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Comment by tacker2000 | Hacker News Reader

tacker2000

This is pretty outrageous. This constant need to fully control and monitor everything your kids are doing is getting out of hand and will by itself lead to severe problems and mental issues for the future generations.

I mean, who didnt share or look at some porn when they were 10 years old? Would it be worth it for a whole army of teachers and consultants to descend on you and file an “incident report” and a “follow up” and “de brief” for this? What a colossal waste of resources and money. The $300k for the software could be better spent elsewhere.

And yes, one suicide was apparently prevented, but then here we are again at the same argument, its like the one in the current apple/child porn case.

Should we all get monitored just because of one positive but disproportionately small outcome?

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It's the digitization of the mindset where parents wouldn't let their kids go a mile to the park alone, or go play with a friend on the next block, etc. By the way, there's an app called life360 that's increasingly popular with parents of high school kids. It tracks the user everywhere, monitors driving speed, that sort of thing, so the parents can observe their children at all times. Some have even demanded that their children continue using it in college. It's a goddamn digital panopticon and it needs to stop.

I know someone who's in college and still has to have this on her phone (it's not conditional on her paying for something, as far as I know she pays for her car). It's very odd. She's also not allowed to drive on the highway either (if she won't learn now, then when will she?).

Outcome of this is whenever we see her someone else drives, so maybe it's just a long con to save her money on gas.

That's absurd. Highways are much safer than local roads.

And weed is safer than alcohol. Thats the thing- rules dont need to make sence, they just are.

> Some have even demanded that their children continue using it in college.

This seems like it needs to be fixed with legislation. Make it illegal to track others' location without their explicit consent (hopefully this is already the case, now that I think about it), and also make it illegal for anything whatsoever to be conditional on giving that consent (e.g., make it illegal to tell your kids "I'm only helping to pay for your college tuition, or letting you drive my car, if you install Life360").

Sure this app is kind of creepy but making it illegal for a parent to demand it? Hey great, instead of my wonderful parents paying for my college I'm going to report them to the cops, and send them to jail! That will show them! Of course now there's nobody to cover my college tuition but whatever.

You are a mini-tyrant in training. Thinking the world's problems can all be fixed by making something illegal. Encouraging the government to interfere in intra-family relations. Never actually thinking about how any of these policies would play out. Insanity.

"You are a mini-tyrant in training"

He is tyranically fighting parental tyrany? How ironic.

For every happy hamily I know one that's fucked up. Once you are 18, you are free to escape abusive parents, and that often means you loose their financial support. Sometimes thats what you have to do

Parents who want to pay for your college are abusive? I think you use that word extremely liberally.

You are 100% correct that a person ought to be entirely independent upon reaching adulthood, if he/she so chooses. You know how you do it? "Mom, Dad, I'm not going to play by your rules any more, thanks but no thanks, I'm going to make my own way out there in the world." How successful are you going to be as an independent person if you don't have the balls to make a simple statement like that, if instead of declaring independence, your only means of resolving this conflict is by calling the cops and sending your parents to jail because they "abused" you by asking you to install some app?

"Parents who want to pay for your college are abusive? I think you use that word extremely liberally."

Parenting is not all about money. Some parents have a very specific and tyrannical idea of how their kids 'should' turn out, and will not hesitate to spend money, beatings or literal blackmail to achieve it.

Think of a wealthy father that beats his daughter because her behaviour is 'improper', or forces daughter/son into marriage. Or of Eton College which is stupidly elite and expensive, yet famous for beatings. This stuff is common enough that I've witnessed some of it, and it's not pretty.

I am not claiming the proposal on offer here would be of any help, just trying to clarify the issue

Pretty sure that beatings (and blackmail too) are already covered in the criminal statutes of every state. Requesting that a child, especially an adult child, install an app, is not, and should not be.

With all due respect, you've gone way, way out on a tangent that has nothing to do with the original statement or my initial reply.

Giving parents a blank check to "own" their kids is the better solution? Not really.

Ummm, any kid heading off to college is allowed to say no. What the world doesn't need is cops and judges deciding mundane issues like what apps he/she has on their phone and sending parents to jail for disagreeing.

What else can we make illegal? How about a parent requiring their kid to eat broccoli. How about demanding the kid maintain a C-average before joining a sports team. Let's also make it illegal for a parent to ask the kid to do some basic chores before playing video games. Surely you have some more ideas while we're at it...

Legislating parenting is always a bad idea.

The only way college students could be meaningfully freed from parental supervision is with tuition, room, and board affordable on a student’s earning power.

Outside the US I'm not sure "living at the college" is as much of a thing.

Plenty of countries going to college and moving out of home are different events that happen at different times.

That seriously depends on where you live in relation to the school you want to go to. It's really the same in the US. One difference is that I'm only aware of the US having the land grant system where many large state schools were given chunks of land away from any city to start agricultural colleges. That leads to the situation where many large and prestigious universities are nowhere near where people live, so you really must live at the school.

Sure, as with anything that is geographically constrained. In Australia all the most prestigious universities are in the major cities.

Same with Asian (Singapore, Taiwan, Korea, China, Japan) universities as well. I believe Europe is similar.

The "move away for college" is very much a US piece of culture.

Which further reinforces that college is extended adolescence, subject to parental supervision and control.

If we want college students to have the rights and freedoms of adults, then they need the means to support themselves.

No, many move out during high school. Many move out after university. They are seperate events, not in any set order.

How can kids consent anyway?

That's a great, and deep, question.

The idea of consent is a rather dumb one.

It came out of kink. Communication and consent in that case is rather important since the difference between rape and battery and a fun night is rather thin. For some getting a toilet brushed vigorously stirred in their privates is a good time for most it isn't.

Trying to apply that to normal people is not only bizarre but actively harmful. A much better one is harm minimization, everything people do is bad for them, we just want to make it the least bad it can be.

When you start using that lens pretty much all our laws which deal with children are there to make adults feel better and nothing to do with actually protecting children. E.g. sexting is the safest way to have sex. It is also the only way to have sex that two 12 year olds will be arrested and put on the sex offender registry for.

I will also point out that we are happy to wave the consent banner when it is convenient and hide it away when it is not. Where is consent in the workplace? In our economic system? Eldercare? Marketing? Data collection? Drone attacks? And on and on. We basically run our society on meme morality.

"The idea of consent is a rather dumb one. It came out of kink."

We had Contracts for thousands of years, they are a form of concent in exchange for something.

Without concent, you have no rights.

I would be really interested in hearing from people downvoting this. What is problematic here?

I think the kids should just refuse to wear the device or install the app. The parents want the kid to succeed have good grades, go to college, etc. if the parents can't be persuade by common sense and logic then the kid can leverage the success in order to persuade the parents to not require the app. What are the parents going to do, kick him out of the house and make him homeless? I know that it is easier said then done but still that is the only option I can think about.

Kids need to unionize.

I'll be teaching my children how to use the most tinfoil floss hardware/software so they don't have a digital profile they don't want before they are 18.

The pinephone and similar are great for anyone under 12, and hopefully will get more usable soon.

> The pinephone and similar are great for anyone under 12

You know what is also great for anyone under 12... not having a smartphone.

If all citizens were locked away in a padded cell, the government would prevent all homicide, overdoses, rape, etc. Just because something prevents a suicide doesn't make it a good thing. I know you're saying the same thing, I'm just putting it more starkly.

There are other ways of preventing suicide, homicide, overdoses, rape, etc, which don't violate privacy, security, etc.

This is the point it’s coming to. When “the other side” says “one death is too many”, I’m almost tempted to scream “one death is not enough.”

If we’ve literally made tragedy impossible, there’s no way we haven’t traded away a disproportionate amount of freedom to get there.

This is really going to sound dumb, but this kind of creeping surveillance is the biggest reason I hope we can make self-sufficient off-planet colonies. I honestly believe that the trend toward complete surveillance and control in the name of complete safety is irreversible, and the only way to escape it is to literally move to where they cannot physically reach you.

This strategy is also doomed to failure. We’re talking about kids whose brains are in full-time adapt-and-learn mode. They will create other language to talk about these things that will completely fly over the heads of the adults and the software. I remember being in eighth grade where kids would make fun of a teacher to their face without their knowledge.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prison_rape_in_the_United_Stat...

The solution is obviously solitary confinement \s.

The ideal society is that scene in Matrix with towers of reddish cells with people in them.

I did not share or look at porn at 10 years old, and I don’t think that it was common to do so pre-puberty, pre-internet.

I’m not sure there is gain in normalizing this.

We definitely should not be normalizing this, but we also should not be building a panopticon just to try to stop it.

Agree. Both can be true at once.

Me neither - I was 8.

One friend's dad had playboy magazines. Another had videos. And another had games where if you knew the password (we did) it would show some 8 bit graphics with nudity.

It wasn't about sexual arousal. It was just about curiosity. Hell, my 6 year old tries to see my butt all the time. Because it's my butt and it's usually covered.

Those examples are nudity as far as I can tell. I think we’re talking about porn, which is quite another thing for an 8 year old to experience.

I grew up pre internet.

We, as neighborshood kids, had a stash in the woods of pornos we stole from family.

To be fair, I think a lot of modern internet porn is probably way more depraved than porn that existed pre-internet, and there is a virtually infinite supply of it available for free. One consequence of this is that there are a lot of people, especially young people, who are addicted to porn.

Personally, I think it’s best to avoid porn completely.

Not even the lingerie section in mail-order catalogues? Kids use what they have. And yes, sexual content is a normal thing. just talk to kids about it, and why they are too young watching that stuff. You cannot prevent anyways.

How is the lingerie section anything like porn? Nudity != porn

For a 10 year old, pre internet, it was the closest thing. a and easy to come by. I don't have problem with either, so.

>I don’t think that it was common to do so pre-puberty, pre-internet.

Pre-puberty, probably not, no interest for obvious reasons. Pre-internet, absolutely. Playboy, Penthouse, Hustler, etc were prevalent. BBS's existed too.

BBS’s are the internet.

Anyway, what I was trying to say was, pre-internet it kinda required post-puberty hormones to be motivated enough to clear the hurdles to accessing porn.

Also, to another commenter’s point, the porn I was able to access was amazingly innocent by comparison to what is probably commonly available now.

BBS's are most certainly not the internet. They were most often stand-alone and independent, with offline networking in the form of FidoNet ("offline" in that FidoNet boards would dial up at regular times to transmit and receive messages from other nodes).

BBS's entirely predate the Internet's general availability (although of course the Internet is older than most people realize).

>BBS’s are the internet.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bulletin_board_system

They kinda melded a little at the end of the BBS era and the beginning of the public internet era with integrated email and whatnot and you can still get to some via telnet, but they were distinct entities / networks / protocols from the internet.

Gotta ask how old are you?

I do remember a Playboy when it came out in 1971. The Willy Rey issue (girl on the stock certificate). Nice looking.

Not only were Playboys pretty rare, but they were a different kettle of fish than any modern adult images/video.

Are times better or worse? I couldn't tell you. Lots of differences. Many women never have children. Divorce is common. People aren't raised on farms with all the attendant physical realities of life. Slavery was common in most societies. People got married at young ages. Sex has been secretive or not depending on the era.

Probably the worst thing about porn is a scarring of the mind, sex as non-participatory act, exotica as normal, staring at screens, addictive behavior, the internet as a net negative.

Plenty of porn in the woods pre-internet.

Well, as long as you are the person who is normal, we can finally all set our sails in the right direction.

Well said. Also, the whole argument of "one bad thing prevented" is fundamentally flawed. It is not possible to evaluate how many bad things it causes, because, unless somehow clear enough for our dumb human observational skills, those are brushed under "would have happened anyways".

If schools and governments wanted to help prevent suicides, the answer isn't difficult. You try to improve social security, and otherwise make an effort to foster safe environments.

Stranger monitoring everything you do and might punish you for it... is exactly the opposite.

> who didnt share or look at some porn when they were 10 years old?

Me.

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