This makes me think of how, as a child, every site asked “are you over 13”, and I diligently clicked “yes”. Some more clever sites asked for my birth year… forcing me to do the arduous work of taking the current year and subtracting 14.
Though I suppose the real plan here is to pass the law and then have the government selectively prosecute social media companies for having users under 16.
I remember my daughter at an astonishingly young age encountering a age-login screen, turning to me and asking "How would they be able to tell?" then merrily telling the system she was 18.
A small transaction would cover 99% of cases (e.g., pay a dollar that's immediately refunded). It would stop kids from casually creating accounts. The kids who can do this are already precocious enough to bypass any other verification steps you could come up with.
Maybe if they use a profile pic that you algorithmically determine is someone underage, you could do some additional checks. The smart ones would learn not to utilize a profile pic of themselves, which would ultimately be better.
I wonder if it'd really cover anything remotely close to 99% of cases. Even if 100% of parents knew about it and watched their credit cards enough to notice a $1 refunded transaction it just takes something like one friend in high school with a credit card to sign up all their little brother's friends. It may even just cause more credit cards being shared around than kids it stops from getting to the site they want on.
Then there'd be even more unintended consequence. Instead of sites you don't want kids creating accounts on you'd have sites selling 5 minutes of ads to create an account for them or increasingly shady stuff. Preventing this kind of site is the same as the original issue.
I understand the point you're trying to make with this (social media will definitely abuse the additional knowledge/opportunities they get by having compulsory credit card info), but chargebacks are actually a pretty effective incentive against this. Given that chargeback fees are ~$20-$100 per incidence, you'd only need 5% or less of users calling out the social media site's false charge for that company to be netting a loss.
I would relish the opportunity to cost Facebook $20 because they gave back a couple cents less than they should have.
> have the government selectively prosecute social media companies for having users under 16.
The US government is already legally mandated to prosecute companies known to harbor information, collected online, concerning minors less than 13 years old without consent from their parents or legal guardians.[1]
It's why Youtube blocks comments and doesn't personalize ads on videos published for kids, to pick out a prominent example.
Laws are getting stricter. Around the world, there is increasing regulatory requirement for businesses to actively investigate user behavior (tracking!) to identify and exclude underage users who are concealing their age.
Yeah, similarly I had just gotten used to entering an elder sibling's birthday whenever asked. Adding these arbitrary age restrictions does nothing but make it increasingly obvious to kids how little our leaders and other supporters of these arbitrary age restrictions actually care.
I don't think enforcement actually needs to be very tightly controlled. The barriers that are put in place like the one you describe are already enough to create a social milieu where parents and kids with think twice about these things and understand that there is a recognised harm potential.
There's nothing stopping you pouring your youngsters a glass of wine with dinner, but as a society we've made the dangers of alcohol and similar things so well understood that no parent wants to.
> as a society we've made the dangers of alcohol and similar things so well understood that no parent wants to.
Unfortunately, as a society, we have a much harder time grasping social media threat data. I suppose some of that is due to how news orgs consistently+bizarrely+hugely overstating the actual harms in the data.
I realized the error after submitting (added ten years to my age/subtracted ten years from my birth year), but I didn't think anyone would be confused by it so didn't bother correcting it
Some more clever sites asked for my birth year… forcing me to do the arduous work of taking the current year and subtracting 14.
But why? You could have just picked a year that worked, and sticked with it. Obviously, there's no way of telling which year works, but you could have bruteforced that just once.
Though I suppose the real plan here is to pass the law and then have the government selectively prosecute social media companies for having users under 16.