Drawing attention

From an acceptance point of view there is no difference in forcing providers to implement an API to talk to your device or forcing providers to talk to a central service (or at least any service implementing a certain interface).

If the goal was for more surveillance, they could have immediately gone for that route.

They could also have kept the current “ask the user” approach and mandated website providers to store these information. That would have been a much smaller step and would have brought them closer to big brother as well.

Now they went for an approach that takes a step away from what we already have, making it more privacy friendly. Websites don’t have to ask (and potentially store) your birthday anymore and can still stay compliant.

The US bills I have read also don’t enforce any real age (how could they). They require the birthday to be stored on the device for the device to reply with the info if the user is within a certain age bracket. But nowhere did I see anything that would force users to store their truthful birthday. All that it would do is making the already existing age checks much more convenient and giving parents the opportunity to make them slightly more secure.

Isn’t that level already socially normalized? Every second website asks me for my birthday to derive my age for as long as I can think. Many of them ask me basically every time I use them (even Steam, where I am logged in and my payment history alone should imply that I am old enough).

How would the current approach help?

Its not invasive yet (no third party, no ID, no verification; its basically just another user controlled date field that is not even exposed). So it is not lowering any barrier in that regard.

It’s also not a helpful intermediary step for harder measures, because as soon as you want a third party to do attestation, storing that on a user controlled device is just unnecessary complexity and risk of circumvention. It would be easier and safer (for those introducing it) to just let the attesting party talk to the providers directly.

The comment you answered to said not all software has to implement age checks; only those who actually deal with age relevant content. You said it would be a foot in the door. So… who’s foot to do what?

Who exactly gains anything from forcing lets say Krita to implement an age check?

No. Because the information is user provided and unverified, so there’s no reason to lock anything down that could increase security. Once they want attestation, they need a third party service involved, in which case the device being part of the trust-chain doesn’t make sense anymore.