I mean, age lines are always arbitrary. Do you find ridiculous if an election comes up and you can’t vote because you’re one month short of the legal age to vote?
That’s just how restrictions work in general. There are always edge cases where you can argue it’s ridiculous. But the only way to solve that is to not have restrictions at all which I don’t think is a smart idea either.
That’s a completely different context with very different stakes, though. Posting your thoughts on an online forum isn’t the same thing as participating in an election, isn’t the same thing as driving a car, etc.
I shouldn’t have to upload my personal information to some innocuous, utterly inconsequential website to prove that I’m 30 years old. I have a right to privacy. Again, the moment any website I visit requires me to submit proof of my age is the moment I stop visiting that website out of the principle of the thing.
Maybe it’s paranoia from the day job, but most platforms can’t even prevent leaks of usernames, email addresses, and password hashes. They should not have PII of any kind if they can’t secure it and won’t refrain from selling it or sharing it with “partners”. Frankly GDPR doesn’t go far enough; platforms should have to treat personal information like it’s nuclear waste.
Data is 
on one hand, i recognize the benefits of having the ban in promoting more offline barrier and reducing these big corporations impacts on kids.
on the other hand, being someone who did grow up primarily on social media, i can’t imagine not really having it. i was an extremely agoraphobic and socially anxious kid and did not interact with other people irl (and my irl interactions were mostly me being bullied). it was really helpful for me in order to actually have interactions with other people in a more comfortable environment. i also definitely would not have learned about queer and trans identities until much later since i grew up in a very conservative area.
so if 13 year old me had current, 20 year old me’s brain, i think it would be fine as (thanks to social media posts) i was able to recognize my mental illnesses and how to actually improve myself. but if i had actual 13 year old me’s mind, id imagine id have a much worse time in K-12.
So, there’s a reason why I asked the question the way I did. I said:
in a hypothetical scenario where we have a technological solution to get a user’s age without risking leaks or sending documents
And the reason why I wrote that is because I know that if the question is “would you be willing to send copies of your documents to every site” the answer is obviously “fuck no”.
The reason I asked the question the way I did is because what I’m interested in figuring out is if people’s position is tinted by the implication of the verification process itself (not wanting to send the document) or if they have a more general philosophical position that has nothing to do with the way you identify people.
So, imagine you don’t have to send documents. Imagine you have your phone or your computer to carry “proof” of your age. And imagine when you browse a site, as part of the normal initial handshake between server and browser everything happens automatically and if you’re not part of the desired age group your connection is rejected (the same way we’re already getting blocked based on location)
Would you be ok with sites doing that? Not being forced to do it by the government. Just them doing it for whatever reason.
And yes, I know the technical implementation doesn’t exist, that it would have profiling issue and yada yada yada, I get that. It’s a thought experiment.
Ok yeah so that’s part of the practical issue related to how you do that in reality. But as I said, thought experiment: with that issue solved, so no risking leaks or aggressive profiling or anything of that stuff, would you still be against it as a matter of principle?
Glad you mentioned the GDPR; I already severely restrict the amount of personally-identifiable data I collect on my own website due to the existence of the GDPR and other privacy-related legislation. I can’t even begin to imagine how much more stressful it would be to maintain a website if I were suddenly legally required to PROVE the age of my visitors, just because I happen to swear at times or discuss mature subjects that some parents out there might perceive as being “damaging” to their child.
Just as a thought experiment, where there’s a guaranteed zero possibility of my identity somehow leaking or falling into the wrong hands? Then sure: if website owners want to restrict certain people from accessing their site, that’s their prerogative, and I’d be OK with that. Their site, their rules. I’d still avoid the site out of principle, though, if the web administrator’s reasons for restricting their site to a particular arbitrary age range didn’t make any sense to me.
Ok so the issue for you is not the age-gating per se, but rather the fact that from a technological standpoint we don’t really have a way to do it that is secure and doesn’t involve sending documents to god knows who.
Their site, their rules. I’d still avoid the site out of principle, though
Well if it was implemented like geofencing for example you’d not even notice it if you were inside the allowed age bracket. You’d just get access to the site and notice nothing. But I get what you’re saying.
You cut out the relevant part of my response: “I’d still avoid the site out of principle, though, if the web administrator’s reasons for restricting their site to a particular arbitrary age range didn’t make any sense to me.” That’s an important “if.” People and corporations who decide to restrict their websites to certain age ranges would, presumably, still divulge that information to their visitors. If they decided not to divulge that information, then there’s a chance I might not notice anything … but I’d get very curious and quite suspicious if I was in my 60s and on, say, a forum for gaming, and everyone there who volunteered their age was older than 50. I’d ask the website owner for clarification on that front, and if I wasn’t satisfied with their response, I’d leave the forum.
Also, to return to the technical side of things, parents give their kids access to their phones and computers all the time … and I gave one of my old iPhones to my 78 year old grandmother before she passed away. So even age identification that’s somehow hard-baked into your device won’t guarantee that the people using those devices are the age the server/browser thinks they are – unless, of course, said device is somehow using biometric scanning to prove age, which would be a whole ‘nother problem I wouldn’t touch with a ten foot pole.
Just to be clear: from a purely implementation stand point this is un unsolvable problem. There’s no way to do this that is 100% secure. There’s no need to mention giving devices to others. Because no implementation is secure. Not even showing up in person with a fucking paper ID is secure because you could forge an ID.
I don’t think we’ll get there anytime soon. Not at a global level. At the country level there are solutions that may or may not work but that’s only something you can do with limited scope. And the internet doesn’t have that.
So assuming that the implementation of the idea is completely smooth and unobjectionable, I still am not sure that I would be for age-gating in general. The main reason for this is that once you start applying blanket bans on anything, you suddenly have to start worrying about edge cases, and there are always cases that you haven’t thought about. Those people are the ones who end up falling through the cracks, and how severely it hurts them depends on what type of services you’re trying to offer. If it’s just entertainment, then it counts as an annoyance, but the more vital to life you get, the more you’re going to inevitably hurt the people who are left out.
There are two edge cases I can think of myself that I’ve personally experienced. I have a kid, and we’ve gone the “kid account” route in a few cases, usually related to gaming. Most sites and services have a “family” option that lets you sign up for a “parent” account and then designate other “child” accounts that have fewer freedoms for safety reasons. It’s a great idea in theory, because of course I don’t want to give my kid unlimited access to my credit card or potentially objectionable materials. But what happens if my kid wants to make an in-app purchase that we don’t find objectionable? You’d think that would be straightforward, but almost nobody has managed to get it right. The best case scenario would be to buy it under the parent account, then make it available to the child account, but very few stores allow you to do this because they want to tightly restrict content and keep it from being potentially shared to other people who didn’t pay for it. Temporarily enabling purchases? Not even an option on most kid accounts.
And that’s just dealing with in-app purchases like skins and DLC. There’s plenty of stuff out there in a game store, for instance, that I don’t find objectionable, but the store does, and that means my kid doesn’t even get to access it. Sometimes the store has marked it as objectionable because some other country halfway across the world (or maybe a local parent who complained? Who knows) doesn’t like anything LGBTQ+ adjacent in their games, and so that restricts our choice over here as well. I’ve gone through so many headaches trying to get this crap to work, and the answer is always just to forgo the child account and police content in our own house, as parents.
Another, much more serious example, is from my own childhood. I grew up in a really conservative household, where my parents did not like to talk about being queer or having mental illnesses. Even if I had gotten them to talk about these things, it would have been colored through their own hate-filled rhetoric and full of inaccuracies. But having access to the internet gave me an avenue for learning about myself in healthy, medically-backed ways that I would not have otherwise been able to access. It wasn’t until much later in my life that I got treatment for depression, for example, but knowing how it worked and–more importantly–that I was not alone helped me cope until I got there.
I know you’re just talking about age-gating social media, but I wonder about those edge cases who are being restricted by abusive, or simply misguided, parents who don’t want their children to learn about themselves. What resources would they be losing out on? Would sites like this also implement those “mandatory parental screening” rules that let parents see everything they’re doing on those sites? What other privacy would they lose as a result?
I suppose it’s not just the age gating itself, but everything it brings with it, that really worries me.
Yes, because as far as I’m concerned you shouldn’t need to know who I am unless I’m trying to buy something from you with a credit card.
This might be more paranoia, but there are reasons my website is static and read-only. I don’t want to know who my readers are unless they choose to email me, and even then they’re free to use an alias. You could call yourself Joshua Norton, Emperor of the United States and Protector of Mexico and I wouldn’t care unless I’m getting email from 69 other guys using that alias.
I just don’t want to have to deal with PII for a website I run as recreation. That makes as much sense as me storing spent fuel rods from Three Mile Island in my basement.
While content warnings for the fiction on my website say my fiction isn’t for kids under 13, that’s not something I try to enforce. I’m perfectly OK with kids reading material that isn’t “age appropriate” since I was reading Stephen King at 10 and I turned out OK.
But too many parents are too uptight about the media their kids get into, and stating a minimum age lets me tell them, “Fuck off. I stated that my material isn’t appropriate for unsupervised preteens. Where the hell were you when your daughter was reading about angry wizard sex?”
I’m actually talking about age-gating sites in general. The Australian law is about social media but I was posing the question very broadly from a purely conceptual standpoint.
The question can be very broadly be viewed as “would you be conceptually ok if a site kept some people out for reasons related to age?”
Assuming no technical implementation issue (that in my fantasy land aren’t a thing)
Interesting. Also interesting that you open the door to the possibility of me knowing who you are when you have to buy something which is definitely not something that happens in the real world if I enter your store and I give you cash in exchange for some goods.
That’s why I was specific about credit card payments. Likewise if you paid by check. But the value of a $100 bill doesn’t depend on your identity. Likewise a money order, bearer bond, or travelers’ check. If you pay cash, I’m not asking questions. Why should I?
Credit cards are different because they can be stolen and used for fraudulent transactions. But cash has no provenance.
Ah ok got it. So it’s not about being my concern knowing who you are. It’s about me getting payment informations that may or may contain information about who you are.
Credit cards are different because they can be stolen and used for fraudulent transactions.
I don’t see why this matters in the context of online anonymity/identity though. When I buy something using my CC I don’t also provide an ID to prove I am the legal owner of that card. I just provide card details.
Exactly. And if your bank suspects fraud they might ask you to confirm the transaction. There is no reason for a business to know who you are, how old you are, or where you live once the transaction is successfully concluded. None of that data should be retained any longer than absolutely necessary. It shouldn’t even be collected without good cause.
Preventing libidinous adolescents from accessing material spicier than their moms’ trashy romance novels isn’t sufficient cause, regardless of what conservatives think.
You made me realize that if there’s one entity that can realistically build a database with names and ages that’s probably Stripe. At this point they probably have info on quite a significant % of the population.
That should scare you, because I strongly doubt that they are consistent about applying the ethical policy to government requests for data, which is “judicial warrant or GTFO”.