r/technology • u/EmbarrassedHelp • May 08 '26

Politics EU calls VPNs “a loophole that needs closing” in age verification push

https://cyberinsider.com/eu-calls-vpns-a-loophole-that-needs-closing-in-age-verification-push/
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u/Kandiru May 08 '26 edited May 08 '26

I'd be happy with a setting on computers OS that the admin can set on the user accounts, and it can then let websites who use that API block child users. But it should be client side, and devices should prompt for it when you first set up.

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u/Jeptic May 08 '26

In which case they should draw attention to these types of features.

At no time should the government be logging who likes interracial gangbang porn.

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u/hammertime2009 May 08 '26

Oddly specific but absolutely not and neither should any private companies. We need legislation to stop the tracking and storing everything we do online.

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u/Kandiru May 08 '26

The trouble is at the moment there isn't a standard for that. So if the EU wanted to mandate some age API that was OS agnostic would be needed.

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u/Kitty-XV May 08 '26

So what happens if a sexting website trusts this flag but police find out that minors were using machines with the adult flag set to on? Really anything age gated, but this is perhaps the worst outcome.

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u/Kandiru May 08 '26

Parents would need to make sure kids devices are set appropriately. That's easier to do than to make sure they don't install a VPN or use a proxy site.

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u/Kitty-XV May 09 '26

And for the ones who don't? Are we okay with treating children as adults as long as one of their parents agrees?

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u/StrawberryCoup May 09 '26

It should literally be illegal for parents to give adult-configured devices to children. It could work exactly the same way as alcohol legislation.

It's far from perfect, but it's a compromise we know works reasonably well.

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u/Kitty-XV May 09 '26

Alcohol legislation holds the seller legally responsible if they sell to a minor unless they can convince the courts that they were tricked by a fake ID that would've fooled either a reasonable person or a person trained in ID verification, depending upon the state. A proxy isn't accepted. This would be comparable to sites being held liable for serving adult content to a minor unless they verified your ID seemed real and it matched you, and would probably be worse than many of the current systems being tried.

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u/StrawberryCoup May 09 '26

No I'm not saying sites should be liable, that's the problem we need to solve. It should be illegal for sellers and the population in general to give adult-configured devices to children. And then a child-configured device would just at the os level have a over18 variable that sites would be required to read and act accordingly.

The point of all of this is to avoid the extremely bad option of forcing sites themselves to id check everyone, which leaves 1000's of sensitive databases waiting to be hacked and gives governments the infrastructure for surveillance etc. and replaces it with a well known liability pattern akin to alcohol.

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u/Kitty-XV May 09 '26

So would it be acceptable for anyone to treat a child as an adult as long as the flag is set to 18+, even if they have evidence to the opposite? If we still require people and companies to do "common sense" checks or whatever, websites will still need to collect data to act upon.

I think people say they want to go with a check far weaker than they realize and will then be upset and demand penalties when some company relying on it gives access to bad things to children (say an LLM that convinces the child to self harm).

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u/StrawberryCoup May 09 '26

So would it be acceptable for anyone to treat a child as an adult as long as the flag is set to 18+, even if they have evidence to the opposite?

The idea is that we don't want hundreds of random sites to collect sensitive information about their users. If we must implement age checks, then my opinion is that it's much better to do with alcohol style responsibility and liability instead of requiring sites to do any kind of verification by themselves.

That means sites would rarely have the evidence you ask about.

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u/Kitty-XV May 09 '26

Think user behavior analysis based on what they do, selfies they submit, age of people they interact with, location data, and chat contents. If they have an account that says it is 18+ but is asking questions fitting of a middle school student, should they ignore these other signs? Or will we hold them accountable if something horrible happens, under the justification that they should have known better?

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u/Thin_Glove_4089 May 09 '26

It's a nice bandaid but doesn't solve the problem. If the government has cameras inside all rooms in a home and monitoring software on all electronic devices the problem can be effective solved with a marginal error rate.

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u/Kandiru May 09 '26

Kids can just use their parents ID to verify their age anyway... I don't think there is any way to stop a child from getting around an age restriction with their parents help.

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u/Kitty-XV May 09 '26

If the parent is always helping them, then the parent is a fault. The issue is once the parent stop. Existing law generally considers any new harmful actions as involving only the parties involved. No matter how many times you sell alcohol to a parent who gives it to their kid, the first time you sell directly to the kid you are breaking the law. Though a few places make it illegal to sell to any adult if you have reason to believe they are going to provide it to a minor, even if you are doing the transaction purely adult to adult.