In real life everything from porn to alcohol to cigarettes, and even movies all require ID. And it's super easy to bypass in endless ways, but those efforts have nonetheless been overwhelmingly successful. And I don't really understand the issue people have with social media and ID. You're already required to link your phone which is a massive invasion of privacy, and the sites themselves not entirely infrequently demand ID from accounts at their own arbitrary and whimsical discretion.
The digital world is not like the real one. When you show your ID once all it's details are saved and can be searched across. When showing your ID to the cigarette vendor they will not notice most data and will have forgotten it a while later. So we need to be more careful with the data we give out digitally.
No ID is needed, just proof that you are above a certain age. There are technological solutions to just give out that data, but politicians seem to not want to go that way. This is the real issue, not age checking. The fear that age-checking means tracking...
>In real life everything from porn to alcohol to cigarettes, and even movies all require ID. And it's super easy to bypass in endless ways, but those efforts have nonetheless been overwhelmingly successful.
By what possible measure have they been overwhelmingly successful? Pornography and alcohol are still used regularly by a double-digit percentage of youth.
In person ID requirements all rely on punishing merchants if a minor fools them with a fake ID which aligns the incentives pretty well. It's hard to imagine how that would work online. Do you go to jail/pay thousands of dollars if someone hands their phone to their kid while logged in to Facebook or Google? You would if you sold beer to a kid who was given their parent's wallet.
Without an enforcement mechanism that punishes site owners the whole system fails. And you can't reasonably expect site owners to be responsible for checking ID on every request. So, it's (practically) impossible.
> And I don't really understand the issue people have with social media and ID. You're already required to link your phone which is a massive invasion of privacy
Yep, and we* lost that argument and "think of the children" hysteria won.
* I would bet the same folks opposed to ID requirements now were opposed to phone number then
Sites don't require phone numbers because of any sort of law or regulation. They started requiring them on their own, likely in an effort to amplify their tracking efforts by being able to a high confidence unique identifier to an account which can be paired and cross-referenced with data from other sources to create ever more detailed and invasive profiles of people. Privacy with anything involving companies like Facebook or Google is just nonexistent. And people are fine with this, until there's actually a motivation that isn't outright dystopic.
The companies that would be punished in this case would be Google/Facebook/etc if found to be willingly complicit in enabling fraudulent underage access. And the poetic thing about this is that this is where their endless datamining comes back to bite them square in the ass. That'll be day 1 discovery in the lawsuits, because Google/Facebook/etc already know full well who's e.g. under 14, with an extremely high degree of accuracy.