[sveme]

There's a fairly non-invasive way to do age verification: ID cards that connect to a smartphone app that only provide a boolean age verification to the requesting service. Requesting service can be anonymous to the ID app and the requesting service can only receive a bool.

That most implementation will try to collect far more data is the real concern.

[Saline9515]

The goal isn't child protection but surveillance and profits for kyc companies.

[maxhille]

My German ID can do that already AFAIK.

[gzread]

There's an even easier one: When you buy a phone, the salesman checks your ID and sets the phone to child lock mode or unlocked mode.

[matheusmoreira]

Phones should have no locks unless the user installs them and holds the keys.

[eipi10_hn]

Parents can hold the keys for underaged?

[matheusmoreira]

That arrangement is OK. It exactly mirrors things like car keys. The problem is giving the keys to the corporations or the government.

[umanwizard]

Why?

[matheusmoreira]

Because if we don't have the keys to the machine, then we don't actually own our computers. If we don't own our computers, then we have no freedom.

Because everything the word "hacker" ever stood for will be destroyed if this nonsense gets normalized. The day governments get to decide what software "your" computer can run is the day it's all over.

[gzread]

The salesman would give you the key if you're over 18

[umanwizard]

> Because if we don't have the keys to the machine, then we don't actually own our computers.

It is not self-evident to me that people under 18 should "own [their] computers" or have unrestricted "freedom".

[yason]

In the modern world, this is like saying people under 18 shouldn't have the freedom to be able to read and write. We would be decades back into digital stone age if we had held onto such a preposterous idea in the 80's and 90's. Virtually everything we have now is basically built by people who were hacking on their computers in elementary school and exercising their freedom of speech in terms of writing code freely at the discretion of their own imagination.

[fc417fc802]

Think about how the proposed idea would most likely be implemented. It would be used as justification for manufacturers to sell devices that the end use doesn't control. They already do that; this would give them legal justification.

[matheusmoreira]

Then their parents should own it. Not the corporations, and certainly not the government.