alt Hacker NewsYou can be in favor of privacy while simultaneously thinking porn, gambling, and advertisers shouldn't be targeting children. The age verification bills I've read have steep penalties for retaining information, so that seems fine since that's literally more protection than you get in person.
It's really more just concluding that those corporations should be liable for their behavior. It also has nothing to do with "the Internet" which is largely unaffected. Except of course ideas for forcing OS behavior coming out of California which are obviously bad.
I actually think things could be a lot simpler if we just made the laws like alcohol: it's illegal (with criminal liability) for a non-parent adult to provide <restricted thing> to a child. Simple enough. Seems to work fine as-is for Internet alcohol purchases. Businesses dealing in restricted industries can figure out how to avoid that liability. That's entirely compatible with making it illegal for businesses to stalk everyone, which we should also do!
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If you implemented that simple solution the expected outcome is businesses collecting ID at the door. But unlike the age verification bills there'd be no prohibition of or penalty for misuse of the collected information. It's a strictly worse outcome.
You can make intentional targeting illegal without criminalizing the accidental. And mandating self categorization of content by service providers would enable standardized filtering that was broadly effective.
The above won't get kids off of social media and it won't serve the purposes of the surveillance state but it will meet the stated goals of those pushing these measures.
Keeping children off of social media is a much trickier problem. I think we'd be better served by banning certain sorts of algorithmic feeds.
> The age verification bills I've read have steep penalties for retaining information, so that seems fine since that's literally more protection than you get in person.
The best way (and only way) to prevent retaining information is to not share them in the first place.
> You can be in favor of privacy while simultaneously thinking porn, gambling, and advertisers shouldn't be targeting children.
There are other method to achieve this without mandatory identification. You can force these content to be served with an HTTP header providing their legal minimum age of consultation or type of content, and blocking them browser side. Governments could maintain filter lists for different age bracket and release them to everyone, allowing easy compliance on the device parental control settings.