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A resident of said country here. Another questionable measure by Government to protect our mollycoddled, insufficiently-resilient society. That said, a better
by hilbert42 1y ago
A resident of said country here. Another questionable measure by Government to protect our mollycoddled, insufficiently-resilient society.
That said, a better approach would be to limit kids under certain age from owning smartphones with full internet access. Instead, they could have a phone without internet access—dumb phones—or ones with curated/limited access.
Personally, I'm not too worried about what risqué stuff they'll see online especially so teenagers (they'll find that one way or other) but it's more about the distraction smartphones cause.
Thinking back to my teenage years I'm almost certain I would have been tempted to waste too much time online when it would have been better for me to be doing homework or playing sport.
It goes without saying that smartphones are designed to be addictive and we need to protect kids more from this addiction than from from bad online content. That's not to say they should have unfettered access to extreme content, they should not.
It seems to me that having access to only filtered IP addresses would be a better solution.
This ill-considerd gut reaction involving the whole community isn't a sensible decision if for no other reason than it allows sites like Google to sap up even more of a user's personal information.
- abtinf 1y ago> Another questionable measure by Government to protect our mollycoddled, insufficiently-resilient society Complains about mollycoddling. > a better approach would be to limit Immediately proposes new mollycoddling scheme.
- hilbert42 1y agoMollycoddling kids is one thing, we've always done that to some extent. Mollycoddling adults is another matter altogether.
- xboxnolifes 1y agoBoth proposals are mollycoddling children. It just happens that one of them inconveniences adults.
- strken 1y ago"Inconvenience" is downplaying the impact of not letting adults use incognito mode to search for things. Yes, right now search engines are only going to blur out images and turn on safe search, but the decision to show or hide information in safe search has alarming grey areas. Examples of things that might be hidden and which someone might want to access anonymously are services relating to sexual health, news stories involving political violence, LGBTQ content, or certain resources relating to domestic violence.
- rendall 1y agoAlso porn. Let's be honest, all of this energy expenditure is about porn.
- Cartoxy 1y agois it tho because we have been doing porn since forever and porn is not gatekeeperd by SE at all. seams like long term slow burn to Gov tendrils just like digital ID and how desperate the example came across as to show any real function, contradictory even. Pivot, what about the children. small steps and right back on the gradient of slippyslope we are
- GoblinSlayer 1y agoPeople search porn in google? Because google is internet itself?
- falcor84 1y agoBecause it's easier to put your query into the address bar than to open a dedicated search page, and most people use Chrome with the default being Google search.
- XorNot 1y agoAbsolutely no one searches for porn on Google except if they don't know the URL of an aggregator. Which that one kid will tell everyone if they don't.
- bamboozled 1y ago[flagged]
- frollogaston 1y agoor just don't get them smartphones
- pmontra 1y agoMisinformation and propaganda are not only on smartphones.
- fc417fc802 1y agoStill those do make it awfully easy to subscribe to notifications that actively push all sorts of problematic things onto you at an alarming rate. A high rate of exposure to something can lead to problems where there otherwise wouldn't be any.
- frollogaston 1y agoThis doesn't mean they should have smartphones
- DiggyJohnson 1y ago> it would suck for the ruling class though because we'd have to stop feeding kids religion This seems out of place and unrelated. If anything Gen Z and presumable Alpha, eventually, are more religious than their parents.
- graemep 1y ago> it would suck for the ruling class though because we'd have to stop feeding kids religion The ruling class in the west are generally extremely anti-religious. They have a good reason to be - the biggest religion in the west is anti-wealth (the "eye of the needle" things etc.) and generally opposed to the values of the powerful. The US is a sort of exception, but they say things to placate the religious (having already been pretty successful in manipulating and corrupting the religion) but very rarely actually do anything. I very much doubt the president (or anyone else) in the current US government is going to endorse "give all you have to the poor".
- tacticus 1y ago> That said, a better approach would be to limit kids under certain age from owning smartphones with full internet access. Instead, they could have a phone without internet access—dumb phones—or ones with curated/limited access. This wouldn't allow them to watch gambling ads or enjoy murdoch venues.
- hilbert42 1y agoOh, the cynicism of some people. :-) Yes, that empire exported itself to where it would have the greatest effect—cause the most damage.
- SlowTao 1y ago> Thinking back to my teenage years I'm almost certain I would have been tempted to waste too much time online when it would have been better for me to be doing homework or playing sport. That is true. I spent my time coding a 2D game engine on an 486, it eventually went nowhere, but it was still cool to do. But if I had the internet then, all that energy would have been put into pointless internet stuff.
- kolinko 1y agoI had internet access since 13yo, although it was the internet of 1996, so it was way more basic. And for me it was a place to explore my passions way better than any library in a small city in Poland would allow. And sure - also a ton of time on internet games / MUDs, chatrooms etc. And internet allowed me to publish my programs, written in Delphi, since I was 13-14yo, and meet other programmers on Usenet. On the other hand, if not for internet, I might socialise way more irl - probably doing thing that were way less intelectually developing (but more socially). It just hit me that I need to ask one of my friends from that time what they did in their spare time, because I honestly have no idea.
- bombcar 1y agoThe Internet of 1996 and even of 2006 was a lot more “work” than the direct-into-your-eyebulbs Internet of today. YouTube didn’t start until 2005! Even just getting Flash working to watch Home*Runner was an effort.
- jdcasale 1y agoI'd keep in mind that internet usage of 96 (I was there) bears no resemblance whatsoever to internet usage of today. The level of predatory sophistication of today's attention economy makes any sort of comparison between the two misguided at best.
- kolinko 1y agoYes, but complaints about my generation sitting in front of computers was not that much different from my generation's complaints now of the next generation being on social media.
- Tade0 1y agoMy take is just like we have allowance to introduce children to the concept of money, parents could use data allowance to introduce children to the concept of the internet. The worst content out there is typically data-heavy, the best - not necessarily, as it can well be text in most cases.
- closewith 1y agoThat's a naïve view of the internet, where much of the worst experiences children have are in text via chat.
- Tade0 1y agoPretty sure a picture is still worth a thousand words. Also text is something you can prepare for, police if need be. Random visual internet content? Too many possibilities, too large a surface area to cover.
- red_admiral 1y agoMoney is, depending on the country, slowly evolving from physical coins/notes to plastic cards to pretend plastic cards on smartphones, to the same but you need an app to manage the account, to let's stop pretending and just use an app in the first place. The last one is difficult because you need a common standard, either someone becomes a monopoly (or two or three quasi-monopolies such as google/apple) or better still this is one of few cases where government regulation could do more good than harm. I think China is already close to the last phase at least in cities, going down the government regulated route? This is highly country dependent of course - in some places shops must accept coins by law, even if it's so unusual that you have to roll a critical success to get the right amount of change back. I would like a world where we can give children physical pocket money rather than some abstraction, and they don't need a smartphone of their own to check their balance. But we'll probably have to fight for that at some point.
- dzhiurgis 1y agoAustralian gov can’t even enforce vape ban, how you’d expect smartphone ban to be enforced?
- florkbork 1y agoWhat if the point isn't to enforce at the user level, but at the company level? 30,000 penalty units for violations. 1 unit = $330 AUD at the moment.
- theshackleford 1y ago> That said, a better approach would be to limit kids under certain age from owning smartphones with full internet access. Instead, they could have a phone without internet access—dumb phones—or ones with curated/limited access. This would be completely and utterly unenforceable in any capacity. Budget smartphones are cheap enough and ubiquitious enough that children don't need your permission or help to get one. Just as I didnt need my parents assistance to have three different mobile phones in high school when as far as they knew, I had zero phones.
- account42 1y agoWhich is of course why we don't bother making selling cigarettes and alcohol to children illegal. Except we totally do that because it largely works even if sufficiently motivated individuals can and do get around the restrictions.
- theshackleford 1y agoCigarettes and alcohol are consumbable products that must be acquired again and again. There are already millions of phones in open circulation and you only need to acquire it once. Even if you could stop phones, you wont stop them from accessing it from literally a near infinite supply of other devices. It's pure and utter fantasy.
- florkbork 1y agoI find I am broadly supportive of these laws (The Online Safety Amendment (Social Media Minimum Age) Bill 2024), even if this specific regulation is a bit of pearl clutching wowserism. Why? If you read the original legislation https://parlinfo.aph.gov.au/parlInfo/search/display/display.w3p;db=LEGISLATION;id=legislation%2Fbills%2Fr7284_aspassed%2F0001;query=Id%3A%22legislation%2Fbills%2Fr7284_aspassed%2F0000%22 https://parlinfo.aph.gov.au/parlInfo/search/display/display.... You get 30,000 civil penalty units if you are a scumbag social media network and you harvest someone's government ID. You get 30,000 civil penalty units if you don't try to keep young kids away from the toxic cesspool that is your service, filled with bots and boomers raving about climate change and reposting Sky News. This absolutely stuffs those businesses who prey on their users, at least for the formative years. And when I think about it like that? I have no problem with it, nor the fact it's a pain to implement.
- kypro 1y ago100% agree. The framing that explicit material is bad for kids, while probably true, is besides the point. Lots of things a parent could expose a child to could be bad, but it's always been seen as up to the parent to decide. What the government should do is ensure that parents have the tools to raise their kids in the way they feel is appropriate. For example, they could require device manufactures implement child-modes or that ISP provide tools for content moderation which would puts parents in control. This instead places the the state in the parental role with it's entire citizenry. We see this in the UK a lot too. This idea that parents can't be trusted to be good parents and that people can't be trusted with their own freedom so we need the state to look after us seems to be an increasing popular view. I despise it, but for whatever reason that seems to be the trend in the West today – people want the state to take on a parental role in their lives. Perhaps aging demographics has something to do with it.
- immibis 1y agoSince when does HN believe it's technically possible for an ISP to implement content moderation tools?
- jolmg 1y ago> That said, a better approach would be to limit kids under certain age from owning smartphones with full internet access. Instead, they could have a phone without internet access—dumb phones—or ones with curated/limited access. Why should this be the government's responsibility rather than the parents'?
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- reaperducer 1y agoWhy should this be the government's responsibility rather than the parents'? For the same reason that the government limits smoking and alcohol. Because the parents can't/won't.
- jolmg 1y agoA teen can go to the store on their own and consume the cigarettes and alcohol right out the door without the parents knowing. There I can see why the parent would need the collaboration of greater society. But for a phone? A child/early-teen shouldn't be able to afford a phone nor contract with a cellphone-service-provider being underage. That should be collaboration enough. If they got a phone beforehand, it's because the parents themselves got it for them. Even considering a mid teen starting work, buying a phone and using it with WiFi, they can only really own things with the parents' approval. They can't really use it enough to form an addiction without the parents noticing and having the opportunity to confiscate it.
- sieabahlpark 1y ago[dead]
- gt0 1y agoI'm in Australia too. I feel a lot of Australians think the government is more mollycoddling than it is, it's hard to think of an actual policy in Australia that is outside of the norm of the Western world.
- justinclift 1y agoI wonder how well solutions like "Spriggy Mobile" work in practice? https://www.spriggy.com.au/mobile https://www.spriggy.com.au/mobile