Do Not Turn Child Protection into Internet Access Control
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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
(Spring is nearly here and my excuse about my rig also heating my house is about to end. Soon I will be paying extra to run my a/c as my rig pumps out a steady 1000w under load.)
No chips for you, random government. No chips for you either, or you. And you.
Of course you're probably going to say something about how guns and bank accounts are crucial components to crime, in which case the same holds for AI in the mexican telecoms hack.
That sounds reasonable. A bank can just be an institution that holds money for people; they don't need to be all over their customer's business. It is like a telecom not being responsible for what their customers say. In a simple sense banks don't need KYC.
And the same logic about hacks also applies to access to a command line or Linux or a programming language or just a general-purpise computer.
"Given the recent [everything] hacks were [definitely] done with [Python scripts, a Linux distro and a computer with disabled secure boot], it seems [...]"
I hope you get my point.
As for your gun comparison, a gun is a very optional thing and the identification is just for purchase. It's not like a GPS tracker and shot counter is welded onto it at the time of purchase, nor do you need a gun to do the vast majority of everyday tasks.
As for bank KYC, well, I for one am actually not sold on the idea that having to send a blurry photo of my ID and smiling at my phone camera to open a Relovut account is in any way beneficial to society. Terrorism still gets financed, money still gets laundered, taxes still get evaded. But every swipe of my card can and will be used against me by banks, loan providers, advertisers, government agents and eventually also hackers.
One glance and I have your full name, home address, SSN, all online handles and aliases, employment history, email, and phone number, instantaneously on a HUD. It doesn't even need to be marketed as "doxxing as a service;" it can just be marketed as "professional networking" or "social media." That way people will voluntarily submit their information and all rights over it to the platform.
Until people feel their privacy being viscerally raped on a minute to minute basis nothing will change.
1> Auto-nude. Today we can "nudify" photos and videos. Soon, augemented reality glasses will be able to nudify eveyone in real time. (This is totally possible today.)
2> Auto-tranlation. Cool. Everyone can talk to everyone, but users will have censorship options. I don't much like hearing australians so I will just have the glasses make them all sound like proper Texans. And the sound of people with alternative views to my own are replaced with calming country music.
3> Lie detection. Glasses will look for facial/voice body ticks suggestive of deception. Good luck talking your way out of a ticket, or explaining to you boss how you were "sick", when they have a lie detector online 24/7.
4> Censorship of "bad" objects. Signs with ads or news that I do not agree with will be blocked and replaced with more appropriate text. Mosques will appear as churches. Garbage and pollution will become happy birds and clear blue skies. Homeless people will be replaced with attractive young people (see #1 above).
5> Race replacement. I don't like certain races. So my glasses now make everyone Chinese. So long as I don't turn off the glasses, I can live my custom racist utopia.
Live translation seems either better than autonude or worse, but not in the middle of the pack I’d assume? Am I missing something here?
I've used the internet for 30 years, built websites etc. I've never been asked ID for general transactions. On the other hand we've had restrictions on porn for kids since before I was born. I'm skeptical much is new.
Right now my personal preference would be a standard for web services certifying content as "kid friendly" combined with a standard for "kid friendly" devices that block uncertified content by default. This would accomplish the alleged goal of blocking children from accessing adult content without infringing on the rights of adults.
It may well be true, and worrying about the possibility that it is is what should motivate people to build alternatives/workarounds.
Find a way to accomplish the stated goal in a way that doesn't erode our rights, and you'll win a lot more people over.
Once people start arguing those measures aren't good enough and that you need to start sacrificing some of your rights in order to keep kids safe, then your position will look a lot more reasonable to moderates when you push back.
This is what they want to happen with the initial round of "it's just a DOB field bro" legislation. It'll be completely useless, easy to bypass, and annoying to adults. But, everyone will be warming up to this government mandated prompt in their OS. Perfect, now legislators know they have a foundation to work with to introduce "reasonable" amendments to this prompt that require you to upload ID, for example. Frogs in a pot.
Now - wouldn't a government LOVE to know who's saying what? Rather than shutting down the entire $$$$$ international corporate internet.
Money concerns as usual.
At the same time, we have to be real: Online anonymity has significant, real-world drawbacks. I don't think it's reasonable to keep dreaming of the 90s or 00s when the internet was a comparatively innocent place. As society is more and more digitized, the stakes become much, much higher. An information leak 30 years ago was bad, but it had a fairly limited impact radius. Today it can lose you your house, your savings, your relationships, and even your life ("swatting" comes to mind).
This extremely ill-advised legislation across various jurisdictions cannot just be brushed off as a global turn towards fascism. It is that, but there are also real, legitimate concerns that need to be addressed, and the tech world has not leveraged its expertise to come up with any solutions so far. Sticking our head in the sand crying "git gud" while millions get scammed out of their life savings... It's not great.
(Children getting into trouble is honestly the least of my concerns here. Don't let your child go online unsupervised. The internet is not for them. You wouldn't let them roam free in a red light district or an underground illegal weapon's market either, even though they are unlikely to come to any harm.)
I think people who say this should back it up by posting their full name, date of birth, SSN or other ID number, and address. A phone number would also be helpful so we can call and verify that they made the post. Otherwise they're not being honest.
But this isn't (intellectually) honest, either?
Maybe you can justify asking that they post under their real name, but asking for the kind of information that's required to steal their identity isn't the same as asking them who they are.
Do please be specific about those. Provide concrete examples and justify for the class why those involved couldn't have voluntarily done away with anonymity for that particular interaction.
Hypothetically someone can browse a tor site in one tab, post on 4chan in a second one, all while accessing online banking in a third. The bank can use hardware backed 2FA to verify you. Where's the issue here?
Here is one example: It's likely that we will never know who was behind the attempted backdoor in the xz library, which was almost successful in making a huge number of Linux installations worldwide vulnerable to remote exploitation. [1]
That malicious contributor is protected by online anonymity. Now, I know that it's probable that a state actor was behind "Jia Tan", meaning they could have been supplied with a fake ID as well, but that's still a higher barrier.
I don't think (and have not stated) that anonymity is worthless - it definitely is, especially if you're persecuted minority or under other kinds of threat. I just don't think it's helpful to pretend that it is completely unproblematic.
In USA, small business, small bank and credit unit are often used as excuse to push back these kind of rules.
Online anonymity has significant, real-world benefits which every doxxed person ever will list for you.
So you are afraid of minor information leaks getting you killed, but you’re also trying to tell us that online anonymity is a bad thing?
Come on. This argument isn’t even coherent from paragraph to paragraph.
> I don't think it's reasonable to keep dreaming of the 90s or 00s when the internet was a comparatively innocent place
This is such a strange argument as the internet was most definitely NOT an innocent place, even relatively speaking, in that period.
I think there is a lot of nostalgic history rewriting in these claims. Much like political movements that claim that the past was a better time, it’s easy to only remember the good parts of how things were in the past.
How about this is actually the real problem? Online banking is not worth an omniscient global surveillance state, let alone the immense amount of leverage gained by this digitization.
The solution is called a durable power of attorney and then moving significant assets to different financial institutions with e-statements. Or the heavyweight option is a living trust.
Mandatory identity verification or locking down software really have no bearing on this problem. Scammers leverage generic apps in the app stores just fine.
This problem most certainly is a part of the global turn towards fascism, which is ultimately based on frustrated people demanding easy answers and then empowering those who are able to give them easy answers by lying to them.
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.
But I also think the internet has more potential for harm now. Widespread social media makes it easy for predators. YouTube actively incentivises content creators to produce brain numbing shit instead of the more amateur and educational content I was exposed to. Instagram creates vicious dopamine hooks that children have no mental defense against.
Also sorry to sound egotistical but I think I was an outlier that drifted into doing educational things, many or most kids will spend every moment they get just playing video games.
That being said, I’m in favour of parents doing the parenting, not the government.
I am in the same predicament as both of you, having grown up with unfiltered internet access, and not wanting it to have went any other way (I love my life, actually!)
There is a condescending tendency when people hear what I said above, to tell me that I am an outlier, or, God forbid, a "genius", and other equally worrying conclusions regarding my character.
I agree that, today, there are millions more ways that children can fall for objectively negative things, that have been completely, and intentfully engineered to be terrible in a way which can be exploited for profit.
But also, I simply think that, with enough access to mind-numbing content, for long enough... people will simply realize that, actually, they don't want that. At least, not just that.
Adults are not a good term for comparision in the matter of less aggressive addictions, like with social media, because they already have lives they want to escape, with responsibilities and whatnot.
These are not scientifically sourced claims, but, in my experience, children have a lot more time, energy, curiosity, and will/intent to create, for one reason or another, and they have been doing those things since time immemorial.
This is just a consequence of having access to ~the entirety of all human knowledge at their fingertips, with no restrictions, and with an incredible amount of free time at their disposal.
This aspect of parenting is really hard. If your kid is 10 years old and all their classmates have Roblox, saying 'no' to your kid does isolate them socially, because all the other kids are talking about what they did in Roblox at school and play Roblox together after school. To make it worse, some primary schools even allow kids to play Roblox at school during breaks or the teachers make TikTok videos, making kids want to have Tik Tok as well (TikTok-teachers are a real phenomenon), etc. So, even when you are trying, it gets undermined by others. Trying to fight it is kind of pointless, because most other parents don't see the issue.
Same for e.g. instant messaging, it is basically Sophie's choice: you allow them into these addiction machines or you isolate them socially. It would be much easier if social media and certain types of addictive games were just not allowed under 16. Just like we don't sell cigarettes or alcohol to kids.
I also completely agree with the counterpoint that age verification on the internet is generally bad.
Luckily, some things can be done without grave privacy violations. E.g. where high schools 10-15 years ago would gloat about being iPad or laptop schools, more and more are completely banning smart phones and laptops during school time.
At any rate, it's perfectly possible to hold both views at the same time: social media and addictive games should be forbidden under 16 and the age verification initiatives are terrible for privacy.
Maybe we should just ban Facebook, TikTok, etc. no more addiction, no more age verification needed :).
I think if a perfect system existed that could gate websites behind age verification, without any privacy compromise and assure the user of this, I would support it. There are zero-knowledge proofs of course, but they're a black box, and the user still has to trust that the system has been implemented correctly. Unless mandated by law, companies have no incentive to build a perfectly private age verification system.
So instead every time I got a new Linux or FreeBSD CD-ROM set, I would go through all the documentation and try everything out, and read source code. I got Pascal and C books through the local library, where you had to order the book and usually wait two or three weeks.
But I also didn't have the omnipresent cameras (you could still do dumb stuff as a kid and not get filmed/photographed). No pressure to show a fake version of yourself on social media. No pressure to be always available through instant messaging.
I feel like it was the best time to be a kid. Access to information was relatively easy (albeit slower than on the internet), but without all the terrible downsides for kids. Without all the dopamine shots and highly addictive social media and games. Without the all-ways present tracking of your every move.
Though even the kids slightly after me probably still had a good time. Early 2000s, Internet access became more ubiquitous, but it still took almost 10 years for the worst of addictive websites, etc. to rise. I sure miss the early web.
Unfortunately, internet evolved to become much more predatory and addictive, with platforms like Meta running world-scale ops that they know lead to addiction, depression, scam and sexual harassment.
I honestly would like to give my children the same experience of the internet as the one I had. Unfortunately I fear that it may not be possible anymore. That's not to say that we should run a surveillance experiment with everyone connected to the web.
I'm roughly the same as you in terms of information access, though whether I was a child is debatable; was 14 when I got my first dialup connection. My family wasn't tech-adjacent so it was me who pushed for it; the only control in place was the amount of time I'd spend there.
The only control I have in place on my son in terms of content is whether something is scary or if he won't be able to understand most of it, because arguably he's still too young for many things.
But once he's 12 I don't think I want to restrict most things in terms of content, and by 16 I personally don't care if he watches hardcore midget porn, as long as I have the chance to contextualise and explain the industry.
But.
What I'd rather control (or ban, even) is rather all ML-driven doomscrolling platforms and the "social media" that turned people no longer social. The Internet you and I grew up in no longer exists (or it's a small hidden fraction of it), and now it's a wasteland of engagement traps and corporate revenue directed dark patterns.
You and I learnt to separate wheat from chaff, research, deep dive, and what not. Internet is now, by and large, instant gratification loops and user tracking. I don't want my son (or myself, actually) pulled into that. Porn is literally healthier: you bust a nut and go on with your day, but I see some people wasting hours on end, reel-after-reel, with increasingly targeted ads shoved to their face. Hard pass on that.
Age control, if any, should lie in the hands of the parent/guardian. Make it by law a setting on the routers (new devices are <18 until admin approves them), or the ISPs for mobiles. I'm okay with that. Absolutely not on random third parties handling personal information filling the gap for every random website.
All of that leaving aside the fact that zero knowledge proofs solve this problem without sharing any sensitive information.
But of course, the corporations benefiting from this are not interested in pushing those, IMO reasonable, age controls.
All fine. The dangers of access to unfiltered information are certainly real but not worthy of constant worry.
I saw very quickly that what separates a live person from a very deceased flat person was a moment of sillyness/forgetfullness/stupidity. "I didn't SUSPECT that is even possible to happen to a person!" - "We're....fragile?!" - "Ah, bike helmet... I think they're REALLY GOOD idea...."
PSA's just aren't listened to by teenagers. But something that's real - that happened, with the security camera timestamp in the corner... kids learn safety.
I mean, is that good?
Isn’t another way of looking at that to say that it poisoned an innocent time and left you aware and afraid of death when you might otherwise have been enjoying the end of your childhood without that burden?
In general parents might want their kids to be a little more mindful, but not grow up too soon.
Yeah now they know they might die, but they also know they will die.
Cool. What now? You might have a kid thinking that they are going to die tomorrow, for the next 70 years.
If you expect admins of edgelord websites to respect the laws of different countries or even care about kids, I suggest checking out 4Chan’s response to various attempts to regulate them.
The uncensored internet taught me more than I could ever have been taught in school, and I'll be forever grateful for that. It didn't take me long to understand that I could generally hate no ethnicity or people or country, and the people who do are manipulated by their government or other powerful figures in their life (or disproportionately swayed by experiences in their life). Humans are pretty much all the same, we all have far far more in common than we do differences. I have a stronger perspective of this than my immediate ancestors (demonstrated over and over throughout my life) and I do credit my exposure to the open internet for a huge amount of that.
There is one huge and problematic difference now, though: the uncensored internet of the 90's is nothing like the disinformation-saturated internet of today.
I've heard this a few times, but what was so bad? And, sorry to break it you, reality has some bad bits to it - do you think being ignorant of these is useful, or that it just sets you up for a bigger fall?
Why do you think removing independence (nannying) from another human being is the answer? Would you want to be nannied for ever, by corporations and governments?
Oftentimes the answer is "nobody". There's just nobody you can rely on to get the level of care you require. There are lots of arguments like Bowling Alone for how the breakdown of community has contributed to this separate issue.
In my view, by constructing and supporting legislation like this, people are implicitly admitting that parents, teachers, schools, communities, and all the rest are failing at their job of keeping moderation local and raising the next generation.
But the thing is, unfortunately this is a true statement in too many cases, including mine. My parents failed to parent me well enough, and my counselors were either instrumental in my own trauma or failed to address my issues soon enough, and as such I developed a sex addiction in adolescence fueled by persistent ongoing stress from my upbringing that I continue to seek treatment for to this day. Could content moderation laws have cured my parents' narcissism? Nope. Could they have prevented me from needing to act out to relieve the stress of my early relational trauma? Nope. Could they have helped match me with more competent therapists? Nope.
Could they have caused me to go to rehab for alcohol abuse instead of porn? Maybe. For all his statements I disagree with, I subscribe to Gabor Mate's view that traumatized individuals are compelled to be addicted to something. At that point, there are a lot of things to become addicted to other than the ones you can content moderate, given the (false) assumption that it's possible moderate enough of it.
Pornography was necessary but not sufficient for me to have it that bad coming out of childhood. Early exposure to it was only incidental. My upbringing was far more significant a cause in this. But unlike which websites I was allowed to visit as a child, a 100% chance of having emotionally involved parents isn't something you can legislate into existence.
What I feel isn't being talked about enough in this discussion is that this implicit realization that the world just sucks sometimes leads to justification that someone else needs to step in to protect children's fragile minds if the formerly trusted institutions aren't. The big option left is the platforms and systems hosting the tech themselves so they're targeted instead.
My opinion? If your parents aren't able to raise you to be free of significant trauma spawning "hungry ghosts" that you will need to turn to your unfettered internet access to feed, whether TikTok or LiveLeak or elsewhere, lest you are bombarded by stress every waking moment... then the situation was hopeless to begin with. You can't fix that problem with laws. You should have just had better parents, as awful as that sounds. And because of nothing more than bad luck, you're just going to have to unpack that problem with the healthcare system for years/decades, because there's not much else we know of that can meaningfully address childhood trauma that severe.
However, I don't think the medical establishment will necessarily help. Or looking outside generally - this will probably only compound or defer the problem. You will have to deal with it yourself in the end. I believe everyone already has all they need in themselves to do this.
It takes incredible conviction and force of will to keep your kids off the phone till they’re 16. Fewer than 1% of parents manage it. The problem is that the teenager wants a thing that everyone else has and it’s hard to keep saying no.
I think internet connected smartphones should be illegal for kids under 16 to own or use. It’s a tough sell tho.
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.
Above all, the LLM panopticon will watch us all.
Technology will not save us. Nothing will save us but ourselves and we're busy making rent and doomscrolling.
The information asymmetry between individuals and the powerful is permanently reversed.
Thinking about it in terms of the monopoly of violence being the root of power negotiations; typically a resistance movement has more information about the state/colonizer than vice versa, because power has to be visible - guerilla warfare thrives on this.
That's gone. The powerful will have complete detailed information and automatic analysis.
The medium is the message.
What's different is that, for a while, the early Internet age (and a little bit earlier - Usenet etc) made that underground very accessible. Now we're reverting back to the original situation where it was very much shunned and criminalized.
What is it you mean by this?
I see so many offhand comments about the dystopian UK here but AFAICT there’s a lot of noise and very little meat. The only thing I can think you mean is the UK is currently debating a bill to limit jury trials to more serious offences. While I do find that pretty offensive, there’s nothing fast track about any of its justice system at the moment.
On the contrary, people are waiting years for trial, which is bad for the accused because they have it hanging over them, and bad for victims who get no swift resolution.
Which is funny as thats what I heard from my older family growing up. Except it's a lie and they have plenty to hide!
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.
For example, it seems to me there is a whole lot of worry around megacorporations, often related to capitalism and the inequalities it brings.
In that context, if you don't place privacy as a priority, how are you not either stupid or ignorant? Is my premise just wrong?
It's really more just concluding that those corporations should be liable for their behavior. It also has nothing to do with "the Internet" which is largely unaffected. Except of course ideas for forcing OS behavior coming out of California which are obviously bad.
I actually think things could be a lot simpler if we just made the laws like alcohol: it's illegal (with criminal liability) for a non-parent adult to provide <restricted thing> to a child. Simple enough. Seems to work fine as-is for Internet alcohol purchases. Businesses dealing in restricted industries can figure out how to avoid that liability. That's entirely compatible with making it illegal for businesses to stalk everyone, which we should also do!
The early Internet users weren't people who subscribed to AOL to look at porn in the 90's. They were the people who were granted access to the ARPANET to work in the 80's. The Internet was an exclusive community back then. You had government employees, knowledge workers, and elite university students who had all passed institutional screening processes. You were only allowed to use the ARPANET if you were using it to do something useful and aligned. Therefore you could feel reasonably assured that anyone you talked to online was going to be better than the average person you'd find going outside and walking down the street. If you wanted to know who they were, you could just finger their username. If you wanted to know who owned a domain, you could whois it, get their name and then even write them mail or call them.
People have wanted that old Internet back for a long time. i.e. the one that existed before Eternal September. Those are the people who run your tech companies. The ones who remember what it was like. These people understand what people actually want isn't always the same thing as what they say they want. They understand why the only truly successful Internet spaces on the modern Internet are the ones like Facebook that got people to be non-anonymous. Another example is the best places to work that folks desperately want to get into are the companies like Google whose intranets are much more like the old Internet. These are really the only Internet spaces that normal people want to use. Because people want to interact with other people who are similar to them. Because people want to know who other people are. Otherwise we can't operate as the social creatures that evolution designed us to be. I don't think any civilization in history has operated its public square as a gigantic red light district where everyone is required to wear a mask. So why should we?
Overcoming the anonymous religion problem that somehow glommed onto the hacker and cyberpunk movements is more important and urgent now than it's ever been, because the Internet has been filling up with billions of AI agents. It's gonna be Eternal September in overdrive. Humanity is really facing a tradeoff where you'll have to have gatekeeping again and won't be allowed to conceal who you are, or you can be gaslit by machines forever in your own robot fantasy.
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.
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.
I don’t intend to give up or accept limitations on these rights because you consider yourself to have “privacy rights” or ownership interests in my records, my memories, my perceptions, or the reality in front of me. I find the notion of the government or another person interfering in this process, the perception and recollection of reality, to be creepy and totalitarian by itself.
In 1984, it is not only that the government is aware of Winston, but that it routinely tampers with or destroys evidence of the past & demands to control the perception of the present. I do not think we should let a government do that, even for a good reason like “protect your privacy” any more than we should let it destroy general purpose computing “for the children.”
> 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
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.
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.
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.
Well, your example wouldn't be solved by age verification in any way. They could still legally access Roblox or a discord private chat (or even another private chat method) after this law.
So the example show how it is about irrational fear and not protection in any way.
And this is an tragic edge case, if you want to take this kind of edge case in consideration, you also have to take in consideration what the age verification would imply as tragic edge case.
After all, dating apps are an even more extreme version of this. If you're attractive enough, you get to have many one night stands and many murder opportunities.
People are occasionally hospitalized due to self, family, or friends handling food improperly. That doesn't warrant a legal intervention whereas dining establishments do.
> before someone inevitably says “where were the parents?” and wash their hands of the situation
Nope, that's exactly what I say. The law cannot reasonably replace responsible parenting if society is to remain a pleasant place to live.
Many of us are pretty damn okay at beating back the flame and controlling the flow of the worst of things away from homes, but nobody is perfect.
We don't expect every family and parent in these areas to have fire fighting skills, self evacuation is recommended.
Parents every where now find themselves surrounded by the delibrately laid gasoline of addictive social media and grooming risks et al. and it's infeasible to expect every parent be skilled in defensive cyber secuirty.
It's reasonable to expect communities to want simple barriers and means of protection, the existance of reasonable control and throttling options for parents.
There's always a chance of horrible shit happening, but we shouldn't put every single person under a microscope to ensure the one in a million doesn't occur.
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.
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.
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.
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-safe...
>> Keeping trans content away [...]
Isn't it a stretch to round off "trans content" to "LGBT+ content"? I mean, from a pure logical point of view the statement is correct, because "trans content" is a subset of "LGBT+ content", and therefore "suppressing LGBT+ content" is technically correct, but it's at least misleading. The left's version of this would be something like "twitter is suppressing anti-immigration content!", and the actual example is some alt-right commenter saying that immigrants should be lynched. Immigrants being lynched is certainly an subset of "anti-immigration", but it's still misleading.
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.
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.
These things are not possible with any reliability, we spent two decades encrypting everything.
It is: disable CH encryption because the owner of this device, to whom we are leasing connectivity, has set the "isChild" flag for this device to true in her account with us so that we can filter the Internet for this device.
There's no such standard signal right now. But I'd prefer such a signal strongly over code that I cannot control running on my own device to enforce legislation. If we're going to enforce these things somewhere, code on my devices is the last place I want that enforcement to happen.
> ...and why would any device respect it?
Because if they do not the ISP drops all further packets and the connection dies.
If my kid takes their tablet to grandma and grandpas I want the preferences and signals to carry forward, even when connected to a network at household that is nominally only adults.
These technologies don't need to be bullet proof to be effective and they don't need to send more information than "treat all requests from device as being from under 8/13/18." The ills these age verification efforts are trying to address (and they are real problems) are from excessive, not casual or incidental use. Yes, there will be many kids that get around any reasonable control, but just making it less convenient will reduce harm.
I have various content controls on at my house. I'm the admin, I can turn them off whenever I want to. I almost never do, because 1) the block reminds me I should probably shouldn't be going to whatever site I'm going to and 2) for the most part, my experience is better with the "restricted" search engines/youtube/social media.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Association_of_Sites_Advocatin...
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.
I don't know how long their specific proposal would take, but on a Unix or Unix-like system the California bill could be done in a week.
0. Make a directory somewhere, say /etc/age_check, and in that directory create four files: 0-13, 13-16, 16-18, 18+, owned by some system account with permissions 000.
1. This would be the hardest part. Modify whatever is used to interactively create new user accounts to ask for the user age if the account is a child's account, and than add an ACL entry for the appropriate /etc/age_check file that allows the child's account to read that file.
The California bill says you have to ask for and age or birthdate but the API you provide for apps to ask for age information just requires giving an age bracket, so I'm taking that as meaning I am not required to actually store the age. I only have to make the API work.
2. The API for checking age is to try to open the files in /etc/age_check. Whichever open succeeds gives you the user's age bracket.
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.
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.
So the app requests a signal (like, calling an API), and the OS returns the signal (returning the age group).
Regarding API vs installation lock, TBH I don't think the law concerns that level of details. An OS or app-store installation lock that checks app ratings can be considered as a valid implementation.
The password-based app installation lock I proposed in my original comment doesn't require any kind of age checking at all, so it naturally doesn't fit the California law. The device owner (in this case, the parent who buys the device for their child) gets to decide what apps can be installed on their child's phone on an app-by-app basis using a password set by the parent. The app store doesn't need to know, and the apps don't need to know.
But yeah I get the point, API based solutions are complicated and brittle because they require all services to implement it properly. In contrast a user-set app installation password in the OS settings is more effective and easier to implement.
No it doesn't. A browser/appinstaller with parental/age controls enabled would fail as unavailable if there was no age rating on the website/app. This is exactly the solution we should be aiming for, as it keeps the incentives lined up instead of turning them upside down.
One big problem with the laws currently being pushed is that it leaves the decision for what sites are "appropriate" for kids completely in the lands of corporate attorneys. For example, Facebook will happily make an "under 18" site that uses LLMs to censor posts, but still contains all of the same dopamine drip mechanics. Whereas keeping the decision process of appropriate under the control of the end-device means parents could straightforwardly go beyond what corporate attorneys decide, and block Facebook regardless of the age rating.
I'm responding to another comment of yours here since HN loves the rate limit. In that comment you were talking about locked down bootloaders. But bootloaders are already thoroughly locked down, and most devices are still essentially usable. The current looming threat is remote attestation, which makes it so that websites (and other services) are able to prevent you from running software of your choice when interacting with them! The backwards legislation being currently pushed is all but guaranteed to end up in more demands for remote attestation, whereas the correct direction of information flow (sites/apps publish headers saying they're suitable for <18 etc) would not necessitate remote attestation.
I stand by my original comment. No new laws are needed. All of the features outlined in 1), 2), and 3) should be user-controlled, and there's no need to send info over the air.
edit: on second thought, there is a trap here. If hardware manufacturers lock down the bootloader, then we're basically still handing over parental authority to governments and companies in the long run. So I think for a start, we just implement a app-install password lock like sudo. It will be easier to implement than the API. The convenience API can come later when hardware manufacturers are banned from locking bootloaders.
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?
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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.
seems like a good plan to me.
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.
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.
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.
This doesn't mean every device needs to implement child locks. It also shouldn't affect anyone using unlocked devices at all.
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.
But there isn't going to be consensus on everything, so content filters are still needed.
Isn't that literally the California law?
> This doesn't mean every device needs to implement child locks
Which is the exact opposite of what the California law says, going so far as to mandate that open source embedded operating systems ask users for their age.
Lets do it again!
Coincidently, that system was provided by IBM.
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.
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.
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.
> 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?
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.
- Dox, coerce, blackmail, and ruin political candidates, powerful CEOs, and wealthy people. If they watch a category of porn that is embarrassing or have an affair, suddenly you have leverage against them. You can parlay that to accomplish lots of things.
- Make it impossible to talk about certain things and eventually eliminate those things. Porn today, abortion tomorrow. LGBT, women's rights ... it's a tool to start enforcing an ideology. Eventually these things can be disappeared entirely, not just the discourse. You just cordon off and begin washing it away bit by bit, year by year. Once the control mechanisms are in place, it cannot be stopped.
- Kill anonymous communication. This can pin identities to online comments. You can then punish people of the ideology you don't like by denying them jobs, auditing them, etc. This has a chilling effect on political opposition. This also makes it much harder to leak or report information safely and harms the ability to whistle blow.
- In general, this also pushes society into more religious, more conservative views. With it comes a lack of skepticism and a greater appreciation for authority.
- Ultimately, this is a step into 1984. If we go down that route, we will eventually be owned in whole by the authoritarian powers at top. This entire conversation will be memory holed.
Once a right is lost, we will not get it back. Then it's just one step after another into hell.
We must fight this.
Our lives, our freedom, our future - depend on it.
This is mostly fantasy propagated by works of fiction. In the real world release of any evidence of sins has practically zero impact on the wealthy people and when it very occasionally does have an impact it just happens in cases of people who weren't wealthy enough for the circumstances.
The right to actual real privacy is the same thing as the right to actual real freedom of speech, and we should harm anyone who is trying to take that most basic foundation of all rights away.
I agree with Alexander Solzhenitsyn.
Don't be fooled that your team doesn't have people with the same impulses. Privacy and civil liberties exist to protect us from abuse of authority on all sides.
- "Oh I see John is connected to this account. I really don't like this HN comment and opinion he posted, I find it deeply offensive. Put him on the bank KYC fail list."
- "We'd love to give you this mortgage backed by the US government, but why didn't you post the right flag in support of the new hip thing?"
- "Before you login to your retirement account, how much wealth are you secretly harboring there from this job we think you unfairly got due to your privilege?"
- "If you just let us monitor your activity and the ideas you see, we'll stop you from wrong-think and will create a utopia"
why? If age restriction get legislated into the OS, it puts a damper on further attempts on adding restrictions to sites, because they can point to the existing legislation and claim it's enough.
Such an API can then be extended to provide location data to "help the police find bad guys", track purchase histories to "prevent fraud"; all the stuff that Apple and Google blocked fb from sniffing from user devices
It's circumvention of these privacy protections with added vengeance since now Google and Apple will be sitting with the cost of implementation and the liability
No, they're pulling up the ladder. Meta is fine losing the app store battle because it can easily afford regulation requiring first-party compliance, and no startup could.
My kid had classmates as young as 8 using it. Facebook knows this.
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?
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.
Who exactly is influential & organized enough across many western countries to push legislation that no one is asking for? Notice that epstein said he worked for [withheld] in some of his emails.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
- Linux distros without age verification (which excludes distros with systemd)
- decentralized/distributed microblogging: Nostr, Bluesky, Mastodon
- decentralized social news sites: Lemmy
- GrapheneOS
The unfortunate true is IAC is coming to most countries in the world, no matter how much the Hacker News audience hates it...
A lot of these trajectories aren't really for us - the techy folk.
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.
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.
Oh right, the kids...
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.
- Australia
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.
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-beh... and 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.
The same could be said about enterprise, investment, war, etc.
It's the people who won't take risks that schemers try to exclude.
This is the real reason why no one will ever remember your name kid.