The aged verification march continues, with South Carolina getting in on the action:
The law, sponsored by Rep. Brandon Guffey (R-York), requires covered platforms to repeatedly estimate and verify the age of every South Carolina account holder.
However, the South Carolina bill introduces a new twist where platforms are required to perform continual monitoring of users' ages.
Once an account holder hits 25 cumulative hours on a platform within six months (the “first trigger date”), the platform has 14 days to estimate whether that person is over 15, with 80% confidence.
At 50 hours (the “second trigger date”), the confidence requirement jumps to 90%. After that, the platform must update its estimate every 100 hours of use, or whenever it runs data analytics on the user for any other reason, whichever comes sooner.
The penalties are pretty rough:
A platform that guesses wrong faces $10,000 per violation. A platform that overinvests in behavioral profiling to avoid those fines faces no penalty at all. The incentive structure points in one direction.
And if the platform thinks you are a minor it must obtain parental consent to remove restrictions like:
Platforms cannot show children profile-based feeds, profile-based advertising, or any “addictive interface features,” a category that includes infinite scrolling, auto-play video, push notifications, and display of personal metrics like reaction counts.
But of course proving a parental relationship is going to involve uploading government identification.
We obtained a copy of the bill for you here.
Also, note that these kind of laws are very popular with legislators.
The bill passed with almost no opposition, clearing the House 115-0 and the Senate 42-1. It takes effect January 1, 2027, and it brings with it a surveillance apparatus aimed at all users.
The days of an open internet are quickly coming to a close. I don't see why governments will stop at these age verification laws, when it is ever so much more convenient for their enforcement arms to just insert themselves between users and internet access in general -- or deputize the the private sector a la the bank secrecy act.
I feel that this is a current thing, as we see the device/os-level age verification attempts popping up in several US/EU states and the UK but are causing minimal unrest. The question is if there is a resistance to be had at all at this point, or if it has to get worse before there can be a critical mass against this nonsense.
I don't see very much resistance at a all. Excluding the Bitcoin people I know, almost no one I know is concerned about this. Even for the freedom loving people seem oblivious to it. I suspect this is because they don't understand how the technical side of it works and could be expanded or twisted to encompass all our digital life.
At least for the people I know, it will have to get much worse before it starts to activate the normie.
Everything you disclose on the internet can and will be used against you, forever.
I think this is the thing we need to illustrate.
The lobbying was hard with this one..
Any >50 users probably remembers the "Clipper Chip" fiasco in the mid-90s. Right when internet was gaining in popularity there was this US Gov sponsored idea that "security chips should be installed in all phones and internet devices".
There was lots of push back on the subject and it was defeated. But the push to de-anonymize users never really went away and is now just bundled up in these age-protection laws....which it appears that they are successful.
With the Clipper Chip there was no industry buy-in, but now the tech conglomerates want all data to train their AI control grid.
Cheap software encryption came to the rescue in the 90s.. this time we have Nostr!
What happens when you turn 15? Why isn't it 12, 18, or 25? At a minimum join the EFF and send the emails.