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Do Not Turn Child Protection into Internet Access Control
- deleted 7mo ago[deleted]
- jameskilton 7mo agoThat's the trick, it's always been about control. No-one in such positions actually cares about the children.
- mindslight 7mo agoI think the truth is closer to them being tightly bound to one another over their shared "love" of children. Epstein bouncing around the academic community was the tip of an iceberg. Imagine the reputation laundering that goes on with all of these "for the children" NGOs.
- ElectroBuffoon 7mo agoThe adult entertainment industry cared decades ago [0]. Their solution is simple: sites send the RTA meta tag if applicable, browsers in accounts configured by guardians as "children" look for it. [1] [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Association_of_Sites_Advocating_Child_Protection https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Association_of_Sites_Advocatin... [1] https://www.rtalabel.org/ https://www.rtalabel.org/
- jmcgough 7mo agoWhat's sad is how effective this is. Religious groups figured out a few years ago that anti-porn groups accomplish nothing, but if you start an anti-trafficking group you can restrict porn access.
- mc32 7mo agoTraffickers now use refugee programs as conduits for human trafficking.
- chaostheory 7mo agoIt’s meta this time.
- phyzix5761 7mo agoWhich religious groups specifically are pushing for this and where? I want to know so I can call them out when I see it.
- tangotaylor 7mo agoTheir real goals are even worse than that. Some of these groups have admitted they're also about suppressing LGBT+ content. As the Heritage Foundation admitted: > Keeping trans content away from children is protecting kids. No child should be conditioned to think that permanently damaging their healthy bodies to try to become something they can never be is even remotely a good idea. https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2024/07/kids-online-safety-act-passes-senate-despite-concerns-it-will-harm-kids/?comments=1&comments-page=1#comments https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2024/07/kids-online-safe...
- gib444 7mo agoHeritage's tweet in the screenshot in your link makes no reference to "L", "G", "B" nor "+". Just "T"
- abcde666777 7mo agoI mean, I don't disagree with the sentiment of keeping trans ideology away from kids, in exactly the way I'd want to protect them from any kind of religious indoctrination.
- WarmWash 7mo agoFirey take there, but I know a few people who are trans and neck deep in the kool aid. They will tell you that 25-30% of population is trans, and just haven't been liberated/are in denial. Look, it's cool to be trans, no problem. These women I know are good people and net contributors to society. But they are off the ideological deep-end, and would happily spend 3 hours at the family BBQ lecturing an impressionable 13 year old about how those weird body feelings are very likely gender dismorphia. They're just as drunk on their flavor of delusional social media as any other religious nut is crazy about God.
- simonask 7mo agoThe idea that even a single person in the world is trans because of "trans ideology" is what's absolutely insane here. If you think you could be convinced by anyone that you're not living out your true gender identity, I have news for you... Most people, children too, are not having those thoughts unless there's actually a journey waiting for them.
- ip26 7mo agoIf that reduced trafficking, would it not be a worthwhile exchange?
- cs02rm0 7mo agoIt's always been internet access control, there is no child protection.
- baal80spam 7mo agoIt was never about children...
- squarefoot 7mo agoAccess control and pervasive surveillance has been the plan since day one; child protection is the leverage. Also, I don't expect people who repeatedly hide the contents of certain files to care about children.
- wewewedxfgdf 7mo agoYou must be crazy, who could possibly object to governments "protecting the children"?
- bilekas 7mo agoIt's too late and never about children, simply deeper forms of data harvesting and surveillance. What makes me extremely sad and concerned is that more recent generations simply have no idea or expectation of privacy online anymore. There will never be more of a fight against all this Orwellian behavior.
- taurath 7mo agoToo many people making too much money - to be honest, people really should blame tech for it, all it takes is RSUs to look the other way. Morally most of the US is running far away from tech and the surveillance state but here it’s still okay to work for monsters and self justify building population control systems and ad networks (often one and the same)
- dmix 7mo agoThe solution is always to constrain every level of government with more aggressive privacy laws. As long as they are allowed to do it then some private contractors will take the money to help make it ... or government will make their own in house tech teams. Relying on the morals of the general public to limit state surveillance is not a good strategy, but it is of course good when companies take a stand and the tech community creates tools to push back.
- throwaway173738 7mo agoIt should be prohibited outright. If you allow a loophole for corporations then they will just sell it as a service and we will never be free of it.
- taurath 7mo agoCompanies create the environment - the government is supposed to be “small” - and it must remain small so the US “consumer” can be leeched from
- dmix 7mo ago
- HardwareLust 7mo agoThe entire purpose of this exercise is control. "Child protection" is just a ruse to get the stupids onboard.
- borissk 7mo agoThe big tech is going to be one of the big winners from Internet Access Control. This will give them a more reliable way to link a user account to an actual human being - a link that can be monetized in a variety of ways. All kind of political regimes can use such regulations to enhance their control of the population. And the loosers are going to be the Internet users and small companies. The unfortunate true is IAC is coming to most countries in the world, no matter how much the Hacker News audience hates it...
- holyhnhell 7mo ago[flagged]
- amarant 7mo agoWhy would IAC lead to less slop? What's the mechanism here?
- charcircuit 7mo agoImagine if it was possible to ban people who spam instead of only being able to ban the IP of a spammer.
- amarant 7mo agoSo IAC is magically removing slop AND spam from the internet? It's still not clear how? Are we always broadcasting our government issued identity documents to every website we visit? I don't think that's gonna work out the way you think it's gonna work out
- charcircuit 7mo agoNo, but it means that you have the chance to moderate it since every user is tied to a real life person. >Are we always broadcasting our government issued identity documents to every website we visit? South Korea and China already have this where when registering an account you provide an id number.
- kogasa240p 7mo agoLol no
- cluckindan 7mo agoIt’s not even a debate if these controls are problematic. The litmus test is to mentally substitute the age field for an ancestry field and place the system in 1930’s Germany. Coincidently, that system was provided by IBM.
- bluegatty 7mo ago'Preventing children from buying guns is Nazism!' Actually, this sentiment is a 'litmus test' for common sense. We use age discrimination universally in all affairs, across the globe, across all cultures. Of course the same thing is going to apply to 'content', it's just a lot harder and creates ugly externalizations. It's a real problem, with no real solutions, at least not yet.
- cluckindan 7mo agoNobody is arguing that gun shops shouldn’t check buyers’ ID. That’s a strawman. The situation is more like we set up a new system of checkpoint booths on every highway at city limits, and anyone entering the city gets their ID checked, and that is justified by claiming that it’s so children can’t buy guns.
- bluegatty 7mo agoReferences to 'nanny state' are the strawman. Also - your analogy is wrong - we are not 'age verifying' the whole web, we're 'age verifying' things that ostensibly should be 'age verified'. Let's just say - 'porn' - to keep it simple. Porn is to be 'age verified' on the web literally like it is in the city shop. You don't have to present your ID to read CNN. They're not saying 'present your id to get into the city, but into the porn shop' Youre screaming strawman's and presenting strawmans. The issue is more nuanced then you've presented.
- cluckindan 7mo agoYou seem to have misunderstood the situation completely. The laws being passed in US states force OS level age and identity verification, shifting the responsibility away from individual websites.
- SilverElfin 7mo agoI read in some other discussions that this is about social media companies being able to increase their profits and nothing else. But the social media companies lobbying for these laws are shamelessly making it look like some kind of protect the children thing. It is all pushing more ads annd getting more users. The way it works: today, social media companies cannot advertise to children under 13 under COPPA. So these companies have to do their best to guess the user’s age, and if it is possibly a child, they can’t advertise and have to lose those profits even though MAYBE the user is an adult. Now they can shift the legal compliance costs and liability to the operating system provider or phone manufacturer and not be responsible for the user’s identity. And then they can advertise much more at that point, without being conservative. This also lets them have a different experience for minors that doesn’t advertise to them, but targets them carefully to keep them as users until they are older, so they start to become a source of advertising profits later. It’s well known that Meta is behind a lot of funding for nonprofits pushing these laws under a “protect the children” thing. But now even Pinterest’s CEO is shamelessly saying parents don’t have a responsibility to manage their own kids, and is supporting all of this. See https://www.gadgetreview.com/reddit-user-uncovers-who-is-behind-metas-2b-lobbying-for-invasive-age-verification-tech https://www.gadgetreview.com/reddit-user-uncovers-who-is-beh... and https://time.com/article/2026/03/19/pinterest-ceo-governments-should-ban-social-media-for-kids-under-16/ https://time.com/article/2026/03/19/pinterest-ceo-government... Evangelist/theocratic conservatives welcome these laws because they view it as enabling and validating age-based restrictions for other things. For example, Project 2025 called for a ban on porn. And separately, the Heritage Foundation pushed age-verification for porn websites, and has openly admitted it is a defacto porn ban. That should have been ruled unconstitutional on free speech grounds, but the current SCOTUS upheld it unfortunately. They’ll next use age-based verification for all sorts of content - maybe for LGBTQ stuff, maybe for something else. In the end, everyone else will lose. If you have to prove your identity to anyone, there is a high chance this information can be accessed and surveilled by the government. There is a high chance at some point, no matter what they claim, your identity data will be hacked and sold. And of course if you can be identified online, then anything you say or do can be traced back to you, and that can be used against you by the government. Suddenly, being a protester in these chaotic times will become a lot more risky.
- 7mo ago
- jjk166 7mo agoThe people pushing for "child protection" went to the island. It's not even about control, it's about shifting liability away from platforms so they can further gut moderation, reducing their expenses and getting away with doing nothing to stop the actual bad actors.
- cyanydeez 7mo agoI mean sure; but look at it from their POV, controlling the medium is the message right from 1984. Like LLMs, you can't learn about doing evil things without seeing how they benefit yourself.
- gruez 7mo ago>The people pushing for "child protection" went to the island. What does this even mean aside from a thinly veiled accusation that such efforts are being pushed by a shadowy cabal of pedophiles elites? I'm sure you can find some overlap between people who want to push age verification laws and people who went to the island, but what about everyone else pushing for the law but who didn't go?
- afh1 7mo agoThose are just stupid.
- girvo 7mo ago> shadowy cabal of pedophiles elites Its a shame that this used to just be a conspiracy theory one could mostly ignore, but we simply can't pretend that there isn't rampant CSA by those in power, because we've had proof of it despite their best efforts. Without wanting to get into politics, the leader of the United States right now was friends with the supposed ring-leader... > but what about everyone else pushing for the law but who didn't go? Useful idiots, perhaps? Wanting to protect their own power and gain more? It's certainly not actually about protecting children. Never has been.
- pipes 7mo agoI might be misreading you, but are you saying that the whole Qanon thing isn't a baseless conspiracy theory?
- Beestie 7mo agoWell age verification works so well to keep alcohol, tobacco and weed beyond the reach of minors so....
- superkuh 7mo agoHere we see the danger of the lay perception that multi-media screens are the same as chemical drugs. They are not. Not even close.
- polyamid23 7mo agoI wonder if setting my OS age to let’s say 10 would protect me from ads…
- varispeed 7mo agoThe people who want to control internet access use children to achieve their means. Why these creeps get to power? Normally people thinking too much about children would be casted out of society at best.
- vsgherzi 7mo agoY E S. I’m tired of hearing about child proofing the internet. We need a solution that’s not enforcing age or id verification on the os or internet itself like meta is pushing. We need better solutions and we should fight draconian enforcement with extreme prejudice
- kepeko 7mo agoMaybe the positive is that access control might break the illusion of privacy. Okay it's quite private in the sense that we don't know our friends browsing history but we know somebody, somewhere is collecting data and selling it to their 100 partners. Do you think there might ever be a moment when someone decides, legally or not, dump enormous amount of info, in a way that allows people to see what google searches other people did or browsing history etc? A moment when people's embarrassing secrets come into light.
- andai 7mo agoSaw a mini documentary once, which was filmed in China, that showed how easy it was to buy this data. Many apps spy on location and sells it to brokers. In the documentary, they showed a common practice: people buying their romantic partner's location history to make sure they haven't been doing anything naughty.
- plasticeagle 7mo agoAI;DR It's too late in any case, the Internet as we know it will eat itself. It will be destroyed by AI, and AI agents from without. And it will be destroyed from within by stupid laws such as the ones under "discussion" in this AI-edited and AI-illustrated nothingpiece. By which I not mean the infrastructure. I mean the current crop of social media websites. The infrastructure will remain, and perhaps something better will come along to use that infrastructure.
- einpoklum 7mo agoBut the whole point of bringing up child protection was to restrict Internet access, to police Internet content and to legitimize mass surveillance. Or do we really believe that states which condone support, fund and sometimes engage in the mass killings children are motivated by genuine moral concern for the young? ----- Still, there is somewhat of a silver lining: Perhaps this will encourage young people, and people who value their privacy, to avoid those "social networks" in favor of places where there is no age verification, 2FA with a physical phone number, etc. etc.
- dlcarrier 7mo agoFor the US, the worst of it started in 2019, when the held YouTube liable for all content that a child might access. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/YouTube_and_privacy#COPPA_settlement https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/YouTube_and_privacy#COPPA_sett...) That's what pushed all of the content networks to lobby for the liability to go somewhere else.
- Diffusion3166 7mo agoGiven that it seems Meta is commissioning these laws, I wonder if a viral open source license that explicitly fails to grant Meta a license to use or modify the software would effectively deter future lobbying for regulations which are especially difficult for the open source community to comply with.
- tzs 7mo ago> Given that it seems Meta is commissioning these laws That's not given. Someone found some good evidence that Meta was supporting (and even supplying language) for some of the earlier laws. Those were the laws doing age checks on websites and typically requiring uploading ID documents or face scans to those websites. I've not seen anyone provide evidence that Meta has anything to do with the laws that are like the California one, which do not require providing any documentation or proof whatsoever of age. They just required that the parent of a child who uses a device be asked to provide a birthdate or age when setting up the child's account, and that the OS providing an API that apps on that device can use to get the age bracket of the child.
- windowliker 7mo agoArguments about erosion of privacy miss the point: that is exactly what they want.
- cat-turner 7mo agoparents need to do their job and raise their children, and moderate their content.
- Ylpertnodi 7mo agoWhose great-grandparents are you going to blame?
- mamami 7mo agoBecause of course it's so easy. You obviously have never visited a site your parents would have disapproved of
- Nasrudith 7mo agoYou should never have had sex if you wanted to avoid doing anything hard.
- Keeeeeeeks 7mo agoA theory that’s floating around is that since frontier models are so good at sounding like humans, companies paying for ads are arguing that Dead Internet Theory -> ad costs should go down. Therefore, the push to ID everyone using the internet (even down to the hardware) is a way to prove that ads are being served to real humans in their target demographic.
- phendrenad2 7mo agoIt makes a lot of sense, too. Previously, governments wanted everyone to have to swipe their driver's license before accessing the internet. But now, businesses want it too. And that makes all the difference in a world built on capitalism.
- dzogchen 7mo agoAm I the only one that simply disregards everything that follows an AI slop image?
- tzs 7mo agoIs there something wrong in particular with that image? The composition fits in well with the content of the article, and the art seems pretty well down. I'm only seeing one error that would make me think "a human probably didn't draw this" and took a while to notice that.
- dzogchen 7mo agoIt is just awful and the entire composition does not make sense. Why is there a globe in the sky? Why is the text ‘open access’ there which is a completely different topic? No thought or skill went into that image besides the prompt that the author wrote in 10 seconds. It signals that the author probably didn’t put any effort in the article as well.
- bfivyvysj 7mo agoToo late - Australia
- hei-lima 7mo agoI was a kid with unrestricted, unsupervised internet access, and it definitely affected many things in my life. If I happen to have a child in the future, they won't go through that. The Brazilian government passed a law requiring age verification for every site categorized as 16+. It can't be self-declared, so companies usually resort to facial scans and ID verification. I DO NOT want photos of our Brazilian children going to foreign agents who are PROVEN to profit from and do God-knows-what with our biometric data. And the funniest part? The same law says 'regulation shall not, under any circumstances, authorize or result in the implementation of mass surveillance mechanisms,' but also mandates that these measures must be 'AUDITABLE.' In other words, someone needs access to that data. It’s all so stupid and incoherent. People who are less tech-literate FIERCELY support the measure, and whenever someone opposes it, they claim that person supports digital child abuse... Anyway... the responsibility of protection should come from the parents, not from companies that profit off your biometric data.
- deadbabe 7mo agoWhat did it affect in your life? Ultimately something with affect a kid’s life.
- hei-lima 7mo agoI mean... access to adult content at that age is really, really bad. It really messed up my brain. Gore videos, chatting with adults, etc. But I learned many good things, too. It's a double-edged sword.
- ivanjermakov 7mo agoI don't see how this "child protection" enforcement would help in case of small obscure websites with porn and gore? No way their admins gonna comply. I doubt ISPs would go that far to DNS whitelist compliant websites only.
- hei-lima 7mo agoI never said this would help... in fact, I’m against this kind of measure, at least the way it’s being done. But I wouldn’t be surprised if Brazilian ISPs are forced to block this sort of thing (just look at what happened with Twitter (X) the year before last).
- sfRattan 7mo agoIt's irksome that these laws and bills in multiple countries are trying to put limits on the general purpose computer. It's the wrong solution and arguably put forward in bad faith. If you want access control, the appropriate point for regulation is with ISPs and cellular providers, and the appropriate mode of regulation is requiring these companies to provide choice and education for families, and awareness of liability. Require ISPs and cellular network providers to offer a standard set of controls to their customers informing the common person (in common language) who is using those connections and what they are doing with them. For ISPs, this looks like an option for a router with robust access controls, designating some devices (based on MAC address) as belonging to children and filtering those devices' network requests at the network gateway, or filtering one hop up onto the provider's infrastructure (e.g. the ONT for fiber connections). For cellular providers, it looks like an app available to parents' devices and similar filtering for devices designated as belonging to children (based on IMEI). When a family signs up for Internet service, either at-home access or cellular data, the provider must give both parents a presentation about these tools, and about the liability the parents face for allowing their children unsupervised, latchkey access to adult content, no different than allowing children to drink alcohol. It may even make sense to require ISPs and cellular providers to track MAC addresses and IMEIs of devices their own customers designate as "for children" and make those providers liable for not filtering Internet for those devices, and also liable for allowing targeted advertising against those devices. I don't think achieving that setup is likely, but it's fundamentally the right way to solve this problem, and parents are pushing for a solution one way or another. I don't love it, but if it's coming almost inevitably we should at least push to do it right. It's a dead-end, losing strategy to blanket oppose one solution to legislators and provide no alternative. I write all of that as someone who values privacy and liberty, both in meatspace and cyberspace.
- gzread 7mo ago> filtering those devices' network requests at the network gateway, or filtering one hop up onto the provider's infrastructure These things are not possible with any reliability, we spent two decades encrypting everything.
- 7mo ago
- mamami 7mo agoYou don't understand, the children need to be exposed to Nick Fuentes, Andrew Tate, and algorithmically generated suicidal ideation from Facebook. It's crucial for their development, actually
- kgwxd 7mo agoThe only people on the planet that care about this, and understand it enough to maybe do something about it, are reading this thread right now. I got nothing. Anyone else got any ideas?
- TomGarden 7mo agoFor many it's not about the children. For many it is. I haven't made my mind up on this topic, but Jesus, the comments here strawmanning everyone who supports this kind of thing as disingenuous or worse... Wow. I'm not sure how we make any corner of the internet usable within the next few years without verification given all the misinfo, bots & AI slop anyway.
- psyclobe 7mo agoIf you think u can control a kids imagination to circumvent these controls then you are part of the problem
- abcde666777 7mo agoThe more people that use something the more it inevitably trends toward average mediocrity. A lot of these trajectories aren't really for us - the techy folk.
- a-dub 7mo agohow about if i do nothing the internet assumes i'm a child and therefore does not track me, show me ads or permit doom scroll feeds. then if i want i can jump through some hoops and pay some money or something to get a digital id that lets me attach a zkp to all my http requests that then unlock the magic of ads, tracking and doom scroll feeds. seems like a good plan to me.
- pembrook 7mo agoThat would be a solution if the people pushing this actually cared about "protecting kids." But let's be honest, governments want a dragnet they can use to monitor/control all internet communication. The people running western democracies are equally as power hungry and zealously authoritarian (my ideas will bring utopia!) as the people running the CCP. The only difference is, the CCP has permissionless authority, so they ended internet freedom in China decades ago. They didn't have to ask. Western authoritarians on the other hand, have to fight a slow battle to cleverly grind you down over time, so that you get tricked into allowing them to gatekeep the internet. It hasn't worked so far. The next step (this one) is "okay, so you don't want to have to ask us permission before you visit a website...but won't anybody think of the poor beautiful innocent children???" Emotions activated. Rational thought deactivated. They'll get what they want because they always get what they want. And you'll be convinced it's good for you over time, because most people just follow whatever the mainstream "vibes" are, and the elite sets the vibes. It's amazing a free internet existed this long. Great while it lasted.
- a-dub 7mo agoi'm only half joking. adding zkps to http requests is probably the correct privacy preserving technical solution that could be built into something sensible. the bigger issue is that lawmakers are thinking in terms of smartphones, tablets and commercial pcs as shrink wrapped media consumption devices with a setup step... not protocol level support that preserves parts of computing and the internet they don't even really know exists. seems like the ietf should have lobbyists or something.
- 7mo ago
- yalogin 7mo agoThe big issue isn’t even age verification. The end goal is verified user identification. They want every transaction on the internet to be associated with the exact identity of the user. No more anonymity. In the short term the way it will be implemented is this — age verification will not be a binary, it will also want to push your DoB, name, location etc and they say “the choice is with the user” but the default will be to send everything. Very soon there will be services that require DoB or name or something else to gate new or existing functionality. That is the slippery slope it will be built as and that is how they win the game
- owisd 7mo agoIf the end goal was user identification then the digital ID + zero knowledge proof age verification methods would be disallowed, which they aren't. https://blog.google/products-and-platforms/platforms/google-pay/google-wallet-age-identity-verifications/ https://blog.google/products-and-platforms/platforms/google-...
- mindslight 7mo agoYou got suckered by the marketing. Google's "zero knowledge" approach requires devices locked down with remote attestation, which prohibits end users from running their own code (when interacting with websites that prevent it, which as time goes on under this plan will be everywhere). The only actual difference here is that this is Google's desired approach to destroying anonymity and personal computing.
- pstuart 7mo agoThe moment "think of the children!" enters the chat is when suspicions should be heightened.
- ginko 7mo agoJust ban children from using the internet.
- rustyhancock 7mo agoQuite mind boggling to me that a nanny state can exhurt such a large amount of global control. It's darkly comedic that the single most toxic experience since the pop up ad - the cookie consent popup was similarly imposed. The solution is simple. Websites and services (including ISPs) become governed by the country in which they operate not the whims of foreign entities.
- bluegatty 7mo agoWhere do all these people come from? The 'nanny state' prevents people from driving cars without a license? That prevents you from buying myriad substances without a note from the doctor? That makes it illegal for you to buy a gun? " become governed by the country in which they operate not the whims of foreign entities" ... is not going to work, at face value, because 'operation' involves the consumer and the producer, each of whom may be in different jurisdictions, and even if they were in the 'same nation' ... this is still a hard problem. No easy answers, and there are legit concerns.
- 1vuio0pswjnm7 7mo agoControlling access to certain websites, i.e., so-called "social media", is not "internet access control". The web is not the internet. Nor are these laws limiting access to _all_ websites. Third, not all operating systems are controlled by corporations like Apple, Google, etc. and used to protect and promote corporate interests
- txrx0000 7mo agoWe have to separate child protection from Internet control so that the "protect the kids" narrative loses its potency. So here's a counter-narrative: we can implement digital child protection without Internet-wide access control, and it requires just 3 simple features that can be implemented in less than a week. There's no need to introduce new laws at all. This could just be done tomorrow if there is genuine will to protect the kids. 1) If you're a platform like Discord or Gmail, give users the option to create an extra password lock for modifying their profile information (which includes age). This could also be implemented at the app level rather than at the account level. Parents can take their child's phone, set the age, and set these passwords for each of their child's apps/accounts. 2) If you're an OS developer, add a password-protected toggle in the OS settings that gates app installation/updates, like sudo on Linux. Parents can take their child's phone and set this password, so they can control what software runs on their child's phone. If we have this, then 1) isn't even strictly needed because parents can simply choose to only install apps that are suitable for their child. 3) If you're a device manufacturer, you should open-source your drivers and firmware and give device owners the ability to lock/unlock the bootloader at will with a custom password. Parents should be able to develop and install an open-source child-friendly OS. Companies like Apple and Samsung have worked against this for years by introducing all kinds of artificial roadblocks to developing an alternative OS for their hardware.
- renewiltord 7mo ago[flagged]
- tzs 7mo agoSo basically parents set the child's age and apps rely on that if they need to know if the user is old enough? That's pretty similar to the California bill. Parents set an age when creating a child's account. The OS provides an API to get the user's age bracket from that, which apps that need to know the age bracket of the user can call.
- txrx0000 7mo agoThe California bill gets it backwards. Rather than Internet services taking the user's age and deciding what content to serve, the Internet service or app should broadcast the age rating of its content to the OS (if convenience is desired), like how movie ratings work. The responsibility to decide what content is suitable for a child should rest in the hands of that child's parent, not the state or the corporation. edit: on second thought, realistically, the API solution is too brittle regardless of which way it goes. Because the API requires every service to implement it and that's not happening, whereas an app installation lock only requires one child-friendly OS to implement it, then parents can choose that OS.
- cdrnsf 7mo agoThe people pushing these bills are the same that are looking to ban library books. They’re either bad or ineffective parents (or both). Instead of having a healthy relationship and discussion with their kids they’d rather impose their own regressive ideas by way of legislation on everyone.
- donpark 7mo ago[dead]
- 1970-01-01 7mo agoI'd be ok with this if both ends of the spectrum were covered. Sorry, you're too old to access this computer. Go ask a younger adult if you want to read the news or see photos of your grandkids.
- braiamp 7mo agoI fail to see why the "protections" that child data deserves, isn't also the same kind of protection that everyone deserve. In what way are children special, in a digital world, that adults shouldn't be protected the same way?
- gzread 7mo agoIn this world where we are committed to not making laws affecting the freedom of an adult in any way, even to be forced to consent to things.
- skybrian 7mo agoDevices with child locks turned on really shouldn't have access to everything on the Internet. A simple protocol could let cooperating websites know when child locks are on, so they don't show inappropriate content. Whitelisting or blacklisting could handle the rest. This doesn't mean every device needs to implement child locks. It also shouldn't affect anyone using unlocked devices at all.
- AJ007 7mo agoHow does that even begin to make sense? I want to protect my child from X type of content -- one of many jobs of a parent, but I will trust all content to self report to be child inappropriate? "Inappropriate" is entirely subjective and can not be defined as some sort universal bool -- and that's before you get to the point of actively malicious actors like Meta and Tiktok actively exploiting children for their content farms generation and ad impression factories. If the user owns and controls their computers -- as they should -- then that subjective content filtering layer belongs there, in the owners control. If its a child's, then the parent owns the device, not the child.
- skybrian 7mo agoThe idea is that society should have some common standards for what's inappropriate for children. For example, parents don't want their kids to buy cigarettes, but also, stores don't want to sell them cigarettes. When there's consensus on this, cooperation is possible. Parents have an easier time when they get cooperation from the rest of society. But there isn't going to be consensus on everything, so content filters are still needed.
- iamnothere 7mo agoSo simple, just get various Christian, Muslim, atheist, traditionalist and progressive, sane and insane parents to all agree on a common set of what is appropriate and inappropriate. And then enforce that on all of their children. Why didn’t I think of that? That should go great.
- k33n 7mo agoWe had a good run when the internet was a disruptive force. But mass adoption of anything always leads to where we are. The internet is an established institution. The wild west days are over. If you're looking for that vibe, p2p technology in small corners will be where you can find it.
- jacquesm 7mo agoFor almost three decades authorities have been wondering how to put this 'free communications' genie back into the bottle without taking the GFW approach. It looks like this time they just might get it. If you really believe that this is about child protection then you are much too gullible, that was never the main reason. If the authorities really wanted to do something about child protection online they'd spend a fraction of what they are going to spend on this on building out the departments in the various countries that actually work on that problem exclusively. As it is they have more work they can handle, which leaves a lot of cases lying and far more of these perps active than what would otherwise be the case. So as long as you don't see that you know for a fact that this child protection is not the real reason.
- SilverElfin 7mo agoIt is all about advertising profits. See what I said at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47471747 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47471747 But what do we do about it? Look at social media comments on this topic. There’s huge support for these age verification laws. Parents chime in about how their kids were affected by social media and how badly this is needed, instead of taking responsibility for raising their kids properly. That article by the Pinterest CEO calling for these laws is naively seen as some sort of sacrifice of profits for the good of everyone’s kids. And no one talks about privacy or the effects on speech. And all these well funded nonprofits pushing these dishonest bills onto legislators have time and resources. Feels like the privacy friendly people are losing the battle.
- novok 7mo agoIMO instead of age gating everything, it should've been the other way around, which is making unrestricted smartphones or similar an 18 or 16+ device, much like cars.
- deleted 7mo ago[deleted]
- AvAn12 7mo agoYou can’t determine age from a face scan. And it’s trivial to hold up a photo of an older person. Seriously if a website wants an image of your government ID or facial image, maybe ask yourself if you really need to access that site. There WILL be breaches and those drivers license scans will get loose in the world sooner or later. Fully agree that this is all about access control. No thank you.
- WWilliam 7mo ago[flagged]
- jchook 7mo agoLike the evergreen comic, "How would you like this wrapped?" by John Janik For decades policymakers have been trying to sell us the same surveillance state they accuse their adversaries of having, wrapped as either security or protecting children. https://i.redd.it/ifb8agngc7dy.jpg https://i.redd.it/ifb8agngc7dy.jpg
- nirui 7mo agoYou all saw the Epstein scandal, right? If you saw one cockroach this randomly, then you know there are thousand hiding. Maybe that's why Epstein is un-lived. So I found it very ionic that, to quote on quote "protect" child from online harms, they asks you to upload the photo ID of you and your child to, guess what, real potential pedophiles. Of course they're going to claim your information is totally safe... just like Bill Gates told his wife it's safe to have sex with him after his STD infestation. Sure, I don't really know how the companies will actually handle your personal photos, but there's a history where a tech CEO made an attractiveness comparison website using photo obtained from their user uploads without user agreeing. So go figure. The best way to protect your child is to tech them how to use Internet for their own benefit, and only allow them to create accounts after they've learned how to use Internet correctly. The companies and governments will NEVER do that for you, they'll only steal and steal even more.
- mrcwinn 7mo agoThis happening and it can’t be stopped. There is bipartisan consensus, so hard to come by otherwise, because both parties share the same corporate interests. Deal with it.
- funnybookbinder 7mo agoban porn altogether
- reboot81 7mo agoAnyone else open for internet v2? Like a completely new system, with everything that we enjoyed with the first one around the millenia: buggy webpages, slow downloads, crappy browsers, having to download plugins… Lets do it again!
- 4k93n2 7mo agoAutonomi seems like a good start
- SarahC_ 7mo agoGullible to believe its about kids - especially when there's a million options to limit the internet on devices already. IMAGINE A WAR. Now - wouldn't a government LOVE to know who's saying what? Rather than shutting down the entire $$$$$ corporate internet. Money concerns as usual.
- gasull 7mo agoUnfortunately they won't be stopped, so we have to look for the solution ourselves: - Linux distros without age verification (which excludes distros with systemd) - decentralized/distributed microblogging: Nostr, Bluesky, Mastodon - decentralized social news sites: Lemmy - GrapheneOS
- delusional 7mo ago> They come from recommendation systems, dark patterns, addictive metrics, and business models that reward amplification without responsibility. That rings extremely true to me, the issue you run into is that liberals and conservatives don't believe the government has any role in the commercial relationship between adults. This means any limits you want to impose on the "free market" has to be directed at protecting children, since those are the only people you're allowed to protect. We already have many laws to safeguard children, the problems being that children have been taught to self declare as adults, and parents can't stop that without some help from the technology.
- PeterStuer 7mo agoIt never was about the children. It never was about age. The goal has always been identification. And the goal of identification is control. Never be fooled by the 'easy to evade' part. That is always just a first step to get you to care less to oppose the introduction. Once in place, the enforcement and compliance mechanisms rapidly change to the real system.
- mk89 7mo agoThey are doing crazy things to not do the one single thing that had to be done years ago - make Facebook, Instagram and Co. pay hard for the damage they brought on our kids and society. 90% of the crap our kids are exposed to comes from there. Not sure what's left to tackle, once you remove these websites from the picture - videogames? News?? Oh right, the kids...
- jaromilrojo 7mo ago[dead]
- xg15 7mo agoThis article seems to be mostly an AI reformulation of the standard retort in tech: "Protecting kids online should be the parents' responsibility, not ours!" > Guardianship is something else. It is the contextual responsibility of parents, teachers, schools, and other trusted adults to decide what is appropriate for a child, when exceptions make sense, and how supervision should evolve over time. Moderation is partly technical. Guardianship is relational, local, and situated in specific contexts. But there is no mention how this guardianship is supposed to work in practice if unsupervised internet access is pushed everywhere: Kids are expected to have their own devices (or will use one from a friend), school whatsapp groups are at the same time essential for communication and potentially dangerous. Even if a page filter is set on a phone, which pages exactly would you block or unblock?
- Spivak 7mo agoThey don't get unsupervised internet access, there's always a supervising adult in between the child and the internet. For the child's devices it's the parent who has access to parental control software which will restrict access no matter where the device is, at the school it's the school, at the library it's the library, and for the friend's device it's that friend's parents. The answer for what pages do you block is that you use a service who does the work of categorizing pages for you. Every parental control software worth their salt will have this. It's basically the entire value proposition of paid filter software. No matter the enforcement mechanism there is no way to defeat the "Shawn's parents are cool" problem because Shawn's parents will just give him their IDs to verify. And I know this because I'm for sure going to be that parent.
- ModernMech 7mo ago100% of the time they want to “protect children” it’s never about that, because if it were, they would do something also to feed them and prevent them from being shot by guns. If the same people pushing for age verifications for all children are not also pushing to feed all hungry children, then I simply do not trust them, at all.
- wesselbindt 7mo agoI object to the use of the verb "turn into" in this title. It assumes any of this was ever genuinely about child protection, and it absolutely isn't and never was.
- LynettaPir2144 7mo ago[dead]
- locopati 7mo agoJust wait until the governments start really coming after the people they don't like based on their internet usage. We're already seeing this in the US around social media profiling. States have tried to associate queerness with sex (rather than existence) in ways that will lead to restricting queer content.
- FMKKMF 7mo ago[dead]