> These NGOs have converged upon a unified strategy: use the rhetoric of ‘child safety’ to advocate for digital ID laws that would prevent adults from using the internet anonymously.
Of course.
Anyone who brings up kids is trying to manipulate you into giving up your freedom for security. Whatever argument they make should be simply ignored and dismissed.
There's an ongoing debate in Australia to ban gambling advertisements. One of the arguments that is supportive of a ban says that children shouldn't be exposed to gambling advertisements during sports broadcasts, as they should be family friendly.
Or guarantee that even if you provide such data to a nice, friendly, democratically run and ethically managed administration, that some future regime change to a completely different group of people won't result in catastrophic misuse.
This is the issue I have with most of my well meaning but somewhat politically uninformed friends. The idea of “wouldn’t it be good if …” (idealized scenario), is never followed up with a “yes, but …” (realistic evaluation of how politics actually works).
Yes it might actually work out ok if a mythical benevolent dictator could manage things with infinite precision and unlimited compassion. I would imagine that has never happened at any reasonable scale.
The Conservative folks seem to phrase this as a desire to “keep government small” - which always seemed a little clunky given the stakes and track record of these governments.
> Whatever argument they make should be simply ignored and dismissed.
This makes very little sense. People sometimes appeal to the safety of children cynically, but it's very often sincere, since parents genuinely do worry a lot about their kids.
You can tell people to ignore these appeals, but it won't work, and you'll be leaving better arguments on the table.
We should not ignore it, but firmly dismiss it with reason. The recent Illinois law that applies to all Internet-capable operating systems is blatantly unconstitutional. People should not be forced by law to disclose their age (or anything) in order to engage in digital communication. That forced utterance of your own age is compelled speech, a violation of the First Amendment.
For parents who are genuinely concerned about child safety, you are being used to push an agenda. If we want to solve the digital parenting problem, we have to understand how the problem came to be in the first place and why there isn't a good solution at the moment:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49118578
Comes down to something I have said for a long while. Anyone that wants power, who is saying it, why are they saying it and why do people believe them.
Half the laws we're complaining about (e.g. California, Illinois) are literally just regulating parental controls, and I can no longer give the benefit of the doubt to people who act as if this is the same as forcing internet users to scan their ID. People who conflate these two things are paid lobbyists of Meta to make sure Meta won't have to be safe for children even when the parental controls checkbox is turned on.
Regulating parental controls by making you scan an ID to use a computer is even worse than doing it to access a website. I understand that today's laws are not doing that, but do you genuinely, truly believe in your heart of hearts that once every OS has mandatory age fields, that nobody is going to start proposing legislation to attempt to enforce its validity by ID verification + hardware attestation? You're not willing to give the benefit of doubt to people with concerns about this, but you are willing to give the benefit of doubt to the surveillance states that have been pushing us down a slippery slope for 25+ years, sliding further and further down every single year without reprieve?
Of course that is not parental controls. That's 3rd party controls. Parental controls means you create a child account for children and when a site is detected as being adult ideally using RTA headers [1] then a password prompt asks for the parents approval. That is parental controls.
Indeed, that's a reasonable approach. Just to clarify that we're agreeing, the comment I was replying to was strongly defending California and Illinois' laws that require the OS record an age field for the primary user of the device, which while currently self-declared is at least an obvious path for future, more invasive legislation.
The problem with a self declared approach is that puts a mechanism in place. Once in place the laws can easily scope creep year over year to add more information or require putting in ID information or some future nation-wide digital ID and digital wallet which could easily be the plan all along. All they need is the API that will interface with websites using some agreed upon standard and then it can easily be extended. Give them an inch, they will take a mile.
> I understand that today's laws are not doing that,
Come on. Like 80% of my entire post was devoted to pointing out a gradual erosion of rights over time, and I explicitly stated that it's not the case today.
Tech people keep ignoring the fact that many people a) find the parental controls too hard to use and b) have no confidence that their kids won't find a way to circumvent them.
If parents felt in control of technology they wouldn't be calling on governments to regulate it in the first place. I know a lot of tech people like to assume that government wants to control everything and these parents are fake front groups established to manufacture consent, but this is infowars-type conspiracy thinking. Most people are just not that facile with technology and people who have kids are atavistically opposed to anything that could harm their kids.
Tech people's unwillingness to even engage with concerns about harm to children (eg the GP) more or less guarantees more aggressive regulation. IT's a self-defeating position.
I recently put some thought into what I would have done if I had encountered "parental controls" to use the Internet when I first encountered it as a young teen in 1992. I would have made it my personal mission in life to circumvent everything and anything possible. I feel fortunate that no such controls existed and the adults in my life knew significantly less about the technology than I did.
Was I exposed to some clearly adult content? Yes. But I didn't find it particularly compelling, the video games I could download and other things I could explore were more interesting.
It is also concerning to me that gen-alpha (or whatever the age bracket is called) people are increasingly being pushed into walled garden, app-based social media platforms instead of actually learning what the Internet really is, and what it's capable of.
My dad added parental controls to our PC sometime around 1997. It also had Eudora installed, which my dad used for email. Poking around, I found the ini file that had the ciphertext of the password for the email server. On a whim, I made another account in Eudora and put the ciphertext in as my password. In the ini, the plaintext of the password came out; I guess Eudora used some symmetric rot16 or xor like cipher! The same password worked to unlock parental controls, which had taken me just about a week to circumvent.
I have a feeling we had a similar experience growing up. I generally agree, but also, we got QAnon/Alex Jones and such which have quite directly screwed up my country. So I don’t know, my opinion is often contradictory and fluid. I don’t know where I stand anymore. I believe in an “open internet,” but also, there’s people like Andrew Tate who have ruined the minds of people I care about.
We can debate if these systems and people existed before (they did), but the reach and scale is different now. My most controversial opinion these days is that not everyone should be allowed to upload to YouTube if it’s public facing. We need basic screening and filtering.
One personal observation, the early commercial internet as it was transitioning from universities/research labs/certain high-tech firms into a mass market thing with millions of users, it had its share of nutjobs and crazy as well. But it was boutique, hand crafted , personal level crazy and it was for the most part disregarded because none of the whackjobs could collect a sufficient following or megaphone to spread their message.
For instance in about 1994 I remember coming across a set of textfiles that were some lengthy manifesto about how the US government had supposedly manufactured AIDS in a lab somewhere. But it never got any traction.
Now we have the unfortunate venn diagram overlap between something like a Tate and a major social media platform, and he can get his message out to millions of angry, horny, unemployed young men...
> For instance in about 1994 I remember coming across a set of textfiles that were some lengthy manifesto about how the US government had supposedly manufactured AIDS in a lab somewhere. But it never got any traction.
There was a BBS in my area that ran on a small bank of 14.4 USR modems that had a gold mine of content like that. It was such a fun time.
Well, I'm sorry parental controls are too hard to use, but all of the parents who want all other adults to sacrifice their online anonymity just to make to for it need to get their heads screwed on straight. They're screwing a) themselves b) everyone else and c) their own children when they reach adulthood.
On one hand the software world needs to re-learn the lost art of proper UX research and rely on data from user trials instead of on vibes and reading tea leaves with analytics, but on the other hand parents have a wholly unrealistic expectation of being able to keep their kids in a hermetically sealed bubble until they turn 18.
Kids are going to get into stuff you don’t want them to no matter how hard you try to prevent that, short of keeping them in locked padded rooms with no electronics (which would be abuse). Parents are right to want to steer them in the right direction and keep them out of the worst trouble, but that’s as far as it goes.
I don't think this is a viable or realistic option in 2026/2027. Try to imagine what your own personal reaction would have been when you were 14 years old if 90%+ of your peers had an iphone 17 or equivalent and your parents gave you a flip phone, and tried to ban you from using smartphones.
Why repeat the same argument if it clearly hasn't worked? Do you expect it to suddenly become effective?
Change in behavior can only follow from change in incentives. Parents must be held legally liable if they allow their children access to social media. That means jail time for negligence.
Because according to HN there's no way to force social media companies to not serve children without destroying privacy. That leaves parents who aren't changing their behavior because nothing has incited them to change. Legal liabily is an incentive that changes behavior.
Supposedly the incentive already exists because parents want their children saved from the harms of facebook and social media. The story is that parents are clamoring for the government to do something about it. I don't think parents really are, or where they are the expectation is that the social media companies will be forced to change their behavior, not that parents will be forced to start parenting their children or be forced to provide a scan of their face and passport every time they do an internet search.
The government has just decided to fall back on "think of the children" as a way to implement more surveillance and control.
The incentive for parents to stop giving their children smartphones does not exist. If it did exist, it would incite parents to perform the action: ie not give their children smartphones.
Incentives incite action. No action. No incentive.
Plenty of us survived the internet when it was an even wilder west, IRC chats with strangers trying to learn perl, not putting your name and social security number into random websites. Being aware of predators. It's a very specific kind of power-hungry move fast and break things tech that refuses to accept responsibility of the fallout.
Anonymity, the right to move privately and be private online is much bigger than parents who are frustrated with out of control capitalism.
Besides, this only benefits the big corporations. They of course will happily back anything that absolves them of their sins.
It was a noncommercial wild west. You were up against some troll trying to get a reaction by linking you to goatse, not some trillion dollar international corporation with a literal army of addiction experts A/B testing how to maximize engagement.
looks like we had some bot on bot action down here. I know what the difference is you didn't make it past the first sentence. Make a note in memory to read the whole comment before commenting for next time.
I fully appreciate that you care more about anonymity on principle, but it seems very naive to assume that principles are necessarily going to win out over the demands of aggrieved reactionary parents. Cranky parents are very consistent voters and providers of tax revenue in most polities and politicians want them to be reasonably happy and quiescent for the sake of stability. It seems to me you are wildly underestimating the size of your potential opposition.
Are aggrieved reactionary parents demanding that they should have to scan their face to look at websites? It seems to me like they just want social media companies to be forced to change their harmful and predatory practices and that instead of properly regulating the bad behavior of social media companies the government has decided to use this issue as a means to give themselves more surveillance and control.
We don't need to make parents the enemy of our online privacy. We just need parents to reject the idea that they have to give up their identity and the identity of their children to every shitty social media company and shady website on the internet to "protect" them.
Parents aren't calling on governments to regulate it. Implementations like Apple's Client Side Scanning was not a populist movement, and many savvy parents spoke up about how it crossed multiple lines that set the stage for authoritarian abuses. Apple got so much flak for entertaining the idea that they had to drop it, there was no way to come out looking benign with it.
This is the "Christian moms need Congress to regulate Cable TV" problem all over again. Don't let them watch TV if you oppose what is on it. It's not HBO's responsibility to raise your child, it's yours.
This continues to be an absolutely false characterization of what Apple was planning to do, which it was doing BECAUSE IT WANTED TO SUPPORT USER PRIVACY
> I know a lot of tech people like to assume that government wants to control everything and these parents are fake front groups established to manufacture consent, but this is infowars-type conspiracy thinking
You may not be aware of this, but Meta has been actively spending millions of dollars to redirect the rage against their algorithms and addictive harms, especially against children, and one of their strategies to try and help avoid liability is to put the onus on the federal government to pass ID legislation, to literally make it easier for Meta and similar companies to age gate most content under simple blanket policies. The way that they are doing this is by funding otherwise very small "parents rights organizations" with money and connections they otherwise wouldn't have. What does Meta gain from this? Less liability and lower cost in content moderation. What do the parents rights groups get? "Check ID laws".
That's enough motivation for both groups, it's very simple.
Now where do you get into "conspiracy theory" territory? Well thetr are also other groups that want online ID for their own purposes, and they are more than happy to help fund these groups to get something they also want.
All of this is very easy to provide backing links for with a simple Google search, if you're interested.
In the inverse, none of the opposition matters until it can solve the problems the universal surveillance approach doesn't even solve anyways. Whatever argument they make should be simply ignored and dismissed.
It's a tradeoff situation and nobody wants to leave it as such to find an answer which serves the best balance. Instead, we are doomed to discuss the absolutes of freedoms vs the absolutes of child safety.
I'd really like to see something like a required parental controls architecture products had to support (but not every device had to force universally). These kind of solutions only goes as far as the problem is a technical one, e.g. a kid on their dad's office computer they weren't supposed to access can still see things they shouldn't, but such is the truth with any pure technical approach to the problem which is not actually fully technically bound.
The only real downside to this is that a 0kp cannot be reliably tied to an identity of the person using the device and thus tickets could be proxied/shared around with semi technical tools (and/or an ai agent tasked with creating a proxy). This really isn't solvable without device-level attestation[0], as if a website needs to reliably say "this person is actually this person" then it needs all pieces of data itself.
This could be solved by adding in a still privacy-preserving step like "The device is doing periodic face id scans and matching them to an identity, and constantly renews/re-presents to the age assurance consumer", but that has its own drawbacks[0].
0: Namely, lock in to devices that can do this, and that includes basically guaranteeing a double digit percentage of adult humans would not have access due to their device being old, unsupported, missing the hardware, etc. And with so many humans excluded, you would not have mass adoption. Probably also excludes rooted devices if we bring in attestation of unmodified software.
I agree with the other commenter who replied to you. I don’t think this comes from actual parents. And the article suggests this latest push is from right-leaning groups whose goals are surveillance and censorship.
That said, I’m a father of 3. I’m a millennial and tech worker. I have the digital literacy to teach my kids about the internet and its horrors in a safe way. Not every parent does, so passing this off as a “parent better” issue doesn’t solve anything either.
I dunno if you can legislate “better parental control ux”, but I’m open to similar ideas so parents can get some support without compromising on privacy.
We know what good UX is already from history. Movies for example have an age rating system that clearly lists the ages the movie is suitable for. If you look underage, you get asked to provide ID.
Parents do not have the time or energy to configure modern parental controls which work more like tuning firewall rules.
The other part of the problem is you need collective action, if you ban your child from Facebook, they won’t get invited to parties anymore. If all children get banned, the parties will be arranged over sms or some other non social media. As it is today, banning your kids from social media is overly punishing since all the other kids are using it.
That was my point though.. showing ID at the door doesn’t translate well to the Social Media landscape.
If we actually cared about supporting children and parents as a country, parental controls and access, and making sure that systems were actually safe and protected privacy, would NOT be an afterthought.
The polling I have seen from Germany and Australia of a social media ban for children was quite in favor of it. Sentiment here on HN and on Reddit was the polar opposite. We are in a bubble.
Fair play. This should 100% be viewed as a logical extension of that same effluvium. This is not a bug but a feature for them, many of these laws allow companies like Meta to offshore the responsibility of not harming children onto individuals while continuing to melt the brains of anyone unfortunate enough to still have a Facebook or Instagram account.
> Like it or not, there is a large constituency who wants to “protect the children”.
Is there, though? The push is coming from lobbyists who seem to be largely funded by wealthy elites, corporations, and other opaque organizations. One of them seems to be Meta. It doesn’t look like a grassroots effort.
It seems to me the intrusiveness of age verification will continue to grow.
They want the OS the report the users age. People will use this to claim whatever age they want. For instance, if companies cannot advertise to children, they might find that almost every computer is reporting that the user is a child--turns out adults want the protections kids receive as well--sometimes.
Eventually they will have to enforce a system intrusive enough that no lying or abuse of the system is possible. We might even approach "Verification Can" levels of verification.
For the first time in human history, the cost of surveillance has dropped below the cost of privacy.
It is more expensive today to maintain your privacy and anonymity than it is to surveil you. The collective surveillance grid makes it possible to track people's movements, whereabouts, their predilections, political views, personal images and more for a few cents every day. It's a bargain.
And in this new world, the eye watches everyone, all the time, forever. Most people, including people on HN, are still stuck in a human-first world. The new surveillance state isn't going to be thousands to hundreds of thousands of humans sitting in a shadow-y room going over pictures and videos. Today, a bunch of vectors and a large multi-modal model will do just fine. Servers are cheap (for a nation state) and never need to eat or sleep.
And they will be used to watch you. Especially if you're attractive. Or, valuable. Or, blackmail-able. After all, NSA employees routinely abuse multi-billion dollar surveillance assets to stalk women. It's so common that the NSA calls it LOVEINT.
In the world to come, people are going to wish they were being surveilled by the NSA. Because at least the NSA punishes these people. Occasionally.
When this kind of technology becomes this cheap and this pervasive, then the end of anonymity means unaccountable sheriff deputies stalking their former spouse and family. Or, prospective romantic interests.
With this new oracle, these people will be able to set up alerts for when their spouse is thinking of leaving them. To catch their child accessing support for abuse or something more ephemeral like being an atheist, having different political views or LGBT+.
Anyone who doesn't see the forest for the trees, or who embraces this because "parental controls are too hard to use" will doom themselves and future generations to a world that's materially worse than our hyper-surveilled present.
I can't believe I'm saying this, but at this rate I'm going to miss the days when it was just the NSA reading my emails (and they still do! Howdy!). I know the track record. But at least the NSA has some sense of institutional responsibility and control. Most institutions in your life, including your HOA don't.
The whole think of the children angle is so cursed. Used to push surveillance meanwhile actual harm against children goes ignored. See Epstein files and the grooming gangs in the UK
If it actually did anything to protect the children it wouldn’t be so objectionable
> Used to push surveillance meanwhile actual harm against children goes ignored.
Worse, these laws will actually create new harms to children who will be forced to give their identity to websites and identity services that will exploit them and fail to protect that data.
That’s wild that this myth has a Wikipedia entry. There’s not a single shred of proof in the report cited here. It’s pure speculation. Like a racist Reefer Madness.
Epstein and grooming gangs are both real. Not that the whole "grooming gangs" problem hasn't been vastly amplified and turned into a repeated media talking point by a bunch of the extreme right wing in the UK, however. There's plenty of domestic non south asian pedos and molestors there too.
On this topic, have people noticed the sudden coordinated media push for Flock Is Your Friend? The Free Press, The Atlantic, and Axios have all churned out pro-Flock articles in the last week. Clearly someone (I assume A16Z, but it could be multiple groups) is panicking about the mounting bipartisan backlash to Flock cameras and is starting to write checks to try and head it off.
My theory is that the establishment sees the oncoming economic crisis and is desperately trying to plan for managing the fallout. They don’t like Flock or its backers, but they feel they have no choice. Same as why Palantir is gradually being rehabilitated in the mainstream press.
You’ll also notice that Anduril is quickly being accepted now that we’re expending munitions faster than our replacement rate.
Put in a less polite way, they're preparing for the metaphorical pitchforks and torches held by mobs of the common people which might manifest themselves in a more kinetic format.
Yes. My hope is that the rare earths shortage, memory shortage, and current focus on munitions will delay the era of drone-based policing until after the crisis.
Drew Harwell, Douglas MacMillan, and Aaron Schaffer from the Washington Post also wrote a shameful article on this topic on August 4th (the title changed, along with an image of a woman who was harassed to something else). No counterpoint. Total submarine article.
The threat from COVID (and more importantly, long COVID) never went away, but they sure convinced the average person that it did.
Today you can see an N95 in the wild once in awhile, so some people are paying attention, but they are less than 1%. Many others are suffering brain damage, unexplained heart issues, taxed immune systems, etc and have no idea why (nor does their doctor).
That'd be a lot easier to believe if you provided a source, which you should do if you care enough to comment in the first place, I think?
A cursory google suggests that the return-to-office movement is primarily driven by management's desire for voluntary turnover, avoiding the bad press of mass layoffs. But certainly doesn't show that it's 'been debunked 100 times'.
In my own experience, it's been 50/50 a desire for voluntary turnover, and also a control tactic. Employees are easier to strong-arm when they're immersed in the idea that company culture actually matters.
Didn't mean to imply that was the only reason, so I've added another reason to my comment.
I haven't come across much of the debunking of the commercial property issue. I would say it's undeniably factor, but we can argue about the scale.
A total of $800 billion—in real terms—of value is at stake by 2030, and, on average, the total value of office space is expected to decline by 26 percent from 2019 to 2030.
You think that the size of investment firms that own something like, a good sized chunk of midtown Manhattan class A and B commercial real estate aren't capable of deploying social and tradtional-media influence tools to push an agenda to repopulate their office space? That would be a very inaccurate assessment of how large and motivated they are.
It is very unlikely that “NGOs” have the funding influence and power to do this. The more likely source is state backed intelligence agencies. The NGOs are just there to create a buffer.
Ask yourself logically - who would pay these NGOs to do things like attempt to extort meta into a $500M+ settlement over “harming child mental health.”
This is all connected and intelligence agency backed. It’s far from innocent, it’s non corporate - some had suggested meta was behind it - but as we have seen meta is the one getting targeted.
Didn't HN decide to not allow AI submissions? This is quite explicitly one in that the operator of the site declares to "automate investigative journalism" and launched the site with its five pieces of 'journalism' yesterday.
And to point out the obvious on the actual quality of the piece, The US has itself passed age verification laws in 20 states, such as Texas where it was driven not by the British but by domestic interest groups and decidedly state senators like Angela Paxton.
Also given the slant of the site it's pretty obvious was the political motivation here is, I guess yelling at the British always works
I'm always surprised how defensive people get in here about privacy when so many corporations have vastly more information about you than the government does.
This isn’t a “gotcha”. Many here take exceptional steps against this kind of thing and also advocate for restrictions on what kind of data corporations can collect.
The corporations aren't going to throw you in jail if you cross state lines to get an abortion. The US government is already doing this when they get that data.
Flagging on submissions deranks a submission after some count, making it fall off the first three pages. I think it's a much higher bar (like moderation involvement) to fully make it dead.
> Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what
someone says.
If the same standard were applied for posts, this one would fail. I recognize that it is a popular perspective that these measures are essentially a war on anonymity, but that is not what they intend to fix, although it is quite possible that anonymity is a casualty of whatever war is at hand.
I believe efforts to resist these measures would be more effective if they engaged with the problem: the modern internet is a harmful experience for young minds, beyond what any society should consider acceptable. I personally don't think shocking content is the worst of it. Algorithms that maximize engagement over enriching experience are a curse for any age group, and developing brains face the worst of it.
Is age-gating the internet the right answer? Will it even help? Are there ulterior motives? Those are open questions that need discussion. Dismissing a genuine problem is choosing not to engage in the discussion.
I disagree with you. Plans to eliminate anonymity have been discussed for years in elite circles, at Davos and similar events, and it’s most often framed in the context of social control (eliminating dissent or foreign influence).
Larry Ellison on surveillance: “Citizens will be on their best behavior, because we’re constantly recording and reporting everything that’s going on.”
This is not new and it’s not about kids. This is the culmination of years of planning that began after the Arab Spring, when elites began to get concerned about how the Internet could be leveraged for domestic regime change.
As far as the matter of ulterior motives, we're not in disagreement. Assuming that's true, it is important to address the real problem they are hijacking to realize their goals. Dismissing it as a made up problem just means you lose credibility with anyone who is paying attention.
It will always be possible to find a cause du jour to justify violating the rights of citizens, because crime happens and reality is messy. The real problem is that the mass media is complicit in this agenda, so they amplify the excuse until bad laws are passed (laws which seldom solve the problem).
While I do think we should make efforts to reduce crime and create better spaces for kids, laws like this aren’t the answer.
Ellison is probably in favor at least partially because he's a database salesman, and oppressive domestic spy agencies need lots and lots of really big databases.
> the modern internet is a harmful experience for young minds
Because of the goal of advertising revenue as the ultimate driver as to build an addictive permanent scroll of slop on tiktok or instagram, and the desire of social media companies to build walled gardens where someone's entire online experience stays in their "app.". As you say, this affects young and old alike.
> These NGOs have converged upon a unified strategy: use the rhetoric of ‘child safety’ to advocate for digital ID laws that would prevent adults from using the internet anonymously.
Of course.
Anyone who brings up kids is trying to manipulate you into giving up your freedom for security. Whatever argument they make should be simply ignored and dismissed.
There's an ongoing debate in Australia to ban gambling advertisements. One of the arguments that is supportive of a ban says that children shouldn't be exposed to gambling advertisements during sports broadcasts, as they should be family friendly.
Should that argument be ignored too?
Worth noting that there's no security in a system that abusively collects your data. That goes for children as well.
Or guarantee that even if you provide such data to a nice, friendly, democratically run and ethically managed administration, that some future regime change to a completely different group of people won't result in catastrophic misuse.
This is the issue I have with most of my well meaning but somewhat politically uninformed friends. The idea of “wouldn’t it be good if …” (idealized scenario), is never followed up with a “yes, but …” (realistic evaluation of how politics actually works).
Yes it might actually work out ok if a mythical benevolent dictator could manage things with infinite precision and unlimited compassion. I would imagine that has never happened at any reasonable scale.
The Conservative folks seem to phrase this as a desire to “keep government small” - which always seemed a little clunky given the stakes and track record of these governments.
Which is no longer a hypothetical
> Whatever argument they make should be simply ignored and dismissed.
This makes very little sense. People sometimes appeal to the safety of children cynically, but it's very often sincere, since parents genuinely do worry a lot about their kids.
You can tell people to ignore these appeals, but it won't work, and you'll be leaving better arguments on the table.
Yes it’s normal to worry about your kids. It’s normal for family and friends to worry about your kids.
When a politician is worried about your kids, you should be worried about your rights and freedoms. Not only for your own sake but for your kids too!
We should not ignore it, but firmly dismiss it with reason. The recent Illinois law that applies to all Internet-capable operating systems is blatantly unconstitutional. People should not be forced by law to disclose their age (or anything) in order to engage in digital communication. That forced utterance of your own age is compelled speech, a violation of the First Amendment.
For parents who are genuinely concerned about child safety, you are being used to push an agenda. If we want to solve the digital parenting problem, we have to understand how the problem came to be in the first place and why there isn't a good solution at the moment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49118578
Comes down to something I have said for a long while. Anyone that wants power, who is saying it, why are they saying it and why do people believe them.
That one can get deep really quick.
Sounds like a good way to cede the argument to the opposition and let those that do believe them make up the rules.
Especially when there are very obvious and tangible harms from modern social media.
Either you participate and help drive privacy preserving methods to solve the problems, or someone else will solve it in a way less desirable to you.
rhetoric all the way down
Note how they always ignore parental controls, and skip straight to deanonymize everyone.
Half the laws we're complaining about (e.g. California, Illinois) are literally just regulating parental controls, and I can no longer give the benefit of the doubt to people who act as if this is the same as forcing internet users to scan their ID. People who conflate these two things are paid lobbyists of Meta to make sure Meta won't have to be safe for children even when the parental controls checkbox is turned on.
But the other half are. UK, Brazil, Texas, Virginia.
Regulating parental controls by making you scan an ID to use a computer is even worse than doing it to access a website. I understand that today's laws are not doing that, but do you genuinely, truly believe in your heart of hearts that once every OS has mandatory age fields, that nobody is going to start proposing legislation to attempt to enforce its validity by ID verification + hardware attestation? You're not willing to give the benefit of doubt to people with concerns about this, but you are willing to give the benefit of doubt to the surveillance states that have been pushing us down a slippery slope for 25+ years, sliding further and further down every single year without reprieve?
Of course that is not parental controls. That's 3rd party controls. Parental controls means you create a child account for children and when a site is detected as being adult ideally using RTA headers [1] then a password prompt asks for the parents approval. That is parental controls.
[1] - https://nochan.net/b/Internet-Crap/20230829-Think-Of-The-Chi...
Indeed, that's a reasonable approach. Just to clarify that we're agreeing, the comment I was replying to was strongly defending California and Illinois' laws that require the OS record an age field for the primary user of the device, which while currently self-declared is at least an obvious path for future, more invasive legislation.
The problem with a self declared approach is that puts a mechanism in place. Once in place the laws can easily scope creep year over year to add more information or require putting in ID information or some future nation-wide digital ID and digital wallet which could easily be the plan all along. All they need is the API that will interface with websites using some agreed upon standard and then it can easily be extended. Give them an inch, they will take a mile.
What law anywhere in the US is specifically forcing the physical scanning of an ID to use a computer?
> I understand that today's laws are not doing that,
Come on. Like 80% of my entire post was devoted to pointing out a gradual erosion of rights over time, and I explicitly stated that it's not the case today.
Haven’t seen a good DARVO in a while.
Deny: the laws aren’t about this! (Many of the laws are)
Attack: these people are lying! (They are not)
Reverse victim and offender: these people are Meta lobbyists! (Meta has spent a lot of money on groups campaigning for these laws)
We could very easily push for giving parents the kinds of control and auditing that hackers, manufacturers, and governments currently have
Tech people keep ignoring the fact that many people a) find the parental controls too hard to use and b) have no confidence that their kids won't find a way to circumvent them.
If parents felt in control of technology they wouldn't be calling on governments to regulate it in the first place. I know a lot of tech people like to assume that government wants to control everything and these parents are fake front groups established to manufacture consent, but this is infowars-type conspiracy thinking. Most people are just not that facile with technology and people who have kids are atavistically opposed to anything that could harm their kids.
Tech people's unwillingness to even engage with concerns about harm to children (eg the GP) more or less guarantees more aggressive regulation. IT's a self-defeating position.
I recently put some thought into what I would have done if I had encountered "parental controls" to use the Internet when I first encountered it as a young teen in 1992. I would have made it my personal mission in life to circumvent everything and anything possible. I feel fortunate that no such controls existed and the adults in my life knew significantly less about the technology than I did.
Was I exposed to some clearly adult content? Yes. But I didn't find it particularly compelling, the video games I could download and other things I could explore were more interesting.
It is also concerning to me that gen-alpha (or whatever the age bracket is called) people are increasingly being pushed into walled garden, app-based social media platforms instead of actually learning what the Internet really is, and what it's capable of.
My dad added parental controls to our PC sometime around 1997. It also had Eudora installed, which my dad used for email. Poking around, I found the ini file that had the ciphertext of the password for the email server. On a whim, I made another account in Eudora and put the ciphertext in as my password. In the ini, the plaintext of the password came out; I guess Eudora used some symmetric rot16 or xor like cipher! The same password worked to unlock parental controls, which had taken me just about a week to circumvent.
As usual it seems education is the only long-term solution. Forcibly keeping people out just makes them want it more.
I have a feeling we had a similar experience growing up. I generally agree, but also, we got QAnon/Alex Jones and such which have quite directly screwed up my country. So I don’t know, my opinion is often contradictory and fluid. I don’t know where I stand anymore. I believe in an “open internet,” but also, there’s people like Andrew Tate who have ruined the minds of people I care about.
We can debate if these systems and people existed before (they did), but the reach and scale is different now. My most controversial opinion these days is that not everyone should be allowed to upload to YouTube if it’s public facing. We need basic screening and filtering.
One personal observation, the early commercial internet as it was transitioning from universities/research labs/certain high-tech firms into a mass market thing with millions of users, it had its share of nutjobs and crazy as well. But it was boutique, hand crafted , personal level crazy and it was for the most part disregarded because none of the whackjobs could collect a sufficient following or megaphone to spread their message.
For instance in about 1994 I remember coming across a set of textfiles that were some lengthy manifesto about how the US government had supposedly manufactured AIDS in a lab somewhere. But it never got any traction.
Now we have the unfortunate venn diagram overlap between something like a Tate and a major social media platform, and he can get his message out to millions of angry, horny, unemployed young men...
> For instance in about 1994 I remember coming across a set of textfiles that were some lengthy manifesto about how the US government had supposedly manufactured AIDS in a lab somewhere. But it never got any traction.
There was a BBS in my area that ran on a small bank of 14.4 USR modems that had a gold mine of content like that. It was such a fun time.
Well, I'm sorry parental controls are too hard to use, but all of the parents who want all other adults to sacrifice their online anonymity just to make to for it need to get their heads screwed on straight. They're screwing a) themselves b) everyone else and c) their own children when they reach adulthood.
On one hand the software world needs to re-learn the lost art of proper UX research and rely on data from user trials instead of on vibes and reading tea leaves with analytics, but on the other hand parents have a wholly unrealistic expectation of being able to keep their kids in a hermetically sealed bubble until they turn 18.
Kids are going to get into stuff you don’t want them to no matter how hard you try to prevent that, short of keeping them in locked padded rooms with no electronics (which would be abuse). Parents are right to want to steer them in the right direction and keep them out of the worst trouble, but that’s as far as it goes.
So really, both sides need to improve here.
Parents can stop giving kids smartphones.
I don't think this is a viable or realistic option in 2026/2027. Try to imagine what your own personal reaction would have been when you were 14 years old if 90%+ of your peers had an iphone 17 or equivalent and your parents gave you a flip phone, and tried to ban you from using smartphones.
Why repeat the same argument if it clearly hasn't worked? Do you expect it to suddenly become effective?
Change in behavior can only follow from change in incentives. Parents must be held legally liable if they allow their children access to social media. That means jail time for negligence.
Why would we even consider jailing parents before banning social media from kids and jailing Mark Zuckerberg for pushing it on them?
The power imbalance between individual parents and big tech is immense.
How can we be mad at random parents for not defeating the most powerful and rich people in history?
Because according to HN there's no way to force social media companies to not serve children without destroying privacy. That leaves parents who aren't changing their behavior because nothing has incited them to change. Legal liabily is an incentive that changes behavior.
Supposedly the incentive already exists because parents want their children saved from the harms of facebook and social media. The story is that parents are clamoring for the government to do something about it. I don't think parents really are, or where they are the expectation is that the social media companies will be forced to change their behavior, not that parents will be forced to start parenting their children or be forced to provide a scan of their face and passport every time they do an internet search.
The government has just decided to fall back on "think of the children" as a way to implement more surveillance and control.
The incentive for parents to stop giving their children smartphones does not exist. If it did exist, it would incite parents to perform the action: ie not give their children smartphones.
Incentives incite action. No action. No incentive.
Plenty of us survived the internet when it was an even wilder west, IRC chats with strangers trying to learn perl, not putting your name and social security number into random websites. Being aware of predators. It's a very specific kind of power-hungry move fast and break things tech that refuses to accept responsibility of the fallout.
Anonymity, the right to move privately and be private online is much bigger than parents who are frustrated with out of control capitalism.
Besides, this only benefits the big corporations. They of course will happily back anything that absolves them of their sins.
It was a noncommercial wild west. You were up against some troll trying to get a reaction by linking you to goatse, not some trillion dollar international corporation with a literal army of addiction experts A/B testing how to maximize engagement.
looks like we had some bot on bot action down here. I know what the difference is you didn't make it past the first sentence. Make a note in memory to read the whole comment before commenting for next time.
I fully appreciate that you care more about anonymity on principle, but it seems very naive to assume that principles are necessarily going to win out over the demands of aggrieved reactionary parents. Cranky parents are very consistent voters and providers of tax revenue in most polities and politicians want them to be reasonably happy and quiescent for the sake of stability. It seems to me you are wildly underestimating the size of your potential opposition.
Are aggrieved reactionary parents demanding that they should have to scan their face to look at websites? It seems to me like they just want social media companies to be forced to change their harmful and predatory practices and that instead of properly regulating the bad behavior of social media companies the government has decided to use this issue as a means to give themselves more surveillance and control.
We don't need to make parents the enemy of our online privacy. We just need parents to reject the idea that they have to give up their identity and the identity of their children to every shitty social media company and shady website on the internet to "protect" them.
[delayed]
Parents aren't calling on governments to regulate it. Implementations like Apple's Client Side Scanning was not a populist movement, and many savvy parents spoke up about how it crossed multiple lines that set the stage for authoritarian abuses. Apple got so much flak for entertaining the idea that they had to drop it, there was no way to come out looking benign with it.
This is the "Christian moms need Congress to regulate Cable TV" problem all over again. Don't let them watch TV if you oppose what is on it. It's not HBO's responsibility to raise your child, it's yours.
Can we stop pretending an online porn blocker is the same as AI scanning the photos you take and uploading ones it doesn't like?
This continues to be an absolutely false characterization of what Apple was planning to do, which it was doing BECAUSE IT WANTED TO SUPPORT USER PRIVACY
> I know a lot of tech people like to assume that government wants to control everything and these parents are fake front groups established to manufacture consent, but this is infowars-type conspiracy thinking
You may not be aware of this, but Meta has been actively spending millions of dollars to redirect the rage against their algorithms and addictive harms, especially against children, and one of their strategies to try and help avoid liability is to put the onus on the federal government to pass ID legislation, to literally make it easier for Meta and similar companies to age gate most content under simple blanket policies. The way that they are doing this is by funding otherwise very small "parents rights organizations" with money and connections they otherwise wouldn't have. What does Meta gain from this? Less liability and lower cost in content moderation. What do the parents rights groups get? "Check ID laws".
That's enough motivation for both groups, it's very simple.
Now where do you get into "conspiracy theory" territory? Well thetr are also other groups that want online ID for their own purposes, and they are more than happy to help fund these groups to get something they also want.
All of this is very easy to provide backing links for with a simple Google search, if you're interested.
In the inverse, none of the opposition matters until it can solve the problems the universal surveillance approach doesn't even solve anyways. Whatever argument they make should be simply ignored and dismissed.
It's a tradeoff situation and nobody wants to leave it as such to find an answer which serves the best balance. Instead, we are doomed to discuss the absolutes of freedoms vs the absolutes of child safety.
I'd really like to see something like a required parental controls architecture products had to support (but not every device had to force universally). These kind of solutions only goes as far as the problem is a technical one, e.g. a kid on their dad's office computer they weren't supposed to access can still see things they shouldn't, but such is the truth with any pure technical approach to the problem which is not actually fully technically bound.
It never came, it has always been here.
Like it or not, there is a large constituency who wants to “protect the children”.
By demonizing them and failing to engage with the worries over social media and pornography We have brought it on ourselves.
Is it to be wondered at that many people are angry when tech companies have polluted the commons with their effluvium?
> By demonizing them and failing to engage with the worries over social media and pornography We have brought it on ourselves.
There is a really good way to do this that solves most concerns: https://blog.google/innovation-and-ai/technology/safety-secu...
The only real downside to this is that a 0kp cannot be reliably tied to an identity of the person using the device and thus tickets could be proxied/shared around with semi technical tools (and/or an ai agent tasked with creating a proxy). This really isn't solvable without device-level attestation[0], as if a website needs to reliably say "this person is actually this person" then it needs all pieces of data itself.
This could be solved by adding in a still privacy-preserving step like "The device is doing periodic face id scans and matching them to an identity, and constantly renews/re-presents to the age assurance consumer", but that has its own drawbacks[0].
0: Namely, lock in to devices that can do this, and that includes basically guaranteeing a double digit percentage of adult humans would not have access due to their device being old, unsupported, missing the hardware, etc. And with so many humans excluded, you would not have mass adoption. Probably also excludes rooted devices if we bring in attestation of unmodified software.
I agree with the other commenter who replied to you. I don’t think this comes from actual parents. And the article suggests this latest push is from right-leaning groups whose goals are surveillance and censorship.
That said, I’m a father of 3. I’m a millennial and tech worker. I have the digital literacy to teach my kids about the internet and its horrors in a safe way. Not every parent does, so passing this off as a “parent better” issue doesn’t solve anything either.
I dunno if you can legislate “better parental control ux”, but I’m open to similar ideas so parents can get some support without compromising on privacy.
We know what good UX is already from history. Movies for example have an age rating system that clearly lists the ages the movie is suitable for. If you look underage, you get asked to provide ID.
Parents do not have the time or energy to configure modern parental controls which work more like tuning firewall rules.
The other part of the problem is you need collective action, if you ban your child from Facebook, they won’t get invited to parties anymore. If all children get banned, the parties will be arranged over sms or some other non social media. As it is today, banning your kids from social media is overly punishing since all the other kids are using it.
That was my point though.. showing ID at the door doesn’t translate well to the Social Media landscape.
If we actually cared about supporting children and parents as a country, parental controls and access, and making sure that systems were actually safe and protected privacy, would NOT be an afterthought.
> I don’t think this comes from actual parents.
The polling I have seen from Germany and Australia of a social media ban for children was quite in favor of it. Sentiment here on HN and on Reddit was the polar opposite. We are in a bubble.
Fair play. This should 100% be viewed as a logical extension of that same effluvium. This is not a bug but a feature for them, many of these laws allow companies like Meta to offshore the responsibility of not harming children onto individuals while continuing to melt the brains of anyone unfortunate enough to still have a Facebook or Instagram account.
edit: sp
> Like it or not, there is a large constituency who wants to “protect the children”.
Is there, though? The push is coming from lobbyists who seem to be largely funded by wealthy elites, corporations, and other opaque organizations. One of them seems to be Meta. It doesn’t look like a grassroots effort.
This faced a huge backlash when first introduce in the UK, there's even a infamous meme with a children saying face the wall lol.
It seems to me the intrusiveness of age verification will continue to grow.
They want the OS the report the users age. People will use this to claim whatever age they want. For instance, if companies cannot advertise to children, they might find that almost every computer is reporting that the user is a child--turns out adults want the protections kids receive as well--sometimes.
Eventually they will have to enforce a system intrusive enough that no lying or abuse of the system is possible. We might even approach "Verification Can" levels of verification.
Several states have already had this for a while now.
For the first time in human history, the cost of surveillance has dropped below the cost of privacy.
It is more expensive today to maintain your privacy and anonymity than it is to surveil you. The collective surveillance grid makes it possible to track people's movements, whereabouts, their predilections, political views, personal images and more for a few cents every day. It's a bargain.
And in this new world, the eye watches everyone, all the time, forever. Most people, including people on HN, are still stuck in a human-first world. The new surveillance state isn't going to be thousands to hundreds of thousands of humans sitting in a shadow-y room going over pictures and videos. Today, a bunch of vectors and a large multi-modal model will do just fine. Servers are cheap (for a nation state) and never need to eat or sleep.
And they will be used to watch you. Especially if you're attractive. Or, valuable. Or, blackmail-able. After all, NSA employees routinely abuse multi-billion dollar surveillance assets to stalk women. It's so common that the NSA calls it LOVEINT.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LOVEINT
In the world to come, people are going to wish they were being surveilled by the NSA. Because at least the NSA punishes these people. Occasionally.
When this kind of technology becomes this cheap and this pervasive, then the end of anonymity means unaccountable sheriff deputies stalking their former spouse and family. Or, prospective romantic interests.
https://www.firstalert4.com/2026/08/03/brentwood-officer-acc...
https://www.yahoo.com/news/us/articles/cops-using-license-pl...
https://www.yahoo.com/news/us/articles/rogue-officers-turned...
https://www.newsweek.com/flock-camera-police-arrests-1226378...
https://ij.org/police-have-reportedly-used-license-plate-rea...
https://edition.cnn.com/2026/07/26/us/flock-cameras-surveill...
With this new oracle, these people will be able to set up alerts for when their spouse is thinking of leaving them. To catch their child accessing support for abuse or something more ephemeral like being an atheist, having different political views or LGBT+.
Anyone who doesn't see the forest for the trees, or who embraces this because "parental controls are too hard to use" will doom themselves and future generations to a world that's materially worse than our hyper-surveilled present.
I can't believe I'm saying this, but at this rate I'm going to miss the days when it was just the NSA reading my emails (and they still do! Howdy!). I know the track record. But at least the NSA has some sense of institutional responsibility and control. Most institutions in your life, including your HOA don't.
https://ktvz.com/cnn-regional/2021/07/22/arnold-residents-ce...
Honestly I wouldn't be so cranky about this if it were proper government based ID instead of creepy Thiel companies doing it.
And if it was mostly about posting content anonymously instead of even reading these sites.
The whole think of the children angle is so cursed. Used to push surveillance meanwhile actual harm against children goes ignored. See Epstein files and the grooming gangs in the UK
If it actually did anything to protect the children it wouldn’t be so objectionable
> Used to push surveillance meanwhile actual harm against children goes ignored.
Worse, these laws will actually create new harms to children who will be forced to give their identity to websites and identity services that will exploit them and fail to protect that data.
What do you think about California AB1043?
Epstein is real, the “grooming gangs” are not, unless you’re talking about Jimmy Saville.
This is flagrantly untrue https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rotherham_child_sexual_exploit...
That’s wild that this myth has a Wikipedia entry. There’s not a single shred of proof in the report cited here. It’s pure speculation. Like a racist Reefer Madness.
I challenge anyone to post the proof here.
This is clearly an AI bot. Watch it automatically respond to my comment.
so the grandparent commentor has broken UK law by knowingly sharing false information. over here officer, a thoughtcrime has taken place!
First sentence: "From the late 1980s until 2013..."
I think OP is referring to stuff like the Rupert Lowe’s Rape Gang Inquiry
What about it?
TBF they are real, but are they isolated to one ethnic group? No. Are the victims as numerous as Rupert Lowe's report makes it out to be? No.
Epstein and grooming gangs are both real. Not that the whole "grooming gangs" problem hasn't been vastly amplified and turned into a repeated media talking point by a bunch of the extreme right wing in the UK, however. There's plenty of domestic non south asian pedos and molestors there too.
On this topic, have people noticed the sudden coordinated media push for Flock Is Your Friend? The Free Press, The Atlantic, and Axios have all churned out pro-Flock articles in the last week. Clearly someone (I assume A16Z, but it could be multiple groups) is panicking about the mounting bipartisan backlash to Flock cameras and is starting to write checks to try and head it off.
Pro-Flock bots come out in droves in the replies to any Xitter post that’s even mildly negative towards them too. It’s not the least bit subtle.
basically: https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/wont-somebody-please-think-of...
My theory is that the establishment sees the oncoming economic crisis and is desperately trying to plan for managing the fallout. They don’t like Flock or its backers, but they feel they have no choice. Same as why Palantir is gradually being rehabilitated in the mainstream press.
You’ll also notice that Anduril is quickly being accepted now that we’re expending munitions faster than our replacement rate.
> trying to plan for managing the fallout
Put in a less polite way, they're preparing for the metaphorical pitchforks and torches held by mobs of the common people which might manifest themselves in a more kinetic format.
Yes. My hope is that the rare earths shortage, memory shortage, and current focus on munitions will delay the era of drone-based policing until after the crisis.
You are giving them way, way, way too much credit. They are not planning for a future economic crisis.
Drew Harwell, Douglas MacMillan, and Aaron Schaffer from the Washington Post also wrote a shameful article on this topic on August 4th (the title changed, along with an image of a woman who was harassed to something else). No counterpoint. Total submarine article.
Noticed the same with some media publishing anti-work-from-home articles recently.
"We need the plebs to want to mock people who work from home, to reduce the reticence in coming back to work in the office"
"We need our commercial property values to go back up"
Edited to add:
"Our managers need to _feel_ as if they're actually managing people"
The entire back-to-normal narrative was and still is a total mindfuck:
https://www.thegauntlet.news/p/how-the-press-manufactured-co...
The threat from COVID (and more importantly, long COVID) never went away, but they sure convinced the average person that it did.
Today you can see an N95 in the wild once in awhile, so some people are paying attention, but they are less than 1%. Many others are suffering brain damage, unexplained heart issues, taxed immune systems, etc and have no idea why (nor does their doctor).
Eesh, those are some sobering numbers.
It's 2026, the conspiracy theory that business people wanted RTO for office space value has been debunked 100 times. Such a silly, nonsense idea.
That'd be a lot easier to believe if you provided a source, which you should do if you care enough to comment in the first place, I think?
A cursory google suggests that the return-to-office movement is primarily driven by management's desire for voluntary turnover, avoiding the bad press of mass layoffs. But certainly doesn't show that it's 'been debunked 100 times'.
In my own experience, it's been 50/50 a desire for voluntary turnover, and also a control tactic. Employees are easier to strong-arm when they're immersed in the idea that company culture actually matters.
Didn't mean to imply that was the only reason, so I've added another reason to my comment.
I haven't come across much of the debunking of the commercial property issue. I would say it's undeniably factor, but we can argue about the scale.
A total of $800 billion—in real terms—of value is at stake by 2030, and, on average, the total value of office space is expected to decline by 26 percent from 2019 to 2030.
https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/real-estate/our-insights...
You think that the size of investment firms that own something like, a good sized chunk of midtown Manhattan class A and B commercial real estate aren't capable of deploying social and tradtional-media influence tools to push an agenda to repopulate their office space? That would be a very inaccurate assessment of how large and motivated they are.
Follow the money. That also shows which media sources you should never trust
It is very unlikely that “NGOs” have the funding influence and power to do this. The more likely source is state backed intelligence agencies. The NGOs are just there to create a buffer.
Ask yourself logically - who would pay these NGOs to do things like attempt to extort meta into a $500M+ settlement over “harming child mental health.”
This is all connected and intelligence agency backed. It’s far from innocent, it’s non corporate - some had suggested meta was behind it - but as we have seen meta is the one getting targeted.
Didn't HN decide to not allow AI submissions? This is quite explicitly one in that the operator of the site declares to "automate investigative journalism" and launched the site with its five pieces of 'journalism' yesterday.
And to point out the obvious on the actual quality of the piece, The US has itself passed age verification laws in 20 states, such as Texas where it was driven not by the British but by domestic interest groups and decidedly state senators like Angela Paxton.
Also given the slant of the site it's pretty obvious was the political motivation here is, I guess yelling at the British always works
I'm always surprised how defensive people get in here about privacy when so many corporations have vastly more information about you than the government does.
The government has a monopoly on violence and companies do not.
(yet). Contractors for the government that will be happy to help implement the violence are coming soon. If they're not already here by some metrics.
Corporations can't arrest and jail me. The most they can do is file a lawsuit.
This isn’t a “gotcha”. Many here take exceptional steps against this kind of thing and also advocate for restrictions on what kind of data corporations can collect.
Privacy doomerism is a form of complicity.
Because most here works in said corporations.
More the reason to be defensive about it and fighting back corpo and government.
The corporations aren't going to throw you in jail if you cross state lines to get an abortion. The US government is already doing this when they get that data.
That isn't true. This is settle law -- states can not prevent people from going to other states to have abortions.
"I'm surprised how much people hate this thing when this other thing, which they also hate, is even worse"?
When I flag a comment sometimes the comment immediately becomes [flagged] [dead] as my flag pushed it over the threshold.
I've never seen this happen when flagging an article. Can anyone confirm article flags actually do anything?
I clicked flag, then clicked to unflag. Nothing changed
Flagging on submissions deranks a submission after some count, making it fall off the first three pages. I think it's a much higher bar (like moderation involvement) to fully make it dead.
HN has this guideline for comments:
> Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says.
If the same standard were applied for posts, this one would fail. I recognize that it is a popular perspective that these measures are essentially a war on anonymity, but that is not what they intend to fix, although it is quite possible that anonymity is a casualty of whatever war is at hand.
I believe efforts to resist these measures would be more effective if they engaged with the problem: the modern internet is a harmful experience for young minds, beyond what any society should consider acceptable. I personally don't think shocking content is the worst of it. Algorithms that maximize engagement over enriching experience are a curse for any age group, and developing brains face the worst of it.
Is age-gating the internet the right answer? Will it even help? Are there ulterior motives? Those are open questions that need discussion. Dismissing a genuine problem is choosing not to engage in the discussion.
I disagree with you. Plans to eliminate anonymity have been discussed for years in elite circles, at Davos and similar events, and it’s most often framed in the context of social control (eliminating dissent or foreign influence).
Larry Ellison on surveillance: “Citizens will be on their best behavior, because we’re constantly recording and reporting everything that’s going on.”
This is not new and it’s not about kids. This is the culmination of years of planning that began after the Arab Spring, when elites began to get concerned about how the Internet could be leveraged for domestic regime change.
As far as the matter of ulterior motives, we're not in disagreement. Assuming that's true, it is important to address the real problem they are hijacking to realize their goals. Dismissing it as a made up problem just means you lose credibility with anyone who is paying attention.
It will always be possible to find a cause du jour to justify violating the rights of citizens, because crime happens and reality is messy. The real problem is that the mass media is complicit in this agenda, so they amplify the excuse until bad laws are passed (laws which seldom solve the problem).
While I do think we should make efforts to reduce crime and create better spaces for kids, laws like this aren’t the answer.
Ellison is probably in favor at least partially because he's a database salesman, and oppressive domestic spy agencies need lots and lots of really big databases.
> the modern internet is a harmful experience for young minds
Because of the goal of advertising revenue as the ultimate driver as to build an addictive permanent scroll of slop on tiktok or instagram, and the desire of social media companies to build walled gardens where someone's entire online experience stays in their "app.". As you say, this affects young and old alike.
Capitalism. Your problem is capitalism. The so-called vaunted “free market.”