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0 pointsjmyeet5h ago0 comments

What's depressing to me is just how self-serving all this is. The original bill was AB 1043. Who supported that, breaking with other tech companies? Why Meta of course [1][2]! Meta likes this because it pushes liability onto the OS providers. Guess who doesn't have an OS? Google's support is a little stranger given Android. It seems like AB 1043 also shifted liability to third-party app developers instead of the app store so, conflicting goals?

Likewise, you'll have Microsoft and maybe Apple pushing for Linux to be included for, again, entirely self-serving reasons. Microsoft is never one to miss an opportunity to benefit Windows.

All that's going on here is competing corporate interests. Likely nobody in power actually cares the actual end users.

As much as libertarians chafe against it, I think we've demonstrated that something has to be done in relation to children online. Advertising to children, harmful impacts of social media, cyberbullying, addictive behavior and selling the data of minors needs to stop. How we get there is unclear. Meanwhile, everyone responsible is just trying to limit and shift their legal liability and that's it.

[1]: https://www.politico.com/news/2025/09/13/california-advances...

[2]: https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/1rshc1f/i_traced_2_b...

0 comments

tzs3h ago

If Meta is liable for when someone underage uses their service, then Meta is going to require proof of age which almost certainly means giving them copies of things like driver's licenses or passports probably along with video showing that you match the photo.

In jurisdictions taking the California approach Meta does not need to ask for anything like that. Their app just has to ask the OS, which reports the age bracket that was entered when the user account was made on the device, and the OS gets that information from whoever set up the account. The OS trusts whatever is entered at that time. No driver's licenses or passports or face scans or videos are involved.

> As much as libertarians chafe against it, I think we've demonstrated that something has to be done in relation to children online

...and this is pretty much the way to do it with the least impact on privacy and anonymity possible without first building up some high tech cryptographic infrastructure that would likely include hardware requirements that would, at least at first, exclude users who do not have an iOS/iPadOS or Android device that has a secure hardware element.

rezmason2h ago

> If Meta is liable for when someone underage uses their service, then Meta is going to require proof of age—

Let's be clear what this means, "Meta is going to require" something. They'll require it to continue to do something, which is namely to be a bad company, running bad services, without pivoting to something else.

Of course, no one requires Meta to continue to be Meta. We'd protect people by requiring companies like Meta to request PII outright, because then the user is explicitly prompted to decide whether using Meta's services is worth surrendering their privacy. And if consumer sentiment and market forces mean anything anymore, that will incentivize Meta to replace their bad services with better ones, ones that don't cause them tricky liability issues.

In other words, forcing operating systems to demand PII from users from the get-go, regardless of the quality of that signal, and to broadcast that to any website, is not, as you put it, "the way to do it with the least impact on privacy and anonymity possible", etc etc. The "way to do it" is to phase out this rotten era of surveillance apparatus disguised as social media companies.

Sorry for being irate, it just feels like so many people these days arrive too quickly (for my taste) at conclusions without testing certain popular assumptions about the inevitability of tech oligarchy.

subarctic2h ago

> As much as libertarians chafe against it, I think we've demonstrated that something has to be done in relation to children online

Just cuz today's ad-supported social media is bad for kids, doesn't mean everyone should have to verify their identity to use it. You can just make it 18+ and if kids lie to get around it that's not the end of the world. And in general, regulations that would make these things better for everyone would be better rather than just saying kids can't use it and not fix the actual problems with them

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