There is age verification is a hot topic right now. California and Colorado are pushing for operating system level age restrictions that will almost certainly lead to age verification in the future, countries and states are forcing websites to hold onto customer’s government IDs to verify their age before granting access to websites, and some services like Discord are pre-maturely implementing ID verification. If you have the maturity level of a raccoon on caffeine or higher, you probably see how none of this is a good thing or even makes sense in context of “protecting children”.
I really don’t want to argue why anyone who is pushing for these laws is either actively malicious or a useful idiot so I won’t at the moment, but if anyone wants me to I’ll do so. Same thing with explaining why age verification is authoritarian, dumb, and dangerous. If you want me to I’ll explain my thoughts, but it should be fairly self-evident why having people identify themselves online to companies that have a bad track record of protecting privacy is a bad idea.
What I’m here to say is there is an alternative that doesn’t put any harm to our freedom, privacy, or children while also making sure that parents are responsible for their parenting instead of the state.
It is Called Parental Controls
Most computer systems have parental controls. This is a feature that allows you to limit what applications, websites, and features a user can control. They often include other features like limiting screen time and setting up application specific time limits.
My proposal is simple, have a law that requires the operating systems to provide basic parental controls to the admin user. The admin user can then specify content/application white or black lists, time limits, etc.
For websites, you can have web browsers read a standard HTML meta tag that states the age for the website, make it optional. The parental controls can then tell the browser to not allow websites above an age rating and block the websites that do not provide this tag.
No need for ID, no need for the state or platforms to know more about us than necessary, and no need to allow a few misguided people who don’t understand technology to give more power to companies and governments over our lives just because they are too lazy to teach their kids online safety.
Best part, a lot of this infrastructure is already there. Age verification is a fix for a non-existent problem.
And before you pull “that is too technologically demanding on parents” card, no it is not. We just need to have operating systems include these tools in a more accessible way and have parents who are willing to actually parent instead of use the state as a sludge hammer to make up for their inability to think. Most parents likely don’t want these obtrusive laws, most people in general don’t, but a few lazy and manipulative people do and we can’t let that happen.
Stand Up Against Age Verification
In the past we were told not to use our real name online. Now we have the same people pushing to make sure there is no privacy, that anyone with time and energy should be able to access all our personal info. We already know with the constant data breaches that if we give personal info to companies that they objectively don’t need to provide their service, we are also giving that info to everyone willing to seek out data dumps.
Contact your local government officials and put pressure to oppose any form of age verification. It is another tool to allow those more powerful than you to restrict your access to information, privacy, and overall freedom.
If you are in a place that already has some of these backwards restrictions, use VPNs, alternative networks and protocols like I2P, and push for these laws to be overturned. The worst thing you can do is comply.
If you have other ideas or disagree with me, please email me. I’m more than willing to engage in productive conversation, even more so if you have children.
Please don’t lay down and let the future get even more dystopian than the world already is.
