Use parental controls on your child's device if you don't want them seeing things. Don't use your bad parenting as an excuse to violate privacy with age verification for everyone else.
There's a major difference in who imposes the age gate. The parent, for their own children, or the website, for all children and adults. (In some cases, both types are wrong to use.)
The California Digital Age Assurance Act forces operating systems to collect age info. Adults cannot choose to withold both their own age info and the age info of their children. Older children in abusive parental situations cannot both get their own (standard) devices and withold their age info. I oppose such an implementation because a more privacy-respecting implementation is available: the government could mandate that operating systems provide device owners with an option to reveal their age info or their children's age info.
Anyway, TFA is not about any particular act. TFA is about the attitudes that lead toward both privacy-harming government-mandated age gates and toward privacy-harming or education-harming voluntary/informally-pressured age gates.
It seems what would be more productive would be for sites to publish metadata about the nature of the content. Then the access method could decide whether, or which of it to show.
Analogy: parent seeing that a movie is R rated and not letting their kid see it.
Age verification means that the content origin still has to rate its material for age suitability, and match that to the user. Asking them to do just one out of these two things is easier.
Doesn't work, what if both are on the same page such as a home feed? Analogy: the theater shows both R and PG movies, so a forcefield prevents kids entering the building on days where an R movie is shown at any time in any theater that day.
If both are on the same page, then it it can't be a domain-level (e.g. DNS) property, but something in the HTML markup. Like a certain actual <div> contains 18+ material; if the configured age of the user is less, then that element is not shown. That aspect of it seems the least difficult.
Digital "theaters" do not have the same limitations as physical theaters. The metadata can mark the page as R but include an additional indication that a PG filtered version of the page is available, via a different URL or a website setting that uses a cookie.
If the website doesn't want to make a filtered version than the metadata can mark the page as R with an additional indication that PG content is present on the page. The parent can manually select the PG content or someone will make parental controls that can automatically select or (like an ad blocker) filter for only the PG content.
You're right in that, setting aside future laws which might build off of the California Digital Age Assurance Act, the text of the law is compatible with privacy because adults or children can lie about the age info, perhaps with no legal consequences for doing so.
I was wrong to say:
> Adults cannot choose to withold both their own age info and the age info of their children. Older children in abusive parental situations cannot both get their own (standard) devices and withold their age info.
I fix both sentences by adding to the end of each one "unless they lie about the age info".
The other parts of my previous comment remain unchanged so far:
> The California Digital Age Assurance Act forces operating systems to collect age info.
[...]
> I oppose such an implementation because a more privacy-respecting implementation is available: the government could mandate that operating systems provide device owners with an option to reveal their age info or their children's age info.
Are the proponents of the California Digital Age Assurance Act satisfied with the law despite the elephant-shaped "they can select any age they want to" loophole? If not, then the spirit of the law does not respect privacy. If yes, I would still oppose the law. I want both the text and spirit of the law to respect privacy, not merely be compatible with privacy. An illustrative example: even if there were a technology or magic that literally prevented law enforcement from searching a house without a warrant, I would still want the legal system to have a law (in the constitution, specifically) recognizing a right to have one's house not be searched by the government without a warrant.
> the article author seems not to mind the controls if they are on manufactured gore or porn.
From what I've read of her blog, my interpretation is that Heather Burns opposes all government-mandated age verification (which most government-mandated age gates would require), but does not necessarily oppose all voluntary (on the part of the website) or socially-enforced age gates.
> not to mind the controls if they are on manufactured gore or porn.
Should we ignore the differing purposes of creating contextually inappropriate info and the differing purposes of sharing it? Is there a logical or moral contradiction in treating potentially inappropriate info created or shared by people for the purpose of pleasing or shocking (without urgency) other people with violent, disgusting, or sexually explicit material differently than we treat potentially inappropriate info shared or recorded (not the same as created) by people for the purpose of informing or shocking (into urgency) other people?
What's more in this case, 9/11 is one of the few events that some US middle schools (with students as young as 10 or 11) and high schools hold an annual moment of silence for. After "hearing" it twice, almost every student will understand that 9/11 is being singled out as a particularly important historical event. At least by the end of middle school age, children should have some room to voluntarily (on the part of the children) learn about the most disturbing aspects of 9/11.
How is this not bigger news? The UK is demanding mandatory client side scanning malware that watches everything you see/do, on every smartphone in the country. This includes spying on encrypted messages before they are encrypted.
The EU Commission is currently rushing ahead with their anti-privacy age verification plans that require Google/Apple account to function. They aren't going to save anyone from this.
I also wouldn't be surprised to learn that the Commission is trying to get Google to be more proactive at banning accounts and preventing individuals from being able to create new ones. That's what the States were demanding in the recent court case against Meta.
Politicians have been pushing companies to be more aggressive about banning individuals who open new accounts after their previous one gets banned. That was even one of the requirements of the deal in the recent social media court case in the US.
Canada is about the learn this lesson the hard way with bill C-22. At the rate things are going, Canadians will wake up to find themselves being blocked by WhatsApp, iMessage, Signal and other popular messaging apps.
The legislation currently have weak surface level protections against encryption backdoors, but law enforcement are seeking to remove those. The legislation also requires mandatory data retention and surveillance, which also means that messaging apps will ban Canada.
The only people living in a fantasy world are the ones that want mandatory online age verification for social media, adult content, private messaging, video games, and things of that nature.
Mandatory online age/ID verification is an unacceptable violation of privacy. It doesn't matter how its implemented. There's no such thing as privacy protecting or anonymous age verification.
Parental controls and self-declaration of age are the only acceptable solutions.
Mandatory verification is an unacceptable attack on privacy. A device level whitelist of kid safe areas that is disabled by default and enabled by parents is a better idea.
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