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by Morromist 38 days ago
The next age verification tech will involve checking tallness so we'll have kids standing on eachother's shoulders in a big trenchcoat to do the very adult act of installing linux.
4 comments

My 12yo son is already significantly taller than me! We had to use his passport to prove he’s much younger than these systems report because they were locking him out from chatting to his friends (said the age gap was too big)
Wait, am I understanding correctly: for your child to chat with their friends you had you send a copy of their passport to a stranger in the Internet because "a system" thought they were older looking that their friends?

What are we doing even?

> What are we doing even?

We forced parents to both work 40 hours and more including commutes and mandatory overtime, which led to an insane demand to have "safe spaces" for children where they do not need a parent.

yeah :( I'm definitely not in the pro "kids need to be protected from the internet/social media/whatever" camp as I'd much rather teach my kids to make smart decisions and manage it ourselves vs the government mandated solution we now have. The way it's implemented though means services (Roblox in this case) have to verify the age of the child. Those kids can only talk to other kids that are +/- some range from their own age. So it was either let him continue playing as though he's a 16yo but not actually be able to play with any of his friends, or use the identity verification provider they have to prove he's not. The whole thing is a gross mess imo.
How do they know how tall he was ? Oh perhaps his face looks older too ?
yeah, his face looks older too I guess. Was mostly calling out that height isn't going to necessarily help either.
And when they need to find a way to circumvent this, they will ask for the full height picture without clothes on. Instead of addressing the problem of this entire idea and implementation they will continue to double down on it.
And that’s how the laws designed to protect children ended up producing the worlds largest collection of photos of naked children.
Mostly naked grownups, with a few fairly tall children who are naked, except for the fake pubic hair.
Don't worry, most "protect the children" regulation casts a web so wide it includes plenty of pubic hair and sexually active teens
The UK government already has one of if not THE largest collection of CSAM in the world, called the CAID (Child Abuse Image Database).
Lol. Or standing next to a dollhouse or something.

Let's be realistic here. All this age verification stuff is pseudoscience and more importantly it isn't tested or standardized at all. It's just theater so the creeps get all the data on your children they can.

Meta has made a killing, literally, exploiting children psychology. Social media is the orphan crunching machine for nonorphans or something.

>All this age verification stuff is pseudoscience and more importantly it isn't tested or standardized at all. It's just theater

<lightbulb moment>

Abdicating responsibility, standards and government enforcement are three of white collar America's favorite things.

Seems like an opportunity for someone to become a billionaire by creating a standardization and licensing agency and then paying for some shills to get the ball rolling. Give it 5yr and everyone will have to do business with you lest the feds kick in their door. Give it 10yr and the useful idiots will be in the comment section talking about how XYZ age verification mechanism must be good because it's "certified" by your garbage and that the sky will fall if we get rid of it.

I hope I'm too jaded, but frankly I don't think I'm jaded enough.

So what would you do to combat the very real problems associated with (unlimited) access to known cognitive harms for minors?
not op, but my thoughts..

1 - hold the parents accountable for putting a dangerous weapon in the hands of munchkins without supervision.

2 - phone manufactures and or internet providers that sell and connect them, must include a bouncer bot system like a locked phone. The parents get to choose and change which set of bouncers filter the phones.

These can be simple like 18 and over content according to your jurisdiction block.. but I would hope they would spend time to choose multiple bouncers that block different things for different values and offer ways to request access to blocked things.

I have posted more details previously.

They are trying for it that's for sure. It reminds me of the us war on drugs for some reason. Obviously I don't want kids doing drugs but it had ludicrous takes that were terrible for society. I guess there aren't enough wars going on? Have to go to war against the Internet or something now.
It reminds me of Tipper Gore and her righteous crusade against video games.
I can already see angry post on reddit that some short king failed a verification test.
This is the new version of being IDed while in your 30's.
Grey beard here who still has to show id to buy beer (even non-alcoholic beer) at a certain grocery store chain.
I bought beer in Tennessee, with my visiting mother (obviously 21+), and they ID'd us both (as state law requires).

It tickled her silly that she "got ID'd for the first time in decades."

I didn't have the heart to tell her they HAVE to ID everybody at purchase, here.

She glowed all day, so very happily #RIPmommabear