"...like forcing users to upload copies of their government IDs to access an online service."

"Some states, like Louisiana, have tailored their bills to ban kids from seeing online porn by forcing everyone, including adults, to verify their age before using the site. Google’s proposal does not oppose age verification on porn and gambling sites."

That's terrifying. Signing up for Lemmy would require uploading a government ID. I don't know the solution to this problem, but I'm not confident this proposal is the right one.

Ban them, exile them all!

Edit: Ok, i may have been a bit too vague with this comment. So i'll be more specific. ⬇️

Some platforms like Tiktok, Instagram, Snapchat and YouTube have been nothing but harmful to youngsters (from all ages), due to their manipulative algorithm and poor content management.

So i do believe there should be a much more stronger restriction in access to those platforms.

Something like, you can register at 16 with your parent's permission, or something like that.

Now i now that sounds very drastic, but consider this:

1- It has been proven time and time again how social media has done more harm than good to teenagers.

2- I'm only talking about about platforms owned by the big corporations, platforms here on the Fediverse are (from my perspective) much more safer (in the sense that you don't really see harmful content if you don't want to).

"think of the children" is always a poor excuse to strip away citizen freedoms. Usually never actually helps them anyways.

Anyways, the practice of age verification itself I don't have a problem with, but any implementation I can conceive is full of glaring issues that render it impossible without us forfeiting our rights to anonymity and/or surrendering our data to an untrustworthy source and or just being plain unreliable to attempt to use.

I think we need to keep children off the internet but there’s not really a way to do that other than having parents be more responsible. I think public shaming could work wonders in this area

Let their parents do it.

This is why I vote Democrat. The idiots back shit like this and we shame the shit out of them until they stop because of the obvious overreach, but the "Parental Rights!" "Small Government!" (Louisiana) crowd fucking eats it up and runs with it without any forethought or sense of hypocrisy before it's even an actual law.

But didin't Google already track your age?

I remember that in 2014 Google erased my first Gmail account because i was -15 and that didin't aligned with their new "policies".

As if teenagers would actually go on a service that forces them to upload a government ID.