Technology

Literally every type of age verification ever put into place has been circumvented by children. EVERY SINGLE ONE.

How about instead of trying every complicated stupid way to regulate users and especially children ..... you regulate and control companies and corporations instead.

I couldn't stop laughing when one of my kids showed me a picture of his 10 year old friend's effort with the texta. We are talking comical magician curly moustache. Roblox verified that account as 18 though and now that account can't talk to his school friends.

What year were you born on January 1st?

I can’t wait to email this to my MP

Canada Bill S209 needs to die. It’s bad legislation.

Vincent Adultman

I'm in my mid thirties and I'd still buy a mask or something to trick these systems if and when this becomes a thing in my country.

Good, good -- teach the children that authority is bullshit. This kind of thing is more effective than book learnin'.

I guess now we must ban pens and markers because children might draw fake mustaches and bypass age verification.

So long humble pen. We will miss you.

Is it legal to “verify” my age to be a minor? Would less of my information be collected?

…not that any of it is accurate anyway.

Today in: "Just let the parents parent."

It's good to see a reminder that depending on the majority of parents to act in absence of real, tangible regulation is doomed to be a failure.

As I understand it, most adult content producers aren't actually interested in having minors using their sites. It seems like the easiest thing to do would be to have them add some "Adult Material" flag in their metadata, and let consumers respond as they wish to that tag - whether that's done through browser settings, router nannyware, or whatever.

Is there a technical reason this isn't what's being pushed for? I'm sure there's lobbying and "optics" reasons for not doing this, but is there any practical reason for not pursuing this, or something like it?

We want your children to be safer online so we forced them to self-identify with biometric data? Isn’t that part of what caused this in the first place?

Privacy, security, and regulation is the answer here, not more surveillance capitalism. But that’s anathema to the business models of every social media company so instead we get this ham-fisted attempt at jamming the square peg of “digital advertising surveillance” into the round hole of “protecting children”. The mechanical action damages everything involved.

This system is specifically and very effectively designed to monitor, analyze, addict, and sell people, and this “solution” just ends up being more engineering to that end. Asking it to selectively age-gate content is like inventing a global network for information transfer and then becoming outraged when it’s used for file sharing. Copy is an intrinsic operation of digital data, and exploitation is an intrinsic operation of social media. We’re asking it to do the opposite of what it’s created to do.

Parents should be in charge of filtering content for their children, and the government should be in charge of using the collective power of the people to regulate companies that exploit them instead of serving them. Asking social media companies to do it is backing the wolf truck up to the chicken coop while the guy hired to protect the chickens tells you “The wolves will protect the chickens from other predators!”