Google will expand age checks on Android worldwide till the end of the year
android-developers.googleblog.com194 points by dmantis 4 hours ago
194 points by dmantis 4 hours ago
I'm fundamentally opposed to age verification because it usually leads to mandatory account creation no matter how privacy friendly the age verification process itself may be. It's already extremely annoying that, for example, on YouTube, you can no longer watch many videos without an account. Furthermore, the whole thing also reinforces monopolies. Once you've verified your age on one platform, the barrier to switching to another is even higher than before.
The only acceptable solution would be for apps and websites to simply include a recommended age. Allowing parents to configure their children’s devices to block services that require users to be older than the specified age or that do not provide an age rating. Once this were established, websites targeting all age groups would have a strong incentive to participate. Otherwise, they would suddenly become invisible to a large portion of their underage users.
And instead of an age you could even make the indication about what is potentially objectionable so that parents can choose when to allow their kids to see what - and adults can also choose to avoid certain things.
Add glass this looks reasonable but how do you enforce that kids connection always goes to the parents?
You are just moving the verification point to another gate, it means that no anonymous connections are possible anymore to the entire Internet because we want to allow parents to control their kids.
You want to use your friends, Wi-Fi? Not that requires full identification so that we know that its not some kid trying to look at stiff their parents don't allow.
Want to connect your can toilet to the internet? Well, we will need to either cryptographically identify the device or attach its ID to your real ID because we don't want to kids look at stuff their parents did not allow and this might just be a proxy device for some nerdy 14 y/o.
Want to use your old PC? Sorry that's not possible, now all devices that connect to the internet require biometric identification because we can't tell if this is an adult or just some kid using a legacy device to look at stuff their parents don't allow.
The answer is quite simple. You just don't verify it. The point isn’t to verify the age but to set the age on the device itself. If the parents set the age on the cell phone or computer, that setting is then used as the basis. The operating systems can be configured so that only the device administrator can change the age. Systemd already has a field for storing the age, which programs can read. If the child doesn’t know the root password for the laptop, they can’t change the age. If they do manage to get around that, well, so be it. The solution doesn’t have to be perfect because it would still be an improvement over the current situation without restricting adults in any way.
No, the point was that the actual decision happens client side and under the control of the sysadmin (the parent).
> You are just moving the verification point to another gate
Yeah, the gate being the decision of legal entities of age, aka. adults.
> You want to use your friends, Wi-Fi?
That would still do whatever your parent decided for you.
> Want to connect your can toilet to the internet?
Whether the toilet can connect to the network, is the decision of the network administrator, and toilets don't contain UAs, so that wouldn't even have software on them, where you could configure such behaviour.
You're making the mistake of assuming that every kid has access to identified device and that device is under parent control. You can't make this assumption because that's not true.
It might be true for some middle class helicopter parents that have iPhones and time to manage and keep it under strict control but there are non-middle class kids out there who just use whatever device they can get their hands on and their parens neither have time nor ability to control that.
How many children, actually have the money to buy themself another smartphone, or get a smartphone gifted by random people? I bet that's very rare.
In real life, it doesn't work like this for most people. In real life, kids want something and either the parents agree to buy that and then they no longer bother with that device or the kid saves its money trades something and get that device.
The idea that a kid gets an expensive device that can't buy by itself and the parents have control or what device the kid gets is a very middle-class assumption. Life isn't that perfect for most people.
That's a parent issue, the same as if their kid has a secret stash of cocaine or enjoys dancing in traffic.
No technical measure can fix stupid.
That's not parents issue. That's why we go after people who sell or give drugs to kids. Is a serious offense, we don't wave our hands and say its parents problem and not drugging kids is a popular policy unlike drug enforcement for adults.
Yeah, but that assumes, that there are people out there, selling smartphones to children at scale. First the price for one is way to large for the financial budget of a child, and second that gets even more price-intensive, after the first one got confiscated by the parent.
There are literally people out there selling smartphones to children at scale. A smartphone these days can be bought as cheap as a burger because 2nd hand market exist and its not limited to iPhones.
And the child can also go and buy a porn magazin, which is likely to be eventually found by the parent, just like the burner phone you suggest. The former is also going to be cheaper.