So I have been reading a lot of stuff online lately, and feeling the age verification arguments with the concerns over privacy, having to prove your age stuff. There is a lot to dig into here, and I feel it is important to kind of share my thoughts as an ActivityPub Mastodon Instance owner and just a digital citizen of the internet.
Overreaching Age Policies
So I want to first say that the stuff happening around some of these laws in many places… is far too vague or far too far-reaching. The fact that things like Spotify needing to age verify you to listen to certain types of music, and Reddit needing to age verify you for not porn but “sensitive” subjects, just feels like too much. I think my first point of concern around this is that we are asking too much.
Now, as a long-time digital citizen… I know how governments love to hide and use the defense of “you don’t want children to accidentally see bad things, do you?!” That said, yeah, I don’t… but I don’t think that is a valid reason to impose such invasive controls on the operators of services that are not even pushing adult content, but may have some “suggestive” stuff… However, it is important to point out we have really good tooling and easy to set up parental controls parents can use, and have shown effective… but it seems we would rather put that burden on the providers than the parents…
The internet has taken a lot of effort to create and implement very good protections against adult content. It just requires that the parents/guardians implement them. However, I see this more as us just going back to the whole situation with public television… where we created several tools and televisions that made it easy for parents to program the TV to block content based on ratings. However, we seem to repeat this cycle, where we want to push the regulation on the businesses and not the parents taking the responsibilities for what we have created.
Complexities of the Technology
Look, I do get that it isn’t as simple as creating tooling for parents/guardians to protect their children from content they don’t want them to see. I know that, as someone who grew up in a poor, low-income home, the parents don’t always have the time to learn and set those things up. However, that said we have come long way to make it much easier for parents to set this stuff up. Given the way Apple has designed the onboarding of children’s accounts into its system, on-device detection of obscene content would blur it. There are companies that have focused on making this easier and better to set up, and have guided efforts to take steps to protect children.
So, with that said, I think companies like Apple and Google have default setup profiles that apply simple settings. So I don’t think it is too much to ask them anymore to just enable the default configurations, so just get rid of that excuse these days that its to hard.
Reasonable Privacy Age Verifications
I am not opposed to having something that allows us to age-verify. If there is a way to validate it while preserving privacy, I would like that. I know there are ways of accomplishing this; it will take some good engineering to get something similar to showing your ID to a bouncer at a club. I know that is a controversial take, but this is a battle we have mostly already lost… to not show an ID at all for at least certain things. I am not saying we should do this for everything, but I think it is reasonable to implement some basic, privacy-respecting age gating.
Continue to Push Back
While my previous section says I want something there, I am not saying for everything. I think it is important not to have all our stuff tied to our real-life identity, because the reason the Internet is so great is that it allows us to be anonymous. There are several places where I don’t think age restrictions should even be put in place. Things like news article sites, or even just using your phone, let alone your operating system. Why do these things need to have age verification? It doesn’t make sense.
Take the time to write your local government. Not just if you are in the USA, but in any country! Lawmakers are there to listen to us, and yeah, they don’t always listen… but if most of us are all asking for the same thing, they are more likely to listen to you because they want to get re-elected. So take the time to write, even if there isn’t a law on the books where you live yet… it is coming, we are seeing it start to spread across so many countries and states. So please take the time to reach out to your government and share your thoughts and feelings on the topic so they can take them into consideration.
