More US States Are Preparing Age-Verification Laws for App Stores (politico.com) 57
Yes, a federal judge blocked an attempt by Texas at an app store age-verification law.
But this year Silicon Valley giants including Google and Apple "are expected to fight hard against similar legislation," reports Politico, "because of the vast legal liability it imposes on app stores and developers."
In Texas, Utah and Louisiana, parent advocates have linked up with conservative "pro-family" groups to pass laws forcing mobile app stores to verify user ages and require parental sign-off. If those rules hold up in court, companies like Google and Apple, which run the two largest app stores, would face massive legal liability... California has taken a different approach, passing its own age-verification law last year that puts liability on device manufacturers instead of app stores. That model has been better received by the tech lobby, and is now competing with the app-based approach in states like Ohio. In Washington D.C., a GOP-led bill modeled off of Texas' law is wending its way through Capitol Hill. And more states are expected to join the fray, including Michigan and South Carolina.
Joel Thayer, president of the conservative Digital Progress Institute and a key architect of the Texas law, said states are only accelerating their push. He explicitly linked the age-verification debate to AI, arguing it's "terrifying" to think companies could build new AI products by scraping data from children's apps. Thayer also pointed to the Trump administration's recent executive order aimed at curbing state regulation of AI, saying it has galvanized lawmakers. "We're gonna see more states pushing this stuff," Thayer said. "What really put fuel in the fire is the AI moratorium for states. I think states have been reinvigorated to fight back on this."
He told Politico that the issue will likely be decided by America's Supreme Court, which in June upheld Texas legislation requiring age verification for online content. Thayer said states need a ruling from America's highest court to "triangulate exactly what the eff is going on with the First Amendment in the tech world.
"They're going to have to resolve the question at some point."
Joel Thayer, president of the conservative Digital Progress Institute and a key architect of the Texas law, said states are only accelerating their push. He explicitly linked the age-verification debate to AI, arguing it's "terrifying" to think companies could build new AI products by scraping data from children's apps. Thayer also pointed to the Trump administration's recent executive order aimed at curbing state regulation of AI, saying it has galvanized lawmakers. "We're gonna see more states pushing this stuff," Thayer said. "What really put fuel in the fire is the AI moratorium for states. I think states have been reinvigorated to fight back on this."
He told Politico that the issue will likely be decided by America's Supreme Court, which in June upheld Texas legislation requiring age verification for online content. Thayer said states need a ruling from America's highest court to "triangulate exactly what the eff is going on with the First Amendment in the tech world.
"They're going to have to resolve the question at some point."
Coordinated attack on free speech (Score:5, Insightful)
Both Dems and GOP hate free speech (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Both Dems and GOP hate free speech (Score:4, Insightful)
What do all the states mentioned in the article have in common?
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Listen, I am not happy that Trump administration is censoring anyone, but at least I am relived that he did mostly stop censorship of conservative views. More so, from within conservative movement you still allowed to dissent (e.g., on Iran, on Israel, etc.).
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"A major aspect of the examination surrounded false assertions by Musk and others that Twitter had been ordered by the government to help presidential candidate Joe Biden in the coming election by suppressing an October 2020 New York Post story about Hunter Biden's laptop. Researcher Matt Taibbi found no evidence of government involvement in Twitter's decision to initially withhold the story."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
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An actual example of direct government infringement on the first amendment:
https://www.thecentersquare.co... [thecentersquare.com]
https://www.military.com/featu... [military.com]
Moral panics work (Score:2, Insightful)
Anyone who opposes this bullshit can't do anything about it because the voting public is too fucking stupid to know what's going on.
I mean if they owned billion dollar media networks then yeah they could explain this to voters but if they owned a billion dollar media networks they would be looking forward to using these laws to take over the internet and control it fo
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Ahh... the "my side is better" argument always comes out!
So, would Harris, or Perot, or Hunter Thompson, or Svengali, or Rasputin, or Genghis Khan have been a better use of your vote?
Hint: your vote doesn't really matter... your vote is the popular vote, that's it. It's decided by the Electoral College in the end.
A little Google, if you will:
"The Electoral College is a group of presidential electors established by the United States Constitution, responsible for electing the president and vice president eve
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Trump r[a]n on the platform of free speech
Only if you ignored lots of evidence. An example:
https://www.aclu.org/project-2... [aclu.org]
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Would you rather your 8-year-old daughter gets to watch TikTok videos and learn how to pole dance?
Maybe your 9-year-old son watches some videos and learns the fastest way to skin a goat, and uses that on classmates.
Maybe your kid watches a bunch of videos and ends up screwed up like Eugenia Clooney... would you rather your kid doesn't end up like any of those? Those are the choices here... one or the other. Parents use the phones and tablets to keep their kids entertained now, instead of sitting the kid d
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This is one of the reasons why, personally what I want is each parent deciding what they are okay with their specific kid doing on the internet. Your values and fears don't necessary line up with mine. If people want to use phones and tablets to keep their kids entertained, that's thei
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Actually, it was bullying that screwed her up, most likely some of that was online, and she would've been old enough to be "entertained" by a cell phone or tablet getting to see all that body image stuff that screws up so many.
I'd rather the kids watch either of those shows than sit around and watch 'A Is For Adley" and get to learn how to be a spoiled brat.
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Oh, yeah... because, there's a little thing called... what's the word... it's right there... Research!
I only know about Clooney because some video of hers showed up on my YT feed and I looked up who the skeleton chick was, and Adley is because my former bosses daughter was obsessed with her (and she became a spoiled brat who had to have everything).
The way you or Jeff down the street chooses to raise the kids is up to them, just don't be surprised when the kid expects everything to be given to them while th
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So... check Tiktok... what're a lot of the videos on there about?
Are the majority cute cat videos and stuff? I won't go there, because I don't need to... https://www.safesearchkids.com... [safesearchkids.com]
(no kids here, they wouldn't spend all their time online if I did have any)... or, am I thinking of Instagram (is there really a difference?)?
So, I'm totally wrong, none of that happens on either of those platforms, there's none of that online. And, it's totally fine to just toss the kid a tablet or whatever so they're en
cant protect the world (Score:1, Insightful)
Why do conservatives want to ban so many things? It is un-Amercian, very un-Amercian. Puritanical idiots.
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Authoritarianism gives them a hardon. Like the ICE agent who shot an unarmed white woman in the face. He has a Filipina wife and flys a don’t tread on me flag at his home. However he loves wear a mask and treading on others all day.
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Shooting a driver who was attempting (partially successfully) to run over his teammate is not "treading on others", it's doing his duty. Even though the orders he received were issued by a deranged orange monkey, assaulting an officer with a deadly weapon (such as a car) is still supposed to be responded to with deadly force.
Inconsistent (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Inconsistent (Score:4, Interesting)
Nothing. You won't realize it from news headlines and summaries, but if you actually look at the laws they apply to PCs too. For the CA one, when you buy a new phone/tablet/laptop/PC/headset/etc... and setup an account, you have to provide your age (there goes local accounts). Then the OS has to provide that info to whatever app or service that wants it. It's a law for 'device manufactures' because since effectively no one sells a device without an OS, non-techies don't know the difference.
None of this is needed because parents can already install or use built-in across control software on both PCs and phones to limit access to adult content. Public computer access can have those things turned on by default and turned off at the request of the in-person user by flashing their id to an admin. App installation is already restricted on both phones and PCs.
The main point of this is to eventually block all porn for the common people (the 2025 Project people have specifically said that's why they're pushing these) by being able to shame or blackmail anyone using it and retroactively punish people (not that shame matters anymore). It is far easier to modify existing laws than pass completely new ones, so these types of verification laws get modified to be far worse over time. That happens a lot and the news rarely covers the modifications. As an example, the school voucher programs were advertised as letting disabled and retarded kids move to a more fitting school. A year later and the income cap on those vouchers is gone and 87% of the kids using them are from rich families who don't need aid in paying for private schools as they had already been doing it. The same will happen to these verification laws. Once all the infrastructure is there for porn, it'll be expanded for everything else in the name of fighting crime, fraud, and abuse. It's working fine for porn, so why are you against catching credit card thieves? The 1st versions might hide your identify but the later revisions certainly won't. Don't forget some states still have laws banning owning more than X number of sex toys. The Supreme Court removed your 'privacy rights' in regards to these laws when it reevaluated abortion. When the state can track everything you buy, it's trivial to enforce these types of laws. Oh, only liberals have sex out of marriage so anyone looking at these types of things is probably a domestic terrorist. Do you really want us to wait until they've hurt someone before we arrest them? Our job is to keep you safe so we need to arrest these people before they attack you, not afterwards.
The rich can avoid these things by setting up a corporation which then buys or subscribes to whatever on their behalf and that item is freely usable by anyone in the corporation, which just happens to be one person. Oh, and buying that is a business expense so it's tax deductible too. Yes it costs time and money to set that up. That doesn't matter because they hire someone else to do it and the cost isn't even a rounding error for them. Plus there's bonus privacy laws for politicians and similar classes of people.
Re: Inconsistent (Score:2)
Theyâ(TM)ll block porn right after the ability to create it with AI is easy to download and use.
Humans are notoriously clever at getting around censorship.
But also , I donâ(TM)t want to be around the USA when itâ(TM)s run by Christian Nationalists. Iâ(TM)m not that much of a freak. Thereâ(TM)s no hate like Christian love and no perversion like the repressed.
This is all about control and continuous warping of minds.
Re: Inconsistent (Score:2)
And I played the gore filled game Space Quest.
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Well, even if it asks for your age, what prevents you from entering fake information? If it wants an ID card number, I'm fairly certain you can find one online to get around that.
Software on a phone is a little more difficult (at least, with default settings) to just install from anywhere (only from the Apple Store)... you can install from an APK you downloaded, but you have to enable that in Settings.
The reason you can't just download anything for Android is not everything is built with Android in mind wh
Re: Inconsistent (Score:2)
The âoeto avoid all the liabilityâ excuse would hold more water if anyone, anywhere in the big corporate world were held liable for software on phones.
I suppose theyâ(TM)re giving âoefor the childrenâ a rest so they can cycle back to that one day.
pyromania (Score:1)
I love how the legal system is, on the one hand (for you and me) doubling down on all their absolute stupidest bullshit, and on the other, just absolutely disregarding white collar crime on a massive scale which is performed so obviously, flagrantly, in broad daylight and with not even the respect of an attempt to hide it, and they just pretending they aren't an interested party. fuck everything about all of it, especially your pseudo-objective pretensions
Justice is not blind, it's just given up on you and
That CA one is the worst of all (Score:5, Interesting)
If Politico's article is accurate (*) then the California law is the most absurdly evil of all, making Texas legislators look like Free Software-friendly angels by comparison. California legislators and governor think this is a hardware problem!
They've put the burden on hardware manufacturers. Somehow Dell, System 76, etc is supposed to be in charge of making sure that their laptops can communicate the user's age to websites, regardless of whatever OS and applications the owner wants to run on their own laptop.
I fear this is an attempt to force hardware manufacturers to remove owners' ability to choose what OS and applications they run. If System 76 sells you a Pop OS laptop (or Dell sells you a Windows laptop), they need to make sure their fork of Linux (or Windows) and all applications which can access the network, can access the laptop hardware's (?!?) age-by-user database, and that part of Pop OS can't be open/maintainable (same for Dell's version of MS Windows), nor can the owner replace the unmaintainable OS or unmaintainable browser/apps or else the hardware manufacturer is liable.
So if they don't want to suddenly be destroyed by the government, they need to make sure their hardware has a locked bootloader and a very owner-hostile OS.
That's fucking evil and I hope horrific misfortune [angry details omitted] befalls ever legislator who voted in favor of it, and the governor who signed it.
(*) I can't stress how important that disclaimer is. I haven't read the actual bill yet; I'm just going by TFA's description of it.
Re:That CA one is the worst of all (Score:5, Informative)
You should probably try reading the actual bill. [ca.gov] It's not that long.
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Thanks for the link. This does make it clear that it's about the OS, not the hardware as Politico implied. So it's Debian, not Dell, needs to be worrying about this.
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The burden is put on whoever installs the OS and for that OS to prompt the user for their age during initial account setup. The OS then has to provide that age via a "signal" to the appropriate apps and services.
It's both a good and bad bill. It's good because it does respect the identity of a user. It's bad because effectively all it does is move the "Click here if you're over 18" to account creation, meaning it does nothing to verify someone's age and is thus a worthless law. It also does nothing in t
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No, you cannot. If you're distributing applications from third-party developers, you're covered. Also, just to head off the
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Yeah I read that bit wrong. The system only has to provide the age signal to covered application stores. It says nothing about which groups actually need it. The system won't be able to figure out which stores are covered or not so it'll just provide it to anyone who asks.
Parenting won't matter. If it's available even if no one is looking at it, someone will want to restrict it anyway.
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If Politico's article is accurate (*) then the California law is the most absurdly evil of all, making Texas legislators look like Free Software-friendly angels by comparison. California legislators and governor think this is a hardware problem!
Wrong. California law is treating it as a device problem. Hardware + OS. Since most devices are sold as complete systems nowadays, they are attempting to regulate the device. Most devices are personal, aka single-user configurations. So, you set the device-user's age at setup and require the device to securely communicate the user's age to services that require it.
It is still a badly flawed idea... but the law is not as you represent it.
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Translation: I'll happily give my Driver's License to Twitter, Facebook, Google, Pinterest, Tumblr, Reddit, Fox News (online), CBS (online), New York Times (online), Washington Post (online), Redtube porn, OnlyFans and 20 other media corporations / data mongers. But sharing it with Dell and System 76 is "evil".
You already share much information with Samsung or Apple who do both hardware and software. Laptop manufacturers sell equipment with Windows product key and software update service in the BIOS, s
Is freedom only allowed... (Score:2)
Re:Is freedom only allowed... (Score:4, Insightful)
That argument is too stupid for words. You have age limits in place already for getting a driver's license, buying alcohol, buying firearms, voting, buying marijuana, and signing a contract, or signing a contract. This is more of the same.
Yes I am well aware that the average 14 year old (especially girls) thinks they know everything worth knowing but they are still idiots and the goal is to keep them intact until the rest of their brain hopefully turns on around age 20.
Re:Is freedom only allowed... (Score:4, Insightful)
Sounds like maybe your children shouldn't have a device at all, or else a dumbphone that is literally just a phone without any access to app stores. That makes a lot more sense than requiring everyone else to present ID to do anything online. After all, IT IS ABOUT PROTECTING THE CHILDREN, RIGHT?
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As for the the other "limits already in place" I'll just link you to this [eff.org] and this [eff.org] instead of reposting everything here. TL;DR: No, online verification is a far different beast than offline verification, despite having simila
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Let me refer you to:
https://yro.slashdot.org/comme... [slashdot.org]
Offline, maybe the parents should, I dunno... it's complicated concept... I'll post it anyways... Parent The Kids!
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The parents could easily monitor what their kids do online, they refuse. (Despite the fact that the software to do so exists.)
The ISP (the company the parents get a bill from every month for providing an internet connection to their kids) could implement a content filter or set up some anonymous signaling on their side indicating the device is owned by a child, that the kid's device can't do anything about and has no contr
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So... allow TikTok, but block "pole dancing" or "butchering humans" or block Eugenia's videos as a search result for everyone (or for everyone who says they are below a certain age, because the kid would never lie about that, right?). Know what they'll do... change the name of the video and not tag it with 'pole dancing' or 'butchering humans'! Not to mention... you're assuming that the kid enters their age correctly or the parent's notify that phone #3 is a 10-year-old's phone (great way to find kids onl
Censorship and control (Score:3, Informative)
They're done with that and they are going to use stupid people like your Fox News loving Grandpa to take the internet for themselves and turn it into cable television.
And you can't stop them because are there aren't enough people who have figured out what they're doing or there's too many people busy freaking out over whatever nonsense right wing media is telling them to freak out about this time.
Good 'ol Texas (Score:1)
Joel Thayer, president of the conservative Digital Progress Institute and a key architect of the Texas law, said states are only accelerating their push. He explicitly linked the age-verification debate to AI, arguing it's "terrifying" to think companies could build new AI products by scraping data from children's apps.
Worried that a company might scrape a kids information, but unconcerned that a girl who is raped and gets pregnant might die when she's forced to give birth.
Fight back (Score:3)