News for hackers. Stuff that matters.
Re:YouTube-dl can no longer download age-restricted videos by danShumway on Tuesday June 01, 2021 @11:24AM (#27355855)
Well, the devil is in the details. In practice, making sure that kids can't see certain content or making sure that they never get advertised to often involves age validation.

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.

There are no comments on this comment yet.