[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

[ThatPlayer]

> Which puts us exactly where we are

The difference here is it can be set by the parent on the OS and locked. Requiring sudo equivalent to change.

The way it is now, there's nothing stopping a (18-) user from logging out of a 'parental control enabled' account and making a new account without those controls on any service from Facebook to Steam. So the only effective option at that point is to entirely block that app or service.

This gives more power to parental control software. And yeah moves the responsibility from the service to the parents, which is what the services want cuz COPPA and other similar laws.

[mittensc]

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

[watwut]

Overwhelming majority of kids wont. The idea that the average teenager even knows what those words mean is not realistic.

[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.

[Dylan16807]

> Requiring the central database is the scary part.

Yes, agreed.

And this type of proposal has no central database, so it removes the scary part.

(Unless you're talking about the local accounts on each computer storing dates of birth for a single household as a "central database" in which case you're being ridiculous and please stop doing that.)