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> Tired of misleading cookie banners? The EU Commission has finally proposed a solution: set your privacy preferences in the browser once, and never see another
by Phemist 2mo ago
> Tired of misleading cookie banners? The EU Commission has finally proposed a solution: set your privacy preferences in the browser once, and never see another banner.
So lawmakers do know how to make legally binding preferences based on device settings? What a crazy innovation.. now if only parents were given these options to indicate their child is using a device.. we could do away with all this Online Safety Act nonsense...
- tgv 2mo agoThe problem there is that parent's won't know how to do it, or won't care. Many can hardly operate the most user-friendly phone, let alone manage accounts. The online safety acts and its EU counterparts are somewhat risky, but nobody wants the mention the only proper alternative: a total ban on "social media." Not just for kids, but for everyone. Or a ban on smart phones, that would work too, at least short term. But: money.
- broken-kebab 2mo agoIt's ok if parents won't care. It's a choice too.
- SoftTalker 2mo agoYes, you can't make parents care, but make it easy for the ones who do, and you'll also pick up some number of those who care but only if it's not too difficult. There's no reason a parent should have to set permissions separately in 10 differents apps on a child's device.
- Kuyawa 2mo agoWhen we buy a new phone, the configuration process should ask if the device will be used by a kid. Easy and simple. When restoring factory defaults, the same question, just in case the phone is sold, gifted, stolen or whatever. If you are going to give a phone to a minor you should set that option right from the start.
- conception 2mo agoThat’s not true. Every TV app has a parent setting. That’s really easy to use browser support profiles just like TV apps do bad. UX doesn’t mean that it can’t be set up easily for parents. Windows itself could have profiles for kids that has all this set automatically. It’s not hard. There’s just no will to do it.
- alt227 2mo ago> There’s just no will to do it. Exactly. The problem is its from the parents side.
- deleted 2mo ago[deleted]
- monkpit 2mo agoSpoken like someone who has never used parental controls. They’re a shitshow.
- alt227 2mo agoYou miss my point. It is that parents dont care. However good the parental controls are, there are millions of parents who just dont and wont ever care.
- monkpit 2mo agoYou replied to a comment saying the companies don’t care to make it easy. Then, you shifted the blame to parents instead of the companies. I got your point just fine.
- conception 2mo agoOh thank god! Thats a fantastic reason to abandon the tens of millions that do!
- alt227 2mo ago> The problem there is that parent's won't know how to do it, or won't care. This is unfortunately the reality. The other day a friend asked me to help her make her phone safer for her kids to use. I started by asking if she set permissions on the apps she downloaded. She looked at me blankly, "What permissions?". I proceeded to show her how you can granularly control what you allow each app to do on your phone and what access it is allowed. Her head blew up, she had no idea any of this existed and after gong through a few menus, she didn't care any more. It was all too complicated and too much to think about for a busy mum. This is why governments unfortunately are having to try to protect people from themselves. As tech competent people it all seems so simple to us, but we need to remember the majority of the population just click 'Allow All' and blow past all permission and security questions as they have no idea what any of it means.
- dijit 2mo ago"is this device for you, or a child" is one of the first options when setting up an iphone. I haven't set up an Android in a while, but, I doubt it's massively different.
- alt227 2mo agoYeah but most parents devices are for them, they just let their kid use it too.
- dijit 2mo agoAh, I guess it's impossible to have a quick enable kids mode then. We should just give up and give random individuals access to everyone's camera roll.. no other way.
- dwedge 2mo agoIs there a term for agreeing with someone's stance but disagreeing with the person because they're so insufferable and sarcastic in the way they present the argument?
- SoftTalker 2mo agoThat's why the setting should be on the device, not the browser or individual apps. One setting that you could even get pre-configured when you buy the phone.
- alt227 2mo agoIt still doesnt solve the problem of the millions of parents that just dont care.
- GaryBluto 2mo agoWhy should I care that they don't?
- preg_match 2mo agoRight, this is the big picture nobody acknowledges. I'm not paying the price for your kid because I don't know them. I couldn't care about them even if I wanted, because their existence doesn't even intersect with my life. Yes, as a parent, you are required to put in more effort into parenting your kid than random hypothetical people. That's obvious, and has been the case forever. I understand the concept of community, but community is not me sacrificing my privacy for someone 1000 miles away. If parents don't want to do X, Y, and Z to lock down their devices then that is their right. And I support their rights, so the conversation is over right then and there IMO.
- djaro 2mo agoBecause we live in a society and trillion dollar companies exploiting children for the crime of having negligent parents is bad. The aim here is to protect the children. "Just let parents protect them" doesn't work when there's millions of parents that won't care.
- SoftTalker 2mo agoMore parents will care if you make it easier.
- BiteCode_dev 2mo agoA child can still access knives if the parents don't care.
- readread 2mo agoI've build some moderately sophisticated server systems up on "bare metal" (as the kids say), know my way around a shell better than most programmers, understand networking better than most programmers, et c., and I still find restricting and monitoring kids' devices to be a huge pain in the ass. The only places it's not extremely shitty are the Switch (which still isn't great) and Apple devices. Options between "we don't have tech in the house" and "wide-open tech, we have it all" are all some amount of painful, usually for no good reason. (I remember once investigating how to do some pretty basic stuff for this in Linux, hoping to find something nicer than manually setting some executable permissions and firewall rules and then having to go back and change them all the time, and the closest thing to a guide I found was an old article from Red Hat that basically lead with "LOL, good luck you poor sap, Linux sucks at this" before going on to explain the various bad ways available to sort-of, but not entirely, accomplish it with a lot of work, and significant ongoing time-burden)
- vidarh 2mo agoUK mobile operators already defaulted to blocking adult sites before OSA, and lets the subscriber turn it off, which seems like a reasonable option. It'd be even better if there was a way for people to selectively turn it off for specific devices without MITM the connections. It wouldn't be that hard to come up with a mechanism for that.
- mcfedr 2mo agoif parents wont make the slightest bit of effort why should the rest of us pay to keep their children safe?
- tgv 2mo agoA bit of empathy goes a long way. That child may be your nurse one day, taking care either of you or candy crush.
- djaro 2mo agoBecause children shouldn't be the ones paying for the crime of having bad parents. Children should be safe regardless of what the parents do, because they're independent people and not property.
- mcfedr 2mo agoyou can say that about a lot of things, but we do largely trust parents. but all these social media bans seem to stem from parents who claim to be helpless, when really they are lazy and the wider impact of these laws is massive. no technical way exists to do this without taking the privacy of everyone
- throwawayk7h 2mo agoIt should be by default, rather than relying on the parent proactively.
- mike_hock 2mo agoDon't fall for the "we are just stupid" propaganda, which is used constantly by governments acting in bad faith. Browsers already had settings for deleting cookies. There was never a reason for banners whose only function was pulling the ladder up from smaller competitors and concentrating power in the hands of an oligopoly that could siphon data directly from the OS. This coupled with a law mandating ISPs provide a "change IP on demand" feature would have given users a sort of "Tor light" level of privacy. Strong privacy is trivial to achieve for a government that doesn't have a conflicting goal of total surveillance.
- aspbee555 2mo agochanging IP is not really enough for privacy, there is many ways to fingerprint your machine/browser and uniquely identify you across networks https://creepjs.org/checker https://creepjs.org/checker
- deleted 2mo ago[deleted]
- mike_hock 2mo agoNo, but it's the obvious starting point. You can then put additional laws on top banning fingerprinting out of band (if you care about window dressing), fund development of anti-fingerprinting technologies, fund Tor, run exit nodes in a transparent and publicly auditable fashion, etc. It's not hard to make privacy work when you are the government rather than working against a hostile one.
- IanCal 2mo agoWe have those laws. You need consent regardless of how you get the data. That’s they say “we value your data” (a phrase you can read in two ways) and ask if 1368 partners can have it for various uses.
- inigyou 2mo agoI think it's because every single website breaks if you don't allow cookies at the browser level. Some knowledge of what the specific cookie does was necessary.
- echelon 2mo ago>>>>>>> now if only parents were given these options to indicate their child is using a device.. we could do away with all this Online Safety Act nonsense... THIS Holy shit. This is such an obvious fix. And it shuts up those surveillance state goons immediately. My God, why have we tried to summon up the ghost of 1984 when such a simple fix as this will do. Parents can lock devices into "child mode" that emits "user is child" headers. Websites can then block. The blast radius is zero. Good God, we need to fast track this into browsers right now. If we hurry we might be able to point to this as the technical fix. Once some of the infrastructure exists, OS vendors can hook into it. Firefox devs - please do this right now. Please spearhead this. I might have to vibe code an advocacy site for the spec and set up a GitHub / RFC process.
- spiderfarmer 2mo agoMake a website about that. I’ll spread it.
- inigyou 2mo agoCalifornia AB1043, in other words
- dijit 2mo agoI agree, and I agree with the enthusiasm on which you bring in. I've long since considered that the efforts for online child safety should be pointed at educating parents and spearheading some kind of certification of compliance for child safety of software and websites. [this product is certified to adhere to EU:CSA] Then you can block everything not certified, and the software that does the blocking would also be certified, the two major prongs you need (endpoints and sites working together: else they're blocked). The rest of the money goes to education for parents about this fact, and the dangers of not doing it, and how to do it. This is super "easy" (when comparing to the effort it would take for putting backdoors in everything). Which is why I think that the reason is definitely not child safety, and more about crime control. Me talking about UK blocking people unless they ID themselves in 2013: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6979295 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6979295 Me talking about how its disingenuous because we have superior technical solutions to this particular issue last year: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45010902 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45010902
- Levitating 2mo agoThat's exactly what the California's Digital Age Assurance Act does but that wasn't well-received either.