Pamasich

I’m personally against this kind of thing, but I hate how much of a fantasy echo chamber this stuff is here. There’s so much misinformation and hyperbole in this thread alone.

In general I support the idea of device-level age verification. The narrative around it uses old school methods only (this one goes with just inputting your date of birth, which I’ve already done for years for stuff like Steam), rather than the ID or face scan by random third parties methods used in age verification discussions and requirements elsewhere. In my opinion software being able to use an API provided by the OS itself is much better, and with the right OS (linux) much more trustworthy than any web-based solution.

My only real problem is the lack of user choice. This comes in two forms:

1. Giving your birth date should be optional. I’m fine with them requiring that no birth date given means you default to being underage, but actually giving the birthdate should be up to the user.
2. The birthdate should not be given out to random software asking for it. Either the user should be asked for permission, or only a boolean of whether they are underage or not should be provided. This bill doesn’t require either of those, nor leaves it to later clarification.

For people who only go off headlines and comments and don’t read the article, here’s the important bits:

• This only affects some users, not everyone
• The issue is that comment sections are disabled and video descriptions claim to be empty
• The issue goes away with a refresh, you don’t need to turn off the adblocker, though you’ll have to refresh every video
• It affects all videos
• The link to adblockers is due to everyone who is reporting the issue being a user of an adblocker, and turning it off fixing the issue permanently until it’s turned on again
• There’s no specific browser or adblocker mentioned in the article
• It affects Premium users too

edit: added “the article” after “don’t read” to clarify