[SoftTalker]

We have had the need to prove age for hundreds of years. To buy alcohol. To drive a car. To vote. We depend on government-issued documents to do this. Not sure why anyone would really expect this to change just because it's online now.

[elevation]

Older systems were imperfect and were understood to be. I've meet veterans who joined the Navy at 14 or 16. I've met many College students who can pass as old enough to buy alcohol, especially with a fake id. Dead people are sometimes registered to vote. We know this and have systems to try to catch these exceptions.

But cellphone access is different; it's assumed to be perfect, but it's increasingly being moderated by machine learning heuristics that serve as judge, jury, and executioner, severing your services if a couple of your actions trigger a fuzzy approximation to some of the training data.

AI moderation helps suppress spammers, but it's also punishing false positives, and there is just no recourse. Any ID system that piggybacks on "Apple | Google" is effectively shunning some non trivial portion of society. Governments of the people need to provision their own tech systems that are accessible to all citizens, even those who have run afoul of an AI moderation system.

[elevation]

This year, an octogenarian friend got locked out of his android phone permanently. He had never had a PIN on his Samsung phone.

It started when he signed up at a new bank, giving them his phone number. Somehow the bank enrolled his in their online banking system, which notified Samsung, who remotely initiated the "let's give your phone a pin" flow, presumably to protect him during online banking. (This happened without his knowledge -- he had not installed the bank's phone app.)

Later that day, when his phone went into a modal "let's setup a pin" screen, he panicked, assuming an attacker had gained control of his phone, since this was not something he initiated. No button would let him exit the screen, so he powered it down. Now, when he powers it up, it demands a pin, but he doesn't know what pin that would be. The only way to get the phone back would be to factory reset it, meaning he'd be wiping his data. He had the money to replace his phone, but that may not be true of every citizen, especially at his age.

People assume digital auth systems are perfect. But you don't hear from consumers who can't get online to tell you "I've lost access."

I've shared some other similar stories: a widow who got banned for life from facebook within minutes of making an account from an apple device on a consumer ISP with her real cell phone number.

A coworker attempted to sell his son's sporting goods on facebook marketplace and was banned for life with no appeal because AI thought it was "weapons."

Some high school students each made a gmail address from the same laptop one afternoon, only to be banned the next day. Each supplied their own cellphone number, but the accounts got shut down, presumably because multiple accounts were being created from the same device too rapidly.

AI moderation means there are a ton of unwritten rules, and private companies will keep you out of their platforms if you break them. That's fine, but it means governments have no business serving their citizens from these exclusive platforms.

> e signed up at a new bank, giving them his phone number. Somehow

[microtonal]

It started when he signed up at a new bank, giving them his phone number. Somehow the bank enrolled his in their online banking system, which notified Samsung, who remotely initiated the "let's give your phone a pin" flow, presumably to protect him during online banking.

Do you have a proof that this actually a thing? I don't see what mechanism exists to do this and I don't see why Samsung would even bother to do this.

[SoftTalker]

Perhaps cooincidence and Samsung pushed an update that now required a PIN, but there was an untested failure mode (rebooting the device after the PIN setting process had been initiated but not completed).

[SoftTalker]

I've never gotten banned but I've been moderated/throttled (even here with the occasional "you're posting too fast") quite often. The triggers on things happening too fast from the same IP address or session seem quite sensitive and thus when I'm doing anything critical such as online transactions I space them out by many minutes, which is inconvenient.

[account42]

> That's fine

No it's not. Government use of these platform or not, once they become big enough being cut out of them means being cut out of a significant part of society. We shouldn't accept "no recourse" and "no due process" just because its a private company.

[leonvoss]

Hundreds? 200 years ago most people did not even have birth certificates. I can think of multiple famous examples of people who lived in Europe 500 to 800 years ago where we don't know their real age. In existing countries with poor state capacity, a lot of people don't have legitimate birth certificates and there is some evidence that they make up their age to some degree. For example on surveys in such countries there are too many people reporting round number ages. My experience in such countries is that you can find very young looking males riding motorcycles late at night around the city and anybody can buy alcohol. That's how it was in the United States "hundreds" of years ago. Please read a book.

[saltwatercowboy]

Very obviously because privacy advocates are concerned by the effects of mass deanonymization. I find it doubtful that you don't grasp that.

[athrowaway3z]

I bought a bag of chips without having to show my ID.

There is a big difference between: Government demands every website to have age verification, and government supported scheme by which service can opt into age verification.

As of now, American private spyware is actively filling the demand.

I get the feeling some privacy advocates are approaching the choice as a tier system, with government being the worst case.

I don't see it.

The only viable solution for the future of privacy is to not be dependent on the giant platforms in the first place.

[SoftTalker]

Government is demanding age verification because the websites and platforms completely punted on the issue of keeping inappropriate content from children. Yes parents have a role here but we live in a society and we depend on/demand everyone doing their part. We (the tech sector) made our own bed here.

[simoncion]

> Government is demanding age verification because the websites and platforms completely punted on the issue of keeping inappropriate content from children.

Nah. Parental Controls are baked into every major consumer OS. If government cared about giving guardians the tools needed to care for the vulnerable ones they're responsible for, they'd require those parental controls to be beefed up [0] and that it be a requirement that online services and both local and remote software be required to honor the restrictions required by those Parental Controls.

Instead, what we get proposed is a system that cares very much about how old you are, and not one bit about the things that one's guardian understands one needs to be protected from. This system will work for some under-eighteens, but it will fail for many others, as well as every single dementia-damaged elder or brain-damaged/developmentally-stunted adult.

What's being proposed is absolutely not about protecting people... if it were, the mandate would be to beef up the existing fully-anonymous systems, rather than requiring identifying information from users.

[0] ...I mention this because I often hear in Internet discussion that these controls are insufficient, not because I have personal knowledge that they're inadequate.

[microtonal]

Nah. Parental Controls are baked into every major consumer OS.

Even the parental controls that are there are a train wreck. Our kid has an iPhone and the parental controls have all kinds of weird issues like, you give them 15 minutes of WhatsApp daily. First time on a day they start WhatsApp it says that all their time is up. Or suddenly they cannot run an application that was permitted by a parent. Then you uninstall and install the app again and suddenly it works.

It is unusable.

There web is also a huge hole in all of this. A lot of services you can also use as a website. A whitelist is too limiting and a blacklist is a daily task to maintain (and would require spying on your kid).

I also prefer to avoid age attestation altogether, but I am also not sure what the solution is. I think many people do not realize how much social pressure there is to use certain apps/games and how bad parental controls are. Yes, we say "no" to a lot of things, but you cannot say "no" to everything. Missing certain cultural touchstones (certain TV shows, certain games) makes your child an outsider.

[simoncion]

> Even the parental controls that are there are a train wreck.

As I said:

  If government cared about giving guardians the tools needed to care for the vulnerable ones they're responsible for, they'd require those parental controls to be beefed up...

> There web is also a huge hole in all of this.

and as I went on to say:

  ...and that it be a requirement that online services and both local and remote software be required to honor the restrictions required by those Parental Controls.

I expect that you don't, but if you'd like to argue that it's impossible for the government to do either or both things, then I'd argue that it's impossible for them to make age and/or ID verification work.

[SoftTalker]

I agree... the government's plan (as usual) misses the mark and probably won't solve the problem. But the reason the government is getting involved is precisely because parental controls (if any) that were delivered by the platforms were too hidden, too complicated, and had to be set for every app or website instead of once on the device and have that enforced on everything.

[joquarky]

That is the superficial reason that government is getting involved.

If you want the real reason, I'll provide a hint: it aligns with the underlying goal of DOGE.

[simoncion]

> But the reason the government is getting involved is...

Nope.

[NoMoreNicksLeft]

Parental controls, at minimum, need to be unified. I should be able to deal with the Xbox at the same time as the iPhone. Need a new standard. I need to be able to whitelist and blacklist times and dates, drill down into particular apps/games/services with some decent granularity, do conditional whitelisting, etc. I need a big red killswitch for these right at the top of the parental control app.

Parental controls aren't baked in, they're bolted on and half-assed. One of them I've noticed over the years... I can't disallow Plex except at the app level (outside of Plex entirely). I can't easily give access to the educational libraries, but disallow it to the entertainment libraries. There are a million little anecdotes like that, because no one gives a shit about the problem.

Many parents, I think, are left with all-or-nothing choices. And it's not long before the reddit crowd starts insinuating that the reason your kid doesn't have a phone is so they can't call for help... from you.

It's a big clusterfuck.

[simoncion]

> ...starts insinuating that the reason your kid doesn't have a phone is so they can't call for help... from you.

I mean, parents, are -far and away- the most likely folks to abuse a kid, followed by friends of the family and close relatives. Stranger Danger was always fake, and teaching kids to be afraid of every adult who's not a family member is -and continues to be- a fantastic way to perpetuate child abuse.

But. Internet trolls are gonna troll and are best disregarded. If those folks seriously live in an area where an abused kid can never physically go to a teacher or other responsible adult for assistance, I'd recommend that they get the fuck out of whatever hellhole they're living in.

[CircuitSeuss]

So what you’re saying is… the social media platforms/ tech sector needs to take basic measures to make their platforms less exploitative for all users regardless of age? I’m sold. What sort of incentives do you think would be the most effective motivation for platforms here?

[SoftTalker]

Ideally? Doing the right thing. But that's too much to ask.

Ending section 230 might be a good start. Make platforms responsible for the damages done by whatever they distribute.

[izacus]

> I get the feeling some privacy advocates are approaching the choice as a tier system, with government being the worst case.

The issue is that a lot of voices you hear are from a big country which voted for fascists and those people now somehow think that technology will save them from the government they created. But that's not how it works unfortunately.

[intended]

Privacy is losing ground, despite people understanding the stakes.

Privacy advocacy is losing the battle, because it is being framed as a choice between privacy and the status quo, and people vehemently dislike the status quo.

[SoftTalker]

That's a separate concern from depending on government entities to issue proof of identity/age.

[nkrisc]

Proving your age is a relatively new phenomenon. My grandmother, born in Chicago in the 1920s didn't even know her exact age. That is not at all uncommon for her generation.

[wat10000]

Maybe hundred of years, singular. And reading/watching stuff in our own homes has never required any proof of age.