This is actually a level headed way to deal with it. Provide a way for the device to inform the website / app of their age status (it can be bucketed for increased privacy/compatibility with existing rating systems). Then legislate that it is on the website to inform the device of the type of content being served. Then the device/browser can be responsible for implementing the privacy controls (page blocking, notifications, overrides, etc.), and the parents are responsible for ensuring their children's devices are configured with their ages.

This approach could create a black market where,say, high school seniors would buy these tokens and resell to high school sophomores/juniors.

The thing is gun laws won't protect against school shootings unless you basically completely disarm the population--which is not realistically possible as there would be too much non-compliance. And note two things about the data:

1) Many sources seek to inflate the number of school shootings by counting incidents in which the school is only incidental, not the target. Think drug deal in the parking lot when school is out etc. And note that counting firearm deaths to minors counts mostly gang vs gang stuff.

2) It is almost certain that guns save more people in self defense situations than they take in all mass shootings (using the realistic test of public and indiscriminate targets--again, the numbers are inflated by things like gang fights), let alone just school shootings. (And, no, I do not believe Lott's numbers. He's way high and an awful lot of what he does count is deterred robbers and the like, where death was unlikely in the first place.)

Gun laws stop school shootings? Where in the US does that work?

It's a "problem" because we are becoming a theocracy.

There's no reasonable demonstration of harm and a very strong correlation between availability of pornography and a big reduction in sex crimes. The purported harms are due to blocking reasonable sex education, leaving teens with the equivalent of Hollywood being the only model of sex they see. The original study that was created to show the harms concluded they couldn't find any to anyone, even minors.

I remember pop-up porn adds started to appears around 1995 or so and 1995 is 30 years away...

> Why it is problem right now?

Push from the different generation? Late boomers got very puritan with age, also see themselves as more moral, again with age.

Nope, not here. Perhaps you live in some totalitarian shithole where you lack privacy or haven't figured out how VPNs work.

A new account on Facebook, Instagram or Google/YouTube will usually instantly get restricted and triggers either ID or Phone verification anyways.

It's important to conceal your identity because the internet is forever. Your comments, opinions, beliefs, embarrassing moments... all recorded (essentially) for life. This happens through administration changes, different jobs, life changes, belief shifts, different friends and partners, etc. Without anonymity, anybody can comb through your entire history to make any point they want. To justify any accusation about you they want using 'evidence' from years past. To stalk or harass. To fire you for daring have an opinion about something. Depending on your government, to arrest you for what you've said in the past.

A huge issue with the modern web is that everything is seen as a profit motive. I don't care how many billions of dollars tracking everything we do and tying it to our person is worth. I don't want it.

OK.

Here's an easy explanation.

Someone you don't like somehow gets voted into power and begins trying to enact changes towards a social group you belong to.

Building anonymous systems is one way to avoid Bad Actor X from having Big List Y, leading to Atrocity Z.

Having a really successful social network isn't a goal post, it's just a result.

Great -- it made a zillion dollars, meanwhile we've built the biggest leakiest information trove on individuals, for individuals to be exploited, ever imagined.

You may be combining or missing a few factors.

Tech platforms are valued at billions of dollars because they found ways of convincing their users to give up anonymity. That has nothing to do with whether the anonymity was important.

> No one ever explains why it's so important that everyone always conceal their identity on the web.

I live next to idiots with gigabit and guns, that’s why.

Reddit stands out against this wave. I reckon that Reddit is worth at least a billion

> requiring calls to an API to verify the user's age

By simply asking for their age. There's nothing about requiring that the age is actually attempted to be verified as accurate at all. And the "age bracket" is specifically defined as nonpersonally identifiable information.

And it still gives no consequences for wrong/fake information.

Interestingly, they also define a "developer" simply as "a person that owns, maintains, or controls an application".

Wouldn't that inherently include all users of a computer in general?

Of course all these measures risk making identifying minors trivial for any website and app, which is... not really ideal

I hadn't thought about GitHub -I'm guessing the authors of the bill didn't either - but you're right, that is somewhat concerning. Still, I don't think it's the end of the world...

> The requirement is also that developers will request the signal. No scoping to developers that have a reason to care?

I don't see that requirement. Here's the sum total of the developer's responsibilities (emphasis added):

> A developer with actual knowledge that a user is a child via receipt of a signal regarding a user’s age shall, to the extent technically feasible, provide readily available features for parents to support a child user with respect to the child user’s use of the service and as appropriate given the risks that arise from use of the application, including features to do all of the following:

> (A) Help manage which accounts are affirmatively linked to the user under 18 years of age.

> (B) Manage the delivery of age-appropriate content.

> (C) Limit the amount of time that the user who is 18 years of age spends daily on application.

It would be nice if it had specific carve outs for things that aren't expected to interact with this system, but it seems like they're leaving it up to court judgment instead, with just enough wiggle room in the phrasing to make that possible.

If your application doesn't have a concept of "accounts", then A is obviously moot. If you don't deliver age-inappropriate content, then B is moot. The only thing that can matter is C, but I'd expect that (a) nobody is going to complain about the amount of time their kids are spending on Vim and (b) the OS would just provide that control at a higher level.

This is what worries me a bit, that this will be used as an excuse for walled gardens and so forth.

"We can't allow side loading because that would be illegal in terms of age verification".

I would love to be wrong about this though.

It seems very reasonable to require a feature in an OS, like requiring seatbelts in a car. Of course, it depends on the feature though.

I think this is more of a liability thing. If the parent set the age as underage and the kid does a bunch of stuff to circumvent that, it’s on the kid and parent and not the website.