I really don’t want to look up and read any actual articles about any of these proposed age-verification laws, because I know it’ll send me into a depression spiral
But I am kinda wondering what exactly the wording is on how they require websites to do their verification
I mean. Clearly they allow methods that do not work at all (face recognition; history of what videos you’ve watched before; arguably credit cards and ID cards too, because kids living in their parents’ houses usually have pretty easy access to those)
And if that’s the case, and if the specifications on what type of verification you can use are vague enough….
would it be possible for a website to follow the letter of the law while not actually following the harmful spirit of it
“what is this household object that only OLD people will recognize?? prove you’re an adult by clicking the correct answer. (You get unlimited tries and we’re not stopping you from googling anything)”
Something like that
I mean I’m not expecting we could actually get away with it. But it’d be nice. And (as someone working on my own website) I’d like to know the exact parameters of what we CAN get away with…
I mean.
Do I want kids to go on my personal website and see things that’ll scar them for life? Absolutely not. I’m trying my very best to put clear warnings on everything on my site that I think could need it–
–so that kids, or parents supervising their kids’ internet usage, or anyone who doesn’t want to see those things, can choose not to.
But that is the most that a website owner can reasonably do.
Every method of trying to put the responsibility of restricting kids’ internet usage in a website owner’s hands is going to be a disaster.
Beyond even the question of “what needs to be restricted?” –like my previous post joking (not quite joking) about how saying the F word twice in a blog post makes it R rated according to MPAA movie rating standards, and the R rating means no one under 17 can be allowed to see it without an accompanying parent or guardian, and how do we enforce this on a website as foul-mouthed as Tumblr–
Beyond that– the logistics of restriction, by a party who inherently cannot verify anything because the person whose age we’re trying to verify is not here, we can’t know where they even are; only, at the very most, whose official ID documents they have access to, and pretty much none of us have the resources to automate uploading of IDs to our websites and give ANY guarantee they’ll be safe…
It’s a nightmare.
So… if the government is going to be so horrifically incompetent as to require us to put on some kind of ID verification theater? Then, maybe all we can do is figure out how to make it harmless as well as useless.
I guess I’ll watch these proposals as they develop, and read the fine print when I have the emotional strength to… in between fighting like #&// to stop them, because I do NOT want to have to censor cuss words like that.