Summary
A YouGov poll revealed that 77% of Germans support banning social media for those under 16, similar to a new Australian law.
The survey found that 82% believe social media harms young people, citing harmful content and addiction.
In Australia, the law fines platforms up to AUD 49.5 million (€30.5M) for allowing under-16s to create accounts, with enforcement trials set before implementation next year. Critics
Of course you can. All you need is a trusted 3rd party (the organization who issued your ID, probably your government) to verify your identity and sign a statement that you are over 16 years old. Then you present that statement to the social media company and you’ve done it.
First off, how can you possibly trust any 3rd party with that information and whatever you’re browsing. Secondly, as soon as you show a statement to this company, that is privacy invasive right there. Also how do you know they’re securely processing this and deleting it when they’re done? This is where is becomes insecure and creates a surveillance state.
By using an identifier like a session token the verifier never has to know what website you’re visiting. You show the social media company a message containing this season token, an assertion that you are over 16 years old and a signature. You don’t need it to delete or securely process that data, as the only thing it knows is that you’re over 16 and it’s required to verify this for all users.
Session tokens are valid because they come from the service themselves, that’s how they know they’re good.
That doesn’t work here because if there’s no identifying information in this token from a 3rd party service (the ID verification service), then it is useless because it can simply be reused by everyone.
So you’d have to create a unique one for each site, which would involve the login website and verification service to link to each other, which is extremely privacy violating.
If it is NOT unique (ex: anonymous person request verification for site A), then that service can reuse that verification token and break it. So identifying the sites together is required for this to work and is a massive issue.
The solution is simple on-device parental controls and have the browser flag this. Yes it can be cheated just like “are you 18+?” prompts, and that’s how it should be.
It’s also important to point out that you’re saying social media. ID verification would not stop there, it would then be used for sites like porn, which nonsense laws have already passed for this without proper solutions. Which the government should have zero business seeing what legal porn you watch, nor is there anything wrong with porn that it should be banned.