Google will expand age checks on Android worldwide till the end of the year(android-developers.googleblog.com) |
Google will expand age checks on Android worldwide till the end of the year(android-developers.googleblog.com) |
Heard Google is also rolling out QR codes to get past captchas? Ie linked to a device that would now be identity linked too.
All seems pretty dystopian or to quote googles slogan - being evil
On the other hand, youtube became so unusable that I have spotify premium now.
So, give it a few years and corpos will take it down because of missing profits.
YOU have become their product.
By the way, this also explains one reason why Google shut down third party access/applications recently on Android. Android (if one uses the Google software) becomes the ultimate spy tool on people. At the same time you see several countries force age sniffing on people - this is the beginning of the end of the free web. It will happen in various steps; the next one is Microsoft adding this to their software.
LOL
behind the curve, and completely missing the point.
If I a child is on the internet without adult supervision, that’s a parenting problem, not an issue for the state or other people to solve.
Theoretically you could make this double blind and that's the story they are telling.
We have no way to (dis)prove it though.
Alas, here goes the freedom, with thunderous applause.
The problem with this comparison is that the authorities can open a letter if they need to for various well-intended reasons, but they cannot open an encrypted message. Either the authorities can scan all messages, or they can scan no messages, there's no inbetween.
The mandate to verify age before selling alcohol has been around forever. This is not a new idea. The biggest restriction until now has been that there was no good way to do these kinds of age verification, but that problem has been solved. You can still debate whether or not age verification is a good idea for specific subjects, but selling 10 year olds alcohol or porn has been illegal for much longer than the internet has existed.
But there're countries where that already exists. They usually get labelled as a threat to democracy. Isn't it ironic? It's as if our own governments are the greatest threat to our way of life.
The main argument is that there is an assumption this data is not stored in the real world, which is only sometimes true. Some places like airports and some concerts, shows, bars, etc. scan identification with digital readers whose data is presumably retained. One reason for this is because fake identification is a thing so defense against this converges to the same solution as digital verification.
Imo best to spend energy thinking of the appropriate solution that minimizes privacy violation than conceptual fighting against the idea.
I don't think it's fair to say that parents who don't care to use parental control measures already available to them have no tolerance for that.
The only acceptable solution would be for apps and websites to simply include a recommended age. Allowing parents to configure their children’s devices to block services that require users to be older than the specified age or that do not provide an age rating. Once this were established, websites targeting all age groups would have a strong incentive to participate. Otherwise, they would suddenly become invisible to a large portion of their underage users.
I'm afraid you'd get the cookie banner problem but way worse. Everyone that's not Meta/Google/Apple would immediately add a legal CYA "18+" age rating and stop thinking any more about it.
The whole problem with the regulation we have right now is that it assumes the Internet is for kids, and everything for adults must be hidden. When we really just should declare the whole Internet as 18+ and the sites for kids should be the specially marked exceptions.
I imagine the same thing will happen here...
Companies have show that they are incapable or unwilling to address the problems they cause. And market forces are not working to correct things. It’s also pretty obvious that saying “parent should take responsibility” is also not working. Just observe the world around you to know it’s a non starter.
This is where regulation is supposed to come in.
At the same time, companies have shown that they will abuse any personal information that is shared with them and we are now giving them more details about ourselves…
Connect them with each other and populate their air-gapped "Internet" with like-minded authoritarian AI-bots and create special news like Don and Vladimir are being fed to keep them from tantrums. A win win for everyone!
Ooh, and mental health services. Plenty of mental health services as we're so poor of a race that even our richest can't afford enough therapy to feel alright!
... unfortunately I don't have a vote according to Tobi
https://fortune.com/2026/07/27/shopify-ceo-voting-rights-str...
For some reason we're making sure no 12 year old can drive or run for any government positions, but a 90 year old can keep the driver's license that they've had since before the start of colour television, or make critical decisions affecting millions. We can't have it both ways.
This is much much better than having to do face scans and credit checks etc. to prove to some sketchy third party that you are over 18.
I think if Google had bothered to do this 5 years ago we might not be in the shitty situation we are now, but it's probably too late now.
Which parents and which developers? How many of them? From where?
It seems like a very good solution to me. It gives parents a simple solution to define the age of the phones user and a mechanism to allow apps to get an age range and tailor usage appropriately.
It does all this while leaving everyone else undisturbed.
Put the age range into http headers and you solve children accessing content via the web as well.
(In case it's not obvious: rethorical question, Google just wants to do platform lock-in with Android and sees this as a useful means to bludgeon it.)
I have mozilla, brave, waterfox, mullvad and a few others.
It's amazing to see how google and others big companies are marking you as bot.
Also on the "privacy-preserving tool", technically apps get a bracket ("16–17") instead of a birthdate. But who holds the actual data? Google. The privacy improvement is against the developer only.
There's more and more evidence that internet access isn't healthy to have for children anyway.
Why are we all so horny to transfer unlimited liability to parents?
Nowadays there are many many ways to supervise your children's online access. And yes, there are also many many ways for kids to work around that too, but ultimately if you buy your kid a device with internet access, you should try to supervise that. Parents need to care more about what their children are up to, instead of silencing them with a tablet for a moment of personal silence.
So at the end of the year they contract again?
Or should the headline read _by_ the end of the year?
Prove me wrong
Moreover, children are all of our [mid-term] futures too. If education fails, there are no doctors for anyone not ultra-wealthy.
You have to look from the other direction too - children have natural rights and deserve to be extending dignity as humans too.
That seems to be a uniquely American pathology.
Everywhere where else in the world, and in non-white American subcultures, the community is expected a hand in raising children. But many Americans consider it socialist and an attack on Christian values.
See Hillary Clinton getting mocked for saying "it takes a village"[0] or BLM being accused of wanting to "destroy the nuclear family" by encouraging community based parenting[1].
[0]https://www.cnn.com/ALLPOLITICS/1996/news/9608/27/hillary.sp...
[1]https://medium.com/@emailnatesmith/the-blm-statement-on-fami...
I'm not a fan of age verification in the first place, but I am extremely not a fan of random third parties doing the verifying.
You can't tell me that these social media companies don't already know exactly how old someone is just based on the enormous data that is collected.
And, that public key of yours must be used only on given platforms. You want to participate on Facebook or Reddit, then you use that public key to prove who you are. Which platforms require verification is another issue.
But it should still be legal and allowed to access conventional forums, Usenet , tor accessible discord servers without having to prove who you are.
Otherwise , the right to organize is over and we effectively live in an authoritarian regime .
One not entirely inaccurate definition of government is a loose agglomeration of third parties.
Or, less flatteringly, a stupendously large way too loose agglomeration of way too many third parties welding way too much power way too arbitrarily.
I’ll bet that most people are in the same boat - they trust their device manufacturer with information like their credit card number, but not anyone else.
And I think it’s a pragmatic compromise.
Then who should? Government, where each implementation strips away rights to privacy - which in some countries, including mine, are a constitutional right? Where it expands powers of government to track everyone's activity online - and remember we're one election away from total policy shift(just like with latest US elections)?
Free market? The profitable solution is, depending on environment - either ignore the problem(profit from ads served to children, no extra work necessary), or strip away all privacy (to filter out bots and get paid more per ad).
The sad reality is that "parent should take responsibility" is least bad option available, and takes into the account individual development of a child.
Even creation of a highly regulated child only internet creates more problems - as now that becomes a highly profitable target for bad actors(both individual abusers, and companies trying to serve ads)
Site/app asks "≥18?", device generates a UUID specifically for that [app/domain + device], the device passes that UUID to government database along with the "≥18?" question and the ID card info but not the app/domain, government database gives the answer and signs just the UUID and the answer and doesn't include any ID card info.
Government doesn't know what you're looking at, website doesn't know your ID.
(There's probably also better ways to do all this, I'm not a cryptographer and I expect that will be obvious from this comment to people who are).
Unfortunately they completely botched it by having the proof-of-concept app rely on Apple & Googles integrity APIs - which a bunch of countries copied.
There should however be no force age verification. Social media companies already know how old you are or very close to it using the data they collect everyday. Using this data they should be required to use "best effort" to determine which algorithm you fall in. Nothing is 100% and we should stop pretending it is, sure some kids will find a way around but they would also if there is a age verification system.
Frankly, in that case I want the kids algorithm. It is preferable for me as an adult, I do not want the intentionally harmful one either.
The reason the current system doesn't work when it comes to unfettered internet access is either that parents by and large don't actually agree with the threat assessment of said internet access for kids, or they ignore it because the consequences of doing so are disproportionately small. Personally, my vote is that they just don't think it's that big of a problem.
To me, the ideal solution would be more granular and better parental control configurations, especially on the web. Pair that with preconfigured devices that have "unremovable" parental controls, branded as "kids/youth phones." If parents care about this, they'll buy those phones for their kids and the problem is solved. If they don't, then this isn't something parents want, and we shouldn't really pursue it further.
Sometimes parents know their children, and what's best for them, better than faceless politicians (who we've seen are often attracted to said children for some reason).
Growing up in my household there was a time when I was allowed to read and watch whatever I found interesting. My younger brother was not. That was because my parents knew us and judged that at my level of maturity I was unlikely to be negatively impacted, whereas my brother would get nightmares or copy-cat things he saw that he definitely shouldn't.
That's how it should be. Yes, there are bad parents who will decide poorly. That's the cost of freedom.
Yes, agreed. However regulation does not necessarily have to mean age checks.
The most obvious low hanging fruit to start off with is open and interoperable content filtering infrastructure (ie parental controls) so that there's some common standard that literally everything supports out of the box. It needs to all work together - the current situation tends to be spotty and unreliable thus parents tend not to bother trying to use it.
Start with an extensible metadata format that enables websites to self-classify pages. Account for things like loading alternative resources on the same page. Mandate that all websites and app stores include such metadata and that all browsers and operating systems have some baseline functionality for making use of such data in a sensible manner.
Only after that has completely and utterly failed should we even begin to consider highly invasive measures such as mandating government ID checks.
Either that, or just accept the harm.
That's like saying "take a look at owners of fast sport cars, it's obvious this is not working and they have too many accidents." If you want to patronize other parents and think the government should be more responsible and parents less responsible, please state that honestly. Don't make up alleged "facts" to make a point.
Otherwise, I'll just say "it's obvious you're wrong, just observe the world around you and you know age verification is a non starter."
In any case, the story with parents and addictive devices is even harder for parents than e.g. cigarets. For example, a LOT of schools in the UK think that it's good to give childrens ipads to study, and there's nothing that parents can do to prevent this. In this specific situation saying that "parents should take responsibility" is unfair to parents, because their only option to avoid this is home schooling.
> To request a user's age range and sharing status, you call the Play Age Signals API (beta) from your app at runtime. The default age ranges the API returns are 0-12, 13-15, 16-17, and 18+, but you can receive custom age ranges.
https://developer.android.com/google/play/age-signals/use-ag...
But I don't find it any better. I don't see any viable reason to provide identification to my phone's OS. If a parent buys a phone for their child, they can already set up parental controls before handing it over.
I wish Motorola all the best with their GrapheneOS partnership.
If anything, I would imagine that Google's changes are motivated by driving traffic to their Google Play Store, where they make billions in commissions.
Once this framework is in place for the Google Play Store, perhaps they can lobby for strict age verification laws, and then tell developers who publish outside of Google Play that they are responsible for compliance themselves.
It always gives me the "he only beats me because he loves me" or "he wouldn't beat me if I knew how to behave better" vibes. It's not healthy, not sane, not rational.
One disagreement though; I don't even think they will lock people out of their devices outside of very narrow and specific instances or examples to "cut the grass" as the Israelis call it, to scare and remind people they are the slaves and the long arm of the tyranny can reach out and crush them if they don't self-censor and self-subjugate. Psychological and ideological control has very much proved itself far more effective than physical control in all circumstances. They want to be able to monitor and then use methods and technologies to control that have not really come to light in society even thought they were systematized through the Iraq war. You are now the "insurgents", are you old enough to remember those, those insurgents in their own country?
For kids this is a privacy risk because there are so many thresholds. Once you're above 18, all you need to care about is "are you a pensioner".
Kids have been lying about their age since the dawn of the internet and people have started catching on, so now we're getting actual restrictions rather than the assertion that nobody in their right mind would click "I am 18 or older" to access a website.
Californian law mandates that operating systems keep track of their users' age, so of course Android must follow. In all of the cases listed on Google's blog, though, the option to not share information and download an app that doesn't ask for your age range is still an option.
Too many seem to fall into the familiar problem-solving mode, ready to provide compromises or solutions while forgetting that once the infrastructure is in place, it can easily be modified later to undo the compromises which facilitated its acceptance in the first place. There is an inherent power asymmetry and it's not generally in favor of those building and using the infrastructure.
They also actively undermine the US constitution. Will be interesting to see whether the remaining judges have any power to change this or whether they were also integrated into the new dictatorship model.
They want to track everyone now. Age sniffing is just one additional step for forcing verification. This will continue - see how suspiciously many countries adopt new legislation. It is quite fascinating to me to see how easy it is to kill off democracies.
Your solution here has the same flaw, I think. If the algorithm thinks I'm underage, I'm locked out.
it will solve by consumers, don't worry
chatgpt basically never sent email and it's regular now - like 2 4 emails per month
so, it doesn't look great for chatgpt
So if there is something being done we should choose a solution that has at least some accountability to the general public (through elected representatives).
The alternative is Google, Apple etc where almost anyone has exactly zero influence and the government can still block as they like.
For those precocious kids who parents decide should be the exception because they are "good with computers" well I'm thinking some sort of waiver would be required that held the parents responsible then maybe let the kid hack on the internet but this is an unpopular view, the unpopular part being the "parents being responsible for their kids" bit.
But in general I think its a tough time to be legislating this stuff because "reasonable perspectives" are not what we are voting into office right now lol
When I was in primary school, one of the things teachers had us do was debate the pros- and cons- of television. The pro side included educational content.
First Windows PC at any of my schools had Encarta.
Wikipedia can be downloaded in entirety and read offline, though it is so broad it may need a degree of filtering to become age-appropriate even for 16 year olds.
I have the firm belief that infinite scrolling is one of the darkest pattern that was ever invented.
Infinite scrolling is a very different issue (although it's definitely a contributor to the harm, I agree).
([1] Unless I'm being unfair here; maybe the algorithm is available somewhere, I just don't see it obviously linked anywhere)
I can’t wait to not age verify on instagram and permanently get back a feed that’s only people I follow.
I doubt it matters because nobody seems to configure the parental controls that are there, anyway. Only schools seem to try, and only because they're legally held responsible for what kids do on their computers.
You can set up, for example a child friendly DNS (Family version of OpenDNS) then Firefox come along and bypass it (DoH).
Probably, we need an OS level setting, per account, browsers would need to expose it to websites, apps installed would have to check and provide content according to local legislation/rules. Bypasses would have to be performed by an "adult" account.
The main issue is that adults would be able to set themselves as children and avoid negative commercial activity. That's a problem because it means FANG, etc, will lobby against it and then ensure their implementations are convoluted and broken.
The rumored Motorola devices are even more expensive. It's the signature and some foldables, all in the 1000+ MSRP range. At least with pixels you can get the a series for as little as 400 on sale.
And if enough people stand out, it doesn't matter anymore.
They gather more data now. Only verified users will be able to use the internet in unrestricted ways - that is what is new.
If it appeals to politicians who view "protect the children" and surveillance positively, that is a bonus.
Do you force people not to give up their own liberties? In a democracy?
Although better privacy laws would cut off the access of non-customers to the data of those customers devices.
With ZKP, if you make a business out of reselling tokens you get with your own identity, eventually they will see that you use orders of magnitude more tokens than normal people.
So with ZKP it's more difficult to cheat. Not impossible, just less accessible.
My personal opinion is that age verification itself is a bad idea, but if we're going to go ahead with it, I'd much rather we use ZKP for it than the current mess of "upload your passport and picture of yourself to dodgy 3rd parties that likely now have your browsing traffic associated with your real name"...
How does it prevent fingerprinting if you get access to both logs and try to time it? Even more so if you include already present tracking infrastructure, which as a government you can just request data from.
It is possible to de-anonymize people based on aggregate data already, and this proposed solution just adds extra data points.
Even in countries in which this requires a subpoena, agencies break the law frequently and don't get punished.
Legal systems aren't computer systems. This isn't a technical problem but a social/political one.
But then the government knows your location at any point of time and how often you use websites requiring the age check. Also, if your device is configured to do it automatically, a child can also follow this verification.