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It'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
by bilekas 7mo ago
It'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 agoThe US government is very far from small. That said, I'd be open to rules on the data broker industry though considering it's scale and how the foreign governments can buy/hack them bypassing all of Tiktok-esque national security handwaving.
- fc417fc802 7mo ago> Tiktok-esque national security handwaving. Algorithmic feeds are propaganda tools. A foreign government being able to propagandize your citizens is a legitimate threat, not handwaving.
- Nasrudith 7mo agoThink for a nanosecond about how exploitable that is. Imagine for a moment that a foreign nation had obtained proof that say ICE was engaged in sex trafficking and publishing it only for it to be blocked as 'destabilizing propaganda'. If anybody says that propaganda is a valid reason for censorship I say, censor thyself first.
- fc417fc802 7mo agoNo one said anything about censorship. There are many things that would pose a threat if controlled by a foreign adversary. Communications platforms with algorithmic feeds are one of them.
- greenie_beans 7mo ago"morals of the general public" helps lead to "more aggressive privacy laws"
- arcanemachiner 7mo agoBy RSU, I'm assuming you mean this: > Restricted Stock Units (RSUs) are a form of equity compensation where employers promise company shares, typically vesting over time, offering a way to align employee interests with company performance
- taurath 7mo agoYes - you buy the house in the bay, and companies will lock you in with the vesting schedule. Just another 3, 4 years and you’ll be rich enough to afford a second one, or retire early. Some people can self justify what they do, or pretend because they work in a “nicer” part of a company than the core revenue part that it’s all okay that what pays their checks is mass behavior manipulation. I don’t like ads or social coercion, at all.
- smartmic 7mo agoIt’s only too late when we stop fighting back and accept it as a given. Don’t underestimate civil disobedience and the hacker spirit.
- catlifeonmars 7mo agoThis. Fatigue and despair are by far the most effective way to control a population. You don’t need to convince people you’re doing the right thing, you just have to convince them that it’s too late.
- bigyabai 7mo agoI do underestimate the hacker spirit. HN's response to Client Side Scanning was disheartening, barely anyone could condemn Apple despite the obvious red-line being crossed: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28068741 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28068741 And once you step outside HN, forget it. You can save yourself, but there are thousands of people that do respond to the "think of the children!" nonsense and will call you a creep for objecting to it. It's game over now, you will fight against this for the rest of your life.
- tqi 7mo agoI think it would be helpful to engage with the possibility that they are neither stupid nor ignorant, rather that they simply have different values and priorities than the early internet users.
- sillysaurusx 7mo agoI’m not sure it’s possible to have different priorities without being stupid or ignorant of history. Once you concede a certain right, such as a right to privacy, you rarely if ever get it back. Most people seem not to care about this, despite ample evidence that it’s something worth caring about. Stupid is the obvious term for it, though obtuse could work as well. Of course, I don’t blame them. They haven’t lived in a context where they need to care. All of the reasons they’ve heard to care have come from stories of people who lived before them. But ignoring warnings for no good reason is still dumb. A better thing to engage with is whether we can meaningfully change the situation. It might still be possible, but it requires an effective immune response from everybody on this particular topic. I’m not sure we can, but it’s worth trying to.
- Kim_Bruning 7mo ago> They haven’t lived in a context where they need to care. You might believe you don't need opsec, and then new laws are passed, or your national supreme court overturns the case that gave you your rights, or someone invades; and now suddenly you're wanted for anything from overstaying a visa, outright murder, or simply existing. USA, right now, peoples lives are being destroyed because the wrong people got their data. Lethal consequences exist in Russia, Ukraine, Israel, Palestine, Lebanon, Iran. Certain professions per definition: Journalists, Lawyers, Intelligence, Military. Certain Ethnicities. (Jewish, Somali) ; Faiths... It doesn't need to be quite this dramatic though. But you might accidentally have broken some laws and don't even know about it yet. Caught a fish? Released a fish? Give the wrong child a bowl of soup [1]. Open the door, refuse to open the door. Signed a register; didn't sign a register. The list of actual examples is endless. The less people know about you, the less they can prosecute. [1] A flaw in the Dutch Asylum Emergency Measures Act (2025) that would have criminalized offering even a bowl of soup to an undocumented person. The Council of State confirmed this reading. A follow-up bill was needed to fix it.
- SilverElfin 7mo agoFor the government it may be surveillance. For the people funding these new laws, it is about advertising profits. See what I said at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47471747 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47471747
- catlifeonmars 7mo agoWith respect, this take is a good example of all or nothing thinking. It’s not too late.
- mattmanser 7mo agoGo watch the newest Louis Theroux, into the manosphere. At points Louis and whatever absolute scumbag he's with walk around the streets while the guy is filming his own content. There are kids, literally 11/12 year olds, walking up to these predatory, evil, scammers on the street going "oh my god it's MC" or whatever their name is. Multiple times. And he hardly gets to spend any time with these men because they clock pretty quickly they're not going to come off well. In the space of like 3 days, Louis caught on camera at least 10/20 young kids recognizing these toxic people from videos they had watched. Even the ones who'd been banned from most platforms, because their videos get reshared under different accounts and insta/tiktok/facebook aren't bothering to catch these reshares. It really is about the kids. And it all comes down to these people convincing young men to spend money on scam courses or invest in scam brokerages by getting them to join telegram group chats. And suddenly it's really clear to me why telegram's under scrutiny.
- weird_tentacles 7mo ago[dead]
- zingerlio 7mo agoI share your observations and concerns. But I don't think the current erosion of digital privacy and the censorship creep were made to address those. There are better ways (even though they are not fully fleshed out yet) to minimize toxic/populist influence, but a blank cheque to sacrifice our rights isn't one.
- gzread 7mo agoSome of them clearly are - the one in California.
- aucisson_masque 7mo agoHas there even been a time when we really had privacy online ? It didn't take long for the CIA to sniff everything on everyone, early 2000's. Maybe you're referring to the 90's but at that time the internet wasn't really that popular, it was a niche thing.
- NeutralCrane 7mo agoI live in an area that has been declared among the safest in America. Two months ago a 17 year old girl from our city disappeared. Turns out she had been being groomed for a year over Discord and in Roblox by a 39 year old the next state over. He eventually convinced her to let him pick her up, after which he filmed himself having sex with her, killed her, and then dismembered her body. He apparently was grooming other underaged girls in a similar way as well. The digital age presents with it novel forms of danger for children, and for adults for that matter, and there is absolutely no way to effectively address these risks without some amount of reduction in privacy. And before someone inevitably says “where were the parents?” and wash their hands of the situation, a healthy society should care for and protect all children, especially those whose parents do not. It’s one thing to hold the opinion “I am willing to sacrifice some number of lives, in order to preserve privacy”. That is an honest and potentially justifiable opinion someone may hold. But declaring the situation to simply be a facade to harvest people’s data seems to me like a reflexive response to avoid uncomfortable truths regarding the situation.
- weird_tentacles 7mo ago[dead]
- AJ007 7mo agoDiscord & Roblox - no encryption, privacy, or anonymity on either of those platforms, by the way.
- chinabot 7mo agoIf the government knew every single user on the internet's name, address, phone number and what they had for breakfast, it would not stop monsters like this, or even slow them down.
- mindslight 7mo agoStill none of that necessitates the type of mandatory partial-ID verification being pushed by these laws. Roblox can straightforwardly require ID verification on their own, of both the parent responsible for the account, as well as the children directly (request documentation from their school, birth certificate, etc. Yes, high touch to verify these documents. But we're talking protecting children here, right?) If anything this type of legislation is about absolving them of the responsibility of doing so!. Imagine a company making their offering "for adults only", with de facto kid usage as parents relent and just let their kid use an older age on the computer.
- Nursie 7mo ago> It's too late and never about children, And this is why these arguments never translate well to mainstream politics. By declaring a-priori that it is not about the children, and leaping straight to a deeper, more sinister motive that you're sure is there, even if you're right that there are people behind the scenes agitating for these sinister reason, you ignore that a lot of the general public and a lot of the political class genuinely do see this as a child protection issue. If you can't even concede this, then you're missing large parts of the picture and your attempts to resist it will be that much harder.
- Nasrudith 7mo agoFuck the idiotic general public then. It was never about the children and everybody knows it. The same people who won't pay half a percent more in property taxes to ensure every schoolkid can get three meals a day suddenly care enough to want to give up privacy for safety? Pull the other one, it has bells on it.