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Once we're at teenagers, then it's still - did you raise them to be aware of the world around them? Did you give them the tools to evaluate safe and unsafe onl
by abofh 2y ago
Once we're at teenagers, then it's still - did you raise them to be aware of the world around them? Did you give them the tools to evaluate safe and unsafe online activity?
A kid doesn't accidentally end up addicted heroin unless they have exposure to heroin. Child grooming predates encryption and the internet and relied primarily on trusted people convincing children not to talk.
No amount of decrypted internet traffic will protect your children from unsupervised in-person access by strangers - worrying about what they do online as a black box of whataboutism -- and again, it's the parents, not society as a whole who has that responsibility.
Are there evil people? Yes. Are there corporations that are interested in you being addicted to their products (Oxy, Alcohol, Nicotine, Meta) -- yes.
Do you need the right to inspect what I send to my wife to protect your children? No.
I'm sorry that teenagers are hard, they always have been - that's a hard part about parenting. The hardest part though is that you raised them to make their own choices - and this is the final exam -- did your kids make good choices. You don't get to put that responsibility on anyone else, you raised them, you gave them the tools - and at some point, they will make a choice without you. If you believe the only way for them to make a good choice is to be able to surveil every aspect of their lives, then I hate to tell you what will happen when they stop being children.
- ben_w 2y agoI'm not suggesting that we should break crypto to keep kids safe, I'm suggesting that we shouldn't let kids be on the internet at all. Society doesn't let kids vote, doesn't let kids buy alcohol or tobacco, doesn't let them drive or join the army, and doesn't let them watch 18-rated films. I remember being a teenager. I remember the valuable life-lesson we got about not trusting strangers in the form of the police creating a (safe) demonstration with one of their own plain-clothed officers pretending to be a villain, I remember subsequently making huge errors of judgement, and I remember others being far more trusting than me. I remember the school anti-drugs campaign centred on Leah Betts, and that the way the teachers talked to us felt so patronising that I wanted to do drugs just to spite them. (Never acted on it, just wanted to). I remember the art department computer, some very old attempt at security to stop kids messing with it, which I could trivially circumvent. I remember when we got ISDN at school, and that I immediately started heavily using the internet whenever possible. They had content filters of course, but they were mediocre at best.
- abofh 2y agoTo be clear, I agree with you in principal - I think unsupervised children on the internet is a horrible idea, I just draw the line short of legislating that. I'm not looking forward to when mine are old enough to realistically need to start using the internet, and wish that I could put them on dial-up text-mode internet like I grew up on instead of this ad-filled garbage we have today... But that's on me I suppose.