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On the unfortunate need for an "age verification" API for legal compliance reasons in some U.S. states (lists.ubuntu.com)
submitted 6 months ago by to c/linux@lemmy.ml
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[–] 2 points 6 months ago (9 children)

This law puts that age setting front and center

No. All this law does it promote more data collection and impose more restrictions.
They don't care about the children and, even if they did, it's the parents' job to parent them.

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  • [–] -1 points 6 months ago (8 children)

    Leaving it to parents is the reason why we are in this mess.

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  • [–] 1 point 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (6 children)

    By "this mess" are you referring to Ch. trafficking? I'd say the responsible people for that are the ones running the criminal rings... but the responsibility for prevention (beyond just plain law enforcement) should still ultimately be with the parent, imho. Since they are the ones with the most power and control over the environment the child is exposed to (I mean, it does not matter how many authentication layers you add, ultimately a child can pass it if they use the parent's ID...).

    If by "this mess" you mean the risk of leaking private information that everyone is concerned about, I don't think that's really caused by the "leave it to parents" mentality.. if anything, that's caused by the "parents shouldn't have the responsibility" mentality, which is pretty much the opposite...

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  • [–] 1 point 5 months ago (5 children)

    No. I am more referring to how we left parents to let their children have free reign of the internet and they got injured. It is exactly because we cannot trust parents to moderate what their children do online that these laws are coming up. Do you think we would still get these laws if there were no children on the internet (maybe still for pron but that is because people are prudes).

    I see that you edited your comment to take this part out but I do want to talk about it anyways.

    You compared this to having automatic roads that shift risky drivers to their own space and how that would be ridiculous. Which it would be. But comparing a law like this to driving is an awful comparison.

    Until recently there were very few laws regulating what a child is allowed to access online. But that is just not the same as driving. States require that you get a license, take a test, follow road rules, get your vehicle inspected, and many more requirements. We have these requirements because we know that we should not let an untrained driver on the road.

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  • [–] 1 point 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (4 children)

    It is exactly because we cannot trust parents to moderate what their children do online that these laws are coming up.

    I disagree. The reason we cannot trust parents is because we are not making them responsible in the first place.. there's not a system in place to assign them responsibility regarding the child accessing places it should not (if we do really think they should not).

    So if by "trust" you mean "blind" trust with no accountability, then well, we can't "trust" NOBODY, not just parents.

    The problem is that instead of controlling the bad parent, we are trying to control everyone else to try and child-proof the world.

    States require that you get a license, take a test, follow road rules, get your vehicle inspected, and many more requirements. We have these requirements because we know that we should not let an untrained driver on the road.

    The reason I removed it is precisely because I expected this kind of misunderstanding. You are assuming that in my comparison getting a license is comparable to a sort of age limit permit, but the way I framed my comparison, the equivalent of "getting a license" would be educating the parents and keeping a "parental license". The parent is the bad driver.

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  • [–] 1 point 5 months ago (3 children)

    there's not a system in place to assign them responsibility regarding the child accessing places it should not (if we do really think they should not).

    That's what this law does. It provides a system (age attestation) and penalties for violating it.

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  • [–] 1 point 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (2 children)

    No, this law is not placing penalties on the parents. It's placing them on the OS distributors.

    If you come to my house and get sufficient proof that my child is having an account in a web service it should not, and you go to the police with it, do you think they would punish me with a fine or anything? (and you don't even need any sort of special authentication technology for "age attestation" to start penalizing that, btw)

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  • [–] 1 point 5 months ago (1 child)

    That law just says "A person that violates this title[...]". Which is vague. But it appears to me that this would include the parent.

    It is also something that only athe AG can bring charges for. This won't be something that police are getting out their ticket books for. And if we don't like how the AG is handling it, we can try to recall them.

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  • [–] 1 point 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago)

    How can the account holder violate the title when the title is not demanding anything of them? the whole document is about what the developer and OS distributor "shall" do.. there's no responsibility attached to the account holder. There's no "shall" attached to the parent. At most all it says is that the OS provider shall offer an interface that requires the Account holder to enter their age... which again is a mandate directly addressing what the OS provider shall be responsible of doing, not the parent. I think it's pretty clear that the document is targeting the OS providers & devs.

    In fact, it even says that the developer should correct the age themselves, as if the account holder signaling the wrong age was already an expected situation, business as usual:

    (B) If a developer has internal clear and convincing information that a user’s age is different than the age indicated by a signal received pursuant to this title, the developer shall use that information as the primary indicator of the user’s age.

    But sure, that's only for the AG to interpret... until it happens, it seems to me that it would be silly to assume that parents are gonna start to get fined, all these years the pressure has always been put into the service providers, with the parents often being given relative freedom to decide what to do (and that mentality is specially big in the US, where many states allow you to even home school your child, California amongst them...). Targeting something as "local" as an OS level question seems to me like a bad choice if they actually wanted to suddenly start putting pressure on the parents about age restrictions with this new law.

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