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Comment by roenxi | Hacker News Reader

Also, key point in the framing, when was it decided that Discord supposed to be the one enforcing this? A pop-up saying "you really should be 18+" is one thing, but this sounds like a genuine effort to lock out young people. Neither Discord nor a government ratings agency should be taking final responsibility for how children get bought up, that seems like something parents should be responsible for.

This is over-reach. Both in the UK and Australia.

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When a corner shop sells cigarettes to minors, who's breaking the law?

When a TV channel broadcast porn, who gets fined?

These are accepted laws that protect kids from "harm", which are relatively uncontroversial.

Now, the privacy angle is very much the right question. But as Discord are the one that are going to get fined, they totally need to make sure kids aren't being exposed to shit they shouldn't be seeing until they are old enough. In the same way the corner shop needs to make sure they don't sell booze to 16 year olds.

Now, what is the mechanism that Discord should/could use? that's the bigger question.

Can government provide fool proof, secure, private and scalable proof of age services? How can private industry do it? (Hint: they wont because its a really good source of profile information for advertising.)

Cigarettes are deadly

Broadcasting porn isn't an age ID issue, it's public airwaves and they're regulated.

These aren't primarily "think of the children" arguments, the former is a major public health issue that's taken decades to begin to address, and the latter is about ownership.

I don't think that chat rooms are in the same category as either public airwaves or drugs. Besides what's the realistic outcome here? Under 18's aren't stupid, what would you have done as a kid if Discord was suddenly blocked off? Shrug and not talk to your friends again?

Or would you figure out how to bypass the checks, use a different service, or just use IRC? Telegram chats? Something even less moderated and far more open to abuse, because that's what can slip under the radar.

So no I don't think this is about protecting kids, I think it's about normalizing the loss of anonymity online.

You can swap cigarettes with another age restricted product, like pornography or 18-rated DVDs if you prefer.

The UK also has rules on what can be broadcast on TV depending on the time of day.

> These aren't primarily "think of the children" arguments

Are you kidding me? v-chip, mary whitehouse, Sex on TV are all the result of "think of the children" moral panics. Its fuck all to do with ownership.

> I don't think that chat rooms are in the same category as either public airwaves

Discord are making cash from underage kids, in the same way that meta and google are, in the same way that disney and netflix offering kids channels.

Look I'm not saying that discord should be banned for kids, but I really do think that there is a better option than the binary "Ban it all"/"fuck it, let them eat porn"

Kids need to be able to talk to each other, but they also should be able to do that without being either preyed upon by nonces, extremists, state actors and more likely bored trolls.

Its totally possible to provide anonymous age gating, but its almost certainly going to be provided by an adtech company unless we, the community provide something cheaper and better.

At least the ways that a corner shop verifies age don't have the same downsides as typical online age verifiers. They just look at an ID document; verify that it's on the official list of acceptable ID documents, seems to be genuine and valid and unexpired, appears to relate to the person buying the product, and shows an old enough age; and hand the document back.

The corner shop has far fewer false negatives, far lower data privacy risk, and clear rules that if applied precisely won't add any prejudice about things like skin color or country of origin to whatever prejudice already exists in the person doing the verification.

That's exactly how a digital ID system would work, and yet people argue against those all the time as well.

Additionally, the corner shop does not have far lower data privacy risks - actually it's quite worse. They have you on camera and have a witness who can corroborate you are that person on camera, alongside a paper trail for your order. There is no privacy there, only the illusion of such.

By data privacy risks I meant the risk of a breach, compromise, or other leak of the database of verified IDs. No information about the IDs are generally collected in a corner shop, at least when there's no suspicion of fraud; they're just viewed temporarily and returned. Not only do online service providers retain a lot of information about their required verifications, they do so for hugely more people than a typical corner shop.

Also, corner shop cameras don't generally retain data for nearly as long as typical online age verification laws would require. Depending on the country and the technical configuration, physical surveillance cameras retain data for anywhere from 48 hours to 1 year. Are you really saying that most online age verification laws worldwide require or allow comparably short retention periods? (This might actually be the case for the UK law, if I'm correctly reading Ofcom's corresponding guidance, but I doubt that's true for most of the similar US state laws.)

At least the US laws I've looked at have all specifically mandated that data shall not be retained, some with rather steep penalties for retention (IIRC ~$10k/affected user).

A lot of these shops have cameras which could similarly be compromised. In fact the camera is likely to be more vulnerable and probably already had been hacked by DDoS orgs.

I hate sites asking for photo verification, but I think it is more about convenience/reliability for me. My bigger fear is that if AI locks me out with no one to go for support.

Where I live they scan the barcode on the back of the ID into their POS. I don't know what data that exposes, or exactly what's retained, but I suspect it's enough to thoroughly compromise the privacy of that transaction - with no pesky, gumshoe witness-statement and camera-footage steps necessary.

Its a different risk.

The cornershop does not have access to your friend graph. Also, if you pay by card, digital ID only provides corroboration, your payment acts as a much more traceable indicator.

The risk of "digital ID" is that it'll leak grosly disprocotionate amounts of data on the holder.

For Age verification, you only need a binary old enough flag, from a system that verifies the holder's ID.

The problem is, people like google and other adtech want to be the people that provide those checks, so they can tie your every action to a profile with a 1:1 link. Then combine it to card transactions to get an ad impression to purchase signal much clearer.

The risk here is much less from government but private companies.

When the corner shop checks your ID, they won't take a photo of it. Digital IDs can easily be stored without the user's knowledge. That's a privacy nightmare.

> and unexpired

Because certainly one's identity might totally change if one's ID card expires...

Expiry places a bound on duplication and forcing additional duplication allows you to update standards. It's a tradeoff to produce a strictness ratchet.

The person in possession of an expired ID can quite easily change, yeah.

> This is over-reach. Both in the UK and Australia

2/3 of Australians support minimum age restrictions for social media [1] and it was in-particular popular amongst parents. Putting the responsibility solely on parents shows ignorance of the complexities of how children are growing up these days.

Many parents have tried to ban social media only for those children to experience ostracisation amongst their peer group leading to poorer educational and social developmental outcomes at a critical time in their live.

That's why you need governments and platform owners to be heavily involved.

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/article/2024/jun/...

that sounds quite puritan. my god says I can't, is one thing. my god says you can't either, is very different.

now replace god with parent.

You realize that is how EVERY law works right... The person your replying to says the public overall supports the idea/law. If following that law is a deal breaker for you you either need to persuade thos ppl to your view or move

A law to stop people from not going out of their way to include you when you made a choice to be unreachable sounds pretty desperate.

maybe it's "puritan" or maybe it's a normal view and it looks puritan from where you stand. how do you know which? One bit of evidence is the 2/3 to 1/3 split.

Everybody loves government overreach until the government starts to tell you how to live.

> Putting the responsibility solely on parents shows ignorance of the complexities of how children are growing up these days.

Don't have kids if you're unwilling to parent them. "It's hard! :(" is not an argument.

"We've tried nothing and we're all out of ideas!"

It almost certainly is overreach, but locking young people out of porn is hardly a new concern. We have variants of this argument continuously for decades. I'm not sure there is a definitive answer.

There's a SCOTUS case in FSC v. Paxton that could very well decide if age verification is enforced in the US as well so sadly this is just the beginning.

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