The court reasoned sensibly: it's wrong to violate the rights of all citizens just to weed out a small group of violators. This is contrary to data protection regulations. The controversial Chat Control law follows the same logic: to find criminals, they propose monitoring everyone.
The problem is that any age verification system effectively becomes an identity verification system. And such tools rarely remain "just for kids"—they quickly become used for other purposes. The only secure way is to verify not the person's identity, but the device's status (for example, that it's a children's device). This is called age assurance: we confirm age without knowing who exactly is in front of us.
> The problem is that any age verification system effectively becomes an identity verification system. And such tools rarely remain "just for kids"—they quickly become used for other purposes. The only secure way is to verify not the person's identity, but the device's status (for example, that it's a children's device). This is called age assurance: we confirm age without knowing who exactly is in front of us.
Age assurance is still treating the symptom. If the platform is designed to addict and radicalize, a children's device getting in doesn't help the child, it just means the harmful design now has a younger victim. The only fix that actually works is making the platform safe for everyone, which means regulating what these services are allowed to do to users in the first place, not building better gates around them.
What is “harmful behavior” when it comes to words? You may have your own definition, but I guarantee that you can’t get a supermajority to agree with it.
(There are some basic things like fraud and such that are already illegal.)
Most people don’t actually want to ban “harmful” speech except for the speech of their political enemies.
Or realize that there is no way to know who is using a device without looking at the device holders for all the time they use the device. It's like ordering alcoholics or cigarettes: the seller looks at you see the white hairs (OK) or see a 16yo face (documents please.) A device registered to an adult can be used by a child. I know, it's a failure of parental control, but how many teenagers managed to get adult magazines in the last 100 years? They will get adult devices too. So there is no way to create a 100% effective system. Kids and teenagers will find workarounds, everybody else will live a worse life.
It also means we don't need identity verification. Anonymous scratch-off cards sold in stores to adults, just like cigarettes, can be used to verify age. Or alternatively, device-only attestation. There's no reason to verify age upon every use of the product; only when it's sold.
This logic is sus. Just because we cannot have a oerfect system doesn't mean we shouldn't have it at all. Like alcohol age limitations, they can be worked around and wont ever be 100 percent perfect but I see regularly teens bouncing off the register at my local store.
So the metric should be case by case for each proposed solution. Most of things proposed are no good, but that doesn't mean there is not a sensible solution out there to limit net for teens.
> age verification system effectively becomes an identity verification system.
this is fundamentally wrong and accepting this as an industry will only lead to required identity verification becoming the norm sooner or later
the important realization is age verification is in the end "just" a form of parenting tool
this means
- it doesn't need to be a "perfect", glancing at the age of a passport when buying adult products isn't perfect either, but it's good enough. And it doesn't require seeing the address, name, (in most cases) day and month, gender etc. on a id, nor any form of "noting them down".
- it doesn't need to be attestation based, unhackable or anything like that. It complements parenting, not replaces it.
- in turn it also shouldn't need anyones id, in most places children below 18 don't need any id but 16+ is still a age barrier
or to lay it out in rough design
- require multimedia devices sold to have a child "mode" functionality
- allow setting a age category or age (to auto determine and update the category), require a age set for this purpose to be kept private on the device and not shared, analyzed etc.
- require web sites and apps to have voluntary min age limits, similar to other products, block access _client side_ based on this information. The standard should allow region/country specific limits and reason tags.
- There are a bunch of edge cases omitted, like sites serving dynamic content/platforms in general. Requirements for parents to be allowed to define exceptions (in both directions) and handling of sides not having your countries age gating. Etc.
- properly educate parent about it
this provides sufficient functionality to support parents in parenting without requiring any identity verification or overriding the parents right to parent
yes, it's not perfect in many ways. But it doesn't need to perfect, it's "just fine" for what it tries to archive.
it's a parenting tool, not an online banking system
EDIT: Also the most relevant devices are not laptops, but phones, tablets, gaming consoles. Some of them have such a system already working "good enough" for the use cases of "games"/"game stores" and similar. Yes not browser. But very much extensible to that.
> The problem is that any age verification system effectively becomes an identity verification system. And such tools rarely remain "just for kids"—they quickly become used for other purposes.
No source but a possible counter-example: SIM card carries the date-of-birth of the user (because, really, part of the problem is that you cannot supervise what a kid does with their phone 24/7), age-restricted websites have a flag in their HTTP headers, browser get age from SIM card through the OS. Same goes with app stores etc.
Like copy-protection there's always a way to circumvent it, the name of the game is to make it difficult enough. And for parents, to make it very easy to set-up.
XKEYSCORE, the UK system brought in to allow warrantless surveillance for national security purposes and child abuse prevention, ended up being used for such minor offences as catching people dumping rubbish in other people's bin, or parents lying about their child's address to get into a better school district. In the United States, the same system was used for low-level offences like cannabis possession.
This could have been an http header. It's hard to identify people, but blocking child-locked devices should be easy, since the devices can be built to cooperate.
Then it's up to parents to give their kids child-locked devices and for stores to not sell unlocked devices to kids.
People keep saying it’s the parents responsibility to keep their kids safe, and don’t give them the tools! This is such an obvious one. I should be able to lock down a laptop for a child, and then have the browser limit websites to those that are actually child safe. I don’t care if a government agency is the one issuing “child safety certs”. This gets around the whole “identify everyone no matter what” thing, and it means that parents don’t have to run an entire IT department level of security infrastructure to keep their kids safe online.
my kids are not teenagers yet, what am I missing? the iPad I let them use has child safety enabled and it seems to do exactly what the comment above you is suggesting.
Parents generally have their own children's best interests in mind. If you personally have kids, feel free to delegate responsibility to someone else, since you believe that you're shitty to your own child. But you do not get to decide how to parent other people's children.
> And before anyone blames the parents, parents will always be shitty. They are an impediment to children's health society must work around.
...huh? This is completely backwards. We should be making laws that punish parents for failing to parent properly. Not laws that punish everyone.
If we pass a law that children under a certain age may not use social media, then giving your child a non-child-locked device should be treated the same way we treat giving your child alcohol or cigarettes.
Regulating such a list seems like a very backwards and expensive way to do this when kids will just use their parents identity (or make up one wholesale). Surely this is really about trying to hold people liable for speech politicians and lobbyists don't like.
Ok, what is your stack? Which MDM did you put on your tween's devices? What about the 15 year old who really wants Graphene OS? Do they VPN back to your home network to ensure your DNS and IP block based filtering applies to their mobile usage? Are you caching the teachers' recommended YouTube videos to Plex from the YTDL container or just monitoring their watch list stats of brain rot shorts?
He’s saying that parents will always allow their kids to see, think, learn, and say things that he believes should be off limits, with government stepping in to decide that.
Cultural tangent: in France, "the government" is the group of ministries (or departments in the US), part of the executive branch. So, the judiciary is not part of the government, and the National Assembly and the Senate (legislative branch) are not either. The head of state is not part of the government either, which is how you can get headlines about disagreements between the President and the Government. It’s quite different from how things are managed in the US. My understanding is that it is somewhat similar in the UK, which would be relevant in a BBC story.
In Western countries, the judiciary and the executive (which contains the day-to-day operations of the government) generally operate independently and can rule against each other. I'm most familiar with the US, and I think its constitution was the first to encode judicial independence - and constitutional review by the Supreme Court was established early on in US history. But all Western countries these days have had judges rule against executive policy and the executive obey it.
The details of how to override a ruling against the executive does differ between countries, and also on whether its considered just an interpretation of law or a constitutional question. Both the US and France have a written constitution that's binding on other branches, while the UK does not.
> The details of how to override a ruling against the executive does differ between countries, and also on whether its considered just an interpretation of law or a constitutional question. Both the US and France have a written constitution that's binding on other branches, while the UK does not.
Yeh. In the UK, the supreme court can not strike down primary legislation. It can rule executive actions are not following the primary legislation or unwritten constitutional rules, but if parliament passes a law that says oranges are now green, the supreme court is in no position to challenge it.
I checked your profile and you are cofounder of a company with branches all around Europe. At least the countries in the EU should have separation of powers, and the judicial (the courts) are independent from the government and there is a parliament which is more or less independent from the government too. Of course the government is usually backed by the majority of the parliament so the two of them often act together. The courts apply the law, whatever it is, but if the parliament or the government or the president (for presidential democracies) do something against the law or the constitution (or equivalent chart), there is at least a court that can undo that legislation and send it back for an overhaul. This is what happened in France.
I am not sure. In French that would be the state (L’État). It’s more complicated in the U.K., with its layers of national, devolved country, and local governance. Then, it would be different again in federations like Germany.
Seems like there are many ways to get toward the best of both worlds -- don't allow people to upload pictures of kids who are clearly under 15 to social media would get us a lot of the way there.
Also all of these companies know from advertising data, and location data, that you are at school, who you are, etc. They would also know that all of your friends are also teenagers.
If the law is serious there are many many ways to enforce this without violating privacy.
Without further violating privacy. I would say that the data these companies are already collecting on people (including children, who many believe should be afforded extra protections from such companies) is a major, systematic privacy violation.
> Seems like there are many ways to get toward the best of both worlds -- don't allow people to upload pictures of kids who are clearly under 15 to social media would get us a lot of the way there.
How do you prevent kids uploading photos of themselves?
As french citizen what I can say is: Parliamentary time wasted. During the initial work the deputees that have initiated the project could have figured out that the constitutional court would, in fine, block the text.
Sometimes they do know but do it anyway (or even for that very reason) because it serves their political interests and then the great bill they were supporting is blocked by someone else, which can be blamed as needed.
I think Trump played that game a number of times, for instance.
What I find interesting is that Texas did it with just pornography sites, everyone complains. Then California, which included those that complained by Texas' law, says they're going to do it at the OS level, some people were okay with it but some still opposed it and possibly some others opposed it. Yet, they're still pushing forward with both?
Just like all the other policies that somehow manage to move at the speed of light across the globe. These politicians are seem to all be influenced by the same thing, with that usually being in opposition to the people that voted for them.
I always find it weird when people declare things “are” rights, as rights are things societies create. “Should be a right” seems like a more appropriate framing
There are. In the constitution, as the court found. There are also reasonable arguments that they are an unavoidable consequence of Human Rights, as described in the declaration of 1789, which is also in the constitution.
The right to privacy is also explicitly in the Code Civil since 1970, in the European Convention on Human Rights and the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union (both are binding to EU member states).
It is unclear to me how you can regulate any digital service with respect to any demographic identity without regression to full identity check.
Parental controls are not a solution, either. People are free to use any terminal they wish. If you wanted to change that then it again regresses to the same issue.
A few options: (a) load a digital copy of an existing ID into your OS's wallet app then the wallet app can simply attest to any service that the device is owned by someone over 18 (b) sell single-use tokens in grocery stores that require an ID to purchase like alcohol. token can be used to verify you're 18+ for one site. (c) require that any network-enabled device can only be bought by showing ID to prove 18+ and then when set up can be configured at the OS-level as child-owned so a parent can buy a device and do the initial setup so it's locked in child mode.
I love how the french can go from bieng, from bieng, French, to making complete rational sensical descions that they will then stick to but refuse to discuss.
Bravo vive la france!
Frankly, the proper solution is to ban social media regardless of age. We are already doing it with heroin and other similar substances and clearly social media are pretty bad for everyone and anyone.
Tobacco and alcohol are scientifically proven carcinogens, yet they are sold ubiquitously in the [western] world. I would argue they are more dangerous than social medias. Yet we don't see any push in banning tobacco and alcohol for 'everyone'.
We won't ban any of all these things because there are people with political power that make fortunes out of them. Whether that's alcohol, social media, tobacco or otherwise.
We will not go for the proper solution, not because it's not the proper solution but because powerful people won't allow it.
If you do look at the things we have indeed banned, you will find that they are mostly coming from outside our countries. It's not cut and dry, but it's very geopolitical pretty often.
Alcohol story is a lot more than just it being a good business, in vino veritas and all. There is a huge cultural aspect around it for better or worse.
I haven't seen children doomscrolling HN lately, have you?
But, whatever it takes. Social media in combination with mobile phones is destroying the latest generations. Add AI in the mix, and we're on the road to Idiocracy.
The problem is that any age verification system effectively becomes an identity verification system. And such tools rarely remain "just for kids"—they quickly become used for other purposes. The only secure way is to verify not the person's identity, but the device's status (for example, that it's a children's device). This is called age assurance: we confirm age without knowing who exactly is in front of us.
Age assurance is still treating the symptom. If the platform is designed to addict and radicalize, a children's device getting in doesn't help the child, it just means the harmful design now has a younger victim. The only fix that actually works is making the platform safe for everyone, which means regulating what these services are allowed to do to users in the first place, not building better gates around them.
(There are some basic things like fraud and such that are already illegal.)
Most people don’t actually want to ban “harmful” speech except for the speech of their political enemies.
2020s: >%2 of all teens smoke
Kinda suggests that putting limitations in place actually produces results. Crazy innit?
If you weren't aware, smoking became uncool a long time ago. Teens who consume tobacco use vapes or Zyn now.
So the metric should be case by case for each proposed solution. Most of things proposed are no good, but that doesn't mean there is not a sensible solution out there to limit net for teens.
this is fundamentally wrong and accepting this as an industry will only lead to required identity verification becoming the norm sooner or later
the important realization is age verification is in the end "just" a form of parenting tool
this means
- it doesn't need to be a "perfect", glancing at the age of a passport when buying adult products isn't perfect either, but it's good enough. And it doesn't require seeing the address, name, (in most cases) day and month, gender etc. on a id, nor any form of "noting them down".
- it doesn't need to be attestation based, unhackable or anything like that. It complements parenting, not replaces it.
- in turn it also shouldn't need anyones id, in most places children below 18 don't need any id but 16+ is still a age barrier
or to lay it out in rough design
- require multimedia devices sold to have a child "mode" functionality
- allow setting a age category or age (to auto determine and update the category), require a age set for this purpose to be kept private on the device and not shared, analyzed etc.
- require web sites and apps to have voluntary min age limits, similar to other products, block access _client side_ based on this information. The standard should allow region/country specific limits and reason tags.
- There are a bunch of edge cases omitted, like sites serving dynamic content/platforms in general. Requirements for parents to be allowed to define exceptions (in both directions) and handling of sides not having your countries age gating. Etc.
- properly educate parent about it
this provides sufficient functionality to support parents in parenting without requiring any identity verification or overriding the parents right to parent
yes, it's not perfect in many ways. But it doesn't need to perfect, it's "just fine" for what it tries to archive.
it's a parenting tool, not an online banking system
EDIT: Also the most relevant devices are not laptops, but phones, tablets, gaming consoles. Some of them have such a system already working "good enough" for the use cases of "games"/"game stores" and similar. Yes not browser. But very much extensible to that.
source?
Like copy-protection there's always a way to circumvent it, the name of the game is to make it difficult enough. And for parents, to make it very easy to set-up.
Then it's up to parents to give their kids child-locked devices and for stores to not sell unlocked devices to kids.
<https://www.rtalabel.org/page.php?content=howtofaq>
Maybe we need a "it's not for kids but it's not porn either" header.
And it's the same reason why everybody keeps pushing the stupidier, most obnoxious and invasive tools to "protect the children".
If you want kids to not access social networks, you need to have most of them out. If only a minority is out, they will just be outcast.
That said, "everybody must do that thing that Apple does" may be a very good example of good regulation. IDK what Apple does, though.
Companies like epic and Microsoft dont. The easy path is just a default install
I suspect this is by design.
And before anyone blames the parents, parents will always be shitty. They are an impediment to children's health society must work around.
I wish we would just pull the plug on ad-based social media altogether. The incentives add up to destroying society.
...huh? This is completely backwards. We should be making laws that punish parents for failing to parent properly. Not laws that punish everyone.
If we pass a law that children under a certain age may not use social media, then giving your child a non-child-locked device should be treated the same way we treat giving your child alcohol or cigarettes.
Zuckerberg was not a parent when he conceived of Facebook and "society" as a whole is pushing social media on kids, not parents.
Maybe cut nontechnicals a little slack? Their adversaries have invested literally billions of dollars in R&D.
The details of how to override a ruling against the executive does differ between countries, and also on whether its considered just an interpretation of law or a constitutional question. Both the US and France have a written constitution that's binding on other branches, while the UK does not.
Yeh. In the UK, the supreme court can not strike down primary legislation. It can rule executive actions are not following the primary legislation or unwritten constitutional rules, but if parliament passes a law that says oranges are now green, the supreme court is in no position to challenge it.
It’s a good thing MPs are serious people and Parliament would never do that, right? :)
In the US "government" generally refers to all three branches; is that not the case in Europe?
Maybe we need an adult only portion of the Internet and verify identity only on that (like bars do to keep out kids).
New TLD maybe? .adult
Also all of these companies know from advertising data, and location data, that you are at school, who you are, etc. They would also know that all of your friends are also teenagers.
If the law is serious there are many many ways to enforce this without violating privacy.
How do you prevent kids uploading photos of themselves?
I think Trump played that game a number of times, for instance.
This give parents useful control, and removes the state overreach.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_law
The right to privacy is also explicitly in the Code Civil since 1970, in the European Convention on Human Rights and the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union (both are binding to EU member states).
Parental controls are not a solution, either. People are free to use any terminal they wish. If you wanted to change that then it again regresses to the same issue.
We will not go for the proper solution, not because it's not the proper solution but because powerful people won't allow it.
If you do look at the things we have indeed banned, you will find that they are mostly coming from outside our countries. It's not cut and dry, but it's very geopolitical pretty often.
But, whatever it takes. Social media in combination with mobile phones is destroying the latest generations. Add AI in the mix, and we're on the road to Idiocracy.
Also, ad hominem are the tool of the really stupid. Be better than them!