(NB: I am firmly opposed to any of this. The solution for parents concerned about their kids is parenting and parental controls, not giving authoritarians of all stripes the means to snoop and ban whatever they decide is obscene or troubling.)
Which makes sense- since exposing minors to pornography was a crime, and got even more illegal somewhere in that time frame, along with the web becoming "professional" (whitehouse top level domain mixup stories anyone?), the honest pornography sites all started self-regulating and asking if somebody is an adult before anything naughty gets shown.
Push from the different generation? Late boomers got very puritan with age, also see themselves as more moral, again with age.
There's no reasonable demonstration of harm and a very strong correlation between availability of pornography and a big reduction in sex crimes. The purported harms are due to blocking reasonable sex education, leaving teens with the equivalent of Hollywood being the only model of sex they see. The original study that was created to show the harms concluded they couldn't find any to anyone, even minors.
A huge issue with the modern web is that everything is seen as a profit motive. I don't care how many billions of dollars tracking everything we do and tying it to our person is worth. I don't want it.
Here's an easy explanation.
Someone you don't like somehow gets voted into power and begins trying to enact changes towards a social group you belong to.
Building anonymous systems is one way to avoid Bad Actor X from having Big List Y, leading to Atrocity Z.
Having a really successful social network isn't a goal post, it's just a result.
Great -- it made a zillion dollars, meanwhile we've built the biggest leakiest information trove on individuals, for individuals to be exploited, ever imagined.
Yes, they just give megaphones to, and make bank on, the propagandists that are responsible for the current moral panic that's resulted in the US government discriminating against LGBT people.
These are the same companies that facilitated propaganda that led to hate and violence like this[1]. A deeper look with plentiful citations is here[2] from the Harvard Systemic Justice Project.
To give you an example that happened here in the US, a friend recently moved back to the city because his neighbors felt emboldened to constantly call him slurs on Facebook when they disagreed with him. He couldn't use local Facebook groups without bigots following him around and calling him slurs. They felt emboldened after this[3], knowing Facebook would do nothing about it. Discriminatory harassment over Facebook after their policy shift drove him from his own home. Facebook's policies allowed a community to successfully rid itself of a minority it didn't want to see or hear.
[1] https://www.pbs.org/newshour/world/amnesty-report-finds-face...
[2] https://systemicjustice.org/article/facebook-and-genocide-ho...
[3] https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/social-media/meta-new-hate-spee...
I'll be just fine, I don't suck at the teat of tech companies like some do.
The real question is what will you do when they come for you? Note that writing code and posting on the internet will get you nowhere.
Tech platforms are valued at billions of dollars because they found ways of convincing their users to give up anonymity. That has nothing to do with whether the anonymity was important.
I live next to idiots with gigabit and guns, that’s why.
And anyway, they created a library (https://blog.google/technology/safety-security/opening-up-ze...) to make age verification not useful for identification but still real.
So… I’m sure you meant fingerprinting but presumably porn sites already do that?
If you are under 18 there is no checking to stop you from saying you are are 18+
The only people it seems might have their privacy slightly reduced are people under 18 who are using a computer or smartphone/tablet that had parental controls set up by presumably a parent or guardian before giving the minor access.
The bill requires that the parent be able to enter the minor's birthday or age in one place, and then provide a way that the age range (under 5, 5-10, 10-13, 13-16, 16-18, 18+) can be given to apps/sites if they ask for it.
Thus, if you are a minor using a device that was set up with parental controls and you try to use an app or site that is restricted, that app or site will find out your age range.
As a counter-point, where in the US has any law stopped teenagers looking at naughty things on the internet?
The data proves nothing about whether it works because it's a cultural problem far more than it is a means problem. They choose to go out in a blaze of infamy rather than be a nobody. They generally are planned long in advance, there's plenty of lethal things they can get their hands on.
1) Many sources seek to inflate the number of school shootings by counting incidents in which the school is only incidental, not the target. Think drug deal in the parking lot when school is out etc. And note that counting firearm deaths to minors counts mostly gang vs gang stuff.
2) It is almost certain that guns save more people in self defense situations than they take in all mass shootings (using the realistic test of public and indiscriminate targets--again, the numbers are inflated by things like gang fights), let alone just school shootings. (And, no, I do not believe Lott's numbers. He's way high and an awful lot of what he does count is deterred robbers and the like, where death was unlikely in the first place.)
You can have age gating or you can have privacy. Same as you can have porn filtering or you can have privacy.