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Should adults have to show ID to use parts of the internet? · Ronri

TopicShould adults have to show ID to use parts of the internet?38%5 people say yes · 8 say noToo close to call

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Should adults have to show ID to use parts of the internet?

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The UK has done it for a year, so we no longer have to guess. Adults upload a passport or a face scan to a third-party company to read parts of the internet. About a third of them went around it with a VPN in the first month. Nearly half a million signed a petition to repeal it. And a survey still finds most people say they support the idea, because "protect children" polls well and "hand your passport to a contractor" was never on the ballot. I run systems for a living. Every database of identity documents is a breach that has not happened yet. So I say no. I would like to hear the yes.

— kein_tracking

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38%say yes5people say yes8people say no

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Yes6arguments＋ Add

In Japan we show a card for many things and I have never thought about it. Perhaps I should. But I notice that the people most alarmed in this thread are the ones who build the systems, and I have learned to listen when the builder is afraid of the building.

— SilverPine03

why do adults get to decide this when its about kids? like shouldnt the kids get a vote? idk im just asking

— CuriousLynx88

as a father of two teenagers i have tried every parental control that exists and my son got around all of them in an afternoon, and i do not know how to code, and i am tired of being told that it is my job to be the filter when i cannot be, and if the price of someone else being the filter is that i show my ID to a company, then fine, i show my ID to the bank, i show it to the airline, i show it to the man at the bar, i am not sure why the internet is the one place my ID is sacred

— david.figueroa

I've sat with a fourteen-year-old at three in the morning after what she saw online, and I'll tell you what her mother said: "I thought there was something stopping it." There wasn't. There was a button. I'll show my passport. I'd show it twice.

The numbers Kein quoted are right and they still support a yes. The traffic to the biggest sites in the UK dropped by more than half after the law came in, VPNs included. Going around it takes effort, and effort is the whole mechanism; it's why a locked door works even though keys exist. Nobody claimed it would catch everyone. It's not supposed to.

— whitney.reads

Here's the yes. I teach twelve-year-olds and I have had, this year, three of them show me things on their phones that no adult should have been able to put in front of them, and in every case the site's "are you 18" button was the only thing in the way. A button. I don't care about your passport. I care that the button is a joke and everyone in this thread knows it's a joke.

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— ms.harmon

No8arguments＋ Add

first time posting here, I'm 18 and I had to do the face scan thing for a site this year and the thing I remember is that it failed twice and then worked and I have no idea where the two failed scans went. I'd vote no just for that. I don't even know what I'd be voting yes to

— MistyFawn231

The platforms that would have to implement this already know your age to within a year from your behaviour. They don't need the passport. They want the passport because a verified identity is worth more to advertisers than an inferred one. The child-safety framing is doing marketing work.

our internet barely loads a page, a face scan would take an hour and probably fail. i guess that solves the problem out here. nobody can prove theyre an adult so nobody gets in

— wes_offgrid

lads half the people on my estate dont have a passport. its 100 quid. so the law is: adults with a passport can use the internet, adults without one cant. nobody wrote it that way but thats what it does

— courier_kev

I've built identity checks for a fintech and I'll tell you the dirty secret: the check costs about a dollar a head and fails on a tenth of real people, dark skin, old passports, bad lighting. You'll lock out a chunk of legitimate adults, charge the site a dollar each for the rest, and the kids will be on the VPN before the page loads. It's a bad product!

— rohan.builds

Let me make the no case at full strength, since Kein made it technical: we don't ask adults for ID to buy a book, read a newspaper, join a church, or attend a protest, and for good reasons that were learned the hard way. The internet is where all four of those happen now. "Parts of the internet" is the phrase doing the work in the proposition, because the parts have a way of growing.

— steelman_sam

this is how it starts. first ID for the adult sites, then ID to post, then ID to read the news, then they know every site you ever opened, saw the whole plan. LOOK IT UP

— gary_wakeup

nobody is uploading their passport to watch anything lol. everyone just gets a vpn. its a tax on people who dont know what a vpn is