US Bill Mandates On-Device Age Verification

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Facebook. There's a wave of child endangerment lawsuits incoming and they want to head that off at the pass by having governments shift all that liability over to the OS vendors.

Meta. Specifically to undercut Apple.

Apple, Google, Meta and Microsoft. Maybe with a push from 3 letter agencies, because it makes their life easier.

Identify devices, not people.

Distinguishing between child-locked and unlocked devices is something any website should be able to do easily. Adult-only should be a config setting.

Vendors shouldn't sell unlocked devices to kids.

Then it's up to parents take sure their kids only have locked devices. (Or not, if they're okay with it.)

And there obviously gonna be market for "verified" devices. Not like there is anything at all that could stop people of any ages looking at porn.

Sounds like a problem. Luckily it turns out my phone has two cameras and a laser dot projector pointed at my face right now. Not hard to imagine a future solution to this issue were we to pass this legislation, sadly…

Short answer: No. Apple already caved in advance.

Longer answer: In the UK, Apple already implements age "verification" at the OS level, starting with IOS/IPadOS 26.4. If Apple had not implemented this, it would still be in compliance with UK law. Apple is anticipatorily obedient.

A company like Apple has visibility of the legislative pipeline in its markets. Looks like the UK was a test bed.

Lots of OECD countries, all at the same time, are pushing for online age verification or OS-level age verification, both equally intrusive and implemented in privacy-violating ways by conflating identity verification and age verification.

The end result is not protecttion of minors, but abolishing anonymity on the Internet. Social media companies claim to want the former, but in reality just want to shift liability to OS and device vendors. Governments happily accept the "side effect" of being able to find and root out dissidents.

Is that an option? Tell me more.

Yes, I am looking to sue to stop this insanity. If you're a lawyer reading this, please reach out.

We still have to provide a way for people that don’t have (smart) phones, but I would absolutely implement asking the phone instead of a 3rd party when available.

We don’t gain anything from asking a 3rd party. In fact it costs money per request.

Some people really need shit spelled out to them. This does a great job of doing that in a small package.

Like the authors of these bills, you appear not to understand the technology.

Consider AB1043. It mandates that applications check the age of the user each time the application is launched.

Think about what that means when you run `make` in a source directory. How many times is the compiler application launched?

Well, perhaps your mental model of the actual objections to it are incomplete. There are a few problems and I'm curious what you have to say about them. First, "The benefit of this is that it can short-circuit support for more onerous age verification". Do you think that it "can" or that it "will"? Big difference. It could also go the other way, right? Opening the door to a more onerous version? Why do you think that isn't worth considering? Secondly, "This is probably the least bad out of all possible ways to implement age checking". What about parental controls that exist already? Someone seriously tried to tell me last time that parental controls "suck", but that's irrelevant, they don't have to suck, and in fact anything can suck. That's just happenstance. So, assuming parental controls were correctly implemented, why do you think this is "least bad" including parental controls? Thirdly, this "age verification" doesn't actually verify anything, because underage people can just choose "adult" anyway. What do you have to say to that? In that case, parental controls actually give you more power, and make this new age check completely obsolete. Thoughts? Lastly, maybe you're not from the USA, but we have a concept of "free speech" which includes the idea that people cannot be "compelled" to certain speech. If people were required to add a "sign here to confirm you're an adult" in every romance novel, that would be fine right? It's also a nothingburger, right? But then, you've compelled people to put something in every published book. Actually, that's a bad analogy. We should say that ALL BOOKS require this signature field on the first page. After all, we don't know what kinds of expletives and horrible things people might have written in the margins of the book (assuming it's being sold second-hand). That would be okay with you, right? Nothingburger? But it compels people to write something, and that's a door most legal scholars know not to open.

> The writing has been on the wall for some time now: the era of completely unrestricted internet is coming to an end.

And books..? And the newspaper? What if a child reads about a horrible murder in the newspaper that keeps them up at night? What if the government outlaws books and newspapers because they can contain bad things? We'd better add a "adult/ not adult" checkbox to the first page to "short-circuit support for more onerous age verification".

I can understand the "baby mode" desire, but as the other reply pointed out, this does not need to be legislated. The big OS companies can easily offer this feature for those that want it.

I'm curious though about all this porn that apparently hides behind a rock on the device and leaps out to corrupt tiny minds when they least suspect it.

Shock websites aside, pornography generally doesn't ambush you. Unless you're a republican giving a presentation and have no idea how that porn got in there.

And, AB1043 specifically exempts websites, so it doesn't protect anyone from the goatse's of the world anyway.

These bills will not do what they purport to do, but they will do a whole lot of bad stuff.

The problem is with government mandates.

Apple and Google already ship OSes with comprehensive APIs and parental controls. There's not even any porn on the iOS App Store by policy.

Creating liability for random OS and app developers is absurd, and foreign porn websites aren't going to comply with this anyway.

> "there's a baby driving"

Why does your baby need internet?

> We do want a way to signal there's a kid driving a device.

Which is extremely irresponsible. It creates a false sense of security and abandons your child to the whims of strangers. This seems akin to putting a "please don't hurt me" sticker on your child and then letting them roam around downtown unsupervised.

> But if we can just have a way to put bright orange vests on devices that require special treatment

There is software you can already use which will lock the device down and only allow it to go to pre-approved sites. I'm unwilling to give up any of my civil rights for your level of convenience above this.

You wouldn’t drop a toddler in the cbd and expect them to be fine, why would you expect a device to be any different?

You need to be a parent and stop expecting the people around you to do it for you.

Edit: and there are already device level parental controls.