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The court reasoned sensibly: it's wrong to violate the rights of all citizens just to weed out a small group of violators. This is contrary to data protection regulations. The controversial Chat Control law follows the same logic: to find criminals, they propose monitoring everyone.

The problem is that any age verification system effectively becomes an identity verification system. And such tools rarely remain "just for kids"—they quickly become used for other purposes. The only secure way is to verify not the person's identity, but the device's status (for example, that it's a children's device). This is called age assurance: we confirm age without knowing who exactly is in front of us.

> The problem is that any age verification system effectively becomes an identity verification system. And such tools rarely remain "just for kids"—they quickly become used for other purposes. The only secure way is to verify not the person's identity, but the device's status (for example, that it's a children's device). This is called age assurance: we confirm age without knowing who exactly is in front of us.

Age assurance is still treating the symptom. If the platform is designed to addict and radicalize, a children's device getting in doesn't help the child, it just means the harmful design now has a younger victim. The only fix that actually works is making the platform safe for everyone, which means regulating what these services are allowed to do to users in the first place, not building better gates around them.

What is “harmful behavior” when it comes to words? You may have your own definition, but I guarantee that you can’t get a supermajority to agree with it.

(There are some basic things like fraud and such that are already illegal.)

Most people don’t actually want to ban “harmful” speech except for the speech of their political enemies.

Since I can't edit the top post, a response to all of the above: the solution is platforms with sane defaults. Honest by default. No content discovery unless you go looking for it. The feed shows what you chose to follow, in order and stops there. The platform behaves how you configured it, not how it's most profitable for them. Right now the default is whatever keeps you on longest, that's the only thing that needs to change
Bingo. This is meta pulling a page from Green Washing book, i.e. how big corp made regular people be responsible for all the waste and recycling instead of being liable of it themselves.
> making the platform safe for everyone

No. I don't want to be treated like a child.

Parents already have the ability to control what their children can do on their personal devices.

It would be better to use public resources to educate parents on how to use those existing controls, if that is something those parents choose to do with their own children.

Or realize that there is no way to know who is using a device without looking at the device holders for all the time they use the device. It's like ordering alcoholics or cigarettes: the seller looks at you see the white hairs (OK) or see a 16yo face (documents please.) A device registered to an adult can be used by a child. I know, it's a failure of parental control, but how many teenagers managed to get adult magazines in the last 100 years? They will get adult devices too. So there is no way to create a 100% effective system. Kids and teenagers will find workarounds, everybody else will live a worse life.
Amen.

And hey if social media is bad for everyone ... put that on social media companies. Not everyone else.

Stupid cookie banners is my favorite example. I don't need to make a legal agreement with every website... if they wanted websites to not do a bad thing, make them, or a mechanism in browsers or something.

This user is known to the state of California to post LLM text.
> The problem is that any age verification system effectively becomes an identity verification system. And such tools rarely remain "just for kids"—they quickly become used for other purposes.

source?

> age verification system effectively becomes an identity verification system.

this is fundamentally wrong and accepting this as an industry will only lead to required identity verification becoming the norm sooner or later

the important realization is age verification is in the end "just" a form of parenting tool

this means

- it doesn't need to be a "perfect", glancing at the age of a passport when buying adult products isn't perfect either, but it's good enough. And it doesn't require seeing the address, name, (in most cases) day and month, gender etc. on a id, nor any form of "noting them down".

- it doesn't need to be attestation based, unhackable or anything like that. It complements parenting, not replaces it.

- in turn it also shouldn't need anyones id, in most places children below 18 don't need any id but 16+ is still a age barrier

or to lay it out in rough design

- require multimedia devices sold to have a child "mode" functionality

- allow setting a age category or age (to auto determine and update the category), require a age set for this purpose to be kept private on the device and not shared, analyzed etc.

- require web sites and apps to have voluntary min age limits, similar to other products, block access _client side_ based on this information. The standard should allow region/country specific limits and reason tags.

- There are a bunch of edge cases omitted, like sites serving dynamic content/platforms in general. Requirements for parents to be allowed to define exceptions (in both directions) and handling of sides not having your countries age gating. Etc.

- properly educate parent about it

this provides sufficient functionality to support parents in parenting without requiring any identity verification or overriding the parents right to parent

yes, it's not perfect in many ways. But it doesn't need to perfect, it's "just fine" for what it tries to archive.

This could have been an http header. It's hard to identify people, but blocking child-locked devices should be easy, since the devices can be built to cooperate.

Then it's up to parents to give their kids child-locked devices and for stores to not sell unlocked devices to kids.

There is just such a HTTP header, for adult sites. It's not granular enough to set individual age ratings, just to mark a page as 18+.

<https://www.rtalabel.org/page.php?content=howtofaq>

People keep saying it’s the parents responsibility to keep their kids safe, and don’t give them the tools! This is such an obvious one. I should be able to lock down a laptop for a child, and then have the browser limit websites to those that are actually child safe. I don’t care if a government agency is the one issuing “child safety certs”. This gets around the whole “identify everyone no matter what” thing, and it means that parents don’t have to run an entire IT department level of security infrastructure to keep their kids safe online.
Child-locked devices can already whitelist/blacklist sites and apps. The issue is not capability.

And before anyone blames the parents, parents will always be shitty. They are an impediment to children's health society must work around.

I wish we would just pull the plug on ad-based social media altogether. The incentives add up to destroying society.

The title is unfortunately edited. The courts have blocked it. The government wants it.
The courts are part of the government no?
This is the correct response. Privacy is a human right.
I always find it weird when people declare things “are” rights, as rights are things societies create. “Should be a right” seems like a more appropriate framing
The right implementation is to have parents mark certain devices as "under 18", and then have those devices perform accordingly.

This give parents useful control, and removes the state overreach.

This is very binary. A 11y old and a 17y old are very different.
As french citizen what I can say is: Parliamentary time wasted. During the initial work the deputees that have initiated the project could have figured out that the constitutional court would, in fine, block the text.
Sometimes these things are a prelude to constitutional changes, or at least could be in the minds of the proponents.
Sometimes they do know but do it anyway (or even for that very reason) because it serves their political interests and then the great bill they were supporting is blocked by someone else, which can be blamed as needed.

I think Trump played that game a number of times, for instance.

Seems like there are many ways to get toward the best of both worlds -- don't allow people to upload pictures of kids who are clearly under 15 to social media would get us a lot of the way there.

Also all of these companies know from advertising data, and location data, that you are at school, who you are, etc. They would also know that all of your friends are also teenagers.

If the law is serious there are many many ways to enforce this without violating privacy.

Without further violating privacy. I would say that the data these companies are already collecting on people (including children, who many believe should be afforded extra protections from such companies) is a major, systematic privacy violation.
> Seems like there are many ways to get toward the best of both worlds -- don't allow people to upload pictures of kids who are clearly under 15 to social media would get us a lot of the way there.

How do you prevent kids uploading photos of themselves?

Good - the lobbyists are losing the war.

Now it is time to disband Facebook - companies leveraging lobbyists to try to destroy democracies, must be disbanded.

What I find interesting is that Texas did it with just pornography sites, everyone complains. Then California, which included those that complained by Texas' law, says they're going to do it at the OS level, some people were okay with it but some still opposed it and possibly some others opposed it. Yet, they're still pushing forward with both?
Just like all the other policies that somehow manage to move at the speed of light across the globe. These politicians are seem to all be influenced by the same thing, with that usually being in opposition to the people that voted for them.
It is unclear to me how you can regulate any digital service with respect to any demographic identity without regression to full identity check.

Parental controls are not a solution, either. People are free to use any terminal they wish. If you wanted to change that then it again regresses to the same issue.

A few options: (a) load a digital copy of an existing ID into your OS's wallet app then the wallet app can simply attest to any service that the device is owned by someone over 18 (b) sell single-use tokens in grocery stores that require an ID to purchase like alcohol. token can be used to verify you're 18+ for one site. (c) require that any network-enabled device can only be bought by showing ID to prove 18+ and then when set up can be configured at the OS-level as child-owned so a parent can buy a device and do the initial setup so it's locked in child mode.
By making the thing that is unsafe to use safe to use?
The Internet was built for adults. Then, we gave kids tablets and phones. Now, decades later, we have a problem. Kids see things meant for adults.

Maybe we need an adult only portion of the Internet and verify identity only on that (like bars do to keep out kids).

New TLD maybe? .adult

Mandatory verification is an unacceptable attack on privacy. A device level whitelist of kid safe areas that is disabled by default and enabled by parents is a better idea.
.xxx has been a thing since 2011, .adult and .porn since 2014, and .sex since 2015.
The moral panic is about harm to children, when the harm to everybody is apparent

These companies are vulnerable to regulation because they must sell advertising in every market they operate in.

We could make them open their algorithms.

I love how the french can go from bieng, from bieng, French, to making complete rational sensical descions that they will then stick to but refuse to discuss. Bravo vive la france!
Oh that’s interesting. Could that potentially be used as a blocker for Chat Control 2.0 at the European level?
Like all those other countries. I'm sure they came up with this idea all by themselves.
Nit: the constitutional council isn't a court. Its members aren't judges, and include past presidents.
Frankly, the proper solution is to ban social media regardless of age. We are already doing it with heroin and other similar substances and clearly social media are pretty bad for everyone and anyone.
Tobacco and alcohol are scientifically proven carcinogens, yet they are sold ubiquitously in the [western] world. I would argue they are more dangerous than social medias. Yet we don't see any push in banning tobacco and alcohol for 'everyone'.
Funny that you’re saying that in a social media