That's a funny way to say they shouldn't be allowed to be on the net by themselves until they are 18.

Going back to the Napster days there was an analogy that the internet is like a street. If you leave a photo or an mp3 available on the street, then I can take it as I pass by.

Well similarly, if you allow your kid on the street and the internet is basically like the pink zone in Amsterdam, your kid will see things. Also they will be susceptible to abusers and advertisers.

For that reason, we should always opt for local software for them to use, no social media and no presence on the net. Also anyone doing business on the net should be barred from doing business with a kid on the net.

I've been thinking of possible ways that you could prove you're of legal age to access a site through a government service without the government being able to know who the user is, and I can't really come up with a clean solution.

The best idea that came to my mind was that you could e.g. have a challenge system where the government service challenges the user to return an encrypted randomly generated value. Each user has e.g. an AES key assigned to them that corresponds to the year they were born in, e.g. everyone born in the year 2000 has the same encryption key in ther ID card, and they just use that to return an answer to the challenge. The government website can know all of the secret keys and just check if it can unencrypt the result with the correct one. This means that the government service won't know anything about the user other than their year of birth, but can confirm their age.

Now two main problems are that, as everyone with the same year of birth has the same key, it could be possible to somehow leak one key and make it so that anyone can pretend to be born at that age, but considering this is for kids, exploiting that sort of problem is probably enough of a barrier to use. Another problem is that this would require you to scan your ID card with every use. Maybe you could accomplish this with a mobile app but idk if that's possible to do in the same way.

I mean yes, the verification service would know about you. But since this is a trusted service, it would be me okay. It doesn't even have to store the verification result, if you don't want to

There is no way. If identity is involved in any way, shape, or form it is a major privacy and security risk. Meta supports it only because it shifts responsibility and liability off themselves. In other words, it benefits them financially. Endangering the public for profit is their whole M.O.

that does not seem to be right. 21 is way too high, and also this would effectively be a universal restraining order kids and not-so-kids, and adults. I don't want to go to jail just because of walking by a kid or a young adult, let alone converse with them, only sick people would actually endorse this.

but also pagers only do one way communication, don't they? that is worthless here. the goal is not to just put a GPS tracker to kids, but to give them a simple communication device.

it would not be a trusted service, but at most legally. just like centralized chat scanning systems.

It doesn't even have to store the verification result, if you don't want to

"if you don't want to" lol. you won't decide whether they will store anything, silly. the control is theirs, cemented, the law is on their side, the political narrative will be on their side (think of the children!!), they'll do whatever the fuck they want.

How about parents just do their job and make sure their kids aren't accessing stuff they shouldn't? I'm a parent, and I'm already doing that, I don't need the government to violate my privacy in order to be a decent parent...

Keep internet free. Like libraries.

Commanding a bad/incompetent/overworked parent to become a good parent doesn't make it so.

Sure, there will be gaps. But asking the government to fill the roll of a patent results in a massive privacy breach. The juice is not worth the squeeze.