5 ms·

A proposed amendment to ban under 16s in the UK from common online services

55 points by ibobev 11mo ago

sajithdilshan 11mo ago
This is the exact policing we don't want government to do regardless of the age. In my opinion it's the responsibility of the parents to decide how to raise their children and teach them how to live and adapt in the age of social media and maintain a balance. In the same sense one could argue that social media like Facebook or WhatsApp should be banned among older population because that's one of the major ways mis/fake information being spread among elderly people and now with AI videos they actually believe those fake stories to be 100% true as well. I think that's more risk to modern day democracy and well being of the society in general.
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 11mo ago
  Nice opinion. Are you a parent? What if most voting age parents want this law?
  - squigz 11mo ago
    Why does that mean people who don't want this law's privacy gets to be invaded? How is this not those parents' responsibility to ensure their child doesn't go on those sites they don't like?
  - Larrikin 11mo ago
    Every single right you have can be taken away by the justification of it will protect children or it is wrong because of something some person wrote in a religious text. Parents who think they need this are bad parents and bad citizens. Someone pointed out that every single one of these laws in spirit does not need the website to verify and block the user. There is no need for complicated schemes of all websites implementing complex screening software and storing all our IDs. The website could report a single string saying if there is adult content and software the parent or authoritarian governments ISP has installed on the device could block it. But protecting children isn't the point
    - internetter 11mo ago
      Yup. We already have <meta name="rating" content="adult"> for this reason. Very conveniently ignored.
  - sajithdilshan 11mo ago
    The fact of me being a parent is non of your concern I would say. If most of voting age parents want this, then what prevents them from enforcing it on their children. Why do they have to rely on government to be the parent. Maybe those parent should not have been parents in the first place if they need government to step in to raise their children.
  - paganel 11mo ago
    They should be able to discipline their kids, if not, then it means that they're not capable parents and social services should be called on them.
- xipix 11mo ago
  We absolutely do need regulation of this harm by the law. It's how we stand together as a society, otherwise one child's rules will seem draconian against their friend's lax parents. There's plenty of precedent in other threshold ages at which children can start indulging in other potentially harmful vices. The vulnerable elder population is more difficult to define by a simple age threshold. We all decline at different ages and different rates.
  - sajithdilshan 11mo ago
    I disagree > one child's rules will seem draconian against their friend's lax parents. So what is wrong with that? parenting is not equal among all parents in UK and why should only this aspect be normalized? > The vulnerable elder population is more difficult to define by a simple age threshold. We all decline at different ages and different rates. This is a hypocritical statement. For children we are more than willing to normalize and enforce rules as us adults wants because we assume all children grow up at same age and same rates, but when it comes to policing adults, the line is gray and more difficult because everyone is different.
    - xipix 11mo ago
      "Can I learn to drive?" "No, you're not old enough" "But my friend is already driving and he's 12" "OK, when you turn 12 you can too."
      - wavemode 11mo ago
        I'm sorry but the parent in this conversation is just stupid. As they say, you can't fix stupid.
      - sajithdilshan 11mo ago
        The parent in your conversation is just stupid and no matter how many laws we pass we cannot fix stupidity. In that case only thing I can suggest is to pass a law to assess the eligibility and maturity of people if they want to have children and issue a permit if they are suitable to have and raise children and otherwise they cannot have children.
- zetanor 11mo ago
  In theory, libertarian-type approaches seem reasonable when you model for cooperative actors. In practice, however, you hit tragedies of the commons and severe first-mover disadvantages. Well-meaning parents who ban teenagers from social media at the level of the family rather than at the level of society will mainly just socially ostracize their kids. I'd imagine you'd need to go Amish-mode and build a social network on behalf of your kids for anything like this to work. If you want to restrict kids from social media (which is an open question), I would much prefer that the laws not gate kids from social media directly as this would require social media websites to ask for ID. Rather, abusive parents who don't lock their kids out of social media websites should be sanctioned. First offenders get all of their Internet accesses taken down for a few months.
  - runako 11mo ago
    > will mainly just socially ostracize their kids Parent of a teen here. This is just flatly false. If you have been a teenager or adult before, you will be familiar with the concept of the clique. For teens, there are athletes, nerds, theater kids, Lululemon kids, etc. There are cliques of kids who do not use social media (because their parents won't let them, or they don't want to, or they prefer to do something else, or their parents do not use social media, or they cannot afford the devices). Teens who do not use social media sort into different cliques. That's it. They are not ostracized any more than theater kids or computer geeks are ostracized. (The latter inclusion was intentional, as it may cause some self-reflection among well-adjusted adults who at one time were members of school computer clubs.)
    - internetter 11mo ago
      Fairly recent teen here. This is simply not true. All my friends who started adamantly against social media had Instagram come end of senior year. At college, I could count on one hand the amount of people I met without it. I know personally, I was never entirely without social media, but I switched to iPhone because I was so tired of being ostracized with regard to iMessage (this was pre-RCS, perhaps this particular concern has been alleviated) Sure I guess all the Android users could band together and form a clique and maybe that happened to some extent, but I didn’t wish to associate as an Android user. I don’t imagine kids want “social media Luddite” to be their clique. I wanted to be an outdoorsy kid with tech interests at the most. My choice of phone brand isn’t a part of this identity.
joefarish 11mo ago
Another well written article from Neil about some terribly written legislation. His personal blog is also pretty good - https://neilzone.co.uk/ https://neilzone.co.uk/
Citizen_Lame 11mo ago
Democracy is clearly heading toward complete authoritarianism.
- cryptonym 11mo ago
  A proposed amendment (of poor quality) is not a law
- nothercastle 11mo ago
  The uk got all of chinas authoritarian systems without any of the public safety and security brenifits that the Chinese got.
jasonjayr 11mo ago
It seems like after trying all this time, "Age Assurance/verification" is what is going to stick to end anonymity and an open internet. Under the never-ending banner of "think of the children!"
pembrook 11mo ago
Listen, I get it. The things that "kids these days" are up to is always seen as unholy and dangerous by everyone once they turn 30: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_panic https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_panic I'm actually pro the idea of regulating your child's use of technology at the parent level. But giving the tools to government to shut off access to communication for certain groups of people because parenting is hard is such a dangerous precedent to set. Once the mechanisms and tools to do this are in place, you're one piece of regulation away from removing the idea of privacy altogether and policing all forms of communication. You're forever building the infrastructure to enable 1984, making it super easy to turn on, and hoping the people in power never once abuse it. All over Europe right now there's some insane things being proposed by domestic politicians. In Denmark, the same people pushing for chat control have proposed a total and complete ban on VPNs. The impulse to safety is an understandable one in the context of children. But we aren't going to form a successful, independent, and flourishing next generation by hiding them from a huge part of modern life until some arbitrary age, and suddenly unlocking access to it in adulthood.
- wongarsu 11mo ago
  > one piece of regulation away from removing the idea of privacy altogether and policing all forms of communication. You're building the infrastructure to create 1984. Politicians attempt this all over Europe, but Britain is trying especially hard, with surprisingly little pushback. Not just the internet, also their state-run and state-accessible CCTV networks, now even with face detection. The idea of giving up privacy for the greater good is surprisingly normalized in the UK I don't think it's a coincidence that 1984 is set in England and was written by an Englishman
- xipix 11mo ago
  /
  - pirates 11mo ago
    Why are so many parents completely OK with abdicating responsibility like this? Dealing with peer pressure and adolescence is something every parent needs to figure out how to do, sans governmental intervention.
Aurornis 11mo ago
Casual calls for banning children from social media are becoming common, even here on HN. The people demanding these bans always assume that the bans will cleanly apply only to sites they don’t use or don’t like, as if only Facebook and TikTok will be impacted. This proposed amendment shows exactly why this entire concept is problematic. The definition of social media site is this: > by regulations made my statutory instrument require all regulated user-to-user services to use highly-effective age assurance measures to prevent children under the age of 16 from becoming or being users. Now imagine all of the user-to-user services you use on the internet: Hacker News, Discord, Signal, any messaging app, the comment section on your favorite news websites. Even Wikipedia is a user-to-user website. The second point that people calling for heavy regulation neglect is that the only way to keep under-16s out of these websites is to enforce age verification on everyone who visits the website. So HN would require ID verification, and Discord, and your messaging apps. I always see ideas about creating age verification services that don’t disclose ID information, but a key part of age verification is confirming (as reasonably possible) that the person presenting the ID with the age on it is the same person who is trying to use the service. The same reason a 16 year old can’t walk into a liquor store with their mom’s ID is going to be applied to these age checks, requiring that the sites make an effort to associate an ID with the user. Otherwise, kids are smart and will borrow their parents or older friends’ IDs or even use online black market services if there are no negative consequences for sharing IDs that perform anonymous age checks. Associating IDs with user accounts is a key part of age check legislation.
- PunchyHamster 11mo ago
  "Internet bad, and as parents we don't really want to be parenting, that's extra work, therefore ban" stance
  - everdrive 11mo ago
    I'm not sure why we give kids smart phones and laptops. This is actually unavoidable. Your school will give your kid a laptop, even if you prohibit it at home. Imagine being 14 and having an entire laptop to prevent you from ever needing to focus in class. I never would have managed it.
bluescrn 11mo ago
It not really about kids. It's about reducing online anonymity for adults, isn't it.
- touristtam 11mo ago
  I am not sure who is going to be interested in the general population amoral interest in a country that is/was OK with well known personal personalities being pedophiles and rags like the mail that will push whatever narratives they feel brings the more dosh.
- alexfoo 11mo ago
  Exactly. In order to prove you are not 15 online you have to prove you are >=16, even if you are 63. And there's no "I'm an adult" proof with leaking exactly who you are. This is thinly veiled "we want to know exactly who is behind every account" legislation. Expect it to be coupled with the usual "If you've nothing to hide you have nothing to fear" argument.
random9749832 11mo ago
Should we not believe that the much of the world is run by essentially the same club of people despite having separate democracies?
yunruse 11mo ago
If every website needed verification, why not simply move the verification to the device or ISP level? This seems like an authoritative move to track users across websites, and another good reason to keep using a VPN. Certainly a terrifying amount of responsibility and upkeep for each individual website. If the UK wishes to establish this and not want it to lead to an insane amount of privacy leaks, it should consider developing a technology that makes it work in a privacy-respecting way, like the European Age Verification Solution [0]'s Zero-Knowledge Proofs. [0] https://ageverification.dev https://ageverification.dev
- 4gotunameagain 11mo ago
  To the device ?? That will turbocharge the draconian lockdown of computing. You will never own a computer you buy every again if that is pushed.
- Aurornis 11mo ago
  > the UK wishes to establish this and not want it to lead to an insane amount of privacy leaks, it should consider developing a technology that makes it work in a privacy-respecting way They don’t care about the privacy aspect. A key part of effective age verification is associating an identity with the account. They don’t just want to confirm that the person accessing the site has access to an ID of anyone who is 16+, they want to make an effort to associate the ID with the account. It’s the same reason why when you present an ID to buy alcohol they look at the photo to make sure the ID is actually yours, not just that you have an ID of someone older in your possession.
- wongarsu 11mo ago
  Even if we keep it at the website level, a government-run solution that allows you to verify your age without revealing your identity would be the logical solution. There is no good reason why they need to know who I am to know how old I am. The EU seems to be headed that way. The UK doesn't seem to care, almost as if associating real names with accounts was the whole point and saving children was just a convenient excuse for them
- idiotsecant 11mo ago
everdrive 11mo ago
The UK in particular seems to be headed into a terrible direction with regard to free speech, being a nanny-state, and surveilling its citizens. I wonder if these sorts of measures (broadly) are supported by their voters or if the voters really have no choice.
- random9749832 11mo ago
  In the UK any topics in regards to politics that are widely spoken about in public is to do with immigration / inflation / housing crisis. Because of these other issues this is happening under the radar and no political party cares.
  - WackyFighter 11mo ago
    It is because the vast majority of the people don't understand really what the internet is, how it works and therefore cannot understand the consequences. However the effects of immigration (both positive and negative), inflation and not being able to afford a house is more easily understood by the layman.
    - random9749832 11mo ago
      Most people definitely do not understand those things beyond price up or more brown/black people. But they are easier to create narratives around that provoke an emotional response.
      - WackyFighter 11mo ago
        Quite a lot of people understand more nuance than you would give them credit for. You are falling for the narrative that most people can't understand these things. Many just understand complaining about it won't do any good. I was talking with my Mother last night about this very subject and she is social worker in her 60s.
- VBprogrammer 11mo ago
  Not sure where you are from but it's not exclusive to the UK. People directly quoting the US president following the tragic death of a right wing commentator also found themselves locked up. Not to mention the same president suggesting that people suggesting that the military should refuse illegal orders should be locked up etc. I think realistically we've grown up in an age where you could say almost anything online, free from any threat of any kind of reprisal. It probably reasonable that, given the internet is key to daily life these days, that we treat it as no different from standing on a park bench and shouting. If you're calling for the death of people based on their religion or some other characteristic then there are consequences to your speech. Unfortunately the most recent example of this kind of legislation, the laws surrounding age verification on websites, was introduced under a previous government so it really doesn't matter who you vote for on this anyway.
b800h 11mo ago
I'm a parent of four, and the family controls on Android, paired with sensible oversight of laptop use at home, are perfectly sufficient. We've enabled WhatsApp, but check it every so often for the younger ones; they have a timeout, can use Wikipedia, and have a time limit on their use of AI. They can't use the stupid services like Tiktok.
aDyslecticCrow 11mo ago
There is a very simple and powerful alternative; add a flag to the http header standard, which is enforced device-wide or web-browser wide for any parent controlled device. If you dont want to serve or moderate your site for children and be exposed to fines, you block any request with the relevant flag. You just need a law to enforce what can be served when using the relevant flag, and some talks with Google, Apple Microsoft and w3 to implement it. you can even segment it my category; no-login, no-posting, no-18-plus, no-violence, no-politics, under-16, region-EU, region-UK. This leaves control to parents to do what they deem appropriate for their age, and doesn't turn into a authoritative surveillance state.... wait thats the point isn't it... nevermid there is no alternative /j
- anthk 11mo ago
  Or just lock the DNS' for every teen device. Much cheaper and less intrusive. If you want to send the net neutrality to /dev/null, please, head on.
  - msla 11mo ago
    > If you want to send the net neutrality to /dev/null, please, head on. What?
  - aDyslecticCrow 11mo ago
    Please clarify. How would dns do anything here? And what does it have to do with net neutrality.
- reactordev 11mo ago
  This is the worst idea ever. Adding even more personal information into HTTP headers is NOT the way to go. The web shouldn't require identification. The web shouldn't require segmentation on protected demographics. The business should. If the goal is to "protect the children", sending this information on every request is ANYTHING BUT protecting the children.
  - wibbily 11mo ago
hnpolicestate 11mo ago
[dead]
ranyume 11mo ago
This is my humble opinion, but such a coordinated action from the governments around the world at this particular time has a certain smell. It smells like they're worried about losing governmental narrative control. It could be about foreign powers, but tech nowadays allows regular people to contest power from the government so they become a target as well. AI, the internet, anonymity/cryptography, a probable war with china and/or russia, all exacerbate this worry. In short, governments want to retain control and prepare for the future, and to retain control they need to control the flow of information and they need to have a monopoly on information. To achieve this they need an intelligence strategy that puts common people at the center (spying on them) and put restrictions in place. But they can't say this outloud because in the current era it's problematic, so the children become a good excuse. This is particularly clear in governments that don't care about political correctness or are not competent enough to disguise their intentions. Such an example is the Argentine government, which these years passed laws to survey online activity and to put it's intelligence agency to spy on "anyone that puts sovereign narrative and cohesion at risk".
- omnicognate 11mo ago
  I'd rather my government control the narrative my children are exposed to than Andrew Tate. Edit: To expand, this is not just a flippant remark. People ignore Andrew Tate because he's so obviously, cartoonishly awful, but they are not the audience. It's aimed at children, and from personal experience its effect on a large number of them worldwide is profound, to the extent that I worry about the long term, generational effect. Children will be exposed to narratives one way or another, and to want to (re)assert some control that over that isn't necessarily just an authoritatian power play.
  - ranyume 11mo ago
    The targets to control are not children. They don't need to be controlled, from an intelligence point of view. Government's attention is not infinite, and between worries of losing power and worries about the wellbeing of children, one of the two is the winner, and it's not the children. If children's well-being was the priority, you would see other stuff being made.
seydor 11mo ago
Nothing could be better for this generation. They would be forced to the real unregulated internet, where nothing is boring and everything is magic and chaos
jonplackett 11mo ago
Whenever anyone invokes ‘won’t somebody think of the children’ it’s almost always an attack on freedom somehow. In this case freedom of speech and anonymity. If you need kids to verify their age, well they’re going to have to verify the adults too aren’t they. Which is what they really want. It isn’t the state’s job to police children - parents should do this. They should just mandate very good easy to use parental controls on devices and spend some money teaching parents how to use them.
stevenalowe 11mo ago
“All regulated user to user services” could arguably include email, text messaging, and voice calls. Is the goal to make the Internet “adults-only” or just to track everyone and everything? Who gets to decide what is “regulated“? Which grifters get to run the “official” age verification services?
WackyFighter 11mo ago
As a British Citizen I've just decided I don't care what the law is and I will just circumvent any of these laws. The current government have basically told everyone that OSA, Mandatory Digital ID etc. is going to happen whether the electorate like it or not. I suggest people put their energy to not trying to convince anyone and instead put their energy into protecting themselves and learning how circumvent these measures. People who understand the issues of these ID checks don't need convincing and those that don't you are unlikely to change their mind. Sooner or later it will become apparent that these laws are unenforceable (via VPNs, Tor or similar tech) and eventually they will be repealed or more likely no enforced like most piracy laws are now. The UK (as well as many of other countries) already lost the war against banning torrent sites (as they are effectively a hydra) and I don't think it get enforced anymore because I can to the big torrent with out issues.
- ruszki 11mo ago
  They don’t care whether it can be enforced against who publicly the law is. There are no people who understand any part of this, and they say that it’s enforceable. The goal is not that. They care about normies, not tech people, or criminals.
  - WackyFighter 11mo ago
    Normies will circumvent this when it becomes too onerous.
Hizonner 11mo ago
Counterproposal for actually useful, effective Internet regulation that would actually do something about the negative effects of "social media": 1. Ban paid advertising, of all kinds, everywhere, without exception. It's an incentive to optimize for engagement, and it's the root of basically all evil on the Internet. People are just gonna have to pay for things. I do not give a fuck if it destroys Google or whoever. 2. Ban collecting any information not intrinsically necessary to deliver a specific Internet service that the user has actually asked for. That includes the user's name. Require zero-knowledge attribute-based authentication of anything that specifically needs to be proven. Require accepting cryptographically anonymous payments. Even if specific information is necessary, you are just going to have to shut down until you have the infrastructure to collect it without getting anything else. The ability to get this information is another incentive to optimize for engagement. 3. Ban sharing even the actually necessary information, except as necessary to cooperate to provide some service that, again, the user has actually asked for. Considerable work involved in defining what "sharing" means, but something a hell of a lot tighter than the GDPR. And notice that I didn't say "sharing without opt-in". Unless you actually need it to provide a service to the user, you can't do sharing even with permission. 4. Just in case there are some incentives left, ban selection/recommendation algorithms that optimize for engagement or for anything that smells like engagement. You can have an exception for a user getting their own recommendation system from a third party that shares no control with the actual providers or carriers of the content. 5. Ban terms of service that prohibit scraping or third-party clients for centralized services. Consider requiring that everything over a certain size have a stable API that can do anything the regular UI can. This makes it harder to force people to keep using manipulative stuff. 6. Ban carrier NAT. Require IPv6 to be turned on wherever IPv4 is turned on, with every retail subscriber given least thousands of stable addresses. Ban "no servers" contracts. Ban "safety filtering" by ISPs unless customers can disable it trivially. Ban traffic prioritization by ISPs. This may allow the Internet to (slowly and uncertainly) heal back toward being a truly decentralized system. 7. Actually enforce your laws against fraud, unfair business practices, etc. ... or you can just fuck around and make kids' lives miserable, I guess. They don't vote.
Razengan 11mo ago
Why is it even a thing to make laws affecting people who have no say in those laws? "They're too stupid to have a say"

55 points by ibobev 11mo ago

This is the exact policing we don't want government to do regardless of the age. In my opinion it's the responsibility of the parents to decide how to raise their children and teach them how to live and adapt in the age of social media and maintain a balance. In the same sense one could argue that social media like Facebook or WhatsApp should be banned among older population because that's one of the major ways mis/fake information being spread among elderly people and now with AI videos they actually believe those fake stories to be 100% true as well. I think that's more risk to modern day democracy and well being of the society in general.

2OEH8eoCRo0 11mo ago
Nice opinion. Are you a parent? What if most voting age parents want this law?
- squigz 11mo ago
  Why does that mean people who don't want this law's privacy gets to be invaded? How is this not those parents' responsibility to ensure their child doesn't go on those sites they don't like?
- Larrikin 11mo ago
  Every single right you have can be taken away by the justification of it will protect children or it is wrong because of something some person wrote in a religious text. Parents who think they need this are bad parents and bad citizens. Someone pointed out that every single one of these laws in spirit does not need the website to verify and block the user. There is no need for complicated schemes of all websites implementing complex screening software and storing all our IDs. The website could report a single string saying if there is adult content and software the parent or authoritarian governments ISP has installed on the device could block it. But protecting children isn't the point
  - internetter 11mo ago
    Yup. We already have <meta name="rating" content="adult"> for this reason. Very conveniently ignored.
- sajithdilshan 11mo ago
  The fact of me being a parent is non of your concern I would say. If most of voting age parents want this, then what prevents them from enforcing it on their children. Why do they have to rely on government to be the parent. Maybe those parent should not have been parents in the first place if they need government to step in to raise their children.
- paganel 11mo ago
  They should be able to discipline their kids, if not, then it means that they're not capable parents and social services should be called on them.
xipix 11mo ago
We absolutely do need regulation of this harm by the law. It's how we stand together as a society, otherwise one child's rules will seem draconian against their friend's lax parents. There's plenty of precedent in other threshold ages at which children can start indulging in other potentially harmful vices. The vulnerable elder population is more difficult to define by a simple age threshold. We all decline at different ages and different rates.
- sajithdilshan 11mo ago
  I disagree > one child's rules will seem draconian against their friend's lax parents. So what is wrong with that? parenting is not equal among all parents in UK and why should only this aspect be normalized? > The vulnerable elder population is more difficult to define by a simple age threshold. We all decline at different ages and different rates. This is a hypocritical statement. For children we are more than willing to normalize and enforce rules as us adults wants because we assume all children grow up at same age and same rates, but when it comes to policing adults, the line is gray and more difficult because everyone is different.
  - xipix 11mo ago
    "Can I learn to drive?" "No, you're not old enough" "But my friend is already driving and he's 12" "OK, when you turn 12 you can too."
    - wavemode 11mo ago
      I'm sorry but the parent in this conversation is just stupid. As they say, you can't fix stupid.
    - sajithdilshan 11mo ago
      The parent in your conversation is just stupid and no matter how many laws we pass we cannot fix stupidity. In that case only thing I can suggest is to pass a law to assess the eligibility and maturity of people if they want to have children and issue a permit if they are suitable to have and raise children and otherwise they cannot have children.
zetanor 11mo ago
In theory, libertarian-type approaches seem reasonable when you model for cooperative actors. In practice, however, you hit tragedies of the commons and severe first-mover disadvantages. Well-meaning parents who ban teenagers from social media at the level of the family rather than at the level of society will mainly just socially ostracize their kids. I'd imagine you'd need to go Amish-mode and build a social network on behalf of your kids for anything like this to work. If you want to restrict kids from social media (which is an open question), I would much prefer that the laws not gate kids from social media directly as this would require social media websites to ask for ID. Rather, abusive parents who don't lock their kids out of social media websites should be sanctioned. First offenders get all of their Internet accesses taken down for a few months.
- runako 11mo ago
  > will mainly just socially ostracize their kids Parent of a teen here. This is just flatly false. If you have been a teenager or adult before, you will be familiar with the concept of the clique. For teens, there are athletes, nerds, theater kids, Lululemon kids, etc. There are cliques of kids who do not use social media (because their parents won't let them, or they don't want to, or they prefer to do something else, or their parents do not use social media, or they cannot afford the devices). Teens who do not use social media sort into different cliques. That's it. They are not ostracized any more than theater kids or computer geeks are ostracized. (The latter inclusion was intentional, as it may cause some self-reflection among well-adjusted adults who at one time were members of school computer clubs.)
  - internetter 11mo ago
    Fairly recent teen here. This is simply not true. All my friends who started adamantly against social media had Instagram come end of senior year. At college, I could count on one hand the amount of people I met without it. I know personally, I was never entirely without social media, but I switched to iPhone because I was so tired of being ostracized with regard to iMessage (this was pre-RCS, perhaps this particular concern has been alleviated) Sure I guess all the Android users could band together and form a clique and maybe that happened to some extent, but I didn’t wish to associate as an Android user. I don’t imagine kids want “social media Luddite” to be their clique. I wanted to be an outdoorsy kid with tech interests at the most. My choice of phone brand isn’t a part of this identity.

joefarish 11mo ago

Another well written article from Neil about some terribly written legislation. His personal blog is also pretty good - https://neilzone.co.uk/ https://neilzone.co.uk/

Citizen_Lame 11mo ago

Democracy is clearly heading toward complete authoritarianism.

cryptonym 11mo ago
A proposed amendment (of poor quality) is not a law
nothercastle 11mo ago
The uk got all of chinas authoritarian systems without any of the public safety and security brenifits that the Chinese got.

jasonjayr 11mo ago

It seems like after trying all this time, "Age Assurance/verification" is what is going to stick to end anonymity and an open internet. Under the never-ending banner of "think of the children!"

pembrook 11mo ago

Listen, I get it. The things that "kids these days" are up to is always seen as unholy and dangerous by everyone once they turn 30: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_panic https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_panic I'm actually pro the idea of regulating your child's use of technology at the parent level. But giving the tools to government to shut off access to communication for certain groups of people because parenting is hard is such a dangerous precedent to set. Once the mechanisms and tools to do this are in place, you're one piece of regulation away from removing the idea of privacy altogether and policing all forms of communication. You're forever building the infrastructure to enable 1984, making it super easy to turn on, and hoping the people in power never once abuse it. All over Europe right now there's some insane things being proposed by domestic politicians. In Denmark, the same people pushing for chat control have proposed a total and complete ban on VPNs. The impulse to safety is an understandable one in the context of children. But we aren't going to form a successful, independent, and flourishing next generation by hiding them from a huge part of modern life until some arbitrary age, and suddenly unlocking access to it in adulthood.

wongarsu 11mo ago
> one piece of regulation away from removing the idea of privacy altogether and policing all forms of communication. You're building the infrastructure to create 1984. Politicians attempt this all over Europe, but Britain is trying especially hard, with surprisingly little pushback. Not just the internet, also their state-run and state-accessible CCTV networks, now even with face detection. The idea of giving up privacy for the greater good is surprisingly normalized in the UK I don't think it's a coincidence that 1984 is set in England and was written by an Englishman
xipix 11mo ago
/
- pirates 11mo ago
  Why are so many parents completely OK with abdicating responsibility like this? Dealing with peer pressure and adolescence is something every parent needs to figure out how to do, sans governmental intervention.

Aurornis 11mo ago

Casual calls for banning children from social media are becoming common, even here on HN. The people demanding these bans always assume that the bans will cleanly apply only to sites they don’t use or don’t like, as if only Facebook and TikTok will be impacted. This proposed amendment shows exactly why this entire concept is problematic. The definition of social media site is this: > by regulations made my statutory instrument require all regulated user-to-user services to use highly-effective age assurance measures to prevent children under the age of 16 from becoming or being users. Now imagine all of the user-to-user services you use on the internet: Hacker News, Discord, Signal, any messaging app, the comment section on your favorite news websites. Even Wikipedia is a user-to-user website. The second point that people calling for heavy regulation neglect is that the only way to keep under-16s out of these websites is to enforce age verification on everyone who visits the website. So HN would require ID verification, and Discord, and your messaging apps. I always see ideas about creating age verification services that don’t disclose ID information, but a key part of age verification is confirming (as reasonably possible) that the person presenting the ID with the age on it is the same person who is trying to use the service. The same reason a 16 year old can’t walk into a liquor store with their mom’s ID is going to be applied to these age checks, requiring that the sites make an effort to associate an ID with the user. Otherwise, kids are smart and will borrow their parents or older friends’ IDs or even use online black market services if there are no negative consequences for sharing IDs that perform anonymous age checks. Associating IDs with user accounts is a key part of age check legislation.

PunchyHamster 11mo ago
"Internet bad, and as parents we don't really want to be parenting, that's extra work, therefore ban" stance
- everdrive 11mo ago
  I'm not sure why we give kids smart phones and laptops. This is actually unavoidable. Your school will give your kid a laptop, even if you prohibit it at home. Imagine being 14 and having an entire laptop to prevent you from ever needing to focus in class. I never would have managed it.

bluescrn 11mo ago

It not really about kids. It's about reducing online anonymity for adults, isn't it.

touristtam 11mo ago
I am not sure who is going to be interested in the general population amoral interest in a country that is/was OK with well known personal personalities being pedophiles and rags like the mail that will push whatever narratives they feel brings the more dosh.
alexfoo 11mo ago
Exactly. In order to prove you are not 15 online you have to prove you are >=16, even if you are 63. And there's no "I'm an adult" proof with leaking exactly who you are. This is thinly veiled "we want to know exactly who is behind every account" legislation. Expect it to be coupled with the usual "If you've nothing to hide you have nothing to fear" argument.

random9749832 11mo ago

Should we not believe that the much of the world is run by essentially the same club of people despite having separate democracies?

yunruse 11mo ago

If every website needed verification, why not simply move the verification to the device or ISP level? This seems like an authoritative move to track users across websites, and another good reason to keep using a VPN. Certainly a terrifying amount of responsibility and upkeep for each individual website. If the UK wishes to establish this and not want it to lead to an insane amount of privacy leaks, it should consider developing a technology that makes it work in a privacy-respecting way, like the European Age Verification Solution [0]'s Zero-Knowledge Proofs. [0] https://ageverification.dev https://ageverification.dev

4gotunameagain 11mo ago
To the device ?? That will turbocharge the draconian lockdown of computing. You will never own a computer you buy every again if that is pushed.
Aurornis 11mo ago
> the UK wishes to establish this and not want it to lead to an insane amount of privacy leaks, it should consider developing a technology that makes it work in a privacy-respecting way They don’t care about the privacy aspect. A key part of effective age verification is associating an identity with the account. They don’t just want to confirm that the person accessing the site has access to an ID of anyone who is 16+, they want to make an effort to associate the ID with the account. It’s the same reason why when you present an ID to buy alcohol they look at the photo to make sure the ID is actually yours, not just that you have an ID of someone older in your possession.
wongarsu 11mo ago
Even if we keep it at the website level, a government-run solution that allows you to verify your age without revealing your identity would be the logical solution. There is no good reason why they need to know who I am to know how old I am. The EU seems to be headed that way. The UK doesn't seem to care, almost as if associating real names with accounts was the whole point and saving children was just a convenient excuse for them
idiotsecant 11mo ago

everdrive 11mo ago

The UK in particular seems to be headed into a terrible direction with regard to free speech, being a nanny-state, and surveilling its citizens. I wonder if these sorts of measures (broadly) are supported by their voters or if the voters really have no choice.

random9749832 11mo ago
In the UK any topics in regards to politics that are widely spoken about in public is to do with immigration / inflation / housing crisis. Because of these other issues this is happening under the radar and no political party cares.
- WackyFighter 11mo ago
  It is because the vast majority of the people don't understand really what the internet is, how it works and therefore cannot understand the consequences. However the effects of immigration (both positive and negative), inflation and not being able to afford a house is more easily understood by the layman.
  - random9749832 11mo ago
    Most people definitely do not understand those things beyond price up or more brown/black people. But they are easier to create narratives around that provoke an emotional response.
    - WackyFighter 11mo ago
      Quite a lot of people understand more nuance than you would give them credit for. You are falling for the narrative that most people can't understand these things. Many just understand complaining about it won't do any good. I was talking with my Mother last night about this very subject and she is social worker in her 60s.
VBprogrammer 11mo ago
Not sure where you are from but it's not exclusive to the UK. People directly quoting the US president following the tragic death of a right wing commentator also found themselves locked up. Not to mention the same president suggesting that people suggesting that the military should refuse illegal orders should be locked up etc. I think realistically we've grown up in an age where you could say almost anything online, free from any threat of any kind of reprisal. It probably reasonable that, given the internet is key to daily life these days, that we treat it as no different from standing on a park bench and shouting. If you're calling for the death of people based on their religion or some other characteristic then there are consequences to your speech. Unfortunately the most recent example of this kind of legislation, the laws surrounding age verification on websites, was introduced under a previous government so it really doesn't matter who you vote for on this anyway.

b800h 11mo ago

I'm a parent of four, and the family controls on Android, paired with sensible oversight of laptop use at home, are perfectly sufficient. We've enabled WhatsApp, but check it every so often for the younger ones; they have a timeout, can use Wikipedia, and have a time limit on their use of AI. They can't use the stupid services like Tiktok.

aDyslecticCrow 11mo ago

There is a very simple and powerful alternative; add a flag to the http header standard, which is enforced device-wide or web-browser wide for any parent controlled device. If you dont want to serve or moderate your site for children and be exposed to fines, you block any request with the relevant flag. You just need a law to enforce what can be served when using the relevant flag, and some talks with Google, Apple Microsoft and w3 to implement it. you can even segment it my category; no-login, no-posting, no-18-plus, no-violence, no-politics, under-16, region-EU, region-UK. This leaves control to parents to do what they deem appropriate for their age, and doesn't turn into a authoritative surveillance state.... wait thats the point isn't it... nevermid there is no alternative /j

anthk 11mo ago
Or just lock the DNS' for every teen device. Much cheaper and less intrusive. If you want to send the net neutrality to /dev/null, please, head on.
- msla 11mo ago
  > If you want to send the net neutrality to /dev/null, please, head on. What?
- aDyslecticCrow 11mo ago
  Please clarify. How would dns do anything here? And what does it have to do with net neutrality.
reactordev 11mo ago
This is the worst idea ever. Adding even more personal information into HTTP headers is NOT the way to go. The web shouldn't require identification. The web shouldn't require segmentation on protected demographics. The business should. If the goal is to "protect the children", sending this information on every request is ANYTHING BUT protecting the children.
- wibbily 11mo ago

hnpolicestate 11mo ago

[dead]

ranyume 11mo ago

This is my humble opinion, but such a coordinated action from the governments around the world at this particular time has a certain smell. It smells like they're worried about losing governmental narrative control. It could be about foreign powers, but tech nowadays allows regular people to contest power from the government so they become a target as well. AI, the internet, anonymity/cryptography, a probable war with china and/or russia, all exacerbate this worry. In short, governments want to retain control and prepare for the future, and to retain control they need to control the flow of information and they need to have a monopoly on information. To achieve this they need an intelligence strategy that puts common people at the center (spying on them) and put restrictions in place. But they can't say this outloud because in the current era it's problematic, so the children become a good excuse. This is particularly clear in governments that don't care about political correctness or are not competent enough to disguise their intentions. Such an example is the Argentine government, which these years passed laws to survey online activity and to put it's intelligence agency to spy on "anyone that puts sovereign narrative and cohesion at risk".

omnicognate 11mo ago
I'd rather my government control the narrative my children are exposed to than Andrew Tate. Edit: To expand, this is not just a flippant remark. People ignore Andrew Tate because he's so obviously, cartoonishly awful, but they are not the audience. It's aimed at children, and from personal experience its effect on a large number of them worldwide is profound, to the extent that I worry about the long term, generational effect. Children will be exposed to narratives one way or another, and to want to (re)assert some control that over that isn't necessarily just an authoritatian power play.
- ranyume 11mo ago
  The targets to control are not children. They don't need to be controlled, from an intelligence point of view. Government's attention is not infinite, and between worries of losing power and worries about the wellbeing of children, one of the two is the winner, and it's not the children. If children's well-being was the priority, you would see other stuff being made.

seydor 11mo ago

Nothing could be better for this generation. They would be forced to the real unregulated internet, where nothing is boring and everything is magic and chaos

jonplackett 11mo ago

Whenever anyone invokes ‘won’t somebody think of the children’ it’s almost always an attack on freedom somehow. In this case freedom of speech and anonymity. If you need kids to verify their age, well they’re going to have to verify the adults too aren’t they. Which is what they really want. It isn’t the state’s job to police children - parents should do this. They should just mandate very good easy to use parental controls on devices and spend some money teaching parents how to use them.

stevenalowe 11mo ago

“All regulated user to user services” could arguably include email, text messaging, and voice calls. Is the goal to make the Internet “adults-only” or just to track everyone and everything? Who gets to decide what is “regulated“? Which grifters get to run the “official” age verification services?

WackyFighter 11mo ago

As a British Citizen I've just decided I don't care what the law is and I will just circumvent any of these laws. The current government have basically told everyone that OSA, Mandatory Digital ID etc. is going to happen whether the electorate like it or not. I suggest people put their energy to not trying to convince anyone and instead put their energy into protecting themselves and learning how circumvent these measures. People who understand the issues of these ID checks don't need convincing and those that don't you are unlikely to change their mind. Sooner or later it will become apparent that these laws are unenforceable (via VPNs, Tor or similar tech) and eventually they will be repealed or more likely no enforced like most piracy laws are now. The UK (as well as many of other countries) already lost the war against banning torrent sites (as they are effectively a hydra) and I don't think it get enforced anymore because I can to the big torrent with out issues.

ruszki 11mo ago
They don’t care whether it can be enforced against who publicly the law is. There are no people who understand any part of this, and they say that it’s enforceable. The goal is not that. They care about normies, not tech people, or criminals.
- WackyFighter 11mo ago
  Normies will circumvent this when it becomes too onerous.

Hizonner 11mo ago

Counterproposal for actually useful, effective Internet regulation that would actually do something about the negative effects of "social media": 1. Ban paid advertising, of all kinds, everywhere, without exception. It's an incentive to optimize for engagement, and it's the root of basically all evil on the Internet. People are just gonna have to pay for things. I do not give a fuck if it destroys Google or whoever. 2. Ban collecting any information not intrinsically necessary to deliver a specific Internet service that the user has actually asked for. That includes the user's name. Require zero-knowledge attribute-based authentication of anything that specifically needs to be proven. Require accepting cryptographically anonymous payments. Even if specific information is necessary, you are just going to have to shut down until you have the infrastructure to collect it without getting anything else. The ability to get this information is another incentive to optimize for engagement. 3. Ban sharing even the actually necessary information, except as necessary to cooperate to provide some service that, again, the user has actually asked for. Considerable work involved in defining what "sharing" means, but something a hell of a lot tighter than the GDPR. And notice that I didn't say "sharing without opt-in". Unless you actually need it to provide a service to the user, you can't do sharing even with permission. 4. Just in case there are some incentives left, ban selection/recommendation algorithms that optimize for engagement or for anything that smells like engagement. You can have an exception for a user getting their own recommendation system from a third party that shares no control with the actual providers or carriers of the content. 5. Ban terms of service that prohibit scraping or third-party clients for centralized services. Consider requiring that everything over a certain size have a stable API that can do anything the regular UI can. This makes it harder to force people to keep using manipulative stuff. 6. Ban carrier NAT. Require IPv6 to be turned on wherever IPv4 is turned on, with every retail subscriber given least thousands of stable addresses. Ban "no servers" contracts. Ban "safety filtering" by ISPs unless customers can disable it trivially. Ban traffic prioritization by ISPs. This may allow the Internet to (slowly and uncertainly) heal back toward being a truly decentralized system. 7. Actually enforce your laws against fraud, unfair business practices, etc. ... or you can just fuck around and make kids' lives miserable, I guess. They don't vote.

Razengan 11mo ago

Why is it even a thing to make laws affecting people who have no say in those laws? "They're too stupid to have a say"