Arizona Bill Requires Age Verification for All Apps

In my ideal world a law would:

1. Require device manufacturers to allow the device owner (which covers parents of minors' devices) to set policy for the device, including allow/blocklist for apps and sites, and allow/blocklists for content categories.

2. Require browsers to respect the device's policy for site allow/blocklist

3. Require browsers to set a certain header for allow/blocklist of content categories

4. Require websites to respect that header.

No need for age verification, no need for the government to decide what is/isn't allowed and for free you allow gamblers to prevent gambling content being shown to them etc.

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This AZ law is frustrating because by targeting the app store it's actually taking a step towards my vision... but in a way that multiplies the harm of age verification instead of diminishing it.

This is a bait-and-switch that will be used to roll in an internet ID for all people. I believe this is why M$ is trying to force people to log in to their local machines with a microsoft account.

The days you move between categories can establish your birthdate, which is a lot of bits if you are doing this on an individual level (basically it's a great start at a supercookie).

Curious, what is driving this "you need permission to use the internet" bills suddenly ?

Really miss the old internet.

All of a sudden various governments and tech companies want to do age verification. Co-incidence?

One thing to keep in mind is that every session has crazy proposals in AZ. (Not clear how many of them get anywhere.)

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_media_age_verification_... for a full picture of US states age verification laws, states in the article include: Arkansas California Florida Georgia Louisiana Mississippi Nebraska New York Ohio Tennessee Texas Utah

Remember when children weren't even supposed to use the internet unsupervised? What happened? The internet hasn't gotten any less filthy.

What would be interesting to know is which age verification services are popular these days?

Who do they think they are? The UK?

You don't need an ID of any sort to conceal carry a gun in AZ, but you need one for an app?

It's clear these "age verification" bills will just keep coming and it's a losing battle to try and oppose each individually.

Instead (or rather in addition to) activism we should go at it from the other end and request the introduction of a verifiably independent authority and zero knowledge protocol that will deliver a cryptographically secure boolean bit (isOver18) with no way to correlate from either end the ID or which website the bit is used for.

The alternative is IDs get collected by all these horrendous privacy fiends and sold / leaked / monetized across the board, which sounds like a dystopian nightmare.

This state fucking reeks.