New U.S laws designed to protect minors are pulling millions of adult Americans into mandatory age-verification gates to access online content, leading to backlash from users and criticism from privacy advocates that a free and open internet is at stake. Roughly half of U.S. states have enacted or are advancing laws requiring platforms — including adult content sites, online gaming services, and social media apps — to block underage users, forcing companies to screen everyone who approaches these digital gates.
This is how it works in Estonia?
Swap the convenience store for an app, and the ID for a digital cert, and ye basically!
Any Estonians reading, please feel free to correct me
What I like about the convenience store idea, is that the certification process is decentralized. An app wouldn’t be.
The store won’t keep a copy of your ID on a database to be inevitably hacked
If that ID is only verified by an underpaid store clerk, that means the system is already a nonstarter. That person is ripe for corruption.
This sort of idea always rolls back up to the government being directly involved if you game it out.
No system is perfect. The “show us your face so we can guess your age” thing we have in the UK (i think its an American company anyway) can be tricked by showing it the guy from Death Stranding, and i assume any other sufficiently realistic game.
The underpaid clerk already sells booze and cigarettes.
The age token would be free at the time of acquisition (paid by taxes of course).
Yes, you’d get the “buy me a porn token please!” request behind the 7-11, but I’d bet it would be far less frequent than requests to buy booze.
There is no technical reason it couldn’t be decentralized. It’s a file handed to you by a trusted issuer, like (not American, so guessing:) the dmv. From that point on it should all be local processing to generate the child certs. It doesn’t need to phone home until the credentials expire.
Again, the implementation is the problem
ETA: Also, phone “home” here is wrong. The app should be a completely independent, 3rd party entity, not built or owned by the dmv (in this scenario) in any way. I believe in Estonia there’s a bunch of different options for the 3rd parties, and they’re heavily vetted and certified, but still independent from the state (who issue the certs).
Now that we see groups pushing for age verification are third parties like Palantir and the US government having demanded account info on those who were critical of ICE I don’t think third party entities going forward can be trusted anymore to be unaffiliated with the state.
Maybe when Estonia got their program implemented. But, now such a system being put in place for other countries is going to be untrustworthy in their motives and methods.
Yep, you’re not wrong. The people currently pushing for age verification are specifically doing it to destroy online anonymity, because they realise what a threat it is to them. I just want people to understand that they are peddling a false necessity. You do NOT need to give up privacy or anonymity to have a viable age verification system. Like I said in another comment:
At some point, I sincerely hope that the current regime will end and be replaced by something more sane. At that point, I don’t want people to immediately think “age verification = bad”
I think easiest method is one that has already existed before. Just do a blanket parental internet block for ISPs and mobile providers.
Account holders who want it lifted can contact the company providing them their Internet access to do it. Or leave it in place and use a login whenever they attempt to access blocked sites.
But, there’s a reason that’s not the method proposed or used as an example with it already existing. Government wants surveillance like 1984 over their citizens and companies want to collect and sell data like Meta.
What you’re describing is essentially the Great Firewall with an exemption form. It wouldn’t solve the problem of underage access to social media, and it would cause a whole slew of other, worse problems in it’s place. For so many reasons I don’t even know where to start, no!! Don’t do this!!
Just starting it at the ISP level than a site by site basis handing over info for every site seems better to me. Its already a utility to begin with where people have to give their info, address, and payment method when they sign up. Its already a verification system to begin with.
Let households themselves decide if they want parental lock or not, and ISPs already offer parental block.
And I dont care about the social media justifications for verification anymore. You, me, and many other people accessed the Internet at a young age and turned out fine.
This hysteria of parents not wanting to take responsibility for raising and monitoring their own kids and demanding the government remove everything seems like boomers back in the day wanting games banned.