Did you see what I posted here ?Age requirement for Discourse - #12 by RGJ
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People probably did. But that app has been cracked/leaked/broken into 2 times already.
Do you have a source to back that up? That āappā is still in prototype phase.
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The best i can come up with is the plug in or theme component (not sure which) where it has you enter your age if your not old enough it lets you know
I assume youāre thinking about recent breaches like
that sort of service carries a larger risk because it stores user information
the value of an alternative using a zero knowledge proof system is that they donāt retain the information beyond initial verification, but of course thereās a risk whenever you transfer any personal info to a third party serviceā¦ hopefully it becomes more common to keep data storage to a minimum as more of these regulations come into effect
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Honestly no community is good enough to make me want to show my face or ID. It feels increasingly relevant nowadays, but if I see a site ask for my face/ID, I just close the tab and forget it exists because I am a strong digital privacy advocate.
Companies like Persona have been in deep water and caught in lies about data practices. They will be again. I canāt in good faith allow a company like them to have access to my ID or facial data. Seems crazy to me that all of this is happening in the name of āprotect the kidsā when the solution is just for parents to watch their kids online. I donāt think the entire Internet needs to suffer and cough up their ID just for some young kids who canāt behave themselves.
We donāt need ID checks, we need accountability.
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anyways, if you are self-hosting, the least you should have are explicit statements in your TOS and Privacy Policy (if you have one). my public forum is hosted in Canada and we have these:
TOS
Your permission to use the forum is subject to the following conditions:
- You must be at least thirteen years old.
Privacy Policy
Our site, products and services are all directed to people who are at least 13 years old or older.
This server is in Canada and we are governed by Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act (PIPEDA), with guidance from the Office of the Privacy Commissioner (OPC). Since this forum serves members from all over North America and in EU, we adhere to the requirements of COPPA (Childrenās Online Privacy Protection Act). Therefore, if you are under the age of 13, you are not allowed to use this site.
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That āappā is still in prototype phase.
An app being in prototype doesnāt mean it can be an excuse to already show security vunrabilities this bad while the EU claims itās ātechnicly readyā
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Nope. I was referring to the above
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Me too (re: privacy minded)
Butā¦
ā¦how can you have accountability while being anonymous?
Also, Iād push back on framing this as kids who ācanāt behave themselves.ā Weāre not talking about unsupervised screen time; there are organised groups actively targeting minors online, specifically to coerce them into self-harm and film itā¦Thatās not a parenting gap, thatās predation. And adolescent brains arenāt fully developed in terms of risk assessment until the mid-twenties; the capacity to identify manipulation isnāt just a matter of maturity or good parenting, itās neurology.
And ājust watch your kids onlineā is a lot easier to say than to do. Teenagers are across multiple platforms simultaneously, many of which use disappearing messages or end-to-end encryption by design. The organised groups doing the worst damage specifically operate in the private channels parents canāt see, and they work fast. You can have a perfectly attentive parent and still have a kid who gets targeted and manipulated in a single conversation before anyone notices, especially since the kid is probably more technically fluent.
Then you could argue, parents could just ban everything, the nuclear option. Which works until your kid is the only one in their class without access to the platform their school uses for homework, or the group chat everyone else is on. Social exclusion at that age isnāt trivial: it does real harm too. You can restrict, monitor, educate, and then they get exposed to it at a friends home. Kids arenāt only online at home on the family computer. The ājust watch themā framing imagines a single access point that hasnāt existed for fifteen years.
You can think the proposed solutions are bad, and I agree some of them genuinely are and hate them too, without treating the underlying problem as something parents could just solve if they tried harder.
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The downside is that you may eventually find yourself surrounded by bots because the communities that donāt verify identity will be the only ones they can join too.
Well said.
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itās probably worth mentioning that the fines levied for non-compliance (or worse if something nefarious / illegal takes place on a forum that isnāt compliant) with COPPA or similar legislation are enormous - like +50K US per violation - money which most forums donāt have to throw away and keep running.
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I donāt have those figures for here. But does the Netherlands have a legal requirement for cyclists to wear helmets?
In Canada they made it law here.
Such a law will never pass here. The aim of the Dutch government is to convince 25% of the population to voluntarily wear a helmet in 2036 (!). My 84-year old mother has never, does not and never will wear a bike helmet (and yes she still rides her bike daily)
Exactly. Charge the parents for neglecting their responsibility.
That being said; we more need campaigns to educate parents on āhow-toā. Often parents donāt create restricted user accounts for the OS. A friend of mine wanted to keep their kids access to th computer more restricted and asked for my help. So I created 2 restricted accounts and gave her control
if they wanted something installed they had to ask her to install it I set it up so she could view browsing logs for Internet activity
Only issue she had was her oldest knows her so well he could figure out her password within 15m
So I told her let me set the password and give it to her. I set the password as ādark4321ā with a hint of Grandmotherās birthday it kept him out the admin account for several months, until he overheard her talking to her sister on the phone and she mistakenly said out loud "No he still hasnāt figure out that the pwird is ādark4321ā.
He spent a lot of extra time with his grandmother trying to figure it out. 
Everything I setup was part of windows no 3rdparty programs.
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Yeah here they forced the issue so imagine our percentages are much higher as donāt see too many anymore not wearing them
Hereās my question
They make it law for you to wear helmets right but what happens if i bike around my yard in one of these places or up and down the neighborhood without my helmet will a police officer stop me?
This can be similarly said with some how having an age verfication feature i could just use my parents I.D or say oh im 18 but never got my driverās license if you get what i am saying.
I was thinking something like how google has you take a photo of yourself then uses ai to estimate your age then promptly deletes the photo after telling you if it thinks your old enough.
Yes this will require a lot of it identifying and may many times identify you incorrectly like suppose iām 18 so i meet age requirements on a community but i look younger the system might detect im younger or what about this i used to have a friend my age but looked about 6 years older then he was.
The officer gives you a ticket and if youāre not an adult your parents pay the fine. It could also go further if a child with a report to protected services. But most likely just fines unless repeated.
Whether the officer acts or not is individual. But if the officer at a a good one they will be diligent..
As for youth using an adultās ID to get around an age check? The UD owner would likely face consequences for not keeping their ID secure contributing to the diliquency of a minor if something happened to involve an investigation. However difficult to say.