At the same time in Europe you go to a nude beach and there are whole families with kids and literally nobody has problems with it. Clothing is optional. No one bothers nude people, no one bothers clothed ones.
In Germany or Sweden you can get your [banned by Apple] out in a public place not designated for nudity per se and this just normal.
But yeah, lets ban more normal/natural stuff.
Please don't post like that again. It's not what this site is for, and it destroys what it is for.
If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules when posting here, we'd appreciate it. Note these in particular:
"Eschew flamebait. Avoid unrelated controversies and generic tangents."
"Don't be snarky."
I much prefer the European view of children being raised as young adults, seeing the world for what it is, rather than the American idea of creating a puritan parallel society scrubbed of all the “bad” things.
Looking back on this I’ve found that the European model raises better critical thinkers – partly due to the school system as well – and you end up with a more sustainable parent-child relationship when the children are grown.
In a world where US culture basically shapes the design of the tech products and social media we all use, this scares me.
This is a key point. Today we are all so progressively aware of "cultural hegemony" and wallow in the shame of colonialism. But we don't see its new and more powerful forms.
The prevalence of digital technology means that companies like Apple and Google imposing their values is a real problem. And let's be clear, these are often very parochial values.
It could be said that Europe's digital split with US is only about things like privacy and data control on the surface. Underneath are more subtle cultural forces at play.
And sadly, beneath all the headlines about AI sentience, this is what Blake Lemoine was actually trying to draw attention to, and that executives consistently dismiss these kinds of concerns [1].
What of the consequences when these corporate values become embedded in AI that plays an ever greater role in our lives?
Considering that Californian children are no less sheltered, I find it hard to believe that this effect on thought is meaningful.
There is a solid case that the US morality is harmful to children.
To girls in particular, even, but this aspect of feminism does not seem popular today.
2019 2001
USA 16.7 45.0
NL 2.5 7.8
https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/pressroom/sosmap/teen-births/teenbi...
I just find it funny when prudish initiatives are promoted under pretence of the same.
So, if you take Germany, Californians are:
- happier
- more wealthy
- more innovative
- have fewer mums die
Now, either this means this better critical thinking described isn't manifesting into any life outcomes, or (and perhaps this is a question worth asking), it isn't better after all.
No matter how good life is in other respects, it's tough for some people (myself included) to feel good when the weather is cold, gray, rainy, and dreary for months on end.
Turns out a country can be superior at one thing without being superior at all the things.
* better c-t does not lead to better l-o
* the c-t is worse
If you feel that World Cups are a better measure than maternal mortality rate, then have at it. The measures we choose are arbitrary, so we can just lay them all out. I'm happy to accept relevant metrics if you have them to show. Personally, I think a society with better critical thinking overall would be able to, given resources, reduce the number of dying new mothers but if you believe there is no relationship I am happy to just accept metrics you offer.
Their success is based on cars, an engineering tradition, the US dollar, the biggest local market, DARPA, the protestant religion, competing nation states next door and a hundred other things.
What I personally think the handling and censorship of nudity might actually influence is democratic discourse, mechanisms of what shocks, what should be censored, what works for populism, what is seen as freedom and what ultimately gets elected.
But I do think that being an attractive immigrant destination is a thing to aspire to.
fair enough
> maternal mortality
Don't know about California, but the US beats Europe in the sense of having 3x maternal mortality
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/maternal-mortality-mdgs?c...
> income, and wealth
fair enough
> comparable gross product
higher in the US, though a lot of that is because of more hours worked
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/gdp-per-capita-worldbank?...
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/annual-working-hours-per-...
> life expectancy
US has stagnated recently, and now about 2 years less
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/life-expectancy?tab=chart...
Having raised a 3 year old in the Bay Area (SF and Albany/Berkeley), I've anecdotally noticed a lot less of the puritan/sheltering attitude you're talking about than in other places in the US. I'd say a moderate version of 'free range parenting' is actually the dominant trend these days around here.
it does not
it's 11.7 per 100,000 in California and 7 per 100,000 in Germany.
Despite similar spending per capita in healthcare.
> Considering that Californian children are no less sheltered
They come from families that on average are a lot more wealthy than the average German family and live in a much more pleasant weather.
Bit apples to oranges.
Easy mistake to make, though, since you have to be aware of definitional differences.
A start to that is here: https://www.cdph.ca.gov/Programs/CFH/DMCAH/surveillance/CDPH...
But you'll have to go read the guidelines to read the difference.
Anyway your numbers are not better than Germany, but also:
What country has the highest rate of maternal mortality? The U.S. Key Findings: The U.S. has the highest maternal mortality rate among developed countries.
Average US mortality rate is 17/100,000
Average European mortality rate is 8/100,000
Remember that in Europe live at least a hundred million more people than in US an it includes much less developed countries than any US State.
Yet the US average is two times worse than EU and 8.2 (EIGHT!) times worse than Belarus (BELARUS!), Poland or my country, Italy.
You know who's got the same stats of US?
Russia. Yes. That Russia.
US maternal mortality rate is the same of Russia, despite spending billions over billions more on healthcare.
Despite being considered a third World country from the American POV.
To put things in perspective for you: Turkmenistan MMR is 10, in Iran is 16, in Tajikistan is 17 (same of the USA).
Can a certain kind of mentality against women bodies considered "unholy" be the cause of it?
Just asking, I don't know the answer.
If this doesn't seem like a stretch to you, by all means continue.
They wouldn't do it if it wasn't profitable in some way or another. But would they choose to give other reasons for their actions, there would definitely be more backslash about their snooping.
People in general know that protecting the innocent is a good thing and Apple exploits this to push their agendas under the guise of children protection. Again.
Like yes: the explicit purpose of parental controls is to allow parents to place limits on what their kids can do on a device, and in America specifically protect them from the concept of people existing under their clothes.
But I fail to see what Apple is doing here that you find offensive? Did you read the article and description of how the feature is enabled and works or did you just decide “Apple is evil and is choosing what I get to see”?
If the US (and American tech companies) cared at all about children, or human life in general, they would do something about guns.
As a European, seeing videos on YT glorifying guns and gun culture is extremely shocking. I would let my kids run around naked all day, anytime, rather than letting them watch one video showing people firing an AR-15 like it's the most normal thing in the world.
YouTube is a cesspit though and I can totally see some overcaffeinated "content creator" churning out videos that misrepresent and pervert the otherwise sane tenets of firearms education.
But - there's the "think of the children" hypocrisy again. Think of the children, and "do something about" (i.e. ban) guns. Or ban videos about guns?
Kids can look at genitals all day but heaven forbid they watch a video about a gun? Or play video games that feature guns? Where's it end? We've exchanged one instance of hypocrisy for another. No thanks!
Culture is a different thing to discuss, sure, and glorifying violence is bad - which is what some of those videos do, though not all of them.
Still, we see countries like the Czech Republic where firearms may be carried concealed, nearly anywhere, with licensing on a shall-issue basis: there are relatively reasonable conditions not far from US-based shall-issue permit requirements (for the US states still even requiring a permit), as well, and CZ doesn’t seem to have issues.
Education about gun safety, and just general personal responsibility, used to be a thing in the US but the “education system” here fails us these days.
The fact that their principles might happen to be at-least-mostly-revenue-neutral is another discussion, though, I suppose.
Not all "protections" are the same.
Everything happens on-device, with no use of Apple servers, and this is clearly called out in the release above. And beyond that, this is a feature that is only enabled by the parent, who society already accepts has the power to censor what their child views.
What you said would be like saying that the GNU foundation is reading your conversations when you type something into emacs.
> there should be a "see anyway" button
If you read the article and look at the pictures, "View photo..." is right underneath the blurred photo. It may not be called "see anyway", and it may not be a button per se, but it has the exact same effect.
Why? If you harass someone, you will put it into contacts so that it is easier.
That is absurd too.
That aside, it would be nice if we could survive just a single thread about a child protection feature without endless absurdist arguments and strawmen being offered.
I appreciate the reply to this comment indicating nudity is often unsolicited. That's very true. A productive thread regarding a feature like this might include discussion of how to limit its scope, or how it might be safely extended to other kinds of harmful content a child might want to avoid. A pointless thread might be one where the heart of the tech industry continues to ignore the fact many new parents ban all unsupervised Internet and new media usage for their children well into their teens due to problems like this remaining unsolved for decades now, and the industry being utterly incapable of having a sober conversation about it.
(obviously that's just my own travel experience, I don't doubt there are places in all of those countries where that's not true)
The reason people try to control children's access to tech and social media isn't because they might see a nipple (lol) but because it's addictive and prevents them from doing anything else.
If we realy want to "protect the chidren" we should start by dismantling FAANGs.
If they are looking for porn themselves (e.g. are of the age to care for such things), they can download it themselves via Safari.
But generally speaking there’s no need to trade this stuff on iMessage.
I'd suggest arguments for or against any particular culture or lifestyle, or attempting to deny they exist, exceed the scope of discussing the feature itself.
Nudist beaches or naturalists' resorts are everywhere in Europe, even where it's less obvious, like in the former communist block.
EDIT: if we are talking about kids nudity, like changing them in the open, in front of everybody, that's never been an issue in my almost 50 years on this Planet as European living in Europe.
I have a feeling that sending nudes to a child's phone isn't exactly lauded as "natural" in Europe. Of course I'm a prude, unnatural, and I guess violent American though so what do I know.
Not to mention it's an opt-in parental control feature for children's accounts.
The quality of the comments here are really poor.
The primary problem with censorship isn’t usually the core motivation. We can all agree that adults shouldn’t send porn to kids, and kids shouldn’t send nudes to anyone, etc etc. Sadly we don’t all agree on what that means - the law is a poor substitute for thinking and understanding context.
Automatic policing will lead to automatic prosecution, we have seen this with Facebook intercepting messages and automatically dispatching relevant authorities. In the case of suicide risks, many agreed this was a public good. Is it a public good when it is done for pot which is illegal federally even though it is legal in California? Do we really want a private company making these choices? Do we really want them in the middle even if it’s “on device” when the device isn’t even open for meaningful inspection?
It is the infrastructure and the corner cases which create a chilling effect on society. Once this is done in one place, it will expand to others.
Do you really think that Saudi won’t push for this on every woman’s telephone? Why limit it only to children? And why limit it only to being opt in?
Do you really not see the future you’re endorsing and that apple is building based on profit motives which are dressed up as “obvious” moral protection schemes?
Remember: the husband in Saudi is the legal guardian/censor of his children but also his fully grown (usually but not always) adult wife.
This can technically expand to textual rather than image censorship as well, we should stop it before that happens. Your device is your own personal space as much as the device is yours or as permitted by law (eg union organization on company time and company computers is sometimes protected).
Providing solutions to do automatic policing on your own device is insanely totalitarian. It isn’t a solution to doing it on company servers which also should not happen. We should not be building this technology and we should regulate the companies to uphold basic civil liberties, especially when they are a de facto monopoly.
Quite literally nothing has been banned here.
I struggle to believe that you read and understood this article before sharing this view. This is an opt-in feature, specifically for use with the existing parental control system, that enables pretty light-touch and overridable prompts if a child receives something that looks like nudity. It's clearly targeted at unsolicited nude pictures being sent to children, and differential cultural views on public nudity have essentially zero relevance to that.
Now instead of an interesting discussion about this feature—why it might be good or bad, the privacy or social implications of it, and so on—we just have a chain of fucking nonsense comments unrelated to it.
There will always be perverts sending nudes to kids one way or another. Where I grew (before the internet) we've had them arrested near schools.
Pretending the world is all unicorns and rainbows is not the way to raise your children IMO - the hard truth is going to hit them sooner or later. Talk to them, treat them as young adults, and explain what is good and what is not, and why.
Fun story: I'm into crossfit semi-professionally and I've recently been very pleased to hear my 5 y.o. telling her friends that they should not eat that much fries and coke if they want to stay healthy and suggested they try fish and chicken instead.
I actually find it scary. I believe that children need to experience the maximum of stuff, and as a French they need to taste all the food, whatever unhealthy they are. Schools are a already pushing a lot of propaganda on children about saving the planet. I can see that the next step will be to tell them that meat pollute and they should be vegan to save the planet.
My child is sometimes telling me things like this and I tell him that he is totally healthy and does not need to worry.
that's a good stand to have, and I would argue that the kid tried to concur:
>> eat that much fries and coke
>> try fish and chicken instead
"that much" (!= never) and "try" (!= have to) seem to be key in the dialog here, although from these excerpts only we get a highly decontextualised version. nonetheless to me it sounded like they always indulge in the same food
> experience the maximum of stuff ... need to taste all the food
Now replace food with drugs, how would you feel? coz TBH some food out there borderlines on being drug-like in terms of addictiveness, both when ingested and how they're being advertised.
The way we raise our child is try food, sure, but be mindful of what you eat. we're certainly not opposed to bad food once in a while, forbidding it would only make it that more alluring. also being healthy right now doesn't mean bad habits can't creep in, and healthy habits are tough to instill after the fact once bad habits have taken hold.
>Now replace food with drugs, how would you feel? coz TBH some food out there borderlines on being drug-like in terms of addictiveness, both when ingested and how they're being advertised.
Well, I also have a big one, nearly 18, and I don't understand him at all. He is spending his free time at the gym, he tells me he goes with his friends. At his age I was trying drugs and binge drinking. I'm in total disconnect here...
That’s not to say I won’t also be talking about the world, and things they’re likely to encounter. Those conversations are happening even now, he’s not being raised in a petri dish, but equally I’d quite like to avoid throwing him directly into a vat of toxic waste unprepared if I can avoid that. Ultimate children are just that, children, they’re not renowned for solid decision making skills.
I'm well aware you can't protect them from all these things, but a lot of people who have young kids seem to think that as soon as they get to school it'll all be OK. My experience has been that the games get harder and stakes rise drastically, to the point where I often consider that killing myself would be a logical way out.
Doing nothing until you can do 100% of everything is not how anything works.
Apple should fix this by creating a kid mode, where the user can only contact people approved by parents and visit sites approved by parents or conforming to kid safety requirements. In this case the children will be perfectly safe.
Why Apple doesn't do it? I guess because it is unprofitable, it requires major investments and doesn't promise any returns.
Kids must be banned from the Internet completely instead of trying to patch different issues here and there.
For restricting access to the internet: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201304 For restricting access to contacts: https://support.apple.com/guide/iphone/set-up-screen-time-fo...
You can do everything you said when you manage your kids accounts (manage contacts, whitelist internet websites, define appropriate content ratings and so on.
Have you tried? It's a dumpster fire.
Child requests app purchase > I get notification > It wants my AppleID password > I go to password manager to get password, but this dismisses the notification.
I believe it's getting a bit of love this OS cycle, but it's hopeless currently.
I got my first phone at 35. I figure my kids can wait a bit.
I required approval for a child's app purchases. The notification is dismissed when I try to get password from password manager.
Shared photo albums? In a family? This is looks to be getting some attention now, rather belatedly.
Meanwhile, the opt in button for this is simple, clear and easy.
Maybe make a support page about one of its features.
That could get posted to Hacker News.
I could continue.
Or if they are no longer available, shouldn't there be a parental control of a white-list of contact numbers that can show more than just the text in the message? This automatic filtering seems like a slippery slope.
In Rome there were statues of Dionysus sporting a huge erection everywhere. It wasn't a problem.
In Italy today still, you can find postcards of him in the same position. (Granted, they are statues, not images in the flesh, but they're pretty realistic.)
I would have a problem with an adult sending nude pictures of themselves to my kids. But I would confront them myself, I don't need Apple's help in preventing it from ever happening like it's a horrible risk.
It's nothing. Really one of the least important problems ever.
I'm much more worried about my kids being glued to stupid games or "harmless" (but constantly updating) TikTok videos.
How do you get "OK with sexual predators" from that?
Just because you feel that way doesn’t mean others do. Everyone parents differently. This is an optional feature that you don’t have to turn on and is off by default.
The same applies to the parent poster I quoted, who was then told they must support sexual predators because of their different parenting.
They didn't tell you to how to feel or tell you how to parent. They stated how they feel and how they parent. You don't have to agree, but that doesn't mean they support sexual predators.
>This is an optional feature that you don’t have to turn on and is off by default.
Yes, that's been well established, and I don't think anyone in this comment chain has said otherwise.
But yeah, I wouldn't mind all that much; it would raise a red flag for sure, given that many grooming operations work by starting out as raising children's curiosity, but I do not see any inherent issue with my child seeing a penis (erect or not!).
At least the ones I've seen in Germany have a nude section and a non-nude section. It's usually not mixed.
At least it was common in the region I lived, there are more prissy places though. I wouldn't do it anymore when everyone has a smartphone though even if taking pictures will get you in huge trouble too.
People who turn on Nudity check, opt in to a nude check.
It's not a "nude beach"... it's "beach".
I'm pretty sure "America is scared of naked bodies" is some internet folk tail that Europeans love to tell.
Having issues with nudity is absolutely not "American". Nor are Germany or Sweden moral compasses by which everybody else should strive to live like.
Look around the world, there are many countries and billions of people around Africa, China, South East Asia, the Middle East, that are as "prudish" if not massively more so than USA. Even with a European or western-centric myopia, does it really hold? How about Poland or New Zealand?
In any case, I don't see what the point is. USA is overall not as liberal with nudity as some European countries. So what? Germany has blasphemy laws and laws punishing people who talk about things, is that normal or natural?
As an adult you can just turn this feature off, if you use messages for this kind of thing.
Kids seeing themselves or each other nude is pretty normal. Kids are curious. That being said, luckily none of the awkward curiosities we entertained when I was a kid had any chance of ending up on some kind of iCloud permanent record, so maybe this is for the better.
Well ok: if you specifically go to a nude beach, I'd expect you'd see naked people and nobody going there having any issue with it. That's why it's called a "nude beach" right?
But they're not common. In France where I go the most often, out of 8 kilometers of beaches on the district, there's like 100 meters (1/100th of the coastal area) where nudism is allowed. And it's not even on a beach: it's all rocks. The town hall picked that one spot, far away from the beaches, to isolate the nudists. It's tiny. There may be a few famous nudists spots around the country but they're not common.
Still France: there are only two cases I can think of where a woman showing its nipples in public is considered normal and that'd be monokini on the beach (but not full nudism) and breastfeeding. You don't see women walking topless in the streets.
Monokini on the beaches is allowed everywhere in France as far as I know but it's way less common to actually see women in monokini than it used to be when I was a kid in the eighties.
Child abuse is a terrible problem, but big tech and politicians are using it as leverage to erode all of our right to privacy. What's next, let's monitor all text communication to stop perverts texting with your child? It will be hailed as another great step towards fighting paedophilia.
The problem with the "child abuse" angle is that protesting against these changes turns everybody against you, because normal people don't have anything to hide. "Why do you hate the children?"
We are losing all of our right to privacy with a massive applause.
Once people internalise the "nothing to hide" argument they begin to reach for the question "what do you have to hide that makes you think this isn't ok" before they are even prompted with the usual arguments about it only being for finding drugs, guns, terrorists, pedophiles, etc
The fact this is on device and off by default is good because that's how this sort of customer feature should be built, like being able to install a DNS filter or other website filtering software. If you're worried, these options should be available to protect your children... but sadly its a small step from "these are available" to "why didn't the government make them turn it on before I bought it for my child and didn't turn it on before giving it to my child"
There is now a feature that scans every photo you receive. There previously was not something scanning every photo you receive. What used to be a conversation between 2 people is now a conversation between 2 people and an Apple blackbox (assuming you turn the feature on).
As with most of these types of tech, the proponents of the "this involves erosion of privacy" aren't necessarily concerned with the exact implementation as described on release, but with how the blackbox works and how the blackbox (and the laws/regulations/obligations around it) will change in the future, and the inability to change the settings of the blackbox, effectively letting Apple become the touchstone for what is 'appropriate', even if it doesn't align with your view of 'appropriate'.
1) Seen the automatic-text-recognition-on-images features in recent iOS? It's already scanning ~every photo you look at, and not just in iMessage. If you put an image in Photos, it's also doing some object recognition on it (which you can see if you search for e.g. "books" or "chairs" in Photos). Dunno if it does that elsewhere, but the text-recognition thing, yeah, that happens all over the OS in all kinds of apps. Maybe (probably) you can turn that off, but this feature folks are complaining about is opt-in so that shouldn't be relevant for this line of reasoning.
And furthermore:
> Messages uses on-device machine learning to analyze image attachments and determine if a photo appears to contain nudity. The feature is designed so that Apple doesn’t get access to the photos.
2) If you don't like this because you don't trust this statement to be true, then I have some bad news for you about who writes the entire closed-source operating system that runs on iOS devices and are the only ones who can deploy any code they like to them, basically at any time.
This is an opt in feature so it’s up to parents whether they think it’s appropriate or not, but I think it’s weird that people are getting mad at Apple for providing a secure, private way to do this when child abuse online is a real thing that happens and some parents may believe that it’s appropriate to trade off some of their young children’s privacy in exchange for some small degree of protection against that.
Not sure if I see anything particularly wrong with that. Apple is an American company.
When a nudist put their clothes back on, then that's it. When a photo goes out and spreads beyond the control of the kid, then that's just the beginning.
It's just a very good option.
In Oregon full nudity is 100% legal everywhere, with no restrictions. Yes, I have seen many penisis I didn’t want to see; sometimes from the naked bike rides, sometimes from people in mental health crisis, sometimes from people who are just too high to pull up their pants.
Technically it’s only allowed for “protests” in Portland, but nudity laws just practically aren’t enforced.
Other natural things I get to see without restriction: smoking meth, shitting on transit stop, lying in pool of own fluids, pissing on lamp post, and having psychotic break. Europeans can only dream of such unbridled freedom.
In the US it is the opposite.
I don’t see anything about Apple banning nudity, where are you reading that?
It's just an NSFW screen that you can click straight through. For me, the benefit is that it gives children an extra thinking moment before they view something that may not be appropriate, or send something that they may not feel 100% comfortable doing.
I've lived in Europe all my life and I'd 100% enable this for my kid.
And it isn't just nude or iMessage either. Tim Cooks' Apple have been forcing their American culture / political stuff to the rest of the world for quite some time.
Part of the reason why I wish I could move away from Apple. Unfortunately Microsoft or Google doesn't seems to be competing and they aren't that much different either.
Could it be that the precarious conditions (families disrupted, lack of intimate space, moral degradation) to which the populations there were submitted during the war shaped this culture?
If yes, what does it tell about the value of this culture?
Except in Japan they install an app called Kodomamo onto kids phones to do this exact thing.
We most likely wouldn't have to deal with the cyber moral police, and total lack of privacy we deal with now (which this is part of)