It's going to take some more searching to find an article that shows what age verification looks like for newer Apple accounts. According to that article if you have a long-standing Apple account and/or a credit card in your name in Apple Pay it might be enough to confirm you as 18+.
It links to fca.org, gov.uk, and racfonudation.org. I think the goal of this page is activism rather than journalism though, and the donation links are a much more apt way for privacy activism funding than ads like on that news site.
Agree to disagree for the same reason the guidelines don't say anything about citing claims in comments: What you're looking for where claims are cited for a full background is provided, is not the only valid way to write something worthwhile on the internet.
You insist this piece should be in the form of a cited and fully explanatory journalistic article when writing such a blog post signals no such goal. The intent here is to alert for support, not to be a news source about the topic. Adding the news piece is great for the conversation here, it's just dunking on the post for not being that type of piece itself is overly dismissive.
This is the third (or fourth) update with this age check and the only one that doesn't enforce credit card (I don't have one), driving licence (I don't have one) or national ID card (I don't have one) as the only methods of verification.
Absolute shambles of a rollout (and I'm hoping it was UKGOV requirements, not just Apple being braindead.)
I get accused of AI writing a lot on Hacker News lately. It’s alway when I take time to read the article, research the subject, and come back to write a thoughtful response with additional info to add to the topic. There’s something sad about how that looks like AI to some people, I suppose compared to the average expectations for what a comment section should look like?
I've been thinking about true/false positives/negatives on this a lot lately and trying to see if there are any non-obvious signals in current AI/human text that impact those.
GP's comment doesn't seem to have any of the "obvious" signals most look for, would you be willing to share what signals you latched on to for this conclusion?
> Ah, the classic "aPpLe cAn dO nO wRoNg" comment from a thread full of nothing but Apple lovers.
Hey, this is an awful comment from someone who has been on HN long enough to know better. That random capitalization thing is a cheap form of sneering, as well as being a tired old internet trope, and the whole comment breaks this guideline:
Please don't fulminate. Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community.
This site is only a place where people want to participate because most people make the effort to do better than this. Please do your part to push the standards up rather than drag them down.
So, are you also going to do anything about the top comment being fake news? It literally says something completely that is not true. Minus the "sneering", I think the validity of my comment remains.
Please don’t try to deflect from your own disrespectful conduct with this kind of “are you going to...?” goading. We don’t moderate on the basis of such charged qualitative judgments as “fake news”. We uphold the guidelines. If someone is wrong, point out how they are wrong, in the conversational style the guidelines clearly call for. Doing it in this sneering and hostile way only weakens your point and trashes this place.
You were asked to keep to the guidelines just a few weeks ago, particularly relating to making swipes at the community, and you committed to doing so: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47243319. We wouldn't be having this interaction if you had kept to that commitment, nor if you had respectfully heeded the reminder I posted. This place only continues to exist because enough other people conduct themselves respectfully.
Sure, I admit I wasn't aware the alternate caps was even a thing in the guideline. If you go into my comment history further, I've done it way more times, but never been flagged before (which is why I wasn't aware it was against the guidelines). Also, I didn't insult the community in my comment (please show me where?). I just pointed out that OP was conveniently choosing to ignore certain key facts in the original article just to craft a narrative - I'm sure you know this, but many people here own Apple stock and sometimes they have a conflict of interest, which really irritates me when they don't disclose and do such shady stuff.
But, let's leave that aside - isn't what you're doing now exactly considered as the very deflection you accused me of, earlier (deflection)? ie. I pointed out something you were wrong about - you just went into pointing out something I did in the past that was wrong instead of addressing my core point - that you didn't have to insult me to enforce the guidelines. You could have done so, without.
Again, as you have found out, I've interacted with dang, I don't know what happened to them, but I never was insulted by them before - despite consecutive flags (and I never repeated those mistakes).
While I agree with the general argument that iOS shouldn’t limit the user’s freedom, it looks to me like Apple actually put in some effort to make this as privacy-preserving as possible.
The article somewhat glosses over it, but you can buy a PASS age verification card at the local post office for 15£. That one is widely accepted and it doesn’t contain unnecessary information that might cause trouble if it leaked (like for example a passport does). And 1 in 3 adults (according to the article) have an Apple account that’s old enough so that they will automatically be unlocked, no further documents needed.
The article strongly accuses iOS of being a walled garden, but I don’t see that as a particularly strong argument after iOS being locked down for ~20 years now.
And as a parent, I know that if child protection is opt-in, there’ll be a huge fight about it, because some other parents won’t activate it, which then makes the situation unfair for the kids. I’d much rather have it on by default so that all kids are treated the same.
The PASS card features your name and photo, it's an ID by any other name.
You must have a very warped perspective of social reality if you think it should be acceptable to force every adult to show their papers before they can do anything in modern society - and all that just so you can avoid your parenting duties. And I say that as a parent.
Your phone should not have any business whatsoever collecting, checking, or verifying the age of the person using it.
> And as a parent, I know that if child protection is opt-in, there’ll be a huge fight about it, because some other parents won’t activate it, which then makes the situation unfair for the kids. I’d much rather have it on by default so that all kids are treated the same.
If you cared about your children, you would be against this. Otherwise you're fighting against your children's future; their privacy, their sanity, their ability to participate in a functioning democracy.
Also parent in the UK - strong disagree, it’s part of our parental responsibilities to set this up, not doing it is the same as not watching a newly walking baby on the stairs (/etc). Compromising everyone’s privacy for a subset of lazy parents is a failing of society.
> because some other parents won’t activate it, which then makes the situation unfair for the kids. I’d much rather have it on by default so that all kids are treated the same.
That’s a strange argument. The government or anyone doesn’t have a mandate to ensure everyone has the exact same experience. Differences in upbringing are normal. I didn’t have a TV growing up while most of my friends did. It might have felt unfair at the time, but it wouldn’t justify the government forcing my parents to get one -> overreach.
Thanks for your comment. It's good to hear from people that want this, as to understand which voters politicians are relying on for support for passing this at a legal level.
However, I fundamentally and ideologically disagree with your views on the matter, and I think your views are incompatible with a free society with checks and balances, and frankly, draconian.
iOS is a walled garden and it will be as strong an argument as ever, regardless of how long iOS has been a walled garden for. Also, don't you see how having to buy your privacy for 15£, even for 0.01£ is ridiculous? And to your last point - a parent can easily bypass all that bullshit if they wanted. They could let their kids use a normal computer without any walled gardens. What's to stop them from seeing 4chan or motherless or anything like that? Nothing. And nothing will unless you force all of society into your dystopic vision of a safe world for kids.
You forgot to mention that the (provisional) driving licence can be issued to 16 year olds.
Full (A1) licence to 17 year olds. It's a proper, full licence, just for a limited power/displacement. Looks proper, "adult".
I don't have iPhone in my household but but I'd very happily ask my nearly 17yo child to try to pass as an adult using their licence to point to the utter stupidity of this.
And to address your last point - the difference is not that Apple is barring adults from the huge portion of the internet (and no, I'm not talking about porn, to address inevitable strawman) unless they submit to the intrusive check.
What proves for me it's malicious, subversive pattern is that it hasn't been widely advertised.
The right way to do it would be to NOT turn it on, but allow to switch "I'm not an adult" option in the settings and then require age check to turn it off. It would require a parent to do it in their child's phone ONCE.
The way it is now is stupid, hostile, so utterly British Government in a way. Great job.
> you can buy a PASS age verification card at the local post office for 15£
If there's one thing the UK internet has taught me is that some brits will throw a fit for every minor inconvenience they face
"Dole appoint at 10am 30min from home!?" Means it's an unsurmountable challenge from them as they might be hangover from the previous day and what do you mean I have to pay the bus fare to get there?
Of course the privacy point stands. But their complaint is not about privacy, is about the effort
This will probably be sneaked in, in more countries under the banner of age verification since more countries are proposing laws than ban children younger than 16 from social media.
I am all for the ban of social media. But I am afraid that it will give us more government meddling and interfering on our devices. And that Apple and google are “forced” to do it. They of course have their own gains.
I think this is trying to fix the wrong problem. As a soon to be parent I am not that worried about supposedly adult content, but I am genuinely concerned about peer pressure into joining various social media platforms and 4 year old with phones streaming cocomelon to my kid.
I activated ADP as soon as it was available here, and I was hoping things would work out, and friends and family who missed the opportunity would be able to use it by now as well.
I’m not pleased with this move, but its implementation has me wondering. I barely keep up with anything these days so I was taken by surprise after I updated. And, probably due to the decrepitude, I was annoyed for a few days that my phone had been nerfed and I had to roll back, before trying probably the first thing any younger person locked out would.
I’m curious, if there’s anyone who hasn’t verified a spare account, if they would point their phone at things? It might take a moment, and there’s no real feedback until the phone accepts your evidence. People have said it takes other people’s credit cards and ID, but I’m wondering if it’ll accept a pet passport too, or really what the limit is.
Thinking that Apple would urgently reconsider anything because of some angry blog post is rather naive. Until this s tangibly affecting Apple's finances the probability they are giving a single shite is approaching zero. Pixel phones and GrapheneOS stonks up.
As much as I'd like to see Apple fight this, shouldn't the blame be placed on the governments for compelling this, rather than on Apple? What is the alternative, pulling out of the UK?
While I'd love this hard-line approach, as it might make other countries think twice, the stockholders probably wouldn't love it.
> Laws like the Online Safety Act 2023 apply to websites and online services — not to entire phone operating systems.
Doesn't this go back to companies like Meta lobbying to push the responsibility to the OS instead of taking it on themselves? I read they did that in the US, I can only assume they did it in the UK as well.
Frankly, I'd rather have Apple qualify me as over 18 one time, and pass a simple boolean to a site vs having to upload proof (an ID, photos...) to every website I want to use. This may be the lesser of two evils.
Fuck the bureaucrats responsible for this. I’m so sick of being completely powerless to fight any of this, being forced to sit and watch. Writing to my MP changes nothing. Signing petitions does nothing. The Government doesn’t give a fuck. They’ve had so many golden opportunities to differentiate themselves from the Tories and all they’ve done is carry the torch.
I will vote for any party that promises to rewind this crap, I don’t care what other policies they have. Enough of the nannying.
The real problem was never just checking age imo. It was deciding who deals with mistakes, who gets blamed when access is blocked wrongly, and how a normal user is supposed to fix it.
Moving that to the phone makes it look cleaner, but mostly just pushes the mess into a layer people have even less control over.
One silver lining this is finally going to push me to switch to a dedicated camera and some niche unrestricted Linux or graphene device as a phone. Goodbye iPhone. (I say this as someone with an Apple account old enough to auto “qualify”, how lucky).
It's funny, I'm less worried about supposed "adult" content than I am "age-appropriate" content that these platforms push onto kids. Anyone remember those creepy as fuck Spiderman Elsa videos pushed on youtube kids?
Or hell, even "normal" content like MrBeast to me is infinitely more damaging to a kid's brain than porn or whatever other thing this policy bans. I'd much rather my kids regularly browse /b/ rather than consuming the brain rotting shit that MrBeast puts out.
What do people expect when handing over their computing to a for-profit company? You can use various services where you knowingly hand over some of your data or offload a computational load, but with Apple it's like you're handing off the keys to your house, the plumbing, the electric wiring, the bricks, the alarm system and everything else to 1 entity. And you get upset when you realize you're just renting a property with less assurance you'd get from a slumlord in the ghetto. And for a lot of people that Apple property is their main computing property. Not a vacation home away from their desktop. Once they're evicted, once the slumlord disables the heating, increases the price of water or forbids you from inviting people, you have no other recourse.
signal did everything right on their end. encrypted push, content only shown if the user opts in. the weak link is iOS caching decrypted notification content in an unencrypted sqlite database that survives app deletion. the 'e2e' in e2e encryption ends at the os, not the app.
For the moment, governments claim to want only she verification "for the children". Let's be honest: governments like the UK and Germany (to name two) are prosecuting people for posting unwanted opinions, or - heaver forfend - for insulting politicians.
To pursue those prosecutions they need identities. Age verification is the first step towards requiring your real identity in social media.
Apple isn't doing shit except for following the law. If you don't like the law, change it.
I will edit this to say, since I'm sure people are out there who will make this point: yes, I read the article. I disagree with it. "Not required by the OS" Well that isn't going to matter much when Apple gets hit with a big fat fine for "allowing" underage users on social media.
Could there not be a reason that Apple made this choice involving their own legal risk? Sometimes what a law actually requires is up to what happens in court in the future.
You can blame the government as much as you like, but this is actually has to do with british nature, they have an obsessive need for control, and if you worked with some you will immediately notice how they will try to make all sort of policies and shit to control the other party, all while they pretend they are open about hearing other’s opinions. So it kinda backfired, what goes around comes around.
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I found this Apple Insider page with more information and an actual description of how it works, from someone doing journalism instead of soliciting donations and subscriptions: https://appleinsider.com/articles/26/02/25/how-age-verificat...
It's going to take some more searching to find an article that shows what age verification looks like for newer Apple accounts. According to that article if you have a long-standing Apple account and/or a credit card in your name in Apple Pay it might be enough to confirm you as 18+.
An article about the age restrictions should at least have some supporting evidence, or at minimum some screenshots like the article I linked.
You insist this piece should be in the form of a cited and fully explanatory journalistic article when writing such a blog post signals no such goal. The intent here is to alert for support, not to be a news source about the topic. Adding the news piece is great for the conversation here, it's just dunking on the post for not being that type of piece itself is overly dismissive.
>According to that article if you have a long-standing Apple account ...
I can confirm that is the case.
This is the third (or fourth) update with this age check and the only one that doesn't enforce credit card (I don't have one), driving licence (I don't have one) or national ID card (I don't have one) as the only methods of verification.
Absolute shambles of a rollout (and I'm hoping it was UKGOV requirements, not just Apple being braindead.)
I guess the logic must be "if it's less than 18 years, there's a slim possibility the owner is under 18."
Just in case people are creating Apple accounts for their newborn, I suppose.
GP's comment doesn't seem to have any of the "obvious" signals most look for, would you be willing to share what signals you latched on to for this conclusion?
> Ah, the classic "aPpLe cAn dO nO wRoNg" comment from a thread full of nothing but Apple lovers.
Hey, this is an awful comment from someone who has been on HN long enough to know better. That random capitalization thing is a cheap form of sneering, as well as being a tired old internet trope, and the whole comment breaks this guideline:
Please don't fulminate. Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community.
This site is only a place where people want to participate because most people make the effort to do better than this. Please do your part to push the standards up rather than drag them down.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
But, let's leave that aside - isn't what you're doing now exactly considered as the very deflection you accused me of, earlier (deflection)? ie. I pointed out something you were wrong about - you just went into pointing out something I did in the past that was wrong instead of addressing my core point - that you didn't have to insult me to enforce the guidelines. You could have done so, without.
Again, as you have found out, I've interacted with dang, I don't know what happened to them, but I never was insulted by them before - despite consecutive flags (and I never repeated those mistakes).
The article somewhat glosses over it, but you can buy a PASS age verification card at the local post office for 15£. That one is widely accepted and it doesn’t contain unnecessary information that might cause trouble if it leaked (like for example a passport does). And 1 in 3 adults (according to the article) have an Apple account that’s old enough so that they will automatically be unlocked, no further documents needed.
The article strongly accuses iOS of being a walled garden, but I don’t see that as a particularly strong argument after iOS being locked down for ~20 years now.
And as a parent, I know that if child protection is opt-in, there’ll be a huge fight about it, because some other parents won’t activate it, which then makes the situation unfair for the kids. I’d much rather have it on by default so that all kids are treated the same.
You must have a very warped perspective of social reality if you think it should be acceptable to force every adult to show their papers before they can do anything in modern society - and all that just so you can avoid your parenting duties. And I say that as a parent.
> And as a parent, I know that if child protection is opt-in, there’ll be a huge fight about it, because some other parents won’t activate it, which then makes the situation unfair for the kids. I’d much rather have it on by default so that all kids are treated the same.
If you cared about your children, you would be against this. Otherwise you're fighting against your children's future; their privacy, their sanity, their ability to participate in a functioning democracy.
They all misformat currency in the same weird way. No one actually British writes 15£.
I don’t want to pay an extra tax to access the web or use my phone.
I don’t want to be monitored or censored by a nanny state because you don’t to stand up to your kids.
I’m angry that this is being brought in without discussion.
This is unacceptable to me. I’m going to vote for whichever party says it will revoke the Online Safety Act.
> because some other parents won’t activate it, which then makes the situation unfair for the kids. I’d much rather have it on by default so that all kids are treated the same.
That’s a strange argument. The government or anyone doesn’t have a mandate to ensure everyone has the exact same experience. Differences in upbringing are normal. I didn’t have a TV growing up while most of my friends did. It might have felt unfair at the time, but it wouldn’t justify the government forcing my parents to get one -> overreach.
However, I fundamentally and ideologically disagree with your views on the matter, and I think your views are incompatible with a free society with checks and balances, and frankly, draconian.
Full (A1) licence to 17 year olds. It's a proper, full licence, just for a limited power/displacement. Looks proper, "adult".
I don't have iPhone in my household but but I'd very happily ask my nearly 17yo child to try to pass as an adult using their licence to point to the utter stupidity of this.
And to address your last point - the difference is not that Apple is barring adults from the huge portion of the internet (and no, I'm not talking about porn, to address inevitable strawman) unless they submit to the intrusive check.
What proves for me it's malicious, subversive pattern is that it hasn't been widely advertised.
The right way to do it would be to NOT turn it on, but allow to switch "I'm not an adult" option in the settings and then require age check to turn it off. It would require a parent to do it in their child's phone ONCE.
The way it is now is stupid, hostile, so utterly British Government in a way. Great job.
> you can buy a PASS age verification card at the local post office for 15£
If there's one thing the UK internet has taught me is that some brits will throw a fit for every minor inconvenience they face
"Dole appoint at 10am 30min from home!?" Means it's an unsurmountable challenge from them as they might be hangover from the previous day and what do you mean I have to pay the bus fare to get there?
Of course the privacy point stands. But their complaint is not about privacy, is about the effort
I am all for the ban of social media. But I am afraid that it will give us more government meddling and interfering on our devices. And that Apple and google are “forced” to do it. They of course have their own gains.
I’m not pleased with this move, but its implementation has me wondering. I barely keep up with anything these days so I was taken by surprise after I updated. And, probably due to the decrepitude, I was annoyed for a few days that my phone had been nerfed and I had to roll back, before trying probably the first thing any younger person locked out would.
I’m curious, if there’s anyone who hasn’t verified a spare account, if they would point their phone at things? It might take a moment, and there’s no real feedback until the phone accepts your evidence. People have said it takes other people’s credit cards and ID, but I’m wondering if it’ll accept a pet passport too, or really what the limit is.
While I'd love this hard-line approach, as it might make other countries think twice, the stockholders probably wouldn't love it.
> Laws like the Online Safety Act 2023 apply to websites and online services — not to entire phone operating systems.
Doesn't this go back to companies like Meta lobbying to push the responsibility to the OS instead of taking it on themselves? I read they did that in the US, I can only assume they did it in the UK as well.
Frankly, I'd rather have Apple qualify me as over 18 one time, and pass a simple boolean to a site vs having to upload proof (an ID, photos...) to every website I want to use. This may be the lesser of two evils.
Not long till complete authentication of the human at every level is required to use a computer.
I will vote for any party that promises to rewind this crap, I don’t care what other policies they have. Enough of the nannying.
https://support.apple.com/en-gb/126788
Moving that to the phone makes it look cleaner, but mostly just pushes the mess into a layer people have even less control over.
Or hell, even "normal" content like MrBeast to me is infinitely more damaging to a kid's brain than porn or whatever other thing this policy bans. I'd much rather my kids regularly browse /b/ rather than consuming the brain rotting shit that MrBeast puts out.
Just sad that Western citizen are throwing hard earned privacy rights so easily out of the window. Giving in to the most trivial emotional blackmail.
0. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RfukJ6uVHXs
The issue is the parties taking a strong stance on this are not the ones I’d normally align with
For the moment, governments claim to want only she verification "for the children". Let's be honest: governments like the UK and Germany (to name two) are prosecuting people for posting unwanted opinions, or - heaver forfend - for insulting politicians.
To pursue those prosecutions they need identities. Age verification is the first step towards requiring your real identity in social media.
I will edit this to say, since I'm sure people are out there who will make this point: yes, I read the article. I disagree with it. "Not required by the OS" Well that isn't going to matter much when Apple gets hit with a big fat fine for "allowing" underage users on social media.
I think that’s what Apple is banking on. They sell privacy as a feature of their products, and I’m grateful for that.