https://bsky.app/profile/tupped.bsky.social/post/3lwgcmswmy2...

> The U.K. Online Safety Act was (avowedly, as revealed in a recent High Court case) “not primarily aimed at protecting children” but at regulating “services that have a significant influence over public discourse.”

[vorpalhex]

Is there anyone who can't do this today? Adult websites self label, and both your router and ISP offer removing adult websites as an option.

If your kid is going to get around that by clever vpn use, age gates don't help.

[michaelt]

I don't have any children myself, but as I understand it in the modern age:

Your kid's smartphone can connect to home wifi, mobile data, public wifi, and friends' home wifi - so network filtering alone won't cut it. And 'Encrypted SNI', 'DNS over HTTPS' and Cloudflare makes network filtering much harder than it was 15 years ago.

On top of that, there's loads of porn posted on Reddit, Twitter, Twitch and suchlike. So any effective block is going to have a lot of collateral damage.

[wildzzz]

Use a DNS that has porn filtering along with any custom sites you don't want them accessing via the browser. You can even create your own MDM profile to prevent a kid from disabling the private DNS. There are sites that will set this up for you too. Furthermore, use parental controls to prevent installing apps without your permission, use the built-in features to limit screen time, and use tools offered by social media apps to limit usage. A super smart IT wizz kid may eventually figure it out but this will keep most kids from accessing inappropriate stuff.

[thephyber]

> On top of that, there's loads of porn posted on Reddit, Twitter, Twitch and suchlike. So any effective block is going to have a lot of collateral damage.

The Texas HB 1181 law only applies to websites which have content that is at least 1/3 porn. If Reddit doesn’t qualify for that requirement, then the Texas law doesn’t require ID verification.

There will always people who will arbitrage the gaps between the legal definition of something and the practical application. The blast radius of those kinds of issues always has been huge.

[Nextgrid]

> If your kid is going to get around that by clever vpn use, age gates don't help.

I think politicians and their supporters believe they do help. Of course from their perspective the only way to know for sure is to implement the restrictions (regardless of whether they succeed, at least they fulfill their campaign promises to their electors of "doing something").

[pyuser583]

> Adult websites self label

Not social media sites. Sites like Reddit are everything. Some also go out of their way to hide certain information from parents.

Reddit (not to be too picky) does some weird things when a logger is in place, essentially making it impossible to know which subreddit is being accessed.

And that's really where the bad stuff lurks - it's peer to peer interactions.

[maccard]

Yes. Look at the UK - in the best case the laws here (OSA) are absolutely trivially bypassable by apps that are openly advertised on the App Store (VPN apps). In the worst case it pushes people onto sites that refuse to comply which are likely holding _actually_ harmful material.

> there’s also people who want to restrict access to adult material

First of all - we’ve been down this path so many times. Won’t someone think of the children is a plea to emotion not to reason. Secondly, there are many ways that people can opt in to those controls already, and for the most part _they work_. Anyone who can bypass those will be able to bypass what’s being rolled out around the world. Lastly; they’re trivially bypassable because a grown up can validate and then just hand the device back to a child.

The UK is pretty good at digital services and had a solid opportunity to make an anonymous, privacy first based age verification system. I designed one (not without flaws) in about 15 minutes, so we definitely could have had something decent. Instead our first move was to make something that basically required a liability shift, and we ended up sending face scans and passport photos to US tech giants - meanwhile the kids were just pointing their cameras at YouTube videos of adults and bypassing the filters.

[drakythe]

While some people may want that, everyone who has the technical know-how to restrict access can name probably a dozen different ways to do it without violating privacy via ID Upload. The only reason to push for ID Upload instead of the other methods is because policy makers are lazy and information resellers want as much information about us all as they can get. Its lazy because it just recreates the liquor store "Can I see your ID please?" experience everyone is so familiar with and takes no explanation, so lazy policy makers find it easy to push for, without accounting for how that data is handled after use. Meanwhile information clearing houses and anti-privacy wanks are salivating at how this can be leveraged so they too push the "ID Upload is the only way!" messaging.

[gruez]

>and information resellers want as much information about us all as they can get.

That seems implausible given that most sites requiring age verification outsource it to some third party, which means they're not getting all the juicy biometrics.

[runako]

You've identified the group that would be incentivized to lobby for this architecture.

[gruez]

That's an unhelpful way of analyzing stuff because you can cynically retort "You've identified the group that would be incentivized to lobby for this" regardless of what happens. No age verification whatsoever? I bet social media companies would like that! Age verification by the government? I bet it's because the government wants to know what porn sites you visit! Maybe verification by the OS instead? Must be the Google/Android OS duopoly! So complicated PKI or zero knowledge proofs solution? There's probably some consultancy that would benefit, not to mention there's still going to be companies that would handle the outsourcing. There's a whole industry for handling user account management/SSO, for instance, and that's entirely open source.

[runako]

I didn't look at it that way, but there is unfortunately a bit of truth in that analysis. Such is life in a captured state.

Honestly, I wasn't being quite that cynical. Just pointing out that there are actors who have business interests in applying a worse architecture.

But IIRC this was made manifest in Alabama, where a tech company lobbied for their age law and then captured the sole source contract for doing the verification.

[tzs]

> But the entire point of age laws is to stifle free speech and ruin privacy. Thus why every age law requires uploading an ID.

The age verification system currently undergoing large scale field trials in the EU does not require uploading ID. Every member of the EU is required to support that system, and any online age verification laws any member passes are required to allow its use.