None of these laws are actually about protecting children. That's not the real goal. The real goal is the complete elimination of anonymity on the web, where both private companies and the state can keep tabs on everything you do.
Not being able to be at least pseudo-anonymous has a real chilling effect on speech and expression. Even if there are laws in place protecting such rights, people will self-censor when knowing they are being watched.
It's how freedom of speech and expression dies without actually scratching that part off of the bill of rights.
I'm ok with running this experiment (not sure how it really turns out) BUT only if everyone participates. Governments and businesses get to watch me... I get to watch them. If the death if anonymity is inevitable, as unpleasant as that sounds, the goal to shoot for then is universal application
There are some people that care about kids, but at this point I have become very cynical about the use of children in politics. The United States won't even sign on to the UN Declaration of the Rights of the Child which would give them the right to food, education, healthcare, etc.
Children are perfect because they can't advocate for themselves and so have no independent voice, but everyone is supposed to respect them except when convenient. A perfect foil.
There are a vast majority of us that believe that our governments should be guaranteeing primarily negative rights - that the powers we grant government must not take certain actions. We believe positive rights are incredible dangerous and ought to be reserved for only those truly special cases where universal collective action is truly required like mutual self defense.
The wonderful thing about positive rights like the one you propose here is that you dont need to wait for government to act. You can start donating yourself right now! No need to force everyone else.
yes, I believe the term for them is "useful idiots"
They use assets to influence people and achieve certain goals. In this case here, terrorism or child pornography is used as cop-out rationale for censorship, surveillance and so forth. It's never about those topics really, perhaps 5% at best, the rest is just sugar-coated decoy to restrict people and keep them as slaves and pets.
> Since both PR campaigns and any action on policy tends to cater to extremes, there's always pressure that is shrinking the middle
This only works on people who are susceptible to this. I understand how propaganda works so I am never fooled by "this is because of terrorists". This is also why I am for 100% transparency at all times.
Is it just "more ID is bad"? Or is there a specific concern that this bill is a targeted overreach to increase censorship and surveillance.
It genuinely doesn't seem like any more of a threat than age-gating Playboy at the bookstore. What have I missed?
I'll never look at that account again in my ficking life.
Age-gating porn doesnt seem problematic to at all. In fact it's far less worrisome than any of the former, which are kind of important for commerce. What am I missing?
The problem is normies don't operate under assumed anonymity. So when the hordes of unwashed regular people joined the internet they wanted their face everywhere. People were shamed out of their handles. Some people gave up their anonymity to make yet another faceless bullshit blog-as-a-resume. Look at most of the top karma farmers on HN. Most of them post their personal information in the their bio. Pathetic.
> people will self-censor when knowing they are being watched.
This has been happening both in public and on the internet for over a decade now.
> Not being able to be at least pseudo-anonymous has a real chilling effect on speech and expression.
The normies would argue you have nothing to hide if you aren't doing anything wrong. The average voter, regardless of party, will happily surrender every ounce of freedom for the thought of security. Hell, I remember sometime around 2007 DEFCON became a first-name-basis conference!
> bill of rights
It's more of a bill of privileges given NGOs and PACs are regularly paying to erode the core rights granted to citizens. Either through lawfare by circumventing the courts and suing companies into bankruptcy, or by directly purchasing congressmen via donation.
What I have found in general is people who cry and complain about this kind of thing were, at one point, happy to have it happen to their political enemies. The laws that are paving the way for age-gated deanonymized internet were at one point used as a cudgel to beat their political enemies down. When the tables finally turn after the Nth "protect the children" bill, it's the other people left crying and now suddenly its a "problem".
____________
We never needed everyone to filter, just parents busy lobbying the government to impose crap onto every possible service and website across the entire world.
Instead, they should purchase devices for their kids that have a child-lock and client-side filters. All sites have to do is add an HTTP header loosely characterizing it's content.
1. Most of the dollar costs of making it all happen will be paid by the people who actually need/use the feature.
2. No toxic Orwellian panopticon.
3. Key enforcement falls into a realm non-technical parents can actually observe and act upon: What device is little Timmy holding?
4. Every site in the world will not need a monthly update to handle Elbonia's rite of manhood on the 17th lunar year to make it permitted to see bare ankles. Instead, parents of that region/religion can download their own damn plugin.
Making it more sophisticated does not change this problem.
The problem is that some want to control other people. I am against this. For similar reasons I stopped using reddit - I finally had enough of random moderators censoring me and others.
Like a nutrition label. It’s your choice (as an adult) what you want to do with that information.
If you are a small child it is indeed up to your parents to censor adult content and I am all for that. Kids will be upset but that is part of growing up. When the parents believe the kids are emotionally ready for adult content then I am sure they will get parental controls disabled. Even if that should not come to pass the kids once they are teens will bypass it anyway.
If you are an adult and your followers are adults then this does not really apply to you. This would only hurt groomers.
Not all of them.
The solution currently undergoing large scale field testing in the EU uses cryptography (specifically zero-knowledge proofs) to allow you to anonymously prove to a site that your government issued ID shows you are above the site's minimum age, without the site getting any information about your real identity.
An aspiring teen could set up an RPi that modifies headers for all traffic on the network that the parental units never even know about. I'd venture there would be plenty of YT, TikTok, Discord threads, etc that would provide a step-by-step set of instructions to do it. Probably just point to an image to download to copy to your SD and voila.
If your kid can figure out how to install a custom certificate on their device and MITM SSL to evade filters, (a) you never secured the device (b) you already lost long ago and (c) let’s get that kid a job or a scholarship.
What I’m saying is you can set rules, you can try your best, but under no circumstances can you build an impenetrable wall for determined kids. Things like this header solution or better controls on the end device would make things safe for the vast majority of kids. So don’t ruin the internet for adults because of a handful of unruly kids who are going to get in trouble no matter what.
An aspiring teen could just have sex with another aspiring teen...
You won't stop teenagers from finding a way to be teenagers. Part of being a teenager is learning how to subvert the rules set by adults to fulfil one's hormonal imperative.
It's probably worth noting that if teens can not view porn, they will likely produce porn making an entirely new tax free underground market on Tor or other networks.
This is just for keeping small children out. Nobody in the history or future of earth have ever or will ever locked teens out of a thing. Archive this comment so we can review it at a later time.
If circumventing a measure requires setting up a RPi and modifying headers, I would call it widely successful, that would be less than a thousandth of kids.
Youtube is user-generated content which is precisely why I would prefer they add an RTA header. Random people uploading videos can claim to be kid friendly when they are not. Take that responsibility away from the uploaders and away from Youtube and hand it to the parents. Less work, liability and cost for Youtube should be a nifty incentive at the risk of blocking some advertising to children which is another loaded topic all together.
The system described still requires action by the webmaster. Their options are: deny the entire site to those sending an RTA header; evaluate the content themselves; or trust the uploader. (Or a combination: have uploaders opt-in to evaluation for a fee, with the content denied to kids by default.)
It is up to the client what to do with the header which right now is nothing. A law would be required to get the snippet of code added to user agents. I estimate it would take an intern one afternoon to get it into the clients they support not counting dev/qa, management approval, etc...
Challenge to FAANG: Show off your interns! There is no harm in adding the code required to detect this header. Example header to detect sent from NGinx. If you detect this header activate nanny controls. To be safe do a separate parental_build to get manager approval.
add_header Rating 'RTA-5042-1996-1400-1577-RTA' always;
For fun, search for this on Shodan.
The website owners and operators have to decide which URLs get the header. If the categorization is "either adult or user-generated content", then I already covered that for the case of YouTube: i.e., the entire site is denied to kids (whose parents opt in).
I also covered that here [1]. Indeed if parents do not enable all of Youtube or Youtube does not move most adult content into a unique URL or their server does not send the header for anything flagged as adult the kids will not be advertised to. They would have to go to a kid friendly site that moderates before a video is viewable or Youtube would have to change moderation tactics. Kids need not visit Youtube. There are kid friendly sites.
It is a serious business concern, there are occasional panics triggered by consumers complaining that a brand ad is shown next to and benefits from the attention of some distasteful content, and they start to bleed important advertisers on mass. YouTube then proceeds to get defensive and demonetizes (removes all ads from) or tags as adult-only any video that may be concerning, where avoiding false negatives takes much more precedence over avoiding false positives.
Of course this is not directly tied to protecting children, but this incentive structure is partly aligned and it is a strong one.
That said, I was mostly dealing with griefers in Trade Wars or LoRD, and the worst thing I could find locally was GIFs of women in bikinis (and waiting for them to download was an excellent way to learn patience). I didn't have to worry so much about the threats that exist today online.
I am so grateful that I grew up when I did and got to experience that.
The look on his face when a 10 year old rode up on a bicycle to buy his gamepad. I don't have a good memory but I still remember that scene ha.
I think it is amusing how these commercial third party intermediaries today are trying to frame things like "chat control" and "age restrictions" as attacks on internet users' rights rather than attacks on their intermediation "business model"
Generally, there is no age restriction on subscribing to internet service. However third party intermediaries that have now occupied seemingly every corner of the web, so-called "tech" companies, want everyone to believe that intermediaries _are_ the internet (as opposed to middlemen who seek to surveil as many internet subscribers as they can)
I am glad I grew up before the internet so that I understand and appreciate the only service that matters is _internet service_. People today take internet service for granted perhaps but I can remember when it was a new frontier
With internet service, there were so many possibilities. Today, so-called "tech" companies portray internet service as a given, apparently useless on its own,^1 whilst they advertise themselves as offering "services" (usually for free, a Trojan Horse for commercial surveillance). They utilise bandwidth paid for by the internet subscriber to transfer encrypted surveillance data to themselves
1. For example, when Mozilla claims something like without an online advertising "ecosystem" the internet would be worthless. The greed and self-entitlement behind this framing is both absurd and hilarious
One can disagree with Mozilla and think advertising sucks, and use tools to block it or FOSS products that don't force it on us, while also seeing how e2ee encryption bans ("chat control") and age verification rules are a restriction of both the rights of service providers and the rights of users.
Another way to put it is, just because a regulation is a restriction of the rights of a service provider does not mean it isn't also a restriction of the rights of a user.
The former does not make the latter true, but in some cases both are true.
I'd also add that if we can't stop bad laws that restrict the rights of (and piss off) both service providers and users , we have no hope of stopping similarly bad laws that only restrict the rights of users.
(Service providers, even small ones if they take the time to speak with their member of Congress, can be very credible, sympathetic, and persuasive stakeholders. When we can fight on the same side--realizing that sometimes we will fight on opposite sides--it's better for user rights that we do so. One of the tragedies of the left and parts of the right in the Trump era is that they see any regulation that hurts Big Tech as a win, even if it also hurts user rights. User rights are safer if we can distinguish between regs that hurt Big Tech and users from regs that don't hurt users.)
I don’t know what the solution is, but I do not think kids should have unrestricted access to the internet, especially if their parents can’t/won’t set limits.
If dad leaves the liquor cabinet unlocked the solution isn’t to ban alcohol.
A free and open internet is non negotiable.
Maybe with enough effort you can force the internet to fracture into a centralized TV-style internet and a “shadow” free internet, but you’ll probably kill the economy in the process. Regardless, you’ll never stamp out those of us who will maintain the free internet over whatever channels we can find.
Public wifi and smart phones chngaes what can be done and what needs to be done.
Do your best as a parent and that is enough. Perfection is not possible or even desired; kids do have a degree of agency, and if they want to break the rules they are going to do it! And breaking some rules (ideally in a safe-ish way) is one way that we learn how to be independent from parents as we mature.
The question, then, is who is responsible for the children in the household? I've always answered this exactly one way: the parents. Power and responsibility must go together, so if the parents are responsible, then the parents must have the power. Parents have been held legally responsible for the crimes of their children, and given the coverage of parents being arrested for letting their kids go on a walk across town, I'd say this sets up incentives pretty well.
But all of that is a sideshow; a narrative. What we actually have is a massive swing towards authoritarianism globally, largely fueled by in increase in the internet allowing for unprecedented surveillance overreach, and the folks trying to seize control of those reins are using children seeing porn as a way to seem benevolent to garner support from folks that don't understand what's actually happening. Huge swathes have been duped into believing the narrative and fighting for age-gating in the worst possible ways, and that's because they're missing the larger pattern.
It's manufactured consent.
You may be right about the authoritarianism; it's a tendency of our species and makes it all the more remarkable that Western freedoms have lasted this long. I think, though, that it's more likely simple greed. The giant tech companies, dependent on ad revenue because nobody would actually pay for what they are offering, must be able to track and profile people.
The "protect kids from porn" lobby has always been around, it has nothing to do with surveillance or the internet. These people would be picketing a bookstore that sold Hustler magazine back in the 1970s, and demanding that customers be made to prove their age.
Then these places should make sure kids are not doing wrong things on the web on their machines. Just like a shop should make sure to not sell alcohol to kids. A library should have some kind of web filter anyway to at least block porn.
We are at that point now with children having unrestricted access to online content that isn’t age appropriate, as well as being influenced by insane weirdos on TikTok and the like at an age where they are particularly impressionable.
The CDC says 4,000 underage drinkers die in the US every year. Maybe we could reduce that with stricter controls, but at what point does that become too burdensome to the rights of legal drinkers?
It's even harder to get the balance right when it comes to free speech issues like online pornography.
That's not quite correct. They count both deaths where the decedent had a high blood alcohol level and deaths where someone else who was responsible for the death had a high blood alcohol level. Because of this many of those in the count were underage but were not drinkers.
For example if I'm driving drunk and you are my sober passenger and I drive us off a tall cliff killing you your death will be included in their count because I was drunk and responsible for it. It also works the other way. If I'm sober and you are drunk, and I drive us off the cliff and you die it counts because you died drunk.
Killing the wolf saved both the children of busy parents that couldn't be bothered to break their legs, and the children that grew old enough to have their leg fixed but weren't yet adult.
Today instead of chasing predators away from children spaces, we just box the children so at one magic birthday they'd be out in the world untouched by evil. The world will be still evil however, and the not children for a day unprepared for it.
What if, here's a radical idea, we terminate corporation with toxic ads or that let predators use their system to target children.
I will be restricting my kids access to the internet.
I judge him worthy of viewing whatever he wants when he inevitably works around those restrictions.
If you hand power to the state every time people fail to properly handle their responsibilities, you end up in a dictatorship. It is a parent's responsibility to keep their kids away from the dark corners of the internet. Thoughtful regulation would create tools to allow them to do that easily, not hand parenting over to governments.
My feelings of freedom in that era, as a teen in a small 90s US city, were what fueled me to co-found one of the organizations (Fight for the Future) cited in the article!
(No longer in the trenches, just on the board, deserve zero direct credit for any of this work--it's all them!)
LoRD was fantastic, as were the turn based games that other people would dial in to take part of. It was such a different era, but we made it work by setting time limits and cooperating.
That's a sweetspot if you ask me.
Governments are also getting more conservative recently with regards to domestic surveillance & social freedoms. In this regard, it's not anyone new, it's just the usual suspects: the same people who fund conservative media, the prison industrial complex, etc.
It creates a divide between people that are looking for a solution to a problem, and people that disregard the problem completely. If you just ignore the actual problem and cynically call it a front for something else, you are just going to be ignored in the actual conversation. The problem is real and it needs a solution, suggest something better or be forced to stay out of the conversation.
For example, if there's a lot of car accidents, and we suggest a speed limit, you might say that it's actually a way for cops and cities to control the population, and make everything slow, and increase city income by charging fines. But the problem still exists despite your cynicism, unless you suggest another solution for the problem, you won't be able to keep your precious speed freedom. Because of course reducing car fatalities is more important than the freedom to go super fast, that's not really under discussion.
This issue is way more nuanced then you are making it. There is no legislation, or anyone enforcing laws to reign in the abuses and therefor the tech is being abused, and will continue to be abused with no end it sight. If you want laws and mechanisms to protect children, first have something in-place that protects people from the abuse that these corporations are encouraging. Until that happens, I do not support any of these initiatives. Its the wrong time for them.
A somewhat analogous situation is how landlords raise rents in sync with each other, not because they're intentionally colluding to fix prices, but because nowadays it's easy to see average rental prices in neighborhoods, and the natural strategy is to set your rental prices based on that.
I think that's the wrong guess. Even with chat control, in some previous forms, the proposals came of the back of lobbying. One such case was Ashton Kutcker's startup https://www.ftm.eu/articles/ashton-kutchers-non-profit-start...
The more recent proposals for chat control were drafted by non-public "high level groups", the identity of which wasn't revealed to the public https://mullvad.net/en/why-privacy-matters/going-dark
I tend to follow information in this space, and could talk about it endlessly (though it would still have minimal effect in the end).
From the things I'm seeing right now, in my mind, all this clampdown on privacy is to have better control of the message and discussion in order to preserve the corrupt status quo. To give one example, many leaks and reports initially come in anonymous due to fear of repercussion from those in power. My country (Romania) changed the legislation a couple of years back to prevent people from reporting corruption anonymously (in a highly corrupt state). Maybe that's why Trump said he loves Romanians, recently, he'd like to do that at home as well.
> more sinister intentional efforts to harm the public
Until recently I wasn't the type of person that would entertain the idea of a shadowy organization that tries to puppetmaster the world. Though with the recent Epstein emails release that in black and white stated about Slovakia's 2018 government "the government will fall this week - as planned" (day prior to mass protests that lead to it falling), makes you wonder about the backroom politics of the western world, and why we need more transparency there, and less control from them.
edit:
And of course, any change that is put behind a "think of the children" message, should raise everybody's eyebrows to the max.
> ...
> The biggest companies say they can manage the risks. Match Group—owner of Match.com, Tinder, Ok Cupid and Plenty of Fish—says any potential legal issues give “huge advantages” to those with enough size to comply. “We are able to have a big legal team, a big customer care team,” Chief Executive Mandy Ginsberg said.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/new-law-targets-sex-trafficking...
Everything that these laws are supposedly regulating has always been there and we have an entire generation now that grew up with it. Everyone was fine just like video games were fine, movies were fine, racy books were fine, and the printing press was fine.
The Internet comments make it seem like lazy parents but it's very convenient that the solution is to ID every single person on the Internet. Facebook pushed this hard with their real name policy and then had to back off because people complained about trans people being forced to use their old names. They've been successfully demonized so now it's time to push as hard as they can. It's probably not just Facebook but it's obviously not organic.
This seems strictly wrong. People talk online. People get their ideas online, and share their ideas online. Internet comments _alone_ are not a social movement, but they certainly do frequently represent social movements.
Internet comments do not represent anything anymore that doesn't manifest in the actual world. They are excellent at having a few influence the many
To your point though, maybe we can no longer reliably tell the difference, and so it'd be better to adopt your view as a rule of thumb.
Google has been bugging me with Android popups for years "please add your birthday to help Google comply with the law". Obtaining that bit of my information isn't something they need to do - it's something they want to do because every bit of personal information they scrape out of me makes their adtech surveillance database joins that much more accurate.
None of this requires some draconian regime where it becomes sites' own responsibilities to obtain and verify their users meatspace identities.
There's absolutely no way to counter this, or at least to round off the censorship power-grab this is allowing, if we don't admit to ourselves that people have become suspicious of the tech sector (us) and are reaching to clip our wings - starting with access to their kids.
If the politicians keep voting for things their constituents don't (and in these cases actively push back against so hard that the politician are forced to withdraw the push) that seems like strong evidence that politicians are doing something with an external incentive...
Politicians having bad incentives (e.g. campaign donations) isn't conspiracy thinking, it's a documented reality. Hell, we even had a supreme court judge taking a present from somebody who's case he was ACTIVELY OVERSEEING.
UK: https://yougov.co.uk/topics/society/survey-results/daily/202...
US: https://issueone.org/press/new-poll-finds-near-universal-pub...
Aus: https://au.yougov.com/politics/articles/51000-support-for-un...
So far as I know there's nothing confounding here - people from across the political spectrum just seem to think it's a good idea to introduce age checks and to restrict children from accessing adult content.
I'm sure social media could say with 99% accuracy whether somebody is a minor already just based on advertising data and if a law prevented facebook from showing diet pill ads to a kid that has absolutely zero with some sort of government tracking bullshit.
The fact that you are citing 3 studies without even reading them apparently really makes me suspicious of your motivation here.
My experiences are all in the UK but everything I've read and everyone I've spoken to (outside of tech circles) reinforces my belief that this is popular. If you disagree then fine but I don't think you can find any polling to support that.
If you can then be my guest - I genuinely would like to see it. I'm not happy with my conclusions.
Or you did read it in which case you'd realize it has nothing to do with people wanting government age verification, and then you also need to back off your claim and owe us an apology.
https://www.thecut.com/article/ashton-kutcher-thorn-spotligh...
In the process I learned about computers and eventually got a modem to access BBSes. It was exhilarating! I would have spent any amount of effort and time to access it.
I basically attribute my entire career to accessing stuff the puritans would have tried to prevent me from accessing.
Also, almost all of the porn I have came from private trackers.
I very much doubt they will be concerned with any of these rules. Things will just move more underground if that happens. And the more underground you go, the more unsavory stuff you might find.
But we all know this isn't actually about protecting children.
In a way, I hope that it ends up being a good thing because the whole clearnet should probably be nuked from orbit.
Us nerds can come up with something better. Federated, encrypted, anonymous and unblockable. It's just the spam problem that is the hard thing to solve. Maybe reputation with proof of work could work.
I'll happily leave the normies to their milquetoast, corporate, manipulated existence.
It's dual use. It is about protecting children, but also along the way these other properties happen to come along. Thing is, with enough cryptography, we could get a way that this would work, but it's too complicated, which results in you being right after all.
There are a few situations where I can see verification is necessary; number #1 is in regards to online transactions involving money from a bank account. But the whole "show your age to watch pr0n" - that is just rubbish nonsense. Same with "people of age 14 are too young to use anti-social media". Now, I think people should quit wasting their time with facebook and so forth anyway, but I consistently reject these attempts to restrict freedom by state authorities acting as lobbyists for control-freaks, dictators or over-eager corporations. The internet could not have gotten big with those restrictions in the first place - so let's remove all of those without mercy.
“Does the child pay for internet access?”
“No, but they have a device that can access the internet!”
“Oh, so the child bought the device and paid the bill?”
“No, the parents do!”
“Ah, so would you say it’s the parent’s responsibility to monitor their children’s internet usage since they gave them a network-connected device?”
“You obviously don’t want to protect kids!”
Look, I do want to protect kids. I really do, but I also am sick and tired of bad actors using “BuT tHe ChIlDrEn” to recruit idiots and -phobes in a quest to make the entire planet and all of its spaces magically safe for children of all ages - at the expense of the superior number of adults who need our own spaces devoid of kids for community, for socialization, for being our full, human selves.
The internet already has an age gate, and it’s called “the adults paying the damn bills”. Those adults are responsible for making internet access safe for kids, not the entire digital planet dropping what it’s doing to make every single private space safe for kids to access without parental supervision. Bring back curated services like Prodigy and Compuserve, or just don’t give kids internet access until they’re ready for it.
Most of humanity grew up just fine without regular internet access as children, and there’s no reason whatsoever we have to foist net-connected terminals onto kids of any age. That’s parental choice, and I refuse to be punished because of someone else’s bad parenting.
This comment should be highlighted on a forum like this. There is absolutely a business opportunity here, and it would double as a public service. You might even be able to get some grants for it!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mariel_boatlift
https://www.reddit.com/r/moviequestions/comments/133gbzl/in_...
https://www.vice.com/en/article/we-talked-to-migrants-about-...
From what i can gather, there was some confusion as to why some nations which clearly and obviously have very high crime/fraud/corruption statistics yet at the same time have incredibly low prison/prisoner statistics (https://www.statista.com/statistics/262961/countries-with-th...) and the governments couldn't figure it out or overlooked it. It turns out that those nations just kick out the trouble and the trouble arrives at other shores, quickly setting up black market trade routes, money laundering shops, heavy violence, and a complete disregard for laws.
Starmer is currently using anti-immigrant sentiment to push his digital IDs, but that's because he is a cynic. He does whatever he needs to do to satisfy his bosses.
> That movie Scarface in the first 25 minutes tells you something.
It tells you that the US puts nations under siege for decades for committing the crime of self-determination, then lets in with absolutely no obstacles all of the economically destroyed and desperate, the extremely right wing, and the participants in CIA-financed death squads who flee, then uses them as a voting block (and a resource) to support the continuation and escalation of those sieges.
edit: immigrants commit less crime in the US than natives. Their children commit more crime, because they rise to the level of natives at their socioeconomic bracket.
Sure most kids can look at naked people and not be too affected, we all have the same parts. But beyond that, a lot of really harmful behavior is depicted in some porn and kids are not really mature enough to understand that in real healthy relationships people don't actually have sex like that.
Both porn and social media can be addictive and unhealthy if they become a substitute for interacting with real people. And this also happens with adults not just kids.
I, for one, would have started with legal threats and financial penalties long ago. But it just won't happen. So I'm fine with technical solutions.
Facebook is able to sell you ads based on your favorite shoe lace colour. They ban terrorists, bots, porn and people named "Mark Zuckerberg" all the time. Noone can claim it's too hard for them to ban minors under 13.
How ironic. Age-gating is immoral, but pay-gating is fine.
Somebody who's 17 choosing to look at porn? Not in America's top 1 million problems.
Maybe there is a problem for a tiny number of individuals, OK. A one size fits all approach like this still isn't the solution in these cases, though.
Yup. Me too.
And it goes back much further. Cf. "Pictures of Lily"[0] for a pop culture exposition from nearly sixty years ago. The point being that "porn" isn't anything new, nor was it difficult to obtain (hence a popular song about "porn") even before computer networks.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g-PHDR2yhxE&list=RDg-PHDR2yh...
Edit: For those who would cite the current ubiquity of "hardcore" porn on the 'net, I'd say that's a difference in degree, not in kind. Something to consider.
If startups build parental control it carries the wrong incentives.
Realistically what's needed for proper parental control.
1. Software that parents can install on phones, and computers (which comes as an upside of less lockdown on devices)
2. A way to whitelist websites and applications (particularly for phones).
3. A way to share, reuse and collaborate on whitelists. No enforcement of a central authority.
And before someone tries to bore me with anecdotes about how your particular kid evaded whatever restrictions you put in place, I think if kids put in thoughtful effort and planning to evade restrictions then parents are off the hook. Same as if a kid stages an elaborate ruse (one that would fool most parents) to get out of the house and drink with friends. That’s not on you. Parents aren’t prison wardens and we shouldn’t ask for a police state to fill in parenting gaps.
Making the state into the parent will affect us all, not just kids. I (and plenty of others) will fight to the end to preserve the last vestiges of the free, open internet. Overlay networks and even sneakernet if necessary. We’re not going to accept authoritarian control of communications no matter how much politicians want it.
Do something similar to what we do with video: make a government enforced voluntary rating system (that is, you use if you want, if you use and lie, the government hits you) with a standard where sites can tell their ratings to the clients.
Have the parents decide if they will use the rating for anything.
1. No smart phones for the child before the age of NN, me I say 18. A Smart phone makes a great High School Graduation gift.
2. Only internet access from a desktop computer with a hosts file that the child cannot change. That probably means no Microsoft Windows PC. See: https://someonewhocares.org/hosts/
eazy-peezy
It's impractical in today's world to raise children without access to devices like tablets and smart phones. That's like having a sugar-free, no TV, hand-sewn, ect, ect, household.
What's more important is to know what your kids are getting into, making sure they are comfortable discussing what they see, and teaching them independent decision making skills.
For example, a few years ago, my then seven-year-old complained to me about all of the Jesus videos that were popping up on Youtube. I told her to thumbs down them, and now Youtube no longer suggests them. She also knows that if other kids watch Jesus videos, that's their right and to keep her mouth shut.
> Sure Timmy I'll send you porn, but it's illegal and I'm taking a big risk here so you gotta do something for me, also you can't tell anyone
You've failed to solve the porn problem and now you've created a larger grooming/CDM problem.
If I didn't know any better I would assume you are spreading misinformation to put children into an unsafe situation