You say it was a coincidence, but how do we know that his name didn’t encourage his invention?

Maybe if his name was Thomas Cureforcancer we would be living in a very different world.

I’m so happy I got married before romance was “disrupted” by tech bros.

I don’t know why anyone would use any of these apps.

I would basically assume that 99% of all messages were scams of some kind.

I didn’t know about that. Maybe that’s plays into it too. But I’m generally a “simpler answer is more likely the most correct” type of guy.

In this case the simple answer is that Meta and others just had their “Tobacco Lawsuits” moment in court and liability floodgates are any to open wide, and they are pushing these laws to divert their liability onto someone else.

It’s so funny to me how badly people want this to be some nefarious governmental conspiracy. Listen, the government already has much better tools to track you online. Your computer has, on a hardware level, sent unique identifiers to ISPs and websites since Pentium IIIs. This age requirement thing isn’t a government conspiracy to track you, they already track you.

It is a *corporate *conspiracy. It’s Meta and other major websites, games, and applications companies that want to off load their liability. Meta and Alphabet just lost major lawsuits for their negligence in protecting kids on their own websites. There is a liability dam about to break for these companies and schools and other advocacy groups start their own lawsuits. That’s what this is about. That’s the real conspiracy.

Almost all “hacks” of modern mainstream software involve users being stupid.

If you hear about a “hack” of a major corporation or hospital or something, the things that is never reported is that it likely started with someone with more user permissions than sense opening a phishing email.

There will always be sites that don’t care and won’t comply with any OS level restrictions in the first place.

And I’ll support strong laws that hold those sites accountable for negligence. I’m really struggling to see why this is so controversial.

So you are going with: Deny the problem of child sexual predators exists at all.

Do you also believe that the Boy Scouts and the Catholic Church also have no responsibility to protect kids, because doing to would similarly require collecting data on people?

(I would disagree with you if you said yes, but I’ll respect your position for being consistent.)

… And if a kid using that browser was abused because the browser lied to the website about the users’ age, then the browser’s creators should bare some consequences for lying to the website that otherwise would have put up protections. Right?

I don’t understand. There will still be porn sites for people.

The way it will work is that when you tell your browser to go to a porn site, the site will ask your Bowser for your verified age. Your browser will then ask your OS for your verified age. Your OS will respond “18+” to your browser. Your browser will tell the porn site “the OS says 18+”. Then the porn site will say “Cool, here’s the porn.” That’s it.

If you use a non-compliant OS, then your browser will say to the porn site “I asked the OS and the OS says ‘null’.” Then the porn site will say, “Well sorry. Then your OS isn’t supported. Come back when you are using a supported OS.”

That’s it.

I’m not sure what you are disagreeing with. That’s generally what I said. If you use a non-compliant OS, your experience will be “age-gated”.

Though I don’t think they will completely block access entirely. Collecting data on kids is extremely valuable to these companies, because kids grow up to be consumers. They will happily continue to let you in, but you won’t be able to go to the 18+ areas.