> 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.
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.
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.
> how the US government had supposedly manufactured AIDS in a lab somewhere
This was Soviet (now Russian) disinformation. The tactic is to make people (especially Americans) distrust the American government. Like claiming that the crack epidemic was caused by CIA inventing/smuggling the drugs in. Sure, Oliver North & Reagan's Iran-Contra affair did this to fund Ronnie's illegal and private war in Nicaragua. The CIA gets all the money they want from a willing, subservient Congress - they don't need to smuggle drugs. Congress specifically outlawed supplying weapons to the Contras, so the administration had to resort to illegal means, like selling weapons to Iran and smuggling drugs to finance that war.
This is the same sort of disinformation as saying COVID was manufactured in a Chinese labs, somewhere in Wuhan.
Yeah, I used to read this stuff when I was younger and more gullible.
> "...not everyone should be allowed to upload to YouTube if it’s public facing..."
You still fantasize about building mechanisms for restricting information as if the very people you oppose won't use it on you when they get into power; no, as if the very people you oppose aren't _currently_ ascendant or even in office and would delightedly use it against you right this moment. Madness.
When you build a high tech muzzle, remember that it will fit onto your head just as well as it fits those you built it for.
> You still fantasize about building mechanisms for restricting information as if the very people you oppose won't use it on you when they get into power
That is a wild misinterpretation of what I said and in no way reflects my opinion.
I am sick and tired of the argument that porn shouldn't be kept from kids because what if someone thinks it's healthy for kids to watch porn (and for all I know it might be, since I haven't sent the scientific evidence).
If some parent thinks that's healthy they can just enter the child's age as 18.
I didn’t say I had a solution or that it was well thought out. I’ve been very open that my opinion is not super consistent/is even contradictory. I don’t know the answer. But what we are doing isn’t working. I’m very conflicted on this subject, I’m just sharing my feelings and trying to spur dialogue, not plant a flag and die on the hill of “lock it down.”
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.
Agreed. I was a middle-schooler in the 2000's, had my own PC in my own bedroom, we had broadband access and I, of course, was exposed to porn while I was trying to download cracks and keygens on Astalavista and other such sites. Mislabelled files on eMule too. Links to porn also were readily shared on IRC channels. But yeah, I can't say it had a damaging effect on me.
It was a mix of being afraid of getting a virus from a porn site, knowing that porn wasn't for my age, and late-night FTA TV airing softcore anyways.
My parents told me to be responsible and kind of explained the dangers of the world the best way they could, and it was expected that I'd be grounded and lose computer access if they found me on a porn site. I preferred playing games. I definitely encountered some dark places on the clearnet (and on the darknet as well) and promptly GTFO.
At the school's computer lab they had plenty of content control which I had the most fun trying to bypass them. For what reason? Just so I could.
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
There was a time when users falsely characterized Dual_EC_DRBG as "private" because Dell's whitepapers looked good. History proved those users to be chumps.
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.
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.
Certainly I think they'd be happy if social media companies changed their behavior, but the problem is that they and the politicians don't really know how to make them do that. So the next best thing they can think of is a digital version of 'you can't come in here if you're under 18' similar to nightclubs, betting shops etc.
We just need parents to reject the idea that they have to give up their identity and the identity of their children
OK, but (as I have asked many times before) what is your alternative, beter proposal? People intuitively understand the idea of checking ID to prevent sales of alcohol to minors, keep teens out of adult spaces and so on, because virtually every adult remembers being a teenager and not being allowed to do certain things due to not being old enough. That makes checking identity an easy sell to people.
What is your better idea that is similarly easy to sell? Because if you don't have one,people will fall back on the mediocre idea of ID checks. I feel like anyone working in the tech field should understand that the best technological solution does not always win out.
> OK, but (as I have asked many times before) what is your alternative, beter proposal?
How about laws that prevent social media websites from pushing harmful content users didn't ask for? How about forcing them to abandon the practices and dark patterns that result in those platforms being addictive? How about putting executives behind bars when their algorithms are shown to cause mental health and body image issues in children? These platforms know that what they're doing is hurting people, but they don't care because they're profiting from it. These companies intentionally designed systems that are harmful and user-hostile. They've got algorithms that seek out and target people's vulnerabilities. They ignored repeated warnings from their own researchers, and actively concealed evidence of the harms they were causing. We don't have to let them do it. Not to children or anyone else. Facebook isn't going to die off if they go back to showing people only things their friends and family post. It might even get more popular. They might make fewer billions though and that's unthinkable to them.
There are a lot of things that can be done, but the government isn't interested because actually solving the problems social media causes isn't going to give them the power they're actually after and it could cause them the bribe money they get from these companies.
Well you're articulating the result you want, but not the mechanism for how you expect to achieve it. A law has to articulate which behaviors are legal or, and what the penalties for non-compliance are. Otherwise we could just pass laws saying 'the economy has to make everyone prosperous, people have to feel safe and fulfilled' and call it a day.
So, what actual rules do you want to make in service of these desirable outcomes? They have to be clear and straightforward enough that they can't be just gotten around with clever lawyers or argued past the point of meaninglessness by shills posing as philosophers. I do not like the idea of everyone having to show ID online (or even much in real life), but I can see why it's popular because it's very easy to explain and understand.
What I'd recommend is research on specific behaviors taken by social media companies to determine which are shown to cause harms. Some of that is already done by the companies themselves. If, for example, infinite scrolling is seen as a practice that increases addiction to the platforms, a law can be passed that makes it illegal to implement infinite scrolling. A law like that is pretty easy to explain and understand. TikTok was called out for sending push notifications to children's phones late at night to drive compulsive consumption and disrupt sleep patterns. Laws can be passed to limit how many unsolicited push notifications platforms can send and during which hours. Laws like that focus on the actual problems themselves, regardless of which platform is doing it, or who they are doing it to.
So let's say I have a business SaaS application, am I banned from showing content in an infinite scroll window? How would I prove my application is targeted for business users and not actually targeting children?
Not saying these are impossible questions to answer or get right in a law, just that there are more things to think about than which component you decide to show data inside.
You wouldn't have to prove that you were or weren't targeting children. You'd just have to operate a social media platform and allow infinite scrolling.
The law would define a social media platform. Maybe something like:
The term “social media platform” means a website or internet medium that— (A) permits a person to become a registered user, establish an account, or create a profile for the purpose of allowing users to create, share, and view user-generated content through such an account or profile; (B) enables 1 or more users to generate content that can be viewed by other users of the medium; and (C) primarily serves as a medium for users to interact with content generated by other users of the medium. [https://www.law.cornell.edu/definitions/uscode.php?def_id=42...]
If your SaaS app met that definition of a social media platform it would be illegal for you to show content in an infinite scroll window. Because your application targeted business users who paid for the service, people would be less likely to sue you. Maybe it'd be worth it to you to include infinite scroll anyway. Companies knowingly break the law all the time after calculating that even on the off chance they get caught the fines they'd face will probably be less than the profit they'd make. The larger your platform got, the less worth it breaking the law could become and of course if the public felt the fines were so low as to be ineffective, the law could be amended to increase the fines.
The law could even allow some platforms to include harmful content like infinite scrolling if certain conditions are met. For example, platforms could be allowed to include infinite scrolling if they require a credit card to sign up, and they display a warning explaining that the platform uses infinite scrolling which has been determined to be harmful by promoting addictive and compulsive behaviors, and it provides an option to disable that feature. Still, it's probably better to widely ban those kinds of practices that serve no purpose other than driving engagement/addictive behavior. We can just decide as a society that we value people's mental health more than maximizing tech billionaire profits.
The EU has been pretty successful with rough definitions and "I know it when I see it". The Digital Markets Act just specifies which specific companies are too powerful and need to be regulated, and a process for adding more.
I'll give them credit for doing a much better job than the US does. I still think they could go a lot farther. There was tons of praise for GDPR as having actual teeth, but there are still companies who are getting fined again and again and again because the violations of the law are making more money for them than the fines they have to pay when they get caught.
You won't go far by calling everyone you disagree with, cranky, aggrieved, and reactionary. Maybe take some time to understand their concerns and you won't be so surprised when their vote wins.
Consider reading the thread more carefully. I'm arguing that it's foolish for people to be dismissive of parents as a political force even if they perceive the parents' disinterest in anonymity and privacy to be cranky or reactionary.
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.
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.
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.
That's not true. Incentives aren't the whole cause of behavior and they aren't the solution to changing it either. That's the same simplistic and flawed mentality that pushes for harsher punishments to deter crime when the evidence shows that doesn't work and that not even death penalty is an effective deterrent. People have several incentives to lose weight, but increasingly they still overeat.
Incentives play a role, you don't want to encourage wrong behaviors certainly, but they're just one factor in determining what people do or don't do. At best, they nudge. Those nudges aren't likely to overcome stronger forces, or even several weaker ones.
> Someone may have a desire or intention to lose weight. But unless they lose the weight they lack incentive.
Here are just some of the incentives overweight people have to lose weight:
They'll look better, to themselves and others. They'll have more clothing options. They'll feel better. They'll be healthier. They'll have drastically lower odds of many future heath problems. They'll live longer which means they can spend more time being with their loved ones.
Those are all incentives. Everyone who is obese has those incentives, even though different individuals may assign different values to them. Even with all those incentives that hasn't stopped the obesity problem. incentives don't incite action, but they can encourage them.
It literally says incite "to determination or action". Given that parents aren't actually taking smart phones away, neither determination nor action are present.
I'll grant you the examples you give incite people to desire to change weight just as negative consequences incite parents to desire that "something should be done," but it doesn't incite them to actually do something.
Describing something as incentive because it incites desire without changing behavior is not exactly what I think of when I think of incentives.
Think of being in the position of trying to come up with incentives for a group of people. Would you call your incentives successful if they created a desire in that group without anyone actually doing anything differently?
You missed the "or has a tendency to incite" part. It's important because incentive doesn't promise a change in action. People can do things even when they have have no incentive to do it. Sometimes people will even do things when they have every incentive not to do it.
If I were going to try to come up with incentives for a group of people, I wouldn't try to create a desire in them. I'd try to give them something they already desired as a reward for doing what I wanted them to do. They'll probably never want to do the thing I want them to do. They might hate doing it. If the incentive is high enough though they just might do it anyway. If my incentives weren't enough to sway them, they'd still be incentives, just ones that were inadequate/ineffective. I wouldn't even be surprised if they failed. Incentives fail to cause changes in behavior all the time.
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.
Maybe not everyone agrees that social media causes literal cancer. I mean it’s not great, but it’s not the worst thing on earth, either. It’s clearly become a moral panic at this point.
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.
> 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.
I'm very aware of that. As I said in another comment, 'ID checks to exclude minors' is a simple and intuitive idea that's very easy to sell; qualities that are singularly lacking in alternative proposals.
How should online services be regulated to mitigate algorithmic harms? To get something over the line politically, it needs to be simple enough that it can be articulated in a few sentences.
> How should online services be regulated to mitigate algorithmic harms?
That would be a good conversation to have!
Instead what is happening is moneyed interests are inputting hundreds of millions of dollars into organizations that otherwise wouldn't have it, which is giving an "unnatural" amount of political influence to those groups, which is changing our country, and not just on this issue. They're literally doing it just to keep their money, and ID checks let them keep it without actually reducing the harms.
They are, but the tech community (ie the group that cares about anonymity privacy on principle) is not making a good counter-argument. To the general public, it comes off as a bunch of trolls and/or conmen arguing in favor of what's convenient for them. Pro-anonymity arguments need to address internet harms and suggest remedies that preserve anonymity.
The problem I'm at pains to points out is that many people show up in threads like this saying that aany 'think of the children' argument is fake and a cover for government intrusion, to the point of ignoring actual concerns about actual harms to actual children. I'm guessing that people saying that are not currently (or ever) interested in having children, but seem to have fallen into a pattern of thinking that the concerns of people who do have children somehow aren't real.
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.
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.
I seem to recall the bad part of the UK OSA was the requirement to write a plan about how you'd protect minors and submit it to the government, not anything to do with ID verification directly (although that's one way to design such a plan)?
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 signalling 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 Trump coin 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 line by line. Give them an inch, they will take a mile.
With proper parental controls there is no signalling.
Tell your favorite AI what OS, kernel version (matters if using a locked down kernel) and browser is being used. Ask for a systemd service that uses bubblewrap to prevent access to systemd, set whatever other limits like memory and CPU usage.
If in the future the browser gets passive / aggressive updates if they mimic Microsoft and refuses to run if there is no age set or if they can not call systemd commands or libraries then script a random age or age range on each login so that it is not used for tracking. pseudo super-cookie
> 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.
Sorry, I didn't read that far. I do think this is a classic slippery slope though.
But don't underestimate human adaptability. Slippery slope arguments assume that once a technology introduces a specific risk, society lacks the agency to create counter-measures, new norms, or alternative uses for that technology.
I haven't found that to be the case throughout most of history.
You're doing the thing. The half I'm talking about, they don't make you scan your ID to use a computer. Actually I don't think even the worst ones make you do that.
You're doing the slippery slope fallacy by saying "well if there are not terrible laws now that just means there will be terrible laws later." A law against murder doesn't mean there will later be a law against farting.
It's not a fallacy to point out the slope is slippery when you are actually, actively sliding down the slope.
And that you're defending dumping a bucket of lubricant on the slope with the pinky promise that it's just for aesthetics, you just like the look of a slippery slope, there's no way we'll ever slide down your lubed slope that we are already sliding down.
There's a slope from making murder illegal to making farting illegal. We are already some distance down that slope because murder and burglary are illegal. But is the slope slippery?
If you forgive the slight exaggeration in my use of "always", then I am half right - in fully half the cases, deanonymization is the first thing they try.
But let's look at those "just regulating parental controls" laws, the California one [1]. What does it do? Does it give parents/the owner the tools needed to limit child access? Does it require vendors to include such tools? No, neither of those. It just establishes how to collect (but not verify) and send age data, so someone else can act on it.
It does nothing to empower parents, but does lay the groundwork to grow an age control ecosystem that can later have verification easily added - all the apps and websites will already support it. Not all "regulation" is the same.
> People who conflate these two things are paid lobbyists of Meta
Meta is the most privacy-hostile company there is, despite fierce competition for that title, and nearly all their services are behind a login-wall, even read-only access, and they don't let you make an account without a phone number [2,3,4]. I avoid them like the plague, and they already go above and beyond what you would want of them.
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.
> OK, but following this logic, shouldn't we disband the government altogether and have mafias rule us all?
Conservatives seem to be fine with mafia rule, so long as the don has the correct party affiliation.
> When is it acceptable to hope that something is actually going to work well enough when handed over to the government?
Mob rule doesn't with very well as a defacto government, or oligarchy. Nor food and drug safety or national defense. Some things just have to be tackled by society as a larger group. Ideally as locally as possible, but not so locally that minorities are crushed or rule becomes petty and micromanaged.
And yet, compared to every military in the past, compared to the fact that war was seen as a normal thing in the past, compared to how it used to be standard to rape and pillage in the past, and that was just expected and fine and normal, current modern militaries of the West are exceptionally disciplined, and their use by politicians doubly so.
Of course, that doesn't mean we can't do better and shouldn't.
But we do need to compare "How things have been for all of human history" to "How we do things now", and see that our modern democracies show immense restraint and a lack of malfeasance, compared to how they've been used in the past.
I feel that people view how the world is today, through such a restricted world view. Where the history of how things were, and the immense and great and incredible progress we've made, is thrown aside because "Oh bad thing happened!", and therefore "The entire West is completely corrupt and everything sucks and we should rip it all down because it's bad".
One only need take a tour around the rest of the world. To compare our militaries to those in non-democratic nations. To how those leaders act, in reality, compared to our leaders. Even the current US admin looks good, comparatively. And yes, I know that's saying a lot.
> And yet, compared to every military in the past, compared to the fact that war was seen as a normal thing in the past, compared to how it used to be standard to rape and pillage in the past, and that was just expected and fine and normal, current modern militaries of the West are exceptionally disciplined, and their use by politicians doubly so.
Are you serious?
During the Vietnam War era, the US dropped over 7.5 million tons of ordnance across Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia, which is more than double the tonnage dropped in all of WW2. In rural parts of Laos and Cambodia, unexploded ordinance is still a daily threat to people. 50 years on.
> To compare our militaries to those in non-democratic nations. To how those leaders act, in reality, compared to our leaders. Even the current US admin looks good, comparatively.
When I see comments like this, I want to believe that it's not real but sadly, I suspect you really believe this.
I understand the Vietnam war is a sore point in America due to recruitment. But your comment is so incredibly one-sided that it's not a serious argument anymore.
The opposing party in the Vietnam war was far worse than the US on a moral level, before, during and after the war. And it wasn't a small difference. We're talking about democracy and democratically selecting laws here? Well: the large majority of the population in Vietnam, including in the North, wanted the US to defeat the Vietcong and the Soviets.
> the large majority of the population in Vietnam, including in the North, wanted the US to defeat the Vietcong and the Soviets.
The 1954 Geneva Accords, which ended the French war, called for nationwide reunification elections by July 1956. Those elections never happened. Ngo Dinh Diem, the US-backed first president of South Vietnam who was a brutal authoritarian, refused to hold them. The US backed his refusal and kept backing him afterward.
In Eisenhower's 1963 memoir, he wrote that everyone knowledgeable he'd spoken to believed Ho Chi Minh would have taken around 80% percent of the vote if elections had happened.
The Vietnamese didn't really care about the Soviets. They are a fiercely independent and proud people with a long history of defending themselves against foreign interlopers and aggressors.
So let me restate your asinine and totally inaccurate conclusion:
The large majority of the population in Vietnam, in both the North and the South, didn't want a foreign power controlling their country and determining their fate. They wanted to run their own country, and have peace.
The large majority of the population in Vietnam, in both the North and the South, didn't want a foreign power controlling their country and determining their fate. They wanted to run their own country, and have peace.
And yet, the poster you're replying to said no such thing. Not even close. They merely said they wanted help repelling an enemy. You're also using hindsight to frame this conflict, something entirely unfair to the people involved at the time.
The US repeatedly tried to get out of that war. Multiple times. They just kept getting pulled back in.
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Re your response. Were they ordered to rape and pillage by their full chain of command?
Or were they acting illegally, regardless of the outcome?
Would a military in a dictatorship have deemed that "illegal"? What about 200 years ago? 1000?
You seem to be ignoring the concept of comparables. And taking acts that the military itself teaches its own soldiers, was wrong.
It's good to have principles. And good to defend them. But if you ignore what others are saying, and the context of their words, you start to slide into zealoty.
> You're also using hindsight to frame this conflict, something entirely unfair to the people involved at the time.
Millions upon millions of people around the world protested the Vietnam War, including millions of people in the US.
On one day alone, an estimated 2+ million Americans participated in anti-war protests. Over 500,000 men were officially categorized as draft dodgers, more than 200,000 charged with violating the Selective Service Act and millions more found a way not to go to Vietnam through deferments and exemptions.
It's both amusing and sad that there are some people (like you) who 50 years later can't see what was apparent to so many people at the time.
> The US repeatedly tried to get out of that war. Multiple times. They just kept getting pulled back in.
That's right. Those pesky Vietnamese villagers just wouldn't let American GIs stop torching their villages, gang-raping their women and children, and executing them. The American military was trying to leave but spreading democracy demanded sacrifice.
"The opposing party in the Vietnam war was far worse than the US on a moral level, before, during and after the war. And it wasn't a small difference. We're talking about democracy and democratically selecting laws here? Well: the large majority of the population in Vietnam, including in the North, wanted the US to defeat the Vietcong and the Soviets."
None of anything you guys have said even attempts to dispute that. The Vietnamese did not want Vietcong rule. Not in the North, not in the South. And that this shamed (or whatever your claim is) some ideology, probably your ideology, does not change that. The Vietcong "had to" do incredibly cruel and horrible things to force the loyalty of citizens. They emptied orphanages, executing kids and even babies, in the middle of the street, slowly, one by one, to "ensure loyalty". That is who you're dealing with here. This goes for A LOT of the parties that socialism supported, especially in Asia. And elsewhere. Socialism has always been enforced by terror, from the red terror in Russia to China's Public Security Bureaus.
You might be right that that does not make the other side 100% good. But you should not get confused. Comparing US, including all the atrocities it committed, to the Vietcong? No sane person has to think even 1 second about that comparison: USA! USA! USA! I certainly do not always agree with what the US government does, the more recent the actions, the less I agree, but that does not bring it even close to the level of the Vietcong.
And that this does not fit your ideology? Tough. Was USA behavior very inconvenient, even unfair, to the people executing children? You know perfectly well how sorry you should feel about that.
But we all know: that's just not what you care about.
You know, you had a bunch of statements in a row, in what appeared to be someone trying to make a point.
And then you said "USA! USA! USA!" ... what in the actual fuck are you trying to achieve with that?
"Was USA behavior very inconvenient" - inconvenient? Inconvenient for the people of El Salvador to have roaming contras, funded and trained in the USA terrorizing the countryside and killing hundreds of thousands of people, mostly innocent civilians. You sure do have a way with words. But by all means, "USA!".
Have you really backslid from "modern militaries don't rape and pillage" to "modern militaries rape and pillage, but it doesn't count because it's illegal"?
If you read carefully, when pulled into deeper nuance, I'm consistently discussing what is legal behaviour for that military. Yes, there is a difference between "that military itself calls that act illegal" and "that military says it's OK to engage in that act". A massive difference.
And at no point did I lump all "modern militaries" together. In fact I specifically talked about democracies vs dictatorships in modern times, too.
So you're confusing "modern militaries rape and pillage" with "militaries' members rarely perform ilegal acts, and rape and pillage".
Or are you trying to claim it's standing, legal, normal operating procedure for the US military to rape? Are you?
Because with the framing you're using, that's what you're apparently trying to build here.
OK. Now compare the entire world's militaries, over the last 50 years, worst-for-worst act. Or since you mentioned WWII, what's the worst done by armies during that time? Hmm?
After all, you're trying to find and hold up the worst the US has done, right? So to compare, you need to find the worst in modern militaries. In militaries of all time. That was what I discussed, after all.
I was quite clear. Compare to all of history. Compare to all militaries today.
Instead you grab at part of an action, and hold it up, without making that comparison. Still.
As a Canadian who has had your current ridiculous president state that we should be the 51st state, and belittled us by calling our Prime Ministers "Governors"? Who has talked about unilaterally redrawing borders? As a Canadian who has considered how I may have to one day slaughter Americans crossing our border? How I may have to look my brothers in the eye, and kill them? I still say that the US military has been a shining light for freedom around the world. If I can remain impartial, then surely you can.
I also say that about police officers in the West, including the US.
Are there bad actions taken by police departments? By individual officers? By groups of officers, over the last decades? YES! Yes, most assuredly.
Now compare the overall score with police in totalitarian regimes.
Comparison is vital, important, key, and any finger pointing has to be in context.
And also note, I said "yes we must do better".
But if you think the US military is evil, then you have never seen evil. Ever.
Now ask yourself which government is currently bombing another country over one man's ego (or due to blackmail by an "ally"), and whether they're on that list, and whether the literal thousands of people killed are just acceptable sacrifices to maintain someone's worldview about 'the good guys'?
And perhaps, then the alternatives are more devastating, and it must be done.
I've written about this in other comments over the last couple of years, but the root of all of this is quite simply, foreign interference. We all remember Cambridge Analytica, its interference in democratic elections in the West, and even how it caused a few regimes to topple in the 3rd world. It's machinations and manipulation of curated news stories was quite simplistic and minor compared to where we sit now.
You simply cannot have a high-trust, well functioning democracy, if 99% of the stuff recommended to you is entirely fabricated nonsense. Worse, if it purposely fabricated to create as much social unrest as possible, and doubly worse if it becomes curated to each person and created and generated on demand.
CA managed this by having a sloth of "different archetypes" for its 100 or so altered news stories per topic. If you were a left wing shopkeep, or a right wing car salesperson, or anything else, you'd be slotted into one of these 100 version of the precise same news story, and fed the best lies to make you do as the payee requested.
Modern AI means this can be far more fine tuned. And algorithms can be gamed, just as CA gamed them with support of Facebook's APIs.
So my point here is twofold. First that government moves slow. What we're seeing now, is the result of CA a decade ago. Really, two election cycles, with senatorial and congressional committees and debates during that time.
And second is that things will not continue as they are now. Nothing you, or I, or anyone does will result in an unchanged Internet. From the perspective of lawmakers, and really a lot of the public, the "world wide" Internet is really only used by "The Rest of the World" to attack us. Attack water plants, hospitals, meat packing plants, nuclear reactors, and beyond that, to manipulate our children into thinking Western Democracy is vile and malign in various ways.
Now of course, there's no reason for most of those things to be on the Internet at all. But the manipulation of adults and children in our society just isn't going to wash. In days gone by, you'd see each community with police informants, not the sort in cop movies where the guy was crooked, but instead actual cities who would keep an eye out, and inform if someone planned something against the state. Pretty much every pub had one in the UK, for example.
Heck, when I was a teenager in Canada, one of my friends had a plan to become an officer. Part of this path was reporting on everything he heard at local parties, of an untoward nature. It's how misinformation campaigns used to be curtailed, stopped, dealt with.
Yet suddenly we presume that the average person, and average kid is going to just deal with misinformation. And bizarrely so, compared to misinformation in a pub, we let people get siloed so every single thing they read and see says the same lie.
How can an average person ever stand again absurdities, if from their perspective everything they can see around them says it is true?
So back to the start? The above, correctly assessed or not, is what the politicians and police and agencies view as happening in the West. And while there are multiple ways to deal with this, their stance is "Why are you afraid of putting your name on your words?".
If we want something other than all the bills being proposed, and all the change coming, we as a tech community need to provide a path to end all anonymity on the internet, in the least privacy reducing way possible. And there are some ways to do so. They've been discussed. But if we don't provide such a method, and drive this conversation, you know who will?
Politicians, with no technical capability at all. The average Joe, scared for his country and family.
Try to fight those two types of people, and you will lose every single time.
So my recommend is, everyone needs to stop bellyaching, suck up to the harsh realities here, and take this massive, unstoppable river, and redirect it by a few degrees so that the best-case is achieved.
The problem is that the government was handed an emotion and a mandate to eliminate it. You’ve declared a “war on jealousy” and demanded the government assemble the troops. That’s not handing them a well reasoned plan and “hoping they don’t mess it up”, you messed it up when you scribbled “no more addiction” on a protest sign.
Straight to Franchise-Organized Quasi-National Entities, since more competition between governments must be good for the customers of government-like services!
How did you arrive at mafias. That's just another form of (abusive) small scale government. A more legitimate and probable type of government is any of the different forms of anarchism or worker cooperatives, if you want to argue for "disband government".
> OK, but following this logic, shouldn't we disband the government altogether and have mafias rule us all?
It's funny because this is exactly the opposite of what actually happened. Mafias are the reaction to the "unification" of Italy, and they almost all come from the previous governments that existed before unification. Northern Italy conquered the south and defeated all the little states there ... and then levied taxes and did not much else. Specifically they did not provide policing, and very few public services.
And then the remnants of the old governments stepped in, provided public services, security on the streets and "pressured" people into paying a second tax. Now you can say that they were almost-feudal governments and therefore defended and enforced the law of large landowners but that wasn't seen as a problem ... because that's how it had always been.
The reason for their success, their initial success at least, is that, first, when Italy was young, it left citizens to their fate, suppressing dissent, stationing small forces in most of Italy that abused locals, were extremely corrupt and did little else. What is generally blamed for their later reputation is that the mafias started using their power more and more for their own purposes, irrespective of cost, while the mafias also pressured the centralized state to do the opposite.
Especially early on it's very hard to pick "the right" side in the war on mafias. In the beginning people saw the mafias as the good guys, and with good reason. Over time mafias became worse and the central state became better, but honestly, the central state wasn't particularly good for people either (in fact it still can be improved quite a bit)
> 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.
That's because people aren't recognizing me as their benevolent god-emperor yet.
That's partly because congress, including state congresses and judges/dept of justice just don't care about that. They are totally unable to see either the consequences of their own imperfection or even just limits to their power.
"Kids are being harmed, so let's end privacy online and force everyone to ID" is not balance, it is the panopticon.
Hilariously, even the baroness cited in the article believes it's extremism. I've even seen her defend privacy and VPNs. She claims she's backing deanonymization because nobody is doing anything else. The ones who want a surveillance state are only too happy to oblige.
Balance is expecting parents to actually parent their children instead of offloading all the responsibility to the state.
Bringing attention to their methods is much better than dignifying the "think of the children" nonsense with a response.
You just posted the answer:
> Especially when there are very obvious and tangible harms from modern social media.
The addictive and manipulative dark patterns of the big techs are harmful and should be banned straight up for everyone. No need to spare the children and let adults get abused. No need to verify age at all.
So why don't we just ban it? Because that'd eat into profits so much it could actually kill their business models.
All this "children" bullshit is just them trying to preserve their business models. It's them saying "year we're harmful and addictive and gambling tier but look we're adult only now". This is why Meta's among the corporations lobbying for this stuff.
Manipulation stops working when the other party is aware of it. Bring their manipulation out into the light.
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.
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
That doesn't change the fact that you're being forced to utter an age bracket in order to communicate digitally. It's the digital equivalent of having your mouth, eyes, and ears taped shut unless you utter "I am x years old" because the law wills it so.
Of course, it's well-established that human beings are capable of making stuff up, and you can claim to be whatever age, but that's not the point.
I also need to utter my device's PIN code, is that compelled speech too? And to drive to a protest I need a driver's license which requires me to answer questions about the road rules. Compelled speech?
> 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.
>When a politician is worried about your kids, you should be worried about your rights and freedoms. Not only for your own sake but for your kids too!
What rights and freedoms should I worry about when a politician wants to make sure my child is fed by supporting food stamp programs or free hot lunches at school?
The idea that any attempt to help a child is inherently suspect honestly says something distrubing about your own worldview. You can't imagine someone genuinely caring for a child that isn't there own?
This level of cynicism is only possible if someone has never interacted with people on a local political level. Once again, it's more a reflection of your own worldview than an accurate reflection of all of humanity. There are some people who genuinely have empathy for others and want to do good. The way some of you refuse to believe that is truly disturbing.
There are some people who have genuine empathy for others and want to do good, and they aren't politicians. The only thing disturbing about this is you don't see it.
Once again, you can only say this if the idea of "politician" is some abtract concept that you can dehumanize. If you get involved in local politics, I guarantee you will meet someone who cares.
In the case of food stamps, that was the leverage by which social engineers destroyed the black family via incentives for single mothers — collapsing from 75% married (circa 1950s) to 25% married (modern).
The “Welfare State” is nothing but modern share cropping from the party of Jim Crow.
Just so I'm clear here, you think half of Black moms have pushed their child's father away for the lucrative reward of food stamps? And that scenario was preplanned by some unnamed "social engineers"?
The sharecropping nature was intentional, ie, their vision of subservient people generating wealth for the state which it then distributed for their basic needs rather than those people owning property by which they could do for themselves.
That it destroyed black families (among others) is merely happenstance rather than intentional racism — stemming from the overall failure of technocratic managerialism.
Your narrative is embellished and does not correlate strongly with the data [1].
Embellished: marriage rates are 33.8% for Black women and 37.8% for Black men, neither of which I would round to 25%.
Uncorrelated: marriage rates dropped sharply among people of all single races on the Census except for Asians. It has dropped more sharply for Black respondents, but anything disproportionately affecting the lower and middle economic classes would disproportionately affect Black families.
Show me some data, and not outdated welfare policies from the 1980s, that supports the "social engineers" causal narrative better than plain deindustrialization. Or deindustrialization combined with good old American racism and mass incarceration. I am willing to change my position on this.
I’m actually talking about the period from 1950-1980 on the chart labeled: “Percentage of married men by race, 1950–2024”
You can see the collapse of black marriages started earlier and is steeper than other demographics — though eventually white marriages enter a similar decline, along with Hispanic marriages. (Asians hold roughly equal.)
This strongly suggests the effect is correlated with poverty and not race — especially with the white effect starting during the collapse of US manufacturing.
But if we agree the correlation is with poverty you haven't refuted my point — as welfare is a strong incentive structure on those experiencing poverty. That chart is perfectly consistent with what I said.
I find it difficult to give some people on this site the benefit of the doubt when they say nonsense like this. How can you possibly believe that free hot lunches in schools leads to slavery? Like what is the literal chain of events that you imagine happening to lead from one to the other?
>I just said the opposite. I can imagine many people genuinely caring for a child that isn’t their own.
Sure, but limited to "family and friends". Following that up with "who does not know my children" indicates you clearly view empathy as extending to merely one's personal relationships and you seemingly can't imagine caring for a stranger's child. I'll grant you cyncism is not the correct description of that worldview, but I stick by the general label of disturbing.
There are many scenarios in which politicians can be legitimately worried about the kids. For example if they want to install crosswalks and enforce speed limits around a school, or if they want to increase funding for social services.
I do believe we should allow for a lot more nuance in our political opinions and avoid most statements that can be made in the constraints of a short comment on social media.
There are no politicians worried about kids. There are politicians worried about the votes of people who worry about kids, which is effectively the same thing.
It's very far from the same thing. The former calls for solutions that protect kids, the latter calls for solutions that can be sold as protecting kids.
Politicians often have kids too, and what parent does not worry about their own kids? Is it that much worse if a politician genuinely cares about other people's kids too?
> 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!
I work with those politicians. They have kids too and they are just as susceptible to media/propaganda/fearmongering as you are. However, unlike you and I, they can do something (usually wrong) about it.
The main example that comes to mind is anything having to do with the environment. “The kids” will face the brunt of our actions (or inactions) on that front so a “for the kids” argument is completely valid. Dismissing a proposal simply because of a “for the kids” element is incredibly reductive and will genuinely end up harming kids.
“For the kids” arguments are distinct from arguments worrying about future generations in that they are almost entirely focused (ostensibly) on preventing harm to children while they are children rather than “all our descendants including the adults”.
Then let's ban child safety locks, child labor laws, and any law that distinguishes child abuse from other forms of abuse. Let's also allow minors to buy tobacco and alcohol while we're at it if we're claiming that any law that exists to protect children as children is inherently misguided.
I think if you spoke to the people actually making the claim they’d define it a little better to include only cases where adults are being asked to give up rights, freedoms, or privileges. But you can ask them.
I didn’t take a position on the argument. I pointed out a distinction.
The same reason you pay taxes. Not everyone is law abiding, taxes pay police to uphold order. Child laws improve upbringing, reducing chance of future criminal acts.
We live in a society, you wouldn't be on HN otherwise.
When irresponsible parents raise irresponsible children, the effects will not be limited to themselves. I don't want to go back to open smoking, causing increased rates of cancer to everyone just because some people want their freedom to smoke. Preventing tobacco sales to children greatly reduced that.
This is coming up again and again because The current status quo does. Not. Work.
There is direct evidence from trials, in which Meta researchers told executives that features like infinite scroll and others “ are inherently at odds with well-being”
There is no effective fight for freedom if there is no effective understanding of the politics and social forces driving change.
The freedom of the internet in the 90s was in itself a social revolution, not just a technological one.
Fighting for a status quo that didn’t work for children and even for many adults is a losing fight.
Fighting for privacy and against ad tech, and against addictive design features for all users is a far stronger fight.
Those who sacrifice freedom for a functioning society deserve neither. We should just keep doing the thing that doesn't work, because the alternative is sacrificing freedom.
Those who defend freedom should do so by being effective at it.
The internet was a magical thing when it was introduced to society at large. However this is NOT the same era.
If we are fighting for privacy and freedom, then why the heck is ad tech still allowed to be accepted as part of this conversation? If we are talking about freedoms, this is one of the greatest moments to say lets not sacrifice any privacy at all in the first place?
There is no functional and effective defense of our values if people are showing up to argue what they feel like fighting, instead of where the challenges actually are.
I agree. We should make a browser that blocks all ads, and a phone that comes with this browser and also doesn't track you, and all that. It should also ask you if you want the account to be parentally controlled, and if so, to what age.
> If we are fighting for privacy and freedom, then why the heck is ad tech still allowed to be accepted as part of this conversation?
Completely agree. Adtech, most of big tech in general, is harmful, and is pushing these panopticon solutions to preserve their own existence and profits. We should treat the root cause.
> We should just keep doing the thing that doesn't work
That's not what he said.
He said:
> Meta researchers told executives that features like infinite scroll and others “ are inherently at odds with well-being"
> Fighting for a status quo that didn’t work for children and even for many adults is a losing fight.
By "status quo" he means the exploitative and addictive business models of big tech.
Why are we bending over backwards to preserve big tech profits?
That's what all of this is. It's big tech lobbying for draconian laws that "solve" the problem in a way that simultaneously preserves their business models. It's big tech saying "sure it's harmful and addictive but look it's adult only now!"
Which is of course total bullshit. Their "get people addicted" business models are the root cause, and "kids are harmed" is merely a symptom of the problem.
Treat the root cause by wiping out their harmful business models.
Incidentally, that was the conclusion:
> Fighting for privacy and against ad tech, and against addictive design features for all users is a far stronger fight.
Sincere or not, their arguments are automatically voided by the simple fact they are building a dystopian cyberpunk panopticon. Nothing justifies that oppression. Not even children.
Oh, I'm sure a lot of those people have been convinced to back these laws out of sincere desire to protect children.
The problem is that those laws are NOT designed to protect children, and the people who convince politicians and the public to support them are NOT doing so out of genuine concern to protect children.
The real, underlying reason why they are being pushed for so hard is to destroy privacy and control people which is going to make everyone but the elite less safe, children included.
Especially if and when we get another Nazi Germany type regime and realize that - oh shit, they have 24/7 overview of where every single person in the world is, what they do, what they think, what their worldviews and identities are.
The real underlying problem is that all the mass surveillance companies proposed laws that look like they protect children, and clueless politicians agreed, while the rest of us just shouted on HN about how they're building a digital dystopia instead of proposing any alternatives. The politicians have to choose between banning electronics for children, or mandating ID scans because those were the options presented.
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.
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.
Kids can't gamble so yes we should enforce laws and ignore that one too. We can then debate if sports gambling itself should be legal or advertised at all.
You said "Anyone who brings up kids is trying to manipulate you" - that's clearly not always true. Now it's OFTEN true, and in politics it's almost always used in bad faith. But that's still not everything, and your simple rule eliminates the well intentioned discussions, and that's throwing the baby out with the bath water.
Now if they are clearly acting in bad faith, then absolutely it's not worth treating that as a legitimate discussion. Now it's "kids", but yesterday it was "terrorists", way back it was "heretics" - there's always a magical word that ill intentioned people will use to bludgeon you with. But you shouldn't let them erase your ability to have honest discussions.
> You said "Anyone who brings up kids is trying to manipulate you" - that's clearly not always true.
Then let's sharpen the statement.
"Anyone who brings up kids is either trying to manipulate you or is a useful idiot for the manipulators."
> But you shouldn't let them erase your ability to have honest discussions.
Tell that to them, not me. I've found that I'm perfectly capable of having honest discussions about pretty much any topic, no matter how controversial, except this.
When children are involved, even perfectly well intentioned people get whipped up into an emotional frenzy and are ready to double down on literally any half baked "solution" to whatever problem is placed in front of them. They cannot be argued out of such a state, and will lash out at anyone who tries. Your "heretic" comparison is apt.
"Anyone who brings up kids is either trying to manipulate you or is a useful idiot for the manipulators."
So say a school administrator has a meeting to discuss the pro's and con's of AI in their school - in good faith, honestly wanting to explore the issues. Then they're automatically bad because they're talking about kids?
I don't buy it. I get what you're saying about it being a political 3rd rail, but that doesn't mean anyone who mentions kids is automatically a bad actor. What a cynical and thought-preventing thing to say.
I think you're someone who says things that are so devoid of nuance that I would say you're not worth having a conversation with.
> Anyone who brings up kids is trying to manipulate you into giving up your freedom
These are NGOs not parents. And "child safety" is often a euphemism. The point is it's hard to argue against child safety. For example, if opaque NGOs demand deanonymization to stop CSAM, I am assuming most people would not want to seem like they are in favor of CSAM. So you need an organized effort to argue in favor of privacy and even then anyone who does it can easily be smeared as a CSAM user. So child safety can backdoor something else.
"The government says all children need to show an ID when browsing the internet in order to be safe"
"The government says all children need to be vaccinated in order to be safe"
I'm not saying these arguments are equivalent, but they seem equivalent because they induce the same feeling of loss of agency. And one cannot simply ignore and dismiss something like this.
No they don't? Laws can't really make anything "structurally impossible" unless they criminalize a lot more - such as hosting a website without full government review (this is illegal in China). These laws are quite clearly targeted at the harm that is happening today and not at locking down the entire internet.
You do have to take enforcement into account when evaluating these laws. Some HNers interpret this as you go to jail for not scanning an ID (which makes sense to programmers because it's a simple if/then), but most of them are actually written as product safety laws, so the government can order you to comply or take your product off the market.
> Laws can't really make anything "structurally impossible"
Require age verification. Kids lie and claim they are 18.
Require better age verification, implemented at the operating system level so that only the parent's administrator account can override it. Kids install a live Linux operating system on a USB drive and boot it, and now they have full access to the web.
Require computers to be cryptographically locked down so that only approved child-protecting operating systems may ever run. For the sake of the kids.
Computing freedom has now been destroyed. It is now structurally impossible for you to be free. It's not your computer anymore, it's the government's, and you better believe they are going to do a lot more than just prevent kids from accessing harmful content.
> These NGOs have converged upon a unified strategy ...
Not just for the war on anonymity. NGOs, often funded by government money (so missing two third of their name), have unified on other topics.
One example that comes to mind is teaming up to organize the biggest influx of migrants into the EU following the arab spring movements: there have been hidden camera recording NGO employees explaining how to dodge controls, how to answer questions (by lying), and they've been actively helping sneaking people illegally in the EU.
A good question one could ask itself before downvoting me is this: if it's a fact that NGOs are teaming up, worldwide, to lie using the rethoric of "child safety" [1]... On which other topics did NGOs lie?
Or are we to believe all NGOs are good and well-meaning, except those working to end anonymity?
And before I forget: in Africa for example it's fully well known that NGO typical means "DGSE":
There are french "doctors" in some of those NGOs who know less about medicine than what I know about medicine by having ex-girlfriends that were doctors.
By squinting one's eye just a little it look like NGO is not that far from a synonym of "shady undercover gov op".
And btw why should any of my taxpayers dollars go to even a single NGO if it's non-governmental?
And another big one: while some of those NGOs have been hard at work passing legislation which as a a result gets people arrested for "hate speech" (or even just for saying "christian prayers in their heads") in the UK, other NGOs are even harder at work making sure that the absolute most horrible of all hate speech cannot ever be criticized "because it's religious".
The double standards are literally insane.
If I was in the UK, I'd GTFO. And not to the EU.
[1] speaking of which, btw, there are serious allegations about NGOs participating in child trafficking, for example in the Haiti SNAFU
Which is precisely the point. Children are political weapons. Precisely crafted to shut down any opposition to whatever it is you're pushing. Oh you're against this? Pedophile.
You don't argue with these people. You summarily dismiss them. You recognize the game they are playing and you refuse to play it.
Call attention to their methods instead: they are exploiting and weaponizing children to push their big tech friendly surveillance agenda.
The flaw in 'calling attention to their methods' is that you rarely have a meaningful opportunity to argue against a bureaucratic system that operates this way.
Whether individuals inside the system are true believers or cynical operators, the response to calling out their methods will be identical:
If they genuinely believe the rhetoric: They will simply double down and say, 'Yes, and protecting the children makes this absolutely necessary.'
If they know it is a manipulation tactic: They will still reply with, 'It is for the children,' because they know it is an impenetrable PR shield that gets them their way.
In either scenario, the bureaucracy is entirely immune to the criticism.
Exposing the game might help persuade third-party observers, but it does absolutely nothing to stop the bureaucratic machine from using that exact same line to steamroll the agenda forward.
The statement “These are child safety laws” premises that the laws would save children - so the way to refute is to ask for proof. Outside of vaccines I doubt there is anything concrete that will directly benefit children. There is no argument that holds up to scrutiny. They also don’t have any good way to measure safety, though Goodhart’s Law would have an impact.
I mean, I want to show an example where it is only a problem when someone else is not as convinced as yourself, one way or the other.
>so the way to refute is to ask for proof..
No use. The same proof will not be convincing for everyone. Let us take vaccine. The proof for a Vaccine for X saving Y lives is often the following.
"Before the vaccine there was Y deaths per year from X. But after vaccines there is zero deaths from X".
The implication is that vaccines saved X lives. This could convince most of the people. But someone can ask. Are those kids who are not dying of X (thanks to the vaccine), are dying of something else?
Now the picture is not so clear.
See, same data, different results depending on how deep you want to probe,
> Are those kids who are not dying of X (thanks to the vaccine), are dying of something else? Now the picture is not so clear.
Why is it not so clear? If they are not dying of X then the vaccine did the job and technically saved the kid’s life from dying of X. Notice that it doesn’t mean that they can’t die of other things.
Because just imagine that may be the underlying cause of death is malnutrition, or poor immune system. In this case the body won't be able to fight of any kind of infection. When you vaccinate such a person for X, that person is able to resist X. But since the immune system health is still weak or the person is still malnutrition, they could still succumb to an infection of Y.
But that is one less death from X, and one death less that the vaccine can claim credit to, but in the larger picture, the vaccine did not save a life.
So the point being 1000 deaths from X to 0 deaths from X does not necessary mean X lives saved.
> So the point being 1000 deaths from X to 0 deaths from X does not necessary mean X lives saved.
Yes, this statement is a non-sequitur. A vaccine preventing death from X does not prevent a death from other causes. That doesn’t mean X isn’t effective.
That’s fair pushback. I concluded that this was the underlying assumption because I couldn’t surmise anything else because you had said this:
> The implication is that vaccines saved X lives. This could convince most of the people. But someone can ask. Are those kids who are not dying of X (thanks to the vaccine), are dying of something else?
To me it assumes mutual exclusivity between not dying of X and dying of something else, but perhaps my bias is showing.
It did not assume mutual exclusivity. But if the underlying cause of succumbing to a disease is poor general health or a poor immune system, then preventing a single disease might not really save the person.
But it still shows up as a life saved by the vaccine (because it prevented a specific disease incidence). That is misleading.
This can be made very clear by taking a small example. Imagine there is an island with a population of 100. Among these 50 are very weak. And every year, these 50 die due to various illness. And among these 50 deaths, 30 are caused by X.
So in order to save these 30 deaths, the government started vaccinating against X. The next year there is zero deaths due to X. But there were still 50 deaths in total that year too. Only that the 30 lives that used to be claimed by X, is now claimed by A, B and C (they are so weak that they will succumb to any infection).
This is not an unrealistic scenario. If you have a weak immune system, any minor infection could end up fatal. The only unrealistic thing in this story is the occurance of constant 50 people who have weak immune system every year. But that does not void the point.
So while the vaccine prevented disease incidence, it did not prevent any deaths.
You're straw manning most people by trying to insist upon this, as most Americans support a ban on social media for children. [1] That turns into the overwhelming majority if you consider only Americans with children. And the percent of Americans that oppose things like age verification for the usage of social media sites is in the single digits.
So it will most likely happen especially because you are certainly right, in part, that no government has ever said no to actions that'd give them more power, let alone ones that are widely supported. But the point of this is that rather than having this as some sort of red-line no, I think it'd be much more pragmatic to try to argue for identity verification regulations that would be most palatable.
Conversations on age verification tend to split into 2 streams.
Conversations where the root submission talks about failures at social media firms and the evidence of harms, or evidence from trials.
Conversations on the attacks against freedom and privacy.
I see very little hope that an actual rebuttal or alternative to the desire to muzzle tech will be forged, because the two conversation streams seem to rarely intersect.
We are not in the 90s anymore. Tech as most people experience it is not the new new thing, and most parents are tired of tech. A more recent pew survey showed that nearly half of teens think that social media is bad for teens. We know that Meta went ahead with features even after their own internal research told them it was bad for teen mental health.
How in hell, is there any effective response created, if the social pressure parents and children are driving, is being dismissed as a conspiracy?
This should be the time that the business models and incentives that allow loot boxes and addicting design mechanisms should be discussed.
There needs to be an actual solution that addresses the issues users are facing, or else they are simply going to choose to sacrifice freedoms for the hope of gaining some control.
In general I would agree with you, but one issue I have here is that I think social media even done fully responsibly would end up being very undesirable for children. Even if we have no algorithm and just 'friend on friend' stuff, social media tends to significantly amplify a lot of the nasty stuff that happens at every school - bullying, rumor milling, conspiratorial stuff (like kids falsely reporting somebody else to try to get them in trouble), and so on.
There's also the typical image crafting stuff that drives envy, insecurity, and so on - kids aren't sharing when they eat left overs mashed up in a bowl, but they are sharing when they go eat at an expensive steak restaurant. That bias already significantly affects adults perceptions of others' life/lifestyle, let alone children. And even without 'the algorithm', there's going to be FOMO and the general addictiveness of updates that's going to leave kids as zombies to their phones rather than interacting with each other as much in real life.
So I'm not really sure it's viable to try to 'fix' social media. You can certainly make it better than it currently is, but I think the issue is that we have horrible companies managing a horrible product.
The issue is that their opinions are not wrong but are incomplete. Exactly the things that make "social media" - now equated with "algorithmic engagement-optimized social media" - harmful to teens make it harmful to adults. You can protect both children and privacy by restricting the harmful behavior. But that is the conspiracy: the issue is framed so that this solution is completely ignored. Not that I expect it to get anywhere close to happening, though.
> Anyone who brings up kids is trying to manipulate you into giving up your freedom for security
That argument loses you most of the population in a vote, myself included. Parents may disagree, for a start; I reckon most women (especially outside of tech) read that and mark you down as "creepy man I don't want near kids".
It's also wrong, as there are lots of rules that are in fact designed to protect children. I recommend reading up on the history of child abuse in the Boy Scouts of America (now Scouts BSA), FBI agent Kenneth Lanning's investigation, and the safeguarding and leadership training that scout leaders must take today.
The UK has a system, I think it's called the DBS, which depending on the level of check ranges from "is this person a convicted sex offender?" to "non-crime hate incidents". One can argue a lot about what the correct level should be, no-one has yet convincingly explained to me why specifically "non-crime" actions should be in a secret police record. But I am on board with someone convicted by a court for child sex offences not being allowed to become a schoolteacher.
No, do not ignore them, do not dismiss them and do not underestimate them.
These people are the enemy, they are smart and resourceful and they have managed to do the unthinkable - convince 2 of the most pro-free-speech nations in the history of the world to start censoring the internet. The idea that I would ever need a VPN to view adult content in the UK would have been laughable 5 years ago and now it's a fact that puts us in the same basket as literal authoritarian hell holes.
I guarantee they will come for the VPNs, that is 100% certain, these traitors will stop at nothing. Only Luigi can save us.
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
I haven't seen any claim that it was isolated to one ethnic group. I have only seen the claim that it was disproportionately immigrants of Pakistani background.
The common talking points online are that it's solely from one ethnic group. Not sure if you have read Rupert Lowe's report, but it was explicitly framed around a particular ethnoreligious pattern of offending - especially men of Pakistani Muslim background, and it repeatedly connected that pattern to immigration and multiculturalism.
And that report has further driven the narrative online that it is solely an immigrant problem.
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.
> 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.
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.
I suspect the crisis isn't a short term economic shock but a long term decline from resource decline, possible water/food shortages amplified by climate blow back. Something that will not end in your lifetime or the next generations.
Military's, intelligence agencies and actuaries have been warning about this for decades now and their language is getting very direct on this and the time lines nowadays.
If you have ever been caught in a rip while swimming, there is a moment when you suddenly getting a sucking sensation as you transition from stable waters into an outward flow. I am starting to think we are in that transitional phase on global stability, that the 2030's are not going to be a comfortable time for many.
They are ensuring that potential disruptors can be reigned in if needed. To try and stop things from being even more unpredictable, for better or worse. Buckle up.
You don't build long term surveillance systems and billionaires don't build bunkers for what they think of as a temporary tough situation.
Fair, perhaps I should have said until after the crisis passes its most acute phase. I expect the eventual energy and climate system shock to result in mass unrest and many excess deaths. Meanwhile wars are almost guaranteed, which will further stretch resources. If we make it out of the initial crisis without a strategic nuclear war, we may settle into a period of extended decline that’s relatively stable, though very unpleasant.
I recommend the Energy Skeptic blog, they often provide sources and links to papers: https://energyskeptic.com/
They also pass my personal test of not advocating for dumb feel-good ideas. Recently they published a well-sourced article on why the US rail system isn’t a good candidate for electrification.
Was all about just doing the math on energy transitions. He wasn't anti renewable technology but did want to point out how scale is a problem that few understand.
My favorite number of his is, that at 3% growth year over year, we would need all the energy of the Milky way galaxy by the year 13,000. As the galaxy is 100,000 light years across, this would defy physics itself.
Seconded, that’s a good one too. I also recommend Jem Bendell as a palate cleanser, his work is fluffier but it’s all about finding ways to thrive during decline rather than succumbing to doom and gloom.
No problem at all, thanks for asking! Two from this year both from the UK.
I really wish I had kept all the others from the US, Europe, Aus/NZ etc. It is a very common theme but they are largely kept quiet and only typically (partially) released through freedom of information requests.
This one from Actuaries UK was one that set off alarm bells. As they advise the insurance industry, they are structured to be politically neutral. The key takeaway is the impacts of 3c temperature rise by 2050 on page 9. The reason this is an issue, we are currently on target to hit that with us likely to pass 2c mid next decade with the rate of warming increasing.
This one from the UK government is all about addressing national security regarding this issue. Typically they are advising that they secure their food supplies and hardened up boarders in the next 5 years. Funnily enough Brexit may have given them the power to enforce this much more than they would have otherwise had. But that just means they have built a unique flavor of oppression.
I once read about a programming language designed for modelling dynamic numerical systems. The example given was world demographics. It was written in the 1980s or 90s. The output showed quality of life peaking in the 2010s, population peaking in the 2020s or 2030s, and then quality of life and population plummeting.
"Rare earths" aren't rare, they're just hard to separate and produce quite toxic & radioactive slag (they're the bottom 2 rows of the periodic table and "rare earth" mines & refineries that were operating in the US are now SuperFund sites). Due to CEOs offshoring work, most of the refining is now done in China. And the Chinese don't want to keep exporting the bare metals, they want to export the things made from those metals - like motors and electric cars made from those motors.
And the "memory shortage" is a byproduct of the AI datacenter bubble. Which is a disaster that will crash the economy.
This is needless pedantry. They are not technically rare, yet we do have a shortage due to China’s tit-for-tat response to our sanctions, and we seem unwilling to invest in the industry needed to secure a domestic supply.
And regardless of the causes of the memory shortage, there is indeed a shortage, which will hopefully help to prevent the mass deployment of drones here at home.
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.
You actually don't think that the world's largest REITs hire lobbyists at the municipal, state and federal levels? That's an extremely naive and uninformed position.
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 XYZ Company is going to listen to some consultant telling them in a press release that they should go back into the office because some REIT needs more money in it? Why would the CEO of a tech company care at all what the value of their leased office building is? Do you understand how leases and real estate works?
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).
And now that the world's had a look at long COVID - it seems like COVID isn't the only virus that causes it, and a big part of aging is caused by the cumulative damage from viral infections.
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.
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 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.
This is very true. There are a handful of countries, South Africa comes to mind, where the government lost that monopoly and security is a type of commodity which has to be purchased in the private sector.
That's not really true though is it. The Sackler family caused over 500,000 deaths. Nestlé has killed millions of babies. DuPont and 3M poisoned every living creature on Earth. Nobody spent even one day in prison for any of it.
Corporations all over the world routinely and knowingly poison, injure, or outright murder their employees and their customers. They spend massive amounts of money preventing the public from knowing about the harms they are causing. Even in the most egregious cases where there is well documented proof of what they've done the heads of these companies still get away with it. They profit from it. They're just happily living their lives in their mansions and on their yachts while graves are dug and families are torn apart.
Not that it makes it any better, those people were treated as just externalities to doing business. Government violence is a lot more targeted. Yes, it has the same result but the intention is very different. One is just careless, the other is malicious.
When corporations knowingly kill people it isn't careless. What they do is entirely calculated. For example, it wasn't carelessness that caused the Philip Morris executives to hire a bunch of scientists who were then ordered to falsify reports saying that smoking wasn't harmful in an attempt to trick the public to keep smoking when the company was sitting on a mountain of evidence showing that their product was killing people.
Government violence is different though. When the government acts against the public they are generally required to follow long and complex procedures with multiple points of checks and accountability. A cop has to get enough evidence to convince a judge to issue an arrest warrant. A person is taken into custody and given access to a lawyer. A trial is held in court with a jury. At every step there are volumes of records detailing exactly what was done, by whom, and why. All of that information is public record and we can request those records to keep watch on what the government does. If the government abuses the power we give them we can vote them out of office and replace them.
Obviously there are a lot of problems with our legal system and places where all of that breaks down, but the goal was for there to be transparency and accountability and nothing stops us from improving the situation. With corporations on the other hand, they act in secret, they don't have to ask anyone for permission, they aren't required to keep records of everything they do, you have no legal right to examine the records they have, and even if you find out a CEO is responsible for murdering a bunch of people for profit you have no power to vote that CEO out of office.
It's pretty clear which of whose two entities is the larger threat. Which one of them has already repeatedly poisoned you and your entire family. Which one do you think was responsible for more violence done to your loved ones?
From my perspective, the difference is that we societally condemn the Sackler family in the same way we societally condemn Robert Pickton or Ted Bundy.
It is absolutely failing of the government and the American legal system that nobody spent time in prison for Purdue's lies and poison, we're in full agreement there.
That said, this position alone doesn't suggest that otherwise law-abiding citizens should be more concerned about corporate surveillance than they are government surveillance.
No, the reason that law-abiding citizens should be more concerned about corporate surveillance than they are government surveillance is that those corporations sell all your data to the government so that the government can get around the need for things like warrants and probable cause while at the same time those companies are also exploiting your data every chance that they get in any and every way that they think will make them more money or give them power and influence over you.
It wasn't until the current administration that the US government handed over the people's most sensitive private data in bulk to private corporations in exchange for bribes.
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.
Governments and Companies have different motivations.
Governments want control, Companies want money.
Control typically comes from a reduction in rights, freedoms, money. When you fail to give those up "naturally" violence, worsened living conditions and abuse are the tools used.
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.
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.
I'm not trying to call everyone else voting for these things dumb, but does the average person who doesn't think about this stuff for a living actually know what they're voting for?
Sentiment here is the same mostly. It’s just guised in an inability to handle the obvious next step. E.g. when a mentally ill person uses ChatGPT and harms themselves, the question asked is “why did we let this person use ChatGPT?” There’s no way to do this allow/deny functionality without an extensive ID service. “Kids are using service A or service B and the social media companies aren’t doing anything about it!” Well, it’s not possible to offer something to a person and determine that they’re not a child except with some service that identifies child/adult.
The answer every time is “well then Google/Apple/Facebook/Shopify/mcMaster Carr shouldn’t exist as a business” and if I’m being honest that is not an achievable target so you’re going to arrive at the attested internet.
Why would you think that? Most of my friends are parents now and all of them are quite concerned about the effect of social media, phones, and technology more broadly.
Basically all of them are planning to delay exposing their kids to phones and screens for as long as possible.
> I dunno if you can legislate “better parental control ux”,
If we must have something, I’m in favor of the OS-level flag where a parent can set the device as belonging to a minor and the apps and browser can receive the flag. Lock it behind the most basic parental controls that can be protected and remotely monitored. There are some loopholes with kids downloading apps that allow custom web requests without the flag being sent, so there probably needs to be an app allowlist or special App Store category to match.
Carve out some legal exemptions for Linux distributions that no kids are using and leave it to the iOS, Android, Windows, and Macs of the world. Any parent who doesn’t like the idea doesn’t have to enable it on their kids’ devices.
> If we must have something, I’m in favor of the OS-level flag where a parent can set the device as belonging to a minor and the apps and browser can receive the flag.
Parental controls already exist. Lawmakers want to step in and parent peoples' kids for them by removing these freedoms from everyone.
Like, explain to me how you think this could be done meaningfully other than some setting that can just be arbitrarily flipped without adding massive complexity.
It doesn't have to be sent anywhere, websites should send a flag when serving various types of content, so parental controls has the information it needs for filtering. Websites could still infer what's being filtered of course, but doing the decision on the client allows for much more granular/extensible categories of content, as well as allowlisting, time limits, etc. Some sites/proxies won't be marked properly, but 99% self-categorizing would help a lot, and it's not like making them do ID checks or attestation is easier than setting an HTTP header or something
Filtering on the app side is more flexible. A game that has some levels not suitable for children could when on a child's device still let them play most of the game.
I think the most useful flexibility is for parents to do more specific categorization, eg allow violence on netflix but not youtube, block some game that would be allowed, request access to something that wouldn't, set time limits and times of day, etc. It's easier to enforce this stuff on the client than try to send the relevant parts to an app or site, but yes there are times you want the latter too.
No they are not. The Illinois law fails to include any of the exclusions I mentioned. None of them enforce the parental password controls or remote monitoring.
Please read my full comment before jumping to respond.
Why would the laws have to enforce that? That should be left to the implementer. All the law needs to do is require that there be a place for a parent to set the age.
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.
It’s weird to see that locking down devices even further is being proposed as a solution to anything.
The unspoken part of this requirement is that websites would have to block users who aren’t connecting via one of these attested, verified, locked down devices.
There is the obvious loophole that using a VPN to a country without these requirements would circumvent it. That’s how kids are already circumventing age restrictions in places like Australia and it’s why the UK has taken an interest in attacking VPNs.
Locked down devices are kind of the only solution that both (A) preserves privacy and (B) solves the problem. However, it indeed strips a user of the freedom to use their device in the way that they want; although, safe to say that the US doesn't have all that much problem with that, given Apple's continued market dominance.
The alternative is what we're getting right now: laws that require verifying ID documents, often in ways that restrict even the notion of maintaining the user's privacy. Attestation might be an "OK" to "good" solution while this is between bad and really bad.
Client-side filtering solves the problem, because children's clients are owned by their parents. We should mandate that websites and apps send metadata about the content being served (eg extending the Rating: RTA header from 20 years ago) and mandate that OSs/browsers allow filtering to be easily configured at setup. This is a more private but also much more granular/useful solution, it's only difficult today because of a lack of coordination
It's not difficult at all. It's not good enough for lawmakers. Their requirement is opt-in to adult content, not opt-out (i.e. the goal is parents don't need to interact with their child or set up parental controls themselves). Which is really bad.
It is difficult for parents to do this today! You can either have a limited set of apps with no general internet access (fine for younger kids), or domain-list filtering which takes significant work to set up, has many false positives and negatives, ie it's both a chore to request/allow useful things, and easy to get around. Lawmakers have been convinced the solution is opt-in, so websites can self-categorize and nothing needs to be configured on device – and I agree that websites need to self-categorize, but then this would make it very easy to reliably filter on device.
my iPhone has "Limit Adult Websites" as an option - and it blocks some known less-than-mainstream adult content sites. I can basically guarantee it consumes the RTA header/label in addition to maybe a list of sites Apple maintains as adult content (maybe similar data to those DNS providers with an IP that DNS blocks adult sites).
> Hardware age attestation will be a long timeframe project. The current work should be towards standards that can get us there.
Unfortunately it's so much easier for lawmakers to slap down a law that says "you must verify IDs right now if you want to continue to exist" with no requirement, and often not even support for, privacy preserving ways to make this happen. The laws are happening now. The chance of reform to align with a privacy-preserving option once the laws are implemented is slim to none.
And obviously we must push back strongly against laws that do not accomplish any collective benefit. I think the only law that makes sense is to say that at some future date hardware will be required to have age attestation.
> Finally, anonymity didn't exist for my grandparents.
Your grandparents could walk to the next town over and give themselves a different name and nobody would ever know who they were. They could get a job, be paid in cash, and deposit that money in a bank account with no KYC. They could drop a letter in a public mailbox without a return address, or put up posters at night, or make phone calls from public telephones. Nobody would know who did it, and there would be no surveillance footage to review after the fact, no digital footprint to trace. They could write a letter to their local newspaper to be printed with a fake name, or publish a book or story or magazine under an assumed identity. There were no ALPRs, no automated facial recognition, no built-in vehicle telematics, no drones, no smartphones to track anyone’s movement, no doorbell cameras on every block, no video tapes, no serial numbers hidden in the printouts from copy machines, no DNA analysis, no databases instantly searchable with the click of a button.
Feel free to make a value judgement about whether what we have now is better or worse than the past, if you want, but don’t invent history to rationalise it. The internet did not invent anonymity. It used to be the default.
That essay seemed unrealistic and dystopic when it was originally written. Now it seems like the typical T&C of every e-reader. If facial recognition was anything other than a PhD type project at that time, that would have prevented the main plot of the essay.
This is the flow back from the idea of 'information wants to be free'.
In letting things flow to easily the opposition is to have heavy lock down on information. A lot of the time, the opposite of one bad idea is another bad idea.
Big tech companies aside, the broader tech community did not fail to engage on the digital parenting problem. We could've solved this problem long ago before anyone even noticed it, but we're actively being blocked from doing so by the exact same people pushing for mass surveillance. See detailed explanation here:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49118578
Believe it or not, sometimes the best answer is to do nothing until the crowd moves on to the next panic, as with the “Satanic Panic” in the 1980s. Turns out D&D was not actually a gateway to Satan worship.
If we’re talking 80s, a better comparison would be He-Man.
The FTC let the free-market run riot with children’s TV. Shows used commercials to push expensive plastic toys. The shows themselves became commercials for their associated product lines. Parents felt unable to resist the social pressure channeled through their children and congress eventually passed an act that let the FCC reign in the FTC’s damage.
In the 2020s family economics has raced to the bottom: wages have stagnated, the cost of goods and services is set based on a household where everyone is in full time employment, and latch-key kids now have He-Man in the palm of their hands courtesy of Apple, Google, Samsung, and Xiomai.
This situation is ripe for exploitation by anyone who can offer parents a solution to their kids’ insatiable phone addiction.
Unrelated, but He-Man is the funniest name ever, and I can't wait for the gender roles people to come out with some series called He-Man and She-Woman.
> Like it or not, there is a large constituency who wants to “protect the children”.
The problem is not that they want to protect children. The problem is that these people are either technically clueless or deceptive which is why they present these surveillance measures as the only reasonable approach.
Why yes, I too want to "protect the children". But that shouldn't require me to upload my ID to a vague 3rd party to prove my age so I can browse reddit or steam.
I believe most online services should have safeguards to protect children because they will actively seek out harmful content and contacts (don't ask me how I know). But these safeguards should not allow for abuse of their users, or accidental info leaks, or sharing of PII to 1st or 3rd parties. There's plenty of ways to do e.g. age or identity verification anonymously and securely, for example.
> 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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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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.
If parents felt in control of technology they wouldn't be calling on governments to regulate it in the first place. I know a lot of tech people like to assume that government wants to control everything and these parents are fake front groups established to manufacture consent, but this is infowars-type conspiracy thinking. Most people are just not that facile with technology and people who have kids are atavistically opposed to anything that could harm their kids.
Tech people's unwillingness to even engage with concerns about harm to children (eg the GP) more or less guarantees more aggressive regulation. IT's a self-defeating position.
Was I exposed to some clearly adult content? Yes. But I didn't find it particularly compelling, the video games I could download and other things I could explore were more interesting.
It is also concerning to me that gen-alpha (or whatever the age bracket is called) people are increasingly being pushed into walled garden, app-based social media platforms instead of actually learning what the Internet really is, and what it's capable of.
We can debate if these systems and people existed before (they did), but the reach and scale is different now. My most controversial opinion these days is that not everyone should be allowed to upload to YouTube if it’s public facing. We need basic screening and filtering.
For instance in about 1994 I remember coming across a set of textfiles that were some lengthy manifesto about how the US government had supposedly manufactured AIDS in a lab somewhere. But it never got any traction.
Now we have the unfortunate venn diagram overlap between something like a Tate and a major social media platform, and he can get his message out to millions of angry, horny, unemployed young men...
There was a BBS in my area that ran on a small bank of 14.4 USR modems that had a gold mine of content like that. It was such a fun time.
This was Soviet (now Russian) disinformation. The tactic is to make people (especially Americans) distrust the American government. Like claiming that the crack epidemic was caused by CIA inventing/smuggling the drugs in. Sure, Oliver North & Reagan's Iran-Contra affair did this to fund Ronnie's illegal and private war in Nicaragua. The CIA gets all the money they want from a willing, subservient Congress - they don't need to smuggle drugs. Congress specifically outlawed supplying weapons to the Contras, so the administration had to resort to illegal means, like selling weapons to Iran and smuggling drugs to finance that war.
This is the same sort of disinformation as saying COVID was manufactured in a Chinese labs, somewhere in Wuhan.
Yeah, I used to read this stuff when I was younger and more gullible.
You still fantasize about building mechanisms for restricting information as if the very people you oppose won't use it on you when they get into power; no, as if the very people you oppose aren't _currently_ ascendant or even in office and would delightedly use it against you right this moment. Madness.
When you build a high tech muzzle, remember that it will fit onto your head just as well as it fits those you built it for.
That is a wild misinterpretation of what I said and in no way reflects my opinion.
Based on whose values and criteria? Yours?
Beware of he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart he dreams himself your master.
If some parent thinks that's healthy they can just enter the child's age as 18.
Here are the specific examples listed in the comment I responded to:
> QAnon
> Alex Jones
> Andrew Tate
It was a mix of being afraid of getting a virus from a porn site, knowing that porn wasn't for my age, and late-night FTA TV airing softcore anyways.
My parents told me to be responsible and kind of explained the dangers of the world the best way they could, and it was expected that I'd be grounded and lose computer access if they found me on a porn site. I preferred playing games. I definitely encountered some dark places on the clearnet (and on the darknet as well) and promptly GTFO.
At the school's computer lab they had plenty of content control which I had the most fun trying to bypass them. For what reason? Just so I could.
It was always there, society hasn’t changed. This shit wasn’t monetized back then though.
This is the "Christian moms need Congress to regulate Cable TV" problem all over again. Don't let them watch TV if you oppose what is on it. It's not HBO's responsibility to raise your child, it's yours.
Anonymity, the right to move privately and be private online is much bigger than parents who are frustrated with out of control capitalism.
Besides, this only benefits the big corporations. They of course will happily back anything that absolves them of their sins.
Unethical human experimentation, by the way.
We don't need to make parents the enemy of our online privacy. We just need parents to reject the idea that they have to give up their identity and the identity of their children to every shitty social media company and shady website on the internet to "protect" them.
We just need parents to reject the idea that they have to give up their identity and the identity of their children
OK, but (as I have asked many times before) what is your alternative, beter proposal? People intuitively understand the idea of checking ID to prevent sales of alcohol to minors, keep teens out of adult spaces and so on, because virtually every adult remembers being a teenager and not being allowed to do certain things due to not being old enough. That makes checking identity an easy sell to people.
What is your better idea that is similarly easy to sell? Because if you don't have one,people will fall back on the mediocre idea of ID checks. I feel like anyone working in the tech field should understand that the best technological solution does not always win out.
How about laws that prevent social media websites from pushing harmful content users didn't ask for? How about forcing them to abandon the practices and dark patterns that result in those platforms being addictive? How about putting executives behind bars when their algorithms are shown to cause mental health and body image issues in children? These platforms know that what they're doing is hurting people, but they don't care because they're profiting from it. These companies intentionally designed systems that are harmful and user-hostile. They've got algorithms that seek out and target people's vulnerabilities. They ignored repeated warnings from their own researchers, and actively concealed evidence of the harms they were causing. We don't have to let them do it. Not to children or anyone else. Facebook isn't going to die off if they go back to showing people only things their friends and family post. It might even get more popular. They might make fewer billions though and that's unthinkable to them.
There are a lot of things that can be done, but the government isn't interested because actually solving the problems social media causes isn't going to give them the power they're actually after and it could cause them the bribe money they get from these companies.
So, what actual rules do you want to make in service of these desirable outcomes? They have to be clear and straightforward enough that they can't be just gotten around with clever lawyers or argued past the point of meaninglessness by shills posing as philosophers. I do not like the idea of everyone having to show ID online (or even much in real life), but I can see why it's popular because it's very easy to explain and understand.
Not saying these are impossible questions to answer or get right in a law, just that there are more things to think about than which component you decide to show data inside.
The law would define a social media platform. Maybe something like: The term “social media platform” means a website or internet medium that— (A) permits a person to become a registered user, establish an account, or create a profile for the purpose of allowing users to create, share, and view user-generated content through such an account or profile; (B) enables 1 or more users to generate content that can be viewed by other users of the medium; and (C) primarily serves as a medium for users to interact with content generated by other users of the medium. [https://www.law.cornell.edu/definitions/uscode.php?def_id=42...]
If your SaaS app met that definition of a social media platform it would be illegal for you to show content in an infinite scroll window. Because your application targeted business users who paid for the service, people would be less likely to sue you. Maybe it'd be worth it to you to include infinite scroll anyway. Companies knowingly break the law all the time after calculating that even on the off chance they get caught the fines they'd face will probably be less than the profit they'd make. The larger your platform got, the less worth it breaking the law could become and of course if the public felt the fines were so low as to be ineffective, the law could be amended to increase the fines.
The law could even allow some platforms to include harmful content like infinite scrolling if certain conditions are met. For example, platforms could be allowed to include infinite scrolling if they require a credit card to sign up, and they display a warning explaining that the platform uses infinite scrolling which has been determined to be harmful by promoting addictive and compulsive behaviors, and it provides an option to disable that feature. Still, it's probably better to widely ban those kinds of practices that serve no purpose other than driving engagement/addictive behavior. We can just decide as a society that we value people's mental health more than maximizing tech billionaire profits.
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.
Change in behavior can only follow from change in incentives. Parents must be held legally liable if they allow their children access to social media. That means jail time for negligence.
The government has just decided to fall back on "think of the children" as a way to implement more surveillance and control.
Incentives incite action. No action. No incentive.
Incentives play a role, you don't want to encourage wrong behaviors certainly, but they're just one factor in determining what people do or don't do. At best, they nudge. Those nudges aren't likely to overcome stronger forces, or even several weaker ones.
Someone may have a desire or intention to lose weight. But unless they lose the weight they lack incentive.
It's simple: incentives incite action. Don't make it more complicated to win an argument.
Here are just some of the incentives overweight people have to lose weight:
They'll look better, to themselves and others. They'll have more clothing options. They'll feel better. They'll be healthier. They'll have drastically lower odds of many future heath problems. They'll live longer which means they can spend more time being with their loved ones.
Those are all incentives. Everyone who is obese has those incentives, even though different individuals may assign different values to them. Even with all those incentives that hasn't stopped the obesity problem. incentives don't incite action, but they can encourage them.
incentive noun [ C or U ] Something that encourages a person to do something by offering them a reward (https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/incentiv...)
You can have a ton of encouragement, but that doesn't mean it will be enough to incite a behavior. What definition of incentive are you using?
It literally says incite "to determination or action". Given that parents aren't actually taking smart phones away, neither determination nor action are present.
I'll grant you the examples you give incite people to desire to change weight just as negative consequences incite parents to desire that "something should be done," but it doesn't incite them to actually do something.
Describing something as incentive because it incites desire without changing behavior is not exactly what I think of when I think of incentives.
Think of being in the position of trying to come up with incentives for a group of people. Would you call your incentives successful if they created a desire in that group without anyone actually doing anything differently?
If I were going to try to come up with incentives for a group of people, I wouldn't try to create a desire in them. I'd try to give them something they already desired as a reward for doing what I wanted them to do. They'll probably never want to do the thing I want them to do. They might hate doing it. If the incentive is high enough though they just might do it anyway. If my incentives weren't enough to sway them, they'd still be incentives, just ones that were inadequate/ineffective. I wouldn't even be surprised if they failed. Incentives fail to cause changes in behavior all the time.
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?
You may not be aware of this, but Meta has been actively spending millions of dollars to redirect the rage against their algorithms and addictive harms, especially against children, and one of their strategies to try and help avoid liability is to put the onus on the federal government to pass ID legislation, to literally make it easier for Meta and similar companies to age gate most content under simple blanket policies. The way that they are doing this is by funding otherwise very small "parents rights organizations" with money and connections they otherwise wouldn't have. What does Meta gain from this? Less liability and lower cost in content moderation. What do the parents rights groups get? "Check ID laws".
That's enough motivation for both groups, it's very simple.
Now where do you get into "conspiracy theory" territory? Well thetr are also other groups that want online ID for their own purposes, and they are more than happy to help fund these groups to get something they also want.
All of this is very easy to provide backing links for with a simple Google search, if you're interested.
How should online services be regulated to mitigate algorithmic harms? To get something over the line politically, it needs to be simple enough that it can be articulated in a few sentences.
That would be a good conversation to have!
Instead what is happening is moneyed interests are inputting hundreds of millions of dollars into organizations that otherwise wouldn't have it, which is giving an "unnatural" amount of political influence to those groups, which is changing our country, and not just on this issue. They're literally doing it just to keep their money, and ID checks let them keep it without actually reducing the harms.
The problem I'm at pains to points out is that many people show up in threads like this saying that aany 'think of the children' argument is fake and a cover for government intrusion, to the point of ignoring actual concerns about actual harms to actual children. I'm guessing that people saying that are not currently (or ever) interested in having children, but seem to have fallen into a pattern of thinking that the concerns of people who do have children somehow aren't real.
Siding with Meta here is going to look ridiculous in hindsight. (It already does tbh)
- signed, parent with 3 adult children
[1] - https://nochan.net/b/Internet-Crap/20230829-Think-Of-The-Chi...
With proper parental controls there is no signalling.
Without signaling nothing would happen. There's always signaling.
If in the future the browser gets passive / aggressive updates if they mimic Microsoft and refuses to run if there is no age set or if they can not call systemd commands or libraries then script a random age or age range on each login so that it is not used for tracking. pseudo super-cookie
Come on. Like 80% of my entire post was devoted to pointing out a gradual erosion of rights over time, and I explicitly stated that it's not the case today.
But don't underestimate human adaptability. Slippery slope arguments assume that once a technology introduces a specific risk, society lacks the agency to create counter-measures, new norms, or alternative uses for that technology.
I haven't found that to be the case throughout most of history.
You're doing the slippery slope fallacy by saying "well if there are not terrible laws now that just means there will be terrible laws later." A law against murder doesn't mean there will later be a law against farting.
And that you're defending dumping a bucket of lubricant on the slope with the pinky promise that it's just for aesthetics, you just like the look of a slippery slope, there's no way we'll ever slide down your lubed slope that we are already sliding down.
If you forgive the slight exaggeration in my use of "always", then I am half right - in fully half the cases, deanonymization is the first thing they try.
But let's look at those "just regulating parental controls" laws, the California one [1]. What does it do? Does it give parents/the owner the tools needed to limit child access? Does it require vendors to include such tools? No, neither of those. It just establishes how to collect (but not verify) and send age data, so someone else can act on it.
It does nothing to empower parents, but does lay the groundwork to grow an age control ecosystem that can later have verification easily added - all the apps and websites will already support it. Not all "regulation" is the same.
> People who conflate these two things are paid lobbyists of Meta
Meta is the most privacy-hostile company there is, despite fierce competition for that title, and nearly all their services are behind a login-wall, even read-only access, and they don't let you make an account without a phone number [2,3,4]. I avoid them like the plague, and they already go above and beyond what you would want of them.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_Digital_Age_Assuran...
[2] https://www.local3news.com/local-news/what-the-tech/what-the...
[3] Facebook now treats a phone number like a near-requirement - https://quackr.io/blog/facebook-account-without-phone-number
[4] https://www.reddit.com/r/privacy/comments/tyrs6c/so_i_had_to...
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.
OK, but following this logic, shouldn't we disband the government altogether and have mafias rule us all?
When is it acceptable to hope that something is actually going to work well enough when handed over to the government?
Conservatives seem to be fine with mafia rule, so long as the don has the correct party affiliation.
> When is it acceptable to hope that something is actually going to work well enough when handed over to the government?
Mob rule doesn't with very well as a defacto government, or oligarchy. Nor food and drug safety or national defense. Some things just have to be tackled by society as a larger group. Ideally as locally as possible, but not so locally that minorities are crushed or rule becomes petty and micromanaged.
Only if "following this logic" means "extrapolate to an unreasonable extreme." Compare:
1. "Just eat healthy food and you'll be healthy!"
2. "Yes, but [things are complex]"
3. "Following that logic, we should just eat trash."
Of course, that doesn't mean we can't do better and shouldn't.
But we do need to compare "How things have been for all of human history" to "How we do things now", and see that our modern democracies show immense restraint and a lack of malfeasance, compared to how they've been used in the past.
I feel that people view how the world is today, through such a restricted world view. Where the history of how things were, and the immense and great and incredible progress we've made, is thrown aside because "Oh bad thing happened!", and therefore "The entire West is completely corrupt and everything sucks and we should rip it all down because it's bad".
One only need take a tour around the rest of the world. To compare our militaries to those in non-democratic nations. To how those leaders act, in reality, compared to our leaders. Even the current US admin looks good, comparatively. And yes, I know that's saying a lot.
Are you serious?
During the Vietnam War era, the US dropped over 7.5 million tons of ordnance across Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia, which is more than double the tonnage dropped in all of WW2. In rural parts of Laos and Cambodia, unexploded ordinance is still a daily threat to people. 50 years on.
As for raping and pillaging: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rape_during_the_Vietnam_War
> To compare our militaries to those in non-democratic nations. To how those leaders act, in reality, compared to our leaders. Even the current US admin looks good, comparatively.
When I see comments like this, I want to believe that it's not real but sadly, I suspect you really believe this.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viet_Cong_and_People%27s_Army_...
The opposing party in the Vietnam war was far worse than the US on a moral level, before, during and after the war. And it wasn't a small difference. We're talking about democracy and democratically selecting laws here? Well: the large majority of the population in Vietnam, including in the North, wanted the US to defeat the Vietcong and the Soviets.
The 1954 Geneva Accords, which ended the French war, called for nationwide reunification elections by July 1956. Those elections never happened. Ngo Dinh Diem, the US-backed first president of South Vietnam who was a brutal authoritarian, refused to hold them. The US backed his refusal and kept backing him afterward.
In Eisenhower's 1963 memoir, he wrote that everyone knowledgeable he'd spoken to believed Ho Chi Minh would have taken around 80% percent of the vote if elections had happened.
The Vietnamese didn't really care about the Soviets. They are a fiercely independent and proud people with a long history of defending themselves against foreign interlopers and aggressors.
So let me restate your asinine and totally inaccurate conclusion:
The large majority of the population in Vietnam, in both the North and the South, didn't want a foreign power controlling their country and determining their fate. They wanted to run their own country, and have peace.
And yet, the poster you're replying to said no such thing. Not even close. They merely said they wanted help repelling an enemy. You're also using hindsight to frame this conflict, something entirely unfair to the people involved at the time.
The US repeatedly tried to get out of that war. Multiple times. They just kept getting pulled back in.
edit
--
Re your response. Were they ordered to rape and pillage by their full chain of command?
Or were they acting illegally, regardless of the outcome?
Would a military in a dictatorship have deemed that "illegal"? What about 200 years ago? 1000?
You seem to be ignoring the concept of comparables. And taking acts that the military itself teaches its own soldiers, was wrong.
It's good to have principles. And good to defend them. But if you ignore what others are saying, and the context of their words, you start to slide into zealoty.
Millions upon millions of people around the world protested the Vietnam War, including millions of people in the US.
On one day alone, an estimated 2+ million Americans participated in anti-war protests. Over 500,000 men were officially categorized as draft dodgers, more than 200,000 charged with violating the Selective Service Act and millions more found a way not to go to Vietnam through deferments and exemptions.
It's both amusing and sad that there are some people (like you) who 50 years later can't see what was apparent to so many people at the time.
> The US repeatedly tried to get out of that war. Multiple times. They just kept getting pulled back in.
That's right. Those pesky Vietnamese villagers just wouldn't let American GIs stop torching their villages, gang-raping their women and children, and executing them. The American military was trying to leave but spreading democracy demanded sacrifice.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/My_Lai_massacre
"The opposing party in the Vietnam war was far worse than the US on a moral level, before, during and after the war. And it wasn't a small difference. We're talking about democracy and democratically selecting laws here? Well: the large majority of the population in Vietnam, including in the North, wanted the US to defeat the Vietcong and the Soviets."
None of anything you guys have said even attempts to dispute that. The Vietnamese did not want Vietcong rule. Not in the North, not in the South. And that this shamed (or whatever your claim is) some ideology, probably your ideology, does not change that. The Vietcong "had to" do incredibly cruel and horrible things to force the loyalty of citizens. They emptied orphanages, executing kids and even babies, in the middle of the street, slowly, one by one, to "ensure loyalty". That is who you're dealing with here. This goes for A LOT of the parties that socialism supported, especially in Asia. And elsewhere. Socialism has always been enforced by terror, from the red terror in Russia to China's Public Security Bureaus.
You might be right that that does not make the other side 100% good. But you should not get confused. Comparing US, including all the atrocities it committed, to the Vietcong? No sane person has to think even 1 second about that comparison: USA! USA! USA! I certainly do not always agree with what the US government does, the more recent the actions, the less I agree, but that does not bring it even close to the level of the Vietcong.
And that this does not fit your ideology? Tough. Was USA behavior very inconvenient, even unfair, to the people executing children? You know perfectly well how sorry you should feel about that.
But we all know: that's just not what you care about.
And then you said "USA! USA! USA!" ... what in the actual fuck are you trying to achieve with that?
"Was USA behavior very inconvenient" - inconvenient? Inconvenient for the people of El Salvador to have roaming contras, funded and trained in the USA terrorizing the countryside and killing hundreds of thousands of people, mostly innocent civilians. You sure do have a way with words. But by all means, "USA!".
If you read carefully, when pulled into deeper nuance, I'm consistently discussing what is legal behaviour for that military. Yes, there is a difference between "that military itself calls that act illegal" and "that military says it's OK to engage in that act". A massive difference.
And at no point did I lump all "modern militaries" together. In fact I specifically talked about democracies vs dictatorships in modern times, too.
So you're confusing "modern militaries rape and pillage" with "militaries' members rarely perform ilegal acts, and rape and pillage".
Or are you trying to claim it's standing, legal, normal operating procedure for the US military to rape? Are you?
Because with the framing you're using, that's what you're apparently trying to build here.
After all, you're trying to find and hold up the worst the US has done, right? So to compare, you need to find the worst in modern militaries. In militaries of all time. That was what I discussed, after all.
I was quite clear. Compare to all of history. Compare to all militaries today.
Instead you grab at part of an action, and hold it up, without making that comparison. Still.
As a Canadian who has had your current ridiculous president state that we should be the 51st state, and belittled us by calling our Prime Ministers "Governors"? Who has talked about unilaterally redrawing borders? As a Canadian who has considered how I may have to one day slaughter Americans crossing our border? How I may have to look my brothers in the eye, and kill them? I still say that the US military has been a shining light for freedom around the world. If I can remain impartial, then surely you can.
I also say that about police officers in the West, including the US.
Are there bad actions taken by police departments? By individual officers? By groups of officers, over the last decades? YES! Yes, most assuredly.
Now compare the overall score with police in totalitarian regimes.
Comparison is vital, important, key, and any finger pointing has to be in context.
And also note, I said "yes we must do better".
But if you think the US military is evil, then you have never seen evil. Ever.
https://www.vanityfair.com/news/photos/2006/08/nachtwey_phot...
It takes a lot to get me to want to say something very nasty to a person but you, sir, would deserve it.
Sort of like when military units go out of bounds, or the police?
Back to the point, have you yet made the comparisons I mentioned?
Now ask yourself which government is currently bombing another country over one man's ego (or due to blackmail by an "ally"), and whether they're on that list, and whether the literal thousands of people killed are just acceptable sacrifices to maintain someone's worldview about 'the good guys'?
I've written about this in other comments over the last couple of years, but the root of all of this is quite simply, foreign interference. We all remember Cambridge Analytica, its interference in democratic elections in the West, and even how it caused a few regimes to topple in the 3rd world. It's machinations and manipulation of curated news stories was quite simplistic and minor compared to where we sit now.
You simply cannot have a high-trust, well functioning democracy, if 99% of the stuff recommended to you is entirely fabricated nonsense. Worse, if it purposely fabricated to create as much social unrest as possible, and doubly worse if it becomes curated to each person and created and generated on demand.
CA managed this by having a sloth of "different archetypes" for its 100 or so altered news stories per topic. If you were a left wing shopkeep, or a right wing car salesperson, or anything else, you'd be slotted into one of these 100 version of the precise same news story, and fed the best lies to make you do as the payee requested.
Modern AI means this can be far more fine tuned. And algorithms can be gamed, just as CA gamed them with support of Facebook's APIs.
So my point here is twofold. First that government moves slow. What we're seeing now, is the result of CA a decade ago. Really, two election cycles, with senatorial and congressional committees and debates during that time.
And second is that things will not continue as they are now. Nothing you, or I, or anyone does will result in an unchanged Internet. From the perspective of lawmakers, and really a lot of the public, the "world wide" Internet is really only used by "The Rest of the World" to attack us. Attack water plants, hospitals, meat packing plants, nuclear reactors, and beyond that, to manipulate our children into thinking Western Democracy is vile and malign in various ways.
Now of course, there's no reason for most of those things to be on the Internet at all. But the manipulation of adults and children in our society just isn't going to wash. In days gone by, you'd see each community with police informants, not the sort in cop movies where the guy was crooked, but instead actual cities who would keep an eye out, and inform if someone planned something against the state. Pretty much every pub had one in the UK, for example.
Heck, when I was a teenager in Canada, one of my friends had a plan to become an officer. Part of this path was reporting on everything he heard at local parties, of an untoward nature. It's how misinformation campaigns used to be curtailed, stopped, dealt with.
Yet suddenly we presume that the average person, and average kid is going to just deal with misinformation. And bizarrely so, compared to misinformation in a pub, we let people get siloed so every single thing they read and see says the same lie.
How can an average person ever stand again absurdities, if from their perspective everything they can see around them says it is true?
So back to the start? The above, correctly assessed or not, is what the politicians and police and agencies view as happening in the West. And while there are multiple ways to deal with this, their stance is "Why are you afraid of putting your name on your words?".
If we want something other than all the bills being proposed, and all the change coming, we as a tech community need to provide a path to end all anonymity on the internet, in the least privacy reducing way possible. And there are some ways to do so. They've been discussed. But if we don't provide such a method, and drive this conversation, you know who will?
Politicians, with no technical capability at all. The average Joe, scared for his country and family.
Try to fight those two types of people, and you will lose every single time.
So my recommend is, everyone needs to stop bellyaching, suck up to the harsh realities here, and take this massive, unstoppable river, and redirect it by a few degrees so that the best-case is achieved.
Or perhaps you’re not actually following the logic but rather an oversimplified characterization of it?
Or are you suggesting these would turn as problematic as zero-privacy surveillance systems in case the government becomes totalitarian?
It's funny because this is exactly the opposite of what actually happened. Mafias are the reaction to the "unification" of Italy, and they almost all come from the previous governments that existed before unification. Northern Italy conquered the south and defeated all the little states there ... and then levied taxes and did not much else. Specifically they did not provide policing, and very few public services.
And then the remnants of the old governments stepped in, provided public services, security on the streets and "pressured" people into paying a second tax. Now you can say that they were almost-feudal governments and therefore defended and enforced the law of large landowners but that wasn't seen as a problem ... because that's how it had always been.
The reason for their success, their initial success at least, is that, first, when Italy was young, it left citizens to their fate, suppressing dissent, stationing small forces in most of Italy that abused locals, were extremely corrupt and did little else. What is generally blamed for their later reputation is that the mafias started using their power more and more for their own purposes, irrespective of cost, while the mafias also pressured the centralized state to do the opposite.
Especially early on it's very hard to pick "the right" side in the war on mafias. In the beginning people saw the mafias as the good guys, and with good reason. Over time mafias became worse and the central state became better, but honestly, the central state wasn't particularly good for people either (in fact it still can be improved quite a bit)
That's because people aren't recognizing me as their benevolent god-emperor yet.
Not possible. You can strengthen defenses but you cannot guarantee it can withstand any possible, dynamic and adaptive attack strategies.
So what you say is impossible to do.
A LOT of damage is done that way.
Hilariously, even the baroness cited in the article believes it's extremism. I've even seen her defend privacy and VPNs. She claims she's backing deanonymization because nobody is doing anything else. The ones who want a surveillance state are only too happy to oblige.
Balance is expecting parents to actually parent their children instead of offloading all the responsibility to the state.
Either you participate and help drive privacy preserving methods to solve the problems, or someone else will solve it in a way less desirable to you.
You just posted the answer:
> Especially when there are very obvious and tangible harms from modern social media.
The addictive and manipulative dark patterns of the big techs are harmful and should be banned straight up for everyone. No need to spare the children and let adults get abused. No need to verify age at all.
So why don't we just ban it? Because that'd eat into profits so much it could actually kill their business models.
All this "children" bullshit is just them trying to preserve their business models. It's them saying "year we're harmful and addictive and gambling tier but look we're adult only now". This is why Meta's among the corporations lobbying for this stuff.
Manipulation stops working when the other party is aware of it. Bring their manipulation out into the light.
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.
For parents who are genuinely concerned about child safety, you are being used to push an agenda. If we want to solve the digital parenting problem, we have to understand how the problem came to be in the first place and why there isn't a good solution at the moment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49118578
Of course, it's well-established that human beings are capable of making stuff up, and you can claim to be whatever age, but that's not the point.
This makes very little sense. People sometimes appeal to the safety of children cynically, but it's very often sincere, since parents genuinely do worry a lot about their kids.
You can tell people to ignore these appeals, but it won't work, and you'll be leaving better arguments on the table.
When a politician is worried about your kids, you should be worried about your rights and freedoms. Not only for your own sake but for your kids too!
What rights and freedoms should I worry about when a politician wants to make sure my child is fed by supporting food stamp programs or free hot lunches at school?
The idea that any attempt to help a child is inherently suspect honestly says something distrubing about your own worldview. You can't imagine someone genuinely caring for a child that isn't there own?
The “Welfare State” is nothing but modern share cropping from the party of Jim Crow.
That it destroyed black families (among others) is merely happenstance rather than intentional racism — stemming from the overall failure of technocratic managerialism.
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/UPxpKe4N8b8
Embellished: marriage rates are 33.8% for Black women and 37.8% for Black men, neither of which I would round to 25%.
Uncorrelated: marriage rates dropped sharply among people of all single races on the Census except for Asians. It has dropped more sharply for Black respondents, but anything disproportionately affecting the lower and middle economic classes would disproportionately affect Black families.
Show me some data, and not outdated welfare policies from the 1980s, that supports the "social engineers" causal narrative better than plain deindustrialization. Or deindustrialization combined with good old American racism and mass incarceration. I am willing to change my position on this.
1: https://usafacts.org/articles/state-relationships-marriages-...
You can see the collapse of black marriages started earlier and is steeper than other demographics — though eventually white marriages enter a similar decline, along with Hispanic marriages. (Asians hold roughly equal.)
This strongly suggests the effect is correlated with poverty and not race — especially with the white effect starting during the collapse of US manufacturing.
But if we agree the correlation is with poverty you haven't refuted my point — as welfare is a strong incentive structure on those experiencing poverty. That chart is perfectly consistent with what I said.
So your criticism is wrong at two levels:
- you didn’t even discuss the correct time period
- you showed data consistent with my claim
I just said the opposite. I can imagine many people genuinely caring for a child that isn’t their own.
I am skeptical when a politician who does not know my children claims to care about them.
To borrow an LLMism: It’s not cynicism, it’s the reality of history. We the people have been duped many times over. Caveat Emptor.
Sure, but limited to "family and friends". Following that up with "who does not know my children" indicates you clearly view empathy as extending to merely one's personal relationships and you seemingly can't imagine caring for a stranger's child. I'll grant you cyncism is not the correct description of that worldview, but I stick by the general label of disturbing.
If you’d stop straw-manning me for a moment you might notice you still misunderstand my point.
I do believe we should allow for a lot more nuance in our political opinions and avoid most statements that can be made in the constraints of a short comment on social media.
I work with those politicians. They have kids too and they are just as susceptible to media/propaganda/fearmongering as you are. However, unlike you and I, they can do something (usually wrong) about it.
I didn’t take a position on the argument. I pointed out a distinction.
At least that's the anti-AB1043 logic. AB1043 says every phone must have a child safety lock.
We live in a society, you wouldn't be on HN otherwise.
There is direct evidence from trials, in which Meta researchers told executives that features like infinite scroll and others “ are inherently at odds with well-being”
There is no effective fight for freedom if there is no effective understanding of the politics and social forces driving change.
The freedom of the internet in the 90s was in itself a social revolution, not just a technological one.
Fighting for a status quo that didn’t work for children and even for many adults is a losing fight.
Fighting for privacy and against ad tech, and against addictive design features for all users is a far stronger fight.
The internet was a magical thing when it was introduced to society at large. However this is NOT the same era.
If we are fighting for privacy and freedom, then why the heck is ad tech still allowed to be accepted as part of this conversation? If we are talking about freedoms, this is one of the greatest moments to say lets not sacrifice any privacy at all in the first place?
There is no functional and effective defense of our values if people are showing up to argue what they feel like fighting, instead of where the challenges actually are.
Other than that I would agree.
Completely agree. Adtech, most of big tech in general, is harmful, and is pushing these panopticon solutions to preserve their own existence and profits. We should treat the root cause.
That's not what he said.
He said:
> Meta researchers told executives that features like infinite scroll and others “ are inherently at odds with well-being"
> Fighting for a status quo that didn’t work for children and even for many adults is a losing fight.
By "status quo" he means the exploitative and addictive business models of big tech.
Why are we bending over backwards to preserve big tech profits?
That's what all of this is. It's big tech lobbying for draconian laws that "solve" the problem in a way that simultaneously preserves their business models. It's big tech saying "sure it's harmful and addictive but look it's adult only now!"
Which is of course total bullshit. Their "get people addicted" business models are the root cause, and "kids are harmed" is merely a symptom of the problem.
Treat the root cause by wiping out their harmful business models.
Incidentally, that was the conclusion:
> Fighting for privacy and against ad tech, and against addictive design features for all users is a far stronger fight.
The problem is that those laws are NOT designed to protect children, and the people who convince politicians and the public to support them are NOT doing so out of genuine concern to protect children.
The real, underlying reason why they are being pushed for so hard is to destroy privacy and control people which is going to make everyone but the elite less safe, children included.
Especially if and when we get another Nazi Germany type regime and realize that - oh shit, they have 24/7 overview of where every single person in the world is, what they do, what they think, what their worldviews and identities are.
It's impossible for any of this to end well.
That one can get deep really quick.
Should that argument be ignored too?
Any argument with such blatant oversimplifications is almost certainly lacking in nuance and can be ignored and dismissed.
I get what you’re pointing at: politicians regularly abuse these arguments, but that doesn’t mean it’s 100% of all arguments involving children.
Then watch as they accuse you of supporting pedophilia.
Now if they are clearly acting in bad faith, then absolutely it's not worth treating that as a legitimate discussion. Now it's "kids", but yesterday it was "terrorists", way back it was "heretics" - there's always a magical word that ill intentioned people will use to bludgeon you with. But you shouldn't let them erase your ability to have honest discussions.
Then let's sharpen the statement.
"Anyone who brings up kids is either trying to manipulate you or is a useful idiot for the manipulators."
> But you shouldn't let them erase your ability to have honest discussions.
Tell that to them, not me. I've found that I'm perfectly capable of having honest discussions about pretty much any topic, no matter how controversial, except this.
When children are involved, even perfectly well intentioned people get whipped up into an emotional frenzy and are ready to double down on literally any half baked "solution" to whatever problem is placed in front of them. They cannot be argued out of such a state, and will lash out at anyone who tries. Your "heretic" comparison is apt.
So say a school administrator has a meeting to discuss the pro's and con's of AI in their school - in good faith, honestly wanting to explore the issues. Then they're automatically bad because they're talking about kids?
I don't buy it. I get what you're saying about it being a political 3rd rail, but that doesn't mean anyone who mentions kids is automatically a bad actor. What a cynical and thought-preventing thing to say.
I think you're someone who says things that are so devoid of nuance that I would say you're not worth having a conversation with.
These are NGOs not parents. And "child safety" is often a euphemism. The point is it's hard to argue against child safety. For example, if opaque NGOs demand deanonymization to stop CSAM, I am assuming most people would not want to seem like they are in favor of CSAM. So you need an organized effort to argue in favor of privacy and even then anyone who does it can easily be smeared as a CSAM user. So child safety can backdoor something else.
"The government says all children need to be vaccinated in order to be safe"
I'm not saying these arguments are equivalent, but they seem equivalent because they induce the same feeling of loss of agency. And one cannot simply ignore and dismiss something like this.
That's exactly what this is.
They want to build an internet where it is structurally impossible for children to be harmed in any way.
This requires the destruction of the very concept of agency. You can't just do things. You need government approval.
You do have to take enforcement into account when evaluating these laws. Some HNers interpret this as you go to jail for not scanning an ID (which makes sense to programmers because it's a simple if/then), but most of them are actually written as product safety laws, so the government can order you to comply or take your product off the market.
Require age verification. Kids lie and claim they are 18.
Require better age verification, implemented at the operating system level so that only the parent's administrator account can override it. Kids install a live Linux operating system on a USB drive and boot it, and now they have full access to the web.
Require computers to be cryptographically locked down so that only approved child-protecting operating systems may ever run. For the sake of the kids.
Computing freedom has now been destroyed. It is now structurally impossible for you to be free. It's not your computer anymore, it's the government's, and you better believe they are going to do a lot more than just prevent kids from accessing harmful content.
Not just for the war on anonymity. NGOs, often funded by government money (so missing two third of their name), have unified on other topics.
One example that comes to mind is teaming up to organize the biggest influx of migrants into the EU following the arab spring movements: there have been hidden camera recording NGO employees explaining how to dodge controls, how to answer questions (by lying), and they've been actively helping sneaking people illegally in the EU.
A good question one could ask itself before downvoting me is this: if it's a fact that NGOs are teaming up, worldwide, to lie using the rethoric of "child safety" [1]... On which other topics did NGOs lie?
Or are we to believe all NGOs are good and well-meaning, except those working to end anonymity?
And before I forget: in Africa for example it's fully well known that NGO typical means "DGSE":
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Directorate_General_for_Extern...
There are french "doctors" in some of those NGOs who know less about medicine than what I know about medicine by having ex-girlfriends that were doctors.
By squinting one's eye just a little it look like NGO is not that far from a synonym of "shady undercover gov op".
And btw why should any of my taxpayers dollars go to even a single NGO if it's non-governmental?
And another big one: while some of those NGOs have been hard at work passing legislation which as a a result gets people arrested for "hate speech" (or even just for saying "christian prayers in their heads") in the UK, other NGOs are even harder at work making sure that the absolute most horrible of all hate speech cannot ever be criticized "because it's religious".
The double standards are literally insane.
If I was in the UK, I'd GTFO. And not to the EU.
[1] speaking of which, btw, there are serious allegations about NGOs participating in child trafficking, for example in the Haiti SNAFU
Where would you go?
The immediate reply is the accusational: "why are you trying to trying to prevent safety for kids".
It's a simple next step to accuse you of hiding your own child abuse ring.
This sounds like hype, but it's the normal path here in Australian.
You don't argue with these people. You summarily dismiss them. You recognize the game they are playing and you refuse to play it.
Call attention to their methods instead: they are exploiting and weaponizing children to push their big tech friendly surveillance agenda.
Whether individuals inside the system are true believers or cynical operators, the response to calling out their methods will be identical:
If they genuinely believe the rhetoric: They will simply double down and say, 'Yes, and protecting the children makes this absolutely necessary.'
If they know it is a manipulation tactic: They will still reply with, 'It is for the children,' because they know it is an impenetrable PR shield that gets them their way.
In either scenario, the bureaucracy is entirely immune to the criticism.
Exposing the game might help persuade third-party observers, but it does absolutely nothing to stop the bureaucratic machine from using that exact same line to steamroll the agenda forward.
Will you allow an argument against this?
I mean, I want to show an example where it is only a problem when someone else is not as convinced as yourself, one way or the other.
>so the way to refute is to ask for proof..
No use. The same proof will not be convincing for everyone. Let us take vaccine. The proof for a Vaccine for X saving Y lives is often the following.
"Before the vaccine there was Y deaths per year from X. But after vaccines there is zero deaths from X".
The implication is that vaccines saved X lives. This could convince most of the people. But someone can ask. Are those kids who are not dying of X (thanks to the vaccine), are dying of something else?
Now the picture is not so clear.
See, same data, different results depending on how deep you want to probe,
Why is it not so clear? If they are not dying of X then the vaccine did the job and technically saved the kid’s life from dying of X. Notice that it doesn’t mean that they can’t die of other things.
But that is one less death from X, and one death less that the vaccine can claim credit to, but in the larger picture, the vaccine did not save a life.
So the point being 1000 deaths from X to 0 deaths from X does not necessary mean X lives saved.
Yes, this statement is a non-sequitur. A vaccine preventing death from X does not prevent a death from other causes. That doesn’t mean X isn’t effective.
No one said it. Don't put words in my mouth.
> The implication is that vaccines saved X lives. This could convince most of the people. But someone can ask. Are those kids who are not dying of X (thanks to the vaccine), are dying of something else?
To me it assumes mutual exclusivity between not dying of X and dying of something else, but perhaps my bias is showing.
But it still shows up as a life saved by the vaccine (because it prevented a specific disease incidence). That is misleading.
This can be made very clear by taking a small example. Imagine there is an island with a population of 100. Among these 50 are very weak. And every year, these 50 die due to various illness. And among these 50 deaths, 30 are caused by X.
So in order to save these 30 deaths, the government started vaccinating against X. The next year there is zero deaths due to X. But there were still 50 deaths in total that year too. Only that the 30 lives that used to be claimed by X, is now claimed by A, B and C (they are so weak that they will succumb to any infection).
This is not an unrealistic scenario. If you have a weak immune system, any minor infection could end up fatal. The only unrealistic thing in this story is the occurance of constant 50 people who have weak immune system every year. But that does not void the point.
So while the vaccine prevented disease incidence, it did not prevent any deaths.
So it will most likely happen especially because you are certainly right, in part, that no government has ever said no to actions that'd give them more power, let alone ones that are widely supported. But the point of this is that rather than having this as some sort of red-line no, I think it'd be much more pragmatic to try to argue for identity verification regulations that would be most palatable.
[1] - https://yougov.com/en-gb/articles/54969-eight-in-ten-parents...
Conversations where the root submission talks about failures at social media firms and the evidence of harms, or evidence from trials.
Conversations on the attacks against freedom and privacy.
I see very little hope that an actual rebuttal or alternative to the desire to muzzle tech will be forged, because the two conversation streams seem to rarely intersect.
We are not in the 90s anymore. Tech as most people experience it is not the new new thing, and most parents are tired of tech. A more recent pew survey showed that nearly half of teens think that social media is bad for teens. We know that Meta went ahead with features even after their own internal research told them it was bad for teen mental health.
How in hell, is there any effective response created, if the social pressure parents and children are driving, is being dismissed as a conspiracy?
This should be the time that the business models and incentives that allow loot boxes and addicting design mechanisms should be discussed.
There needs to be an actual solution that addresses the issues users are facing, or else they are simply going to choose to sacrifice freedoms for the hope of gaining some control.
There's also the typical image crafting stuff that drives envy, insecurity, and so on - kids aren't sharing when they eat left overs mashed up in a bowl, but they are sharing when they go eat at an expensive steak restaurant. That bias already significantly affects adults perceptions of others' life/lifestyle, let alone children. And even without 'the algorithm', there's going to be FOMO and the general addictiveness of updates that's going to leave kids as zombies to their phones rather than interacting with each other as much in real life.
So I'm not really sure it's viable to try to 'fix' social media. You can certainly make it better than it currently is, but I think the issue is that we have horrible companies managing a horrible product.
That argument loses you most of the population in a vote, myself included. Parents may disagree, for a start; I reckon most women (especially outside of tech) read that and mark you down as "creepy man I don't want near kids".
It's also wrong, as there are lots of rules that are in fact designed to protect children. I recommend reading up on the history of child abuse in the Boy Scouts of America (now Scouts BSA), FBI agent Kenneth Lanning's investigation, and the safeguarding and leadership training that scout leaders must take today.
The UK has a system, I think it's called the DBS, which depending on the level of check ranges from "is this person a convicted sex offender?" to "non-crime hate incidents". One can argue a lot about what the correct level should be, no-one has yet convincingly explained to me why specifically "non-crime" actions should be in a secret police record. But I am on board with someone convicted by a court for child sex offences not being allowed to become a schoolteacher.
These people are the enemy, they are smart and resourceful and they have managed to do the unthinkable - convince 2 of the most pro-free-speech nations in the history of the world to start censoring the internet. The idea that I would ever need a VPN to view adult content in the UK would have been laughable 5 years ago and now it's a fact that puts us in the same basket as literal authoritarian hell holes.
I guarantee they will come for the VPNs, that is 100% certain, these traitors will stop at nothing. Only Luigi can save us.
If it actually did anything to protect the children it wouldn’t be so objectionable
And that report has further driven the narrative online that it is solely an immigrant problem.
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.
You’ll also notice that Anduril is quickly being accepted now that we’re expending munitions faster than our replacement rate.
Put in a less polite way, they're preparing for the metaphorical pitchforks and torches held by mobs of the common people which might manifest themselves in a more kinetic format.
Military's, intelligence agencies and actuaries have been warning about this for decades now and their language is getting very direct on this and the time lines nowadays.
If you have ever been caught in a rip while swimming, there is a moment when you suddenly getting a sucking sensation as you transition from stable waters into an outward flow. I am starting to think we are in that transitional phase on global stability, that the 2030's are not going to be a comfortable time for many.
They are ensuring that potential disruptors can be reigned in if needed. To try and stop things from being even more unpredictable, for better or worse. Buckle up.
You don't build long term surveillance systems and billionaires don't build bunkers for what they think of as a temporary tough situation.
They also pass my personal test of not advocating for dumb feel-good ideas. Recently they published a well-sourced article on why the US rail system isn’t a good candidate for electrification.
https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/
Was all about just doing the math on energy transitions. He wasn't anti renewable technology but did want to point out how scale is a problem that few understand.
My favorite number of his is, that at 3% growth year over year, we would need all the energy of the Milky way galaxy by the year 13,000. As the galaxy is 100,000 light years across, this would defy physics itself.
I really wish I had kept all the others from the US, Europe, Aus/NZ etc. It is a very common theme but they are largely kept quiet and only typically (partially) released through freedom of information requests.
This one from Actuaries UK was one that set off alarm bells. As they advise the insurance industry, they are structured to be politically neutral. The key takeaway is the impacts of 3c temperature rise by 2050 on page 9. The reason this is an issue, we are currently on target to hit that with us likely to pass 2c mid next decade with the rate of warming increasing.
https://actuaries.org.uk/media/r3cporjb/planetary-solvency-c...
This one from the UK government is all about addressing national security regarding this issue. Typically they are advising that they secure their food supplies and hardened up boarders in the next 5 years. Funnily enough Brexit may have given them the power to enforce this much more than they would have otherwise had. But that just means they have built a unique flavor of oppression.
https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/nature-security-a...
I have said it for years now about a lot of countries. They will welcome immigrants with open arms, those arms being machine guns, rockets and drones.
And the "memory shortage" is a byproduct of the AI datacenter bubble. Which is a disaster that will crash the economy.
And regardless of the causes of the memory shortage, there is indeed a shortage, which will hopefully help to prevent the mass deployment of drones here at home.
"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"
A cursory google suggests that the return-to-office movement is primarily driven by management's desire for voluntary turnover, avoiding the bad press of mass layoffs. But certainly doesn't show that it's 'been debunked 100 times'.
In my own experience, it's been 50/50 a desire for voluntary turnover, and also a control tactic. Employees are easier to strong-arm when they're immersed in the idea that company culture actually matters.
I haven't come across much of the debunking of the commercial property issue. I would say it's undeniably factor, but we can argue about the scale.
A total of $800 billion—in real terms—of value is at stake by 2030, and, on average, the total value of office space is expected to decline by 26 percent from 2019 to 2030.
https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/real-estate/our-insights...
I think those kinds of numbers can have more fundamental implications.
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).
Corporations all over the world routinely and knowingly poison, injure, or outright murder their employees and their customers. They spend massive amounts of money preventing the public from knowing about the harms they are causing. Even in the most egregious cases where there is well documented proof of what they've done the heads of these companies still get away with it. They profit from it. They're just happily living their lives in their mansions and on their yachts while graves are dug and families are torn apart.
Government violence is different though. When the government acts against the public they are generally required to follow long and complex procedures with multiple points of checks and accountability. A cop has to get enough evidence to convince a judge to issue an arrest warrant. A person is taken into custody and given access to a lawyer. A trial is held in court with a jury. At every step there are volumes of records detailing exactly what was done, by whom, and why. All of that information is public record and we can request those records to keep watch on what the government does. If the government abuses the power we give them we can vote them out of office and replace them.
Obviously there are a lot of problems with our legal system and places where all of that breaks down, but the goal was for there to be transparency and accountability and nothing stops us from improving the situation. With corporations on the other hand, they act in secret, they don't have to ask anyone for permission, they aren't required to keep records of everything they do, you have no legal right to examine the records they have, and even if you find out a CEO is responsible for murdering a bunch of people for profit you have no power to vote that CEO out of office.
It's pretty clear which of whose two entities is the larger threat. Which one of them has already repeatedly poisoned you and your entire family. Which one do you think was responsible for more violence done to your loved ones?
The end results is they are two sides of the same coin but with very different mechanics. Neither should be accepted.
It is absolutely failing of the government and the American legal system that nobody spent time in prison for Purdue's lies and poison, we're in full agreement there.
That said, this position alone doesn't suggest that otherwise law-abiding citizens should be more concerned about corporate surveillance than they are government surveillance.
It wasn't until the current administration that the US government handed over the people's most sensitive private data in bulk to private corporations in exchange for bribes.
Privacy doomerism is a form of complicity.
Governments want control, Companies want money. Control typically comes from a reduction in rights, freedoms, money. When you fail to give those up "naturally" violence, worsened living conditions and abuse are the tools used.
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?
edit: sp
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.
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.
Parents do not have the time or energy to configure modern parental controls which work more like tuning firewall rules.
The other part of the problem is you need collective action, if you ban your child from Facebook, they won’t get invited to parties anymore. If all children get banned, the parties will be arranged over sms or some other non social media. As it is today, banning your kids from social media is overly punishing since all the other kids are using it.
If we actually cared about supporting children and parents as a country, parental controls and access, and making sure that systems were actually safe and protected privacy, would NOT be an afterthought.
The polling I have seen from Germany and Australia of a social media ban for children was quite in favor of it. Sentiment here on HN and on Reddit was the polar opposite. We are in a bubble.
I'm not trying to call everyone else voting for these things dumb, but does the average person who doesn't think about this stuff for a living actually know what they're voting for?
The answer every time is “well then Google/Apple/Facebook/Shopify/mcMaster Carr shouldn’t exist as a business” and if I’m being honest that is not an achievable target so you’re going to arrive at the attested internet.
Why would you think that? Most of my friends are parents now and all of them are quite concerned about the effect of social media, phones, and technology more broadly.
Basically all of them are planning to delay exposing their kids to phones and screens for as long as possible.
The sentiment of "keep my kids safe on the internet" definitely comes from parents. Yes. We agree.
How we actually get there in a privacy-respecting way is the issue.
If we must have something, I’m in favor of the OS-level flag where a parent can set the device as belonging to a minor and the apps and browser can receive the flag. Lock it behind the most basic parental controls that can be protected and remotely monitored. There are some loopholes with kids downloading apps that allow custom web requests without the flag being sent, so there probably needs to be an app allowlist or special App Store category to match.
Carve out some legal exemptions for Linux distributions that no kids are using and leave it to the iOS, Android, Windows, and Macs of the world. Any parent who doesn’t like the idea doesn’t have to enable it on their kids’ devices.
Parental controls already exist. Lawmakers want to step in and parent peoples' kids for them by removing these freedoms from everyone.
What a fucking stupid, impossible, idea.
Like, explain to me how you think this could be done meaningfully other than some setting that can just be arbitrarily flipped without adding massive complexity.
And arbitrarily changed? Can a regular user arbitrarily change the super user password?
This is literally already the law in California and Illinois.
Please read my full comment before jumping to respond.
There is a really good way to do this that solves most concerns: https://blog.google/innovation-and-ai/technology/safety-secu...
The only real downside to this is that a 0kp cannot be reliably tied to an identity of the person using the device and thus tickets could be proxied/shared around with semi technical tools (and/or an ai agent tasked with creating a proxy). This really isn't solvable without device-level attestation[0], as if a website needs to reliably say "this person is actually this person" then it needs all pieces of data itself.
This could be solved by adding in a still privacy-preserving step like "The device is doing periodic face id scans and matching them to an identity, and constantly renews/re-presents to the age assurance consumer", but that has its own drawbacks[0].
0: Namely, lock in to devices that can do this, and that includes basically guaranteeing a double digit percentage of adult humans would not have access due to their device being old, unsupported, missing the hardware, etc. And with so many humans excluded, you would not have mass adoption. Probably also excludes rooted devices if we bring in attestation of unmodified software.
The unspoken part of this requirement is that websites would have to block users who aren’t connecting via one of these attested, verified, locked down devices.
There is the obvious loophole that using a VPN to a country without these requirements would circumvent it. That’s how kids are already circumventing age restrictions in places like Australia and it’s why the UK has taken an interest in attacking VPNs.
The alternative is what we're getting right now: laws that require verifying ID documents, often in ways that restrict even the notion of maintaining the user's privacy. Attestation might be an "OK" to "good" solution while this is between bad and really bad.
There is no form of digital ID that isn't evil, but anything requiring attestation is super evil.
Old hardware will have to be grandfathered. Old cars don't track us and that has created a market for old cars.
Hardware age attestation will be a long timeframe project. The current work should be towards standards that can get us there.
Finally, anonymity didn't exist for my grandparents. It won't exist for my grandchildren.
Unfortunately it's so much easier for lawmakers to slap down a law that says "you must verify IDs right now if you want to continue to exist" with no requirement, and often not even support for, privacy preserving ways to make this happen. The laws are happening now. The chance of reform to align with a privacy-preserving option once the laws are implemented is slim to none.
Your grandparents could walk to the next town over and give themselves a different name and nobody would ever know who they were. They could get a job, be paid in cash, and deposit that money in a bank account with no KYC. They could drop a letter in a public mailbox without a return address, or put up posters at night, or make phone calls from public telephones. Nobody would know who did it, and there would be no surveillance footage to review after the fact, no digital footprint to trace. They could write a letter to their local newspaper to be printed with a fake name, or publish a book or story or magazine under an assumed identity. There were no ALPRs, no automated facial recognition, no built-in vehicle telematics, no drones, no smartphones to track anyone’s movement, no doorbell cameras on every block, no video tapes, no serial numbers hidden in the printouts from copy machines, no DNA analysis, no databases instantly searchable with the click of a button.
Feel free to make a value judgement about whether what we have now is better or worse than the past, if you want, but don’t invent history to rationalise it. The internet did not invent anonymity. It used to be the default.
The life sum of data about my grandfather would fit on a couple dozen pages.
But nor did he have or expect to have privacy except within his home.
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/253671.253726
https://www.gutenberg.org/files/1981/1981-h/1981-h.htm
That essay seemed unrealistic and dystopic when it was originally written. Now it seems like the typical T&C of every e-reader. If facial recognition was anything other than a PhD type project at that time, that would have prevented the main plot of the essay.
In letting things flow to easily the opposition is to have heavy lock down on information. A lot of the time, the opposite of one bad idea is another bad idea.
Believe it or not, sometimes the best answer is to do nothing until the crowd moves on to the next panic, as with the “Satanic Panic” in the 1980s. Turns out D&D was not actually a gateway to Satan worship.
The FTC let the free-market run riot with children’s TV. Shows used commercials to push expensive plastic toys. The shows themselves became commercials for their associated product lines. Parents felt unable to resist the social pressure channeled through their children and congress eventually passed an act that let the FCC reign in the FTC’s damage.
In the 2020s family economics has raced to the bottom: wages have stagnated, the cost of goods and services is set based on a household where everyone is in full time employment, and latch-key kids now have He-Man in the palm of their hands courtesy of Apple, Google, Samsung, and Xiomai.
This situation is ripe for exploitation by anyone who can offer parents a solution to their kids’ insatiable phone addiction.
The problem is not that they want to protect children. The problem is that these people are either technically clueless or deceptive which is why they present these surveillance measures as the only reasonable approach.
I believe most online services should have safeguards to protect children because they will actively seek out harmful content and contacts (don't ask me how I know). But these safeguards should not allow for abuse of their users, or accidental info leaks, or sharing of PII to 1st or 3rd parties. There's plenty of ways to do e.g. age or identity verification anonymously and securely, for example.
> 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.
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.
Larry Ellison on surveillance: “Citizens will be on their best behavior, because we’re constantly recording and reporting everything that’s going on.”
This is not new and it’s not about kids. This is the culmination of years of planning that began after the Arab Spring, when elites began to get concerned about how the Internet could be leveraged for domestic regime change.
While I do think we should make efforts to reduce crime and create better spaces for kids, laws like this aren’t the answer.
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.