Are we pretending that the porn id laws weren't a first attempt at getting forums like Reddit that might "accidentally" have naked pictures liable and therefore profile everyone?
Because this is leaning on blaming to UK for everything the US is doing to itself an awful lot.
Hasn't the UK had a culture of surveillance (the famous CCTV cameras) and arresting people over online wrongthink for quite some time though? Who inspired who?
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/may/18/facebook-com...
https://www.aclu.org/news/free-speech/new-hampshire-police-a...
https://www.fire.org/news/lawsuit-ex-cop-sues-after-spending...
I suspect that most people with first hand knowledge have simply given up trying to contribute to HN threads about the UK. There is plenty of legitimate criticism to be made of the UK, but here (as you can see from the title) the discourse has degraded to such an extent that the mythically awful UK is held responsible even for bad laws passed by American legislature.
How is Buffy Wicks so damn gullible with tech legislation? Her AB 1043 and AB 1856 (Digital Age Assurance Act), intended to protect children online and regulate Big Tech (but unintentionally criminalizing open source), was sponsored by a dark money influence operation from Meta.
https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/1rshc1f/i_traced_2_b...
She is actually well-respected with housing and transportation bills but I don't know what's going on with her tech bills.
>(but unintentionally criminalizing open source)
Why do you assume this was unintentional? Because she said so?
If there is a problem with children not being sufficiently protected, that is the level at which to solve it. Give families tools and information to do so.
The companies pushing age verification make their money monetizing access to children. They are exactly the sorts of groups I’d like to keep my kids away from. Forcing the kids to label themselves as minors just makes them more vulnerable to online exploitation.
They can only do so much, within the boundaries of their home. It takes a village to raise a child. The policies, thus, should be made village-wide.
No school zone speed limits, or protected crossings on streets near schools.
No requirements for railings on public balconies, fencing around public pools, protective covers over drains or other holes in the ground.
Parents/guardians can just supervise.
Sounds great!
No, I don’t want to scan my face or my passport to use the Web. And also no, this glib, thought-terminating, “common sense” quip about “the parents are responsible” is also something to be rejected. We should try to both collectively protect kids and leave adults alone.
Leave it all to the corporations and you would have them prey on your children on every street corner, splash screen, TV menu, and ad board, with no “parental management” option anywhere. “But parents are responsible”, they would say. Little bundles of joy and energy with no impulse control or critical thinking until they are about a decade or older.
You want to marry someone? Make sure the government approves for your safety.
Want to make dinner? First you have to send the recipe to your local overseer with proof of your safe cooking credentials or you will have to pay heafty fines for noncompliance.
Want to make love, read a book, speak your mind, make a contract with someone, work the job you want? Sorry, you can't decide that yourself, first the politburo must approve it.
Sounds great!
Today OS developers implement inferior option 2 and refuse to implement superior option 1. How do you solve the problem without government involvement?
Those are mostly there because of alcoholic drinks being served and the venue wants to create a certain atmosphere. There are plenty of parents that would take their kids there if they could.
The rest is not just there for kids but also for adults (or elderly).
There is a bunch of adults who would step in a hole in the ground or fall off a balcony.
Maybe that's why metabase was hacked - to conceal sale of data. "It's just a hack, it happens, we fixed the hole, nothing to see here until we find the next buyer".
So your argument is that ID checks are necessary simply because they are possible, and not a privacy invasion?
That is where this become more than just gate keeping and becomes full on tracking.
> The right people to protect children are those responsible for them - their parents and guardians.
My position is that there is a social responsibility to protect children which extends to the community at large, not just their immediate guardians.
It's really on us to figure out how we can have things like the internet without harming children. Now, this is quite annoying, because I have never, and would never, give a child access to the internet in the first place. The internet was never driving around on public streets. I never wanted to force it on anyone.
We all dropped the ball here. We've all accepted and even celebrated more and more of our lives being online. But, more importantly, nobody noticed when children started to get smartphones with internet access. In my mind this is no different than giving children cigarettes or other adult materials. But nobody batted an eye. I'm also not surprised, though. Loads of people here have made tons of money from children having access to the internet.
Unfortunately it's so hard to go back from something like this. So we end up in this stupid situation where people will accept more surveillance because we can't just take phones away from children.
Those are extreme positions.
There are things where you want the government to intervene.
There are things where you don’t want the government to intervene.
What I do in my bedroom should not be monitored by the government.
Me speeding on the road should be monitored by the government.
Conversations I am having online should not be monitored by the government.
It’s my job to teach my kid how to behave when he is bullied at school. The government does not help with that. It is my job to make sure my kid does not become the bully. The government does not help with that.
It is also my job to teach my kid what the internet is, that there are wackos out there, and how to recognize dangerous patterns. That’s life.
If you think this is to save the children…
>No requirements for railings on public balconies, fencing around public pools, protective covers over drains or other holes in the ground.
>Parents/guardians can just supervise.
>Sounds great!
I know you're commenting in bad faith, but at the margin essentially nothing would change except the amount of whining from people of your bent when someone doesn't get punished enough.
The primary determinant of whether society engages in all those activities is not the government but the level of wealth to pay for it all.
The problem is, agreement on those tools is hard to find.
"I want to be able to pen my kid into a digital walled garden, so that they cannot see $bad stuff until the right age"
that seems normal right? nothing contraversial.
The issue is, implementing that is really fucking hard. For mobile phones, largely thats already been done in the UK. You need to opt out of the nanny proxy before you can get porn and reddit.
The issue is, as soon as you get on the wifi, all of those controls disappear. So how do you stop that? if you're an idiot (and the person leading the OSA was an idiot) you do what the UK did. You put in legal tools to "age gate" the internet _at source_ rather than at delivery (like mobile phones)
so yes give people the tool, but if you're not giving techincal guidance, and just saying NO NO NO NO, OSA is what you get.
Even if perfect age verification is implemented, kids will be harmed. Because they are vulnerable while above the arbitrary age limit. So -arguing for age verification is harming children. Won't somebody think of the children?
And the answer comes back to the same point. Parents should mediate this. Online content should advertise its maturity level, and parents should be able to configure devices at setup time for the maturity level they are appropriate for. Then apps should respect that and everyone can be better off without robbing everybody of anonymity or freedom.
Other still need protection at 30, or in fact in my opinion also a lot of people above 50 (that didn't grow up with the internet around) are not prepared for what is out there. Also there are parents that are "underage". Those are not considered either.
I agree it is a very arbitrary limit indeed, but it seems there is no other good proxy so for a lot of people it will be choosing the best worst option, at least that is how the argument in favor is brought forward.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49205469
> you know, i feel like the "it's the parents' responsibility" comments that turn up on submissions like this often tend towards phrasing like "the parents" rather than "with my children i ..."
if you’ve had kids maybe you’d like to share with the class exactly how you go about doing exactly what you’re describing?
if not, maybe let parents figure out how to parent rather than expecting them to be perfect for everyone else’s benefit.
Only if you can figure it out without building a dystopia for everyone else.
That can only work if parents as an interest group stop bothering the rest of us with the very 'think of the children' nonsense that spawned this thread. If you are inventing laws that affect us, we should also have a say.
I need to remember this one, thanks!
The only way parents can try to protect their kids from the world is to keep them isolated, homeschooled, or in some kind of commune or cult. Which unfortunately is not uncommon in the US.
> let parents figure out how to parent
While I agree, I also think there's a role in society to help parents on how to parent, via e.g. education and awareness. Every generation brings new unknowns, like what kids can do in Roblox or how they can browse the internet on their smart fridge, and it's unreasonable to assume every parent knows all of that.
Parents should have the tools to protect their children, the providers should have those tools in place. But those that are dealing the goods as also heavily invested in trying to maximize engagement and so they do not really work to hard on providing those tools.
I frequently see this rhetoric (parents should look after their kids) from naive people on the internet that clearly don't have kids of their own (or don't have teenagers, or don't live or let their kids live free, etc)
Parents shouldn't buy smart phone to kids, period. There are 0 reasons kid of say 15 or lower should have one instead of dumb phone (or new commodore one with google maps and whatsapp but no browser or apps), in same way we don't allow cigarettes or alcohol to be given or sold to them. Helicopter control freak parents can go to hell, their mental issues shouldn't be messing their kid's lives. But to claim parents have 100% responsibility could work only if kids spend 100% of the time with them.
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/tv6vxRBEa2o
Instead of asking parents to do this, you get these laws where you need to show your id to unlock your own device.
Clearly.
Your video actually has the opposite effect: it shows that there are no (easy) ways for parents to protect the children and government regulation is necessary.
The UI should be a single checkbox named "child mode" and small, gray link "configure" that opens the menu from the video. The parent just clicks the checkbox, and sets up a password, a fingerprint or paired device to unlock the mode. That's all. After this only government-approved apps and websites can be opened (parent may edit the white list if they are ok with navigating through a maze of ten thousand menus) and children are perfectly safe. Government may white-list only apps and sites that implement measures for content safety and may not add non-compliant apps.
Also I hate watching vertical videos on a laptop.
(I realise UK police are far from perfect).
I think most people can see that there are levels to everything and UK police are better than a lot of places whilst still needing to improve.
Online posts for _what_ though?
> buying a baseball bat or butter knife
Those are weapons, so long as you have a legitimate use for them, jobs a goodun. But more importanly anything in common law is a weapon. Same for the USA. but the difference is, most of the time you're shot, rather than beaten with a stick.
> refuse medical aid to a victim that is bleeding out because the foreign attacker with the open carry bloody ritual knife called them racist
Ah so you didn't actually look at the case then. The victim was foreign, not the attacker (Harry was polish, not english). Also when two people come to you saying that "that man over there attacked me" and have a whole crowd of people saying the same thing, you arrest the person. Now, if you look at the timeline as soon as the police realise he's been stabbed, they give first aid. Of all the cases to bring up, thats kinda the weakest. tragic, but not a signal of systemic failure. especially considering the number of deaths caused by cops in the USA. and that cops have qualified immunity, unlike in the UK.
NOW! the grooming gangs are interesting, and point to Manchester police being corrupt little shits that they are. The problem is we only hear about the brown gangs. Not the other ones. at the time there used to be a whole string of nonces that would drive thier nackered ford escorts up to the school gates to pick up some 14 year olds. The working class girls would go missing, or suddenly get into drugs. It would be their fault. If you want the actual data, the Jay, Berelowitz and ann coffey reports all lay out the failings there.
Now I'm less worried about the grooming gangs as I am about the general lack of empathy for the working class victims. The warped lens of "oh it was the $racial_group" that "did" it misses the main point is that girls were industrially exploited, and have been repeatedly ignored as they are "shouty little brats". Regardless of the abuser.
Now imagine grooming gangs, in addition to police shooting and killing civilians, on top of political corruption going unchecked, police stalking, in addition to every other terrible thing you could imagine.
The UK isn’t perfect, but the never ending sentiment that it’s the worst in the world because there’s an issue with grooming (which is an issue nearly everywhere sadly) is foolish. Brits have such high standards that you don’t even realise how much of a privilege it is to be annoyed about only a small handful of systemic global issues.
You’re not afraid to walk to your local for a pint and be shot in the head by a cop or kidnapped I suppose, right?
If you look at actual statistics you know why it keeps happening. The chance to be shot if you don't act or live like them is miniscule.
>You’re not afraid to walk to your local for a pint and be shot in the head by a cop I suppose, right?
No "just" scared to open my mouth or defend myself or family with the little to none legal weaponary left that still exists from foreign attackers imported against our will which are excluded from such laws.
Bitch please. Firstly the _victim_ was foreign not the attacker.
second, you are well within your rights to use reasonable force. Sometimes that involves chasing an attacker down the street with a cricket bat and beating the shit out of someone.
> foreign attackers imported against our will which are excluded from such laws.
mate, thats not way to talk about the scottish (they too are allowed to carry knives as part of thier national costume) but if you lived here, you'd probably know that.
I could literally be arrested for what I said, can you claim the same in the US?
>chasing an attacker down the street with a cricket bat and beating the shit out of someone.
Someone literally got arrested for buying a baseball bat couple days ago...
>thats not way to talk about the scottish
Somehow they aren't included in the law exclusion or are part of disproportionate amounts of stabbings, curious.
As much as I like visiting China for leisure, I could personally never live there. I agree the healthcare and safety are great in China though. It’s the same reasons I could never live in places like Dubai or Singapore.
Safety is not a #1 priority for me in the places I choose to live.
1) https://www.leeds.ac.uk/news-society-politics/news/article/3...
https://5rights.stupidlabs.lol/
Disclaimer: this project of mine is still in development, and not quote 100% accurate.. so, take it with a bit of salt.. do your own research...
Also, this is running on a cheap server... please don't hammer it..
Is there any connection with the 5rights foundation?
btw, one of them most powerful feature is finding connections between any nodes... just search for them one by one, click "+" on searched entity, do this for both, or more.. then click: "shortest path" ... you can investigative how anyone is connected to anyone else
For example: "Center for American Progress" is connected to "UK House of Lords" through this long chain:::
Center for American Progress -> [has former fellow] -> Simon Clark -> [board chair of] -> Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH) — US -> [lobbied for] -> KOSA / KOSPA (Kids Online Safety Act / Kids Online Safety and Privacy Act) -> [engaged with] -> 5Rights Foundation <- [founded] <- Baroness Beeban Kidron (Beeban Tania Kidron, Baroness Kidron) <- [has member] UK House of Lords
Graph: https://ibb.co/tTL0cGjm
Of course.
Anyone who brings up kids is trying to manipulate you into giving up your freedom for security. Whatever argument they make should be simply ignored and dismissed.
Yes it might actually work out ok if a mythical benevolent dictator could manage things with infinite precision and unlimited compassion. I would imagine that has never happened at any reasonable scale.
The Conservative folks seem to phrase this as a desire to “keep government small” - which always seemed a little clunky given the stakes and track record of these governments.
That's because people aren't recognizing me as their benevolent god-emperor yet.
OK, but following this logic, shouldn't we disband the government altogether and have mafias rule us all?
When is it acceptable to hope that something is actually going to work well enough when handed over to the government?
Only if "following this logic" means "extrapolate to an unreasonable extreme." Compare:
1. "Just eat healthy food and you'll be healthy!"
2. "Yes, but [things are complex]"
3. "Following that logic, we should just eat trash."
Now ask yourself which government is currently bombing another country over one man's ego (or due to blackmail by an "ally"), and whether they're on that list, and whether the literal thousands of people killed are just acceptable sacrifices to maintain someone's worldview about 'the good guys'?
Of course, that doesn't mean we can't do better and shouldn't.
But we do need to compare "How things have been for all of human history" to "How we do things now", and see that our modern democracies show immense restraint and a lack of malfeasance, compared to how they've been used in the past.
I feel that people view how the world is today, through such a restricted world view. Where the history of how things were, and the immense and great and incredible progress we've made, is thrown aside because "Oh bad thing happened!", and therefore "The entire West is completely corrupt and everything sucks and we should rip it all down because it's bad".
One only need take a tour around the rest of the world. To compare our militaries to those in non-democratic nations. To how those leaders act, in reality, compared to our leaders. Even the current US admin looks good, comparatively. And yes, I know that's saying a lot.
Are you serious?
During the Vietnam War era, the US dropped over 7.5 million tons of ordnance across Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia, which is more than double the tonnage dropped in all of WW2. In rural parts of Laos and Cambodia, unexploded ordinance is still a daily threat to people. 50 years on.
As for raping and pillaging: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rape_during_the_Vietnam_War
> To compare our militaries to those in non-democratic nations. To how those leaders act, in reality, compared to our leaders. Even the current US admin looks good, comparatively.
When I see comments like this, I want to believe that it's not real but sadly, I suspect you really believe this.
After all, you're trying to find and hold up the worst the US has done, right? So to compare, you need to find the worst in modern militaries. In militaries of all time. That was what I discussed, after all.
I was quite clear. Compare to all of history. Compare to all militaries today.
Instead you grab at part of an action, and hold it up, without making that comparison. Still.
As a Canadian who has had your current ridiculous president state that we should be the 51st state, and belittled us by calling our Prime Ministers "Governors"? Who has talked about unilaterally redrawing borders? As a Canadian who has considered how I may have to one day slaughter Americans crossing our border? How I may have to look my brothers in the eye, and kill them? I still say that the US military has been a shining light for freedom around the world. If I can remain impartial, then surely you can.
I also say that about police officers in the West, including the US.
Are there bad actions taken by police departments? By individual officers? By groups of officers, over the last decades? YES! Yes, most assuredly.
Now compare the overall score with police in totalitarian regimes.
Comparison is vital, important, key, and any finger pointing has to be in context.
And also note, I said "yes we must do better".
But if you think the US military is evil, then you have never seen evil. Ever.
https://www.vanityfair.com/news/photos/2006/08/nachtwey_phot...
It takes a lot to get me to want to say something very nasty to a person but you, sir, would deserve it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viet_Cong_and_People%27s_Army_...
The opposing party in the Vietnam war was far worse than the US on a moral level, before, during and after the war. And it wasn't a small difference. We're talking about democracy and democratically selecting laws here? Well: the large majority of the population in Vietnam, including in the North, wanted the US to defeat the Vietcong and the Soviets.
The 1954 Geneva Accords, which ended the French war, called for nationwide reunification elections by July 1956. Those elections never happened. Ngo Dinh Diem, the US-backed first president of South Vietnam who was a brutal authoritarian, refused to hold them. The US backed his refusal and kept backing him afterward.
In Eisenhower's 1963 memoir, he wrote that everyone knowledgeable he'd spoken to believed Ho Chi Minh would have taken around 80% percent of the vote if elections had happened.
The Vietnamese didn't really care about the Soviets. They are a fiercely independent and proud people with a long history of defending themselves against foreign interlopers and aggressors.
So let me restate your asinine and totally inaccurate conclusion:
The large majority of the population in Vietnam, in both the North and the South, didn't want a foreign power controlling their country and determining their fate. They wanted to run their own country, and have peace.
And yet, the poster you're replying to said no such thing. Not even close. They merely said they wanted help repelling an enemy. You're also using hindsight to frame this conflict, something entirely unfair to the people involved at the time.
The US repeatedly tried to get out of that war. Multiple times. They just kept getting pulled back in.
edit
--
Re your response. Were they ordered to rape and pillage by their full chain of command?
Or were they acting illegally, regardless of the outcome?
Would a military in a dictatorship have deemed that "illegal"? What about 200 years ago? 1000?
You seem to be ignoring the concept of comparables. And taking acts that the military itself teaches its own soldiers, was wrong.
It's good to have principles. And good to defend them. But if you ignore what others are saying, and the context of their words, you start to slide into zealoty.
Millions upon millions of people around the world protested the Vietnam War, including millions of people in the US.
On one day alone, an estimated 2+ million Americans participated in anti-war protests. Over 500,000 men were officially categorized as draft dodgers, more than 200,000 charged with violating the Selective Service Act and millions more found a way not to go to Vietnam through deferments and exemptions.
It's both amusing and sad that there are some people (like you) who 50 years later can't see what was apparent to so many people at the time.
> The US repeatedly tried to get out of that war. Multiple times. They just kept getting pulled back in.
That's right. Those pesky Vietnamese villagers just wouldn't let American GIs stop torching their villages, gang-raping their women and children, and executing them. The American military was trying to leave but spreading democracy demanded sacrifice.
I've written about this in other comments over the last couple of years, but the root of all of this is quite simply, foreign interference. We all remember Cambridge Analytica, its interference in democratic elections in the West, and even how it caused a few regimes to topple in the 3rd world. It's machinations and manipulation of curated news stories was quite simplistic and minor compared to where we sit now.
You simply cannot have a high-trust, well functioning democracy, if 99% of the stuff recommended to you is entirely fabricated nonsense. Worse, if it purposely fabricated to create as much social unrest as possible, and doubly worse if it becomes curated to each person and created and generated on demand.
CA managed this by having a sloth of "different archetypes" for its 100 or so altered news stories per topic. If you were a left wing shopkeep, or a right wing car salesperson, or anything else, you'd be slotted into one of these 100 version of the precise same news story, and fed the best lies to make you do as the payee requested.
Modern AI means this can be far more fine tuned. And algorithms can be gamed, just as CA gamed them with support of Facebook's APIs.
So my point here is twofold. First that government moves slow. What we're seeing now, is the result of CA a decade ago. Really, two election cycles, with senatorial and congressional committees and debates during that time.
And second is that things will not continue as they are now. Nothing you, or I, or anyone does will result in an unchanged Internet. From the perspective of lawmakers, and really a lot of the public, the "world wide" Internet is really only used by "The Rest of the World" to attack us. Attack water plants, hospitals, meat packing plants, nuclear reactors, and beyond that, to manipulate our children into thinking Western Democracy is vile and malign in various ways.
Now of course, there's no reason for most of those things to be on the Internet at all. But the manipulation of adults and children in our society just isn't going to wash. In days gone by, you'd see each community with police informants, not the sort in cop movies where the guy was crooked, but instead actual cities who would keep an eye out, and inform if someone planned something against the state. Pretty much every pub had one in the UK, for example.
Heck, when I was a teenager in Canada, one of my friends had a plan to become an officer. Part of this path was reporting on everything he heard at local parties, of an untoward nature. It's how misinformation campaigns used to be curtailed, stopped, dealt with.
Yet suddenly we presume that the average person, and average kid is going to just deal with misinformation. And bizarrely so, compared to misinformation in a pub, we let people get siloed so every single thing they read and see says the same lie.
How can an average person ever stand again absurdities, if from their perspective everything they can see around them says it is true?
So back to the start? The above, correctly assessed or not, is what the politicians and police and agencies view as happening in the West. And while there are multiple ways to deal with this, their stance is "Why are you afraid of putting your name on your words?".
If we want something other than all the bills being proposed, and all the change coming, we as a tech community need to provide a path to end all anonymity on the internet, in the least privacy reducing way possible. And there are some ways to do so. They've been discussed. But if we don't provide such a method, and drive this conversation, you know who will?
Politicians, with no technical capability at all. The average Joe, scared for his country and family.
Try to fight those two types of people, and you will lose every single time.
So my recommend is, everyone needs to stop bellyaching, suck up to the harsh realities here, and take this massive, unstoppable river, and redirect it by a few degrees so that the best-case is achieved.
It's funny because this is exactly the opposite of what actually happened. Mafias are the reaction to the "unification" of Italy, and they almost all come from the previous governments that existed before unification. Northern Italy conquered the south and defeated all the little states there ... and then levied taxes and did not much else. Specifically they did not provide policing, and very few public services.
And then the remnants of the old governments stepped in, provided public services, security on the streets and "pressured" people into paying a second tax. Now you can say that they were almost-feudal governments and therefore defended and enforced the law of large landowners but that wasn't seen as a problem ... because that's how it had always been.
The reason for their success, their initial success at least, is that, first, when Italy was young, it left citizens to their fate, suppressing dissent, stationing small forces in most of Italy that abused locals, were extremely corrupt and did little else. What is generally blamed for their later reputation is that the mafias started using their power more and more for their own purposes, irrespective of cost, while the mafias also pressured the centralized state to do the opposite.
Especially early on it's very hard to pick "the right" side in the war on mafias. In the beginning people saw the mafias as the good guys, and with good reason. Over time mafias became worse and the central state became better, but honestly, the central state wasn't particularly good for people either (in fact it still can be improved quite a bit)
Or perhaps you’re not actually following the logic but rather an oversimplified characterization of it?
Conservatives seem to be fine with mafia rule, so long as the don has the correct party affiliation.
> When is it acceptable to hope that something is actually going to work well enough when handed over to the government?
Mob rule doesn't with very well as a defacto government, or oligarchy. Nor food and drug safety or national defense. Some things just have to be tackled by society as a larger group. Ideally as locally as possible, but not so locally that minorities are crushed or rule becomes petty and micromanaged.
This makes very little sense. People sometimes appeal to the safety of children cynically, but it's very often sincere, since parents genuinely do worry a lot about their kids.
You can tell people to ignore these appeals, but it won't work, and you'll be leaving better arguments on the table.
When a politician is worried about your kids, you should be worried about your rights and freedoms. Not only for your own sake but for your kids too!
What rights and freedoms should I worry about when a politician wants to make sure my child is fed by supporting food stamp programs or free hot lunches at school?
The idea that any attempt to help a child is inherently suspect honestly says something distrubing about your own worldview. You can't imagine someone genuinely caring for a child that isn't there own?
I just said the opposite. I can imagine many people genuinely caring for a child that isn’t their own.
I am skeptical when a politician who does not know my children claims to care about them.
To borrow an LLMism: It’s not cynicism, it’s the reality of history. We the people have been duped many times over. Caveat Emptor.
The “Welfare State” is nothing but modern share cropping from the party of Jim Crow.
Embellished: marriage rates are 33.8% for Black women and 37.8% for Black men, neither of which I would round to 25%.
Uncorrelated: marriage rates dropped sharply among people of all single races on the Census except for Asians. It has dropped more sharply for Black respondents, but anything disproportionately affecting the lower and middle economic classes would disproportionately affect Black families.
Show me some data, and not outdated welfare policies from the 1980s, that supports the "social engineers" causal narrative better than plain deindustrialization. Or deindustrialization combined with good old American racism and mass incarceration. I am willing to change my position on this.
1: https://usafacts.org/articles/state-relationships-marriages-...
I do believe we should allow for a lot more nuance in our political opinions and avoid most statements that can be made in the constraints of a short comment on social media.
I didn’t take a position on the argument. I pointed out a distinction.
The problem is that those laws are NOT designed to protect children, and the people who convince politicians and the public to support them are NOT doing so out of genuine concern to protect children.
The real, underlying reason why they are being pushed for so hard is to destroy privacy and control people which is going to make everyone but the elite less safe, children included.
Especially if and when we get another Nazi Germany type regime and realize that - oh shit, they have 24/7 overview of where every single person in the world is, what they do, what they think, what their worldviews and identities are.
It's impossible for any of this to end well.
> parents genuinely do worry a lot about their kids
There is direct evidence from trials, in which Meta researchers told executives that features like infinite scroll and others “ are inherently at odds with well-being”
There is no effective fight for freedom if there is no effective understanding of the politics and social forces driving change.
The freedom of the internet in the 90s was in itself a social revolution, not just a technological one.
Fighting for a status quo that didn’t work for children and even for many adults is a losing fight.
Fighting for privacy and against ad tech, and against addictive design features for all users is a far stronger fight.
The internet was a magical thing when it was introduced to society at large. However this is NOT the same era.
If we are fighting for privacy and freedom, then why the heck is ad tech still allowed to be accepted as part of this conversation? If we are talking about freedoms, this is one of the greatest moments to say lets not sacrifice any privacy at all in the first place?
There is no functional and effective defense of our values if people are showing up to argue what they feel like fighting, instead of where the challenges actually are.
The immediate reply is the accusational: "why are you trying to trying to prevent safety for kids".
It's a simple next step to accuse you of hiding your own child abuse ring.
This sounds like hype, but it's the normal path here in Australian.
You don't argue with these people. You summarily dismiss them. You recognize the game they are playing and you refuse to play it.
Call attention to their methods instead: they are exploiting and weaponizing children to push their big tech friendly surveillance agenda.
Whether individuals inside the system are true believers or cynical operators, the response to calling out their methods will be identical:
If they genuinely believe the rhetoric: They will simply double down and say, 'Yes, and protecting the children makes this absolutely necessary.'
If they know it is a manipulation tactic: They will still reply with, 'It is for the children,' because they know it is an impenetrable PR shield that gets them their way.
In either scenario, the bureaucracy is entirely immune to the criticism.
Exposing the game might help persuade third-party observers, but it does absolutely nothing to stop the bureaucratic machine from using that exact same line to steamroll the agenda forward.
Will you allow an argument against this?
I mean, I want to show an example where it is only a problem when someone else is not as convinced as yourself, one way or the other.
>so the way to refute is to ask for proof..
No use. The same proof will not be convincing for everyone. Let us take vaccine. The proof for a Vaccine for X saving Y lives is often the following.
"Before the vaccine there was Y deaths per year from X. But after vaccines there is zero deaths from X".
The implication is that vaccines saved X lives. This could convince most of the people. But someone can ask. Are those kids who are not dying of X (thanks to the vaccine), are dying of something else?
Now the picture is not so clear.
See, same data, different results depending on how deep you want to probe,
That argument loses you most of the population in a vote, myself included. Parents may disagree, for a start; I reckon most women (especially outside of tech) read that and mark you down as "creepy man I don't want near kids".
It's also wrong, as there are lots of rules that are in fact designed to protect children. I recommend reading up on the history of child abuse in the Boy Scouts of America (now Scouts BSA), FBI agent Kenneth Lanning's investigation, and the safeguarding and leadership training that scout leaders must take today.
The UK has a system, I think it's called the DBS, which depending on the level of check ranges from "is this person a convicted sex offender?" to "non-crime hate incidents". One can argue a lot about what the correct level should be, no-one has yet convincingly explained to me why specifically "non-crime" actions should be in a secret police record. But I am on board with someone convicted by a court for child sex offences not being allowed to become a schoolteacher.
For parents who are genuinely concerned about child safety, you are being used to push an agenda. If we want to solve the digital parenting problem, we have to understand how the problem came to be in the first place and why there isn't a good solution at the moment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49118578
Of course, it's well-established that human beings are capable of making stuff up, and you can claim to be whatever age, but that's not the point.
That one can get deep really quick.
So it will most likely happen especially because you are certainly right, in part, that no government has ever said no to actions that'd give them more power, let alone ones that are widely supported. But the point of this is that rather than having this as some sort of red-line no, I think it'd be much more pragmatic to try to argue for identity verification regulations that would be most palatable.
[1] - https://yougov.com/en-gb/articles/54969-eight-in-ten-parents...
Conversations where the root submission talks about failures at social media firms and the evidence of harms, or evidence from trials.
Conversations on the attacks against freedom and privacy.
I see very little hope that an actual rebuttal or alternative to the desire to muzzle tech will be forged, because the two conversation streams seem to rarely intersect.
We are not in the 90s anymore. Tech as most people experience it is not the new new thing, and most parents are tired of tech. A more recent pew survey showed that nearly half of teens think that social media is bad for teens. We know that Meta went ahead with features even after their own internal research told them it was bad for teen mental health.
How in hell, is there any effective response created, if the social pressure parents and children are driving, is being dismissed as a conspiracy?
This should be the time that the business models and incentives that allow loot boxes and addicting design mechanisms should be discussed.
There needs to be an actual solution that addresses the issues users are facing, or else they are simply going to choose to sacrifice freedoms for the hope of gaining some control.
There's also the typical image crafting stuff that drives envy, insecurity, and so on - kids aren't sharing when they eat left overs mashed up in a bowl, but they are sharing when they go eat at an expensive steak restaurant. That bias already significantly affects adults perceptions of others' life/lifestyle, let alone children. And even without 'the algorithm', there's going to be FOMO and the general addictiveness of updates that's going to leave kids as zombies to their phones rather than interacting with each other as much in real life.
So I'm not really sure it's viable to try to 'fix' social media. You can certainly make it better than it currently is, but I think the issue is that we have horrible companies managing a horrible product.
"The government says all children need to be vaccinated in order to be safe"
I'm not saying these arguments are equivalent, but they seem equivalent because they induce the same feeling of loss of agency. And one cannot simply ignore and dismiss something like this.
That's exactly what this is.
They want to build an internet where it is structurally impossible for children to be harmed in any way.
This requires the destruction of the very concept of agency. You can't just do things. You need government approval.
You do have to take enforcement into account when evaluating these laws. Some HNers interpret this as you go to jail for not scanning an ID (which makes sense to programmers because it's a simple if/then), but most of them are actually written as product safety laws, so the government can order you to comply or take your product off the market.
[1] - https://nochan.net/b/Internet-Crap/20230829-Think-Of-The-Chi...
With proper parental controls there is no signalling.
You're doing the slippery slope fallacy by saying "well if there are not terrible laws now that just means there will be terrible laws later." A law against murder doesn't mean there will later be a law against farting.
Come on. Like 80% of my entire post was devoted to pointing out a gradual erosion of rights over time, and I explicitly stated that it's not the case today.
But don't underestimate human adaptability. Slippery slope arguments assume that once a technology introduces a specific risk, society lacks the agency to create counter-measures, new norms, or alternative uses for that technology.
I haven't found that to be the case throughout most of history.
If parents felt in control of technology they wouldn't be calling on governments to regulate it in the first place. I know a lot of tech people like to assume that government wants to control everything and these parents are fake front groups established to manufacture consent, but this is infowars-type conspiracy thinking. Most people are just not that facile with technology and people who have kids are atavistically opposed to anything that could harm their kids.
Tech people's unwillingness to even engage with concerns about harm to children (eg the GP) more or less guarantees more aggressive regulation. IT's a self-defeating position.
Was I exposed to some clearly adult content? Yes. But I didn't find it particularly compelling, the video games I could download and other things I could explore were more interesting.
It is also concerning to me that gen-alpha (or whatever the age bracket is called) people are increasingly being pushed into walled garden, app-based social media platforms instead of actually learning what the Internet really is, and what it's capable of.
It was a mix of being afraid of getting a virus from a porn site, knowing that porn wasn't for my age, and late-night FTA TV airing softcore anyways.
My parents told me to be responsible and kind of explained the dangers of the world the best way they could, and it was expected that I'd be grounded and lose computer access if they found me on a porn site. I preferred playing games. I definitely encountered some dark places on the clearnet (and on the darknet as well) and promptly GTFO.
At the school's computer lab they had plenty of content control which I had the most fun trying to bypass them. For what reason? Just so I could.
We can debate if these systems and people existed before (they did), but the reach and scale is different now. My most controversial opinion these days is that not everyone should be allowed to upload to YouTube if it’s public facing. We need basic screening and filtering.
For instance in about 1994 I remember coming across a set of textfiles that were some lengthy manifesto about how the US government had supposedly manufactured AIDS in a lab somewhere. But it never got any traction.
Now we have the unfortunate venn diagram overlap between something like a Tate and a major social media platform, and he can get his message out to millions of angry, horny, unemployed young men...
There was a BBS in my area that ran on a small bank of 14.4 USR modems that had a gold mine of content like that. It was such a fun time.
Based on whose values and criteria? Yours?
Beware of he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart he dreams himself your master.
If some parent thinks that's healthy they can just enter the child's age as 18.
You still fantasize about building mechanisms for restricting information as if the very people you oppose won't use it on you when they get into power; no, as if the very people you oppose aren't _currently_ ascendant or even in office and would delightedly use it against you right this moment. Madness.
When you build a high tech muzzle, remember that it will fit onto your head just as well as it fits those you built it for.
Change in behavior can only follow from change in incentives. Parents must be held legally liable if they allow their children access to social media. That means jail time for negligence.
The power imbalance between individual parents and big tech is immense.
How can we be mad at random parents for not defeating the most powerful and rich people in history?
The government has just decided to fall back on "think of the children" as a way to implement more surveillance and control.
Incentives incite action. No action. No incentive.
Incentives play a role, you don't want to encourage wrong behaviors certainly, but they're just one factor in determining what people do or don't do. At best, they nudge. Those nudges aren't likely to overcome stronger forces, or even several weaker ones.
Someone may have a desire or intention to lose weight. But unless they lose the weight they lack incentive.
It's simple: incentives incite action. Don't make it more complicated to win an argument.
Here are just some of the incentives overweight people have to lose weight:
They'll look better, to themselves and others. They'll have more clothing options. They'll feel better. They'll be healthier. They'll have drastically lower odds of many future heath problems. They'll live longer which means they can spend more time being with their loved ones.
Those are all incentives. Everyone who is obese has those incentives, even though different individuals may assign different values to them. Even with all those incentives that hasn't stopped the obesity problem. incentives don't incite action, but they can encourage them.
incentive noun [ C or U ] Something that encourages a person to do something by offering them a reward (https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/incentiv...)
You can have a ton of encouragement, but that doesn't mean it will be enough to incite a behavior. What definition of incentive are you using?
It literally says incite "to determination or action". Given that parents aren't actually taking smart phones away, neither determination nor action are present.
I'll grant you the examples you give incite people to desire to change weight just as negative consequences incite parents to desire that "something should be done," but it doesn't incite them to actually do something.
Describing something as incentive because it incites desire without changing behavior is not exactly what I think of when I think of incentives.
Think of being in the position of trying to come up with incentives for a group of people. Would you call your incentives successful if they created a desire in that group without anyone actually doing anything differently?
If I were going to try to come up with incentives for a group of people, I wouldn't try to create a desire in them. I'd try to give them something they already desired as a reward for doing what I wanted them to do. They'll probably never want to do the thing I want them to do. They might hate doing it. If the incentive is high enough though they just might do it anyway. If my incentives weren't enough to sway them, they'd still be incentives, just ones that were inadequate/ineffective. I wouldn't even be surprised if they failed. Incentives fail to cause changes in behavior all the time.
Kids are going to get into stuff you don’t want them to no matter how hard you try to prevent that, short of keeping them in locked padded rooms with no electronics (which would be abuse). Parents are right to want to steer them in the right direction and keep them out of the worst trouble, but that’s as far as it goes.
So really, both sides need to improve here.
This is the "Christian moms need Congress to regulate Cable TV" problem all over again. Don't let them watch TV if you oppose what is on it. It's not HBO's responsibility to raise your child, it's yours.
Anonymity, the right to move privately and be private online is much bigger than parents who are frustrated with out of control capitalism.
Besides, this only benefits the big corporations. They of course will happily back anything that absolves them of their sins.
We don't need to make parents the enemy of our online privacy. We just need parents to reject the idea that they have to give up their identity and the identity of their children to every shitty social media company and shady website on the internet to "protect" them.
We just need parents to reject the idea that they have to give up their identity and the identity of their children
OK, but (as I have asked many times before) what is your alternative, beter proposal? People intuitively understand the idea of checking ID to prevent sales of alcohol to minors, keep teens out of adult spaces and so on, because virtually every adult remembers being a teenager and not being allowed to do certain things due to not being old enough. That makes checking identity an easy sell to people.
What is your better idea that is similarly easy to sell? Because if you don't have one,people will fall back on the mediocre idea of ID checks. I feel like anyone working in the tech field should understand that the best technological solution does not always win out.
How about laws that prevent social media websites from pushing harmful content users didn't ask for? How about forcing them to abandon the practices and dark patterns that result in those platforms being addictive? How about putting executives behind bars when their algorithms are shown to cause mental health and body image issues in children? These platforms know that what they're doing is hurting people, but they don't care because they're profiting from it. These companies intentionally designed systems that are harmful and user-hostile. They've got algorithms that seek out and target people's vulnerabilities. They ignored repeated warnings from their own researchers, and actively concealed evidence of the harms they were causing. We don't have to let them do it. Not to children or anyone else. Facebook isn't going to die off if they go back to showing people only things their friends and family post. It might even get more popular. They might make fewer billions though and that's unthinkable to them.
There are a lot of things that can be done, but the government isn't interested because actually solving the problems social media causes isn't going to give them the power they're actually after and it could cause them the bribe money they get from these companies.
So, what actual rules do you want to make in service of these desirable outcomes? They have to be clear and straightforward enough that they can't be just gotten around with clever lawyers or argued past the point of meaninglessness by shills posing as philosophers. I do not like the idea of everyone having to show ID online (or even much in real life), but I can see why it's popular because it's very easy to explain and understand.
Not saying these are impossible questions to answer or get right in a law, just that there are more things to think about than which component you decide to show data inside.
The law would define a social media platform. Maybe something like: The term “social media platform” means a website or internet medium that— (A) permits a person to become a registered user, establish an account, or create a profile for the purpose of allowing users to create, share, and view user-generated content through such an account or profile; (B) enables 1 or more users to generate content that can be viewed by other users of the medium; and (C) primarily serves as a medium for users to interact with content generated by other users of the medium. [https://www.law.cornell.edu/definitions/uscode.php?def_id=42...]
If your SaaS app met that definition of a social media platform it would be illegal for you to show content in an infinite scroll window. Because your application targeted business users who paid for the service, people would be less likely to sue you. Maybe it'd be worth it to you to include infinite scroll anyway. Companies knowingly break the law all the time after calculating that even on the off chance they get caught the fines they'd face will probably be less than the profit they'd make. The larger your platform got, the less worth it breaking the law could become and of course if the public felt the fines were so low as to be ineffective, the law could be amended to increase the fines.
The law could even allow some platforms to include harmful content like infinite scrolling if certain conditions are met. For example, platforms could be allowed to include infinite scrolling if they require a credit card to sign up, and they display a warning explaining that the platform uses infinite scrolling which has been determined to be harmful by promoting addictive and compulsive behaviors, and it provides an option to disable that feature. Still, it's probably better to widely ban those kinds of practices that serve no purpose other than driving engagement/addictive behavior. We can just decide as a society that we value people's mental health more than maximizing tech billionaire profits.
You may not be aware of this, but Meta has been actively spending millions of dollars to redirect the rage against their algorithms and addictive harms, especially against children, and one of their strategies to try and help avoid liability is to put the onus on the federal government to pass ID legislation, to literally make it easier for Meta and similar companies to age gate most content under simple blanket policies. The way that they are doing this is by funding otherwise very small "parents rights organizations" with money and connections they otherwise wouldn't have. What does Meta gain from this? Less liability and lower cost in content moderation. What do the parents rights groups get? "Check ID laws".
That's enough motivation for both groups, it's very simple.
Now where do you get into "conspiracy theory" territory? Well thetr are also other groups that want online ID for their own purposes, and they are more than happy to help fund these groups to get something they also want.
All of this is very easy to provide backing links for with a simple Google search, if you're interested.
How should online services be regulated to mitigate algorithmic harms? To get something over the line politically, it needs to be simple enough that it can be articulated in a few sentences.
That would be a good conversation to have!
Instead what is happening is moneyed interests are inputting hundreds of millions of dollars into organizations that otherwise wouldn't have it, which is giving an "unnatural" amount of political influence to those groups, which is changing our country, and not just on this issue. They're literally doing it just to keep their money, and ID checks let them keep it without actually reducing the harms.
These are NGOs not parents. And "child safety" is often a euphemism. The point is it's hard to argue against child safety. For example, if opaque NGOs demand deanonymization to stop CSAM, I am assuming most people would not want to seem like they are in favor of CSAM. So you need an organized effort to argue in favor of privacy and even then anyone who does it can easily be smeared as a CSAM user. So child safety can backdoor something else.
Either you participate and help drive privacy preserving methods to solve the problems, or someone else will solve it in a way less desirable to you.
You just posted the answer:
> Especially when there are very obvious and tangible harms from modern social media.
The addictive and manipulative dark patterns of the big techs are harmful and should be banned straight up for everyone. No need to spare the children and let adults get abused. No need to verify age at all.
So why don't we just ban it? Because that'd eat into profits so much it could actually kill their business models.
All this "children" bullshit is just them trying to preserve their business models. It's them saying "year we're harmful and addictive and gambling tier but look we're adult only now". This is why Meta's among the corporations lobbying for this stuff.
Manipulation stops working when the other party is aware of it. Bring their manipulation out into the light.
Not just for the war on anonymity. NGOs, often funded by government money (so missing two third of their name), have unified on other topics.
One example that comes to mind is teaming up to organize the biggest influx of migrants into the EU following the arab spring movements: there have been hidden camera recording NGO employees explaining how to dodge controls, how to answer questions (by lying), and they've been actively helping sneaking people illegally in the EU.
A good question one could ask itself before downvoting me is this: if it's a fact that NGOs are teaming up, worldwide, to lie using the rethoric of "child safety" [1]... On which other topics did NGOs lie?
Or are we to believe all NGOs are good and well-meaning, except those working to end anonymity?
And before I forget: in Africa for example it's fully well known that NGO typical means "DGSE":
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Directorate_General_for_Extern...
There are french "doctors" in some of those NGOs who know less about medicine than what I know about medicine by having ex-girlfriends that were doctors.
By squinting one's eye just a little it look like NGO is not that far from a synonym of "shady undercover gov op".
And btw why should any of my taxpayers dollars go to even a single NGO if it's non-governmental?
And another big one: while some of those NGOs have been hard at work passing legislation which as a a result gets people arrested for "hate speech" (or even just for saying "christian prayers in their heads") in the UK, other NGOs are even harder at work making sure that the absolute most horrible of all hate speech cannot ever be criticized "because it's religious".
The double standards are literally insane.
If I was in the UK, I'd GTFO. And not to the EU.
[1] speaking of which, btw, there are serious allegations about NGOs participating in child trafficking, for example in the Haiti SNAFU
Any argument with such blatant oversimplifications is almost certainly lacking in nuance and can be ignored and dismissed.
I get what you’re pointing at: politicians regularly abuse these arguments, but that doesn’t mean it’s 100% of all arguments involving children.
Then watch as they accuse you of supporting pedophilia.
Should that argument be ignored too?
It's a tradeoff situation and nobody wants to leave it as such to find an answer which serves the best balance. Instead, we are doomed to discuss the absolutes of freedoms vs the absolutes of child safety.
I'd really like to see something like a required parental controls architecture products had to support (but not every device had to force universally). These kind of solutions only goes as far as the problem is a technical one, e.g. a kid on their dad's office computer they weren't supposed to access can still see things they shouldn't, but such is the truth with any pure technical approach to the problem which is not actually fully technically bound.
By demonizing them and failing to engage with the worries over social media and pornography We have brought it on ourselves.
Is it to be wondered at that many people are angry when tech companies have polluted the commons with their effluvium?
Believe it or not, sometimes the best answer is to do nothing until the crowd moves on to the next panic, as with the “Satanic Panic” in the 1980s. Turns out D&D was not actually a gateway to Satan worship.
The FTC let the free-market run riot with children’s TV. Shows used commercials to push expensive plastic toys. The shows themselves became commercials for their associated product lines. Parents felt unable to resist the social pressure channeled through their children and congress eventually passed an act that let the FCC reign in the FTC’s damage.
In the 2020s family economics has raced to the bottom: wages have stagnated, the cost of goods and services is set based on a household where everyone is in full time employment, and latch-key kids now have He-Man in the palm of their hands courtesy of Apple, Google, Samsung, and Xiomai.
This situation is ripe for exploitation by anyone who can offer parents a solution to their kids’ insatiable phone addiction.
That said, I’m a father of 3. I’m a millennial and tech worker. I have the digital literacy to teach my kids about the internet and its horrors in a safe way. Not every parent does, so passing this off as a “parent better” issue doesn’t solve anything either.
I dunno if you can legislate “better parental control ux”, but I’m open to similar ideas so parents can get some support without compromising on privacy.
Why would you think that? Most of my friends are parents now and all of them are quite concerned about the effect of social media, phones, and technology more broadly.
Basically all of them are planning to delay exposing their kids to phones and screens for as long as possible.
The sentiment of "keep my kids safe on the internet" definitely comes from parents. Yes. We agree.
How we actually get there in a privacy-respecting way is the issue.
If we must have something, I’m in favor of the OS-level flag where a parent can set the device as belonging to a minor and the apps and browser can receive the flag. Lock it behind the most basic parental controls that can be protected and remotely monitored. There are some loopholes with kids downloading apps that allow custom web requests without the flag being sent, so there probably needs to be an app allowlist or special App Store category to match.
Carve out some legal exemptions for Linux distributions that no kids are using and leave it to the iOS, Android, Windows, and Macs of the world. Any parent who doesn’t like the idea doesn’t have to enable it on their kids’ devices.
Parental controls already exist. Lawmakers want to step in and parent peoples' kids for them by removing these freedoms from everyone.
What a fucking stupid, impossible, idea.
Like, explain to me how you think this could be done meaningfully other than some setting that can just be arbitrarily flipped without adding massive complexity.
And arbitrarily changed? Can a regular user arbitrarily change the super user password?
Parents do not have the time or energy to configure modern parental controls which work more like tuning firewall rules.
The other part of the problem is you need collective action, if you ban your child from Facebook, they won’t get invited to parties anymore. If all children get banned, the parties will be arranged over sms or some other non social media. As it is today, banning your kids from social media is overly punishing since all the other kids are using it.
If we actually cared about supporting children and parents as a country, parental controls and access, and making sure that systems were actually safe and protected privacy, would NOT be an afterthought.
The polling I have seen from Germany and Australia of a social media ban for children was quite in favor of it. Sentiment here on HN and on Reddit was the polar opposite. We are in a bubble.
The answer every time is “well then Google/Apple/Facebook/Shopify/mcMaster Carr shouldn’t exist as a business” and if I’m being honest that is not an achievable target so you’re going to arrive at the attested internet.
I believe most online services should have safeguards to protect children because they will actively seek out harmful content and contacts (don't ask me how I know). But these safeguards should not allow for abuse of their users, or accidental info leaks, or sharing of PII to 1st or 3rd parties. There's plenty of ways to do e.g. age or identity verification anonymously and securely, for example.
The problem is not that they want to protect children. The problem is that these people are either technically clueless or deceptive which is why they present these surveillance measures as the only reasonable approach.
There is a really good way to do this that solves most concerns: https://blog.google/innovation-and-ai/technology/safety-secu...
The only real downside to this is that a 0kp cannot be reliably tied to an identity of the person using the device and thus tickets could be proxied/shared around with semi technical tools (and/or an ai agent tasked with creating a proxy). This really isn't solvable without device-level attestation[0], as if a website needs to reliably say "this person is actually this person" then it needs all pieces of data itself.
This could be solved by adding in a still privacy-preserving step like "The device is doing periodic face id scans and matching them to an identity, and constantly renews/re-presents to the age assurance consumer", but that has its own drawbacks[0].
0: Namely, lock in to devices that can do this, and that includes basically guaranteeing a double digit percentage of adult humans would not have access due to their device being old, unsupported, missing the hardware, etc. And with so many humans excluded, you would not have mass adoption. Probably also excludes rooted devices if we bring in attestation of unmodified software.
The unspoken part of this requirement is that websites would have to block users who aren’t connecting via one of these attested, verified, locked down devices.
There is the obvious loophole that using a VPN to a country without these requirements would circumvent it. That’s how kids are already circumventing age restrictions in places like Australia and it’s why the UK has taken an interest in attacking VPNs.
The alternative is what we're getting right now: laws that require verifying ID documents, often in ways that restrict even the notion of maintaining the user's privacy. Attestation might be an "OK" to "good" solution while this is between bad and really bad.
There is no form of digital ID that isn't evil, but anything requiring attestation is super evil.
Old hardware will have to be grandfathered. Old cars don't track us and that has created a market for old cars.
Hardware age attestation will be a long timeframe project. The current work should be towards standards that can get us there.
Finally, anonymity didn't exist for my grandparents. It won't exist for my grandchildren.
Your grandparents could walk to the next town over and give themselves a different name and nobody would ever know who they were. They could get a job, be paid in cash, and deposit that money in a bank account with no KYC. They could drop a letter in a public mailbox without a return address, or put up posters at night, or make phone calls from public telephones. Nobody would know who did it, and there would be no surveillance footage to review after the fact, no digital footprint to trace. They could write a letter to their local newspaper to be printed with a fake name, or publish a book or story or magazine under an assumed identity. There were no ALPRs, no automated facial recognition, no built-in vehicle telematics, no drones, no smartphones to track anyone’s movement, no doorbell cameras on every block, no video tapes, no serial numbers hidden in the printouts from copy machines, no DNA analysis, no databases instantly searchable with the click of a button.
Feel free to make a value judgement about whether what we have now is better or worse than the past, if you want, but don’t invent history to rationalise it. The internet did not invent anonymity. It used to be the default.
Unfortunately it's so much easier for lawmakers to slap down a law that says "you must verify IDs right now if you want to continue to exist" with no requirement, and often not even support for, privacy preserving ways to make this happen. The laws are happening now. The chance of reform to align with a privacy-preserving option once the laws are implemented is slim to none.
edit: sp
In letting things flow to easily the opposition is to have heavy lock down on information. A lot of the time, the opposite of one bad idea is another bad idea.
Is there, though? The push is coming from lobbyists who seem to be largely funded by wealthy elites, corporations, and other opaque organizations. One of them seems to be Meta. It doesn’t look like a grassroots effort.
Social media already tracks it's users with or without laws. The general populace simply will not wish to anonymize themselves on the internet. So ID Laws only serves as a benefit by restricting children.
Regarding pornography, the demand will always be there. Adding ID tracking will just shift the business model to be more covert, which is also a net benefit to children. And for the adults who seek it, they will find it, with or without ID laws.
So again, I do not understand the rejection of ID law. Either you are known on the internet, of which ID law is just a confirmation of your identity (less bots maybe?), or you are anonymous, and you will skirt any ID laws and not participate in the known identity space. What ends up is ID law straight up does not materially affect you, unless you are a literal child.
And on the day the government decides to ban social media for adults, I say good riddance to it too. Anonymous internet may even thrive because of it.
I'm convinced the pro comments are astroturfing. They've been caught doing it already on Twitter for these bills.
I'm still left wondering how it affects us? Is my insurance rate going to change because of this? Because if they can sell the data after ID laws, they can definitely sell it before ID laws too.
I suppose there will always be some astroturfing for such an issue, but I'm not convinced that it is the majority voice. I don't use Twitter anyways, don't plan on giving my data to them. In fact, with anonymous websites like HN, you would never know either way. So to me, we can either eliminate astroturfing with identification, or consider every anonymous voice in good faith.
The reasons are mentioned every single time these laws are brought up, I can only assume you're willfully ignoring the concerns people have:
It's a security black hole, increasing our attack surface astronomically.
It causes undue compliance costs for websites to meet basic security standards.
It does not reliably prevent the determined teenager from bypassing these restrictions, e.g. with a vpn, but imposes enormous costs on allegedly a nontarget demograpgic (e.g. everyone else). Small benefit with a large cost is a bad policy.
The problem is entirely manufactured by bureaucrats, the public is concerned with gas prices and making ends meet. The parents that are concerned about their child's internet access can and do take the appropriate precautions because child controls already exist.
Whatever justification is given, the end result is mass surveillance, with the expected consequences in reduction of personal and social liberties. This is nothing to scoff at.
It was never about the children, but as long as people discuss as if it were, they have won.
IMHO you have more freedom in China than in Europe. Can you walk on the street and say "Fuck Xi Jinping" like you would in France with Macron? Probably not. But it's a completely useless freedom to have.
At least in China you get relative safety when you walk on the street at night. And when the government decides to restrict some liberties you don't have to pay tens of thousands of politicians and lobbyist to do it.
If you have to choose your poison pill, you might as well pick the cheap one that does bring a semblance of harmony and not complete polarization and chaos.
If you shout insults at Macron, you will be prosecuted. If you display insults about Macron, you will be prosecuted.
https://www.rue89strasbourg.com/insulte-macron-selestat-mani...
https://www.ouest-france.fr/societe/justice/un-homme-de-77-a...
You see, China and the US aren't that different you know. In the US, I can go up to Donald Trump and say "I don't like Donald Trump. The policies of the republican government are rubbish!"
In China, I can go up to Xi Jinping and say "I don't like Donald Trump! The policies of the republican government are rubbish!"
"None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free." – Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
I'm a Brit who wastes time web surfing and the total impact on me so far is reddit asked for a selfie. It's very different from areas where they did have a war on anonymity like bank accounts and investments where you have to scan passports and stuff. I've heard no one at all suggest that for general web surfing.
Whistle blowers, journalists, religious apostates, people unsure about their sexuality all rely on annonimity on the internet.
I can't find the Times article but government officials have clearly stated that this isn't about protecting children, it's about controlling political discourse online. They are now floating the idea of forcing YouTube to give "trusted" public service news sources prominence. Again to control the discourse. That includes the BBC, which I personally have completely lost trust in.
https://www.gov.uk/government/news/plans-for-prominence-of-t...
Sure - open an email not in your name, write to papers not in your name, whistle blow away. It still works. I've got various anon accounts - no problems so far.
Not sure about the trusted source bit although the likes of x and youtube seem to do that anyway a bit - give more prominence to medical experts than antivax cranks for example.
[1] there are caveats, but the crucial point is its a legal process, rather than bidding war.
And here's like ~120 of us who showed up to oppose AB 2023 (the 3D printer spyware bill). It was incredible. https://calmatters.digitaldemocracy.org/hearings/279741#t=19...
I think the easiest way to get involved is to become an EFF member. They'll keep you up to date on all the censorship and surveillance bills. Then you can contact your legislator, sent letters to the CA legislature committees, or show up to the hearings in Sacramento.
For example, all devices could require your ZKP ID attestation to be usable unfiltered. Then the relevant apps/sites would be equally inaccessible to children. And then you remove the ZKP ID attestation because the device owner (parent, school, etc) already knows when the user is a child.
ZKP ID would work but that’s essentially deanonymization because you have to provide your ID to someone though no one has total information. Also just checking for its absence doesn’t work because that’s opt in and less than 5% of parents would do it. Every individual, irrespective of age would have to have a valid one.
That said it was funny, yesterday Microsoft said I had to age verify my account. I went in basically with the intention of backing out of it at the first sign of over reach.
First step was, 'provide you email for this account'. So I did that and then... approved! You are certified over 18+. That is the flip side of this, some of these companies will put up some of the weakest barriers on this stuff.
It is more expensive today to maintain your privacy and anonymity than it is to surveil you. The collective surveillance grid makes it possible to track people's movements, whereabouts, their predilections, political views, personal images and more for a few cents every day. It's a bargain.
And in this new world, the eye watches everyone, all the time, forever. Most people, including people on HN, are still stuck in a human-first world. The new surveillance state isn't going to be thousands to hundreds of thousands of humans sitting in a shadow-y room going over pictures and videos. Today, a bunch of vectors and a large multi-modal model will do just fine. Servers are cheap (for a nation state) and never need to eat or sleep.
And they will be used to watch you. Especially if you're attractive. Or, valuable. Or, blackmail-able. After all, NSA employees routinely abuse multi-billion dollar surveillance assets to stalk women. It's so common that the NSA calls it LOVEINT.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LOVEINT
In the world to come, people are going to wish they were being surveilled by the NSA. Because at least the NSA punishes these people. Occasionally.
When this kind of technology becomes this cheap and this pervasive, then the end of anonymity means unaccountable sheriff deputies stalking their former spouse and family. Or, prospective romantic interests.
https://www.firstalert4.com/2026/08/03/brentwood-officer-acc...
https://www.yahoo.com/news/us/articles/cops-using-license-pl...
https://www.yahoo.com/news/us/articles/rogue-officers-turned...
https://www.newsweek.com/flock-camera-police-arrests-1226378...
https://ij.org/police-have-reportedly-used-license-plate-rea...
https://edition.cnn.com/2026/07/26/us/flock-cameras-surveill...
With this new oracle, these people will be able to set up alerts for when their spouse is thinking of leaving them. To catch their child accessing support for abuse or something more ephemeral like being an atheist, having different political views or LGBT+.
Anyone who doesn't see the forest for the trees, or who embraces this because "parental controls are too hard to use" will doom themselves and future generations to a world that's materially worse than our hyper-surveilled present.
I can't believe I'm saying this, but at this rate I'm going to miss the days when it was just the NSA reading my emails (and they still do! Howdy!). I know the track record. But at least the NSA has some sense of institutional responsibility and control. Most institutions in your life, including your HOA don't.
https://ktvz.com/cnn-regional/2021/07/22/arnold-residents-ce...
Cheaper computer technology has been great for the average persons uses but it cuts both ways. It also means much cheaper surveillance. I suspect that governmental/corporate surveillance now costs less than 1% of their spending, something that simple couldn't have been done even a few decades back.
I do wonder what the world would have been like is say computer technology peaked at 486 level performance/memory. Much of what we have today simply could not have happened in terms of surveillance and social media damages. Alas, this is the world we didn't get.
George Orwell was pretty on the mark.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Brother_(Nineteen_Eighty-F...
How would the Nazi Germany and Hitler gone if they had this system in place, telling them who and where every single Jewish, gay, gypsy, disabled, or just ideologically opposed to them person was, 24/7?
What about other insane rulers? What do you think they would - or rather, will - do with these systems?
The one thing he always said is, they have always been watching and know who is who, what these things do is allow it to be entered into the court of law. Now they can act on these things.
You’ll also notice that Anduril is quickly being accepted now that we’re expending munitions faster than our replacement rate.
Put in a less polite way, they're preparing for the metaphorical pitchforks and torches held by mobs of the common people which might manifest themselves in a more kinetic format.
Military's, intelligence agencies and actuaries have been warning about this for decades now and their language is getting very direct on this and the time lines nowadays.
If you have ever been caught in a rip while swimming, there is a moment when you suddenly getting a sucking sensation as you transition from stable waters into an outward flow. I am starting to think we are in that transitional phase on global stability, that the 2030's are not going to be a comfortable time for many.
They are ensuring that potential disruptors can be reigned in if needed. To try and stop things from being even more unpredictable, for better or worse. Buckle up.
You don't build long term surveillance systems and billionaires don't build bunkers for what they think of as a temporary tough situation.
I really wish I had kept all the others from the US, Europe, Aus/NZ etc. It is a very common theme but they are largely kept quiet and only typically (partially) released through freedom of information requests.
This one from Actuaries UK was one that set off alarm bells. As they advise the insurance industry, they are structured to be politically neutral. The key takeaway is the impacts of 3c temperature rise by 2050 on page 9. The reason this is an issue, we are currently on target to hit that with us likely to pass 2c mid next decade with the rate of warming increasing.
https://actuaries.org.uk/media/r3cporjb/planetary-solvency-c...
This one from the UK government is all about addressing national security regarding this issue. Typically they are advising that they secure their food supplies and hardened up boarders in the next 5 years. Funnily enough Brexit may have given them the power to enforce this much more than they would have otherwise had. But that just means they have built a unique flavor of oppression.
https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/nature-security-a...
I have said it for years now about a lot of countries. They will welcome immigrants with open arms, those arms being machine guns, rockets and drones.
They also pass my personal test of not advocating for dumb feel-good ideas. Recently they published a well-sourced article on why the US rail system isn’t a good candidate for electrification.
Was all about just doing the math on energy transitions. He wasn't anti renewable technology but did want to point out how scale is a problem that few understand.
My favorite number of his is, that at 3% growth year over year, we would need all the energy of the Milky way galaxy by the year 13,000. As the galaxy is 100,000 light years across, this would defy physics itself.
"We need the plebs to want to mock people who work from home, to reduce the reticence in coming back to work in the office"
"We need our commercial property values to go back up"
Edited to add:
"Our managers need to _feel_ as if they're actually managing people"
https://www.thegauntlet.news/p/how-the-press-manufactured-co...
The threat from COVID (and more importantly, long COVID) never went away, but they sure convinced the average person that it did.
Today you can see an N95 in the wild once in awhile, so some people are paying attention, but they are less than 1%. Many others are suffering brain damage, unexplained heart issues, taxed immune systems, etc and have no idea why (nor does their doctor).
A cursory google suggests that the return-to-office movement is primarily driven by management's desire for voluntary turnover, avoiding the bad press of mass layoffs. But certainly doesn't show that it's 'been debunked 100 times'.
In my own experience, it's been 50/50 a desire for voluntary turnover, and also a control tactic. Employees are easier to strong-arm when they're immersed in the idea that company culture actually matters.
I haven't come across much of the debunking of the commercial property issue. I would say it's undeniably factor, but we can argue about the scale.
A total of $800 billion—in real terms—of value is at stake by 2030, and, on average, the total value of office space is expected to decline by 26 percent from 2019 to 2030.
https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/real-estate/our-insights...
firstly the amount of money that the "UK lobby" are pushing is a drop of sand in the ocean.[1]
secondly, and most importantly, the USA has no (federally robust) legal protection for citizens to guard against data collection and aggregation. So whist this is being presented as a war on anonymity lead by the dirty British, this is basically "think of the children" play for protecting anonymity. There is nothing wrong with this, its a good argument, even though its obviously flawed.
If you want to dox someone, you just need to pay the right broker. That is, in the UK really difficult. (for example flock cameras are largely illegal in the UK, certainly no council or HOA can just install them. sure you can put in CCTV, but you cannot process that CCTV to track bystanders)
There are no useful controls for citizens to limit the collection and processing of personal information. so whilst in theory you can be anonymous in america, as soon as you use a phone, or any ISP you are effectively de anonymised. I can as a company, buy your location data, tie it to your IP, then cross check with various ad networks to get usernames. (the civil legal route here is file a john doe and ask for metadata in discovery. Higher legal bar, but I don't think thats something that can be done simply in the UK)
TLDR: Contrary to popular belief there are greater protections to anonymous behaviour in the UK. Yes they have been greatly eroded, but the difference here is that there are no legal ways for companies to unmask you for money[2]. In the USA there is no legal protection for someone to share your ID for money.
[1]musk is currently spending millions propping up convicted criminals.
[2] not without your permission, or without a robust legal proceeding.
They want the OS to report the user's age. People will use this to claim whatever age they want. For instance, if companies cannot advertise to children, they might find that almost every computer is reporting that the user is a child--turns out adults want the protections kids receive as well--sometimes.
Eventually they will have to enforce a system intrusive enough that no lying or abuse of the system is possible. We might even approach "Verification Can" levels of verification.
Can also just lie about your age, "I am as old as the fjords, as young as a newborn lamb" - Thor - GTA Vice City radio ;)
This is something I have noted with Trump, he seems to be one of the last names that made it really big in pre-social media era and had a somewhat unified presence in peoples minds.
Making it to that level nowadays is actually really difficult, heck I would argue that even people like Mr Beast hasn't hit that level of awareness due to the fragmented nature of media and fame.
You can build movement in an echo chamber, it just depends if that is enough.
https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/data-centers/prot...
This is simply a risk that I am willing to make. Just fuck off already.
Like, pick a side: are we the tiny backwater micro state on the verge of bankruptcy with no standing in the world, or are we a hugely influencial world power directing US law?
They can keep floating this stuff and we have to put in a thousand times as much energy to shoot it down. We get worn down quicker than they can. It only has to work once for them, we have to keep pushing back.
My very pessimistic take is one out of Taoism. If you wish for them to fail, let them grow. Eventually the weight of the whole system collapses itself, the question is just on what time frame.
The way out is to go through. I don't like this framing but it seems to be the most accurate.
It’s also a good idea to maintain your own private means of communication, as there will be some hard times ahead.
If it actually did anything to protect the children it wouldn’t be so objectionable
Worse, these laws will actually create new harms to children who will be forced to give their identity to websites and identity services that will exploit them and fail to protect that data.
And if it was mostly about posting content anonymously instead of even reading these sites.
Today's America in a nutshell
And to point out the obvious on the actual quality of the piece, The US has itself passed age verification laws in 20 states, such as Texas where it was driven not by the British but by domestic interest groups and decidedly state senators like Angela Paxton.
Also given the slant of the site it's pretty obvious was the political motivation here is, I guess yelling at the British always works
Ask yourself logically - who would pay these NGOs to do things like attempt to extort meta into a $500M+ settlement over “harming child mental health.”
This is all connected and intelligence agency backed. It’s far from innocent, it’s non corporate - some had suggested meta was behind it - but as we have seen meta is the one getting targeted.
Other countries have already implemented this or are making strenuous efforts towards it. In Pakistan right now you need to submit a copy of your national ID card and scan your fingerprints to get a live LTE data service SIM card. This is not hyperbole but is real practice in some places that is soon going to be imported to jurisdictions that traditionally have more "freedom".
https://www.pta.gov.pk/category/biometric-verification-77103...
https://www.biometricupdate.com/202607/pakistan-fast-tracks-...
Statements like this are inflammatory—basically a personal attack—and ironically are much more likely to violate HN guidelines.
Corporations all over the world routinely and knowingly poison, injure, or outright murder their employees and their customers. They spend massive amounts of money preventing the public from knowing about the harms they are causing. Even in the most egregious cases where there is well documented proof of what they've done the heads of these companies still get away with it. They profit from it. They're just happily living their lives in their mansions and on their yachts while graves are dug and families are torn apart.
It is absolutely failing of the government and the American legal system that nobody spent time in prison for Purdue's lies and poison, we're in full agreement there.
That said, this position alone doesn't suggest that otherwise law-abiding citizens should be more concerned about corporate surveillance than they are government surveillance.
Government violence is different though. When the government acts against the public they are generally required to follow long and complex procedures with multiple points of checks and accountability. A cop has to get enough evidence to convince a judge to issue an arrest warrant. A person is taken into custody and given access to a lawyer. A trial is held in court with a jury. At every step there are volumes of records detailing exactly what was done, by whom, and why. All of that information is public record and we can request those records to keep watch on what the government does. If the government abuses the power we give them we can vote them out of office and replace them.
Obviously there are a lot of problems with our legal system and places where all of that breaks down, but the goal was for there to be transparency and accountability and nothing stops us from improving the situation. With corporations on the other hand, they act in secret, they don't have to ask anyone for permission, they aren't required to keep records of everything they do, you have no legal right to examine the records they have, and even if you find out a CEO is responsible for murdering a bunch of people for profit you have no power to vote that CEO out of office.
It's pretty clear which of whose two entities is the larger threat. Which one of them has already repeatedly poisoned you and your entire family. Which one do you think was responsible for more violence done to your loved ones?
The end results is they are two sides of the same coin but with very different mechanics. Neither should be accepted.
Privacy doomerism is a form of complicity.
Governments want control, Companies want money. Control typically comes from a reduction in rights, freedoms, money. When you fail to give those up "naturally" violence, worsened living conditions and abuse are the tools used.
> Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says.
If the same standard were applied for posts, this one would fail. I recognize that it is a popular perspective that these measures are essentially a war on anonymity, but that is not what they intend to fix, although it is quite possible that anonymity is a casualty of whatever war is at hand.
I believe efforts to resist these measures would be more effective if they engaged with the problem: the modern internet is a harmful experience for young minds, beyond what any society should consider acceptable. I personally don't think shocking content is the worst of it. Algorithms that maximize engagement over enriching experience are a curse for any age group, and developing brains face the worst of it.
Is age-gating the internet the right answer? Will it even help? Are there ulterior motives? Those are open questions that need discussion. Dismissing a genuine problem is choosing not to engage in the discussion.
Larry Ellison on surveillance: “Citizens will be on their best behavior, because we’re constantly recording and reporting everything that’s going on.”
This is not new and it’s not about kids. This is the culmination of years of planning that began after the Arab Spring, when elites began to get concerned about how the Internet could be leveraged for domestic regime change.
While I do think we should make efforts to reduce crime and create better spaces for kids, laws like this aren’t the answer.
Because of the goal of advertising revenue as the ultimate driver as to build an addictive permanent scroll of slop on tiktok or instagram, and the desire of social media companies to build walled gardens where someone's entire online experience stays in their "app.". As you say, this affects young and old alike.
It's not just about child safety. No one is safe from this increasing levels of toxic environment created by digital/online ways. A lot of types of people will be extinct, who are unable to deal with technology driven media onslaught, complexity, online crime and content manipulation. There is no scope for trust and assumptions. One need to be on their toes in every engagement with others and these systems, or hire an agent/expert even for simple tasks in life.
The tech-savvy people here might argue for freedom and anonymity at any cost. But think of other social classes, laws and the way the nations and societies came to be what they are today. The world doesn't just belong to tech nerds only.
People need safety from all this tech. That may against the wishes of a tiny minority of the people. But a nation, by nature, enforces generic policies that benefit those most of the people.
The mobile and desktop OS should have a checkbox "child mode" in the onboarding stage. Switching device to "child mode" allows only installing white-listed apps from the government list and opening white-listed websites from the government list. Parents may edit the white lists but not required to do anything other than checking a box and setting a password, or registering a fingerprint, or a paired device.
The white-listed apps and websites (who volunteered to be included into the white list) must implement measures to ensure safety. Another option for a website to opt-in is to add a HTTP-header claiming safety. White-listed sites may be subject to additional regulations.
Non-white listed apps and websites are not required to implement anything, including checking age, asking for selfies etc. If the parents add a website to the white list, it becomes their responsibility to ensure that it does not contain any harmful content. For example, if parents allow their child to use Telegram, Telegram is not obliged to do any age checks and content restrictions.
My proposal achieves safe environment for all ages, but at the same time:
- based on liberal principles of voluntary participation rather than on totalitarian principles like most other proposals
- doesn't require any age checks, selfies or passports
- doesn't require adult websites to do anything and spend money for compliance, unlike most other proposals which assume that every business must spend money on moderation and compliance
- only those sites and apps that want to be in the white list, have to spend resources
- doesn't require banning VPNs as VPNs will not be approved for inclusion into a white list