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.

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.

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.

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.

There's a reason why nobody is giving the parents those tools.

And it's the same reason why everybody keeps pushing the stupidier, most obnoxious and invasive tools to "protect the children".

The title is unfortunately edited. The courts have blocked it. The government wants it.

The courts are part of the government no?

In Western countries, the judiciary and the executive (which contains the day-to-day operations of the government) generally operate independently and can rule against each other. I'm most familiar with the US, and I think its constitution was the first to encode judicial independence - and constitutional review by the Supreme Court was established early on in US history. But all Western countries these days have had judges rule against executive policy and the executive obey it.

The details of how to override a ruling against the executive does differ between countries, and also on whether its considered just an interpretation of law or a constitutional question. Both the US and France have a written constitution that's binding on other branches, while the UK does not.

No, separation of powers

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?

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?

YouTube kids is able to do it. They detect kids in regular YouTube and whether they are the account owner and move them to YouTube kids.

Oh that’s interesting. Could that potentially be used as a blocker for Chat Control 2.0 at the European level?

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

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