Background: Meta/Facebook, Google and Apple all support age verification. It gives them legal cover and for their ad platforms gives better data.<p>But Meta/FB have been strongly lobbying to make it required at the OS level, so they aren't responsible for it, whereas Google and Apple both want it to be an application responsibility.<p>I think the CA version of this ended up with a carve-out for open source? I can't recall the details.
> all support age verification<p>No, they all support harvesting your data so they can continue doing what they do best: building shadow profiles and targeting ads.<p>Nothing a signal of an age group tells them more than "send me more ads for XX year-olds".<p>Why do you think it's always a question asked in online surveys?
> The law also stipulates that all transmitted digital signals have to be encrypted.<p>I'm hoping there's nuance, but I'm surprised the article didn't go deeper on this too. ARP? ICMP? DHCP?<p>I can't actually load the bill to read it ATM.
From reading the article, it sounds like an enforced standardisation? Like, asking for account age bracket and then having a standard API to ask for it would be easy, right? Just write it to a root owned `~/.age-bracket` for each user or something (obviously something better).<p>It's a feature many apps implement in all kinds of ways already, especially games and social media stuff, so this, in theory, just makes it easier and consistent?<p>I'm against leaking our kids ages, and all the privacy and other concerns as much as anyone, but are we just getting overly angry too quickly on this one?<p>I get that it's a slippery slope too.
It passes responsibility and accountability from the large platforms to the open-source communities and to parents who are most likely tech illiterate.<p>Facebook, etc. can wash their hands when they "accidentally" serve gambling ads (or whatever) to children and say "well it's not our fault the parent has the laptop misconfigured"<p>It's classic blaming the victim.
illogical hubris - no state can regulate the internet; no state can compel developers to write code. the court cases on this will be interesting
This is censorship; it is like saying you can't eat a steak because a baby can't chew it. They will try to ban Linux or fine Linux developers unless it reports the user's age.
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I’m not looking forward to updating my array of 3D printer controllers with Raspbian in them and having them suddenly ask me for some sort of age attestation. Why would I be glad about this? My kids just aren’t allowed to use social media and have super locked down devices, so even the alleged advantage doesn’t help me.