Perhaps I'm misunderstanding, but the war on anonymity was first (just) passed in the US at a state level as porn laws before it passed in the UK.
Are we pretending that the porn id laws weren't a first attempt at getting forums like Reddit that might "accidentally" have naked pictures liable and therefore profile everyone?
Because this is leaning on blaming to UK for everything the US is doing to itself an awful lot.
There are people in the replies below going back and forth about whether the US or the UK started the surveillance state first. I think as undemocratic as the US can behave in practice, it's hard not to argue that the UK won the CCTV surveillance race. London is heavily surveilled. And it doesn't help that someone just posted this:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49255496
Hard not to argue in what metric? The US has Flock cameras spreading like the plague, if we're going purely based on vibes. And the Snowden disclosures about how they spy on their own citizens on a massive scale is over a decade old at this point.
Plus, a city covered in CCTV could theoretically be freer than one with much less coverage, if those cameras are recording to encrypted storage and accessible only with a judicial warrant, and the others are a lawless free for all with private and public operators hoovering up all the data.
First, maybe we can just eventually require Flock cameras to also record only to encrypted storage accessible by a judicial warrant. Presumably you are perfectly OK with that?
Second, privacy advocates have much to say about being surveilled at all, regardless of whether the data is encrypted or not. They’re opposed to recording at all, not recording and then the judge gets to randomly decide when to release recordings.
> maybe we can just eventually require Flock cameras to also record only to encrypted storage accessible by a judicial warrant
This is a private company's proprietary photography and derivative works. While counties and states might be able to insist on such stipulations as conditions of use of public right-of-way, no such requirements would be legal otherwise.
Home Depot's CCTV footage is no different than Flock's footage captured from their parking lot.
You missed out that 40% of US household have a video doorbell, 50% of which are Ring.
I find that all the metrics about CCTV very misleading, and the whole thing seems to be to distract that the article is blaming the UK for actions of the US and US based companies.
It's not really worth arguing over who is worse at violating privacy. Crucially theyre both awful, both getting worse and both treating Russia and China as an aspirational model.
Not to mention the UN convention on cybercrime which is a ridiculous one since it makes co-operation necessary if the penalty in the home country is 4 or more years - there are quite a few countries where speaking out against the leader, been gay or been trans will get you that (or much much worse).
Canada opposed it originally and then quietly signed it most recently, the UK didn't start this stuff though we are up to our tea drinking little necks in it as usual.
Pointing out a law you don't like in another country as justification to ignore local laws, or to critique internation relations policy, is a terrible argument.
Some country has laws that some other country dislikes, therefore they should be able to ignore them?
I think comes down to what influence you think you have. I'm a backend developer and sys admin, when it comes to international law, I think of it in relation to hosting content in other countries or serving users in other countries. Judging the quality of laws on another country is beyond my scope, if it conflicts with my ethical constitution, I just don't provide service to that country, I don't provide service in an anonymous manner that makes it possible for users of that country to evade local law because I find the law may contain bad parts.
What I'm not sure is whether you think of your influence on the subject as a sysadmin that actually wants to provide such services, or whether you think of it as some individual posturing, like a random citizen voicing their opinion on Israel v Palestina knowing full well you have no influence.
> Some country has laws that some other country dislikes, therefore they should be able to ignore them?
I don't know your political beliefs, but I'll say that conservatives make this nonsense argument all the time.
Focus: the person you're responding to is talking about people going to jail for criticizing a leader or being gay or trans. These are violations of human rights. I can't speak for noir_lord, but for me, human rights are more important than any law, full stop. If human rights are being violated by the law, the law is wrong and it is our ethical imperative to do everything within our power to hinder the enforcement of that law (note that what is within our power may not be much).
So when you say, "Some country has laws that some other country dislikes, therefore they should be able to ignore them?" my response is that if any country has laws that violate human rights, then it is our ethical obligation to ignore those laws. To be clear: I'll happily break the laws of my own country if those laws violate human rights. Human rights supersede laws in every case.
> I think comes down to what influence you think you have. I'm a backend developer and sys admin, when it comes to international law, I think of it in relation to hosting content in other countries or serving users in other countries. Judging the quality of laws on another country is beyond my scope, if it conflicts with my ethical constitution, I just don't provide service to that country, I don't provide service in an anonymous manner that makes it possible for users of that country to evade local law because I find the law may contain bad parts.
Standing up for human rights isn't beyond your scope, nor is it beyond your influence. You can provide service in an anonymous manner that makes it possible for users of that country to evade local laws, you just choose not to. And look, we all have limited resources--I'm not saying you're obligated to help with every human rights issue that you come across. But it seems like you're saying that nobody should help people break local laws, even when those laws are unethical. And frankly, that makes you unethical. It's no inconvenience to you if I help Saudi Arabian gays hide their sexual orientation or help Russians criticize Putin. If you're trying to get other people who want to protect human rights to stop doing that, you're de-facto supporting those human rights violations, whether you explicitly agree with them or not.
> What I'm not sure is whether you think of your influence on the subject as a sysadmin that actually wants to provide such services, or whether you think of it as some individual posturing, like a random citizen voicing their opinion on Israel v Palestina knowing full well you have no influence.
Disingenuous nonsense. Certainly a lot of what is done in the name of human rights is ineffective. But I'm not even seeing any indication you care about human rights. Why should someone who does care about human rights be taking strategic notes from you?
Humans rights change over time and are different in different places.
Currently its not a human right to be able to marry an ai personality or a machine but it will be. 100 years ago it wasn't human right to marry same sex.
Human rights are not fixed in time. We may see privacy rights becoming a human right soon or not depending on how things play out. Should having a dark sky at night be a human right currently we don't think so but that could change.
You're talking about what humans believe are human rights. I'm talking about what human rights are.
The right to privacy is a human right, even if no government on the planet actually respects or formally recognizes it.
The right to privacy was always a human right, it's just that formal protections of that right have become more necessary as technology and society have advanced, resulting in more and more violations of that right. In 1791 the prohibition of unwarranted government search and/or seizure was close to adequate to protect the right to privacy, but with recording devices in our pockets, pervasive public surveillance, metadata tracking, and corporate involvement in surveillance, the 4th amendment no longer adequately protects the right to privacy.
This doesn't mean the right to privacy is new--the right to privacy has existed as long as humans have had a psychological need for privacy. It just means that new attacks on the right to privacy require new legal and technical protections against those attacks.
You’re literally arguing nonsense. You have no way to define what a “human right” is outside of some kind of moral framework that others have no obligation to subscribe to. “Human rights” do not exist. The word right in this context literally makes no sense without some kind of moral underpinning, which again circles back to requiring some kind of moral framework (religion for example) that only work as far as a group of people agree on. There is no such thing as what “human rights are” there are only things certain groups of people have decided to agree is a “right” within their community.
It's an orthogonal concept to human rights btw, there's human rights laws, and treaties, both of which are positive law. Similarly, there's laws proper about almost every non human-rights subject (say investment vehicles), and there's natural law about every other subject (say investment vehicles).
Another concept I would recommend looking into are courts and legal process. Otherwise, I'm not sure what you think happens when your belief of what natural law is, clashes with someone else's vision. The body of procedural law tends much more towards positive law out of necessity, otherwise it would devolve into recursive disagreements as to what the process (and the process for handling process disputes(and the process..)) is, a disregard for natural law and respect for the positive law as a sort of convention arises out of practicality at least in the process, arguably leaking into actual substantive law.
Jurisdiction might be a good next step to tie it into this thread's topic, what happens when there's a dispute as to whose rules and courts should judge a matter? The importance of positive law in this matter is mostly accorded by courts unanimously, and the borders of countries are written in constitution in blood. We tend to err towards not rewriting those as they are 'expensive'.
> if any country has laws that violate [what I think are] human rights, then it is our ethical obligation to ignore those laws.
> I [..] help Russians criticize Putin
I'm not so much trying to get you not to do this at this point, just suggesting you don't do this, at least don't say that you do publicly, with your given name. Hopefully you are just larping, but if you are not, I think you'd be a public enemy of every country, not some high ranking Amnesty member.
On that note, I would recommend getting in touch with Amnesty International and getting to know the limits of what you can or cannot do (as a member of their organization). I still wouldn't want to be associated with Amnesty, but at least they do what they do without fucking shit up and getting incarcerated(except when they do).
Quoting "It's no inconvenience to you if I help Saudi Arabian gays hide their sexual orientation or help Russians criticize Putin." as "I [..] help Russians criticize Putin" is one of the most bizarre responses I've ever received here. I think I'm pretty safe saying what I actually said given Russian intelligence is probably capable of reading English.
> Because this is leaning on blaming to UK for everything the US is doing to itself an awful lot.
Hasn't the UK had a culture of surveillance (the famous CCTV cameras) and arresting people over online wrongthink for quite some time though? Who inspired who?
This. The UK "wrongthink arrests" were for stuff like calling for a building full of people to be burned down. While the US arrests you for criticising the police chief.
The UK arrests were also for stickers with: slogans such as “Reject white guilt”, “Nationalism is nurture”, “We will be a minority in our homeland by 2066” and “Diversity – designed to fail, built to replace” - https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2024/jan/16/uk-man-with-...
Note that most of the time, articles are happy to omit actual quotes, instead parroting the prosecution's description of the speech in question, using vague terms such as "racially aggravated comments" or "inciting racial hatred":
Viewing far right propaganda does not carry a 15 year jail sentence, though conservative politician Rudd wished it did: your own article (did you even read it)
Nor is "merely possessing material" that could stir up racial hatred a crime. The law requires intent or likelihood of stirring up racial hatred. I don't know why you linked to a page filled with ads when the text of the law is available straight from the government that implemented it: https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1986/64/data.html#key-a...
If a person presenting or directing the performance is not shown to have intended to stir up racial hatred, it is a defence for him to prove—
(a)
that he did not know and had no reason to suspect that the performance would involve the use of the offending words or behaviour, or
(b)
that he did not know and had no reason to suspect that the offending words or behaviour were threatening, abusive or insulting, or
(c)
that he did not know and had no reason to suspect that the circumstances in which the performance would be given would be such that racial hatred would be likely to be stirred up.
ok good. Except for the viewing thing. That one is crazy. Most of what you described is just disinformation though and I'm fine with the UK taking a different approach than the US.
Burning the Koran is not a statement of fact, so it cannot be disinformation.
"young white girls are being raped by these grooming gangs" is also accurate (though the precise number is contentious, mostly because the police turned a blind eye, or even actively aided the gangs): https://www.ibtimes.co.uk/britains-grooming-gang-scandal-rep...
So can you be more specific in what you were referring to as being "disinformation"?
> “We will be a minority in our homeland by 2066” is accurate
Accurate as in someone said it? Centuries ago, people were worried that if the number of horses increased at the current rate, we would be waist-deep in horse manure.
And you admit yourself that the "precise number is contentious".
> Accurate as in someone said it? Centuries ago, people were worried that if the number of horses increased at the current rate..
"Someone" being a population expert. Of course, "if we do nothing about it" is implied - if nothing could be done, why even bring it up? But of course you know this, and stretching a best estimate prediction by an expert to somehow qualify as "disinformation" is not arguing in good faith.
> And you admit yourself that the "precise number is contentious".
The man jailed did not state any number, and was not in jail for getting the number wrong, so that objection is irrelevant. I only add the caveat to avoid an argument about the number that the source cited.
I see this a lot, but it depends on how you define these terms. If person A defines British such as British = Briton, you categorically claiming that British =/= Briton is not really an argument, just a statement of belief. An argument would be why you think your definition is better, more correct, etc.
Your framing of the stories is interesting:
* "UK arrests were also for stickers" - surely there must be a point where we stop someone putting racists stickers everywhere.
* "merely possessing materials designed to Stirring up racial hatred" - Presumably you're okay with someone stirring up racial hatred?
* "Viewing "far-right propaganda" carries a 15 year jail sentence:" - No it doesn't, that's just an MP trying to get votes.
* ""young white girls are being raped by these grooming gangs" ". Where does it say anything about a jail term?
> Your framing of the stories is interesting: * "UK arrests were also for stickers" - surely there must be a point where we stop someone putting racists stickers everywhere.
The post I replied to claimed "The UK wrongthink arrests were for stuff like calling for a building full of people to be burned down". That example shows this is clearly not the case, and entirely non-violent speech [0] is criminal. That you personally agree with that prosecution is irrelevant.
> "merely possessing materials designed to Stirring up racial hatred" - Presumably you're okay with someone stirring up racial hatred?
What does it matter what I agree with? It doesn't stop being censorship, or a counterexample to the parent post's claim, if I agree with it.
> "Viewing "far-right propaganda" carries a 15 year jail sentence:" - No it doesn't, that's just an MP trying to get votes.
After reading the text of the law [1], you are correct - it only applies to material "useful to a person committing or preparing an act of terrorism". My mistake for believing the word of the UK Home Secretary about the law she was pushing.
> ""young white girls are being raped by these grooming gangs" ". Where does it say anything about a jail term?
I apologize, I should have better organized the citations. [2] only talks about the conviction, the jail sentence is reported in [3]: Jailing him for 10 months and two weeks, Judge Nicholas Barker said it was clear that Heggie had wanted his offensive comments about the Muslim faith "to be read and heard by many".
[0] Yes, speech, not "vandalism" or other charge related to the stickers themselves, not their content - the conviction was literally for "stirring up racial hatred", and the average sticker promoting a nightclub or dance class, even if technically illegal, does not come with a 2 year jail term: https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-leeds-68448867
No, not really. This is a narrative that is pushed by certain segments of the American right (and some of their UK allies). It easily dominates online discussion in an environment where the majority of people posting have no direct experience of life in the UK. Actual life in the UK is very unlike what you would imagine on the basis of reading HN threads, or Elon Musk’s twitter feed.
I suspect that most people with first hand knowledge have simply given up trying to contribute to HN threads about the UK. There is plenty of legitimate criticism to be made of the UK, but here (as you can see from the title) the discourse has degraded to such an extent that the mythically awful UK is held responsible even for bad laws passed by American legislature.
Yup, apparently people that live their lives in the UK are the indoctrinated ones. Not the majority of the HN crowd that consume whatever the algorithm feeds them and think they are enlightened.
No disagreement here, but I suppose it's a useful rhetorical trick. Paint something you don't like as "foreign". I've certainly seen Brits use a comparison with the Great Firewall of China to argue against various state surveillance projects.
Right, so there isn’t currently hundreds of people in UK jails for simply saying “bad words” online? That must be algorithmic misinformation slop too huh?
The UK's culture on this stuff has been relatively famous since Orwell coined the term thoughtcrime. The major advantage the US has over the UK historically has been the oceans, but an interesting secondary one is the US was built by people who seemed to have a healthy fear of the extended groupthink sessions that the UK tends to fall into. It's always been something of a problem given how insular their upper class is.
The UK was an amazing leader on liberty in the days when absolute monarchies were the assumed default government, but their free speech standards are a long way from exemplary in modern times.
> US was built by people who seemed to have a healthy fear of the extended groupthink sessions
Nah. Slavery in the south was enforced by massive amount of forced groupthink. They called themselves pro-freedom btw. See, limitations on slavery represented taking away freedom in their minds. And that conception stayed.
And anyway, USA is far from actual freedom including freedom of speech. It does not even rank that well in international comparisons. It is just strong in calling itself free or freedom minded. And huge bulk of that we are freedom rhetorics is from authoritarian fascists
> No it did not. Online right wing is trying to push narrative that is all.
It's sad that people don't see what's so obviously happening in the uk. Censorship is alive and well in the uk, and there are plans afoot to further the control of the online world.
The online world is trash, democracy existed before the internet and it will exist after it becomes an AI slop playground. If you are worried age gates tracking you just speak to people in the real world?
Plenty of evidence in this thread, but we can't make you followers of the regime understand it since your entire worldview's foundation is built on this denial of facts.
the UK has been doing this for years, but the recent round of "ID EVERYONE" is because facebook doesn't want to deal with liability for banned underage folks, and because Palantir wants to snoop on everyone's traffic in an attempt to mind control the masses.
Which states? How much? Were these anomalous events that were overturned, or more systematic? These are honest questions I'm having, not trying to argue any narrative
I know it's against the HN rules to suggest that some read the fine article, however the answer to your questions and more are in the first paragraph, and in picture format too!
Reading the article, I must clarify my question. You said that there was state level movements prior to the UK. Did you mean that prior to 2023 or 2017 there were US state level efforts? Where was that happening? Sorry for not being clear
United Kingdom:
Online Safety Act 2023, effective 2023-10-26
I'm not saying this is all the US' fault (blame lies with big tech who need excuses to mine minors data), but the title blames the UK exporting id verification to the US when the US is very capable of doing it to itself.
> A joint statement by Buffy Wicks, the lead author of AB 2273, Jordan Cunningham, another AB 2273 author, and 5Rights Foundation states, “The Bill is practicable and realistic, drawing as it does on the UK’s Age Appropriate Design Code (AADC).”
How is Buffy Wicks so damn gullible with tech legislation? Her AB 1043 and AB 1856 (Digital Age Assurance Act), intended to protect children online and regulate Big Tech (but unintentionally criminalizing open source), was sponsored by a dark money influence operation from Meta.
You think Israel is going to let anonymous donation laws get in their way? This is the country that stole nuclear material from America, has a PAC that bribes 80% of congress and runs the largest blackmail ring in human history.
Here's my idea how "safe mode" might be implemented without selfie, passport and without every app or website owner having to spend money on compliance.
The mobile and desktop OS should have a checkbox "child mode" in the onboarding stage. Switching device to "child mode" allows only installing white-listed apps from the government list and opening white-listed websites from the government list. Parents may edit the white lists but not required to do anything other than checking a box and setting a password, or registering a fingerprint, or a paired device.
The white-listed apps and websites (who volunteered to be included into the white list) must implement measures to ensure safety. Another option for a website to opt-in is to add a HTTP-header claiming safety. White-listed sites may be subject to additional regulations.
Non-white listed apps and websites are not required to implement anything, including checking age, asking for selfies etc. If the parents add a website to the white list, it becomes their responsibility to ensure that it does not contain any harmful content. For example, if parents allow their child to use Telegram, Telegram is not obliged to do any age checks and content restrictions.
My proposal achieves safe environment for all ages, but at the same time:
- based on liberal principles of voluntary participation rather than on totalitarian principles like most other proposals
- doesn't require any age checks, selfies or passports
- doesn't require adult websites to do anything and spend money for compliance, unlike most other proposals which assume that every business must spend money on moderation and compliance
- only those sites and apps that want to be in the white list, have to spend resources
- doesn't require banning VPNs as VPNs will not be approved for inclusion into a white list
I also have a proposal for lawmakers. It's simpler, and it will address the digital parenting problem from the root, and also solve a bunch of other societal problems in the process: use antitrust to force hardware vendors to ship their smartphones without an operating system. End the mobile OS cartel and let there be competition.
This digital parenting problem would have been solved long ago if hardware wasn't locked down to oblivion. Kids nowadays use phones and tablets for the most part, so there should be a bunch of toy forks of Android with child-friendly features builtin as a result of natural demand, and some might not even have a browser or app store. There should also be scam-proof OSes for the elderly. But those don't exist because the mobile operating system duopoly is forcing the entire population to use the same two OSes, stifling software competition that would normally respond to user demand for different feature sets.
Your proposal doesn't even attempt to solve the problem these laws solve. If I'm a parent, how do I prevent my kid from telling some website that they are an adult? AB 1043 solves this by letting me set this on their OS account, which all other services will query.
AB 1043 doesn't solve anything. It just delegates parental responsibility to the tech companies - you're giving them your child's age and letting them decide what's good for the kid.
> If I'm a parent, how do I prevent my kid from telling some website that they are an adult?
You don't need to because all content filters and permissions can be implemented on the client-side at the OS and app level. Rather than every service taking your child's age and deciding what to filter, you decide what to filter based on your child's level of maturity. You'll have total control over what runs on the hardware. Think: user accounts and permissions, local firewalls and traffic inspection, executable permissions, app installation locks, stripped down browsers and apps, small local neural networks, bootloader locking with custom password, etc. The market will follow the gradient of user value and spawn a bunch of OSes with different feature sets, probably better than what I can come up with, and you pick the OS with features that suit your needs.
> you're giving them your child's age and letting them decide what's good for the kid.
No. It solves exactly the problem I described. Age-restricted services currently ask users for their age at signup. With AB 1043, it asks the OS, which was given the age at account creation time. Your solution doesn't do anything for this.
If you buy an Android device, you can already do everything you proposed, but that doesn't solve the problem that parents have. Parents want some way to hold services legally accountable for COPPA violations without all the hassle of 100% device supervision. The only way to do that is to require a standard that service providers and OSes can both implement. Just changing a few OSes with low usage that service providers don't know how to integrate with does nothing.
The problem you described is the wrong problem to solve. Not all parents want to hand over parental decision making to the corporation or the state. And even if you do, there's a better way to delegate that without building the instruments for top-down authoritarian governance. Someone else made a well thought out comment about this on one of the other replies, if you want to read it:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49262748
> If you buy an Android device, you can already do everything you proposed
That's just blatantly false. Most Android devices are incredibly locked down nowadays, they're approaching iPhone-level. There was a brief period in Android's infancy where we were close, but the market wasn't allowed to develop before they started adding anti-competitive barriers at every layer of the stack.
> Not all parents want to hand over parental decision making to the corporation or the state.
That's not what the law solves at all. Android already solves for parental controls. The law solves for holding service providers accountable.
> That's just blatantly false
Clearly, you have never used Android. Your linked comment even gets the simple fact that Android is a multiuser OS wrong. You don't even have to fork Android. Your proposal can be implemented entirely in userspace. It doesn't solve the problem that these laws solve.
Half the laws people are complaining about are literally this although instead of a checkbox, it asks you for the birth date of a hypothetical child whose protection you want the device to match. And they don't use a government whitelist, but expect sites to self-declare and reserve the right to take action against sites that use misleading classification.
I.e. they establish the framework for censorship and deanonymization by making everyone else responsible for child-safety, except the person that should be setting up the parental controls - all they get to do is select a "child" or "not child" option. The law doesn't require they be given any control besides that - no default whitelist of apps and websites that they could edit, no blacklist, no screen time limits, nothing. Just an easy way to hand off control to someone else. A way that would be unnecessary if they instead got real parental controls.
Because I would rather parents make the minimal effort [1] to restrict which pages their children visit and how often, than legally require every website and game to deanonymize, surveil, and censor their users. Which includes not just Facebook, but every forum (HN, reddit, small bicycling pages [2]), game, and chatroom. Because the latter would mean anyone hosting public discussions would be doing so only at the government's will. If they don't like the direction those discussions take, they will use the vague laws against "harm" to force a change. Like the UK government admitted [3]:
First, we are told, the relevant secretary of state (Michelle Donelan) expressed “concern” that the legislation might whack sites such as Amazon instead of Pornhub. In response, officials explained that the regulation in question was “not primarily aimed at … the protection of children”, but was about regulating “services that have a significant influence over public discourse”, a phrase that rather gives away the political thinking behind the act.
[1] It's not minimal now, but that's the point of government funding and requiring better parental controls.
1. John Smith is the parent. Giving them power to control what the child visits allows them to do their parenting job.
2. What proposal makes Facebook responsible for anything? Surely none of these. They will just say they are appropriate for ages 13+ and what will parents do?
> Half the laws people are complaining about are literally this although instead of a checkbox, it asks you for the birth date of a hypothetical child whose protection you want the device to match
The huge difference is that these laws make that data flow to the sites, which are then in control of the go/no-go decision. This is another data point of identifying information being leaked to the surveillance industry, and people who opt out and use secure browsers (that don't leak such info) will be denied access, or put in a legally fraught position when programmatically declaring an incorrect age (eg 1970-01-01) to interoperate.
The open society free association version is where information only flows from sites to user agents. Sites declare who they consider themselves suitable for - "appropriate for under 18", "appropriate for under 13", "contains moderated user generated content", "contains unmoderated user generated content", "uses algorithms meant to increase individual engagement (ie addiction)" etc. The browser then makes the choice based on its parental control settings.
(note that unlike GP comment there is no need for a "government list". site self-assertion handles the technical implementation perfectly, browsers with parental controls enabled don't display sites that don't include tags, and legislation requires a good-faith labeling of sites over a certain size so sites don't simply try to push some fiction saying that every user must be over 18)
I genuinely don't know if the people who keep doing this are just stupid, unreasonably contrarian, or intentionally trying to sound unreasonable (and are in favour of the UK style approach) to weaken the apparent position of being against the UK-style approach.
It's incredibly disappointing to see people constantly complain about the actually _reasonable_ implementations (that don't rely on a loss of privacy for adults _or_ children).
> - based on liberal principles of voluntary participation rather than on totalitarian principles like most other proposals
Well, except for children, who under this proposal don't get to participate in anything online that hasn't been explicitly endorsed by the government or their parents. Too bad for that 17 year old who wants to get their news from Reuters rather than Fox.
I personally prefer proposals that treat children as human beings first and foremost, and only infringe on their rights in specific cases where the reduction in harm outweighs the infringement.
Yeah, the First Amendment applies to children after all. We shouldn't give the government, tech companies, or even parents total control over children's online communications. The only exception is when they're very young, and even that should be actualized locally by parents rather than the online platforms or the government. I think a good test for maturity is whether they're able to purchase and use their own device. If the kid can figure out how to earn 100 dollars and buy a used phone off of Craigslist without your guidance, then it's time to let go or at least loosen your controls from device-level to the home router level. And when they can afford their own mobile data or figure out VPNs that can't be blocked by the filtering you set up on the router, I'd say they're ready for the open Internet.
I've had this exact same proposal, and it's basically perfect. We can go one further and require a fee for inclusion. Then, if Meta for instance really wants to be included in that list, they must prove they are child-safe AND pay a little fine. We can make exemptions for non-profits. The system would be self-paying, no taxes needed.
A whitelist is the only thing that works. Anything else is not just stupid, it's ineffective. These laws are 100% ineffective. Many, maybe most, porn sites will just... not implement an ID check. A whitelist solves that.
Probably the government list. That part is a bad idea. It can be reactive instead, allow anyone to declare their site is child-safe and then punish false declarations.
Why would there be a government controlled white list?
I guarantee such a list will contain surveillance watering holes like google, and pedo havens like roblox. 99% of the stuff my kids see that I wish they wouldn’t involves misogynistic/racist/incel jokes buried 20+ minutes into YouTube minecraft videos.
Child mode should just require a second device (or a pin) to install apps, and include a adblock-list style whitelist (one regexp per line) for parents to select from for the web browser.
Alcatel used to make landfill-grade android tablets with the first feature, no account required.
That reminds me: Child mode should not require a third party account with a commercial surveillance firm, like it does on Android!
So under your proposal, all checks would happen exclusively on the end-user device. Websites would do absolutely no age checking, nor would they get any kind of signed certificate from end-user devices vouching for the user's age. Am I understanding this correctly?
Would this not immediately lead to demands for hardware makers to prevent the installation of non-compliant operating systems?
White-listed sites could report the content rating (for example in HTTP headers) and the browser in "child mode" would refuse to display non-appropriate content. Lack of the header means that content is for adults only (unless parents manually white list the site). Also, websites could use different domain for "child mode" version.
> Would this not immediately lead to demands for hardware makers to prevent the installation of non-compliant operating systems?
In child mode, yes, installation of any other OS (compliant or not) should be prevented.
>In child mode, yes, installation of any other OS (compliant or not) should be prevented.
Not just in child mode, because child mode would only exist in compliant operating systems. It would not exist in all Linux or Android distributions for instance.
So governments would have collude with or regulate hardware vendors to control and certify what can run on the hardware available in the country.
This would be a highly centralised system with the potential the become tyrannical.
Browsers already support safe browsing - a service that checks opened urls for fishing, so safety can be provided as a mode of such service (app store can check app url there). Also it doesn't really need to go through government, AFAIK DuckDuckGo and some DNS providers implement such feature independently.
No. SafeBrowsing is a black list, and it doesn't provide the necessary level of safety. I propose to use the white list. Also, SafeBrowsing works only within a browser and my proposal is to implement child mode system-wide.
Safe browsing is filtering, and the result depends on what filter or service you use. It can be a black list or white list, it's an implementation detail invisible to the browser, it just sends a url and receives a reply whether it's ok to open. The only problem is that such filer is not provided yet, or maybe it is, I just don't know, and browsers don't implement switching to this filter.
We already have all of this, multiple paid and free solutions exist across all major devices and operating systems, and at an ISP level.
The only thing a parent has to do is turn it on, but apparently even that is too much work for people who would rather hand the state full control of their rights.
And what stops children from reinstalling their OS? I know many kids can do it at 11 or 12. Or are you requiring BIOS lock? Are there restrictions on hardware to enable this?
The right people to protect children are those responsible for them - their parents and guardians.
If there is a problem with children not being sufficiently protected, that is the level at which to solve it. Give families tools and information to do so.
I’ll just add that age verification schemes serve no purpose—-and are actively harmful—-unless there is some reasonable policy that’s applied after the enforcement.
The companies pushing age verification make their money monetizing access to children. They are exactly the sorts of groups I’d like to keep my kids away from. Forcing the kids to label themselves as minors just makes them more vulnerable to online exploitation.
They don't actually care about children being protected. If they did, who in their right mind would trust the government to pull it off? It's like people who send their kids to public school thinking they're really going to be safe and educated. They're either rolling their dice with the best option they have, knowing there's a significant likelihood of failure, or checking a box. "My kid's in school, I did what I needed to do, now it's someone else's problem."
> It's like people who send their kids to public school thinking they're really going to be safe and educated
I really feel like I missed the /s or something.
Or possibly the poster went to a much worse public school than I did? (USA public = government funded.)
Reducing a challenge like education to a sound bite to win an argument on HN lowers the level of dialog.
Also, where I live the majority of people trust the government enough to send their children to public school, and it isn’t clear that the pay-for schools are much better.
I obviously can't speak for everyone, but even when I was in school, I knew (thought) schools primary purpose was to babysit kids and teens so any damage they were doing was in a contained environment. Education was just busy work and safety is definitely a goal but a difficult objective.
When I went to college, I met friends with dramatically different experiences in their schools than I had, and that was the first time the idea that school was more than just a babysitting camp had crossed my mind. My school was safe from exterior threats, and they took the bomb threats and jail breaks very seriously, even holding us in our classrooms late into the day until the perpetrator was caught, but internal threats caused by kids would always outnumber the teachers capacity to thwart. My parents choose where we lived based on the school having the least violence in the area so I know my experience wasn't even on the extreme end.
Edit: I realize I didn't address education. In short, in successful because my mom put a lot of work trying to educate me and ensure I took homework seriously. Even though I hardly attended my classes, I graduated top 10% because submitting homework was all you needed to do to surpass your peers. Any kids whose only educational influence was school itself, at least where I grew up, didn't receive much of an education.
You want to marry someone? Make sure the government approves for your safety.
Want to make dinner? First you have to send the recipe to your local overseer with proof of your safe cooking credentials or you will have to pay heafty fines for noncompliance.
Want to make love, read a book, speak your mind, make a contract with someone, work the job you want? Sorry, you can't decide that yourself, first the politburo must approve it.
> You want to marry someone? Make sure the government approves for your safety.
Historically, many states in the US required blood tests of both partners prior to marriage. Mostly it was a test for syphilis, which was the main reason that 16th ^ 17th Century people used tons of makeup. Do not google what that disease looks like in the tertiary stage if you want to sleep at night.
The thing is, if you really care about your kid, that is your assumed threat model anyway. Sure, it's nice that it's somewhat mitigated by these rules, but in reality people don't assume the school zone is safe, they know there's still impaired drivers to account for, etc. Yeah, the railing is there, but you'll tell your kid not to lean on it.
> No ID checks at clubs, bars, or other adults-only venues.
Those are mostly there because of alcoholic drinks being served and the venue wants to create a certain atmosphere. There are plenty of parents that would take their kids there if they could.
The rest is not just there for kids but also for adults (or elderly).
There is a bunch of adults who would step in a hole in the ground or fall off a balcony.
1) venue is in meatspace, 2) age can be eyeballed, 3) they don't routinely hoard data, 4) they don't routinely leak hoarded data, 5) they aren't monopoly with billions of users routinely extorted for PII, 6) they don't routinely leak all that hoarded data, 7) they don't have bots, 8) they aren't connected to PRISM for routine surveillance, 9) they don't routinely leak all the hoarded data, 10) they don't sell hoarded data on black market, 11) they don't sell hoarded data to thousands of business partners, 12) they don't have thousands business partners that routinely hoard, leak and resell data
Maybe that's why metabase was hacked - to conceal sale of data. "It's just a hack, it happens, we fixed the hole, nothing to see here until we find the next buyer".
> 1) venue is in meatspace, 2) age can be eyeballed, 3) they don't routinely hoard data, 4) they don't routinely leak hoarded data, 5) they aren't monopoly with billions of users routinely extorted for PII, 6) they don't routinely leak all that hoarded data, 7) they don't have bots, 8) they aren't connected to PRISM for routine surveillance, 9) they don't routinely leak all the hoarded data, 10) they don't sell hoarded data on black market, 11) they don't sell hoarded data to thousands of business partners, 12) they don't have thousands business partners that routinely hoard, leak and resell data
So your argument is that ID checks are necessary simply because they are possible, and not a privacy invasion?
Because otherwise they can not serve alcohol. This is the law because alcohol is an addictive substance and more addictive if interacted with in younger years as your brain is not fully developed. And "we" as a society deem alcohol consumption problematic as it is associated with risks for other societal participants, like drunk driving accidents and domestic violence. Similarly why you can't enter a casino underage.
The underage crowd can't enter a space that is specifically exists for experiencing the prohibited behavior. Where the internet is a more general space and we are restricting anyone that has not proven to be adult. And what are we restricting them from? Posting/publishing & accessing content, that sounds like age based censorship.
Would someone underage have less rights to receive or publish unpleasant/controversial topics under the First Amendment? I think you need to have a very strong case to undermine those rights and I just don't think "might protect the kids" (which is debatable) is strong enough.
>No ID checks at clubs, bars, or other adults-only venues.
No school zone speed limits, or protected crossings on streets near schools.
>No requirements for railings on public balconies, fencing around public pools, protective covers over drains or other holes in the ground.
>Parents/guardians can just supervise.
>Sounds great!
I know you're commenting in bad faith, but at the margin essentially nothing would change except the amount of whining from people of your bent when someone doesn't get punished enough.
The primary determinant of whether society engages in all those activities is not the government but the level of wealth to pay for it all.
While what you say seem intuitive, it is missing one point. Those locations probably are not recording exactly who is coming and going and what they are saying/doing.
That is where this become more than just gate keeping and becomes full on tracking.
Yes. There is also an inequality issue because not all parents/guardians are equipped to afford the same protections for their children. For example, there are parents out there who would let their children smoke at 8 years old because they don't care. This isn't fair. Such lack of care becomes abuse and parents shouldn't have a right to abuse their children.
It's really on us to figure out how we can have things like the internet without harming children. Now, this is quite annoying, because I have never, and would never, give a child access to the internet in the first place. The internet was never driving around on public streets. I never wanted to force it on anyone.
We all dropped the ball here. We've all accepted and even celebrated more and more of our lives being online. But, more importantly, nobody noticed when children started to get smartphones with internet access. In my mind this is no different than giving children cigarettes or other adult materials. But nobody batted an eye. I'm also not surprised, though. Loads of people here have made tons of money from children having access to the internet.
Unfortunately it's so hard to go back from something like this. So we end up in this stupid situation where people will accept more surveillance because we can't just take phones away from children.
You are talking about leaving "everything" to the parents.
Those are extreme positions.
There are things where you want the government to intervene.
There are things where you don’t want the government to intervene.
What I do in my bedroom should not be monitored by the government.
Me speeding on the road should be monitored by the government.
Conversations I am having online should not be monitored by the government.
It’s my job to teach my kid how to behave when he is bullied at school. The government does not help with that. It is my job to make sure my kid does not become the bully. The government does not help with that.
It is also my job to teach my kid what the internet is, that there are wackos out there, and how to recognize dangerous patterns. That’s life.
> You are talking about leaving "everything" to the parents.
> Those are extreme positions.
It's a very extreme position, and yet on every HN thread about digital ID there are multiple, upvoted, top-level comments suggesting that responsibility for children's safety lies solely with parents.
Well, if that's the case, why do these commenters accept ID checks at bars and the other things I mentioned?
Move the goalposts all you want, but I replied directly to a comment which said:
> The right people to protect children are those responsible for them - their parents and guardians.
> If there is a problem with children not being sufficiently protected, that is the level at which to solve it. Give families tools and information to do so.
That is the context with which my comments should be read. I'm trying to point out how absurd that position is when you extend it to anything in the physical world.
Yes, and now big corporations have inserted themselves into each one. Your community is you, your siblings, your parents, your grandparents, your school, your sports clubs, your workplace, Google, Microsoft, Amazon and Apple.
There have been many cases where clubs stored the documents scanned which were then hacked. Or where club/bar staff used the scanned/stored documents to stalk attractive women.
The things you've listed are obviously reasonable, but the laws being proposed for digital parenting are very much not the same as those benign, locally-implemented guardrails. Take the recent Illinois law as an example: they're mandating all Internet-capable operating systems to broadcast the user's age bracket to all software that requests it. That effectively means you can't communicate online if you don't comply. The physical equivalent of that is making it illegal for you to see, hear, or talk at all, unless you utter the magic words "I am x years old". That is compelled speech, and it's deeply incompatible with the First Amendment.
They don't mandate what x is. Is the fact that the government requires service providers to ask if their users are above 13 years old for COPPA also compelled speech that is incompatible with the First Amendment?
They do not mandate what x is, but they do mandate that you must say a specific age in any Internet-capable OS, and that age must be communicated to any software asking for it. Either comply with the law and utter an age, or you're breaking the law if you communicate online without such an utterance. It is using compelled speech to threaten your right to all digital speech.
There are cases where compelled speech is considered constitutional, but surely not when it's used to threaten the primary way people communicate.
And contrary to your claim, COPPA does not legally require service providers to ask every user how old they are, nor are users obligated to reply. Age questions are just how service providers chose to implement it. And I don't think COPPA is a good example of a law working as intended.
> Either comply with the law and utter an age, or you're breaking the law if you communicate online without such an utterance.
Not you. The OS distributor breaks the law if they don't give you this ability.
> And contrary to your claim, COPPA does not legally require service providers to ask every user how old they are, nor are users obligated to reply
It requires service providers to ask if you are under 13 if they collect any personal information, including email address. Users are required to respond in the negative in order to use these services without them getting permission from an adult.
> I don't think COPPA is a good example of a law working as intended.
The question is whether it is a First Amendment violation. In the almost three decades since it was proposed, it hasn't been challenged. No serious person thinks AB 1043 is a First Amendment violation either.
I disagree with your understanding of COPPA, but I'm not going to repeatedly argue over the precise boundries of COPPA because that's not the point. COPPA is not a First Amendment violation as I understood it, nor is California's AB 1043. The latter is still very bad, just not to the point of being unconstitutional (but it's close). AB 1043 would violate the First Amendment just like the Illinois one if it didn't add a last-minute open-source OS exemption.
> Not you. The OS distributor breaks the law if they don't give you this ability.
Ok, but that's a technicality and it doesn't change the fact that your entire ability to see/hear/say anything online is being gatekept by a legally-compelled utterance.
> your entire ability to see/hear/say anything online is being gatekept by a legally-compelled utterance.
And? If there is no First Amendment violation, what is the problem with that? There are already many de facto compelled utterances required to communicate with other devices on the Internet.
The part of my comment that you quoted is exactly the reason why the Illinois law is a First Amendment violation, and why the California one is borderline. And as far as I'm aware, there are no other legally compelled utterances that bar ordinary citizens from all online communications at the moment. There are only instances where speech is compelled in a more local manner, and often not by law.
> And as far as I'm aware, there are no other legally compelled utterances that bar ordinary citizens from all online communications at the moment.
It does not bar all online communications. The law simply says the OS must provide some way for the account to have a set age and provide it to services that need that information. If a service doesn't need that information, there is no compelled utterance. COPPA and GDPR both require compelled utterances online for certain services as well.
The subject of Internet anonymity and children really presents a pest or cholera situation.
No, I don’t want to scan my face or my passport to use the Web. And also no, this glib, thought-terminating, “common sense” quip about “the parents are responsible” is also something to be rejected. We should try to both collectively protect kids and leave adults alone.
Leave it all to the corporations and you would have them prey on your children on every street corner, splash screen, TV menu, and ad board, with no “parental management” option anywhere. “But parents are responsible”, they would say.
Do you think the laws in the article are about collecting the private information of minors? The first few laws listed on that page aren't at all. It's rage bait. The about page confirms that it is AI slop.
> The right people to protect children are those responsible for them - their parents and guardians.
How does the ability to successfully reproduce confer expertise in protecting children from perils of the 21st century, specifically internet porn, hate speech, cyber bullying, addictive platform design, etc?
> If there is a problem with children not being sufficiently protected, that is
> the level at which to solve it.
Society creates the greater environment that kids grow up in. And we all then pay for the problems when they occur because of those sh*tty environments. Pushing fixing it all onto parents is like trying to get kids to be healthy when they are driven everywhere, surrounded by fast food joints and bombarded with junk food adverts. Claiming that it would be different with a little more public service information and tools on top ... well the obesity rates would beg to differ.
Ultimately, society creates the greater environment and lives with consequences, as such society cannot not be involved in any meaningful attempt to deliver improvements.
Society is made up of families, i.e. children and parents. So yes of course it's up to society to solve these problems, tautologically. But that's not what you meant. Everywhere you wrote "society", you really meant "government". Might as well be honest about it.
How about looking at this from a different angle?
All this time, we have been asking children to adopt to internet or giving parents tools and information to adapt children’s to the internet. Instead, what if we ask ourselves a different question in this age of AI? Can we not build an internet that adapts to children? And provide progressive digital wellbeing.
Coz that’s what we have been doing in physical world for children. We build schools and playgrounds for children, set speed limits near schools, and even medicine is packaged specifically for children. But on the Internet, we do the opposite. Isn't it the time to reimagine the Internet for children?
Half these laws are literally just about giving parents tools to do so. Like the California digital age assurance act which, despite the name, does not assure age. It assures (provides certainty about) how parental controls should work.
Every time I see this take I remember the time my step father picked me up by my throat and body slammed me on the floor. I was 12. I've had tinnitus ever since. Children really do need protection from some parents. I'm glad you had a good upbringing, be well.
The meat of the subject isn't about protection from physical violence here though is it? I mean, yeah, have governmental protection for kids against abusive parents - obviously. But in regards to the breadth of the Internet and tech, I think it needs to be focused on the endpoint - the actual parents.
the weird thing about it all is that age is a bad proxy in the first place for a child's level of safety in interacting with online content. Some kids are super mature at 11 and others still need protection at 16. For some reason the world has fixated on "years alive" as a perfect measure of vulnerability and now are doggedly pursuing it.
Even if perfect age verification is implemented, kids will be harmed. Because they are vulnerable while above the arbitrary age limit. So -arguing for age verification is harming children. Won't somebody think of the children?
And the answer comes back to the same point. Parents should mediate this. Online content should advertise its maturity level, and parents should be able to configure devices at setup time for the maturity level they are appropriate for. Then apps should respect that and everyone can be better off without robbing everybody of anonymity or freedom.
Other still need protection at 30, or in fact in my opinion also a lot of people above 50 (that didn't grow up with the internet around) are not prepared for what is out there. Also there are parents that are "underage". Those are not considered either.
I agree it is a very arbitrary limit indeed, but it seems there is no other good proxy so for a lot of people it will be choosing the best worst option, at least that is how the argument in favor is brought forward.
I agree that something has to be done about kids on socials. But perhaps we can start with not punishing anyone by default and punishing offenders instead.
I don't see legally why a checkbox "not underage" isn't enough, as long as the rules are actually enforced and the people ticking that box while underage are punished appropriately. Instead of denying access to all unless proven above a certain age.
I don't think anyone believes that age is a perfect proxy. Just that it is good enough, and that any better solution is either much more difficult or impossible.
> any better solution is either much more difficult or impossible.
I just don't buy that. I think it is perfectly feasible to mandate device makers support parental controls that include content maturity settings. In many ways that is easier than requiring every web site in the world to comply with age verification.
This is something where I agree and disagree with both sides.
Parents should have the tools to protect their children, the providers should have those tools in place. But those that are dealing the goods as also heavily invested in trying to maximize engagement and so they do not really work to hard on providing those tools.
When the market leads to bad outcomes, that's where the government steps in with regulation, as is the case with the California laws linked in this article. You appear to fully agree with them, which makes sense to me because the laws look perfectly reasonable.
> you know, i feel like the "it's the parents' responsibility" comments that turn up on submissions like this often tend towards phrasing like "the parents" rather than "with my children i ..."
if you’ve had kids maybe you’d like to share with the class exactly how you go about doing exactly what you’re describing?
if not, maybe let parents figure out how to parent rather than expecting them to be perfect for everyone else’s benefit.
Sure. That's pretty easy, just copy-paste California's digital age assurance act. (Seriously go read it before making assumptions. It's not dystopic at all.)
That can only work if parents as an interest group stop bothering the rest of us with the very 'think of the children' nonsense that spawned this thread. If you are inventing laws that affect us, we should also have a say.
> phrasing like "the parents" rather than "with my children i ..."
I need to remember this one, thanks!
The only way parents can try to protect their kids from the world is to keep them isolated, homeschooled, or in some kind of commune or cult. Which unfortunately is not uncommon in the US.
> let parents figure out how to parent
While I agree, I also think there's a role in society to help parents on how to parent, via e.g. education and awareness. Every generation brings new unknowns, like what kids can do in Roblox or how they can browse the internet on their smart fridge, and it's unreasonable to assume every parent knows all of that.
The problem is, agreement on those tools is hard to find.
"I want to be able to pen my kid into a digital walled garden, so that they cannot see $bad stuff until the right age"
that seems normal right? nothing contraversial.
The issue is, implementing that is really fucking hard. For mobile phones, largely thats already been done in the UK. You need to opt out of the nanny proxy before you can get porn and reddit.
The issue is, as soon as you get on the wifi, all of those controls disappear. So how do you stop that? if you're an idiot (and the person leading the OSA was an idiot) you do what the UK did. You put in legal tools to "age gate" the internet _at source_ rather than at delivery (like mobile phones)
so yes give people the tool, but if you're not giving techincal guidance, and just saying NO NO NO NO, OSA is what you get.
Totally disagree. If you want to stop kids from using cell phones and social media, you are not going to achieve that at the family level. It is just not possible because if your peers are on the platforms and are using smart phones, no amount of family level restrictions are going to stop kids from using them. It has to be at the state or higher level so that everyone is prevented from using social media or smart phones at the same time so that is the norm. It has to be alcohol tier regulation if you actually want it to be effective
Pretty much. As soon as kids start going to school, there is a large amount of time where they are out of the supervision of the parents. This is when they end up being dragged to the general flow of society for better and worse.
There is going to be an even larger amount of time where the kids will be out of supervision of the parents once they grow up. That you get a limited test run of that via school instead of a surprise that your parenting has failed when your precious little kid falls prey to the world after turning 18 is something you should be glad for.
You clearly don't have kids. You drop them at school and for maybe 8 hours a day, as a parent you have 0 control over whats happening. Bullying, peer pressure etc. How is that also parent's responsibility?
Parents shouldn't buy smart phone to kids, period. There are 0 reasons kid of say 15 or lower should have one instead of dumb phone (or new commodore one with google maps and whatsapp but no browser or apps), in same way we don't allow cigarettes or alcohol to be given or sold to them. Helicopter control freak parents can go to hell, their mental issues shouldn't be messing their kid's lives. But to claim parents have 100% responsibility could work only if kids spend 100% of the time with them.
You have limited influence. The school has a lot more. Would you choose a school with a bad reputation for letting children watch brainrot all day? What if every school is like that and you don't really have a choice - would you homeschool? Or would you say the government should maybe tell the schools to stop doing that?
Said parents and guardians cannot protect their kids all the time - they have their own responsibilities like work. Most kids go to school during the day. The few that aren't grow up in homeschooling systems or cult-like environments, which are their own problem.
I frequently see this rhetoric (parents should look after their kids) from naive people on the internet that clearly don't have kids of their own (or don't have teenagers, or don't live or let their kids live free, etc)
But we went to school 10-80 years ago and even 10 years ago, school was very different back then. Apparently now there's a lot more technology involved, and kids can bring their phones and use their phones all day which is why there's a backlash. When I was at school, phones were mainly used for texting (or calling, but not at school) and if you were (un)lucky enough have one, you had to put it in a locked drawer of the teacher's desk at the start of the day.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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)
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?
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
>When a politician is worried about your kids, you should be worried about your rights and freedoms. Not only for your own sake but for your kids too!
What rights and freedoms should I worry about when a politician wants to make sure my child is fed by supporting food stamp programs or free hot lunches at school?
The idea that any attempt to help a child is inherently suspect honestly says something distrubing about your own worldview. You can't imagine someone genuinely caring for a child that isn't there own?
>I just said the opposite. I can imagine many people genuinely caring for a child that isn’t their own.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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?
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.
> 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 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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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?
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.
"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.
Half the laws we're complaining about (e.g. California, Illinois) are literally just regulating parental controls, and I can no longer give the benefit of the doubt to people who act as if this is the same as forcing internet users to scan their ID. People who conflate these two things are paid lobbyists of Meta to make sure Meta won't have to be safe for children even when the parental controls checkbox is turned on.
Regulating parental controls by making you scan an ID to use a computer is even worse than doing it to access a website. I understand that today's laws are not doing that, but do you genuinely, truly believe in your heart of hearts that once every OS has mandatory age fields, that nobody is going to start proposing legislation to attempt to enforce its validity by ID verification + hardware attestation? You're not willing to give the benefit of doubt to people with concerns about this, but you are willing to give the benefit of doubt to the surveillance states that have been pushing us down a slippery slope for 25+ years, sliding further and further down every single year without reprieve?
Of course that is not parental controls. That's 3rd party controls. Parental controls means you create a child account for children and when a site is detected as being adult ideally using RTA headers [1] then a password prompt asks for the parents approval. That is parental controls.
Indeed, that's a reasonable approach. Just to clarify that we're agreeing, the comment I was replying to was strongly defending California and Illinois' laws that require the OS record an age field for the primary user of the device, which while currently self-declared is at least an obvious path for future, more invasive legislation.
The problem with a self declared approach is that puts a 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
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?
> 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.
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)?
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.
Tech people keep ignoring the fact that many people a) find the parental controls too hard to use and b) have no confidence that their kids won't find a way to circumvent them.
If parents felt in control of technology they wouldn't be calling on governments to regulate it in the first place. I know a lot of tech people like to assume that government wants to control everything and these parents are fake front groups established to manufacture consent, but this is infowars-type conspiracy thinking. Most people are just not that facile with technology and people who have kids are atavistically opposed to anything that could harm their kids.
Tech people's unwillingness to even engage with concerns about harm to children (eg the GP) more or less guarantees more aggressive regulation. IT's a self-defeating position.
I recently put some thought into what I would have done if I had encountered "parental controls" to use the Internet when I first encountered it as a young teen in 1992. I would have made it my personal mission in life to circumvent everything and anything possible. I feel fortunate that no such controls existed and the adults in my life knew significantly less about the technology than I did.
Was I exposed to some clearly adult content? Yes. But I didn't find it particularly compelling, the video games I could download and other things I could explore were more interesting.
It is also concerning to me that gen-alpha (or whatever the age bracket is called) people are increasingly being pushed into walled garden, app-based social media platforms instead of actually learning what the Internet really is, and what it's capable of.
My dad added parental controls to our PC sometime around 1997. It also had Eudora installed, which my dad used for email. Poking around, I found the ini file that had the ciphertext of the password for the email server. On a whim, I made another account in Eudora and put the ciphertext in as my password. In the ini, the plaintext of the password came out; I guess Eudora used some symmetric rot16 or xor like cipher! The same password worked to unlock parental controls, which had taken me just about a week to circumvent.
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.
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.
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.”
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.
It has nothing to do with the content being restricted and everything to do with who is deciding what to restrict for whom.
Parents deciding to block sexual material in the context of their family is absolutely fine. It is proportional, it hurts no one and it is a perfect example of individuals and family units exercising their own autonomy and freedom.
The government deciding to regulate the flow of information for the entire nation is deeply alarming, for it is a sure sign of tyranny no matter what it is they're restricting. They always prepare the terrain first, they always go after the objectionable material, they always have good intentions, they always claim it's to protect kids. Suddenly, industrial grade surveillance and repression systems have been implemented, and citizens will be proved fools for trusting their governments with that much irresistible power.
> "...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.
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.
I don't think this is a viable or realistic option in 2026/2027. Try to imagine what your own personal reaction would have been when you were 14 years old if 90%+ of your peers had an iphone 17 or equivalent and your parents gave you a flip phone, and tried to ban you from using smartphones.
Why repeat the same argument if it clearly hasn't worked? Do you expect it to suddenly become effective?
Change in behavior can only follow from change in incentives. Parents must be held legally liable if they allow their children access to social media. That means jail time for negligence.
Because according to HN there's no way to force social media companies to not serve children without destroying privacy. That leaves parents who aren't changing their behavior because nothing has incited them to change. Legal liabily is an incentive that changes behavior.
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.
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.
Well, I'm sorry parental controls are too hard to use, but all of the parents who want all other adults to sacrifice their online anonymity just to make to for it need to get their heads screwed on straight. They're screwing a) themselves b) everyone else and c) their own children when they reach adulthood.
On one hand the software world needs to re-learn the lost art of proper UX research and rely on data from user trials instead of on vibes and reading tea leaves with analytics, but on the other hand parents have a wholly unrealistic expectation of being able to keep their kids in a hermetically sealed bubble until they turn 18.
Kids are going to get into stuff you don’t want them to no matter how hard you try to prevent that, short of keeping them in locked padded rooms with no electronics (which would be abuse). Parents are right to want to steer them in the right direction and keep them out of the worst trouble, but that’s as far as it goes.
> I 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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
> 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
I suspect that the blow back from climate change and resource depletion IS why they are much more interested in added surveillance. When things start to get rough, they want to ensure compliance where possible. This is why they tend to come down hard on climate change protestors.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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
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).
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.
> 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.
> 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.
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.
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”.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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 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.
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.
Drew Harwell, Douglas MacMillan, and Aaron Schaffer from the Washington Post also wrote a shameful article on this topic on August 4th (the title changed, along with an image of a woman who was harassed to something else). No counterpoint. Total submarine article.
The threat from COVID (and more importantly, long COVID) never went away, but they sure convinced the average person that it did.
Today you can see an N95 in the wild once in awhile, so some people are paying attention, but they are less than 1%. Many others are suffering brain damage, unexplained heart issues, taxed immune systems, etc and have no idea why (nor does their doctor).
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.
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.
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.
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?
If you're going to take an aspect of UK law it would be better to take some aspects of the police training: how long they are trained, how to do de escalation, the idea of policing by consent.
I think getting arrested over online posts, buying a baseball bat or butter knife while they refuse medical aid to a victim that is bleeding out because the foreign attacker with the open carry bloody ritual knife called them racist, could be called "toxic". Not even mentioning there part in covering up grooming gangs on national level for being political inconvenient.
Those are weapons, so long as you have a legitimate use for them, jobs a goodun. But more importanly anything in common law is a weapon. Same for the USA. but the difference is, most of the time you're shot, rather than beaten with a stick.
> refuse medical aid to a victim that is bleeding out because the foreign attacker with the open carry bloody ritual knife called them racist
Ah so you didn't actually look at the case then. The victim was foreign, not the attacker (Harry was polish, not english). Also when two people come to you saying that "that man over there attacked me" and have a whole crowd of people saying the same thing, you arrest the person. Now, if you look at the timeline as soon as the police realise he's been stabbed, they give first aid. Of all the cases to bring up, thats kinda the weakest. tragic, but not a signal of systemic failure. especially considering the number of deaths caused by cops in the USA. and that cops have qualified immunity, unlike in the UK.
NOW! the grooming gangs are interesting, and point to Manchester police being corrupt little shits that they are. The problem is we only hear about the brown gangs. Not the other ones. at the time there used to be a whole string of nonces that would drive thier nackered ford escorts up to the school gates to pick up some 14 year olds. The working class girls would go missing, or suddenly get into drugs. It would be their fault. If you want the actual data, the Jay, Berelowitz and ann coffey reports all lay out the failings there.
Now I'm less worried about the grooming gangs as I am about the general lack of empathy for the working class victims. The warped lens of "oh it was the $racial_group" that "did" it misses the main point is that girls were industrially exploited, and have been repeatedly ignored as they are "shouty little brats". Regardless of the abuser.
You know, I really wanted to say in my original comment I guarantee someone will bring up grooming gangs - and sure enough.
Now imagine grooming gangs, in addition to police shooting and killing civilians, on top of political corruption going unchecked, police stalking, in addition to every other terrible thing you could imagine.
The UK isn’t perfect, but the never ending sentiment that it’s the worst in the world because there’s an issue with grooming (which is an issue nearly everywhere sadly) is foolish. Brits have such high standards that you don’t even realise how much of a privilege it is to be annoyed about only a small handful of systemic global issues.
You’re not afraid to walk to your local for a pint and be shot in the head by a cop or kidnapped I suppose, right?
>in addition to police shooting and killing civilians
If you look at actual statistics you know why it keeps happening. The chance to be shot if you don't act or live like them is miniscule.
>You’re not afraid to walk to your local for a pint and be shot in the head by a cop I suppose, right?
No "just" scared to open my mouth or defend myself or family with the little to none legal weaponary left that still exists from foreign attackers imported against our will which are excluded from such laws.
Where in the world is your ideal country, that is doing everything right. Genuinely curious as it sounds like you want accessible weapons + unfiltered reach of speech with no side effects.
There obviously does not exist such a country and neither country are working towards it. I rather worry about being shot during a traffic stop if I give them a reason such as acting out than simply opening my mouth.
Safety is one topic, but this person is also discussing censorship and corruption.
As much as I like visiting China for leisure, I could personally never live there. I agree the healthcare and safety are great in China though. It’s the same reasons I could never live in places like Dubai or Singapore.
Safety is not a #1 priority for me in the places I choose to live.
Also highest quality of life, most technological progress, least corrupt government (executing people caught doing corruption helps with that). Main bad thing is you can't criticise the government or vote.
> Also highest quality of life, most technological progress, least corrupt government (executing people caught doing corruption helps with that). Main bad thing is you can't criticise the government or vote.
Where does it stand against other countries with respect to happiness?
> No "just" scared to open my mouth or defend myself or family with the little to none legal weaponary
Bitch please. Firstly the _victim_ was foreign not the attacker.
second, you are well within your rights to use reasonable force. Sometimes that involves chasing an attacker down the street with a cricket bat and beating the shit out of someone.
> foreign attackers imported against our will which are excluded from such laws.
mate, thats not way to talk about the scottish (they too are allowed to carry knives as part of thier national costume) but if you lived here, you'd probably know that.
Yes, the same can happen in the US. In general, no country has successfully constructed a magical force field that prevents its police officers from ever arresting people for stupid reasons.
Most of the online outrage has been about arrests for social media posts, and it’s arrests that you refer to in your comment. When it comes to prosecutions for hate speech, it would be difficult to make the case that the UK is an outlier. There are many other European and non-European countries that have stricter laws in that regard. If your point is just that most of the world, unlike the US, doesn’t consider hate speech to be protected speech, then indeed, that’s true. But there is no reason to single out the UK to make that point. If you want to feel even more outraged, have a look at the list I compiled here:
> "Hate" Speech laws are a blanked go to jail card
You're confusing communications act with hate speech, which are different. Also the EU is civil code, which does law _very differently_
Also can you point to someone who has been jailed for hate speech? as in it was the only charge, rather than an aggravating factor? (Ie tommy robininson hasn't been convicted for it, ever. and you'd think he'd be the one given that he's organising marches saying lets kill brown people. )
for what you said? no. for what you write? very unlikley.
>Someone literally got arrested for buying a baseball bat couple days ago...
I see you follow Tommy robinson. Right so the point here is, if that person is wrongly arrested (which looks likely) they are in line for a tidy sum. However if they have a court order from not buying (an aluminium) baseball bat then they wont.
The crucial point here is, arresting is just that, unless they have committed a crime nothing else happens. apart from the embarrassment. Its not like they would have been shot, or kneeled on until you stop breathing.
> Somehow they aren't included in the law exclusion or are part of the group doing disproportionate amounts of stabbings (or rape), curious.
Wait are you confusing sikhs with the bradford grooimg gang? dude they are different religions, Race and live in different places. Harry's case is really unusual. but whats not unusual is that everyone involved got jail time, even the offender's mum, cause if you lie to cover up for your son, you're gonna get jail time.
> part of the group doing disproportionate amounts of stabbings
I mean the scots have problems we know this, but a lot of it stems from drug use. Oh you mean sikhs again. Right. Look its really not like it says on twitter. Its sunny today, and I strolled though south london to work, I wasn't stabbed once for being "white".
I can wear any national costume and carry a knife or sword. or for work.
I love such cases... because "almost" all of them have hidden political agendas... so, as usual, I let my investigative agent run over this and prepare me detailed connections graph between prominent personnel, orgs, funding, and political connections...
Search for "5rights foundation" in that "search graph" box on left side, then click on relevant search result from below (dont click on + icon.. thats for finding routes) ... and the graph will adjust to this node and show all connections..
btw, one of them most powerful feature is finding connections between any nodes... just search for them one by one, click "+" on searched entity, do this for both, or more.. then click: "shortest path" ... you can investigative how anyone is connected to anyone else
For example: "Center for American Progress" is connected to "UK House of Lords" through this long chain:::
Center for American Progress -> [has former fellow] -> Simon Clark -> [board chair of] -> Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH) — US -> [lobbied for] -> KOSA / KOSPA (Kids Online Safety Act / Kids Online Safety and Privacy Act) -> [engaged with] -> 5Rights Foundation <- [founded] <- Baroness Beeban Kidron (Beeban Tania Kidron, Baroness Kidron) <- [has member] UK House of Lords
"Connections"... how most important personnel from 5rights are associated with other entities (people, org, events, etc), that can directly, or indirectly, connect to political circle... thus, act as political influence network...
Very nice, this is what investigative journalism should be doing as well, but if it's "democratized" by just putting it up on a website we don't need to wait for anyone to publish it.
As long as all the sources are listed and verifiable, of course.
There's huge power in collective investigations... of course, as you rightly said, the sources should be mentioned (though this is not always possible to safeguard whistleblowers, if any).
thanks.. there are a few nodes that are giving error when clicked.. but, i am fixing as i am discovering these... as I said, this is still in development...
UK government (and the rest of Europe) has had a very easy time implementing strict administrative regulations due to public acceptance. And the children argument is like the easiest angle to attack, you can use it for almost any cause and win.
Some state-resistant technology (idk if this term is in general use) like Signal planned for a lot of contingencies that could happen caused by governments. Tor is kind of like that too. So I have more optimism for building tech that is state-resistant than I do for any kind of constitution, or movement, or law. That's not to say give up but I think it's hard to argue against a state.
War is coming to Europe. At this point I'm even thinking about moving to China - at least they don't accept Zuckerberg checks. Tbf in my case I'm also a tech holder - so i'm just getting robbed.
I lived in China for a while a decade ago, studied at Tsinghua and did some research as well.
IMHO you have more freedom in China than in Europe. Can you walk on the street and say "Fuck Xi Jinping" like you would in France with Macron? Probably not. But it's a completely useless freedom to have.
At least in China you get relative safety when you walk on the street at night. And when the government decides to restrict some liberties you don't have to pay tens of thousands of politicians and lobbyist to do it.
If you have to choose your poison pill, you might as well pick the cheap one that does bring a semblance of harmony and not complete polarization and chaos.
You see, China and the US aren't that different you know. In the US, I can go up to Donald Trump and say "I don't like Donald Trump. The policies of the republican government are rubbish!"
In China, I can go up to Xi Jinping and say "I don't like Donald Trump! The policies of the republican government are rubbish!"
I think the difference is that in China the public are aware of the policies and they know how it will affect them if they say something dangerous. This keeps the power in check in a way since they can mostly only act on policies they have made clear before. In the US there is a false sense of freedom which makes the reasoning of power opaque and unchecked.
"None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free." – Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
I actually think sustained adherence to the goal of deanonymizing the Internet to basically get kids off of it in the face of significant minority opposition, actually portrays strength. I care deeply about privacy and surveillance in the real world, but who cares about the Internet, it’s an optional virtual space. For anything that’s not optional like banking, commerce etc. I’m completely OK with being not anonymous because that’s the status quo.
There are many people who have voiced this topic already. If you don't care about your privacy why do other people have to give it up ? It's a non-argument - nobody cares about your opinion.
This is a garbage UI and it looks like it was designed using "dark patterns" to ensure that nobody uses it. Look how many clicks (18 clicks, I counted) one needs to do in the correct sequence without a single mistake, and how many distracting and misleading options are there. It is a sabotage, it is a rebellion. Technically, yes, Apple can claim that they have "safe mode", but in practice it is unusable. Apple clearly doesn't want parents to enable restrictions, for reasons I do not understand, probably they just hate children or people having a family.
Your video actually has the opposite effect: it shows that there are no (easy) ways for parents to protect the children and government regulation is necessary.
The UI should be a single checkbox named "child mode" and small, gray link "configure" that opens the menu from the video. The parent just clicks the checkbox, and sets up a password, a fingerprint or paired device to unlock the mode. That's all. After this only government-approved apps and websites can be opened (parent may edit the white list if they are ok with navigating through a maze of ten thousand menus) and children are perfectly safe. Government may white-list only apps and sites that implement measures for content safety and may not add non-compliant apps.
I use Apple's parental controls daily and it is complete garbage. Unfortunately it's also the best (less bad?) of everything I tried.
My kids' devices consistent get confused about how long the device/specific apps has been used, and changing things is a lot of work, and at the same time not granular enough.
> Apple clearly doesn't want parents to enable restrictions
I have used both Google's FamilyLink and later iPhone's ScreenTime parental controls. Google's implementation of parental controls is way superior to Apple's. FamilyLink tracks multiple devices, has easy settings for daily screen time limits, has school time downtime schedules, and has per-app time limits that cannot be bypassed, unlike Apple's implementation which can be bypassed with the tap of a button.
I really like Google's FamilyLink, unfortunately my child's friend group all have iPhones and rely on FaceTime for social interaction, which made my child demand an iPhone as the primary phone.
EDIT: It looks like I just haven't correctly configured Apple's ScreenTime to remove the bypasses [0]. Yay for unhelpful default settings.
It's not only about blocking access to porn websites but children can access whatsapp groups where child predators are. Why can children access this content in those communication apps? It sounds like providers of these platforms must prevent children accessing those becquse children need to use such platforms to coordinate on their assignments and homeworks. This can be solved by having a "children-type" device account as someone else suggested. The app would know a child is using it and block access. No government id needed.
For the first time in human history, the cost of surveillance has dropped below the cost of privacy.
It is more expensive today to maintain your privacy and anonymity than it is to surveil you. The collective surveillance grid makes it possible to track people's movements, whereabouts, their predilections, political views, personal images and more for a few cents every day. It's a bargain.
And in this new world, the eye watches everyone, all the time, forever. Most people, including people on HN, are still stuck in a human-first world. The new surveillance state isn't going to be thousands to hundreds of thousands of humans sitting in a shadow-y room going over pictures and videos. Today, a bunch of vectors and a large multi-modal model will do just fine. Servers are cheap (for a nation state) and never need to eat or sleep.
And they will be used to watch you. Especially if you're attractive. Or, valuable. Or, blackmail-able. After all, NSA employees routinely abuse multi-billion dollar surveillance assets to stalk women. It's so common that the NSA calls it LOVEINT.
In the world to come, people are going to wish they were being surveilled by the NSA. Because at least the NSA punishes these people. Occasionally.
When this kind of technology becomes this cheap and this pervasive, then the end of anonymity means unaccountable sheriff deputies stalking their former spouse and family. Or, prospective romantic interests.
With this new oracle, these people will be able to set up alerts for when their spouse is thinking of leaving them. To catch their child accessing support for abuse or something more ephemeral like being an atheist, having different political views or LGBT+.
Anyone who doesn't see the forest for the trees, or who embraces this because "parental controls are too hard to use" will doom themselves and future generations to a world that's materially worse than our hyper-surveilled present.
I can't believe I'm saying this, but at this rate I'm going to miss the days when it was just the NSA reading my emails (and they still do! Howdy!). I know the track record. But at least the NSA has some sense of institutional responsibility and control. Most institutions in your life, including your HOA don't.
It is a great example of how difficult it is to anticipate the N-th order effects of things. 79 years ago the transistor was invented, in less than a century it ended up being the back back of a global surveillance system. Not many people could have foreseen this.
Cheaper computer technology has been great for the average persons uses but it cuts both ways. It also means much cheaper surveillance. I suspect that governmental/corporate surveillance now costs less than 1% of their spending, something that simple couldn't have been done even a few decades back.
I do wonder what the world would have been like is say computer technology peaked at 486 level performance/memory. Much of what we have today simply could not have happened in terms of surveillance and social media damages. Alas, this is the world we didn't get.
> 79 years ago the transistor was invented, in less than a century it ended up being the back back of a global surveillance system. Not many people could have foreseen this.
The next generation of cellular service, 6G, will include something called Integrated Sensing and Communications. ISAC will be a millimeter radar that uses cellphones to see all sorts of behavioral stuff like, who you are next to, are you/they breathing/walking/running/standing. No opt out at all. Similar to how some researchers are using WiFi signals in your home to see where you are in your house.
The question I would really like the "people" pushing so hard for surveillance to ask themselves is:
How would the Nazi Germany and Hitler gone if they had this system in place, telling them who and where every single Jewish, gay, gypsy, disabled, or just ideologically opposed to them person was, 24/7?
What about other insane rulers? What do you think they would - or rather, will - do with these systems?
Nations that kept detailed records of religious membership tended to have their Jews & Jehovah's Witnesses rounded up much faster than occupied nations that didn't keep such records.
I think the easiest way to get involved is to become an EFF member. They'll keep you up to date on all the censorship and surveillance bills. Then you can contact your legislator, sent letters to the CA legislature committees, or show up to the hearings in Sacramento.
What you don’t realize is most people want this. The social media bans across Western Europe, and Australia are heavily supported by the vast majority of the population.
You could make it easy to ban on children's devices, rather than having websites do it. At the moment you either have a small set of allowed applications, which is fine for younger kids, or domain-list filtering which is unreliable, hard for parents to set up (and not that hard for kids to get around). There are many ways to improve the situation – I think websites should have to attach metadata about the content being served, browsers should use this to apply a device policy, and devices should make it easy to configure basic rules on first setup. People aren't asking specifically for hardware-attested facial scanning
There’s no such thing as children’s devices. Everyone uses the same smartphones. Optional on device restrictions don’t matter as long as your peer group is on the platform, kids will not stop using it. People are not asking for biometric scanning, but I believe the vast majority would be OK with some sort of ID based authentication system. Now there are ways we can do that in a decentralized way where neither of the parties have total information and I fully advocate for that.
Are you saying parents would choose not to block it, or children would get around it? Like you say people want to block it, but currently it's very hard while allowing access to Google and other resources, or it's easy to get around. Why does this require server verification?
For example, all devices could require your ZKP ID attestation to be usable unfiltered. Then the relevant apps/sites would be equally inaccessible to children. And then you remove the ZKP ID attestation because the device owner (parent, school, etc) already knows when the user is a child.
I think an equivalent thing would be to look at adoption of V-chips and how few parents turned the feature on. This version of parental control was a failure> I don't expect other versions to do a better job.
The on the ground reality is that now most social interactions at schools and the content for those interactions happen on social media and apps/private chat rooms. If you don’t have a smartphone or not using those platforms, you’re just left out. There’s going to be serious social cohesion issues for the kids that don’t have access to them. It’s also going to cause continuous pressure throughout your schooling years to circumvent whatever restrictions your parents are putting on and to be in constant conflict with them because of that pressure. That’s life altering stuff.
ZKP ID would work but that’s essentially deanonymization because you have to provide your ID to someone though no one has total information. Also just checking for its absence doesn’t work because that’s opt in and less than 5% of parents would do it. Every individual, irrespective of age would have to have a valid one.
I know, but I think the reality would change if it took 10 seconds to reliably block everything. It would also be the default if you enter an age below 16 at setup (tap a second device or scan a distinct face id to act as guardian). It should also be enforced in schools (and made possible to enforce by schools) as part of their filtering of explicit/harmful content, maybe they can even deploy their own policies eg blocking most phone use during school hours.
This would be for harmful websites like ones that show pictures of ICE shooting people, Thai citizens making fun of the King, or Chinese folks posting pictures of the tank person, for people under the impressionable young age of 999 years old, right?
Yep, here in Australia you almost never hear anyone mention it. The silence is deafening, especially with how quickly people just rolled over on this stuff "For the children".
That said it was funny, yesterday Microsoft said I had to age verify my account. I went in basically with the intention of backing out of it at the first sign of over reach.
First step was, 'provide you email for this account'. So I did that and then... approved! You are certified over 18+. That is the flip side of this, some of these companies will put up some of the weakest barriers on this stuff.
The fact that the vast majority of comments here are engaging with these campaigns policies on the level of 'protecting the children', is proof enough that the propaganda effort has worked beautifully.
It was never about the children, but as long as people discuss as if it were, they have won.
We know what this is really about, its to give the UK intelligence services the ability to spy on US citizens and then pass the information on to US intelligence. We'll probably get similar laws in all the other five eyes as well.
That's not what this is about at all. Its British NGOs lobbying US states to pass state-level digital-ID laws. The end goal seems to be to make anonymous posting on the internet illegal. Its more about mass censorship than surveillance.
We need marketing for working class laypeople, esp on the right, to understand what's happening on our web, our devices and on our streets and why they should care. I don't think I've seen this type of marketing for this demographic land in any meaningful way yet
UK has two competing governance models: The Round Table (decentralized, king as "first among peers") and the Tower of London (Centralized autocracy, originally imposed by the Norman conquerer William I).
The Star Chamber, as an extension of the Tower of London, served as an administrative tool to avoid trial by peers, lower the standards of evidence, while eliminating privacy and the spread of "libel" in favor of public stability. "The truth is no defense" in the Star Chamber model because libelous claims that were TRUE were more damaging to public stability.
There's a strong precedence in common law for supression of privacy and speech if it threatens the legitamcy of the administrative state.
Someone I used to associate with was always really switched on with these things. Many things he said in the past that sounded a bit extreme or conspiratorial, turned out to be the real deal years later. Always interesting in retrospect.
The one thing he always said is, they have always been watching and know who is who, what these things do is allow it to be entered into the court of law. Now they can act on these things.
I mean, I wasn't even thinking at that level. It's been about 10 years since Facebook forced everyone to verify their identity. The only difference now is there is a push to codify it into law.
It's interesting that 5Rights focus shifted completely from rights to surveillance and control. Back in 2017 they still thought about a rights framework [1], the website has since been taken down.
The goal behind these efforts, fundamentally, is to make it impossible to organize efforts to dissent against whatever comes next. We still have the tools for mass organization but we lack unifying charismatic leaders who could use them in time.
This is something I have noted with Trump, he seems to be one of the last names that made it really big in pre-social media era and had a somewhat unified presence in peoples minds.
Making it to that level nowadays is actually really difficult, heck I would argue that even people like Mr Beast hasn't hit that level of awareness due to the fragmented nature of media and fame.
You can build movement in an echo chamber, it just depends if that is enough.
Delay the legislation whenever possible, call your Congress critter and make their lives a tiny bit worse. Deny them at every level of government including local and state assemblies where you have a bigger voice. Defend your communities by actually showing up to city council meetings. That kinda stuff...
The wild west era of the internet was an anomaly and we were naive to ever believe it will go on forever. State actors and Big Businesses have mostly put the genie back in the bottle.
The UK laws are indeed, oddly enough, much more restrictive than the US laws here. If there is one country with worse police powers than the USA it is the UK.
The UK people always complain about BREXIT now (which they themselves decided to go through via majority vote), but I am glad they can no longer sabotage the EU now.
I simply do not understand the optaphobia of the tech literate.
Social media already tracks it's users with or without laws. The general populace simply will not wish to anonymize themselves on the internet. So ID Laws only serves as a benefit by restricting children.
Regarding pornography, the demand will always be there. Adding ID tracking will just shift the business model to be more covert, which is also a net benefit to children. And for the adults who seek it, they will find it, with or without ID laws.
So again, I do not understand the rejection of ID law. Either you are known on the internet, of which ID law is just a confirmation of your identity (less bots maybe?), or you are anonymous, and you will skirt any ID laws and not participate in the known identity space. What ends up is ID law straight up does not materially affect you, unless you are a literal child.
And on the day the government decides to ban social media for adults, I say good riddance to it too. Anonymous internet may even thrive because of it.
One of the lobbyist organizations is backed by the data broker industry (AVPA). And it's well known several privacy rapist corporations (Meta) are also backing these bills. So yes, it absolutely affects us, and that should be obvious.
I'm convinced the pro comments are astroturfing. They've been caught doing it already on Twitter for these bills.
Is this [AVPA](https://avpassociation.com/)? As far as I can tell, they are a group that benefits from age verification because they directly provide the service. This is typical lobby behaviour? I was not aware that Meta is backing the bill, but based on how they already fingerprint each of their users, I don't see how an additional ID number affects their business model.
I'm still left wondering how it affects us? Is my insurance rate going to change because of this? Because if they can sell the data after ID laws, they can definitely sell it before ID laws too.
I suppose there will always be some astroturfing for such an issue, but I'm not convinced that it is the majority voice. I don't use Twitter anyways, don't plan on giving my data to them. In fact, with anonymous websites like HN, you would never know either way. So to me, we can either eliminate astroturfing with identification, or consider every anonymous voice in good faith.
Right, but that's typical company behaviour. "Hey I have a product, use me!" Does not seem to be the dystopia level action that the previous commenter implied, unless we know that they are willfully selling the data to third parties, which I won't fully discount, but innocent until proven guilty.
Similarly, I do not understand the willful ignorance and bootlicking attitude of those who want to support coercing others into sharing orivate information.
The reasons are mentioned every single time these laws are brought up, I can only assume you're willfully ignoring the concerns people have:
It's a security black hole, increasing our attack surface astronomically.
It causes undue compliance costs for websites to meet basic security standards.
It does not reliably prevent the determined teenager from bypassing these restrictions, e.g. with a vpn, but imposes enormous costs on allegedly a nontarget demograpgic (e.g. everyone else). Small benefit with a large cost is a bad policy.
The problem is entirely manufactured by bureaucrats, the public is concerned with gas prices and making ends meet. The parents that are concerned about their child's internet access can and do take the appropriate precautions because child controls already exist.
Whatever justification is given, the end result is mass surveillance, with the expected consequences in reduction of personal and social liberties. This is nothing to scoff at.
Thank you very much for taking the time to reply. Here's what I think:
> Similarly, I do not understand the willful ignorance and bootlicking attitude of those who want to support coercing others into sharing orivate information.
I think by enacting these ID laws, we immediately add a barrier of entry to social media. Social media has been too easy to participate, and many people have let their guards down allowing them to collect our data and sell our attention. Just like how cookie banners annoy users, my hope is that the additional barrier of ID laws will make people think twice before submitting themselves to social media.
> The reasons are mentioned every single time these laws are brought up, I can only assume you're willfully ignoring the concerns people have:
> It's a security black hole, increasing our attack surface astronomically.
Do you mean the possibility of a data leak? Social media is public. When people are broadcasting their location willingly, I don't see how an ID number adds harm.
> It causes undue compliance costs for websites to meet basic security standards.
And they should. Restaurants follow food safety and hygiene regulations. Websites should follow child safety regulations. That is fair.
> It does not reliably prevent the determined teenager from bypassing these restrictions, e.g. with a vpn, but imposes enormous costs on allegedly a nontarget demograpgic (e.g. everyone else). Small benefit with a large cost is a bad policy.
The effect of juvenile subversion, I think, has been overstated. The UK government released a study that [30% of teenagers used VPNs](https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/childrens-circumv...). If 70 percent of teenagers are off social media, I think it's a worthwhile endeavour.
> The problem is entirely manufactured by bureaucrats, the public is concerned with gas prices and making ends meet. The parents that are concerned about their child's internet access can and do take the appropriate precautions because child controls already exist.
One can do both. Again, child safety is not an issue of the individual. Peer pressure is a real phenomenon. I wouldn't blame a parent stuck in the ghetto for not being able to give their children better opportunities.
> Whatever justification is given, the end result is mass surveillance, with the expected consequences in reduction of personal and social liberties. This is nothing to scoff at.
I would like to add that it is mass surveillance of public spaces, which is already plenty surveilled. I believe in ID laws for public online activity, not your personal WhatsApp chats. If this sounds like a slippery slope, there are many alternative solutions to be found.
The crux of ID laws for child safety should not be its existence, but its scope. Apply it to social media companies who have shown that they cannot be trusted with the attention of children, nothing more.
It's cute people think the UK has this level of influence over the USA
Like, pick a side: are we the tiny backwater micro state on the verge of bankruptcy with no standing in the world, or are we a hugely influencial world power directing US law?
It might just be me, but when the US decides to do something like requiring age verification on porn sites it feels half-hearted, sort of stupid and mostly annoying. When the EU does it, it feels naive, overreaching, bureaucratic, mostly harmless (but annoying and misguided). When it is the UK that attacks privacy it feels incredibly dystopian, at least to me. It's somehow darker, compared to the US or the EU and I don't understand why.
There's a better network layer solution than trying to block visitors at every host or at the endpoint devices' OS/application layer. I know because a company in my country is already testing such a thing in private beta. A router firmware that provides two wifi endpoints per home, one for adults and one for minors. You only share the minors' password with your children. The firmware maintains a whitelist of sites (it periodically downloads from a central server, I think). There is nothing to be installed on endpoint device, and no gatekeeping is necessary at the host. Apparently this can be extended to mobile networks as well, but I haven't looked at it in detail.
It also provides addiction control features and network level integration to google safesearch, youtube, bing and duck-duck-go providing fool proof 24x7 protection. In fact any social media service could be integrated at network-level as long as that service facilitates child-friendly environment.
Also when integrated with mobile core network solution, the child safety and usage policies follow the child in cellular data and home wifi data.
Also it’s more than a whitelist. It maintains a list of over 130 million websites which are not suitable to children. Including malware sites. And this list is growing daily as they are classifying websites on the fly.
Yes, if it's to provide full safety coverage, it has to be rolled out at telco level including mobile connectivity, which is where this solution runs into red tape.
The funny thing about this quote in context was that Ben Franklin was using it to argue for MORE state power, not less. Remember, Ben was the guy that would steal private letters and publish them in his newspaper.
It seems to me the intrusiveness of age verification will continue to grow.
They want the OS to report the user's age. People will use this to claim whatever age they want. For instance, if companies cannot advertise to children, they might find that almost every computer is reporting that the user is a child--turns out adults want the protections kids receive as well--sometimes.
Eventually they will have to enforce a system intrusive enough that no lying or abuse of the system is possible. We might even approach "Verification Can" levels of verification.
Yeah, the US is getting the worst version. We can't have federal digital ID because "mark of the beast" but you have to show ID to watch porn so a bunch of private ID verification gatekeepers have shown up.
The whole think of the children angle is so cursed. Used to push surveillance meanwhile actual harm against children goes ignored. See Epstein files and the grooming gangs in the UK
If it actually did anything to protect the children it wouldn’t be so objectionable
> Used to push surveillance meanwhile actual harm against children goes ignored.
Worse, these laws will actually create new harms to children who will be forced to give their identity to websites and identity services that will exploit them and fail to protect that data.
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.
It's shocking to me how Americans can easily go for this kind of stuff. A few years ago an otherwise enlightened community leader here in the US told me how he admirer European anti hate speech laws.
It didn't occur to him that such laws could so easily be used to silence him in the near future. I think it's a bit of labor/left wing thinking that "we are so obviously good and smart and right" that any restrictions would only apply to others.
I knew this was about money and censorship and not just "saving the kids" but I didn't know about all these NGOs, good article.
In the world they want to impose on us, atrocities like Gaza and Epstein would be virtually unknown. We are already seeing clampdowns and police sent to doors as a scare tactic, it only gets worse from here.
We have to be extremely conscious of groups like these, they are enemies of the people and they are actively working to remove our freedoms and rights. Do not underestimate them, do not let them get away with it.
I can't be the only one who will never comply with these draconian, anti-privacy laws, nor the only one with the technical prowess to bypass them. Never used social media (unless you count HN as social media, which is a stretch), so perhaps it won't be as great a loss as it will be to many. I have no doubt there are many like-minded people (in number if not in population %) that feel the same, and will undoubtedly repopulate newsgroups and message boards that are not subject to this authoritarian nonsense.
Fight this shit off. We do not need this. Digital Privacy has tools coming up - we are all loosing on this because of a few monkeys I wish some people had to courage to deal with. I'm honestly exhausted by this shit. Let all of it rot.
They can keep floating this stuff and we have to put in a thousand times as much energy to shoot it down. We get worn down quicker than they can. It only has to work once for them, we have to keep pushing back.
My very pessimistic take is one out of Taoism. If you wish for them to fail, let them grow. Eventually the weight of the whole system collapses itself, the question is just on what time frame.
The way out is to go through. I don't like this framing but it seems to be the most accurate.
You don’t even have to “let them” grow, they will do it regardless, as they hold the seats of power. But that doesn’t mean that silent acquiescence is the right path, either. Speaking up attracts like-minded allies.
It’s also a good idea to maintain your own private means of communication, as there will be some hard times ahead.
UK person here, and someone who has been lobbied and lobbied the government on tech regulations.
firstly the amount of money that the "UK lobby" are pushing is a drop of sand in the ocean.[1]
secondly, and most importantly, the USA has no (federally robust) legal protection for citizens to guard against data collection and aggregation. So whist this is being presented as a war on anonymity lead by the dirty British, this is basically "think of the children" play for protecting anonymity. There is nothing wrong with this, its a good argument, even though its obviously flawed.
If you want to dox someone, you just need to pay the right broker. That is, in the UK really difficult. (for example flock cameras are largely illegal in the UK, certainly no council or HOA can just install them. sure you can put in CCTV, but you cannot process that CCTV to track bystanders)
There are no useful controls for citizens to limit the collection and processing of personal information. so whilst in theory you can be anonymous in america, as soon as you use a phone, or any ISP you are effectively de anonymised. I can as a company, buy your location data, tie it to your IP, then cross check with various ad networks to get usernames. (the civil legal route here is file a john doe and ask for metadata in discovery. Higher legal bar, but I don't think thats something that can be done simply in the UK)
TLDR: Contrary to popular belief there are greater protections to anonymous behaviour in the UK. Yes they have been greatly eroded, but the difference here is that there are no legal ways for companies to unmask you for money[2]. In the USA there is no legal protection for someone to share your ID for money.
[1]musk is currently spending millions propping up convicted criminals.
[2] not without your permission, or without a robust legal proceeding.
> the USA has no (federally robust) legal protection for citizens to guard against data collection and aggregation.
In the US, laws and court rulings have held that the person/company that aggregates the data owns the data. In the past it was based on phonebook authoring, but has since become "whoever owns the computer owns whatever data is in that computer".
The EU has the opposite - you own the data about yourself. We need to move to that standard.
Didn't HN decide to not allow AI submissions? This is quite explicitly one in that the operator of the site declares to "automate investigative journalism" and launched the site with its five pieces of 'journalism' yesterday.
And to point out the obvious on the actual quality of the piece, The US has itself passed age verification laws in 20 states, such as Texas where it was driven not by the British but by domestic interest groups and decidedly state senators like Angela Paxton.
Also given the slant of the site it's pretty obvious was the political motivation here is, I guess yelling at the British always works
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.
> I see you're putting "no internet access without scanning your ID"
Other countries have already implemented this or are making strenuous efforts towards it. In Pakistan right now you need to submit a copy of your national ID card and scan your fingerprints to get a live LTE data service SIM card. This is not hyperbole but is real practice in some places that is soon going to be imported to jurisdictions that traditionally have more "freedom".
Flagging on submissions deranks a submission after some count, making it fall off the first three pages. I think it's a much higher bar (like moderation involvement) to fully make it dead.
I also flagged the article. The first few laws that I looked at on the page had nothing to do with digital IDs. This article is the worst form of AI slop: rage bait.
I'm always surprised how defensive people get in here about privacy when so many corporations have vastly more information about you than the government does.
This 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.
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.
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?
Because things that won't get you into trouble today will get you into trouble tomorrow when they change the rules. I'd prefer to have the government know as little as possible about my doings.
This isn’t a “gotcha”. Many here take exceptional steps against this kind of thing and also advocate for restrictions on what kind of data corporations can collect.
The corporations aren't going to throw you in jail if you cross state lines to get an abortion. The US government is already doing this when they get that data.
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.
I'd dispute there is a UK war on anonymity just because they've tried to stop showing kids porn and the like. The UK has always been kind of pro anonymity - there was ID during WW2 but it was scrapped after. There have been revolts against ID cards, you don't have to carry a driving license to drive and things like that. We've always had child protection though - film certificates, over 18 to buy porn mags etc. The new internet stuff seems like a half hearted child protection effort.
I'm a Brit who wastes time web surfing and the total impact on me so far is reddit asked for a selfie. It's very different from areas where they did have a war on anonymity like bank accounts and investments where you have to scan passports and stuff. I've heard no one at all suggest that for general web surfing.
What country have you been living in? The UK is most certainly at war with anonymity: one of the highest CCTV countries in the world, key disclosure, OSA, KYC means yes you do need to scan your passport/ID now for any financial institution, Apple stopping full device encryption, the only thing left is ID cards and we will have no anonymity at all.
If you really believe the UK is a privacy-friendly and anonimity-friendly country then you have definitely been brainwashed. I can't think of a first-world country that's worse than the UK in this.
The nuance here is that only the state can deanonymise you[1], in the USA you can just pay a data broker. Sure the UK is the boogeyman here, but the reason why the federal government isn't making a fuss is because they already have the legal rules to force a backdoor.
[1] there are caveats, but the crucial point is its a legal process, rather than bidding war.
You are measuring only the inconvenience you have directly experienced. Not the impact on wider society.
Whistle blowers, journalists, religious apostates, people unsure about their sexuality all rely on annonimity on the internet.
I can't find the Times article but government officials have clearly stated that this isn't about protecting children, it's about controlling political discourse online. They are now floating the idea of forcing YouTube to give "trusted" public service news sources prominence. Again to control the discourse. That includes the BBC, which I personally have completely lost trust in.
Sure - open an email not in your name, write to papers not in your name, whistle blow away. It still works. I've got various anon accounts - no problems so far.
Not sure about the trusted source bit although the likes of x and youtube seem to do that anyway a bit - give more prominence to medical experts than antivax cranks for example.
Technology helps, but it also enabled increased 'toxicity' in general, across the global ecosystems, including social, human relations, trust, digital crime etc.
It's not just about child safety. No one is safe from this increasing levels of toxic environment created by digital/online ways. A lot of types of people will be extinct, who are unable to deal with technology driven media onslaught, complexity, online crime and content manipulation. There is no scope for trust and assumptions. One need to be on their toes in every engagement with others and these systems, or hire an agent/expert even for simple tasks in life.
The tech-savvy people here might argue for freedom and anonymity at any cost. But think of other social classes, laws and the way the nations and societies came to be what they are today. The world doesn't just belong to tech nerds only.
People need safety from all this tech. That may against the wishes of a tiny minority of the people. But a nation, by nature, enforces generic policies that benefit those most of the people.
> Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what
someone says.
If the same standard were applied for posts, this one would fail. I recognize that it is a popular perspective that these measures are essentially a war on anonymity, but that is not what they intend to fix, although it is quite possible that anonymity is a casualty of whatever war is at hand.
I believe efforts to resist these measures would be more effective if they engaged with the problem: the modern internet is a harmful experience for young minds, beyond what any society should consider acceptable. I personally don't think shocking content is the worst of it. Algorithms that maximize engagement over enriching experience are a curse for any age group, and developing brains face the worst of it.
Is age-gating the internet the right answer? Will it even help? Are there ulterior motives? Those are open questions that need discussion. Dismissing a genuine problem is choosing not to engage in the discussion.
I disagree with you. Plans to eliminate anonymity have been discussed for years in elite circles, at Davos and similar events, and it’s most often framed in the context of social control (eliminating dissent or foreign influence).
Larry Ellison on surveillance: “Citizens will be on their best behavior, because we’re constantly recording and reporting everything that’s going on.”
This is not new and it’s not about kids. This is the culmination of years of planning that began after the Arab Spring, when elites began to get concerned about how the Internet could be leveraged for domestic regime change.
As far as the matter of ulterior motives, we're not in disagreement. Assuming that's true, it is important to address the real problem they are hijacking to realize their goals. Dismissing it as a made up problem just means you lose credibility with anyone who is paying attention.
It will always be possible to find a cause du jour to justify violating the rights of citizens, because crime happens and reality is messy. The real problem is that the mass media is complicit in this agenda, so they amplify the excuse until bad laws are passed (laws which seldom solve the problem).
While I do think we should make efforts to reduce crime and create better spaces for kids, laws like this aren’t the answer.
Ellison is probably in favor at least partially because he's a database salesman, and oppressive domestic spy agencies need lots and lots of really big databases.
> the modern internet is a harmful experience for young minds
Because of the goal of advertising revenue as the ultimate driver as to build an addictive permanent scroll of slop on tiktok or instagram, and the desire of social media companies to build walled gardens where someone's entire online experience stays in their "app.". As you say, this affects young and old alike.
Are we pretending that the porn id laws weren't a first attempt at getting forums like Reddit that might "accidentally" have naked pictures liable and therefore profile everyone?
Because this is leaning on blaming to UK for everything the US is doing to itself an awful lot.