Why should we have user age tracking in Operating Systems and websites?

6 points by alcides

regalialong

— The Lunduke Journal

I hate to do torpedo comments like these, but people really need to stop citing Lunduke as if he's a reliable source. (I don't blame you since bigger publications like PC Gamer made the same mistake)

There's no need to mince words, the guy is openly a bigot and has constructed himself culture war narratives in his writing to agitate against trans people / what he perceives as DEI.

Without scrolling too far through his feed, here's just him spouting some white replacement stuff too

zimpenfish

I was slightly amused to see him promoting SQLite's Code of Conduct which has things like "love your neighbor as yourself", "Do not bear false witness", "Honor all people", "Be a help in times of trouble", "Do not give way to anger", "Do not entertain deceit in your heart" and hoo boy, his X account is wildly against all of those.

dangroshev

I really dislike how the narrative around age verification is consistently misleading with claims that age verification is irrevocably tied to "the end of the anonymous internet". This is false on several levels:

A few high profile platforms are not "the internet". If we're at the stage where twitter or facebook (now forced to not collect minor's PII) is the same as "the internet", that's a much bigger problem in itself.
There are multiple technical and legal solutions that preserve anonymity (or at the very least pseudonimity) while allowing age verification. The solutions range from selling scratch cards in physical stores, like we do with alcohol already, to zero-knowledge proofs, to custodial schemes, to meaningful legal requirements on SaaSes like Persona to not share PII with their customers.
We already have a tie between a identity and internet access. Most (all?) home ISPs want a contract with an actual human being, which does in fact tie access to internet with a government ID (or its surrogate like a bank account) in many places.

I think the narrative is counterproductive and prevents the community from lobbying effectively. We retreat from the political discussion and self-isolate in a bubble of nerd outrage, denying the public demand for kids to not be subjected to data collection or ads for nazi memorabilia (see Musk's Twitter). This retreat creates an opening for ultra-conservatives and mega-corporations to lobby unopposed.

kornel

You're taking a "think of the children" problem at face value.

There are countless less invasive ways in which parental controls could have been improved. It's naive to think that a hardcore but ineffective solution has been chosen by mere incompetence.

It's already a success of ultra religious lobbying. The real goal wasn't to protect the children, but to get immoral websites blocked. They're not even targeting the mega platforms with lots of garbage content. In the UK the lobby had a weird obsession with a suicide forum and that was Ofcom's first target.

Such legislation gets momentum when multiple groups get something out of it. UK govt loves surveillance. The Online Safety Act is a farce, but the failure is already used to manufacture consent for a VPN ban and digital government ID. These are very unpopular proposals, but think of the children! UK toddlers are forging documents and installing proxies.
- dangroshev
  
  I'm taking it at face value because voters take it at face value. It's a valid and genuine concern outside of our bubble. "Parents should just be better at parenting" is not a vote winner. I also think it's unfair to the parents to leave them alone against multi-billion corporations that are actively trying to exploit minors, even when they know that they are actively harmful (see the extensive reporting on Meta's internal policies and product choices).
  
  This is a very good example of the discourse I was talking about. You entirely correctly point out that there are multiple groups at play, but then fall back onto conspiratorial, US-style thinking that mixes together all the different groups into an ominous Government Blob that is supposed to do Bad Things By The Back Door. There is no Government Blob in that sense. In the sense in which The Blob does exist (a collection of disparate voices pulling into different directions), you and me can (and arguably should) be a part of it.
  
  Take the "digital government ID", a subject of much conspiratorial thinking lately. Here's a very level headed take on it to make sure we're on the same page: https://takes.jamesomalley.co.uk/p/how-the-uk-digital-id-will-work
  
  We can see that the US government had very little trouble creating a paramilitary organisation executing people on camera in broad daylight, enabled by a privately-built panopticon collating diverse government databases and privately-sourced data collections. The US, similarly to the UK, has no single ID, with a similarly motivated pushback. Estonia does, and a lot of their state infrastructure is made simpler and more convenient thanks to ubiquitous digital IDs. The US has public executions. Estonia doesn't. Therefore, maybe it's not having a government ID that makes or breaks democracies?
  
  What does make or break democracies is participation and thoughtful policy instead of knee-jerk polarisation. The Labour Together report that kickstarted the ID discussion is public, the people in Labour Together are real people and you can easily meet many of them in London. You can go read it or even talk to the people and see that it has nothing to do with the OSA. There is no shady cabal trying to somehow curtail our freedoms, but there are decent folks working on unified login for gov.uk, DVLA, and NHS, and policy nerds in think thanks.
  
  But somehow that's not where the discourse online is.