Why isn't online age verification just like showing your ID in person?

Can you send a link or explain how this can be done?

As a not super tech savvy parent I find it impossible to keep my son off screens. He always finds a workaround. So I'm a fan of age verification especially after reading The Anxious Generation, despite all the hate it gets from hacker news.

Not really. There are ways to prove ownership of one of several hundred million tokens. If you give out this many tokens, the odds that some will be stolen or sold must be fairly close to 1.

Yea, I think anyone who grew up at the start of the internet in homes realises just how different it is now, and that teaching your kids about how to be safe online etc is an important part of parenting. But we are at the point where we have some parents who always had access to what it is now, and don't see it as a bad place.

"Stranger Danger" is no longer don't get into a van with someone who promises you sweets kinda thing.

Agreed. My kids are young right now, but I'm wondering if we can just have a shared family room computer like in the 90s. (school-based laptops might thwart this, but maybe by the time they're school-aged people will realize that constantly putting kids in front a screen is a bad thing to do?)

I'm not sure why we don't just make a law that parents must set parental controls on their kids' devices. We do this for most other things.

Define controlled and define appropriate in a fashion that almost everyone can agree on which is in line with the constitution and enforceable.

You can't.

In theory that sounds right; but as a parent with two young teens I can tell you that in practice this is really really hard -- your teens can get around whatever restrictions you might set, bringing you down to either 1) taking away their phone altogether, 2) turning off the internet altogether (while at home), 3) trying some parental control app (none of which work that well or are inconvenient to use in practice). The only thing I've successfully managed to set up is a blocker on the router that shuts off access to their devices at night (so they go to sleep at a reasonable hour). During the day is just way too complicated.

So we talk about it and try to get them to manage it themselves. They're not unwilling, but the addiction of continuous scrolling is really hard to break. It's not even that the content is terrible, it's more just the mindless zombies -- like sitting all day on the couch watching TV. And they don't even have an IG or TT account (and won't be getting one for a long time) -- this is YouTube (which now has endless scrolling like TT) which I don't want to block altogether because there's other helpful resources on there.

I've always been an early adopter, and was on BBS and IRC and all that back in the day, love the fact that the Internet is a place you can easily set up your own blog and all that, but recently I've honestly come to f*ing hate the internet in general and social media in particular.

How does that work in practice? I've tried to do this at home. It doesn't work at all. It's not the 90s any more- there isn't one PC sitting on a desk with a modem attached to a phone line that you need to wait for 30 seconds to dial up and establish a connection before you're online...

Now you have ubiquitous WiFi and cellular connectivity across dozens of devices in a typical household. Even refrigerators have built in web browsers now. Parental controls are a joke, treated as an afterthought at best - nonexistent at worst. Oh, and the school system provides your kids with a Chromebook with Internet access starting in elementary school.

It's victim blaming at its finest IMO. Yeah, we can all point fingers at the parents who sit their kids down with an iPad. But there's many of us who struggle to limit screen time, working against the profit motive of trillions of dollars of corporations. It's a losing battle.

You want parents to parent? God speed and good luck

Here [1] is the zero knowledge solution. It has existed for ages but not adopted likely due to not providing a name, SSN, location and credit card. No third parties, no dependency on CDN's, no sharing or leaking ... anything.

Given that solution is unlikely to be legislated into action I would suggest people are just going to share adult content on Usenet, Tor, P2P, within G/PG rated video games by plonking down a virtual theater and streaming from a throw-away VM and fully automating syncing with LFTP+mirror+SFTP, sharing USB NVME drives, mobile ephemeral websites over WiFi and other methods when people get tired of this Top/Bottom relationship lobbyists want us to participate in. As a plus side, driving people underground means zero tracking, rules, taxes, obligations, leaking email addresses, etc...

[1] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46152074

EU implementation of age verification is actually base don zero knowledge proofs https://ageverification.dev/

Any on-device solution that simply sends back a yes/no result as you describe is guaranteed to have one of two problems:

1) It is vulnerable to modifications and hacks on the local device that get it to send back a "yes" result without actually verifying anything

OR

2) It requires the device to use some kind of closed, proprietary system that allows the service to guarantee that #1 cannot happen

Now, in general, the tech world is pretty happy to accept #2, but many of the people around here would object to it on very reasonable grounds.

Exactly, on my Play Station I setup for my son I enter his real birthday, then Sony knows what can he do in the Store or chat etc. So we could have the big tech Apple, Google, Microsoft, Canonical ensure to make an idiot prof setup screen and the parent is responsible to set the age of the birthday of the child if they give a device to them . Then the store can be filtered and the browser can have a standard way of adding in the headers an age range or something.

Big tech did not want to cooperate to do this for some weird reason so now we get a much more complicated solution.

Yes I know that if your kid uses a live USB stick he could watch porn on his laptop but IMO is much easier for such a smart kid to find a website that does not respect the browser headers and torrent adult content.

I am not that fond of stores scanning my ID data either. I’m over 21, there’s no question about it. Per policy, they’ll have my name and address in some log too, and with my photos and gait on camera and probably my license plates. What does all of that do for me? Are you safer because I am being recorded?

I like the (disputed) comment elsewhere on this page, requiring parents to parent. They aren’t my kids.

The free speech argument is that these ID checks aren't just being applied to porn sites; there's a push to make social media websites (probably the largest hubs of free speech in the modern world) do them too. That's a much bigger deal. It'd be like if you had to show your ID to a police officer in order to enter exit your front door.

> Convenience stores scan ID, bars scan ID

These are new things, not old things. The idea that stores and bars should be able to record for all eternity the identities of the people who have purchased things from them is just as much of a horror. They can sell that information to anyone.

> hotels take copies of passports…

This is not really a new thing, although it is a fairly new thing (i.e. within the last 40 years, since cheap enough photocopiers.) But it comes from laws about keeping track of who is staying in temporary accommodation, 100 years ago you would have had to sign the register.

This. The German government issues electronic IDs which can provide proof of age in a privacy-saving way, but I've never seen that being used in the wild.

BINGO!!!

I would counter that they already have that. Would go so far to say that the government knows pretty much everything you do online by name. What they can't control, it's access. I think the reason for this is for an eventual license to get on the Internet. The same way you need a license to drive a car, you will need a license tied to your real identity, to use the Internet.

That's kind of the point of all this. They force websites to enact the verification because they have leverage over businesses that they don't have over citizens, and then they expect that the citizens will hate it so much that they don't go to the "bad" sites at all. "Thank you for your cooperation!"

ETA: (accidental submit; sorry) I'm in the same boat! Not entering my ID information into any website, much less ones they've got on the list. And so they've successfully boxed us in. At least for me, I intend to raise hell about it aside from just not sharing PIA, but I don't have any delusions of it's effect.