The big issue isn’t even age verification. The end goal is verified user identification. They want every transaction on the internet to be associated with the exact identity of the user. No more anonymity.<p>In the short term the way it will be implemented is this — age verification will not be a binary, it will also want to push your DoB, name, location etc and they say “the choice is with the user” but the default will be to send everything. Very soon there will be services that require DoB or name or something else to gate new or existing functionality. That is the slippery slope it will be built as and that is how they win the game
It’s not very soon, it’s already the case that if one wants to enable the latest models in the OpenAI api you have to submit your details to their “identity provider”.
Which is why it’s important to be able to run models locally. Which also might explain the strategy behind buying all of the memory that is or will exist for at least a year out. Maybe we’ll eventually see AI safety be used to prevent people from running local models.
You mean having to sign into your Microsoft account to get your bootloader co-signed before your legally mandated TPU 3.1 allows you to install a govenment blessed and sufficiently telemetrized signed OS to "your" computer if you are on the whitelist of not-yet-misinformation-spreaders?
+1 for local models. It also teaches users about how much energy they are using. One's perspective on 24/7 chatbots and agentic operating systems changes when you feel the heat coming from a rack of gpus.<p>(Spring is nearly here and my excuse about my rig also heating my house is about to end. Soon I will be paying extra to run my a/c as my rig pumps out a steady 1000w under load.)
Given the recent mexican telecom hacks were allegedly done with significant help from openai/anthropic's chatbots, it seems at least somewhat prudent to require some sort of identity verification for <i>API</i> access? I'm struggling to see how this isn't the tech community's version of "no background checks for gun purchases" or "no KYC for bank accounts".
Is api access really really so extreme that it's italics worthy? Technology should be available to us in other roles than just passive consumer using front ends that might not suit what we need, or work against us in some way. Already I am giving a credit card to openai to use the service, but in addition now I have to hand my government ID over to withpersona.com. who are they? who are their investors? will the leak my information accidentally/accidentally-on-purpose/on-purpose? Okay maybe Rick Song and Persona Identities are genuinely trustworthy, but what happens when someone wants an exit in the future and they merge with palantir and now when i generate a picture i have to worry about being added to a target list for some automated kamakazi drone kill-chain a-la black mirror.
Or if this becomes standard practice .. maybe its not Persona Inc. but i have to vet dozens of these companies and it becomes too hard.
Rather than guns, this is more like Identity verification for pipe purchases from the hardware store because one could use it got build a rocket.
They were also likely done with keyboards and mice. Should we require id at point of purchase for those?
Alright, so does that mean we don't need KYC for gun purchases or bank accounts either?<p>Of course you're probably going to say something about how guns and bank accounts are crucial components to crime, in which case the same holds for AI in the mexican telecoms hack.
> Alright, so does that mean we don't need KYC for ... bank accounts either?<p>That sounds reasonable. A bank can just be an institution that holds money for people; they don't need to be all over their customer's business. It is like a telecom not being responsible for what their customers say. In a simple sense banks don't need KYC.
What happens when everyone needs to use AI for their job? Genuine question that I think gets at the heart of the debate.<p>Once a common technology that everyone has access to becomes powerful enough to alter the lives of others on command, do we as a society just need to do away with the concept of anonymity? We are all just too powerful in isolation, and too much of a threat to the collective, that we cannot reasonably expect not to have some governing body watching at all times?<p>Today, you can buy parts/print a completely untraceable firearm, so do we license sales of steel tubing and 3D printers?
>What happens when everyone needs to use AI for their job? Genuine question that I think gets at the heart of the debate.<p>Considering most places does direct deposit and that requires a bank account (so KYC), I don't see what's particularly new here. Many places also do background and/or work eligibility checks, which again is a form of KYC.<p>>Today, you can buy parts/print a completely untraceable firearm, so do we license sales of steel tubing and 3D printers?<p>Fortunately 3d printed guns are bad enough that it's not really an issue, although the bigger threat is probably CNC machines. However that's probably will get a pass, because they're eye-wateringly expensive compared to black market guns that nobody would bother.
> Considering most places does direct deposit and that requires a bank account (so KYC), I don't see what's particularly new here.<p>Slippery slope is a fallacy, they said.<p>> Many places also do background and/or work eligibility checks, which again is a form of KYC.<p>Except that it isn't KYC at all, both because employees aren't customers (most people are the employees of one company but the customers of hundreds or more), and because the majority of people don't have that requirement imposed on them <i>by the government</i>. There are many jobs you can get without a background check.
Just yesterday I thought about the right middle ground for KYC when buying guns.<p>The issue with centrally registering guns is than when you country is taken over by hostile forces (whether an invading army or a democratically elected abuser who turns it into a dictatorship), they know who has the guns and can force those people to surrender them (politely at first, authoritarians always use a salami slicing technique).<p>The issue with no controls is that even anti-social and mentally ill people can get them.<p>I wonder if the right middle ground could be:<p>- Sellers have to do their due diligence - require ID, proof of psychological examination, whatever else is deemed the right balance.<p>- Not doing due diligence means they get punishment equal to that for any offense committed with that gun.<p>- They might be required to mark/stamp the gun so that it can be traced back to them or have witnesses for the transfer.
The arguments for background checks generally have to be split into two separate classes of people.<p>The first is the mentally ill. Intuitively it seems desirable to say that someone undergoing treatment for e.g. depression shouldn't buy a gun. The problem here is the massive perverse incentive. If you're pretty depressed but you're not inclined to forfeit your ability to buy firearms, you now have a significant incentive to avoid seeking treatment. At which point you can still buy a gun but now your mental illness is going untreated, which is <i>very</i> worse than where we started.<p>The second is career criminals, i.e. people who have already been convicted of a crime and want to commit another one. The problem here is that career criminals... don't follow laws. If they want a gun they steal one or recruit someone without a criminal record into their gang etc., both of which are actually worse than just letting them buy one.<p>On top of that, when people get caught, prosecutors generally try to get them to testify against other criminals in exchange for a deal, who are then going to be pretty mad at them. Which gives them a much higher than average legitimate need to exercise their right to self-defense once they get back out. And then you get three <i>independent</i> bad outcomes: If they can't defend themselves they get killed for snitching, if they acquire a gun anyway so they don't then they could go back to prison even if they were otherwise trying to reform themselves, and if they think about this ahead of time or are advised of it by their lawyers then they'll be less likely to cooperate with prosecutors because the other two scenarios that are both bad for them only happen if they snitch.<p>Meanwhile the proposal was only ever expected to address a minority of the problem to begin with because plenty of the people who do bad things can pass the background check. And if you have a policy that doesn't even solve most of the original problem while creating several new ones, maybe it's just a bad idea?
Personal guns have absolutely nothing with defense against "hostile forces'. That is pure fantasy.<p>Occasionally, gun owners are THE hostile force buying guns explicifely to bully and threaten. But that is about it, really.
An account level flag in a user account on an operating system is the opposite of verified identification. It is self assertion by the owner of the computer: the parent. If such a control works in the same way as enterprise supervision the child won't be able to install a vpn, or other software to bypass the control.
I hope someone takes those Meta glasses or an Oculus or Apple Vision or something and hooks it up to clearview or some other facial recognition service and agentically scrapes OSINT sources to doxx people on the street, in real time.<p>One glance and I have your full name, home address, SSN, all online handles and aliases, employment history, email, and phone number, instantaneously on a HUD. It doesn't even need to be marketed as "doxxing as a service;" it can just be marketed as "professional networking" or "social media." That way people will voluntarily submit their information and all rights over it to the platform.<p>Until people feel their privacy being viscerally raped on a minute to minute basis nothing will change.
My black-mirror prediction for how augmented reality and AI will interact: In order of horribleness.<p>1> Auto-nude. Today we can "nudify" photos and videos. Soon, augemented reality glasses will be able to nudify eveyone in real time. (This is totally possible today.)<p>2> Auto-tranlation. Cool. Everyone can talk to everyone, but users will have censorship options. I don't much like hearing australians so I will just have the glasses make them all sound like proper Texans. And the sound of people with alternative views to my own are replaced with calming country music.<p>3> Lie detection. Glasses will look for facial/voice body ticks suggestive of deception. Good luck talking your way out of a ticket, or explaining to you boss how you were "sick", when they have a lie detector online 24/7.<p>4> Censorship of "bad" objects. Signs with ads or news that I do not agree with will be blocked and replaced with more appropriate text. Mosques will appear as churches. Garbage and pollution will become happy birds and clear blue skies. Homeless people will be replaced with attractive young people (see #1 above).<p>5> Race replacement. I don't like certain races. So my glasses now make everyone Chinese. So long as I don't turn off the glasses, I can live my custom racist utopia.
Yeah, none of this is about children. "Think of the children" is just a means to an end, and most likely what we'll find is even when we lose all pretense of anonymity somehow the kids will figure out a way to get access.
IMAGINE A WAR.<p>Now - wouldn't a government LOVE to know who's saying what? Rather than shutting down the entire $$$$$ international corporate internet.<p>Money concerns as usual.
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I feel like I see these comments basically verbatim and it's freaking me out. The whole "I share your concerns, but hear me out: anonymity is bad." It's basically identical wording every single time.<p>I think people who say this should back it up by posting their full name, date of birth, SSN or other ID number, and address. A phone number would also be helpful so we can call and verify that they made the post. Otherwise they're not being honest.
> I think people who say this should back it up by posting their full name, date of birth, SSN or other ID number, and address. A phone number would also be helpful so we can call and verify that they made the post. Otherwise they're not being honest<p>But this isn't (intellectually) honest, either?<p>Maybe you can justify asking that they post under their real name, but asking for the kind of information that's required to steal their identity isn't the same as asking them who they are.
> Online anonymity has significant, real-world drawbacks.<p>Do please be specific about those. Provide concrete examples and justify for the class why those involved couldn't have voluntarily done away with anonymity for that particular interaction.<p>Hypothetically someone can browse a tor site in one tab, post on 4chan in a second one, all while accessing online banking in a third. The bank can use hardware backed 2FA to verify you. Where's the issue here?
When financial institutions in the USA are not even adding basic things like... approve transaction on phone, keeping most things pull based based on knowing a few magic numbers vs. push based and other really basic things, this really doesn't hold water. Things being anon doesn't even register in the day to day of what is bad with the internet, vast majority of it is from very non-anonymous sources, influencers, apps or institutions.
In many other countries, these are enforced by central bank, bank association or legislations.<p>In USA, small business, small bank and credit unit are often used as excuse to push back these kind of rules.
> An information leak 30 years ago was bad, but it had a fairly limited impact radius. Today it can lose you your house, your savings, your relationships, and even your life ("swatting" comes to mind).<p>So you are afraid of minor information leaks getting you killed, but you’re also trying to tell us that online anonymity is a bad thing?<p>Come on. This argument isn’t even coherent from paragraph to paragraph.<p>> I don't think it's reasonable to keep dreaming of the 90s or 00s when the internet was a comparatively innocent place<p>This is such a strange argument as the internet was most definitely NOT an innocent place, even relatively speaking, in that period.<p>I think there is a lot of nostalgic history rewriting in these claims. Much like political movements that claim that the past was a better time, it’s easy to only remember the good parts of how things were in the past.
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> I neither believe nor did express any of the opinions you accuse me of.<p>I directly quoted your beliefs that minor information leaks on the internet can lose your house and get you killed, as well as your claim that the internet was significantly more innocent in the past.<p>These were the points you were putting forward along with your insistence that we have to “be real” about the problems of anonymity on the internet.<p>Its hard for me to believe that you don’t recognize the dissonance between the two points you were putting forward.<p>Your silly “Are you an American” attempt at an insult or rebuttal reveals the level of conversation you’re having, though.
> As society is more and more digitized<p>How about this is actually the real problem? Online banking is not worth an omniscient global surveillance state, let alone the immense amount of leverage gained by this digitization.
> Online anonymity has significant, real-world drawbacks.<p>Online anonymity has significant, real-world benefits which every doxxed person ever will list for you.
> <i>Sticking our head in the sand crying "git gud" while millions get scammed out of their life savings...</i><p>The solution is called a durable power of attorney and then moving significant assets to different financial institutions with e-statements. Or the heavyweight option is a living trust.<p>Mandatory identity verification or locking down software really have no bearing on this problem. Scammers leverage generic apps in the app stores just fine.<p>This problem most certainly is a part of the global turn towards fascism, which is ultimately based on frustrated people demanding easy answers and then empowering those who are able to give them easy answers by lying to them.
Somehow they will eliminate anonymity for real people, but bots will still be pushing Russian or... some other country's interests with massive bot farms.
If the end goal was user identification then the digital ID + zero knowledge proof age verification methods would be disallowed, which they aren't. <a href="https://blog.google/products-and-platforms/platforms/google-pay/google-wallet-age-identity-verifications/" rel="nofollow">https://blog.google/products-and-platforms/platforms/google-...</a>
You got suckered by the marketing. Google's "zero knowledge" approach requires devices locked down with remote attestation, which prohibits end users from running their own code (when interacting with websites that prevent it, which as time goes on under this plan will be everywhere). The only actual difference here is that this is <i>Google's</i> desired approach to destroying anonymity and personal computing.
I was a kid with unrestricted, unsupervised internet access, and it definitely affected many things in my life. If I happen to have a child in the future, they won't go through that.<p>The Brazilian government passed a law requiring age verification for every site categorized as 16+. It can't be self-declared, so companies usually resort to facial scans and ID verification. I DO NOT want photos of our Brazilian children going to foreign agents who are PROVEN to profit from and do God-knows-what with our biometric data. And the funniest part? The same law says 'regulation shall not, under any circumstances, authorize or result in the implementation of mass surveillance mechanisms,' but also mandates that these measures must be 'AUDITABLE.' In other words, someone needs access to that data. It’s all so stupid and incoherent.<p>People who are less tech-literate FIERCELY support the measure, and whenever someone opposes it, they claim that person supports digital child abuse...<p>Anyway... the responsibility of protection should come from the parents, not from companies that profit off your biometric data.
I guess the opposite case might not be as interesting to many, but I achieved basically unfiltered internet access as a child, and it has been immensely helpful for me as a person. Everything I am today -- a programmer, technically literate, a founder of a startup with momentum, I am because I had freedom and autonomy as a child (which was not <i>granted</i> to me, rather achieved by me). Many of the people of my age who grew up with strict controls and supervisory parents seem kind of lost and uninformed to me, now that they are turning into adults. I feel this narrative is surprisingly rarely heard on HN, but I cannot be the only one?
I think the same for me, I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t be in my career if I had been restricted to an hour a day on a filtered iPad.<p>But I also think the internet has more potential for harm now. Widespread social media makes it easy for predators. YouTube actively incentivises content creators to produce brain numbing shit instead of the more amateur and educational content I was exposed to. Instagram creates vicious dopamine hooks that children have no mental defense against.<p>Also sorry to sound egotistical but I think I was an outlier that drifted into doing educational things, many or most kids will spend every moment they get just playing video games.<p>That being said, I’m in favour of parents doing the parenting, not the government.
> Also sorry to sound egotistical but I think I was an outlier that drifted into doing educational things, many or most kids will spend every moment they get just playing video games.<p>I am in the same predicament as both of you, having grown up with unfiltered internet access, and not wanting it to have went any other way (I love my life, actually!)<p>There is a condescending tendency when people hear what I said above, to tell me that I am an outlier, or, God forbid, a "genius", and other equally worrying conclusions regarding my character.<p>I agree that, today, there are millions more ways that children can fall for objectively negative things, that have been completely, and intentfully engineered to be terrible in a way which can be exploited for profit.<p>But also, I simply think that, with enough access to mind-numbing content, for long enough... people will simply realize that, actually, they don't want that. At least, not <i>just</i> that.<p>Adults are not a good term for comparision in the matter of less aggressive addictions, like with social media, because they already have lives they want to escape, with responsibilities and whatnot.<p>These are not scientifically sourced claims, but, in my experience, children have a lot more time, energy, curiosity, and will/intent to create, for one reason or another, and they have been doing those things since time immemorial.<p>This is just a consequence of having access to ~the entirety of all human knowledge at their fingertips, with no restrictions, and with an incredible amount of free time at their disposal.
I also had the same experience (not just with Internet - I had unfiltered access to basically any and all reading materials), and I felt that on the whole it was a massively positive experience for me. I feel really sad for all the children today who mostly grow up in much more closely controlled environments. I understand why parents do that, but I'm also not at all convinced that most parents actually know what is good for their kids - just <i>believe</i> that they do.
> I was a kid with unrestricted, unsupervised internet access, and it definitely affected many things in my life. If I happen to have a child in the future, they won't go through that.<p>I've heard this a few times, but what was so bad? And, sorry to break it you, reality has some bad bits to it - do you think being ignorant of these is useful, or that it just sets you up for a bigger fall?<p>Why do you think removing independence (nannying) from another human being is the answer? Would you want to be nannied for ever, by corporations and governments?
To me the question is more <i>who</i> is going to nanny me, and ideally its <i>myself</i> (the mature option), but in my experience starting as a child and going into adulthood, mental health can break this down to where people <i>can't</i> nanny/take care of themselves. In that case, the question at hand is: who is going to protect you from yourself? The state? Your family? Your friends?<p>Oftentimes the answer is "nobody". There's just nobody you can rely on to get the level of care you require. There are lots of arguments like Bowling Alone for how the breakdown of community has contributed to this separate issue.<p>In my view, by constructing and supporting legislation like this, people are implicitly admitting that parents, teachers, schools, communities, and all the rest are <i>failing at their job</i> of keeping moderation local and raising the next generation.<p>But the thing is, <i>unfortunately this is a true statement</i> in too many cases, including mine. My parents failed to parent me well enough, and my counselors were either instrumental in my own trauma or failed to address my issues soon enough, and as such I developed a sex addiction in adolescence fueled by persistent ongoing stress from my upbringing that I continue to seek treatment for to this day. Could content moderation laws have cured my parents' narcissism? Nope. Could they have prevented me from needing to act out to relieve the stress of my early relational trauma? Nope. Could they have helped match me with more competent therapists? Nope.<p>Could they have caused me to go to rehab for alcohol abuse instead of porn? <i>Maybe.</i>
For all his statements I disagree with, I subscribe to Gabor Mate's view that traumatized individuals are compelled to be addicted to <i>something.</i> At that point, there are a lot of things to become addicted to other than the ones you can content moderate, given the (false) assumption that it's possible moderate enough of it.<p>Pornography was necessary but not sufficient for me to have it <i>that bad</i> coming out of childhood. Early exposure to it was only incidental. My upbringing was far more significant a cause in this. But unlike which websites I was allowed to visit as a child, a 100% chance of having emotionally involved parents isn't something you can legislate into existence.<p>What I feel isn't being talked about enough in this discussion is that this implicit realization that the <i>world just sucks sometimes</i> leads to justification that someone else needs to step in to protect children's fragile minds if the formerly trusted institutions aren't. The big option left is the platforms and systems hosting the tech themselves so they're targeted instead.<p>My opinion? If your parents aren't able to raise you to be free of significant trauma spawning "hungry ghosts" that you will need to turn to your unfettered internet access to feed, whether TikTok or LiveLeak or elsewhere, lest you are bombarded by stress every waking moment... then the situation was hopeless to begin with. You can't fix that problem with laws. You should have just had better parents, as awful as that sounds. And because of nothing more than bad luck, you're just going to have to unpack that problem with the healthcare system for years/decades, because there's not much else we know of that can meaningfully address childhood trauma that severe.
What did it affect in your life? Ultimately something with affect a kid’s life.
I mean... access to adult content at that age is really, really bad. It really messed up my brain. Gore videos, chatting with adults, etc. But I learned many good things, too. It's a double-edged sword.
Seeing people squish at a young age - and I am not being flippant here - helped reduce my teen "I'm immortal! I'm unstoppable!" phase.<p>I saw very quickly that what separates a live person from a very deceased flat person was a moment of sillyness/forgetfullness/stupidity. "I didn't SUSPECT that is even possible to happen to a person!" - "We're....fragile?!" - "Ah, bike helmet... I think they're REALLY GOOD idea...."<p>PSA's just aren't listened to by teenagers. But something that's real - that happened, with the security camera timestamp in the corner... kids learn safety.
I don't see how this "child protection" enforcement would help in case of small obscure websites with porn and gore? No way their admins gonna comply. I doubt ISPs would go that far to DNS whitelist compliant websites only.
I never said this would help... in fact, I’m against this kind of measure, at least the way it’s being done. But I wouldn’t be surprised if Brazilian ISPs are forced to block this sort of thing (just look at what happened with Twitter (X) the year before last).
Does the admin of the small website hypothetically agree that they don't want to show gore to children?
For me, it didn't mess up my brain at all, it showed me a much broader range of what humanity really is, which is exactly what I wanted to understand at that time. I understood the depravity humans will exact upon others, or those they see as lesser (such as the treatment of animals, or prisoners, "the enemy" whoever/whatever that may be). I also saw unfiltered sharing of valuable knowledge, science, tech stuff, software, games, music, culture...<p>The uncensored internet taught me more than I could ever have been taught in school, and I'll be forever grateful for that. It didn't take me long to understand that I could generally hate no ethnicity or people or country, and the people who do are manipulated by their government or other powerful figures in their life (or disproportionately swayed by experiences in their life). Humans are pretty much all the same, we all have far far more in common than we do differences. I have a stronger perspective of this than my immediate ancestors (demonstrated over and over throughout my life) and I do credit my exposure to the open internet for a huge amount of that.<p>There is one huge and problematic difference now, though: the uncensored internet of the 90's is nothing like the disinformation-saturated internet of today.
As a kid, I know that it is pretty easy to avoid those websites(because I do).
What did it do to mess up your brain? What were the lasting negative effects?
Messed up how?
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It's too late and never about children, simply deeper forms of data harvesting and surveillance.<p>What makes me extremely sad and concerned is that more recent generations simply have no idea or expectation of privacy online anymore. There will never be more of a fight against all this Orwellian behavior.
It’s only too late when we stop fighting back and accept it as a given. Don’t underestimate civil disobedience and the hacker spirit.
UK showed how to deal with civil disobedience (fast tracked judicial process). Hardware attestation will deal with the hacker spirit.<p>Above all, the LLM panopticon will watch us all.<p>Technology will not save us. Nothing will save us but ourselves and we're busy making rent and doomscrolling.
There will always be some form of underground.<p>What's different is that, for a while, the early Internet age (and a little bit earlier - Usenet etc) made that underground very accessible. Now we're reverting back to the original situation where it was very much shunned and criminalized.
We won't save ourselves. We might slow the process, but the information environment is permanently altered and we can't put it back.<p>The information asymmetry between individuals and the powerful is permanently reversed.<p>Thinking about it in terms of the monopoly of violence being the root of power negotiations; typically a resistance movement has more information about the state/colonizer than vice versa, because power has to be visible - guerilla warfare thrives on this.<p>That's gone. The powerful will have complete detailed information and automatic analysis.<p>The medium is the message.
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While I agree with you, my worry is that younger generations have been conditioned to just expect privacy invasions, and I hear the same "Well I have nothing to hide" more and more with my younger family at least.
> and I hear the same "Well I have nothing to hide" more and more with my younger family at least.<p>Which is funny as thats what I heard from my older family growing up. Except it's a lie and they have plenty to hide!
"Pass me your phone, I want to screenshot a few things and post on social media".
This. Fatigue and despair are by far the most effective way to control a population. You don’t need to convince people you’re doing the right thing, you just have to convince them that it’s too late.
Absolutely, but this can only happen if we refuse to run nonfree software on our machines. Even if the maintainers of a Linux distro decided to somehow implement some anti user feature like age attestation, it would be trivial to patch that out from the source or to remove it from a running system with root access. The real danger here is devices that are not fully owned by the user, such as iPhones.
I do underestimate the hacker spirit. HN's response to Client Side Scanning was disheartening, barely anyone could condemn Apple despite the obvious red-line being crossed: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28068741">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28068741</a><p>And once you step outside HN, forget it. You can save yourself, but there are thousands of people that <i>do</i> respond to the "think of the children!" nonsense and will call you a creep for objecting to it. It's game over now, you will fight against this for the rest of your life.
That was almost 5 years ago. Lately, though, I see more people have stopped tolerating these attacks on freedom. See pewdiepie, louis rossman, deflock, piracy ressurection. Uk petition against digital ID becomes one of the largest petitions in history.<p><a href="https://petition.parliament.uk/petitions/730194" rel="nofollow">https://petition.parliament.uk/petitions/730194</a>
HN is mostly for people with entrepreneur spirit, not hacker spirit - entrepreneurs who want to be known as hackers. The difference is vast.
I think it would be helpful to engage with the possibility that they are neither stupid nor ignorant, rather that they simply have different values and priorities than the early internet users.
And what would those values and priorities be? Because it doesn't seem to me that they align with what they actually do.<p>For example, it seems to me there is a whole lot of worry around megacorporations, often related to capitalism and the inequalities it brings.<p>In that context, if you don't place privacy as a priority, how are you not either stupid or ignorant? Is my premise just wrong?
You can be in favor of privacy while simultaneously thinking porn, gambling, and advertisers shouldn't be targeting children. The age verification bills I've read have steep penalties for retaining information, so that seems fine since that's literally more protection than you get in person.<p>It's really more just concluding that those corporations should be liable for their behavior. It also has nothing to do with "the Internet" which is largely unaffected. Except of course ideas for forcing OS behavior coming out of California which are obviously bad.<p>I actually think things could be a lot simpler if we just made the laws like alcohol: it's illegal (with criminal liability) for a non-parent adult to provide <restricted thing> to a child. Simple enough. Seems to work fine as-is for Internet alcohol purchases. Businesses dealing in restricted industries can figure out how to avoid that liability. That's entirely compatible with making it illegal for businesses to stalk everyone, which we should also do!
> The age verification bills I've read have steep penalties for retaining information, so that seems fine since that's literally more protection than you get in person.<p>The best way (and only way) to prevent retaining information is to not share them in the first place.<p>> You can be in favor of privacy while simultaneously thinking porn, gambling, and advertisers shouldn't be targeting children.<p>There are other method to achieve this without mandatory identification. You can force these content to be served with an HTTP header providing their legal minimum age of consultation or type of content, and blocking them browser side.
Governments could maintain filter lists for different age bracket and release them to everyone, allowing easy compliance on the device parental control settings.
If you implemented that simple solution the expected outcome is businesses collecting ID at the door. But unlike the age verification bills there'd be no prohibition of or penalty for misuse of the collected information. It's a strictly worse outcome.<p>You can make intentional targeting illegal without criminalizing the accidental. And mandating self categorization of content by service providers would enable standardized filtering that was broadly effective.<p>The above won't get kids off of social media and it won't serve the purposes of the surveillance state but it will meet the stated goals of those pushing these measures.<p>Keeping children off of social media is a much trickier problem. I think we'd be better served by banning certain sorts of algorithmic feeds.
Okay, so make it illegal for them to record any information which is what the actual laws do (or better, explicitly criminalize all the other current stalking). The point is you don't need to be prescriptive about how to prevent children from accessing the sites. Just make it so you can face massive fines and be arrested if you don't. They can figure out how to comply with the law, and they can be effective or be shut down.<p>They're not actually owed a solution for how to make their business model work. They can just be told that what they're doing is unacceptable, and they can figure out what they'd like to do next. If you're worried they might react with some other unacceptable thing, we can clarify that that's not okay either.
I agree that open ended requirements are better than the imposition of prescriptive solutions. But I don't want online ID verification and that's where your proposal logically leads so I am equally opposed to it.<p>> They're not actually owed a solution for how to make their business model work. They can just be told that what they're doing is unacceptable,<p>You listed a few different things previously. Which one are we talking about here?<p>I think <i>the rest of us</i> are owed a solution where we can still do what we want without having our privacy violated. Regulations need to take the end user into account.<p>I already proposed what I think would be a workable solution to achieve the stated goals without unduly eroding the status quo. Do you have any response to it?
Self categorization has been the status quo since the 90s and has proven to be insufficient. More generally, assuming people agree that something is a social problem/should be restricted, I don't think "have a third party come up with a solution that people can buy to filter us" makes sense. The liability belongs on the people dealing in the restricted item.<p>We don't give kids special debit cards that detect and block purchases of cigarettes and alcohol and say "make sure your kids don't get cash". We make it a crime to sell those things to a child.<p>Why is online ID verification a problem for e.g. porn and gambling but it's fine for alcohol? Why should it be fully anonymous? Should we also allow anonymous porn and cigarette vending machines in person? Why is online special?<p>This whole idea of anonymous access can't even work in a world where you actually pay for things online, which makes the whole proposition even more dubious. If you're an adult and spending money online, you already told them who you are (modulo darknet markets with crypto). Or you could buy a porn gift card in person with an ID flash like other restricted physical items if you're uncomfortable with online payments. And treat the gift card as restricted as well: giving it to a minor is a crime. So then what's the problem exactly? <i>Ad supported</i> porn specifically somehow is important enough to be special?<p>More to the point: as far as I know, if you perform a sex act in plain view inside of a private establishment that's open to the general public with no restrictions, then that's public indecency/lewd conduct, a criminal act, even if the owner consents. If children are present it can become a felony and you're going on the sex offender list along with jail time. Why is an unrestricted public website different?<p>Why are you "owed" this privacy online when someone running an open to all, fully anonymous, unchecked porn theatre in person would be arrested? How about the privacy you are owed is that your business stays between you and whomever you interact with, and even they can be asked/required not to keep or share notes about you? But they can still be expected to know you are an adult before they sell you adult services.
TBH I think this is all either fundamentally flawed or incredibly weak except for your final paragraph. That one actually poses a somewhat interesting question - why the seeming disparity between online and offline porn regulations in the US? Still, it fails to address (or even acknowledge) the differences in the impact of requiring ID between those scenarios.<p>Also I think you have this entire thing exactly backwards. It's not on the rest of us to convince the other camp that ID shouldn't be required. Rather it's on the other camp to put forward a convincing case that ID should be required - that there is no realistic alternative and that the tradeoffs are worth the cost. Otherwise the current status quo wins out.<p>> Self categorization has been the status quo since the 90s and has been proven to be insufficient.<p>What are you on about? Legally mandated self categorization has never been tried and would presumably work if there were penalties for violations. You don't even need 100% compliance, you just need high enough compliance that the default becomes to filter out any site that fails to do so.<p>Voluntary self categorization isn't particularly useful because almost no operators bother to do it. So you're left with no (workable) option other than whitelist filtering.<p>> have a third party come up with a solution that people can buy to filter us<p>I never suggested anything of the sort.<p>> The liability belongs on the people dealing in the restricted item.<p>The items are not currently restricted and I don't agree with you that they should be. However I would agree to changing things to make all providers liable for accurately self categorizing the content they serve up by means of a standardized header format or some other protocol.<p>> Why is online ID verification a problem for e.g. porn and gambling but it's fine for alcohol?<p>Presumably because you have to take receipt of the shipment so the vendor is already going to collect your PII.<p>Why is legally requiring that a gambling website send a header categorizing itself as such unworkable yet somehow it's all going to work out just fine if we require them to do the much more complicated thing of securely handling and accurately verifying identification documents? That seems like an obvious contradiction to me.<p>> Why should it be fully anonymous? Should we also allow anonymous porn and cigarette vending machines in person?<p>Don't we effectively do exactly that? There's no requirement for ID retention on sale of alcohol or cigarettes and until recently the norm was for the clerk to briefly eyeball your license. They also didn't used to bother checking ID if you looked old enough. (That's changed at the major retailers around here lately but that's a different matter.)<p>Anyway I never claimed the brick and mortar way of doing things was ideal so arguing as though I've agreed to that seems rather disingenuous.<p>> If you're an adult and spending money online, you already told them who you are<p>But I did not give them a copy of my ID or any otherwise unnecessary PII and do not want to be required to do so. Also there are plenty of ways to pay for things online without readily revealing your identity to the couterparty. I expect you are well aware of that fact.<p>> Why is an unrestricted public website different?<p>For practical reasons I'd imagine. Analogies are great and all but at the end of the day a global electronic communication network has rather different properties than a physical brick and mortar location that you walk into.<p>Regardless, the reputable services all seem to agree with you (as do I) and thus go out of their way to send headers marking them as adult only. It's roughly equivalent to a shop hanging a "no under 18 allowed" on the door but then not bothering to ID anyone. If parents can't be bothered to configure even the most basic of controls on their children's devices why should the rest of society be made to suffer for that?
I’m not sure it’s possible to have different priorities without being stupid or ignorant of history. Once you concede a certain right, such as a right to privacy, you rarely if ever get it back. Most people seem not to care about this, despite ample evidence that it’s something worth caring about. Stupid is the obvious term for it, though obtuse could work as well.<p>Of course, I don’t blame them. They haven’t lived in a context where they need to care. All of the reasons they’ve heard to care have come from stories of people who lived before them. But ignoring warnings for no good reason is still dumb.<p>A better thing to engage with is whether we can meaningfully change the situation. It might still be possible, but it requires an effective immune response from everybody on this particular topic. I’m not sure we can, but it’s worth trying to.
> They haven’t lived in a context where they need to care.<p>You might believe you don't need opsec, and then new laws are passed, or your national supreme court overturns the case that gave you your rights, or someone invades; and now suddenly you're wanted for anything from overstaying a visa, outright murder, or simply existing.<p>USA, right now, peoples lives are being destroyed because the wrong people got their data. Lethal consequences exist in Russia, Ukraine, Israel, Palestine, Lebanon, Iran.<p>Certain professions per definition: Journalists, Lawyers, Intelligence, Military.<p>Certain Ethnicities. (Jewish, Somali) ; Faiths...<p>It doesn't need to be quite this dramatic though. But you might accidentally have broken some laws and don't even know about it yet. Caught a fish? Released a fish? Give the wrong child a bowl of soup [1]. Open the door, refuse to open the door. Signed a register; didn't sign a register. The list of actual examples is endless. The less people know about you, the less they can prosecute.<p>[1] A flaw in the Dutch Asylum Emergency Measures Act (2025) that would have criminalized offering even a bowl of soup to an undocumented person. The Council of State confirmed this reading. A follow-up bill was needed to fix it.
I have the right to my own senses, my own observations, my own memories. I have the right to photograph what I can see with my eyes, and to write down what I can remember. Unless enjoined by a specific duty of care (doctor/patient, attorney/client, security clearance, etc) I have the right to discuss my memories with others. This obtains even when using electronic tools and even when working in association with others.<p>I don’t intend to give up or accept limitations on these rights because you consider yourself to have “privacy rights” or ownership interests in my records, my memories, my perceptions, or the reality in front of me. I find the notion of the government or another person interfering in this process, the perception and recollection of reality, to be creepy and totalitarian by itself.<p>In 1984, it is not only that the government is aware of Winston, but that it routinely tampers with or destroys evidence of the past & demands to control the perception of the present. I do not think we should let a government do that, even for a good reason like “protect your privacy” any more than we should let it destroy general purpose computing “for the children.”
I'm actually fine with that; so long as that is restricted to your own senses, observations, and memories; and doesn't somehow spill over and somehow pertain to mine. Basically the typical freedom to swing your fists ends at the tip of my nose argument. <i>This</i> is probably a solvable problem between reasonable people; give or take.
It can remain legal to operate a security camera while being illegal to upload unencrypted footage to any third party. I'm not worried about individuals, only about big business and the government.<p>> This obtains even when using electronic tools and even when working in association with others.<p>I think it is reasonable to place limits on public "speech" (ex uploading videos of people) without interfering with private (in the case of electronics E2EE) communications.
There are many people rights people don't have and they're okay with that and even support not having the right to stab people, not having the right to steal from a store, not having the right to take nude pictures of children... What if this one is like that?
they are saddled with more problems that they can reasonably care about and broader issues like privacy drop off of their radars because they've never had it
Too many people making too much money - to be honest, people really should blame tech for it, all it takes is RSUs to look the other way. Morally most of the US is running far away from tech and the surveillance state but here it’s still okay to work for monsters and self justify building population control systems and ad networks (often one and the same)
The solution is always to constrain every level of government with more aggressive privacy laws. As long as they are allowed to do it then some private contractors will take the money to help make it ... or government will make their own in house tech teams. Relying on the morals of the general public to limit state surveillance is not a good strategy, but it is of course good when companies take a stand and the tech community creates tools to push back.
It should be prohibited outright. If you allow a loophole for corporations then they will just sell it as a service and we will never be free of it.
Companies create the environment - the government is supposed to be “small” - and it must remain small so the US “consumer” can be leeched from
By RSU, I'm assuming you mean this:<p>> Restricted Stock Units (RSUs) are a form of equity compensation where employers promise company shares, typically vesting over time, offering a way to align employee interests with company performance
Yes - you buy the house in the bay, and companies will lock you in with the vesting schedule. Just another 3, 4 years and you’ll be rich enough to afford a second one, or retire early. Some people can self justify what they do, or pretend because they work in a “nicer” part of a company than the core revenue part that it’s all okay that what pays their checks is mass behavior manipulation. I don’t like ads or social coercion, at all.
Has there even been a time when we really had privacy online ?<p>It didn't take long for the CIA to sniff everything on everyone, early 2000's.<p>Maybe you're referring to the 90's but at that time the internet wasn't really that popular, it was a niche thing.
> It's too late and never about children,<p>And this is why these arguments never translate well to mainstream politics.<p>By declaring a-priori that it is not about the children, and leaping straight to a deeper, more sinister motive that you're sure is there, even if you're right that there are people behind the scenes agitating for these sinister reason, you ignore that a lot of the general public and a lot of the political class genuinely do see this as a child protection issue.<p>If you can't even concede this, then you're missing large parts of the picture and your attempts to resist it will be that much harder.
Fuck the idiotic general public then. It was never about the children and everybody knows it. The same people who won't pay half a percent more in property taxes to ensure every schoolkid can get three meals a day suddenly care enough to want to give up privacy for safety? Pull the other one, it has bells on it.
I live in an area that has been declared among the safest in America. Two months ago a 17 year old girl from our city disappeared. Turns out she had been being groomed for a year over Discord and in Roblox by a 39 year old the next state over. He eventually convinced her to let him pick her up, after which he filmed himself having sex with her, killed her, and then dismembered her body. He apparently was grooming other underaged girls in a similar way as well.<p>The digital age presents with it novel forms of danger for children, and for adults for that matter, and there is absolutely no way to effectively address these risks without some amount of reduction in privacy. And before someone inevitably says “where were the parents?” and wash their hands of the situation, a healthy society should care for and protect all children, especially those whose parents do not.<p>It’s one thing to hold the opinion “I am willing to sacrifice some number of lives, in order to preserve privacy”. That is an honest and potentially justifiable opinion someone may hold. But declaring the situation to simply be a facade to harvest people’s data seems to me like a reflexive response to avoid uncomfortable truths regarding the situation.
> But declaring the situation to simply be a facade to harvest people’s data seems to me like a reflexive response to avoid uncomfortable truths regarding the situation.<p>Well, your example wouldn't be solved by age verification in any way. They could still legally access Roblox or a discord private chat (or even another private chat method) after this law.<p>So the example show how it is about irrational fear and not protection in any way.<p>And this is an tragic edge case, if you want to take this kind of edge case in consideration, you also have to take in consideration what the age verification would imply as tragic edge case.
If the government knew every single user on the internet's name, address, phone number and what they had for breakfast, it would not stop monsters like this, or even slow them down.
There will always be weird tail risks. The law should only get involved where there are widespread systemic problems.<p>People are occasionally hospitalized due to self, family, or friends handling food improperly. That doesn't warrant a legal intervention whereas dining establishments do.<p>> before someone inevitably says “where were the parents?” and wash their hands of the situation<p>Nope, that's exactly what I say. The law cannot reasonably replace responsible parenting if society is to remain a pleasant place to live.
I live in extremely fire prone areas.<p>Many of us are pretty damn okay at beating back the flame and controlling the flow of the worst of things away from homes, but nobody is perfect.<p>We don't expect every family and parent in these areas to have fire fighting skills, self evacuation is recommended.<p>Parents every where now find themselves surrounded by the delibrately laid gasoline of addictive social media and grooming risks et al. and it's infeasible to expect every parent be skilled in defensive cyber secuirty.<p>It's reasonable to expect communities to want simple barriers and means of protection, the existance of reasonable control and throttling options for parents.
I agree with that however I'm puzzled by your comment because in the context that you're responding to I don't think I said anything that would imply otherwise. Being particularly skilled in "defensive cyber security" isn't a requirement to avoid grooming of your child in the general case - some combination of communication, supervision, and filtering is.<p>> It's reasonable to expect communities to want simple barriers and means of protection, the existance of reasonable control and throttling options for parents.<p>I agree 100%! However ID verification is not a reasonable (or even particularly effective) solution to that. I apologize if I've misconstrued your intended meaning but given the broader context that's what it seems like you're implying.<p>Realistically there's no way to prevent grooming other than keeping tabs on your child. The least labor intensive (but also most intrusive) way to do that is probably whitelist parental controls and watching for unauthorized devices. It is not even remotely realistic to expect a communication platform to detect that a child is speaking with an adult they don't know (as opposed to one they do) and also that it isn't a benign interaction (such as a gaming group or etc) and then somehow act on that information (how?) without manufacturing an absurd dystopia in the process.<p>When it comes to filtering I think it would be reasonable to impose a standard self categorization protocol on all website operators. That would make non-whitelist filtering much more reliable (a boon to parents, educators, and employers) without negatively impacting privacy or personal freedoms.
Okay, in the specific upthread context;<p>* there are very few urban population clump on the planet that don't face the threat of child grooming and exploitation, both before and after the digital device explosion.<p>* that threat vector significantly increased and morphed with the spread of personal digital devices for children; the threat comes no longer from potentially any personal with contact in real life, it has now expanded to include potentially the entire digital world and now can be automated via groomGPT<p>* A simple "where were the parents" response on a per parent basis is unfair in the sense that spotting grooming in a digital device world is a difficult challenge .. even a simple constrained playground with stock babytalk language construction can be socially backdoored (See: "I want to stick my long-necked Giraffe up your fluffy white bunny" )<p>* Concerned parents will look for solutions, communities, at local, state, and federal levels should devote resources to providing solutions in informed contexts and graduated levels.<p>* <i>Unaware</i> parents will exist, and will likely dominate the demographics, or not?<p>* Is the correct _default_ social policy here (answer varies by country and culture) to shield the less cyber aware from the worst of the worst with filters ... that the better informed can bypass or deselect?<p>I guess where we diverge on PoV is where the perimeter of swiss cheese protection should extend to.
Discord & Roblox - no encryption, privacy, or anonymity on either of those platforms, by the way.
Still none of that necessitates the type of mandatory partial-ID verification being pushed by these laws.<p>Roblox can straightforwardly require ID verification on their own, of both the parent responsible for the account, as well as the children directly (request documentation from their school, birth certificate, etc. Yes, high touch to verify these documents. But we're talking <i>protecting children</i> here, right?)<p>If anything this type of legislation is about absolving them of the responsibility of doing so!. Imagine a company making their offering "for adults only", with de facto kid usage as parents relent and just let their kid use an older age on the computer.
I'm sure the same government that held the Epstein class responsible will get right on to making sure his proteges are brought to justice, we just need to give up more freedoms first.
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With respect, this take is a good example of all or nothing thinking. It’s not too late.
For the government it may be surveillance. For the people funding these new laws, it is about advertising profits. See what I said at <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47471747">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47471747</a>
Go watch the newest Louis Theroux, into the manosphere.<p>At points Louis and whatever absolute scumbag he's with walk around the streets while the guy is filming his own content.<p>There are kids, literally 11/12 year olds, walking up to these predatory, evil, scammers on the street going "oh my god it's MC" or whatever their name is. Multiple times.<p>And he hardly gets to spend any time with these men because they clock pretty quickly they're not going to come off well.<p>In the space of like 3 days, Louis caught on camera at least 10/20 young kids recognizing these toxic people from videos they had watched. Even the ones who'd been banned from most platforms, because their videos get reshared under different accounts and insta/tiktok/facebook aren't bothering to catch these reshares.<p>It really is about the kids.<p>And it all comes down to these people convincing young men to spend money on scam courses or invest in scam brokerages by getting them to join telegram group chats. And suddenly it's really clear to me why telegram's under scrutiny.
I share your observations and concerns. But I don't think the current erosion of digital privacy and the censorship creep were made to address those. There are better ways (even though they are not fully fleshed out yet) to minimize toxic/populist influence, but a blank cheque to sacrifice our rights isn't one.
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A theory that’s floating around is that since frontier models are so good at sounding like humans, companies paying for ads are arguing that Dead Internet Theory -> ad costs should go down.<p>Therefore, the push to ID everyone using the internet (even down to the hardware) is a way to prove that ads are being served to real humans in their target demographic.
It makes a lot of sense, too. Previously, governments wanted everyone to have to swipe their driver's license before accessing the internet. But now, businesses want it too. And that makes all the difference in a world built on capitalism.
What's sad is how effective this is. Religious groups figured out a few years ago that anti-porn groups accomplish nothing, but if you start an anti-trafficking group you can restrict porn access.
Their real goals are even worse than that. Some of these groups have admitted they're also about suppressing LGBT+ content.<p>As the Heritage Foundation admitted:<p>> Keeping trans content away from children is protecting kids.
No child should be conditioned to think that permanently damaging their healthy bodies to try to become something they can never be is even remotely a good idea.<p><a href="https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2024/07/kids-online-safety-act-passes-senate-despite-concerns-it-will-harm-kids/?comments=1&comments-page=1#comments" rel="nofollow">https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2024/07/kids-online-safe...</a>
>they're also about suppressing LGBT+ content<p>>> Keeping trans content away [...]<p>Isn't it a stretch to round off "trans content" to "LGBT+ content"? I mean, from a pure logical point of view the statement is correct, because "trans content" is a subset of "LGBT+ content", and therefore "suppressing LGBT+ content" is technically correct, but it's at least misleading. The left's version of this would be something like "twitter is suppressing anti-immigration content!", and the actual example is some alt-right commenter saying that immigrants should be lynched. Immigrants being lynched is certainly an subset of "anti-immigration", but it's still misleading.
> Isn't it a stretch to round off "trans content" to "LGBT+ content"?<p>Not really. Do you think the people attempting to ban trans content are otherwise fine with kids being gay/lesbian/etc? Do you think they view gay/lesbian identities as legitimate, rather than unnatural perversion? It’s the same rhetoric in my experience, we’re all just deviants making choices. It seems like casual uninvested people just got used to gays being in the public eye and anti-gay people lost the ability to get anyone to care about that position. Turns out they’re just normal people trying to live their lives.<p>> Immigrants being lynched is certainly a subset of "anti-immigration", but it's still misleading<p>I don’t think your analogy works unless you believe that transgender people are uniquely extreme compared to other identities. If true, I think that more shows your prejudice than anything. Maybe if enough trans people end up in the public eye, casual uninvested people will stop thinking negatively about trans people generally too. Maybe one day they’re realize we’re just people trying to live our lives.
Hi, I've been openly queer for over 20 years. Using trans people as a wedge to pry apart the entire LGBTQ community is a tale as old as time. This isn't theoretical or a slippery slope argument; it's recent history. It's effective <i>because</i> it sounds "reasonable" on its face, but it's a ploy.<p>Just one of the many, many, many reasons that trans rights are human rights.
>This isn't theoretical or a slippery slope argument; it's recent history. It's effective because it sounds "reasonable" on its face, but it's a ploy.<p>It quite literally is the slippery slope argument. You just don't want to call it that because the term is almost always used in the context of a fallacy, and you think you're right. It's like "freedom fighters" vs "terrorists". Nobody calls themselves terrorists, even terrorists.<p>Moreover the "It's effective because it sounds "reasonable" on its face, but it's a ploy" argument works equally well for any side, eg. it's not hard to imagine someone on the right saying "today it's Jan 6th protesters and that might seem reasonable, but tomorrow it's anyone at unite the right protests, and when president AOC's in power it's anyone who's protesting against trans surgery for minors".
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Read this[1], law makers have made it very clear that they mean <i>all</i> LGBT content, and not just the content you feel like reducing it to.<p>[1] <a href="https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2026/03/rep-finke-was-right-age-gating-isnt-about-kids-its-about-control" rel="nofollow">https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2026/03/rep-finke-was-right-ag...</a>
Trans content is first, it'll be gay content after that.
I mean, I don't disagree with the sentiment of keeping trans ideology away from kids, in exactly the way I'd want to protect them from any kind of religious indoctrination.
The idea that even a single person in the world is trans because of "trans ideology" is what's absolutely insane here.<p>If you think you could be convinced by anyone that you're not living out your true gender identity, I have news for you... Most people, children too, are not having those thoughts unless there's actually a journey waiting for them.
The idea that none of them are trans for that reason is what sound insane to me. Are you not aware of how much humans absorb from the messaging in their environment?<p>And FYI, I've seen it happen with one of my own family members - someone who so far as I can tell isn't 'a man in a woman's body', but rather just someone who never fit in and was always a bit of a social outcast.<p>Their struggle was never their bloody gender, it was their struggle to find a way to fit into the world.<p>And that's what a lot of transitioning <i>actually</i> is. Because human psychology works such that when we're not fitting in, when we feel insecure and out of place, a subconscious pressure emerges to reinvent ourselves due to the current formula not working for us.<p>It's offensive to me that you'd make such claims whilst clearly so naive about it.
Is it really insane? In the detrans community, it's not uncommon for people to see their transition as ideologically led, see e.g. <a href="https://lacroicsz.substack.com/p/by-any-other-name" rel="nofollow">https://lacroicsz.substack.com/p/by-any-other-name</a>.
OK, sure, there’s going to be confused and vulnerable people making mistakes. As I understand it, the detrans community is a tiny fraction of an already tiny fraction who ever in their life identified as trans.<p>This isn’t an actual risk to anybody, and I can’t believe I have to say that.
It’s weird to say in the same comment “it happens but as far as I know it’s rare” and “this isn’t an actual risk to anybody.”<p>I do wonder how many would detransition if it wasn’t too embarrassing for them or because they’re effectively stuck that way if they did bottom surgery. Certainly I’m sure there are many more that quietly do it and not be a part of a community around it - I know of one person who did.<p>I’m sure there are many reasons people transition. For instance, there used to be a subreddit that collected (many) trans people commenting on how much them transitioning or being the other gender turned them on (Reddit being Reddit, it was banned). Some might do it because it feels like a way to get a new start. Some might do it because it’ll get them attention. Some, I’m sure, do it because they genuinely feel like they have the wrong body.<p>All of those could (of course) be affected by social interactions, with only the last one being positive. Unfortunately it would be really hard for us to ever know the true statistics, as that sort of thing is hard for even the person experiencing it to suss out.
Respectfully, not everyone shares this view.
Do you believe that children are more impressionable than adults? There is a community of detrans people who talk openly about how they became trans because they were influenced by peers and authority figures in their lives.<p>Go read some threads on the detrans subreddit.
Firey take there, but I know a few people who are trans and neck deep in the kool aid. They will tell you that 25-30% of population is trans, and just haven't been liberated/are in denial.<p>Look, it's cool to be trans, no problem. These women I know are good people and net contributors to society. But they are off the ideological deep-end, and would happily spend 3 hours at the family BBQ lecturing an impressionable 13 year old about how those weird body feelings are very likely gender dismorphia. They're just as drunk on their flavor of delusional social media as any other religious nut is crazy about God.
Gender dysphoria can be medically studied, is not an ideology and is not a disorder. Hope this clears things up.
It stopped being centered around gender dysphoria quite a while ago. Gender identity is where it's at now, and the idea that one does not need to be dysphoric to be trans is currently the most mainstream one.
Yes, you do not need to be dysphoric to be transgender, however. It is actually quite difficult to compare rates of gendery dysphoria to transgender identity, as transgender identity is inherently self-reported, but studies on gender dysphoria focus on diagnosed cases, not undiagnosed estimates. Therefore it is also not possible to assert that non-dysphoria is dominant among current transitioning people as you do.
What we call gender dysphoria is really just a cluster of symptoms around people's sense of their identity.<p>But identity as a whole is a very murky thing - if you ask me it's largely an adaptive abstraction that our minds invent.<p>The purpose of said adaption is to adopt a role which functions within the tribe/society for purposes of survival.<p>I think we way over-simplify the whole thing by making it about gender and gender roles.<p>And it's that over-simplification that I would label as the ideology. Because that's what ideologies do: they take the complex ambiguities of the world and try to cram them into a simplistic box.
Heritage's tweet in the screenshot in your link makes no reference to "L", "G", "B" nor "+". Just "T"
Which religious groups specifically are pushing for this and where? I want to know so I can call them out when I see it.
If that reduced trafficking, would it not be a worthwhile exchange?
It’s meta this time.
Traffickers now use refugee programs as conduits for human trafficking.
It never was about the children. It never was about age.<p>The goal has always been identification. And the goal of identification is control.<p>Never be fooled by the 'easy to evade' part. That is always just a first step to get you to care less to oppose the introduction. Once in place, the enforcement and compliance mechanisms rapidly change to the real system.
It's irksome that these laws and bills in multiple countries are trying to put limits on the general purpose computer. It's the wrong solution and arguably put forward in bad faith.<p>If you want access control, <i>the appropriate point for regulation is with ISPs and cellular providers, and the appropriate mode of regulation is requiring these companies to provide choice and education for families, and awareness of liability</i>.<p>Require ISPs and cellular network providers to offer a standard set of controls to their customers informing the common person (in common language) who is using those connections and what they are doing with them. For ISPs, this looks like an option for a router with robust access controls, designating some devices (based on MAC address) as belonging to children and <i>filtering those devices' network requests at the network gateway, or filtering one hop up onto the provider's infrastructure (e.g. the ONT for fiber connections)</i>. For cellular providers, it looks like an app available to parents' devices and similar filtering for devices designated as belonging to children (based on IMEI).<p>When a family signs up for Internet service, either at-home access or cellular data, the provider must give both parents a presentation about these tools, <i>and about the liability the parents face for allowing their children unsupervised, latchkey access to adult content</i>, no different than allowing children to drink alcohol.<p>It may even make sense to require ISPs and cellular providers to track MAC addresses and IMEIs of devices their own customers designate as "for children" and <i>make those providers liable for not filtering Internet for those devices, and also liable for allowing targeted advertising against those devices</i>.<p>I don't think achieving that setup is likely, but it's fundamentally the right way to solve this problem, and parents are pushing for a solution one way or another. I don't love it, but if it's coming almost inevitably we should at least push to do it right. <i>It's a dead-end, losing strategy to blanket oppose one solution to legislators and provide no alternative</i>. I write all of that as someone who values privacy and liberty, both in meatspace and cyberspace.
Largely agree with this, though I'll throw in that the OS should provide a signal as well. I know for sure that iOS and Windows both have family modes that work pretty well, I suspect Android does as well.<p>If my kid takes their tablet to grandma and grandpas I want the preferences and signals to carry forward, even when connected to a network at household that is nominally only adults.<p>These technologies don't need to be bullet proof to be effective and they don't need to send more information than "treat all requests from device as being from under 8/13/18." The ills these age verification efforts are trying to address (and they are real problems) are from excessive, not casual or incidental use. Yes, there will be many kids that get around any reasonable control, but just making it less convenient will reduce harm.<p>I have various content controls on at my house. I'm the admin, I can turn them off whenever I want to. I almost never do, because 1) the block reminds me I should probably shouldn't be going to whatever site I'm going to and 2) for the most part, my experience is better with the "restricted" search engines/youtube/social media.
I'd say the solution here is to make child's device always connects back to the home network, and make sure the child's account on the device can't change network settings. We're almost there in terms of ease of use: tailscale and netbird are like 75% of the way to usable for anyone... But the last 25% is probably the hardest.
> filtering those devices' network requests at the network gateway, or filtering one hop up onto the provider's infrastructure<p>These things are not possible with any reliability, we spent two decades encrypting everything.
I'm not imagining filtering based on the path. Even with https, hostname is visible before the handshake. And even when Encrypted Client Hello is widely implemented, it's also easy enough for network providers to drop any ECH packets from devices flagged as "for children" and signal to those devices that their handshake must reveal the hostname, at least to the router doing the filtering.
It's always been internet access control, there is no child protection.
We have to separate child protection from Internet control so that the "protect the kids" narrative loses its potency. So here's a counter-narrative: we can implement digital child protection without Internet-wide access control, and it requires just 3 simple features that can be implemented in less than a week. There's no need to introduce new laws at all. This could just be done tomorrow if there is genuine will to protect the kids.<p>1) If you're a platform like Discord or Gmail, give users the option to create an extra password lock for modifying their profile information (which includes age). This could also be implemented at the app level rather than at the account level. Parents can take their child's phone, set the age, and set these passwords for each of their child's apps/accounts.<p>2) If you're an OS developer, add a password-protected toggle in the OS settings that gates app installation/updates, like sudo on Linux. Parents can take their child's phone and set this password, so they can control what software runs on their child's phone. If we have this, then 1) isn't even strictly needed because parents can simply choose to only install apps that are suitable for their child.<p>3) If you're a device manufacturer, you should open-source your drivers and firmware and give device owners the ability to lock/unlock the bootloader at will with a custom password. Parents should be able to develop and install an open-source child-friendly OS. Companies like Apple and Samsung have worked against this for years by introducing all kinds of artificial roadblocks to developing an alternative OS for their hardware.
(This is a reply to the dead comment, which was not dead when I start writing this)<p>I don't know how long their specific proposal would take, but on a Unix or Unix-like system the California bill could be done in a week.<p>0. Make a directory somewhere, say /etc/age_check, and in that directory create four files: 0-13, 13-16, 16-18, 18+, owned by some system account with permissions 000.<p>1. This would be the hardest part. Modify whatever is used to interactively create new user accounts to ask for the user age if the account is a child's account, and than add an ACL entry for the appropriate /etc/age_check file that allows the child's account to read that file.<p>The California bill says you have to ask for and age or birthdate but the API you provide for apps to ask for age information just requires giving an age bracket, so I'm taking that as meaning I am not required to actually store the age. I only have to make the API work.<p>2. The API for checking age is to try to open the files in /etc/age_check. Whichever open succeeds gives you the user's age bracket.
So basically parents set the child's age and apps rely on that if they need to know if the user is old enough?<p>That's pretty similar to the California bill. Parents set an age when creating a child's account. The OS provides an API to get the user's age bracket from that, which apps that need to know the age bracket of the user can call.
The California bill gets it backwards. Rather than Internet services taking the user's age and deciding what content to serve, the Internet service or app should broadcast the age rating of its content to the OS (if convenience is desired), like how movie ratings work. The responsibility to decide what content is suitable for a child should rest in the hands of that child's parent, not the state or the corporation.<p>edit: on second thought, realistically, the API solution is too brittle regardless of which way it goes. Because the API requires <i>every</i> service to implement it and that's not happening, whereas an app installation lock only requires <i>one</i> child-friendly OS to implement it, then parents can choose that OS.
That's not my understanding. This is what the bill says: Provide a developer who has requested a signal with respect to a particular user with a digital signal via a reasonably consistent real-time application programming interface that identifies [the age group].<p>So the app requests a signal (like, calling an API), and the OS returns the signal (returning the age group).<p>Regarding API vs installation lock, TBH I don't think the law concerns that level of details. An OS or app-store installation lock that checks app ratings can be considered as a valid implementation.
The California law is horrible because it forces everyone to let tech companies and governments decide what's suitable for children, rather than let parents decide. It's telling parents to give every app their child's age and trust that the apps will do the right thing. It also legitimizes personal data collection (in this case, the user's age) for every app and service on the Internet that wants to know your age.<p>The password-based app installation lock I proposed in my original comment doesn't require any kind of age checking at all, so it naturally doesn't fit the California law. The device owner (in this case, the parent who buys the device for their child) gets to decide what apps can be installed on their child's phone on an app-by-app basis using a password set by the parent. The app store doesn't need to know, and the apps don't need to know.
You have a point. Though I suspect that average parents are either too lazy or not tech literate enough.<p>I do want to note that this California law alone doesn't say anything about content restriction. I won't be surprised if there was/will be another bill to assign the responsibility (which may be more controversial). But the current law is only about the age gating mechanism. And on the positive side it removes the need for actual age verification (like using ID) which other regions still insist on.
The California law is the closest thing to what we do in the physical world but better. We already decided as a society to limit the purchase of pornography, gambling, alcohol, tobacco, prostitution, drugs, via age gates and require the merchant to be liable for that. We already find this reasonable as a society. The California law recognizes the tracking problems of requiring a verifiable id online and instead recognizes that parental self-assertion at the point of account creation is enough.<p>Since tracking children is generally illegal, you can also voluntarily lie and label yourself as a child when you don't want to access such content.
We have decided as a society to age-gate the purchase of a very small selection of goods and services, but this did not require a law that says <i>all</i> merchants have the right to know your age. And in this case, it's not even just all merchants, but anyone that serves you any kind of information. The real world equivalent of this California bill would be more like: anyone you've ever talked to has the right to know your age.<p>A more reasonable approach would be for parents to keep tabs on (or for stricter parents, control) who their child is associating with and where they're going, and advise their child on who/what to stay away from if they're out alone. And of course that takes parenting effort. The digital equivalent of this are things like password-gating app installation in the OS and website-blocking in the WiFi router. But I will say, I don't think these kinds of analogies are good because the Internet is too different from the physical world.<p>And let's not underestimate the tracking power of a legally mandated data point: the age contains about 6 bits of information that can be used to identify your user account on the Internet across apps and websites, even if your inputted age is fake.
Would the content rating be per HTML element and the browser would delete the elements with bad ratings from the DOM, or how would it work?
I'd imagine it works like movie ratings. You don't filter movies from scene to scene. There's just one rating for an entire site or app.<p>But yeah I get the point, API based solutions are complicated and brittle because they require all services to implement it properly. In contrast a user-set app installation password in the OS settings is more effective and easier to implement.
> <i>the API requires every service to implement it and that's not happening</i><p>No it doesn't. A browser/appinstaller with parental/age controls enabled would fail as unavailable if there was no age rating on the website/app. This is exactly the solution we should be aiming for, as it keeps the incentives lined up instead of turning them upside down.<p>One big problem with the laws currently being pushed is that it leaves the decision for what sites are "appropriate" for kids completely in the lands of corporate attorneys. For example, Facebook will happily make an "under 18" site that uses LLMs to censor posts, but still contains all of the same dopamine drip mechanics. Whereas keeping the decision process of appropriate under the control of the end-device means parents could straightforwardly go beyond what corporate attorneys decide, and block Facebook regardless of the age rating.<p>I'm responding to another comment of yours here since HN loves the rate limit. In that comment you were talking about locked down bootloaders. But bootloaders are already thoroughly locked down, and most devices are still essentially usable. The current looming threat is <i>remote attestation</i>, which makes it so that websites (and other services) are able to prevent you from running software of your choice when interacting with them! The backwards legislation being currently pushed is all but guaranteed to end up in more demands for remote attestation, whereas the correct direction of information flow (sites/apps publish headers saying they're suitable for <18 etc) would not necessitate remote attestation.
I shouldn't have defended the API or age rating solution. It's just a trap in hindsight. That kind of solution must be rejected altogether even if it's the OS checking the app/website's age rating header, because we'd be giving the OS oligopoly (Apple, Google, Microsoft) way too much leverage, and in the long term they're going to make it so that you can only run their approved apps because unapproved apps didn't implement their age rating API. And there is no competing OS to fix that situation if those same companies keep the bootloader on their hardware locked. That still puts authority over children in the hands of governments and corporations rather than parents.<p>I stand by my original comment. No new laws are needed. All of the features outlined in 1), 2), and 3) should be user-controlled, and there's no need to send info over the air.
You can still get hardware that you can install your own OS on. But you have to be deliberate about picking it out before a purchase, rather than hoping to unlock a random carrier phone down the line. For example my phone is a Pixel running Graphene. It has a locked down bootloader that could only be unlocked with the online consent of Google. While this most certainly chafes me (and if I could snap my fingers and make such schemes blink out of existence I would), I do have to admit that it really isn't that debilitating.<p>The unlocking process zaps the userdata partition. This security model would totally suffice for locking down a child's phone. If the child zaps their phone and erases everything on it, then the parent can handle that out of band.<p>For the general problem, I would say that there has been a longstanding market failure here, in that parental control software isn't widespread or straightforwardly usable across different websites. Your 3 points don't really address that. (2) has been doable on standard desktops forever, and (3) just pushes mobile devices back towards the capability of desktops (which on its own is laudable!). But standard desktops have had these capabilities for decades and still haven't evolved the kind of straightforward parental controls that most parents are demanding.
I don't think it's a market failure. The reality that password-gating software installation at the OS level can be done on most desktops but not most phones is the opposite sign of a market failure. Mobile OSes have increasingly stripped down capabilities in recent years precisely because of anti-competitive practices. The reason standard desktops have not evolved even better parental control features is not because they're not doing better than phones under a free market. They are already doing better in spite of the fact that most kids use desktops a lot less than they use phones. It's just that the absolute level of demand for parental control features has been low until recent years, and even this recent wave of demand is somewhat manufactured.
1) Could be simpler for a start if 2) ensures that no web sites that send a special "over 18" server header are displayed. The header could be more detailed and the parent could select what things are allowed, but for a start make it simple.
Yes, that's even better. Make apps and websites provide an API that broadcasts the age rating of its content, then let the OS attest the apps and websites, not the other way around.<p>edit: on second thought, there is a trap here. If hardware manufacturers lock down the bootloader, then we're basically still handing over parental authority to governments and companies in the long run. So I think for a start, we just implement a app-install password lock like sudo. It will be easier to implement than the API. The convenience API can come later when hardware manufacturers are banned from locking bootloaders.
How would you make a website that can be over 18 or not, such as a social media feed? Would it become over 18 as soon as your following list contains a porn star (who may not have been one at the time you followed them), and then if you're under 18 you can't unfollow them because you can't load the page?
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That's the trick, it's always been about control. No-one in such positions actually cares about the children.
The adult entertainment industry cared decades ago [0]. Their solution is simple: sites send the RTA meta tag if applicable, browsers in accounts configured by guardians as "children" look for it. [1]<p>[0] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Association_of_Sites_Advocating_Child_Protection" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Association_of_Sites_Advocatin...</a><p>[1] <a href="https://www.rtalabel.org/" rel="nofollow">https://www.rtalabel.org/</a>
I think the truth is closer to them being tightly bound to one another over their shared "love" of children. Epstein bouncing around the academic community was the tip of an iceberg. Imagine the reputation laundering that goes on with all of these "for the children" NGOs.
IMO instead of age gating everything, it should've been the other way around, which is making unrestricted smartphones or similar an 18 or 16+ device, much like cars.
The entire purpose of this exercise is control. "Child protection" is just a ruse to get the stupids onboard.
Y E S. I’m tired of hearing about child proofing the internet. We need a solution that’s not enforcing age or id verification on the os or internet itself like meta is pushing. We need better solutions and we should fight draconian enforcement with extreme prejudice
AI;DR<p>It's too late in any case, the Internet as we know it will eat itself. It will be destroyed by AI, and AI agents from without. And it will be destroyed from within by stupid laws such as the ones under "discussion" in this AI-edited and AI-illustrated nothingpiece.<p>By which I not mean the infrastructure. I mean the current crop of social media websites. The infrastructure will remain, and perhaps something better will come along to use that infrastructure.
For the US, the worst of it started in 2019, when the held YouTube liable for all content that a child might access. (<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/YouTube_and_privacy#COPPA_settlement" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/YouTube_and_privacy#COPPA_sett...</a>) That's what pushed all of the content networks to lobby for the liability to go somewhere else.
how about if i do nothing the internet assumes i'm a child and therefore does not track me, show me ads or permit doom scroll feeds. then if i want i can jump through some hoops and pay some money or something to get a digital id that lets me attach a zkp to all my http requests that then unlock the magic of ads, tracking and doom scroll feeds.<p>seems like a good plan to me.
That would be a solution if the people pushing this actually cared about "protecting kids."<p>But let's be honest, governments want a dragnet they can use to monitor/control all internet communication. The people running western democracies are equally as power hungry and zealously authoritarian (my ideas will bring utopia!) as the people running the CCP.<p>The only difference is, the CCP has permissionless authority, so they ended internet freedom in China decades ago. They didn't have to ask.<p>Western authoritarians on the other hand, have to fight a slow battle to cleverly grind you down over time, so that you get tricked into allowing them to gatekeep the internet. It hasn't worked so far. The next step (this one) is <i>"okay, so you don't want to have to ask us permission before you visit a website...but won't anybody think of the poor beautiful innocent children???"</i><p>Emotions activated. Rational thought deactivated.<p>They'll get what they want because they always get what they want. And you'll be convinced it's good for you over time, because most people just follow whatever the mainstream "vibes" are, and the elite sets the vibes. It's amazing a free internet existed this long. Great while it lasted.
i'm only half joking. adding zkps to http requests is probably the correct privacy preserving technical solution that could be built into something sensible.<p>the bigger issue is that lawmakers are thinking in terms of smartphones, tablets and commercial pcs as shrink wrapped media consumption devices with a setup step... not protocol level support that preserves parts of computing and the internet they don't even really know exists. seems like the ietf should have lobbyists or something.
Unfortunately they won't be stopped, so we have to look for the solution ourselves:<p>- Linux distros without age verification (which excludes distros with systemd)<p>- decentralized/distributed microblogging: Nostr, Bluesky, Mastodon<p>- decentralized social news sites: Lemmy<p>- GrapheneOS
It’s not even a debate if these controls are problematic. The litmus test is to mentally substitute the age field for an ancestry field and place the system in 1930’s Germany.<p>Coincidently, that system was provided by IBM.
'Preventing children from buying guns is Nazism!'<p>Actually, this sentiment is a 'litmus test' for common sense.<p>We use age discrimination universally in all affairs, across the globe, across all cultures.<p>Of course the same thing is going to apply to 'content', it's just a lot harder and creates ugly externalizations.<p>It's a real problem, with no real solutions, at least not yet.
Anyone else open for internet v2?
Like a completely new system, with everything that we enjoyed with the first one around the millenia: buggy webpages, slow downloads, crappy browsers, having to download plugins…<p>Lets do it again!
The people pushing for "child protection" went to the island. It's not even about control, it's about shifting liability away from platforms so they can further gut moderation, reducing their expenses and getting away with doing nothing to stop the actual bad actors.
It's not about gutting moderation. They want you to dox yourself to get online. It's a pro-censorship authoritarian-friendly move. I don't believe the narrative that Meta is behind it all either. If they are, they are probably serving someone else.
Here are just some of the things you can do with tracking:<p>- Dox, coerce, blackmail, and ruin political candidates, powerful CEOs, and wealthy people. If they watch a category of porn that is embarrassing or have an affair, suddenly you have leverage against them. You can parlay that to accomplish lots of things.<p>- Make it impossible to talk about certain things and eventually eliminate those things. Porn today, abortion tomorrow. LGBT, women's rights ... it's a tool to start enforcing an ideology. Eventually these things can be disappeared entirely, not just the discourse. You just cordon off and begin washing it away bit by bit, year by year. Once the control mechanisms are in place, it cannot be stopped.<p>- Kill anonymous communication. This can pin identities to online comments. You can then punish people of the ideology you don't like by denying them jobs, auditing them, etc. This has a chilling effect on political opposition. This also makes it much harder to leak or report information safely and harms the ability to whistle blow.<p>- In general, this also pushes society into more religious, more conservative views. With it comes a lack of skepticism and a greater appreciation for authority.<p>- Ultimately, this is a step into 1984. If we go down that route, we will eventually be owned in whole by the authoritarian powers at top. This entire conversation will be memory holed.<p>Once a right is lost, we will not get it back. Then it's just one step after another into hell.<p>We must fight this.<p>Our lives, our freedom, our future - depend on it.
I disagree with almost all of your political opinions, and some of your positions I very much hate. But we should be free to have the argument, without the thread of handcuffs or the threat of starvation. Although I use my real name here, sometimes I prefer not to, and that should be allowed.<p>The right to actual real privacy is the same thing as the right to actual real freedom of speech, and we should harm anyone who is trying to take that most basic foundation of all rights away.<p>I agree with Alexander Solzhenitsyn.
Regardless of how we (mis?)align on social and economic issues, we should align on dislike of authoritarianism and surveillance. It is our common enemy.<p>----<p>Edit: I can't respond to comments anymore (HN rate limits on downvotes and commenting within a single thread), but I also wanted to respond to a sibling comment:<p>> "your team"<p>Just because I believe in personal freedom of people from the government does not mean I'm left-wing. I agree with some democratic party policies, and I disagree with some others.<p>I'm not strictly a libertarian either, because I believe government regulation is necessary to prevent monopolies. But over-regulation is also stifling to progress.<p>But it shouldn't matter what my politics are. Social and economic issues are orthogonal, and frankly, not as potentially dangerous as this one issue.<p>Democrats and Republicans alike should be aligned on their disdain of surveillance and authoritarianism. Either party in power (or any power) can use it against the "other side" (or the entire population outside of the oligopoly).<p>These tools are nothing but evil and designed to control. Once they start sinking their teeth in, they only sink in deeper. Every free person should hate them.
> ruin political candidates, powerful CEOs, and wealthy people<p>This is mostly fantasy propagated by works of fiction. In the real world release of any evidence of sins has practically zero impact on the wealthy people and when it very occasionally does have an impact it just happens in cases of people who weren't wealthy enough for the circumstances.
The government can do a whole lot more than embarrass CEOs and powerful people they don't like. Look at how China controls its tech CEOs by making them disappear until their views align.
The Epstein Island isn't just a fantasy playground for sickos.<p>Every single one of those people has a noose around their neck and is being told what to do. They have a gun to their head now.<p>The intelligence apparatus has been exploiting dynamics like this for a long time.
You've accurately described what could happen with right-wing authoritarians in power. You've not described what could happen with left-wing authoritarians in power.<p>Don't be fooled that your team doesn't have people with the same impulses. Privacy and civil liberties exist to protect us from abuse of authority on all sides.<p>- "Oh I see John is connected to this account. I really don't like this HN comment and opinion he posted, I find it deeply offensive. Put him on the bank KYC fail list."<p>- "We'd love to give you this mortgage backed by the US government, but why didn't you post the right flag in support of the new hip thing?"<p>- "Before you login to your retirement account, how much wealth are you secretly harboring there from this job we think you unfairly got due to your privilege?"<p>- "If you just let us monitor your activity and the ideas you see, we'll stop you from wrong-think and will create a utopia"
Good luck, man. Nobody cared in 2012, and even less people care now. The west is lost. 1984 is already here.
Don't give up!<p>If you think the heat has started, you're mistaken. We're not even in the fire yet. It can and will get <i>waaaay</i> worse.<p>We've been able to push back against these efforts time and time again. Don't stop. Call your legislators. Talk with your friends and get them to do the same. Vote against politicians that support it.<p>It does work.
The problem is that, as a constituency, we are and have always been a tiny minority. Call and vote all you want, it won't change a thing because most people just don't care - or at least don't care enough. And there aren't any good (as far as they are concerned) arguments to convince them otherwise.
Whatever you think the scale of surveillance is, <i>I assure you it is 100x worse.</i><p>North America is rooted. There is no recovery plan.
>The people pushing for "child protection" went to the island.<p>What does this even mean aside from a thinly veiled accusation that such efforts are being pushed by a shadowy cabal of pedophiles elites? I'm sure you can find some overlap between people who want to push age verification laws and people who went to the island, but what about everyone else pushing for the law but who didn't go?
Like who? Name some names of people pushing for this, and we can dissect their motivation.
How about the first country to ban social media for kids, Australia[1]? So far as I can tell the PM/party leader was not in the files. Of course, if you make your inclusion criteria absurdly wide (eg. anyone who voted or advocated for age based restrictions in any shape or form), you'll probably find some pedophiles or even epstien island visitors from sheer luck alone.<p>[1] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Online_Safety_Amendment_(Social_Media_Minimum_Age)_Act_2024" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Online_Safety_Amendment_(Socia...</a>
This has been on Labor’s agenda, in various forms for many years.<p><a href="https://www.abc.net.au/news/2012-11-09/government-abandons-plans-for-internet-filter/4362354" rel="nofollow">https://www.abc.net.au/news/2012-11-09/government-abandons-p...</a>
These laws were passed almost exclusively by the party of self-proclaimed free speech warriors led by Epstein's best friend.<p><pre><code> State | Effective Date | Legislature Control
------------------+----------------+----------------------
Alabama | Oct 1, 2024 | Republican
Arizona | Sep 26, 2025 | Republican
Arkansas | Jul 31, 2023 | Republican
California | Jan 1, 2027 | Democratic
Florida | Jan 1, 2025 | Republican
Georgia | Jul 1, 2025 | Republican
Idaho | Jul 1, 2024 | Republican
Indiana | Aug 16, 2024 | Republican
Kansas | Jul 1, 2024 | Republican
Kentucky | Jul 15, 2024 | Republican
Louisiana | Jan 1, 2023 | Republican
Mississippi | Jul 1, 2023 | Republican
Missouri | Nov 30, 2025 | Republican
Montana | Jan 1, 2024 | Republican
Nebraska | Jul 18, 2024 | Nonpartisan (unicameral)
North Carolina | Jan 1, 2024 | Republican
North Dakota | Aug 1, 2025 | Republican
Ohio | Sep 30, 2025 | Republican
Oklahoma | Nov 1, 2024 | Republican
South Carolina | Jan 1, 2025 | Republican
South Dakota | Jul 1, 2025 | Republican
Tennessee | Jan 13, 2025 | Republican
Texas | Sep 19, 2023 | Republican
Utah | May 3, 2023 | Republican
Virginia | Jul 1, 2023 | Divided
Wyoming | Jul 1, 2025 | Republican</code></pre>
It's curious that you've omitted California (Democrats) and Colorado (Democrats) from your list.
I thought the Colorado bill died.<p><a href="https://leg.colorado.gov/bills/sb25-201" rel="nofollow">https://leg.colorado.gov/bills/sb25-201</a><p>Looks like the CA bill went through though.<p><a href="https://legiscan.com/CA/text/AB1043/id/3269704" rel="nofollow">https://legiscan.com/CA/text/AB1043/id/3269704</a><p>I updated the list. Still looks rather tilted to me!
And Illinois and New York.
This table seems suspect. I spot checked Texas, and while the party affiliation is correct, the dates are not. You put Sept 19, 2023 as the date for Texas, but Wikipedia[1] says it "Enacted September 1, 2024" and "Enacted June 13, 2023". Looking at the other dates, I'm not sure how you got Sept 19, 2023, even through a typo.<p>[1] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SCOPE_Act" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SCOPE_Act</a>
Can you cherry-pick harder? Geez...
Zuckerberg?<p><a href="https://mashable.com/article/tech-ceos-epstein-files-musk-gates-hoffman-thiel-zuckerberg" rel="nofollow">https://mashable.com/article/tech-ceos-epstein-files-musk-ga...</a>
It means that especially those who went to the island but also most of the others don't care about protecting children. They merely see a way to consolidate power and are jumping on it.
> shadowy cabal of pedophiles elites<p>Its a shame that this used to just be a conspiracy theory one could mostly ignore, but we simply can't pretend that there <i>isn't</i> rampant CSA by those in power, because we've had proof of it despite their best efforts. Without wanting to get into politics, the leader of the United States <i>right now</i> was friends with the supposed ring-leader...<p>> but what about everyone else pushing for the law but who didn't go?<p>Useful idiots, perhaps? Wanting to protect their own power and gain more?<p>It's certainly not actually about protecting children. Never has been.
I don't like the "those in power" framing because it implies that they all participated and that such a homogenous group even exists.
In the USA it literally is two homogenous groups though? One of which is majorly complicit in covering up the files, against their constituents’ wishes.
I wouldn't even call them two groups. It's just one group ostensibly and publicly split in half, but it's still one group that intermingles behind the courtains.
I would say both parties are complicit at this point.<p>Keep in mind Epstein died in 2017. We had two GOP terms and one Democrat term from then to now.<p>With what we know from the files that have been released thus far (and how obviously the worst if it has either been shredded or will never see the light of day), the fact they refused to release/prosecute those implicated tells you all you need to know.
Yes, and many people have an extreme incentive to retreat to that framing because<p>* In 2024, they had a choice between pedophiles and not pedophiles and chose the pedophiles.<p>* In 2020, they had a choice between pedophiles and not pedophiles and chose the pedophiles.<p>* In 2016, they had a choice between pedophiles and not pedophiles and chose the pedophiles.<p>There was plenty of evidence of this association in 2016 (bragging about creeping into Ms Teen USA dressing rooms, bragging about being Epstein's best friend in the same sentence as acknowledging he's a pedo, victim testimony under oath that he diddled kids, etc etc), so "I didn't know" isn't an excuse if they cared one iota about the children at any step of the way.<p>It should be good news that the powerful pedophiles are largely (but not exclusively) concentrated in one party, but those who put them in power will do anything to avoid admitting culpability.
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Couple small corrections:<p>Hillary has not been implicated by the Epstein files. Not today and not by evidence available in 2016.<p>Biden has not been implicated by the Epstein files. Not today and not by evidence available in 2020.<p>Bonus: not only was Trump implicated in the Epstein files both today and by evidence available in 2016, he was also in charge of every federal prison and every US spook agency in 2019 when Epstein died under mysterious circumstances.
>Bonus: not only was Trump implicated in the Epstein files both today and by evidence available in 2016, he was also in charge of every federal prison and every US spook agency in 2019 when Epstein died under mysterious circumstances.<p>Who was in charge when Epstein got the sweetheart deal on his first conviction?
I never accused Hillary or Biden of being implicated in the Epstein files. Those aren't corrections, those are non-sequitirs.<p>Bonus: at no point did I refute Trump being a pedophile or being in the Epstein files.
I might be misreading you, but are you saying that the whole Qanon thing isn't a baseless conspiracy theory?
>we simply can't pretend that there isn't rampant CSA by those in power, because we've had proof of it despite their best efforts<p>What's "rampant"? The news coverage provides no shortage of people, but ringing off 100 (or whatever) people that are in the files doesn't say much, even if we make the questionable assumption that inclusion in files implies guilt. I'm sure that everyone would prefer the amount of pedophiles that are in power to 0, but if it's the same rate as the general population that can hardly be considered "rampant", or a "conspiracy". Given some neutral inclusion criteria (eg. members of legislative bodies), is there any evidence they have disproportionate amount of pedophiles?<p>>the leader of the United States right now was friends with the supposed ring-leader...<p>You conveniently omit the fact that they broke up 5 years before he was first convicted. From wikipedia:<p>"Trump had a falling out with Epstein around 2004 and ceased contact. After Epstein was said to have sexually harassed a teenage daughter of another Mar-a-Lago member in 2007, Trump banned him from the club. "<p>>Useful idiots, perhaps?<p>So basically <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_consciousness" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_consciousness</a>?<p>> Wanting to protect their own power and gain more?<p>How does adding age verification help in that? Are they blackmailed by the shadowy cabal? Are they just doing what the voters/lobbyists want? If so, what makes invocation of this reasoning more suitable than for any other political issue? Is everything from tax policy to noise ordinances just something pushed by pedophile elites, helped by useful idiots and people who want to "protect their own power and gain more"?
The resistance to the release of the files including redactions and outright refusal of Congressional order is enough to reveal the magnitude of what's going on. I would even dare say this Iran war is in part due to blackmail gained on DJT.
>The resistance to the release of the files including redactions and outright refusal of Congressional order is enough to reveal the magnitude of what's going on.<p>I agree this makes him look suspect, but it's hardly conclusive. Moreover Democrats did a similar U-turn a few years before. The only difference is that they weren't bombastically pushing the conspiracy theory during the election campaign, which made it easier for them to backtrack later.<p>>When Maxwell was charged in 2020, Democrats continued to push for transparency. [...] After Biden took office in 2021, Democrats appeared to dial back their public calls for Epstein records’ release.<p><a href="https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2025/8/6/fact-check-did-democrats-take-action-over-epstein-case-transparency" rel="nofollow">https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2025/8/6/fact-check-did-democ...</a>
I dont disagree with anything you have written in the above reply. But why does democrats' reversal somehow annul or invalidate the claim about trump? Do you honestly believe it could all be an overly-embellished fable? If you do, then do you think the hundreds, some-say-thousands, of women who claim they were raped are lying?<p>Another explanation could be the democrats' AIPAC handlers told them to back off because it wasn't the precise time to leverage the material yet.
>But why does democrats' reversal somehow annul or invalidate the claim about trump? Do you honestly believe it could all be an overly-embellished fable? If you do, then do you think the hundreds, some-say-thousands, of women who claim they were raped are lying?<p>What claim about Trump? That's he's a pedophile? Based on the rest of your comment it seems like the goalposts are subtly getting moved from "Trump raped kids" to "Trump committed sexual crimes".
You sure are giving them quite the benefit of the doubt. Why?<p><a href="https://www.pbs.org/newshour/amp/politics/see-the-alleged-trump-birthday-note-to-epstein-released-by-house-democrats" rel="nofollow">https://www.pbs.org/newshour/amp/politics/see-the-alleged-tr...</a>
><a href="https://www.pbs.org/newshour/amp/politics/see-the-alleged-tr" rel="nofollow">https://www.pbs.org/newshour/amp/politics/see-the-alleged-tr</a>...<p>1. "alleged"<p>2. I'm not sure what you're trying to refute. I specifically quoted a passage saying that they broke up in 2004, which implies they were together prior to that.<p>3. For the specific claim that Trump's a pedophile, a "drawing of a curvaceous woman" is hardly proof. At best it's a proof that he's a womanizer, but we hardly need proof of that given the "grab her by the pussy" quote.
> You conveniently omit the fact that they broke up 5 years before he was first convicted.<p>And? It doesn’t change the reality of the original statement.<p>The president of the United States <i>was</i> friends with the alleged ring leader of a large pedophile network.
>The president of the United States was friends with the alleged ring leader of a large pedophile network.<p>You're making some leaps logic here here. If someone's outed as a pedophile, everyone who's friends with him should be assumed to be a pedophile? Surely not, given that pedophilia is considered taboo, we'd expect them to hide it, and therefore at least some friends might not be in the know. That's not to say there's no conspirators, but "he was friends with a pedophile therefore he's a pedophile too" is just guilt by association. What you need to prove is that he knew, or ought to have known that his friend was a pedophile. A conviction works decently for this, because it's presumably public knowledge, although even that's questionable because most people don't do a background check on people they met. In the case of Epstien he also hired reputation management firms to suppress his conviction from showing up in the results, which weakens the case even more.
> You're making some leaps logic here here.<p>No, you’re just shifting the goalposts.<p>The original claim was “The president of the United States was friends with the supposed leader of a pedophile ring.”<p>Your response to that was to imply that over time, they had a falling out. To which my point was, so what? It doesn’t materially change the original claim you challenged.<p>A falling out in NO way changes that the original statement was correct, the current president of the United States, Donald J Trump, was good friends with the alleged leader of a large scale pedophile network.<p>> If someone's outed as a pedophile, everyone who's friends with him should be assumed to be a pedophile?<p>If a given friend had their own history of acting like a creepy sex pest when it comes to young women, had a known and close relationship with the alleged leader of a pedophile network AND knew about “the girls”, would I assume them also to be a pedophile? At a minimum, I may in fact conclude that the odds they are also a pedophile are significantly higher than that of the average individual. Birds of a feather and all…<p>It’s not to say they are of course and it may in fact be as simple as they are nothing more than a creepy sex pest with a bad taste in friends, but NOT a pedophile. I gotta be honest but, me personally, I’d rather be neither.
>To which my point was, so what? It doesn’t materially change the original claim you challenged. [...]<p>It changes the claim in the same way that "he ran over a kid" isn't "materially changed" by the addition of the detail that the kid jumped in front of the car and he had no time to stop. The original statement is still technically true, but it's a massive omission to leave the latter part out. That's doubly true if you're invoking that fact in the context of trying to imply the person did other crimes.
And more importantly, resisted releasing the files as hard as he could.
Those are just stupid.
> but what about everyone else pushing for the law but who didn't go?<p>Who exactly is influential & organized enough across many western countries to push legislation that no one is asking for? Notice that epstein said he worked for [withheld] in some of his emails.
>Who exactly is influential & organized enough across many western countries to push legislation that no one is asking for?<p>The anti-social media sentiment has been brewing for a while now, not least due to books like The Anxious Generation (2024). It's also reflected in opinion polls and media coverage. Unless you want to imply there's some massive conspiracy by The Elites™ (ie. not just a few lobbyists Meta hired, but those in academia and media as well), it's probably organic.
you mean the guys who are working alongside a bunch of pedophiles and doing little about it?
I don't know the precise combination of stupidity vs evil that compelled the "think of the children" crowd to choose the single most publicly implicated man in the Epstein scandal as their champion and elect him over someone who wasn't and hasn't been implicated at all in the slightest, but they did. Either way, they receive the culpability for doing so and we should expect their future decision making to be equally compromised.
It's mostly Meta lobbying for this, in every state. Sensationalizing and exaggerating does not help.
I mean sure; but look at it from their POV, controlling the medium is the message right from 1984. Like LLMs, you can't learn about doing evil things without seeing how they benefit yourself.
Which island?
They are doing crazy things to not do the one single thing that had to be done years ago - make Facebook, Instagram and Co. pay <i>hard</i> for the damage they brought on our kids and society.
90% of the crap our kids are exposed to comes from there. Not sure what's left to tackle, once you remove these websites from the picture - videogames? News??<p>Oh right, the kids...
Quite mind boggling to me that a nanny state can exhurt such a large amount of global control.<p>It's darkly comedic that the single most toxic experience since the pop up ad - the cookie consent popup was similarly imposed.<p>The solution is simple. Websites and services (including ISPs) become governed by the country in which they operate not the whims of foreign entities.
Where do all these people come from?<p>The 'nanny state' prevents people from driving cars without a license?<p>That prevents you from buying myriad substances without a note from the doctor?<p>That makes it illegal for you to buy a gun?<p>" become governed by the country in which they operate not the whims of foreign entities"<p>... is not going to work, at face value, because 'operation' involves the consumer and the producer, each of whom may be in different jurisdictions, and even if they were in the 'same nation' ... this is still a hard problem.<p>No easy answers, and there are legit concerns.
You must be crazy, who could possibly object to governments "protecting the children"?
Gullible to believe its about kids - especially when there's a million options to limit the internet on devices already.<p>IMAGINE A WAR.<p>Now - wouldn't a government LOVE to know who's saying what? Rather than shutting down the entire $$$$$ corporate internet.<p>Money concerns as usual.
Like the evergreen comic, "How would you like this wrapped?" by John Janik<p>For decades policymakers have been trying to sell us the same surveillance state they accuse their adversaries of having, wrapped as either security or protecting children.<p><a href="https://i.redd.it/ifb8agngc7dy.jpg" rel="nofollow">https://i.redd.it/ifb8agngc7dy.jpg</a>
You can’t determine age from a face scan. And it’s trivial to hold up a photo of an older person. Seriously if a website wants an image of your government ID or facial image, maybe ask yourself if you really need to access that site.<p>There WILL be breaches and those drivers license scans will get loose in the world sooner or later. Fully agree that this is all about access control. No thank you.
Devices with child locks turned on really shouldn't have access to everything on the Internet. A simple protocol could let cooperating websites know when child locks are on, so they don't show inappropriate content. Whitelisting or blacklisting could handle the rest.<p>This doesn't mean every device needs to implement child locks. It also shouldn't affect anyone using unlocked devices at all.
How does that even begin to make sense?<p>I want to protect my child from X type of content -- one of many jobs of a parent, but I will trust all content to self report to be child inappropriate? "Inappropriate" is entirely subjective and can not be defined as some sort universal bool -- and that's before you get to the point of actively malicious actors like Meta and Tiktok actively exploiting children for their content farms generation and ad impression factories.<p>If the user owns and controls their computers -- as they should -- then that subjective content filtering layer belongs there, in the owners control. If its a child's, then the parent owns the device, not the child.
The idea is that society should have some common standards for what's inappropriate for children. For example, parents don't want their kids to buy cigarettes, but also, stores don't want to sell them cigarettes. When there's consensus on this, cooperation is possible. Parents have an easier time when they get cooperation from the rest of society.<p>But there isn't going to be consensus on everything, so content filters are still needed.
So simple, just get various Christian, Muslim, atheist, traditionalist and progressive, sane and insane parents to all agree on a common set of what is appropriate and inappropriate. And then enforce that on all of their children. Why didn’t I think of that? That should go <i>great</i>.
> a simple protocol could let cooperating websites know when child locks are on, so they don't show inappropriate content.<p>Isn't that literally the California law?
Not which law you mean, but I think there's a distinction between "disallows children under 16 from creating an account" (which apparently requires age verification) and "disallows creating or logging into a social media account from a device with a child lock on." (Which doesn't.)
For almost three decades authorities have been wondering how to put this 'free communications' genie back into the bottle without taking the GFW approach. It looks like this time they just might get it.<p>If you really believe that this is about child protection then you are much too gullible, that was never the main reason. If the authorities really wanted to do something about child protection online they'd spend a fraction of what they are going to spend on this on building out the departments in the various countries that actually work on that problem exclusively. As it is they have more work they can handle, which leaves a lot of cases lying and far more of these perps active than what would otherwise be the case.<p>So as long as you don't see that you know for a fact that this child protection is not the real reason.
It is all about advertising profits. See what I said at <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47471747">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47471747</a><p>But what do we do about it? Look at social media comments on this topic. There’s huge support for these age verification laws. Parents chime in about how their kids were affected by social media and how badly this is needed, instead of taking responsibility for raising their kids properly. That article by the Pinterest CEO calling for these laws is naively seen as some sort of sacrifice of profits for the good of everyone’s kids. And no one talks about privacy or the effects on speech.<p>And all these well funded nonprofits pushing these dishonest bills onto legislators have time and resources. Feels like the privacy friendly people are losing the battle.
Access control and pervasive surveillance has been the plan since day one; child protection is the leverage. Also, I don't expect people who repeatedly hide the contents of certain files to care about children.
Maybe the positive is that access control might break the illusion of privacy.<p>Okay it's quite private in the sense that we don't know our friends browsing history but we know somebody, somewhere is collecting data and selling it to their 100 partners.<p>Do you think there might ever be a moment when someone decides, legally or not, dump enormous amount of info, in a way that allows people to see what google searches other people did or browsing history etc? A moment when people's embarrassing secrets come into light.
Saw a mini documentary once, which was filmed in China, that showed how easy it was to buy this data. Many apps spy on location and sells it to brokers. In the documentary, they showed a common practice: people buying their romantic partner's location history to make sure they haven't been doing anything naughty.
Controlling access to certain websites, i.e., so-called "social media", is not "internet access control". The web is not the internet. Nor are these laws limiting access to _all_ websites. Third, not all operating systems are controlled by corporations like Apple, Google, etc. and used to protect and promote corporate interests
The people pushing these bills are the same that are looking to ban library books. They’re either bad or ineffective parents (or both). Instead of having a healthy relationship and discussion with their kids they’d rather impose their own regressive ideas by way of legislation on everyone.
I fail to see why the "protections" that child data deserves, isn't also the same kind of protection that everyone deserve. In what way are children special, in a digital world, that adults shouldn't be protected the same way?
It was never about children...
Given that it seems Meta is commissioning these laws, I wonder if a viral open source license that explicitly fails to grant Meta a license to use or modify the software would effectively deter future lobbying for regulations which are especially difficult for the open source community to comply with.
> Given that it seems Meta is commissioning these laws<p>That's <i>not</i> given. Someone found some good evidence that Meta was supporting (and even supplying language) for some of the earlier laws. Those were the laws doing age checks on websites and typically requiring uploading ID documents or face scans to those websites.<p>I've not seen anyone provide evidence that Meta has anything to do with the laws that are like the California one, which do not require providing any documentation or proof whatsoever of age. They just required that the parent of a child who uses a device be asked to provide a birthdate or age when setting up the child's account, and that the OS providing an API that apps on that device can use to get the age bracket of the child.
I'd be ok with this if both ends of the spectrum were covered. Sorry, you're too old to access this computer. Go ask a younger adult if you want to read the news or see photos of your grandkids.
The more people that use something the more it inevitably trends toward average mediocrity.<p>A lot of these trajectories aren't really for us - the techy folk.
You all saw the Epstein scandal, right? If you saw one cockroach this randomly, then you know there are thousand hiding. Maybe that's why Epstein is un-lived.<p>So I found it very ionic that, to quote on quote "protect" child from online harms, they asks you to upload the photo ID of you and your child to, guess what, real potential pedophiles.<p>Of course they're going to claim your information is totally safe... just like Bill Gates told his wife it's safe to have sex with him after his STD infestation.<p>Sure, I don't really know how the companies will actually handle your personal photos, but there's a history where a tech CEO made an attractiveness comparison website using photo obtained from their user uploads without user agreeing. So go figure.<p>The best way to protect your child is to tech them how to use Internet for their own benefit, and only allow them to create accounts after they've learned how to use Internet correctly. The companies and governments will NEVER do that for you, they'll only steal and steal even more.
Well age verification works so well to keep alcohol, tobacco and weed beyond the reach of minors so....
We had a good run when the internet was a disruptive force. But mass adoption of anything always leads to where we are. The internet is an established institution. The wild west days are over. If you're looking for that vibe, p2p technology in small corners will be where you can find it.
But the whole point of bringing up child protection was to restrict Internet access, to police Internet content and to legitimize mass surveillance.<p>Or do we really believe that states which condone support, fund and sometimes engage in the mass killings children are motivated by genuine moral concern for the young?<p>-----<p>Still, there is somewhat of a silver lining: Perhaps this will encourage young people, and people who value their privacy, to avoid those "social networks" in favor of places where there is no age verification, 2FA with a physical phone number, etc. etc.
This happening and it can’t be stopped. There is bipartisan consensus, so hard to come by otherwise, because both parties share the same corporate interests. Deal with it.
The people who want to control internet access use children to achieve their means. Why these creeps get to power? Normally people thinking too much about children would be casted out of society at best.
ban porn altogether
Am I the only one that simply disregards everything that follows an AI slop image?
You don't understand, the children need to be exposed to Nick Fuentes, Andrew Tate, and algorithmically generated suicidal ideation from Facebook. It's crucial for their development, actually
Just ban children from using the internet.
> They come from recommendation systems, dark patterns, addictive metrics, and business models that reward amplification without responsibility.<p>That rings extremely true to me, the issue you run into is that liberals and conservatives don't believe the government has any role in the commercial relationship between adults. This means any limits you want to impose on the "free market" has to be directed at protecting children, since those are the only people you're allowed to protect.<p>We already have many laws to safeguard children, the problems being that children have been taught to self declare as adults, and parents can't stop that without some help from the technology.
The only people on the planet that care about this, and understand it enough to maybe do something about it, are reading this thread right now. I got nothing. Anyone else got any ideas?
Too late<p>- Australia
parents need to do their job and raise their children, and moderate their content.
For many it's not about the children. For many it is.<p>I haven't made my mind up on this topic, but Jesus, the comments here strawmanning everyone who supports this kind of thing as disingenuous or worse... Wow.<p>I'm not sure how we make any corner of the internet usable within the next few years without verification given all the misinfo, bots & AI slop anyway.
Arguments about erosion of privacy miss the point: that is exactly what they want.
The big tech is going to be one of the big winners from Internet Access Control. This will give them a more reliable way to link a user account to an actual human being - a link that can be monetized in a variety of ways. All kind of political regimes can use such regulations to enhance their control of the population. And the loosers are going to be the Internet users and small companies.<p>The unfortunate true is IAC is coming to most countries in the world, no matter how much the Hacker News audience hates it...
The moment "think of the children!" enters the chat is when suspicions should be heightened.
I read in some other discussions that this is about social media companies being able to increase their profits and nothing else. But the social media companies lobbying for these laws are shamelessly making it look like some kind of protect the children thing. It is all pushing more ads annd getting more users.<p>The way it works: today, social media companies cannot advertise to children under 13 under COPPA. So these companies have to do their best to guess the user’s age, and if it is possibly a child, they can’t advertise and have to lose those profits even though MAYBE the user is an adult. Now they can shift the legal compliance costs and liability to the operating system provider or phone manufacturer and not be responsible for the user’s identity. And then they can advertise much more at that point, without being conservative. This also lets them have a different experience for minors that doesn’t advertise to them, but targets them carefully to keep them as users until they are older, so they start to become a source of advertising profits later.<p>It’s well known that Meta is behind a lot of funding for nonprofits pushing these laws under a “protect the children” thing. But now even Pinterest’s CEO is shamelessly saying parents don’t have a responsibility to manage their own kids, and is supporting all of this. See <a href="https://www.gadgetreview.com/reddit-user-uncovers-who-is-behind-metas-2b-lobbying-for-invasive-age-verification-tech" rel="nofollow">https://www.gadgetreview.com/reddit-user-uncovers-who-is-beh...</a> and <a href="https://time.com/article/2026/03/19/pinterest-ceo-governments-should-ban-social-media-for-kids-under-16/" rel="nofollow">https://time.com/article/2026/03/19/pinterest-ceo-government...</a><p>Evangelist/theocratic conservatives welcome these laws because they view it as enabling and validating age-based restrictions for other things. For example, Project 2025 called for a ban on porn. And separately, the Heritage Foundation pushed age-verification for porn websites, and has openly admitted it is a defacto porn ban. That should have been ruled unconstitutional on free speech grounds, but the current SCOTUS upheld it unfortunately. They’ll next use age-based verification for all sorts of content - maybe for LGBTQ stuff, maybe for something else.<p>In the end, everyone else will lose. If you have to prove your identity to anyone, there is a high chance this information can be accessed and surveilled by the government. There is a high chance at some point, no matter what they claim, your identity data will be hacked and sold. And of course if you can be identified online, then anything you say or do can be traced back to you, and that can be used against you by the government. Suddenly, being a protester in these chaotic times will become a lot more risky.
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If you think u can control a kids imagination to circumvent these controls then you are part of the problem