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Comment by walthamstow | Hacker News Reader

This kind of ballot issue is a great filter. It's so obviously correct, the reason of any normal person will be "why was it legal at all?", so anyone arguing against the ban is quite probably paid to do so and should be ignored.

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I'm arguing against a ban.

There's no way to implement this without (1) usage-based profiling (what's being banned in the first place) or (2) ID verification.

I'm against both of those.

For me, the only acceptable solutions are: (1) ban all profiling-based ads (2) require respecting DO_NOT_TRACK (so that people/minors/their parents can individually decide what to do, but websites are then legally forced to respect that)

> There's no way to implement this without (1) usage-based profiling (what's being banned in the first place) or (2) ID verification.

(3) zero knowledge age verification hosted by the gov which already has all the data anyways

for my taste that goes a bit too much into "you don't have anything to hide" and doomerism. if one wants, one can boot a TailsOS with a VPN and then no, the gov does not have all the data it needs to link it to you. just because lots of stuff is being monitored we don't have to destroy every privacy boundary in existence.

We're talking about age, not about your foot fetish, the government definitely knows about your age.

There are technical ways to implement this correctly, it's a political problem, not a technical one.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nothing_to_hide_argument

> We're talking about age, not about your foot fetish, the government definitely knows about your age.

well, yeah, they also know how much i earn, where i live etc. but that's not really my point. my point is what online-stuff they can additionally link to me. you responding with the fetish stuff as a counter-argument is kinda weird, and doesn't really seem to take what i wrote seriously.

i hope if we ever have such a solution its one of those hypothetical zero-knowledge "all we do is check your age and give back a single boolean flag and we also don't record from where and why these requests come", just not that optimistic about it. ban online ads and you got a way easier solution without having to build such a system in the first place.

> it's a political problem, not a technical one

i'd say it's both, so i at least half-agree on that point :)

by "zero knowledge" you of course mean "the government can shadowban you without your knowledge" ?

Edit: non-snarky response: what's the default "fall-back" if government's signature is missing? IMO any option ("tracking/no tracking/invalid request") will be exploitable in bad ways.

That's already the case right now. They can ban you from getting internet, a phone, a bank account, a car...

Sometimes I wonder in what kind of alternative reality some people live...

A best effort implementation should be fine. Advertisers already have suspected age fields available (derived from behavioral patterns, linked information across devices, etc). When you develop a reasonable suspicion that it's a minor then stop fleshing out the profile and targeting them. That's what the big players already do (maybe not Meta, but certainly at least Google). That doesn't quite fall into your (1) point since it's not profiling that's being banned, but profiling-based ads.

It seems like a roundabout way of banning profiling of non-ID’d users in general which seems… good? Like, if overlapping regulations have the practical effect of banning tracking, then that’s a win for society, right?

What's the downside to the ban as described, when compared to the status quo?

If there's no profile already, then they can serve the ad, since it's not a profiling-based ad and they don't need to know if the viewer is a minor.

If there is a profile then they have the knowledge to avoid advertising based on that if it's a minor.

I don't see why ID verification needs to come into play?

I would love to see a ban on _all_ profiling-based ads, but this seems like a step in the right direction to me.

If you ban profiling-based ads to minors, and it's not possible to reliably detect when a user is a minor, then you have de facto banned all profiling-based ads. Since you deem that solution acceptable (as do I!) I don't see what the problem is.

Why allow profiling at all? This way everyone gets a bit more privacy, second it doesn't create another situation where you got to prove that you're an adult.

You bring up an excellent argument there, however, haven’t you thought about the money?

I mean, who cares about the developing minds of the next generation when there’s money to be made involved?

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