[anthonypasq]

This is not how any other thing that is banned for children is enforced. It makes no sense.

The person selling the age gated item needs to take lawful measures to ensure they arent selling it to a minor. Their parents have nothing to do with it.

Your solution would be that if a 14 year old walks into a liquor store and doesnt have a note from their parents saying that they arent allowed to drink alcohol, then the store should be able to sell it to them.

[jonplackett]

The proposed solution though is that all adults going into the store have to provide their full name and address and have it recorded by the store to buy alcohol - or any other +18 product they want to buy. These things are not equal.

[tifik]

And that is where details matter. You can implement age verification in such a way that no data gets transmitted anywhere. Ofc I wouldn't expect Meta to not take a chance of collecting even more user data and blame a law for doing it, but if the law is written well enough, it won't mandate a specific method. If it does, definitely oppose it imo.

[txrx0000]

Age verification implies that some authority, usually the tech company, checks your age. It's mandatory personal data harvesting. A method that doesn't require data to be transmitted anywhere is just local permissions and filtering. The tech company should broadcast the metadata of the content they're serving, then the decision to filter it should be made on the client-side according to the device owner's preferences. But big tech is constantly trying to sabotage this permission model by removing root from phones, mandating cloud accounts to use your computer, etc.

[jonplackett]

You can - but currently it’s all just done with random private companies that I would not trust with my email address never mind my passport or adult preferences.

Again - apple’s on device verification is a good idea for this. Apple just sends a ‘yes this is an adult’ message to reddit for example and now I can again participate in chrome up discussions.

[knome]

mandating devices provide a `NoAdult` setting, so so browsers could check it and then send something like a `x-NoAdult` header would give websites a reasonable method for distinguishing minors (or people that just don't want adult content).

it's the old 80s/90s bead curtain separating the adult movies area from the rest of the video store. it keeps kids reasonably separated, and leans on parents making their kids mind. I think that's a reasonable target.

it would work without forcing every internet user that wants to use a given service from having to submit government identification, go through interviews, or sign up to massive centralized identification systems that will inevitably track every movement people make online.

if history is any indicator, those things will lead to breaches and abuse, and people's privacy will be violated.

if there's a legally mandated way for parents to stop their kids from peeking through the internet's bead curtain, that should be sufficient for most purposes.

if the argument is that bad or foreign websites might not implement it, it's not wrong, but that same problem exists with the mass-surveillance methods as well.

if you keep going down the path of forcing everything, eventually you end up with a national firewall, vpns are illegal, anything that can provide anonymity or pseudo-anonymity online is illegal, no one has privacy, and busybodies will spend all their time hunting folks for liking things they don't want them to like when the inevitable breaches come.

to your last point, sure, a 14 year old shouldn't be able to just wonder into a liquor store, but a 40 year old should.

[pocksuppet]

that's literally what the california law, that we keep calling an "age verification law" even though it has nothing to do with age verification, does