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Comment by squarefoot | Hacker News Reader

I know about nothing on this topic, so my only comment is that every time I read something along "please think of the children!" it suddenly raises warning flags.

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There are numerous valuable child protection laws and services against which your knee-jerk would be unwarranted. It just happens to be warranted this time around.

True. More generally, "think of the children" is representative of a class of moral imperative arguments. Such arguments are easily abused by policy makers as they are an emotional short-circuit of logical reasoning. Being skeptical of people who make such arguments is healthy.

He didn't say that all measures to protect children should be rejected out of hand. He is just saying that if someones argument starts and ends with fear baiting around children then they probably have ulterior motives.

They professed unfamiliarity with the details of the situation, so they could not have known that the emotional appeal was the full extent of the argument.

Thanks, that's exactly my point.

It's the same excuse the EU are currently using to infringe upon its citizens' privacy and require messaging application providers to install backdoors. It's an appeal to emotion, and since we have to assume that these legislators are intelligent, it's a disgusting overreach.

They are indeed overreaches, but even a valuable child protection law or service might presumably be pushed with an appeal to emotion. It’s better to familiarize yourself with the situation before dismissing it out of hand. While preserving a healthy dose of skepticism, of course.

I agree that one should look into what is being proposed and its implementation, but in both these instances backdoors are being introduced. Once backdoors are in place any government can petition access, malicious actors have attack vectors, and all of this for one proposed quasi-legitimate use-case.

We are in agreement here.

Nice :)

That doesn't mean that "think of the children" shouldn't raise warning flags.

The fact that good child protection laws exist doesn't invalidate the fact that "child protection" is frequently and increasingly used to push through bad laws.

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