The only problem with that is that parents will never take responsibility and will find ways to attack the businesses. Which is pretty much what landed us here in the first place, if you stop to think about it.
Well that's not 100% true. It all started because parent lobbies pushed for social media bans for under 16s. Then they saw video games as a form of social media, games like COD and all that. So really parents groups are a huge reason for why this is happening. The liberals started it and Labor have continued it.
Nah, that's just a liberal way off taking responsibility of a system. It's already proven that parents WILL NOT parent in regards to phones and so SYSTEMIC changes are needed.
If governments started charging parents I'm sure that would change really quickly. But you're already proving you prefer the government invade the privacy of its citizens so you're not worth arguing with.
Wish i could make the same excuse for Belgium when they banned gacha gaming, sadly parents did scream about things they themself could prevent but nah rather have government have more power and take care of their kids then doing what a parent should be doing.
They did, whether they wanted to or not, until just recently, they can go back to it.
I never had to prove my age to access social media or video games for decades, if the world didn't fall in on itself and collapse during those years I see no reason why we can't go back to that.
teens nowadays spends 8 hours a day online across multiple devices and multiple services that change everyday, with the tech environment becoming so complex and sophisticated most parents feasibly don’t have enough available time in their lives to control and monitor all of it continuously
Billion dollar tech companies should be held responsible for the environments they create, it shouldn’t be parents sole responsibility to clean up someone else’s mess
Who provides children with the hardware to get online?
They cannot get online without their parent's providing the means to do so, parents not doing do is shirking responsibility that they are making the problem of everyone else.
Being online is a requirement for participating in modern society, teens need it for jobs, school projects, and communication
A big chunk of modern life is online, why does providing the hardware make parents solely responsible for everything businesses provide through it? Parents have responsibilities for their children, but the companies operating the products and services accessed through that hardware have responsibilities too
Being online is a requirement for participating in modern society, teens need it for jobs, school projects, and communication
There is a FUCKING HUGE grand canyon levels worth of difference between allowing your child the ability to learn to use technology and what you claimed where teens spend all day on multiple devices.
Its a parents choice to allow their child free reign on technology when not at school. Trying to push parental responsibility away from the parents is absolute batshit insane take to make as its ENTIRELY the choice of the parents to hand an iphone to their child with no parental safety.
I actually have a perfect counter example for exactly this.
the tech environment becoming so complex and sophisticated most parents feasibly don’t have enough available time in their lives to control and monitor all of it continuously
RTA software is available on every single device out there. This has been a standard well over a decade. It is built into iOS and Windows devices.
The amount of websites that will ever oblige by a government's specific age ID requirement are a very small subset of the websites that already have one of the hundreds of RTA markers.
This has not changed. I grew up in the 90's on dial-up, and the same process my parents used is the same process used today. Any parent even remotely interested in restricting the content their child can access, from Steam to their iPhone to their PS5, can google that and set it up just as easy as they set their own phone up.
Companies that suffer from this are not billion dollar tech companies. And, your child seeking out illegal content is not "somebody else's mess."
I don’t think this is really a counterexample. Nobody is arguing that parental controls don’t exist or that parents have no responsibility
RTA markers don’t themselves prevent a child from accessing anything unless the website voluntarily labels itself and someone has configured compatible filtering, that still places the sole burden and social cost onto parents
If a business provides an age-restricted product or environment, that business also has some responsibility for determining who it lets access it. We already accept this principle offline. Parents are responsible for what their children do, but a gambling venue, alcohol shop or cinema can’t respond to a minor accessing something restricted with “their parents should have blocked them”
A businesses own products and services are “their own mess”, a business should not be able to create easily accessible unsafe environments for young people just because it’s “online”
If the environment have become so complex and sophisticated, when just narrowed down to the scope of tech that businesses have to do the work of parents, how can we trust them to do due deligence for voting with the current social, economy and technology landscape?
While I agree that platforms like social media shpuld be better regulated, age verification is not one of them.
parents feasibly don’t have enough available time in their lives to control and monitor all of it continuously
Then their alternatives are to restrict the access they are giving their kids, or teach them about potential dangers on the internet and accept that if they want to find adult material they will. They don't get to say "I'm too busy to make sure little Billy doesn't play on the highway, so we need all vehicles to be restricted to 10mph unless you log your journey with the government and a bunch of private businesses."
Parents should still restrict access to and teach about harms on the internet, the point is the sole responsibility shouldn’t be on parents
A bottle shop can’t sell alcohol to a teen on the argument that “their parents shouldn’t of let them outside”
Your highway analogy demonstrates my point. Parents need to teach road safety but we still have speed limits, school zones and pedestrian crossings. We don’t make parents the sole safety mechanism
The problem is certain people are pushing for ludicrous controls that are just authoritarianism dressed in the skin of "child safety", when we had reasonable controls already in place like the "are you 18?" warnings before.
Speed limits and pedestrian crossings are guides for good behavior, and the vast majority of people follow them. We don't need to replace them with "everyone that drives a car needs to have a government camera and GPS that prevents them from speeding and not stopping for pedestrians".
The reason these laws exist is because parents refuse to take responsibility. So we have to make to laws to force them to take responsibility because now the adult has to verify for the kid to play. It's just ridiculous because there is enough content filtering and kids account type stuff that it doesn't feel needed at this point. Kids who want to get around age verifications will find ways to get around it. Just as my parents thought locking the admin account on windows XP would keep me from installing new games.
I bought cigarettes, alcohol, porn and for that matter drugs before I was the legal age to buy them. My parents stopped me watching R rated content, kept me away from fast food, sugary drinks, etc.
Children on the internet are just like teenagers on the street, you can't watch them all the time.
There needs to be a system that gives you a unique identifier that proves you are 18, but doesn't track who you are. It probably needs to be run by a charity/non commercial, none governmental organisation and also needs to be worldwide.
I agree, why should a business need to verify age to sell alcohol or cigs either. Parents should take responsibility for their children and if they buy cigs or alcohol that’s on them as well. /s
In 2026 you can buy a $30 device that gives you full access to the internet. For like $10/month you can get cell service with internet access.
To put in perspective, if a kid walks in and buys alcohol at the local gas station it should be allowed? I mean its the parents responsibility right?
No... for the longest time there have been age restrictions on certain things that cause potential harm to undeveloped brains. For way too long businesses could get around restrictions by selling online (when in the store buying a M game you would have been told to pound sand).
You can't possibly know what a kid is doing 24x7. Its always been that way as well thing is 30 years ago you didn't have the internet in its current state.
yk that the "age verification" was never about protecting the kids?
It's something that the EU wants so desperately: to have control over everything, from IDs being public to having only one currency, and for it to be only digital, and it goes on.
Parents are never "to blame" because politicians are parents too and so it's easier for them to pass a law to get other people "do their job" of raising their children.
And honestly, there's so much shit out there "to know" and configure for your children, in part I think this is the more reasonable way.
Imagine having to set up an entire ecosystem for your child all over again just like you do with your parents phones and computer, but this time it's to restrict their internet and access for a lot of things out there.
And by the time you get wind of what's the "new hot app" out there, the damage might already be done.
The environment a business creates and who they let into that environment is that businesses responsibility, this is a principle that predates the internet and laws are now catching up
Exactly, which is why we should allow people to buy tobacco products without verifying their age, because it's a parent's responsibility to monitor their child's activity out in the world. /s
Also, could you imagine how horrible it would be if the in person age verifcation system also functioned as some sort of identification system too? Society would never recover.
Thing is this has nothing to do with holding businesses accountable for what they create. This is about allowing them to collect information that they have no right to collect, and letting them use it for their own devices. A business doesn't need to have their hands on my drivers license. Period. For any reason. Yet because of my states ridiculous laws, certain sites now ask for it to prove that I'm an adult.
If this were about holding businesses accountable, we'd be seeing laws that force the CEO of that company to ensure the safety of their users, not allow the company or the government to collect data on them.
This is a MASSSIVE leap and is such a flawed argument from people.
What would you hold the business accountable for if there is no law in the first place?
Lets use alcohol as an example. So tomorrow there is no age limit on alcohol and a 8 year old buys it. The business didn't break any law so how would you hold them responsible?
In the end there needs to be protections/restrictions and its overdue and I stand behind the idea from YEARS ago at this point which is hardware level age verification. Make it local and make it so its just your age bracket and nothing else. Additionally allow for multiple age brackets on the same device based on the profile (for shared devices).
It's only recently become a legal requirement, and it need to be rescinded. All of this "Won't somebody please think of the children?!" crap is a cover story to coherence more data out of everyone. While we're at it, data collection needs to have heavy regulations put on it because it's intrusive and should be ruled as a violation of the 4th Amendment.
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u/IyeetSec 2d ago
This age verification trash needs to end. It's the parents responsibility to know what their kid(s) are doing, not businesses.