I’ll just add that age verification schemes serve no purpose—-and are actively harmful—-unless there is some reasonable policy that’s applied after the enforcement.

The companies pushing age verification make their money monetizing access to children. They are exactly the sorts of groups I’d like to keep my kids away from. Forcing the kids to label themselves as minors just makes them more vulnerable to online exploitation.

No ID checks at clubs, bars, or other adults-only venues.

No school zone speed limits, or protected crossings on streets near schools.

No requirements for railings on public balconies, fencing around public pools, protective covers over drains or other holes in the ground.

Parents/guardians can just supervise.

Sounds great!

the weird thing about it all is that age is a bad proxy in the first place for a child's level of safety in interacting with online content. Some kids are super mature at 11 and others still need protection at 16. For some reason the world has fixated on "years alive" as a perfect measure of vulnerability and now are doggedly pursuing it.

Even if perfect age verification is implemented, kids will be harmed. Because they are vulnerable while above the arbitrary age limit. So -arguing for age verification is harming children. Won't somebody think of the children?

And the answer comes back to the same point. Parents should mediate this. Online content should advertise its maturity level, and parents should be able to configure devices at setup time for the maturity level they are appropriate for. Then apps should respect that and everyone can be better off without robbing everybody of anonymity or freedom.

reads like you’re espousing a theoretical position from a theoretical perspective

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49205469

> you know, i feel like the "it's the parents' responsibility" comments that turn up on submissions like this often tend towards phrasing like "the parents" rather than "with my children i ..."

if you’ve had kids maybe you’d like to share with the class exactly how you go about doing exactly what you’re describing?

if not, maybe let parents figure out how to parent rather than expecting them to be perfect for everyone else’s benefit.

This is something where I agree and disagree with both sides.

Parents should have the tools to protect their children, the providers should have those tools in place. But those that are dealing the goods as also heavily invested in trying to maximize engagement and so they do not really work to hard on providing those tools.

Said parents and guardians cannot protect their kids all the time - they have their own responsibilities like work. Most kids go to school during the day. The few that aren't grow up in homeschooling systems or cult-like environments, which are their own problem.

I frequently see this rhetoric (parents should look after their kids) from naive people on the internet that clearly don't have kids of their own (or don't have teenagers, or don't live or let their kids live free, etc)

Totally disagree. If you want to stop kids from using cell phones and social media, you are not going to achieve that at the family level. It is just not possible because if your peers are on the platforms and are using smart phones, no amount of family level restrictions are going to stop kids from using them. It has to be at the state or higher level so that everyone is prevented from using social media or smart phones at the same time so that is the norm. It has to be alcohol tier regulation if you actually want it to be effective

You clearly don't have kids. You drop them at school and for maybe 8 hours a day, as a parent you have 0 control over whats happening. Bullying, peer pressure etc. How is that also parent's responsibility?

Parents shouldn't buy smart phone to kids, period. There are 0 reasons kid of say 15 or lower should have one instead of dumb phone (or new commodore one with google maps and whatsapp but no browser or apps), in same way we don't allow cigarettes or alcohol to be given or sold to them. Helicopter control freak parents can go to hell, their mental issues shouldn't be messing their kid's lives. But to claim parents have 100% responsibility could work only if kids spend 100% of the time with them.