Hacker News Reader

Comment by dmm | Hacker News Reader

> 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?

View on HN

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.

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.

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.

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

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...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com