Restricting social media for children

[GohanIYIan]

I do. Parents are accountable for a lot of bad shit kids do. Did the kid take a gun to school? The parents are probably accountable at least civilly, if not criminally. Did the tween drink alcohol? Parents are responsible and accountable for neglect. Did the kid assault another kid? The parents are responsible and accountable.

So why treat device usage any differently? Why impose overly onerous identity verifications on people who might not want to provide ID data or companies who either shouldn't or don't want to handle that kind of highly sensitive info (which can open themselves to civil litigation if it's lost or breached)?

Is it actually differently? Kids can't buy alcohol legally. I think in most places they can't buy a gun. We don't actually expect parents to follow their kids around 24/7 to make sure they aren't obtaining alcohol or guns. Instead we have laws intended to make that unnecessary. Like all laws they are not perfectly enforced, but surely they make life easier for parents.

I'm not sure why you would need to retain any information as long as you can demonstrate the account creation process includes a mandatory age check. If a government regulator goes into a liquor store and observes they aren't checking IDs the store will probably get in trouble, but at the same time the store isn't expected to be able to produce a copy of an ID from a sale that happened 3 weeks ago to prove that person was of age.

 

[GohanIYIan]

You need to retain at least some of the information because you need to prove to the regulator that you did the check properly. You will also need to retain it for a period of time for audit purposes.

Why? Why is it necessary to be able to prove after the fact that you did the check properly, when in other ID checking scenarios that is not expected and you merely have to demonstrate that your regular process includes the proper check(s)?

Also, in the Australian setup that kicked off this thread, it sounds like the most common age verification method is to submit a photo of yourself that is then run through an algorithmic age estimator. I'm not sure what the point of retaining that to be audited later would be, but a picture of you isn't exactly sensitive information.

 

[GohanIYIan]

If a federal regulator goes to audit your financial records to see whether you made a transaction with a sanctioned party, do you think they will look at your process documentation and say "Hey, looks legit. No problems for me."?

Or do you think they will ask for your transaction records and verify that you aren't doing business with a sanctioned party?

I think it's clearly context dependent. If you're operating a bank taking large deposits, there are detailed know-your-customer rules and you probably do need detailed records and might be audited. If you're operating a gas station that sells cigarettes, no one if going to audit your records and demand you produce copies of everyone's IDs.

There's different levels of rigor in trying to enforce these laws, and that's both because the stakes are different and the trade-offs are different. We care a lot about preventing money laundering, and the number of people making large, suspicious deposits is quite small, so the average person won't care if the paperwork in that scenario is pretty onerous. An effort to make it nearly impossible for a teenager to get ahold of a cigarette would have to be incredibly draconian and annoying to lots of people.

There's no actual reason a social media age limit would have to be more like the banking model than the cigarettes model. A new law addressing social media could say literally anything about what is and is not subject to audit and what records are or are not necessary to maintain.