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Comment by JohnMakin | Hacker News Reader

Parents and caretakers have the ability to restrict children’s content on any device a child has access to. The burden should be on them to ensure their child is not consuming porn. It shouldn’t be everyone else’s problem that people are unwilling to parent their children.

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You can't expect parents to hover over their children 24/7. Apply the argument you're making to any other instance of corrupting minors. If you have sex with a 14 year old, you're not going to be able to say, "Well the kid's parents should have been watching him..." to the judge. The same applies to showing porn to one.

This is a straw man. Saying that the burden is on parents to ensure a child's safety doesn't mean a child molester is free from blame. You've taken his point and pushed it to the extreme.

The commenter above is putting the burden on the parents in order to claim that a person who shows porn to children is free of blame. How is that a different argument?

> You can't expect parents to hover over their children 24/7

That's not what's being asked. There already exists software, and optional functionality on OSs/routers/browsers, that allows parents to restrict what sites can be viewed. This software covers more sites (and offer greater customization) than proposals involving sites verifying ID would, since:

* The software can trivially add sites to its blacklist regardless of whether they're outside of jurisdictions that would require ID verification

* Sites are more likely to identify themselves as pornographic than to implement ID verification, since it's a significantly smaller burden

* Small/obscure sites that could fall under the radar with non-compliance on ID verification can still be blocked by the software with statistical/ML methods

* For young children a whitelist of known-safe sites can be used

Neither approach is perfect. With ID verification, a child could use a free VPN to bypass it, or be shown a friend's older brother's ID. With filter software, a child could borrow an unfiltered device and find an unfiltered Internet connection to use it on. The question is: would ID verification be better to such an extent that it justifies the privacy invasion and increased risk of fraud, blackmail, etc.? To me, it seems substantially worse than existing solutions.

Yes parents should restrict their kids devices and keep an eye smart device usage generally IMHO. However, doing so well is not easy. There’s so many work arounds unless you severely limit device functionality.

For example, at least a few years back it was basically impossible to enforce DNS based filtering on iOS devices much less other more invasive setups.

There is a very basic iphone setting that restricts adult content from a huge list of sites plus any other sites you want to add to it. This tech has been around for decades.

That's great, but my kids have source code access on their devices.

I am slightly confused by this comment in the context of the thread.

Because you choose to give your children freedom to operate their device however they see fit, you are in support of legislation that restricts what they can use their device to access on the internet?

> any device a child has access to.

That's not the world we live in today. Stores local to me will sell a (terrible but internet capable) phone for $35 to anyone. So you are proposing moving the age verification to the device purchasing stage?

Plus, a minor could use their friends' devices. Their parents may not have set up any controls on those devices.

If only parents had a way of controlling who children associated with. If only.

If that is the worry, then bad influences won’t be stopped by some shitty internet-wide age verification. Teens can bully each other with their cameras, or words. If their peers are the problem, no amount of government playing internet cop will help.

No smart phone and no social media for kids society wide and we go back to good old fashioned bullying in person. That’s much easier to curtail.

I don't think that age verification is a good idea. But I don't think the counter-argument that "parents can just monitor their kids' devices" really holds water - there's still plenty of ways around it.

Complete strawman on a complete strawman situation that isn’t even real. What $35 phone out there has the network bandwidth for porn that isn’t tied to identity in a way that a parent couldn’t easily spot and prevent?

A smaller place like mintmobile would cost 15 a month.

> What $35 phone out there has the network bandwidth for porn that isn’t tied to identity in a way that a parent couldn’t easily spot and prevent?

Here's a couple. You can buy these and use them with the free wifi at McDonalds or with a $30 prepaid plan.

I'm not saying I support these age verification schemes but saying parents can easily control access to the internet is dead wrong.

https://www.walmart.com/ip/Metro-by-T-Mobile-TCL-ION-X-32GB-...

https://www.walmart.com/ip/Simple-Mobile-Nokia-C110-32GB-Gre...

BTW I can pay $30-$100 for a decent Android phone (low end Motorola/Samsung) and a year of talk/text/data in the US.

These deals are extremely common in the US: https://slickdeals.net/newsearch.php?q=tracfone&searcharea=d...

Yes, children under 18 should not have access to a smart phone or social media.

If the kid is smart enough to get a "throwaway" device to circumvent parent supervision what makes you believe he won't be able to circumvent gouvernement internet oversight? Even China and North Korea can't prevent their citizens from doing so.

Prisoners acquire cellphones illegally. It doesn't mean we don't bother enforcing the rule because they can bypass it. We confiscate phones as discovered to disrupt those efforts. We love disruption around here, right?

The point of this is to introduce friction. The goal is not 100% effectiveness and it's a strawman to suggest it is.

Banning cell phones from prisons doesn't affect law abiding citizen. Forcing ID check is a privacy scandal in the making for what I'm my opinion is the government taking decisions on behalf of parents. Just make a gouvernement sanctionned DNS with basic instruction how to set it up or let ISP set it up for you. Good old awareness and education.

The kids could also pay an adult to get past the age verification check for them too.

Once you get to a state where the kid is unsupervised, is determined to break the rules, and has money to help them do it, they're going to succeed.

Blacklist-based parental controls are a major failure in a world where there's no enforcement against sites that fail to set the appropriate headers.

Even whitelist-based parental controls aren't great given what's accessible on major sites that accept user-generated content.

There absolutely is a real problem here - too-early exposure to sex is one of the biggest drivers of sex offenders.

Parents can achieve this without resorting to an atmosphere of paranoia and control. If parents foster transparency, trust, and open communication with their children, where no secrets are kept and children are not afraid to discuss difficult subjects with parents, then a lot of problems are already solved, or nipped in the bud.

Minor children really shouldn't have an expectation of privacy while they're out on the big, bad Internet. The best advice is for families to have computers in common areas only, where children's screens can be noticed and observed by parents at all times. That's not so much about a lack of trust in your own children, but beware the rest of the Internet.

By all means, teens can be granted increasing privileges and privacy as they grow up and begin to have their own lives. IF you as a parent have fostered their trust and you've inculcated "street smarts", then at a certain point you let go and trust them as well. Amazing how that all works.

Or we could admit that this isn’t actually that big of an issue to change the way the entire internet works for the worse. We could also do that.

I think that it's worth keeping in mind that that isn't always possible. For example, with foster children it is not unlikely that experience with previous parents have already given a child baggage that will make that strategy much less successful.

You're right, I mean, why should a parent even bother establishing candor, trust, and communication with their children when it is just soooo harrrrd, give up already!

You're playing at whatever the self-help equivalent of psychobabble is and are clearly not a parent, foster or otherwise. Most kids are self-centered, duplicitous sacks of bullshit. The social aspect of relationships is easily gamed and they know it.

You don't know your child until you've seen their browser history (before they've had a chance to clear it). Take a peek sometime.

I let my kids think I trust them, but I trust them about as much as the GRU. They think I actually believe that they don't have Discord installed, but I already know what they changed the icon and app label to. They think I believe they're not uploading videos to YouTube, but they are. They have no qualms about lying to me-- and I have a good relationship with these two.

> Most kids are self-centered, duplicitous sacks of bullshit.

Most children aren't. You're definitely telling on yourself more than commenting on how children behave. Trust is a shared activity. If you treat children like you'd treat the GRU that's exactly how they'll behave.

> and I have a good relationship with these two.

If you have a good relationship, why are they lying to you? Is it because they don't trust you? Is that because you don't trust them? I wonder who started it. I'm pretty sure you'll blame them again, so I'll pre-answer for that. "they proved it already by making [some mistake]" ...yeah, kids will make mistakes, but when you forgive them, and believe in them, and prove that they can trust you, they will. By treating them like the GRU all you do is prove they can't trust you. You're supposed to be the adult, right? You have to go first, children are only able to copy what they see.

> Most kids are self-centered, duplicitous sacks of bullshit

Trust must be gained.

> You don't know your child until you've seen their browser history

Are you sure ? This is like this MTV commercial when the child is watching porn when the parents enter the room, only to switch to MTV afterwards.

I think you are missing the point. Certainly a parent has a moral obligation to work to build candor, trust, and communication. However, depending on the circumstances that effort may not be fully successful; which is why it might be useful to also have additional systems in place such as regulation on what media providers can provide to children.

In other words, my objection is not to your assertion that parents should work to develop trusting and respectful relationships with their children. Nor do I disagree that such relationships would go a long ways towards addressing media consumption. My disagreement is with the idea that it is always possible to be completely successful.

I think that there is probably a middle ground. Certainly there is a significant responsibility for parents to monitor their children's media consumption and teach them healthy practices. However, it is also not reasonable to expect that they will be able to do so all of the time or that they may not need assistance to do so.

No. That’s not a reasonable expectation. You can’t bombard children with insane content all the time and expect parents to continuously hover and prevent them from looking at it. There is not enough time in a day and makes parents the bad guys in a million different households.

> You can’t bombard children with insane content all the time

Why not ? Ads, wherever pervert, are ok. As long as they don't watch porn... /s

> It shouldn't be everyone else's problem that people are unwilling to parent their children.

There would be legal consequences if a child were to walk into a store and purchased age restricted products. It is because others are not allowed to interfere with the parenting of children. (Some, albeit not all, age restricted products allow for parental discretion rather than being an outright prohibition.) There are also other ways of looking at this, such as protecting vulnerable populations from exploitation. (Such as the sale of addictive substances like alcohol and tobacco to minors.)

I would consider framing the issue as offloading parental responsibilities onto society as disingenuous at best.

When I was a child, there did not exist legally age restricted products in Germany. I do not know a single child who was harmed by the lack of regulation.

The world has become a crazy and disgusting shit.

>The burden should be on them to ensure their child is not consuming porn

This argument is essentially that it's acceptable for websites to show porn to children if their parents don't care or are fine with it.

It's a horrible, dangerous thing regardless of if parents are involved are not, and therefore should not solely be the responsibility of the parents.

Parental controls on devices suck, and are wildly ineffective.

I'm not in any way saying the solution is requiring uploading id or similar verification, but thinking parents can actually effectively control what their kids access is just plain wrong. Always has been.

> Parental controls on devices suck, and are wildly ineffective.

Well, Microsoft Family Safety was very effective to not allow Firefox to run, although Edge ran fine. /s

And what about producing porn?

Do we arrest the parent or the child when the child posts a picture of their genitals on insta-snap?

Both of them. Just to be sure. /s

Yep, but some parents would like to shift responsibility to others (government,...), because the alternative is to actually be a parent to their kids.

Clearly not a parent

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