Hacker News Reader

Comment by guy98238710 | Hacker News Reader

As a parent, I can tell you how the current laws work in practice. When you admit you are younger than 18, average website will, with significant probability, lock your account immediately with no way to correct the situation and no way to setup new account with the same email address. After this happens a few times, you learn to dutifully tell all websites that you are 18.

I fear the mandatory age checking tech/laws. Being a kid is becoming increasingly illegal.

How about equal access laws for children before passing any new laws that encourage websites to block all children?

View on HN

Yeah. Kids only put in their real age once. After they get burned they know they have to say they're over 12 or 18 or whatever the site is asking about for a threshold.

Worse than that, the proof of identity is making it impossible to use the safest option - anonymity. If a kid gets bullied or harassed or targeted by bad actors they can't simply delete their account and create a new one. These laws force them to have one or two super high value (to them) accounts that are difficult to abandon.

I was always ~1 middle mouse spin years old on any age gates.

For the anonymity problem there's nothing really requiring that accounts are 1-1 permanently linked with their identities much less publicly linked to them. Just that they're validated as being >=XX years old right?

I don't think so. I'd be shocked if Facebook, etc. let you create more than one account with the same ID.

I think the obvious solution to this is to require websites not ask the visitors age or name. Like, that stuff is private info, and they don't need it to provide whatever service they're providing.

It is however nice to warn younger kids that something scary is ahead. Images of violence can be traumatizing. Attracting adult attention to suspected bullying is also nice.

What's the percentage of those websites hosted in the UK? You aren't achieving anything with those laws. You should rather focus on content filtering on the device.

or if you're going to ask them their age just display age appropriate content. Automatic categorizing of even user generated stuff should be a pretty much solved problem by now

What is "age appropriate" changes by the year, and is not universally agreed upon by everyone. I'm not sure that is a problem that will ever actually be solved.

As for categorizing content in general, I think it's pretty safe to look at Facebook and Twitter for examples of content moderation failing in spectacular ways, just as it is by all of the horror stories of Google accounts being automatically locked for utterly unclear reasons because some automated system picked up some cue and erroneously banned the account.

I'm not sure if automatic categorization is solved by now. Look at how many not suitable for kids stuff show up on Youtube Kids.

Maybe some other platform does this right, but I'm skeptic. I've watched some TikTok with my niece and some things were way over her age.

Maybe I'm getting old, but at least on TV there was a timeslot marked as suitable for all audiences, enforced by some agency in each country.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com