Doing a more exact calculation of Shannon’s entropy with U.S. demographic information gives actually closer to 1 bit of information. The < 3 upper bound was just a rough upper bound.

It’s a fair concern. However, I would note that the law forbids third party transmission of this data. That is unike browser fingerprints, data brokers, ad servers, etc. are legally forbidden from capturing that information by this law.

Computer systems have had parental controls forever already. They are the once that should be used.

Yes, I too remember navigating to whitehouse.com (wiki link) on school computers in elementary school, while linux-focused websites were blocked as being “hacking-related”. Also whoops, now you have an idea of my age bracket.

This design is much more resilient because it (a) takes advantage of user account systems on computers which a child will have a harder time bypassing, since accounts permissions are generally hardened already (b) is much more resilient, because the onus is not on Kaspersky spyware to maintain a blacklist and naughty sites which will constantly be out of date © is dead simple for parents to set up.

I appreciate that this law allows us to separate the issue of content moderation for children from censorship. No more can politicians use “protect the children” as an excuse to censor adult conversations about war, sexuality, and other controversial topics.

And yes, “terrorism” will be an excuse for some time. Still lots of work left to undo the erosion of civil liberties caused by “anti-terrorism” laws. People are still having their phones searched without a warrant when traveling U.S. -> Canada -> U.S.

Only if it’s vegan leather.

Bad people can have incentives which incidentally align with the the broader public interest.

• Meta, Google, Netlfix etc. all supported net neutrality since they benefit from it.

• Meta, Google and Microsoft all opposed laws permitting NSA bulk data collection.

• Google, Elon Musk, Apple, and our overlord Larry Ellison all opposed encryption backdoors.

In this case, Meta benefits financially from having a uniform legal landscape. That is, they don’t want to have to pay lawyers go fight cases in Florida because a 12 year old saw a video of a drag performance, nor pay a bunch of people to do content moderation. They don’t want the headache of being content police, they just want to make money selling ads.

Kid yourself not, Meta still wants your real-world identity. But they already get that by scanning your photo album in the background, capturing location data, facial-scanning your photos, etc. But it benefits them to not have to argue under 50 different states’ laws they didn’t knowingly or negligentlly facilitate endangering children.

Age validation is surveillance under the guise of “protecting the children”, which it spectacularly fails at for more reasons than I can count.

< 3 bits of information is not meaningful surveillance.

1. Everyone has to validate their age, which creates a whole infrastructure that require documents that “prove” your age.

No, they don’t. That’s the whole point. Self-attested age at account creation is sufficient. Requests for ID docs for age verification are OUTLAWED by this law.

2. A verified “under age” user will be added to a database by unscrupulous players, creating a honeypot for predators.

They can do that today. Also, you are misusing the term “honeypot”.

3. Age verification isn’t universal, isn’t uniform and regardless of the jurisdiction in which it’s implemented, won’t actually prevent content from being procured from sources outside that jurisdiction.

It will be once California’s law goes into effect. California’s laws have historically set de facto national standards, e.g. on car emissions standards.

4. One source of objectionable content is another’s entertainment, legally so, given that laws are made in isolation from each other across borders.

And fortunately, this law allows “objectionable content” to be shown to any user above 18. Online spaces for adults need not impose any objectionable content restrictions. A space where strangers can share videos with kids? Then there can be objectionable content restrictions. Now we have a nice clear line, saying 18+ spaces have no legal obligation to address objectionable content. That’s great!

5. The result of such legislation is the effective censorship of content that some lawmaker finds objectionable, which will cause more harm than good.

It supports censorship only for children. Are you a child? If not, then your speech is not censored, and the speech of your fellow adults is likewise uncensored.

6. Operating System level age verification on open source platforms will spectacularly fail since they’re published outside the jurisdiction.

Are defi cryptocurrencies outside the jurisdiction of the SEC?