New York just proposed the most invasive state-level age verification bill the US has seen. Senate Bill S08102 would extend age verification requirements down to the device itself: internet-connected devices, operating system providers, and app stores would all be required to implement what the bill calls “age assurance” before users can access their own hardware and software ecosystems.
Edit:
Meta is one of the lobbyists for the age verification bill.
Into the Metaverse: The Money and Motivations Behind Meta’s App Store Gambit
In May 2025, Senator Mike Lee (R-UT) and Representative John James (R-MI) introduced the App Store Accountability Act (ASAA), a bill that would require app stores to verify users’ ages and obtain parental consent for users under 18. Meta has bankrolled a wildly expensive lobbying campaign to enact ASAA and its state-level analogs, and instead of recoiling in horror at taking kid privacy advice from Meta, some lawmakers are credulously going along with it.
Confirmed by Bloomberg : Meta Clashes With Apple, Google Over Age Check Legislation
The struggle has pitted Meta Platforms Inc. and other app developers against Apple Inc. and Alphabet Inc.’s Google, the world’s largest app stores. Lobbyists for both sides are moving from state to state, working to water down or redirect the legislation to minimize their clients’ risks.
This year alone, at least three states — Utah, Texas and Louisiana — passed legislation requiring tech companies to authenticate users’ ages, secure parental consent for anyone under 18 and ensure minors are protected from potentially harmful digital experiences. Now, lobbyists for all three companies are flooding into South Carolina and Ohio, the next possible states to consider such legislation.
in addition, there are Over 50 Child Advocacy Groups Unite to Demand App Store Accountability
… I really don’t want to have to stop using all fucking technology now. Ffs this is absolutely disgustingly absurd. EVERYTHING GETS HACKED I am not tying my ID and real name to literally everything I do on an electronic device…
Sorry, but they handed out pamphlets at Davos.
Well not actually Davis, a more important event that nobody’s heard of.
I’m usually left of centre, even a bit more to the left than that.
But all these liberal places passing these laws… They’re making it difficult not to change teams.
I don’t watch conservative mouthpieces on YouTube, just the literal reality of these badly thought-of, privacy nightmare laws… All a conservative would have to tell me is they would revert this, and I’d be hard pressed to vote otherwise.
They’re not getting the memo are they…
What a crazy hypothetical you made up, “left of center”, considering the Republican party was pushing for federal ID verification for online services years before Democrats caught up to speed. Red states brought this up first and resulted in multiple porn sites banning users in those states.
But yes, online censorship and corporate surveillance is a bipartisan issue in the two party system of fascists. You will not be able to “vote” these issues away.
Apparently Louisiana was the first state to really push for this kind of stuff so I seriously doubt conservatives in government would stop pushing stuff like this either.
It’s one of those things that’s going to be inevitable… It’s always “FoR tHe KiDs” but it’s really about knowing exactly what every citizen is doing at all times so they can come after you for whatever displeases them.
Just to point out I’m Canadian and regardless of who started it. Saying they’ll vote Republican to avoid this stuff comes from substantial ignorance.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_media_age_verification_laws_in_the_United_States
The only spin I can see from the right side is they want to be so ass deep into your tech stack that they don’t even have to ask to verify who you are.
I’m also Canadian lol. The point I’m making is that if it has me thinking like this, imagine people who were truly on the fence.
They’re shooting themselves in the foot.
If you’re Canadian then you know “left of center” in American units is still to the right of center everywhere else in the world.
It’s absurd to see a democrat doing something and blame liberals for it.
I was talking about Canada, should have mentioned that. Carney brought up that he wants to look at the issue, and God damnit I will fight this thing or at least the version that’s going to put all of our data at risk.
If it passes anyway, then I cannot in good conscience vote for any party who approved age verification like it is done in the UK, Australia, and some States.
Lol that’s like saying you’d vote in favor of voter suppression laws in exchange for gun rights… yeeaaah no don’t do that lol
Don’t trust conservatives
As a voters you don’t get much a choice. In any voting system there is a case where all your choices are for something you are a hard no on.
In Canada our cons are dumb, but not brain dead like the US’.
I don’t want to vote for them.
But once age verification garbage enters the picture, I become a one-issue voter.
So as a one issue voter, you’d vote for the people doing the thing you don’t like more than the other group, instead of those doing it less?
And you called your cons dumb…
Hey after I fight tooth and nail, write opinion columns, write to all politicians I have access to, and create petitions, if all of this wasn’t enough, what else is there to do?
It’s not a sure thing in Canada, and maybe a party further left will vote against it and oppose it, in which case yeah I’d vote for that.
The team with Palantir, Cambridge analytica, that team? Team Red is all about absolute freedom for the rich, not so much the plebs
for starters, democrats are not leftists.
I’m not American lol
I’m saying they’re poisoning their own well with garbage like that.
deleted by creator
We’re going to PROTECT Children by
Arresting Epstein’s Associates!NOT Bombing Schools!Arresting ANY Pedophile in the Epstein Files!Making the BEST Childhood Vaccines available!having Jeffrey Epstein’s Friend Peter Thiel track Adults!Parents can age check their kids manually. We should not identify every user on the internet.
No we can’t. We try, but kids are not 100% of the time in our sight. They are sitting in their chair “doing homework”, but when they see us coming they switch apps - who knows what they are doing. They are getting up at 3am when we are a sleep, again doing who knows what. Even if we put controls on, anytime there is a way to bypass the control (often a website that looks good enough to fool the automated approval system school has set up) that will spread to the entire school and all kids get access to that for a week in school before it is shutdown.
If you want age verification to work, you need a strong legal effort (international!) so that anyone who makes something online that gets kids (intentionally or not) faces a strong enough legal issue (read years in prison) that it is really stops this. Part of that is enough money for investigation so that it is a given you will be caught. I don’t think you can do this, and so the whole effort is pointless.
Network level content blockers are really easy to setup and they’d be even easier if bills targeted ISPs instead (requiring gateways have the tech built-in). It takes a pretty smart and determined kid to get around network controls and it can target specific devices so adults still have an unrestricted experience.
And good luck for that kid to go online if I confiscate their device.
I can’t - teachers give them homework that must be done on the device all the time.
As a gen z, what school that uses online classroom environments and resources doesn’t give kids school-monitored tech? And for my district, our Chromebooks were HEAVILY locked down and monitored. I remeber trying to search the term “guitar latina” for a music project once and getting my search flagged because of “latina.” Most popular sites were firewalled/unaccessable (so .xxx domains were most likely blocked too). The terminal was literally disabled. Several system settings were disabled or unable to be edited. We couldn’t download programs, and most extensions were blocked (I think they eventually blocked them all). Hell, we couldn’t even change our desktop wallpaper.
Basically, at least at my middle and high school, it was very hard to access inappropriate material, and if you did, you were likely to get caught. Use cloudflare’s family dns (they have a whole setup guide) for your home network and any devices that aren’t fully locked down by the school (includes personal devices that aren’t school owned), and put parental control on so your kids can’t touch it.
If they get past all that, then congrats! You have kids who are very good at problem solving, searching the internet for info, and experimenting. All of which are great qualities for future cybersecurity professionals.
- Confiscate device
- “Time for homework”
- Give back device
- Do homework
- “Homework done”
- Reconfiscate device
It takes a pretty smart and determined kid to get around network controls
Proxies and VPNs exist for a reason. If the entire country of China can’t keep up with the number of VPNs and proxies poking holes in their Great Firewall, what makes you think individual parents have the time to do so? You never used a proxy site to access blocked content on a school computer? It doesn’t take a high degree of technical skill. You just google “proxy site” and paste whatever URL you wanted into the site.
It only takes one kid to figure out the bypass and it spreads all the kids. Some of those kids are talking to kids going to other schools.
every week my kids hear about a new game the school isn’t blocking while they are in class. Sometimes the teachers catch them, but kids are good at hiding what they are doing - and switching to what they should do when the teacher comes near.
Right, so use them to your advantage? Don’t allow unfettered internet access on the device you give your child. Use MDM/Parental controls to lock its internet access to a proxy or VPN that blocks adult websites, as well as other anonymizers. Business have been doing this since forever.
They are only easy to setup if you don’t care about getting them right. Either you block a lot of useful content (only approved, audited things allowed), or you block only things that are known evil (that is you audited it). Either way the vast majority of the internet is not audited and we have no idea which of that is good vs evil. (nevermind trying to get a consistent definition of good/evil). The name “onlyfans” makes me think of sports fans and thus something I’d allow kids to access - of course I know better, I’ll be there is someone out there who would be setting up the firewall who doesn’t know it is in fact adult content.
It’s not on you to know every single website and what it does. All major security providers maintain a classification database of websites that they use to filter the internet. Most major corporations subscribe to those lists, as do schools (I think by law). All you would do is buy one of these services and the blacklist would be managed by them. They’re not 100% perfect, and you child will be able to find a picture of boobs if they try hard enough, but that has always been the case.
One quick and easy way is to change your DNS to 1.1.1.3, which is a public resolver Cloudflare runs which filters out adult domains. This doesn’t scale if you’ve given your child a cellular device that can connect to other networks, but in that case you shouldn’t have done that, or should secure that device with a security solution that can enforce polices across the OS.
Personally I think it should be easier for parents to be able to do this kind of thing without having to learn too much about the tech, but deciding how to raise your child and what to shelter them from is your responsibility. These products have existed for decades. Instead of forcing OS manufactures to confirm ages and identities, we should focus on making sure parents have access to easy to use parental controls.
Every week my kid hears about another game (not boobs) that the school didn’t block and thus they can play when the teacher isn’t looking. There are also a lot of non educational youtube videos they can watch, but since some of their real educational videos are on youtube they don’t block most. (Again youtube will block boobs - but that is not all I’m worried about)
It only takes a single determined kid really as long as they can explain to their friends how to do it and their friends are capable of or able to install some software or boot into a live USB OS for example.
A lot of the various censorship circumvention software is designed to be fairly easy to use. I first learned about Tails when I was like 14 or so because I was being abused for being suspected of being LGBT by my parents and also for various other things such as being autistic and having other disabilities and they were abusing me for things I could not help. So I needed a way to ensure that I would stay protected from their potential digital snooping so I could get support online, talk to my online friends because I had nearly no irl friends and the very few I did kinda have just took advantage of me and bullied me most of the time.
I also needed to be able to rapidly destroy everything I was doing by pulling out the flash drive wiping the RAM and shutting down the PC. One of the somewhat common use cases for Tails is people under domestic abuse situations they are unable to escape from.
There is a reason why the Trevor Project, a mental health support site for LGBT people has an emergency mechanism for quickly leaving the site while your in the middle of a conversation with a counselor or just browsing the resources too.
https://www.thetrevorproject.org/research-briefs/mental-health-among-autistic-lgbtq-youth-apr-2022/
But regardless after I learned about stuff like that I also helped an online friend from another school access content using bridges as well. I helped another friend at some point too though in that case basic web proxies were enough. Though the latter person I guess was not really a great friend since he only really wanted to talk to me when he needed help with things like that.
Psiphon, another censorship circumvention tool is also fairly easy to use and works on mobile and desktop style OSs.
On my phone I used the Shelter app to create a work profile with a separate password from my devices regular password.
I used various apps like Tor Browser, Orbot, and other free and open source apps such as Bitmask that come with 2 free VPN providers.
In some cases Tor may not even be blocked or if it is you can try obfs4, Snowflake proxies, Meek, and Webtunnel bridges to access it for example.
Also a friend could run a private bridge for you from their home if they are tech savvy and want to help you. For obfs4 for example, out of a lot of services someone could self host, that is relatively easy without as much knowlege required as self hosting something more complex.
Wireguard is relatively easy to self host once you become accustomed to how to configure it. SSH is even easier than Wireguard IMO though Wireguard tries to be as easy as SSH there are a few issues that can happen with Wireguard that need more troubleshooting sometimes compared to SSH. SSH can be used for tunneling traffic and you can set your web browser to use it’s SOCKS port.
So if you can find a friend with an ISP that isn’t doing the filtering who can self host something or if a person can access Tor, Psiphon or a VPN particularly one with a variety of anti censorship options this type of network censorship isn’t going to be trivial.
There is also DNS tunneling and a variety of other methods.
Edit: The last thing I will likely say in this particular comment is that people should really consider who they will be condemning to a much worse situation than they are already in by supporting stuff like this and these privacy invasive age verification tools.
Here is additional info about who these types of bills will impact harshly.
"Age-verification mandates most harshly affect people with disabilities. Facial recognition systems routinely fail to recognize faces with physical differences, affecting an estimated 100 million people worldwide who live with facial differences, and “liveness detection” can exclude folks with limited mobility. As these technologies become gatekeepers to online spaces, people with disabilities find themselves increasingly blocked from essential services and platforms with no specified appeals processes that account for disability.
Document-based systems also don’t solve this problem—as mentioned earlier, people with disabilities are also less likely to possess current driver’s licenses, so document-based age-gating technologies are equally exclusionary."
“For many LGBTQ+ young people, especially those with unsupportive or abusive families, the internet can be a lifeline. For young people facing family rejection or violence due to their sexuality or gender identity, social media platforms often provide crucial access to support networks, mental health resources, and communities that affirm their identities.”
"According to a groundbreaking study by Chapin Hall of the University of Chicago, LGBTQ+ youth are 120% more likely to experience homelessness than their peers. And, while LGBTQ+ youth make up only 7% of the total U.S. youth population, they comprise an astounding 40% of all young people experiencing homelessness in the country.
Often times, youth who make their way to Covenant House do so bearing complex histories of physical, sexual, and emotional abuse. LGBTQ+ youth are further traumatized by rejection in their families, schools, and communities due to their gender identity or sexual orientation. This abandonment leads to no support system, putting LGBTQ+ youth at greater risk of exploitation, human trafficking, physical violence, and suicide"
“Platforms that rely on AI-based age-estimation systems often use a webcam selfie to guess users’ ages. But these algorithms don’t work equally well for everyone. Research has consistently shown that they are less accurate for people with Black, Asian, Indigenous, and Southeast Asian backgrounds; that they often misclassify those adults as being under 18; and sometimes take longer to process, creating unequal access to online spaces. This mirrors the well-documented racial bias in facial recognition technologies. The result is that technology’s inherent biases can block people from speaking online or accessing others’ speech.”
“Age-verification systems are, at their core, surveillance systems. By requiring identity verification to access basic online services, we risk creating an internet where anonymity is a thing of the past. For people who rely on anonymity for safety, this is a serious issue. Domestic abuse survivors need to stay anonymous to hide from abusers who could track them through their online activities. Journalists, activists, and whistleblowers regularly use anonymity to protect sources and organize without facing retaliation or government surveillance. And in countries under authoritarian rule, anonymity is often the only way to access banned resources or share information without being silenced. Age-verification systems that demand government IDs or biometric data would strip away these protections, leaving the most vulnerable exposed”
Also the perspectives of young people are almost never considered in these conversations which is why I am glad the Electronic Frontier Foundation actually took the time to ask when KOSA was being considered but these comments in the following link apply to a lot of these other forms of legislation too.
My mesh hub can straight up disable the internet at my house from 12am to 6am or any other hours I want.
but kids are not 100% of the time in our sight.
neither is your age verified phone. kids are already stealing parents credit cards to spend on mobile games, this will just add another incentive. but I bet your next idea will be constant age verification with the front camera.
but when they see us coming they switch apps - who knows what they are doing
and how the fuck does this help with that? your issue is that you are fucking lazy to even enable the built in parental control functions in the phone!!!
They are enabled - the kids have found bypasses. Turning on the hotspot and then using their school device for instance
why isn’t the school device locked down? why do you want to lock down everyone’s private devices, instead of making the school to lock down theirs?
I don’t care about your device. The school devices are lockee down - but it isn’t feasable to lock everything down and still have a useful device for the things they need to do.
yes you do! if you weren’t, you wouldn’t be supporting mandatory age verification in the operating system, including my phone, my computer, and that of everyone else!
The school devices are lockee down - but it isn’t feasable to lock everything down and still have a useful device for the things they need to do.
the school curriculum has a pretty defined list of apps and domains used for education. blame them for not doing a good job at filtering on institutional devices
I have never supported mandatory age verification on devices - it cannot work.
i want the same things people who are for is want - but I want a system that works in the real world. I don’t know what that system is. I know parents and schools are hurting because we don’t have a useful solution.
Lobbying remains more powerful than carefully considered debate.
snd more powerful than voting.
You could say that capitalists have seized the means of democracy, and most of the worlds political class are just a vassal to exert their will over all of us.
I can’t believe all of you who are opposed to this.
Won’t you think of the poor data brokers who’s entire library of intimate personal details about every person who’s ever used a smartphone is practically worthless without the ability to link it to your actual identity.
Screw the children, think of the shareholders you monsters.
before users can access their own hardware
So the New yorkers can’t buy computers and mobile phones anymore.
So what.
This is a clearly coordinated attack on the civilians to get more data to sell and spy on them.
This isn’t a coincidence that these bills pop around at the same time.
Agree. But it’s “citizens” not civilians. “Civilians” are those that aren’t military. Civilians are virtually everybody, police included. The USA started this double-speak ~15 years ago, where they pretend that police are military, and police aren’t civilians. Please stop rewiring your brain by using their language.
Fuck these people
Fucking cockroaches
“Child advocacy groups”, funded by billionaires.
If you can’t see it, you need to peel back a few more layers.
My head is going to explode
Woah. Crazy how governments around the world are all doing this in lock-step.
It’s almost like we’re all being ruled by a handful of families haha.
Yep but point it out and you’re the crazy person 🙄
Go back to do everything on paper. No more invoice through email and payment. Demand everything comes on paper. Pay cash. It drives corpos and administration crazy to go back to old school systems. It’ll probably do more than complain.
At this point, I’d be thrilled if just one thing – elections – went back to paper. I feel like paper ballots would have solved at least some of this current insanity already.
“Elon knows those vote counting computers!”
And this is why pedo Trump wants mail-in voting gone. Those are always on paper.
I don’t know how common this is but in my state the machine is digital but it prints out a filled, paper ballot. That’s what gets counted and not the voting machine data itself (which hopefully doesn’t keep its own tally).
Politicians who unwaveringly support The King of the Pedophiles and a serial rapist think want me to believe they’re “protecting the children.”
Weren’t the red hats the ones bitching about “the nanny state”?
The same crowd that needs the second amendment to stand up to tyranny but are nowhere to be found when tyranny is actually happening?
You mean the hypocrite amendment?
Freedom for me, laws for thee
“Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.”
-someone smarter than me
