[ekidd]

(A), honestly.

You might think you can keep 16 year olds from looking at porn, if they want to. You can't. You have never been able to. All you can do is teach them that the law is stupid and pointless, and they should treat rules with contempt. But they'll still be able to look at porn.

What you can do is allow the government and private companies to track everyone, everywhere, all the time. And you can create more gatekeepers that hold personal identity data, misuse it, and leak it.

[Spartan-S63]

Yeah, I agree with this. I think age-related content moderation is a losing fight and one that will create more contempt for laws, more surveillance, and much more PII surface area that will be exploited.

There are really two "core" issues at play:

1. The prudish nature of US society

2. The fact that we don't have data privacy laws and restrictions on digital surveillance by private companies

[genthree]

Sixteen year olds? Sure, mysterious Forest Porn and the older brother who'd give you skin mags have always existed. And Cinemax at night, catching the odd frame that somehow gets thought the scrambler. Whatever.

But we can't realize all the supposed glorious promise of all this tech bullcrap for education and free exploration of younger kids if we can't at least come pretty damn close to guaranteeing that an eight-year-old won't stumble on Rotten.com or hardcore porn if an adult isn't looking over their shoulder constantly. And whatever that solution is needs to work for parents who don't have the know-how or time to be sysadmins for their household.

[rythmshifter]

I’m still trying to figure out why mysterious forest porn was a thing. I definitely encountered it.

[Dylan16807]

I'm not overly concerned with 16 year olds. But the tools for protecting younger children suck. A consistent account setting and header would do a lot to improve parental controls.

> What you can do is allow the government and private companies to track everyone, everywhere, all the time. And you can create more gatekeepers that hold personal identity data, misuse it, and leak it.

This is already happening. A central setting would improve privacy over the way things are right now.

[marcus_holmes]

> A central setting would improve privacy over the way things are right now.

What? How? What improvement are you seeing that I'm not?

Putting all our PII into one huge repository and then letting corps and govts access it sounds like a dystopian nightmare. This is why we don't like Palantir.

What happens if a bad guy steals that data and your identity? They go and look at CSAM using your ID? The police turn up at your door and cart you off to prison? Are you really going to be able to argue that it wasn't you? If so, what is the point of the system? If we're relying on IP addresses and other evidence for access (so you can fight these charges) can't we just use them in the first place?

[Dylan16807]

I don't know what you're talking about, but it's not what this kind of bill is about.

This kind of bill is about the OS telling things whether you're: 0-12, 13-15, 16-17, 18+

No databases, no stealable identity, only the barest sliver of 2 bits of PII.

As for how it's an improvement, we already have sites asking to see your driver's license or pictures of your face for much worse age verification paradigms. If most of those changed to a local age setting, privacy would go up.

[marcus_holmes]

How does the OS know that you moved from the "13-15" bracket to the "16-17" bracket without knowing your DoB?

And this is the thin edge. Because in a few years there'll be a bill saying something like "too many children are lying about their age online. We need to verify their age" and then we're capturing IDs and storing them somewhere.

[ThatPlayer]

> How does the OS know that you moved from the "13-15" bracket to the "16-17" bracket without knowing your DoB?

No one says it has to be automatic. The OS could require the parent to manually update it.

[godelski]

  > The OS could require the parent to manually update it.

How is their age verified?

At some point one of two things is required:

  1) A promise that the user is a certain age
    - Which puts us exactly where we are
  2) Official identification is used to verify age
    - Which creates a PII nightmare

That's it. There's only those two options. You may not believe #2 is going to be a privacy nightmare but we're already seeing it happen with Discord/OpenAI/LinkedIn and everyone else that uses Persona[1]. They aren't doing the minimal security things and already aren't doing what they claimed (processed on device, then deleted). This "hack" couldn't happen if that was true

[0] https://cybernews.com/privacy/persona-leak-exposes-global-su...

[1] https://withpersona.com/customers

[mittensc]

So the kid boots up linux off a USB stick and makes it all pointless

[Dylan16807]

> How does the OS know that you moved from the "13-15" bracket to the "16-17" bracket without knowing your DoB?

The OS has the birth date. Of probably 1-5 people.

> And this is the thin edge. Because in a few years there'll be a bill saying something like "too many children are lying about their age online. We need to verify their age" and then we're capturing IDs and storing them somewhere.

Those things are already happening. I see this kind of mechanism as significantly more of an alternative to privacy invasion than an enabler of privacy invasion.

[marcus_holmes]

Requiring the central database is the scary part.

The political establishment used to be able to control what you read, through control of the media. Then 1995 happened and everyone got access to anything they wanted. The establishment have wanted to put that genie back in the bottle ever since. This is part of that effort.