The KIDS Act would require age checks to get online

It is not Meta working across the globe because they’re too lazy to implement age verification.

Previously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48708278

That's not the question. Some group is obviously pushing this agenda globally. Who?

Somehow the US ones always fly under the radar: Bilderberg, Council on Foreign Relations, Jackson Hole banker meetup, Bohemian Grove, etc.

It's so Facebook can prove to advertisers the views are not bots/AI.

the harm being us proles being able to communicate and organize. they don't give a fuck about kids, algorithmic feeds, or Russian/Chinese/other villains of the week disseminating propaganda to other bots in Facebook comments. they care exclusively about regaining some degree of control over the flow of information.

consider this: how many people in Europe would be against the ongoing replacement migration if it was still 1999 and 95% of people were still getting news exclusively from the TV and papers, where most incidents of cultural enrichment would never ever be mentioned? and on the other end of the spectrum, consider this: would the BLM protests of 2020 have the same scale and impact if there was no medium for people to spread the video and organize?

TLDR: Arab spring good, American/European spring bad.

> So now that parents have been blocked from parenting, who else is going to do it?

I'm a parent. Nobody has been blocked from parenting by tech companies.

How is it impossible? Worst case, parents can make the kids unlock the device and take it away if the kid does not comply. Not that such extreme measures should ever be needed if there aren't significant pre-existing parenting failures.

And at some age the parent's job should be to make sure the kid can act responsibly on its own rather than micromanaging every possible danger.

https://www.afr.com/technology/australia-takes-social-media-...

But it's not worth the privacy impacts and chilling of free speech.

Done. This alternative solves the whole problem and it's been brought up a million times, but it doesn't matter, because this isn't about protecting children or anything about ages. It's about locking down anonymity, and money for a few interests who want to be the verifiers and craft a future where they hold the keys.

But that wouldn't come with baked in surveillance, so "what else can you do" sounds a bit unnerving.

The question we have to ask ourselves is whether these "protect the children" laws are worth the internet freedoms they are about to erode. I would argue not.

1. It is not the state's responsibility to raise your children. They should ensure that safety is available, they should have some ability to deal with clear cases of abuse - but otherwise you're on your own. Anybody who thinks they want a nanny state just has to imagine the worst possible government abusing this power.

2. On the basis of providing safety, it would be enough for example for mobile phone OSes to provide parent restrictions (as they currently do). Kids can't afford to buy phones, so it's the parents in almost all cases giving them unfiltered access. If you really really want to ensure that all children have filtered access on phones, just spot check kid's phones and confiscate them if they do not have the locks enabled.

It seems insane to me that so many parents believe they have zero responsibility for their children's access to the internet, despite being the source of that access. I'm sorry, parents need to step up.

The default value assigned to a social study from academia should be zero these days, so there merely being a lot of them doesn't mean anything. You really need some very high quality evidence to justify this kind of huge change.

Until there's a solution that actually addresses the problem without creating more, we should just try to make sure more people also know the problem exists and try to help equip parents to deal with it as best they can for now.

Educate the parents maybe?

We could recognize the attention economy as inherently destructive to society and ban it altogether.

Now as I've thought this through some, I could see where selected networking could be made kid friendly, you know, like a top level dns where you need to prove yourself to be underage or heavily vetted adult with id verification, and this entire tld could be made kid friendly. I don't doubt that most of today's dns infrastructure is probably not up to the job, but a very tight and heavily vetted registry for .kids for example (or maybe better as kids.<country> as laws vary) would solve all of this. Make a subset of the internet kid safe and serve the kids that.

The fact that all these proposed laws still give kids general tcp/ip access at the physical level means we do conclude exactly what my parent commenter says, its not really about the kids, its about the free and unfettered flow of information that must be stopped. In the US, its getting close to illegal to disseminate information but once factual information does indeed become criminal in nature, you need to catch the perps and thus the IDs attached to packets of fact carrying information.

Because big players have systems to fill in those information gaps, they have a moat that protects their position in the market.

If the data were instead just handed over, that would weaken those moats.

Yea wouldn’t want to have parents be involved and managing what their kids interact with. What?

As it is all of the parental controls on all devices, apps, and services are extremely lackluster.

So I'd argue legally required, granular, parental controls and empowering parents would be a much better start to resolving this issue compared to blatant government privacy overreach.

Why should we aim to do that ? Who give internet-enables device to their children? In most cases, who give pay for their internet access?

> So how to solve it. And „I don’t like the current approach“ without having a better idea is not a solution.

Defining the problem, and if it exist altogether should be a good start. I'm not even sure the problem is defined, even less it need a solution so badly that we should kill everyone privacy for it.

I was raised in am extremely oppressive and abusive religious household. I would not be who I am today if I didn't have access to opinions outside of those shoved down my throat. I couldn't even listen to radio stations that weren't corporate soft rock or Christian music.

The internet was the only free space I had. Without it, I would certainly have killed myself as a child, rather than continue to submit to violent physical and religious abuse.

If we would stop blindly reacting with short-term thinking to each issue in turn that Corpgov presents us, and actually think deeply about what kind of future we'd like to build for those after us, it becomes radically clear that both the problem and solution as presented to us are actually detrimental in the long term.

You make it a burden on the parents, like all parenting always has been.

In my opinion, US culture losing sight of this is part of why our country is spinning down the drain. Combining Ipad kids with "what do you mean my child is failing? Isn't it your job to fix that?" I suspect has lead to a populace that can't think for themselves.

Being willing to give up your online anonymity to be surveiled online and not only beliving it's not a problem, but really thinking it's to protect children is another result of this.

Anyway, Meta, really? Just to have more of our data? For the absolutely pedestrian explicit purpose of providing more information to advertisers?

This is why I don't buy into conspiracy theories. The truth is typically really boring and predictable - evil corporations will evily corporate.

I half wish for a more exciting villain that would give people a noticeable reason to stand up against - not just annoying people with intrusive ads.

Is is an excuse for some, sure. But we will fail at pushing back if we ignore that there are a meaningful number of concerned parents who support solutions like this because they have become aware of the danger that social media presents. For many of them, self-attestation of age at the OS account level is likely sufficient, not to mention much simpler to implement and use.

But others are working hard to shift the narrative away from age attestation towards age verification or even identity verification. Government officials (on both the right and left) want to be able to police speech based on what is acceptable to those who are currently in power. Companies want to verify humans for advertising and training purposes. And some privacy advocates intentionally conflate age attestation (like California AB 1043) with age verification because it is an easier strawman to attack.

without a meaningful headcount of real users, advertisers will begin to push back on cost or even reduce and eliminate spending on social media altogether.

by proactively identifying real humans, you prevent the collapse of major social media outlets. by tracking their age and location directly, you restore that which AI took away from advertisers in the first place.

age verification makes sure surveillance capitalism continues to function.

which also did happen through the nineties and 2000s before social media, but how would you measure the effects of each on their own?

Yeah, I wonder what caused that?

The most freedom they actually get is on the Internet, that's why they all hang out there.

Yeah. No surprise. The generation of my parents used to run free in the woods. My generation was limited to whatever bicycles offered. And when I have children, I'll probably have to be happy if they can walk to a friend's without some busybody calling the cops on them.

And drinking? Don't get me started on that one - same here. My parents' generation distilled their own spirits (that's banned in Germany these days). My generation had beer. My children? Assuming drinking is still a thing when they're at that age, I'll have to fear getting the cops called on me if they ever drink enough to end up in a hospital (which is a routine thing these days).

Generally: Third spaces (e.g. libraries, "youth centers") are closing down, others (malls, parks) try everything possible to eliminate youth loitering or, god forbid, making noise. And that's if they can actually afford something. It's ridiculous how expensive basic stuff such as fast food or ice cream has gotten.

In contrast to that, phones are free-ish (well, parents buy them for their kids anyway, and mobile data plans aren't a big deal either).

> and with social media use as common as it is, almost every kid who commits suicide will have recently used social media.

Bullying always used to be a thing, yes. But that's a legitimate complaint, the mechanics of social media and cameras being ever present have made bullying much more severe in scale. Hell if I were young today, I'd have probably ended up arrested multiple times if there was some video camera rolling around all time.

It feels absurd to even ask.

I've been pondering recently how much time parents are spending on phones, that, 20 years ago they might have otherwise spent engaging with their kids.

Maybe kids would be better off if we stopped regulating every facet of their lives under the pretence of safety and make them feel if they make one mistake they will ruin their life because now they can't get into a good college or something.

Sound reasoning lol some really hysterical folk on here.

if you actually believed it were that dangerous you wouldn't be literally on social media posting about this would you?

Two of those three are probably better outcomes.

For example in the country I live in psychiatric help has been systematically de-funded during that period as well as support for sports, education and more.

Maybe it's not climate chance, pseudo intellectualism, late stage capitalism, etc. Nah, it's the kids in their group chat or scrolling through tiktok, that's it, that's the reason.

Age checks are part if that. They will just feed the sureveillance capitalism machine and make the problem even worse.

Age checked social media is just like the parlor walls in Fahrenheit 451 and infuencers are Mildred Montag. Just another thing to keep people distracted and neutered.

I remember I used to hang out on IRC during my teens with all kinds of people: jewish lesbians from conservative families and other teens from Scandinavia who got drafted on somewhat right wing warez groups, middle aged goth rockers on music sharing channels. Quite an experience for someone who grew up in a post communist country to interact with so colorful and genuinely interesting people. In contrast to that social media is an entirely fake experience generated with bots, algorithms and AI, just like a techno feudal version of the communist propaganda riddled lalaland that I grew up in. Many a DPRK on steroids, except it herds people into getting enraged and engaged with brands in order to hopelessly buy useless junk instead of submitting to a dear supreme leader. Of course it gets people addicted, because it was designed with that in mind.

.... Is this trolling? Banning social media won't stop them accessing "horrible things", you'd need to disconnect the internet entirely from them, have you done that?

Why do you think social media is bad but somehow regular websites aren't horrible?

Also, a bank would not satisfy section 201 (B), (C), or (D), so it wouldn't be a covered platform anyway. (I should have left "bank" out of my original post, I was really thinking more about discussion sites like this one, blogs, etc.)

(HN itself doesn't meet at least one other requirement besides subsection (E): subsection (D), "Uses a design feature to promote user engagement on the platform".)

Not at all. You named eleven. Even if I'm generous and raise that by a couple of orders of magnitude, it's still a miniscule fraction of all websites.

Of course it's close to all big tech platforms, but that's not the same thing. And if one of the results of this whole kerfluffle is to make more people realize that the big tech platforms are not the same as "the Internet" or "the Web", that would be a good thing.

> Websites like HN are the exception, not the norm.

Which makes it even more important to ask the question of whether "exception" websites like this one can continue to survive if this bill becomes law. Sure, HN users are a tiny fraction of all Internet users. But that's supposed to be one of the things the Internet is for--to give even very small communities a place where they can be a community, and not have to worry about all the other crap that's out there, and not have to be micromanaged by politicians and lobbyists and tech giants.

> It's also disingenuous to say "a personal blog" would be exempt from this when most people don't have blogs in first place since they start microblogging instead

Not all blogging platforms use targeted ads. And if this gives more of them an incentive not to, that would be a good thing.

More technological solutions to social problems.

If parents were really concerned about this stuff they'd take the time to set up parental controls, but they don't. Which makes me pretty sure the push for all this isn't coming from parents.

Please describe how requiring a government ID in order to use a computer prevents an over-seventeen from presenting their ID to unlock their computer and then handing that computer over to an under-eighteen? An over-seventeen handing over control of their unlocked computer to a visiting under-eighteen seems to me to be an under-eighteen "go[ing somewhere] they could access a non-locked-down device".

The only way I can see to even begin to combat that is to constantly surveil the operator of the computer to attempt to detect when its operator changes. Do you have a superior method?

We could lock every kid and adult in a padded cell to prevent kids from being harmed, so why don't we pass a law requiring that? Because its not a proportional response, just like demanding mandatory age verification for every adult is not proportional either.

It was bad and suggesting state violence for lack of compliance with your world view is bad.

So pass laws and enact regulations that require them to be made strong.

Not only does this moot the demands for capture of photo ID, beefing up the parental controls that already exist in every major OS means that -say- adults caring for their dementia-damaged parents can restrict those adults' access to things that could be very dangerous to them and/or their finances. A strictly-age-based "protection" scheme absolutely does not do that.

One might argue that one could "merely" require a "This adult is seriously intellectually damaged. [0] Make sure to protect them from scammers and predators!" flag that can be flipped on by a Registered Caretaker. I humbly suggest that that is information you should never disclose to a company that makes its money by trading in dossiers of its users.

[0] Dear downvoters: I understand that this isn't the PC term for the effects of these sorts of ailments. If you've ever had to watch over and care for someone who gets cored out bad by this shit, it's hard to describe it as anything else.

What features are missing that makes everyone giving up their privacy a better option?

Lack of practice with face to face communication, near inability to talk on the phone, less quality connection with people in general, craned necks, myopia, hidden bullying, privacy violations, dependency on a US company etc

And what do you mean by "can't talk to anyone"?

So the solution to parents deciding to give their kids access to stuff is to make me flash my ID every time I go online on one of my devices that I use in my childless household? And you're confident that there won't be plenty of parents who just put their ID information in for their kids anyhow?

Though I think it's worth noting that age verification _without_ identity verification is basically as impracticable, and arguably more dangerous.

To stay consistent with my point though, if we mandate that everyone must ID verify to access the internet, I think it's just as reasonable we mandate that all such antiques be forcibly modernized with some sort of 5G-connected ID scanner. For the children of course.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stop_Online_Piracy_Act

The only people who think otherwise are terminally online losers who have never organized anything larger than a birthday party.

Money matters but a popular movement is more powerful still in some places look up DSA

For instance:

https://idtechwire.com/spains-pm-proposes-mandatory-digital-...

https://www.weforum.org/publications/reimagining-digital-id/

https://www.weforum.org/stories/2021/01/davos-agenda-digital...

Everyone ignores stuff like this because of people like Alex Jones who make it seem like a lunatic conspiracy theory. But these conferences happen, and they do influence policy. It’s not a “cabal” that issues orders—many participants are national leaders bringing their perspectives (see the link above about Sanchez)—but it does have an impact.

The banal truth is that many different world leaders have talked each other into this after years of discussion on the proper way to “manage” the Internet. They see cyberspace as a threat to top-down technocratic control and view Internet-enabled populism (aka democracy) as something to be quashed.

Is it even possible? Will businesses my voters like and use a lot just leave my country entirely? Will companies be able to develop privacy-preserving age check infrastructure? Will the press present it as a 'Chinese-style Great Firewall' or be more supportive of it? Will the blocks all be trivial to bypass? Will the large number of porn users in my country form a cohesive voting block? Will a powerful pro-privacy, pro-free-speech lobby emerge to challenge this? And will they be backed by powerful, well-funded US interests like Facebook and Google?

Australia simply showed the world passing this sort of legislation isn't political suicide.

This is a win/win for big tech. If they don’t get age verification, they can keep getting kids addicted to propaganda and consumerism. If they do get age verification, they get to see what everyone in the world thinks and is interested in, all linked to government ID.

Edit: the one outcome big tech does not want is anonymous age verification. This is technologically extremely possible, but that would be a lose/lose for big tech because they would lose kid (aka future consuming adult) addiction AND lose perfect tracking linked to government IDs.

It is far more common for that child to be targeted by parents, and maybe by people they know in person, especially because of the lousy social environment their parents have pushed them into, and therefore to have limited offline support systems, and you are now trying to take away all they do have.

I am not disagreeing with you, but the conversation to be had is far, far wider than "think of the children!". Part of any deal would have to be: privacy of citizens is not a business model. But then you are facing the full might of Corp Inc, including their legislative powers.

If there were an organic push by parents, they would be happy to buy and promote products today, without waiting for legislation to catch up. Where are these local parental control products?

Speaking of social media and Youtubes of the world, why can't I, as account owner/parent, totally blacklist some "recommendations"?

Age verification is not a fit tool for content filtering. Users want the latter, but get switcheroo'd into the former.

The public at large have real issues with the current state of the internet and people here don't want to hear it or address it so we get this.

The main issue with this bill is that it requires a huge cost in civic freedoms, with questionable benefits to societal stability. Not only do most youth extremists first offend past the threshold this age verification would catch, this legislation lets big tech off the hook for designing addictive algorithms in the first place, since "there are no kids on the platform anymore, and if there are, they're breaking the law".

[1]: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/1057610X.2025.2...

> Right now if you are not a tech-savvy parent your choices are: (1) deny children access to devices or severely limit that access, or (2) allow your kids to be raised by super-addictive infinite scroll brain rot feeds

> Now imagine you are a non-tech-savvy household with two parents who work. You can't really limit access since you can't supervise it enough, so your choice is now binary: no access, kids raised by brain rot and propaganda. Pick one. You have no control, no ability to whitelist, because not only do you not have time to deal with this but the tools often cost money and are imperfect and ineffective.

No access is the solution here. Tools are not expected to be perfect. The railing on a balcony is there for accidents, not to stop you from jumping off headfirst.

> Then you catch your 11 year old son watching extreme fetish porn that he lacks the maturity to contextualize, or hear him spouting off Nazi ideology or talking about how he's an "alpha male" and women should be his slaves. Or your daughter becomes anorexic by following influencers. Or you have a child who is questioning their sexual orientation or identity and is targeted by an online bullying ring. These are the commonplace examples. There's a lot of much worse shit too, like sextortion of kids. Search for "764."

Take away their internet access. If your child spends 90% of their time on phub, _take away their internet access_. If they spend 90% of their free time doomscrolling, _take away their phone_. If they need Internet access for school work, the can either do their school work at school, or you watch them do their schoolwork, or you find someone else to watch them do it. If you cannot do this, then you cannot be responsible for them and they should be removed from your care. This is basic mental health.

> That's why this push exists. It's not a conspiracy. It's because we -- our industry -- is an amoral shitshow that engineers addiction and refuses to police itself or provide parents with good tools to do so.

This isn't a third party policing the industry, this is telling the industry to police itself...by reaching inside my pockets to check my ID. Invasive security like X-ray machines at the airport aren't there for _your_ safety (regardless of what they say), they're there for _everyone else's_ safety: we're making sure you don't kill others.

> I'd also like to note that for the non-tech-savvy privacy is dead and has been dead for over ten years at least. If you are not tech-savvy your devices are recording everything about you and transmitting it to two dozen ad networks and data brokers.

> That's a different issue, and it's also being addressed by legislation in some places that actually care (not in much of the US, unfortunately).

That's a different issue, and it's also being addressed by legislation in some places that actually care (not in much of the US, unfortunately).

Privacy can be taught. We don't anymore. Nobody objected when platforms like Facebook started requiring real identities, but the simple answer to this is to not give out your information.

I love freedom as a general principle, but internet 2026 is a undefendable cesspool of amorality, scams and worse. We are not in the 90s or early 00s anymore, and never will be again that era is gone.

They are going to track everything everyone does, and the next generation will turn that tracking into coercion and control. This is everything we were warned about in 1984.

Kill products that advertise to kids before you kill privacy.

Make it illegal to advertise to children instead of making people submit their state-issued ID.

Fine parents for letting children online instead of tracking adults in databases.

All of this moral hand-wringing is a lie anyway. They do not care about children. If they did, the kids would get $3 school meals for free instead of 30 million of them going into nutritional deficit.

What hurts a kid more - not getting the necessary nutrition, or them being exposed to porn? I know my friends sent me shock sites when I was a preteen - that didn't turn me into a murdering lunatic. Whereas if I hadn't eaten and grown up healthily, perhaps I wouldn't have made it into a stable career.

My observation is that a society is based on some common ideas, many times myths, but without those common threads you can't make a civilization. This is why dictatorial regimes shut down open internet access rather quickly. They know it will undermine and/or destroy their control of the masses.

Here is the list of cosponsors in case anyone was curious if their "representative" is on the list https://www.govtrack.us/congress/bills/119/s1748/cosponsors

[1] - https://nochan.net/b/Internet-Crap/20230829-Think-Of-The-Chi...

Tried to collect more logical fallacies here.

Always remember Hanlon's Razor and the Golden Rule (for the other team too)

We need social programs like social housing, universal healthcare, free education, and universal food stamps. We need to actually use the abundance of resources we have to meet our fundamental needs (shocker I know).

Incentivizing parents to parent aligns the obligation, agency, and responsibility. People who don't want that level of responsibility can not have children.

If you make corporations liable for minors using their product, they're just going to require identity verification to use their product, and we're back to effectively the same proposal, right? Unless I've misunderstood you.

This applies to more than just tech and money: being unable to give your kids attention because you need 3 jobs to pay for them is just as bad for the kids as being unable to give them attention because you're busy gambling or a drug addict (it does makes a difference to whether you're a disgusting person, though).

At least online there can be a separation between the age verification provider and the online content provider, so that the latter doesn't learn anything from the former except that the user's age is above or below a specific cut-off point. So it can actually be more privacy-preserving than purchasing age-restricted goods over the counter.

Actually not to them through them to one of the few ID verifier 3rd parties that now receives a big portion of the records of anyone that buys adult content in any store with any publisher.

But if you're still worried about online pornographers getting a copy of your identity, maybe don't use their websites? It's an easily avoidable risk. Perhaps use your imagination instead, or read an erotic novel bought in cash from a second-hand bookshop, or something like that.

Yes you do, if they scan your ID with any technology they're uploading a picture to that company's server. If you use a payment card then your bank and the card network also know.

As Christian I would say "more fundamentalist and less Christian". I am not sure this is religiously based. We have similar things happening in European countries that are not religious. Its a moral panic and "think of the children".

> You don't wind up in a database for buying alcohol.

My (just turned 18) daughter said a pub in the UK scanned her driving license so they may well be connecting to some database before letting young people buy alcohol. IIRC the EU wants its age verification app to be used for things like this.

This is a time of "first they came for the....".

I don't think this is a good assumption. It's not uncommon for stores to scan your ID when you buy alcohol.

> This proposal puts your name right next to the category of porn you're into, which will be a great way to coerce all those politicians into voting for the "correct" bill. Would be a shame if they found out a state senator watched porn, so maybe they'd better vote yes on the proposal.

This is not quite how typical systems are structured. Rather, the service provider outsources the age assurance to some third party Age Verification Provider (AVP), which then just returns an age estimate or a yes/no. Commonly, the AVP will have a stated policy that they don't share your identity with the client.

Obviously, you have to trust the AVP to comply with this policy, which is not ideal. There are approaches (e.g., zero-knowledge proofs) that provide some technical privacy protections, but they're not currently in wide use.

Note: this is not an endorsement of age assurance; I'm just trying to clarify the situation.

Their business models require little to no human moderation, because it simply doesn't scale (for their business to stay profitable).

Personally, my feeling is that if you can't take care of your product, you should go out of business.