Take this as an example. The AVMSD isn't new, it was codified in 2010. It has a website[1], and on that website you can read the rules (they even simplified them for us). The rules about minors are pretty relaxed[2]. For non-linear content (such as on-demand video) the law requires that content which "might seriously impair the physical, mental or moral development of minors" wont "normally" be seen/heard by kids. Nowhere does it say that YouTube has to require a National ID to show a video of a zombie. It's all interpretation, because that's how we do laws.
It's true that YouTube said that it's "in line with AVMSD"[3], but it's a lazy excuse to shove in a feature.
[1]: https://ec.europa.eu/archives/information_society/avpolicy/r... [2]: https://ec.europa.eu/archives/information_society/avpolicy/r... [3]: https://blog.youtube/news-and-events/using-technology-more-c...
You know, if you were going to rant about people not reading things, you probably should have first validated your own assumptions. AVMSD was just updated ( https://digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu/en/policies/revision-a... ) which just recently went into effect. The updated law requires online video platforms to age gate content for children. How, exactly, do you propose they do that with an implementation that doesn't suck?
I did, but I didn't stumble on this revision. Now that you linked it, I see hints everywhere that I should have noticed the first time around. Thanks for bringing it up. Although, I'm rather unhappy if my rant was taken to be about reading comprehension though. It really wasn't. I'm annoyed at people blaming laws for poor implementation.
To tackle the revision though, lets looks at the revised text. It's kind of hard to get a hold of, since the EU document database is apparently down, but i managed to find a copy[1]. The relevant text seems to be:
establishing and operating age verification systems for users of video-sharing platforms with respect to content which may impair the physical, mental or moral development of minors;
I don't think it's on my to find a better implementation for YouTube, but with all the smart engineers they have access to, I would think they could come up with something less intrusive.
[1]: https://www.europarl.europa.eu/doceo/document/TC1-COD-2016-0...
[2]: https://www.eu.dk/samling/20161/kommissionsforslag/kom(2016)... Page 20 around the middle of the page.
The sentiment behind this sentence is the driving motivation for almost every single bad tech law on the Internet. Programmers aren't magic, there are limits to what they can and can't do.
Almost every bad tech law starts out with someone saying, "I don't know how this is going to work, but you're required to make it work, and if it falls apart it's your fault." You see this show up in the encryption debates, in the copyright directives, in debates about moderating content and identifying abuse, in the debates about age restrictions. It's universal, it comes from this belief that if you just require things, they'll magically happen because people can "nerd harder".
It is, of course, usually very good for tech laws to legislate outcomes rather than methodology. However, that doesn't get rid of the obligation to determine whether the outcomes being legislated are actually possible.
We should be somewhat sympathetic that non-experts may not know the difference between a possible and an impossible technical goal, and we have to accept that for a politician there isn't much electoral advantage to be gained from trying to explain the difference to their voters.
However, each time I hear an impossible goal proposed, I can't help imagining the politician saying "We managed to land people on the Moon and return them safely, so surely we can do the same with the Sun now."
(as it happens, that's the premise of a Soviet political joke from the Apollo era)
Like many things relating to space travel, I'm prepared to believe the Soviets came up with it first.
[0] https://www.mic.com/articles/80001/did-north-korea-really-cl...
So you don't even have any idea what a better implementation might look like, not even a completely technically infeasible one? And the thousands of smart YouTube engineers, whose jobs revolve around making access to content frictionless to the point of being accused of making it addictive, just haven't thought "we should make this not suck?"
Age verification offline has always been done by checking IDs. Why would you expect anything different by shifting to online? The law demands age verification, and youtube delivered the de facto standard for age verification in the form of ID checking. That seems to be extremely cause & effect of the most straightforward variety. There's no reasonable expectation for anything different to have occurred unless those creating the law also outlined how to do this in a more privacy-sensitive manner. But they almost certainly didn't, so obviously tech companies would go with what's well established practice instead of trying to skate on legally thin ice to create new precedents for age verification.
The main path I can see around this is if the government/some company became accepted standard place for basic profile information. But that's just another id except a digital one. You can probably make a digital id system with good way of specifying which fields you grant to another company. The actual digital id when created will still need a physical id/government check though.
This is kind of an excuse though, because I have never seen an implementation of an age gate online that isn't kind of awful. You either make something that is trivial for kids to bypass, or you make something that is invasive, like Youtube's system.
So we get these laws that say, "solve the problem", and there isn't a way to solve the problem. But criticism of the law or criticism of the law's outcomes aren't allowed because the law doesn't technically require that your solution to be terrible. It just asks you to do something that's impossible to do well without violating someone's privacy.
In the US (at least for a while) this was solved by pretending that self-reported ages are an effective way to protect kids. And we pretended that would at least reduce exposure to this kind of content, even though in practice it has basically no impact at all. But if the law doesn't care about effectiveness, then why have the law in the first place? So we raise the standards a bit so that the law has some teeth. But again, nobody has ever in any context demonstrated a working age gate to me online that doesn't involve violating someone's privacy or collecting identifying information about them like a credit card or ID.
So it doesn't actually matter whether or not the law says the solution has to be terrible. The only outcomes that are possible from these laws are either ineffective solutions or invasive solutions. If there is only one method to accomplish an outcome, then requiring the outcome is effectively the same as requiring the method.
To give another obvious example of this pattern, there's "Make a crypto system which only lets the good guys in, not the bad guys".
In both cases, there's a "think of the children" imperative attached, but at least with laws about age restrictions there's more of a chance that the politicians' true goal isn't mass surveillance.
[0] https://digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu/en/policies/revision-a...
[1] https://www.obs.coe.int/en/web/observatoire/avmsd-tracking
At that point in order to ensure that such content isn't shown to minors you have to require a credit card or an ID because any reasonably kid would figure out how to set his or her age to a reasonable age of majority to avoid being pigeonholed into kid stuff.
Can you give me an example of an alternative strategy that would be legal and more reasonable?
When the law is "you have to verify a meatspace user's age before showing them content that could arbitrarily be considered 'adult' by some group of lawmakers who most likely have different and more puritan values than you," yes, it does require your implementation to suck, because that law sucks by definition.
I'm glad YouTube implemented it this way, so that the pain of shitty laws can be felt instead of being allowed to proceed. Maybe people will actually try to push back against overzealous Internet regulation at some point.
All this is either EU lifers keeping themselves busy to justify their existence to themselves, MEPs wanting something to grandstand on, or something equally vapid. A much better approach would have been to keep the age prompt and leave the rest up to the parents, ie, to do nothing.
I mean... maybe. I have young children and have no desire to have them anywhere near YouTube for essentially as long as possible _because_ of that very concern.
And unfortunately the EU loves coming up with reasons to fine tech firms because they managed to ensure there are none in Europe itself, so it looks a lot like free money, to an organization that's desperate for it (huge budget hole now UK has left + fines go straight into the EU spending pot).
Is that the basic pay (£79,936; €92,584) or the basic+entitled pay (£155,376; €179,968)? (via https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/...)
https://eufactcheck.eu/factcheck/uncheckable-4000-eu-officia... suggests that only 3-4000 (10-13%, not exactly "many"?) are PG13 or above which would be €196,305 (£169,481) - above UKPM.
As a raw number, sure, 4000 is "many" but 10% is not really "many of whom" (which is what GP said) - for me, obviously; other people's interpretation may vary.
(e.g. If I said "there's some cats outside; many of them are blue" but only 10% are blue, I would expect people to query the "many".)
I tend to interpret many as a relative term, meaning "a high number relative to what you're probably expecting". The dictionary is no help here as it just defines many as "a lot", but that in turn is also a relative term.
I think if you want to argue with this point, a better tack would be to argue that the British PM is underpaid and EU staff are what "normal" compensation should look like. Quibbling over whether 10% of them being paid more qualifies as a lot isn't that worthwhile.
Being in the situation of currently enjoying* the UK PM's leadership, I'd be more inclined to argue the other way.
(Although, in a more serious tone, I would argue that long-term high level civil servants probably do deserve a higher wage than transients like PM, President, Cabinet Minister, etc.)
I don't see why YouTube should ask your ID where most sites that host adult content doesn't.
Or.. companies being obtuse with their implementation of the law, as they often are with the cookie/GDPR laws.
I mean, I hate this age validation as much as everyone else, curbing advertising to impressionable kids doesn't sound too stupid to me...
There's some stuff we can do with content that is targeted at kids, I don't think those laws are inherently bad. Although... last time we tried to expand laws around advertising in content directed toward kids, that resulted in a huge number of game streamers and animators getting demonetized, to the point where Youtubers were doing wild things like swearing more in their videos so they could prove that they weren't targeted at kids. We seem to have a lot of difficulty articulating legally what the difference is between "kid appropriate" and "kid targeted" is, particularly when it comes to stuff like video games or "wholesome" (for lack of a better word) content.
To me, it's very much a "who's going to bell the cat" policy. I don't want kids to be subjected to so much advertising, it's a great policy. In theory. But I have not so far seen any practical implementations of age restrictions online that haven't either been completely worthless or really problematic for both privacy and free expression.
And perhaps it shouldn't; America's prudeness around sex but glorification of violence has had an effect around the world through Hollywood for years. Adding that morality to the flow of information might not be what we want.
Also, there’s much more content on YouTube that most parents would absolutely not want their kids seeing than a battlefield trailer.
My exploration online was effectively unrestricted while I was growing up. The internet had far more objectionable content back then that was easily accessible. I don't feel that it had any real negative effect on me. Why would I worry myself sick over my kids seeing it?
Also, even if there is more objectionable content than a Battlefield trailer, the Battlefield trailer is restricted by the same rules. And if everyone else in your kids' friend group is talking about Battlefield then you'd be excluding your kid from it by limiting access to that. And if you don't limit access to it, then you get all the other 'objectionable' content too.
If you legally require Google to act like a parent, they have to do it to everyone.
Not all parents agree that this is the right thing to do.
And if you didn't know, children will eventually start using computers by themselves, probably before they are 12 (probably in first grade or kindergarten, I wouldn't be surprised). A huge portion of internet users are children. That's a fact. The reality is that a huge portion of children are online, and advertisers are specifically targeting children on youtube.
What should I do? Not allowing my kids access to the internet at all is a non-answer in 2020. Hell it was a non-answer in 1995.
And it's all in the name of "protecting" children. This isn't some future hypothetical - it has already happened. I've been barred from a whole slew of content on YouTube because of this.
Right now it's only used by Google. It's likely that in the future most websites will use this, because it's government regulation.
I don't see this as any different than a theater asking to see your ID before letting your buy an R rated movie ticket. I sympathize that it's annoying hell but you probably also don't want Google deciding for themselves what your age is.
The real answer is the behemoths are going to become irrelevant, being inescapably bound to government control and surveillance capitalism. The more hoops and restrictions they add, the more tech people will move to decentralized solutions that don't suffer such bullshit, and eventually the normies will follow. It's just a tragic end to the past few decades of revolutionary energy, pointlessly wasted on centralized dead ends. And in the short term, it's fucking frustrating when trying to get anything done.
Because one thing is sure: your kid WILL see it all because it's 2021.
I mean seriously...you're not closing off all lakes because some kids could drown in them. You teach them how to swim.
> What should I do? Not allowing my kids access to the internet at all is a non-answer in 2020. Hell it was a non-answer in 1995.
A non-answer is not allowing everyone else to surf the web without giving their credit card or ID to every website that hosts adult content. It would have a huge impact on privacy of the users and the freedom of the whole internet in general.
A parent should educate their children, but I know that is simpler to set a bunch of restriction, give to the children a computer, and let him sit hours in front of YouTube while you do something else.
If you want to control what your kids see, don't let them have internet access. This is simply reality. I know that from the time I got internet access, I began to see things that would horrify my parents on a semi-regular basis that they didn't know about. (I had an SA forums account.)
Libraries do restrict the materials that can be checked out by minors and I doubt that counted as supplanting parenting. How else could you give your kid any level of independence without the cooperation of other people?
You should control your kids device and make restrictions there, not place them by default on the entire internet.
So how does this help, anyway?
It'd be nice to be able to turn them loose on a YouTube that was just educational videos I've curated, no weird toy unboxing shit, without having to, like, maintain my own file server and streaming service.
Why not? Doesn't take that much to downlod the videos and let them watch locally - we are in a thread about youtube-dl after all.
And a lot of what they want to watch is formally not for kids and you will be absolutely ok with them seeing it. Especially non English content.
Or anything else that doesn't fuck with my ability not to be tracked by google.
Personally i think age verification is good. This implementation is moronic, though. And all around it's very, very difficult. So difficult that it may never be useful.
We absolutely should. Thankfully it is already not enforced in a lot of places (such as in greece).