this post was submitted on 19 Mar 2026
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I diagree. Look at Privacy Policies and ToS. They are extremely invasive. Basically they say more or less "we will do whatever we want". Why? Because no one reads them or cares, and they want to CYA in any and all situations. Now picture you want to navigate to a website, but the website creator is afraid that, one way or another, some adult content may find it's way their website, so what do they do? Age-gate it. And now they've shirked any responsibility for such content. Every god damn website, the entire internet, will be age-gated. Not just Facebook and Reddit. Children and privacy-concerned adults will not be able to access the internet. And no one will care. That's where we're headed.
I'm not sure what you are disagreeing with. That's generally what I said. If you use a non-compliant OS, your experience will be "age-gated".
Though I don't think they will completely block access entirely. Collecting data on kids is extremely valuable to these companies, because kids grow up to be consumers. They will happily continue to let you in, but you won't be able to go to the 18+ areas.
I'm disagreeing with this. I'm saying there will be no "kid-friendly" areas of the internet, outside of areas that are explicitly for children.
I don't understand. There will still be porn sites for people.
The way it will work is that when you tell your browser to go to a porn site, the site will ask your Bowser for your verified age. Your browser will then ask your OS for your verified age. Your OS will respond "18+" to your browser. Your browser will tell the porn site "the OS says 18+". Then the porn site will say "Cool, here's the porn." That's it.
If you use a non-compliant OS, then your browser will say to the porn site "I asked the OS and the OS says 'null'." Then the porn site will say, "Well sorry. Then your OS isn't supported. Come back when you are using a supported OS."
That's it.
Oh thank god we can protect the human traffickers' right to make a profit off abused women from slums 😍 I was so worried
That's obvious.
The browsers sooner or later will always respond "18+" and do not ask the OS.
... And if a kid using that browser was abused because the browser lied to the website about the users' age, then the browser's creators should bare some consequences for lying to the website that otherwise would have put up protections. Right?
No, absoluetly not. Because the whole thing is notnto protect the children, but to gather more data.
Do you also believe that the Boy Scouts and the Catholic Church also have no responsibility to protect kids, because doing to would similarly require collecting data on people?
(I would disagree with you if you said yes, but I'll respect your position for being consistent.)
That is a completely different premise. A) putting "Catholic church" and "protect children" in the same sentence is already a bold move B) if I place my child in the boy scouts I do have some expectations on them to protect the child, correct. But that's not the all or nothing situation you mentioned in your example
My point is the same as with DNS Blocking: It is proposed under the umbrella of "think about the kids", but it doesn't work for what they propose it and it is a first step in creating the base of a censorship infrastructure. The govements (and by that I mean all of them not just the US) should hold the platform's accountable for shit they mess up now and don't accept "Sorry we can't do that at scale" as an answer. Google and meta should act much harder on reports by the community. interestingly, they CAN act fast and hard for copyright stuff or other things which would reduce their earnings. As long as the governments won't act based on existing measures, I can't take any new ones serious
(3rd option: don't accept the premise)
So you are going with: Deny the problem of child sexual predators exists at all.
There will always be sites that don't care and won't comply with any OS level restrictions in the first place. You will never solve this.
Also, in the USA - there's no suggestions floating around for a 16 or under age ban on accessing social media, moreover, I'm not sure if that specifically is even constitutional.
And I'll support strong laws that hold those sites accountable for negligence. I'm really struggling to see why this is so controversial.
There are laws that make cism illegal in pretty every country. And most countries and companies are pretty quick with takedown requests. So why do we need age verification? CISM is illegal for everyone
Now for other stuff that is legally age gated in one country, but it is hosted in another country which has another legal age limit. Which one counts now?
Does the lawmakers have the reverse law in place, that when a page requests the age bucket, even if there is no legal requirement, does the pagebget fined as well? Otherwise it just leads again to the "cookie banner issue".
Many of whom won't be based in the USA.
You want a "papers please" internet and technology sphere, and you're calling for this on a federated platform heavily populated by people who want to get away from all of that. What sort of response do you expect?
related testimony from a fellow friend of the fediverse against a bill in Colorado from last night: here, starting at 7:12pm
Do not accept the premise of assholes.
Ever heard of parents? It’s not the job of the OS or the browserto monitor and control a kids internet access.
In most jurisdictions you need to be an adult to legally get an Internet access.
So people using the Internet are either adults or under the supervision of adults.
Perhaps we could update our software licenses to include "no implied babysitting".
Yes it is. It absolutely is. If you provide a service, you should responsible for the safety of that service, especially if you are providing and advertising that service to kids.
You are misleading yourself.
Consider a vehicle. We understand that there is a threshold of age and responsibility to operating a vehicle safely, but we don't hold the vehicle manufacturer responsible for driver error if the driver is under the age of licensing.
You are suggesting that an os maker can be held responsible for user decisions, which is both unenforceable and legally unsound.
Correct. Right now the OS maker is not responsible. That exactly why Meta is pushing so hard to change the laws to make them responsible.
Your analogy is a good analogy. In your car analogy, today, no one blames the car manufacturer for a drunk driver, but we do blame bars and bar tenders. In many states, bars have to be licensed and if the bar tender allows some one to get drunk and drive home the bar and the bar tender can be held liable. This situation would be like if bars got together to lobby state and national governments to make it so that the car manufacturers had to install breathalyzers in every car so that the bars could reduce their liability and responsibility.
I don't think you've thought this analogy through, or else you haven't had much experience with bars. Drinking establishments have a duty to "cut off" intoxication, but that ends at the door.
The us military has a history of being very interested in recruits from tweens and teens online. And obviously the us military isn't alone in this.
If what you are suggesting is true, that "it's all OK because protect the kids", it would be fairly awkward to explain this practice.
I didn't understand your disagreement. Yes just like a bar shouldn't be responsible for a person that gets plastered drunk after they leave, Facebook shouldn't be responsible for the actions of a predator that goes to a porn website to lure kids. Just like the Catholic Church shouldn't be responsible for a public school teacher that rapes her students at school. The only times any of these organizations are responsible is when the abuses happen while using their services.
I don't get why this is controversial.
I can't speak for the military's recruiting practices. Yes, I fully agree that the military's recruitment practices are very predatory, and should be reigned in. Politically, I personally think "enlistment" shouldn't be an option at all. It should be random draft. Every year the military should tell Congress how many new recuits they need, and Congress should approve a draft of 18 year olds for that many new recuits. The draft should be random, with no deferments or other ways out of service other than health reasons as determined by a military physician. (But that's way off topic.)
My disagreement with your posture is your implied insistence that protecting children is the only goal of these proposed laws. The military example should have shown you that this is obviously not the main goal of these laws, but you seem to want to ignore this.
Most ppl agree with protecting kids from mature content.
This law(s) is framed in a way to be unenforceable, yet the laws are coming regardless. This would suggest there is another reason for the laws.
Are you seeing how unworkable this proposed law is yet?
We don't prevent kids from going into hardware stores that carry dangerous tools, we assume children are accompanied by a responsible adult. This is no different.
At its core, neither an operating system nor a browser is a service. They are effectively data that the users are serving to themselves. There are certainly some operating systems and browsers that contain the ability to connect a service as a plugin or (I would say) maliciously include a connection to a service by default such as targeted advertising, but those services are neither the OS nor the browser.
Right. That's why Facebook is trying to get the laws changed so that it's the OS that is responsible.
There is a big conspiracy behind this, it's just not a shadowy-government one.
I don't know if you meant to, but you completely ignored the point. Your comment directly quoted @Dirk@lemmy.ml and edited out "OS" and "browser". You then began talking about how "services" have an obligation.
EDIT: I jumbled usernames. My bad.
Right, I was making the point that just like the Boy Scouts and the Catholic Church can't just shrug off their responsibility, online orgs don't get a free pass either.
But if these laws are passed, then they will get a free pass, and just point at the OS maker as the problem. Be mad about that and I'm on your side.
There will just be OS and OS forks that mimic other OS to 'trick' websites into thinking they're verified.
Sure. And if a parent knowingly installs one of those OS's on a computer they let their children use, THEN you can fully blame the parent.
My point here is that they won't be able to stop people with 'unverified' OS accessing the internet.
This is not true. From an adtech perspective, child user data is virtually worthless. Because COPPA exists, most demand platforms (including those outside COPPA jurisdiction) simply will not issue any bid for that type of traffic. To try to bypass this, sketchy publisher groups will try to issue a regs.coppa=0 in their bid requests with the justification of "we couldn't determine that info". COPPA is largely self-reporting based if you didn't know.
Outside of that, what you are describing is called the Chilling Effect. It is were legitimate activities on a site are restricted out of fear that they may break a vaguely worded law. This is a genuine concern and one that federated services had when Lemmy first started to take off. Instance owners were faced with the possibility that without CSAM detection processes in place that they could be held liable for that material being present on their instance.
I don't think that COPPA says that companies can't collect data on kids l at all. Just that there are limitations on how they can use that data while the kids are still kids. When the kids grow up then the previously collected data is fair game. (Why the do you think Facebook, YouTube, Amazon, etc. are so willing to invest in "for Kids" products?)
And, we'll probably disagree on this, but I generally think that people and companies that provide a service are responsible for that service. That includes the Boy Scouts, the Catholic Church, and Lemmy hosts. And everyone in between. (Including parents, but the responsibility is no only on them alone.)
We aren't talking about publishing side groups like Youtube, FB, etc. We're talking about advertisers like DV360 or Tradedesk (the largest ad firms). COPPA has vastly decreased value on the demand side. And user data isn't stored for 20+ years expecting to capitalize on it. After several weeks that data becomes stale and useless. In the 11 years I've worked in adtech engineering, I can confirm that how you think this works vs how this actually works is not the same thing.
And what you are talking about for responsibility is part of the Section 230 amendments being made to force liability on hosts for the "sake of the children". These amendments have nothing to do with children though. They have to do with opening hosts up to liability in defamation suits raised against them to force silence of political critics (this has been WELL documented).
What should Lemmy hosts have to do, out of interest?
Nope - it is extremely risky/costly. Facebook is actively pushing for these laws to push the "blame" onto the OS to get out of a potential $50 Billion worth of fines due to COPPA violations for collecting data on kids. Facebook wants the OS to do all of the actual collecting of data while being required to share that data with Facebook - they get all of the benefit of stealing your data without any of the liability (or work). That's the entire point of these laws.