I’m old enough to remember when age verification bills were pitched as a way to ‘save the kids from porn’ and shield them from other vague dangers lurking in the digital world (like…“the transgender”). We have long cautioned about the dangers of these laws, and pointed out why they are likely to...
They’re all kinda the same amount dumb. The anti aging creams that bill targets are causing genuine long term skin damage to young girls who think they need it because of a massive economic system built on exploiting their insecurities. It’s pretty gross.
It's all about the implementation. The Washington bill is treating diet products as similar to alcohol (check ID in-store and on delivery), which seems fine to me.
The NY law seems to be suggesting that dating app services need to collect (and possibly retain) sensitive information on people, like identification, location data. That's troubling to me.
I understand the concern but if ot stops underage people from getting on, I think it's a good idea. All social media needs it too. We have to protect our kids better. As someone with step kids, I hate that they use tiktok but they were already addicted to it when I entered the picture.
There's an important distinction here: "is a good idea" is not "is the right way to do it". You can also keep kids off of dating apps by banning dating apps, banning children from the Internet, or even just banning children. All of those are horrible solutions, but they achieve the goal.
The goal should be to balance protecting kids with minimizing collateral damage. Forcing adults to hand over significant amounts of private data to prove their identity has the same basic fault as the hyperbolic examples, that it disregards the collateral damage side of the equation.
if you are a parent, it's you whose responsibility is to protect your children. if you are incapable of keeping up with what they do on their devices, and incapable of educating your child on how to use the internet, maybe you shouldn't have made one. if you don't do these, and you want these to be "solved" with laws, you are just forcing mass surveillance on everyone out of your fucking laziness.