Totally a valid point.

Just to clarify I am not for this law. I do not think that this should have been passed. But also the law seems to have some good intentions and I don't want to jump to conclusions after just reading headlines.

It feels like the law makers want to standardize and restrict how this age verification works without actually providing any guidance whatsoever on how to implement such a system.

I'm curious to see what systems companies come up with and what major flaws they will have (intentional or not) that data collectors will exploit.

Age verification is identity collection.

No shit. I don't understand how anyone falls for this.

Also them using stuff like 'online safety' and 'child safety' in their legal titles needs to be used against them. Remember: Right-wing people NEVER use the words you want them to use, they always use their own. When copyright laws in the 90s were being reformed, many copyright/entertainment lawyers derided the laws by referring to them as the 'Mickey Mouse copyright act' because of Disney's massive hand in how they were written and how they disproportionately benefited them.

Call it for what it is. Call it the survellience act, call it the child endangerment act, call it the transgender discrimination act. Don't fucking fall for their 'oh so you want anyone to groom children online' talk through them, not to them. That is what they do to us anyway.

I fully agree. None of this should be required to operate a computer. We should focus on the parents that give their children free range of the internet without teaching them anything and the school ciriculum which is lacking in this department as well.

To me it feels like the lawmakers have some good intentions with this law, but it was rushed through so quickly that they forgot to ask themselves how this actually would be applied and who they are actually trying to protect.

Edit: oh. Also I just wanted to point out that outside of the title and abstract the law does not use the word verify/verification. It just says "indicate" which is way too vague.

This actually speaks to one of the concerning things about this law. There is a section forbidding developers from collecting additional information (unless they have confident information that your age is incorrect). But there is no such clause for OS providers.

Developers shall not "Request more information from an operating system provider or a covered application store than the minimum amount of information necessary to comply with this title."

Or

"Share the signal with a third party for a purpose not required by this title."

This means that discord could not collect IDs or face scans without confidence that your age is incorrect. But windows can still require whatever they want.

But I guess silver lining is that neither of them can sell or even share the data with 3rd parties. Pretty minimal silver lining though.

That's a really good point. It feels like they intended for that to be up to OS providers to determine. But really that was the lawmakers' job to define. My assumption is that this law was rushed.