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Comment by GordonS | Hacker News Reader

The article is one-sided... but are there honestly any good arguments in favour?

The trouble with these issues is that there is always a legitimate argument in their favour. There really are some nasty people in the world and some of them really do prey on children and there really is a lot of content on the Internet that isn't suitable for children and real children sometimes do suffer real harm because of these things.

The question we should be asking is how much that we value for other good reasons we are willing to give up in exchange for the possibility of improving the protection of our children, when there is no crystal ball that tells us either how much of an improvement any given measure would actually make or how much of the potential harm from giving something else up would actually be realised.

Until we view these kinds of rights and protections issues as a balancing act with legitimate arguments on both sides but also genuine concerns from both sides it's impossible to even have an intelligent debate on the ethics, never mind write good laws with all the extra practical concerns that legislation and enforcement introduce.

I do understand the government's argument, but:

  1. I don't believe children will really be "saved" from viewing/reading harmful content - if they really want to see something, they will simply find a way around it, but also remember this is a *UK-only* thing!
  2. I don't believe for a second that the security apparatus won't have unchecked access to the data

I suspect you and I (and probably most people on HN) have similar views on these issues. We skew liberal and we skew technically literate. My point is that "normal" people don't necessarily perceive the same dangers that we do in measures like the ones proposed here. On the other hand "making our children safer online" is something any decent person can get behind as long as you conveniently ignore all the nuance and practical details.

Given who the government here currently are it's hardly surprising that they resort to attention-grabbing soundbites. With a bit of luck the Tories will boot Boris before too long and that'll take many of his current Cabinet out of the picture as well since they were seemingly chosen more for their expected loyalty to Boris than any particular expertise or competence. Then at the very least there is a mini-reset in government and some of the more headline-grabbing but questionable policies of the Johnson administration might be quietly sidelined while whoever takes over desperately tries to steady the ship before the next general election. Although of course they quietly passed legislation earlier this year that pushed the latest possible date for that election all the way back to January 2025...

It's parents being lazy and demanding that the rest of the community accommodate their needs for bringing up their children, while abdicating any actual effort on their part.

So instead of parents actually installing and/or configuring and/or actually using all of the different parental controls that are already available to stop their kids seeing stuff they shouldn't, they want all the rest of us to deal with the bullshit, while not solving the problem.

There is definitely an element of parental responsibility that often gets conveniently ignored in these debates. I'm a sceptic about placing the blame entirely there though, for the simple reason that so much of normal life is now connected. That includes time at school or when kids are playing with their friends and not under their parents' immediate supervision 24/7. The only way a parent could truly keep their child away from any possibility of getting online today would be to restrict their activities and access to technology so severely that they'd barely live a normal life or socialise and develop in a healthy way. So whatever we think of parents and how they raise their children, the problems that modern connected technologies create are always going to need societal solutions as well as parental or schooling ones.

I hope that legislators are actually technically illiterate. If they were, they'd know what kind of stuff gets posted on any underground porn torrent tracker and probably geo-fence the whole internet.

I fail to see how this protects children from those evil people, tho.

It establishes the age and id of UK children to websites and services. However, unless all these services children use are siloed off from the rest of the internet and UK only, bad people from other countries (and those in the UK savvy enough to mask themselves behind some kind of VPN/TOR) will still be able to use these services without having their ids established the same way, and will keep trying and sometimes succeed to groom and abuse children.

Yes, it's a daft plan and it's unlikely to work if they press ahead with it (at least if you think "work" here has anything to do with protecting children). You know that. I know that. But the problem isn't how to convince HN, it's how to convince Mumsnet and the tabloid-reading grandparents.

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