alt Hacker NewsComparing today's internet to the 90s is hardly fair. It has become extremely predatory, and most places youth gravitate towards are controlled by algorithms with the goal of getting them hooked on the platforms to make them available for manipulation by the platform's customers.
Of course, there will be stories of smart kids doing amazing things with access to vast troves of information, but the average story is much sadder.
The EU is working on a type of digital ID that an age-restricted platform would ask for, which only gives the platform the age information and no further PII.
Companies (not talking about system76) amazingly always find the shittyest interpretations of their obligations to make sure to destroy the regulations intention as much as they can. The cookie popups should have been an option in the browser asking the user whether they want to be tracked and platforms were meant to respect this flag. Not every site asking individually, not all this dark pattern annoyance. It's mind-blowing that that was tanked so hard.
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> Comparing today's internet to the 90s is hardly fair. It has become extremely predatory...
I think you're missing the point they're trying to make. It's not that the problem isn't real, it's that the solution won't work. Kids will find a way around. They have a lot more free time than us.
> The EU is working on a type of digital ID that an age-restricted platform would ask for, which only gives the platform the age information and no further PII.
Sure, it might start out that way, but once adoption reaches anything critical the PII will be required to squash free speech as soon as possible. But by then the interaction flow will be familiar, hardly anyone will even notice, never mind care.
The EU has the best frog boiling experts in the world.
None of this is for what you're describing though, there is no reality where such wildly different countries and states in different corners of the world all decided coincidentally to all do this within 6 months of each other. We know it's not "well maybe they saw X country and thought it was a good idea" because even percolating the policy would have taken over a year.
Protecting kids is just the PR reason, the real goal is requiring ID auth for every action taken on a computer. If we normalize it for downloading apps or using websites the next step is to authorize it for connecting to HTTPS at all and then the next step is requiring it to unlock your CPU cores.
If people don't push back on this now there is no world where we get out of 2030 without requiring government ID auth to install linux on your own computer not connected to the internet.
End to end silicon to server auth is absolutely possible and someone is working really hard to make it a reality.