The end result will be the same. If you face a 10k liability for serving the wrong customer, you end up needing to ID your customers.
If the government isn't going to provide that service you end up with private companies verifying identity and the data security issues that entails.
If you want to shift the responsibility of protecting children away from parents, then you end up in a situation where third parties need to be able to differentiate between a child and an adult. I haven't yet seen a proposal that doesn't entail someone - government or private enterprise - getting access to identifiable information.
Of course, you could have something like a signed certificate, so the identity verifier doesn't see who you are patronizing, and the identity seeking business only gets to see your age, but it still has privacy issues.
It also doesn't give any actual age verification information. Verified age is not the same thing as self reported age.
If a kid can figure out how to click "yes, I am an adult" on a website, they can definitely figure out how to do the same thing when they turn on their phone the first time.
Yes. Which entails document fraud, expense and pretty significant risk of failure. No system is perfect, but a fake id is very different than the clerk just asking everyone how old they are and calling it good.
You really cant see the difference between checking an id and asking someone their age?
The point is that asking is completely pointless when lying is free and impossible to detect. You need some way to verify truth, and that necessarily entails exposing PII somewhere in the process.
All California accomplished was to add an api for exposing self reported age. That is very different than actually knowing a customer’s age. Any liquor store can tell you.
You've needed to do that for at least ten years. Mobile internet either requires a contract, or an ID check before you get a sim (pay and go)
Anyone providing internets is liable for what the users are doing. The way you got out of that is responding to legal requests. (originally mostly copyright)
This is the frustrating thing, we have effective and relatively uncontroversial age gated network (mobile data) already. and it worked.
I don’t think that would have worked. Parents buy phones for their kids since the kids can’t buy them. What would the choices be? Give them a phone or not give them a phone. I don’t think society is ready for that kind of choice anymore.
Yes, there are indeed loopholes. My point is this, we have this already, it works already, and if the government had actually researched rather than read the telegraph, we would have had a system that would be much less shouting at the tides to stop them coming in.
of course your foreign sim didn't need ID, but given how easy it is to find out who you are from a sim, its not really needed.
Moreover, most deliberate public wifi asks you to accept the ToS, so that they can legally cover themselves from what ever you are doing. They are still liable if they dont take "reasonable steps" to stop illegal activity occurring on their service.
If the government isn't going to provide that service you end up with private companies verifying identity and the data security issues that entails.
If you want to shift the responsibility of protecting children away from parents, then you end up in a situation where third parties need to be able to differentiate between a child and an adult. I haven't yet seen a proposal that doesn't entail someone - government or private enterprise - getting access to identifiable information.
Of course, you could have something like a signed certificate, so the identity verifier doesn't see who you are patronizing, and the identity seeking business only gets to see your age, but it still has privacy issues.