[Bender]

I just assume this is not related to age at all and rather an excuse to identify people. Is the real reason for tracking, greed , preparation for a world war or some of all of the above? Intention is the part I think gets lot more difficult to tease apart. It was clearly never about protecting small children as the technical solution for that is trivial [1] and non invasive for adults.

[1] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46152074

[chrisjj]

> Apple frames the verification as compliance with the UK’s Online Safety Act, and the prompt tells users that “UK law requires you to confirm you are an adult.” That’s untrue. The Online Safety Act targets platforms and adult content sites, not operating systems or app stores.

Apple's biggest trust destroyer in years - and that is saying something.

What's Apple's real reason? If not a spiteful desire to put false blame on a UK law it hates.

[tim333]

As a Brit I don't think so. It does seem mostly about protecting / restricting kids.

I'm actually slightly puzzled everyone seems to assume otherwise. Amongst people I know, most are concerned about kids being ok and none want strange tracking or preparations for world war and such. Is my group odd like that?

[Bender]

I doubt that protecting kids is strictly a British thing. Most parents will naturally wish to protect their children. Or at least one would hope.

I think the issue is the approach to protecting the kids especially when there are so many ways to do so without having to hand out personally identifiable information that will ultimately get leaked, sold, stolen, shared as I believe most of us know will happen.

There are laws in most countries on the books that require parents and legal guardians to shield children under their care from harmful things. Utilizing existing laws and slightly extending them by requiring the most common and default web clients to look for a header is about as simple and safe as it can get. Create a child account on a tablet, phone, PC and require that the child account by default has parental controls enabled. Detect a header or many other triggers and restrict access until a parent puts in a admin password. Simple as.

Requiring people to input sensitive information about themselves and their children is just asking for evil people to use it for evil things and I think most would agree that is what will happen once this current crap show reaches critical mass or somewhere close to it. Someone will implement some thing that uses magical math to obfuscate names but I can guarantee it will ultimately be reversible.

I actually predicted long ago that this would bleed over from adult sites to other platforms and that is what Apple appears to be training or conditioning people to accept. This is a case of one bad Apple spoiling them all.

[tim333]

I'm not sure about the details but Apple know who I am anyway as I have various stuff with them and presumably the only info they are giving re this stuff is whether the user is over 18 or not? They generally seem quite good with privacy, at least more so than Facebook and the like.

[xvxvx]

It’s about tech companies covering their asses as the days of serving adult content to children, and exposing them to harm, is finally coming to a end. Yes, it’ll be used for other reasons too.

[Bender]

It’s about tech companies covering their asses as the days of serving adult content to children, and exposing them to harm, is finally coming to a end. Yes, it’ll be used for other reasons too.

So to my point legislation could have just as easily required the user-agent to look for a RTA header and utilize existing laws that require parents to be parents. There was never a need for 3rd party age verification at all to cover their asses. Does site have an RTA header? Yes == Ass covered.

[chrisjj]

Uh? What UK law prohibits a device serving adult web content to children?