Then who should? Government, where each implementation strips away rights to privacy - which in some countries, including mine, are a constitutional right? Where it expands powers of government to track everyone's activity online - and remember we're one election away from total policy shift(just like with latest US elections)?

Free market? The profitable solution is, depending on environment - either ignore the problem(profit from ads served to children, no extra work necessary), or strip away all privacy (to filter out bots and get paid more per ad).

The sad reality is that "parent should take responsibility" is least bad option available, and takes into the account individual development of a child.

Even creation of a highly regulated child only internet creates more problems - as now that becomes a highly profitable target for bad actors(both individual abusers, and companies trying to serve ads)

In any case, the story with parents and addictive devices is even harder for parents than e.g. cigarets. For example, a LOT of schools in the UK think that it's good to give childrens ipads to study, and there's nothing that parents can do to prevent this. In this specific situation saying that "parents should take responsibility" is unfair to parents, because their only option to avoid this is home schooling.

Yes, agreed. However regulation does not necessarily have to mean age checks.

The most obvious low hanging fruit to start off with is open and interoperable content filtering infrastructure (ie parental controls) so that there's some common standard that literally everything supports out of the box. It needs to all work together - the current situation tends to be spotty and unreliable thus parents tend not to bother trying to use it.

Start with an extensible metadata format that enables websites to self-classify pages. Account for things like loading alternative resources on the same page. Mandate that all websites and app stores include such metadata and that all browsers and operating systems have some baseline functionality for making use of such data in a sensible manner.

Only after that has completely and utterly failed should we even begin to consider highly invasive measures such as mandating government ID checks.

Unfortunately they completely botched it by having the proof-of-concept app rely on Apple & Googles integrity APIs - which a bunch of countries copied.

I'm not a fan of age verification in the first place, but I am extremely not a fan of random third parties doing the verifying.

Either that, or just accept the harm.

There should however be no force age verification. Social media companies already know how old you are or very close to it using the data they collect everyday. Using this data they should be required to use "best effort" to determine which algorithm you fall in. Nothing is 100% and we should stop pretending it is, sure some kids will find a way around but they would also if there is a age verification system.

Theoretically you could make this double blind and that's the story they are telling.

We have no way to (dis)prove it though.

Alas, here goes the freedom, with thunderous applause.

Connect them with each other and populate their air-gapped "Internet" with like-minded authoritarian AI-bots and create special news like Don and Vladimir are being fed to keep them from tantrums. A win win for everyone!

Ooh, and mental health services. Plenty of mental health services as we're so poor of a race that even our richest can't afford enough therapy to feel alright!

For some reason we're making sure no 12 year old can drive or run for any government positions, but a 90 year old can keep the driver's license that they've had since before the start of colour television, or make critical decisions affecting millions. We can't have it both ways.

For kids this is a privacy risk because there are so many thresholds. Once you're above 18, all you need to care about is "are you a pensioner".

Kids have been lying about their age since the dawn of the internet and people have started catching on, so now we're getting actual restrictions rather than the assertion that nobody in their right mind would click "I am 18 or older" to access a website.

Californian law mandates that operating systems keep track of their users' age, so of course Android must follow. In all of the cases listed on Google's blog, though, the option to not share information and download an app that doesn't ask for your age range is still an option.

They want to track everyone now. Age sniffing is just one additional step for forcing verification. This will continue - see how suspiciously many countries adopt new legislation. It is quite fascinating to me to see how easy it is to kill off democracies.

But there're countries where that already exists. They usually get labelled as a threat to democracy. Isn't it ironic? It's as if our own governments are the greatest threat to our way of life.

Why are we all so horny to transfer unlimited liability to parents?

> To request a user's age range and sharing status, you call the Play Age Signals API (beta) from your app at runtime. The default age ranges the API returns are 0-12, 13-15, 16-17, and 18+, but you can receive custom age ranges.

https://developer.android.com/google/play/age-signals/use-ag...

But I don't find it any better. I don't see any viable reason to provide identification to my phone's OS. If a parent buys a phone for their child, they can already set up parental controls before handing it over.

I wish Motorola all the best with their GrapheneOS partnership.

Too many seem to fall into the familiar problem-solving mode, ready to provide compromises or solutions while forgetting that once the infrastructure is in place, it can easily be modified later to undo the compromises which facilitated its acceptance in the first place. There is an inherent power asymmetry and it's not generally in favor of those building and using the infrastructure.

I don't think it's fair to say that parents who don't care to use parental control measures already available to them have no tolerance for that.

And, that public key of yours must be used only on given platforms. You want to participate on Facebook or Reddit, then you use that public key to prove who you are. Which platforms require verification is another issue.

But it should still be legal and allowed to access conventional forums, Usenet , tor accessible discord servers without having to prove who you are.

Otherwise , the right to organize is over and we effectively live in an authoritarian regime .

You can't tell me that these social media companies don't already know exactly how old someone is just based on the enormous data that is collected.

One not entirely inaccurate definition of government is a loose agglomeration of third parties.

Or, less flatteringly, a stupendously large way too loose agglomeration of way too many third parties welding way too much power way too arbitrarily.

Frankly, in that case I want the kids algorithm. It is preferable for me as an adult, I do not want the intentionally harmful one either.

Nowadays there are many many ways to supervise your children's online access. And yes, there are also many many ways for kids to work around that too, but ultimately if you buy your kid a device with internet access, you should try to supervise that. Parents need to care more about what their children are up to, instead of silencing them with a tablet for a moment of personal silence.

It always gives me the "he only beats me because he loves me" or "he wouldn't beat me if I knew how to behave better" vibes. It's not healthy, not sane, not rational.

One disagreement though; I don't even think they will lock people out of their devices outside of very narrow and specific instances or examples to "cut the grass" as the Israelis call it, to scare and remind people they are the slaves and the long arm of the tyranny can reach out and crush them if they don't self-censor and self-subjugate. Psychological and ideological control has very much proved itself far more effective than physical control in all circumstances. They want to be able to monitor and then use methods and technologies to control that have not really come to light in society even thought they were systematized through the Iraq war. You are now the "insurgents", are you old enough to remember those, those insurgents in their own country?

They also actively undermine the US constitution. Will be interesting to see whether the remaining judges have any power to change this or whether they were also integrated into the new dictatorship model.

Your solution here has the same flaw, I think. If the algorithm thinks I'm underage, I'm locked out.

If anything, I would imagine that Google's changes are motivated by driving traffic to their Google Play Store, where they make billions in commissions.

Once this framework is in place for the Google Play Store, perhaps they can lobby for strict age verification laws, and then tell developers who publish outside of Google Play that they are responsible for compliance themselves.

The problem with this comparison is that the authorities can open a letter if they need to for various well-intended reasons, but they cannot open an encrypted message. Either the authorities can scan all messages, or they can scan no messages, there's no inbetween.

The mandate to verify age before selling alcohol has been around forever. This is not a new idea. The biggest restriction until now has been that there was no good way to do these kinds of age verification, but that problem has been solved. You can still debate whether or not age verification is a good idea for specific subjects, but selling 10 year olds alcohol or porn has been illegal for much longer than the internet has existed.

With ZKP, if you make a business out of reselling tokens you get with your own identity, eventually they will see that you use orders of magnitude more tokens than normal people.

So with ZKP it's more difficult to cheat. Not impossible, just less accessible.

So if there is something being done we should choose a solution that has at least some accountability to the general public (through elected representatives).

The alternative is Google, Apple etc where almost anyone has exactly zero influence and the government can still block as they like.

I can’t wait to not age verify on instagram and permanently get back a feed that’s only people I follow.

They gather more data now. Only verified users will be able to use the internet in unrestricted ways - that is what is new.

I have the firm belief that infinite scrolling is one of the darkest pattern that was ever invented.

The rumored Motorola devices are even more expensive. It's the signature and some foldables, all in the 1000+ MSRP range. At least with pixels you can get the a series for as little as 400 on sale.

I doubt it matters because nobody seems to configure the parental controls that are there, anyway. Only schools seem to try, and only because they're legally held responsible for what kids do on their computers.

Infinite scrolling is a very different issue (although it's definitely a contributor to the harm, I agree).

([1] Unless I'm being unfair here; maybe the algorithm is available somewhere, I just don't see it obviously linked anywhere)

And if enough people stand out, it doesn't matter anymore.