Google will expand age checks on Android worldwide till the end of the year

2) When configuring a device, parent may toggle "child mode" checkbox to switch the device into "child mode", protected with a password or fingerprint.

3) The tokens, containing a private key (same for all tokens) can be sold in liquor stores to adults only. This token could confirm the age without a passport.

It is interesting that is US (unless I am wrong) you can vote and change the government without a selfie and a passport, but you need them to use Reddit or Discord.

> but will require better/easier/free tools and education to help lock down different categories of harm.

There should be a single big "child mode" checkbox for normal people and "configure" button for 1% of geeks. Most people do not need tools and have no interest in configuring allowed categories.

> Everything I've seen is ineffective or can be compromised

Selfie/passport also can be compromised by asking a friend/older brother/parents to verify your account. Especially if you have a poor adult friend with alcoholic dependency in dire need of a new portion.

In the end we do need parents to parent, but websites should help. The easiest way would be for websites to send an HTTP header to the client so that censorware can know to block or allow it accordingly.

That significantly reduces the leaked information: the service doesn't receive any information who you are, and the government doesn't know what service you use. They can collude, but that does not reveal more to them than most current age-verification methods. Children can get another adult to sign their request, but that's a working attack on nearly any age verification (including in-person purchases)

Of course this doesn't replace parenting

Kids nowadays use phones and tablets for the most part. They don't even know how to use a computer that well and are not taught properly. But this isn't really on the kids.

Now, suppose I'm an OS developer. I cannot simply fork Android or iOS to create a child-friendly toy operating system for smartphones with a reduced set of features. The hardware is locked down to oblivion. They want you to use their OS. And their OS has no user accounts, permissions, or firewall configs.

Well, then suppose I'm an app developer, and I want to make a browser or social app with built-in client-side content filtering. But my browser doesn't pass Cloudflare or whatever attestation, and is blocked from half of the sites. It might not even be approved on their app store so people will never find it.

Fine. Then I want to change what content is filtered within the approved apps. But those options either don't exist or is some kind of cloud service where you give them your age, and they decide what to filter.

========= Parents can't even control what software runs on their own hardware. How are they supposed to control what runs on their child's hardware? =========

"The market failed", so they can sell you parenting among other things as a service, with surveillance as a free gift. The tech companies make money while the government gets control over the populace. It's a terrible arrangement.

That is why most digital parenting solutions you've seen are ineffective or can be easily compromised. Tech companies along with the government are playing chess against you at every level of the stack. Don't ever forget the PRISM program exposed by Edward Snowden. Apple, Google, Microsoft, Facebook - they're all complicit. Don't look at what their PR department says, look at what they do: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Snowden#Revelations

One possible short-term solution is antitrust legislation for hardware vendors to ship their devices without an OS... is what I would say if we lived in a sunshine and butterflies world. Maybe the EU is not thoroughly captured yet and still has the ability to implement this, but I doubt it. Technoauthoritarians are building a panopticon to contain the sheep, and they're not even hiding it at this point:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sQqQtgRdjZU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d34b7taQ640

The actual long-term solution is difficult. We have to make our own computers and radio equipment before they outlaw mining and manufacturing using the same safety excuses, which will happen when humanoid robots can do those jobs. The entire stack has to be open-source, which means we will have to diffuse fab technology everywhere so that people can manufacture computers locally, from mining to wafers to final assembly, in every city, or even at home. There are very talented people working on this problem, so it will be done. Just don't fall for the narrative that surveillance is inevitable or needed.

Solution: sites and apps optionally provide metadata suggesting their content/age-appropriateness, parents locally configure software to look at that metadata (including what to do with things that don't have metadata), or they don't, depending on their parenting style and the maturity of their child. Done. No laws or identification or invasive measures required.

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

https://www.rtalabel.org/page.php?content=howtofaq

Use of those kinds of headers needs to be voluntary for websites, which means that censorware has to block any site that doesn't return the header, not just those sites where the value of that header indicates adult content. That will encourage websites to support the header or risk being auto-blocked by any censorware in use, but that's a problem for the RTA header since it only indicates adult content.

Then we certainly shouldn't be passing laws mandating age verification. If parents want to abdicate their responsibility over their children, it's not the role of government to enshrine that abdication into law and take over the duty of parenting from them.

If regulation is to be had, then it should take the form of mandating websites and services provide privacy preserving tools for parents to use, if they want to use them. If they don't, that's on them. Everyone else needn't suffer because a subset of the population has chosen to offload their responsibility into the government and web services.

> I think this means any solution which involves active parent participation is going to get shunned by a vocal subset.

I don't think that's a fair assessment personally, rather you've missed a key detail that things are significantly more complicated than they used to be, it's not just an 'effort' issue. There is no universal "user is age X" setting that applies to everything everywhere, rather everything has a different system and pretty much all of them are terrible in various different ways.

I'm very tech savvy and I still struggled just to set up a Microsoft/XBox account for my daughter so that we could play some computer games together. Access to all the different age rating settings is spread across something like three different apps and websites and in my experience they don't even all work consistently. That experience is also not dissimilar from the experience with other types of accounts. For people I know who are less tech savvy it honestly doesn't matter how much time they put into it, eventually they give up and turn off age ratings because something isn't work and even if there's a solution it would take them hours to figure out.

Point being, if the existing tools were much better I don't think we would be having this kind of conversation.

  > you’re handing the power to

One spot where it's a bit weird is for utility apps that don't have any "mature" content but that obviously isn't intended for kids, so e.g. your tax prep app gets rated as "Ages 4+".

<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PEGI>

Yes, Google also wants to tie back to legal identities to sell ads. I’m not saying they’re doing this in good faith, but proxies like this get messy and dangerous for legal/compliance.

I have personally used the parental controls on Android, iOS and ChromeOS and to be honest they are terrible. Issues with syncing changes, the terrible UX for parental access control (iOS...), issues around audit/access logs, issues around prompting the parent for access.

I am honestly shocked that Apple known for its polished experience hasn't been forced by angry parents.

My daughter's school actually advised parents to not enable parental controls on her ChromeBook because it would interfere with the school's education websites but my daughter was caught playing web games in class so we decided to lock her down anyways.

It might be true for some middle class helicopter parents that have iPhones and time to manage and keep it under strict control but there are non-middle class kids out there who just use whatever device they can get their hands on and their parens neither have time nor ability to control that.

The argument could be made for banning social media but the whole internet I don’t think it’s the correct approach

There are policies in the industry to suggest it.

This is something that can be done online as well. Capitalism is controllable.

Your solution here has the same flaw, I think. If the algorithm thinks I'm underage, I'm locked out.

Also, if you've ever played with this kind of data, there is immense overlap between how some adults and some kids use the internet. Is this user legally a child, or just emotionally a child? Similar to the problem of "There is overlap between the smartest bears and dumbest tourists" in designing bear proof garbage cans.

So if there is something being done we should choose a solution that has at least some accountability to the general public (through elected representatives).

The alternative is Google, Apple etc where almost anyone has exactly zero influence and the government can still block as they like.

Really? can you name any 3rd party you'd trust with this more than your own government?

Given that you know, the government already has all of this info on us. This isn't a choice between "the government doesn't know how old I am" and "the government has all the info on me". Governments usually already do. They have enough data already to issue such proof just by the virtue of us living in the country. Tax records, birth records, driving licences, council taxes, passport info, medical information - there's more than enough to give me a cryptographic certificate that says "yes, gambiting is definitely 18 years old" without me having to do anything. Compared to literally any third party that cannot do any of this, unless they buy my marketing cookies on the open market or something, or yes - I actually go out of my way to give them my passport/credit card/selfies etc.

What services are those other than p*rn?

(Now if the people want to tear apart government, democracy delivers that too.)

The people clutching pearls and screaming “what about the children” can deliver universal healthcare, child care, parental leave, and free education FIRST, and then I will extend a modicum of trust for their overriding “concerns”. Until then, I’m gonna treat this as the bad faith power grab that it very clearly is.

How does it prevent fingerprinting if you get access to both logs and try to time it? Even more so if you include already present tracking infrastructure, which as a government you can just request data from.

It is possible to de-anonymize people based on aggregate data already, and this proposed solution just adds extra data points.

Even in countries in which this requires a subpoena, agencies break the law frequently and don't get punished.

Legal systems aren't computer systems. This isn't a technical problem but a social/political one.

But then the government knows your location at any point of time and how often you use websites requiring the age check. Also, if your device is configured to do it automatically, a child can also follow this verification.

My personal philosophy is that parents have a duty to raise their children but that duty is on behalf of the society into which the children will eventually enter. Consequently, a just society may sometimes impose itself on parental freedoms (in the case of neglect, for example) because, in the end, the child's ultimate guardian and responsibility is the society itself, not the parents. The internet is full of material exposure to which, for children, could reasonably be construed as neglect or abuse, and it is insufficient to leave the entirety of the responsibility to the parents, in that case.

I don't know why Americans are so obsessed with freedom as if were the only social good that a society can pursue. There are many things which make life worth living, that contribute to flourishing, and freedom is high on that list, but its not the only thing.

All that said, I don't approve of age checks of the sort being proposed everywhere now. We can do a lot better at mitigating these problems without damaging privacy so much.

With ZKP, if you make a business out of reselling tokens you get with your own identity, eventually they will see that you use orders of magnitude more tokens than normal people.

So with ZKP it's more difficult to cheat. Not impossible, just less accessible.

I have the firm belief that infinite scrolling is one of the darkest pattern that was ever invented.

I can’t wait to not age verify on instagram and permanently get back a feed that’s only people I follow.

No youths are spoofing being 75 at the corner store.

Oh so you agree with me, that it should be banned, like cigarettes. Thank you.

Why'd you call it "false equivalence" then? Why not call it "a really good equivalence"?

All I see are issues that have been solved before, that app developers have never had to think about. And big tech is lobbying to reinvent it so they can consume more data in disguise.

The rumored Motorola devices are even more expensive. It's the signature and some foldables, all in the 1000+ MSRP range. At least with pixels you can get the a series for as little as 400 on sale.

They gather more data now. Only verified users will be able to use the internet in unrestricted ways - that is what is new.

Do you force people not to give up their own liberties? In a democracy?

Although better privacy laws would cut off the access of non-customers to the data of those customers devices.

Moreover, children are all of our [mid-term] futures too. If education fails, there are no doctors for anyone not ultra-wealthy.

You have to look from the other direction too - children have natural rights and deserve to be extending dignity as humans too.

> it's the least intrusive, least effort solution to the problem that will actually work.

Currently, I have no account tied to my phone or my computer(s), except for an older iPad. Also, I have never sent my ID to any FAANG company. This would force everyone (including adults) to tie an account to their devices and a government ID to their accounts. Bans (which Google does not justify, a lot of the time) would gate users from using apps and possibly sites.

In other words, this helps solidify Google's control over Android users. The problem would be the same for Apple, Microsoft, etc, and in many cases it already is the same.

I get that most people probably have a cloud account for their own devices, and I think that's OK. But currently there is the option not to use their services, and I think that's the fundamental issue, they're effectively removing that option by making apps block users who don't have an account, in the guise of age verification (together with Play Integrity, etc). That option is fundamentally linked to the right to privacy, as once you're required to use certain services to be basically integrated into society (making payments, communicating with others, watching turtle documentaries according to the post) you're not effectively able to exert that right anymore.

There are also other related rights and freedoms here, like the rights to repair, tinker and innovate, that are affected by this action, which helps cement an ecosystem where every app requires Play Services, and as such, is hard to be ported or emulated into other ecosystems, and other actions from Google and Apple.

I have never signed in to a Google account on my Android phone, by the way.

Even from a pro-corporate perspective, is enshrining two companies as the gatekeepers of the internet a good idea? How would a new competitor stand a chance at breaking in?