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Comment by chii | Hacker News Reader

i just dont understand why pollies continue to try implement age and verification policies, and always try to use the "think of the children" argument.

Nobody wants it. It's a form of control on the internet that i would not desire. I don't care about preventing any harm, because the said harm doesn't get prevented in the first place, and new harm is placed on me!

Therefore, anyone in their right mind ought to completely oppose any sort of verification scheme on the internet. If you want verification, get the customer to pay a nominal amount via credit card - that is as far as it ought to be allowed to go. Any further, which includes demanding by law for verification, should not be allowed.

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“I don’t want it” and “nobody wants it” are vastly different things, and in this case the latter is definitely not true.

There probably are/will be ways to do age verification fairly accurately, but they will be scary in other ways, and will certainly violate your privacy, at least during that process.

Larry Ellison has publicly stated that he wants to build an AI powered Chinese style surveillance state that monitors everyone so they never step out of line. He's not the only one.

I have a 14 year old daughter, it is was actually possible, I'd want it.

But, I know better than thousands of policy writers in the Australian government and know it's not actually possible without destroying the internet as we know it, so, I don't want it.

You can't use credit/debit cards, think of the children and the 0.001% of people in Australia without a card.

It is the parent's responsibility to look after their child. If they're using the internet unmonitored when young, the parent is at fault. This responsibility should not be forced upon the gov't which would have to add any draconian laws to prevent mishaps.

This argument will only work when they get rid of encrypted and one-time messages in apps.

Otherwise it's completely impossible for a parent to monitor their kid.

It's quite something to tell a parent: It's your job to monitor your kid, but also we're going to block your ability to do so.

The parent remains in control of a child's electronics. While there's some privacy that a child ought to have, the parents still have the responsibility to monitor their child's online interactions (including with strangers in an encrypted messaging app). The parent doesn't need to be able to secretly decrypt it - they can just ask, and to impose the rule that the child tell the parent who these other people are. And occasionally audit it.

This relationship is not the same as a gov't with the citizenry.

Did you ignore the "one-time messages" part of my post?

Or that you can delete messages?

Apps these days are ultra privacy focused. It's not actually possible to monitor kids. It's just not.

I grew up with a flip phone and an old laptop without a wireless card. I managed to learn how to program on it just fine, and that's what it was given to be for. I also played lots of video games. Oh no? No porn though. No communication with adults online either. For that I went to the computer lab or the library, both monitored.

Why would this be hard to do in today's age? There are even movements organized by the kids themselves that recognize the danger of the smartphone.

>Why would this be hard to do in today's age?

Because we live in an age where coffeemakers have wifi cards in them. You can get a USB wifi card for $5. Every coffee shop has free wifi. Half of 6th graders have a cell phone. You can’t control kids on the internet because they have access whenever they are around other kids.

This is painfully outdated advice that acts as if nothing has changed in 30 years.

When I accessed the internet using some other person's device, my parents tended to notice. Opportunities to do that unsupervised were few and far between. The parents catching it most of the time was sufficient to deter bad behavior. Kids aren't criminal masterminds as a general rule.

> Opportunities to do that unsupervised were few and far between

Hanging out with friends at any location outside the direct line of sight of a parent is not few and far between. Kids can share phones on the bus to school or in the bathroom in between class or at the mall (or wherever kids hang out now).

>Kids aren't criminal masterminds as a general rule.

Kids aren’t criminal masterminds but they want to socialize with their friends. Kids used to sneak out of the house, then they would sneak to the house phone late at night, then they would sneak down to the family computer to chat on AIM, then they would text on their phones, and now they get around parental controls or get old phones to get chat/social media apps. Kids have always done it and will always do it, and now it also exposes them to the whole internet and all that comes with that.

You're saying everything is fine, the parent just needs to spend 24/7 looking over the child's shoulder?

Between talking with your kid, teaching them to be responsible, and implementing technical & physical solutions (at the home level, not country level), there should be very little issue. No need for looking over their shoulder 24/7.

Foisting the parenting onto the government sucks for everyone.

The government can, and has, taken a vested interest in parenting when parents fail.

Car seats? Seat belts? Curfews? Hospital reporting laws? Child safety standards? Mandatory smoke detectors? Curriculum standards? Mandatory education?

All not necessary if parents just did their jobs, right?

On that note, the US government states in their own papers in the SCOTUS case that parental control filtering is so niche, that it is at the level of complete irrelevancy in fulfilling the government’s interest in preventing children from viewing porn. One SCOTUS judge with children has already said that in her experience, it’s impossibly complex even for a devoted parent.

Tech can’t point to parental controls when they failed miserably in their implementation.

> All not necessary if parents just did their jobs, right?

most, if not all of those things, are necessary because a parent is unable to make any changes to stop the danger. Good parenting cannot stop a car accident (unless you're claiming that you have perfect driving skills). Ditto with the other examples.

The difference between age verification and those is that verification puts an undue harm onto the entire population, for which they derive zero benefit, just so that a few parents who cannot be bothered to monitor their child could continue their lack of responsibility.

A few parents? According to the US governments own statistics at SCOTUS right now, almost all parents are failing to restrict, and don’t even know how, even if they wanted to.

This also hoists undue harm across a population - children and teenagers. As the SCOTUS case is going forward, Texas is (correctly) pointing out that this is very different than 90s dial up, and the porn is far more intense, violent, graphic, and accessible. Because we’ve already had porn filters, and even the opposition concedes they’ve been uselessly ineffective, therefore…

That’s the argument. It’s a good argument. You don’t have to like the conclusion. However, I have seen firsthand that filtering, and talking to children, absolutely is not, and never will be, effective.

>However, I have seen firsthand that filtering, and talking to children, absolutely is not, and never will be, effective.

Weird, I have seen firsthand that absolutely can be! I guess we're at an impasse.

Do the children in question watch porn, even sometimes?

If so, it was not effective.

And even if it was, according to the US government, >90% of parents can’t pull it off, and they’ve had over 20 years to try (tech companies included). That’s law-changing time.

As one legal analogy put it: Imagine if there was a law mandating public transportation from City A to City B. There’s a bus line, but it’s people 6 feet or taller only. Don’t come into the courtroom defending it by saying crawling is always an option, and some people have been crawling, so therefore the law is upheld.

This is a pathetic incarnation of the "think of the children!" fallacy Americans love so much. You fundamentally cannot stop children from watching porn. It is like arguing for a second prohibition so we can stop kids from accessing alcohol - not only will the plan fail, it will disproportionately harm the legal consumers to the point they're comfortable breaking the law. Age authentication doesn't work, and it's going to train kids to access illegal pornography if they want their fix.

Parents can't stop it any more than they can stop kids from watching violent movies or renouncing their faith. Quit arguing with this slippery-slope logic, your comment history reads like Pagliacci's personal diary.

>All not necessary if parents just did their jobs, right?

No... Parent's can't reasonably mitigate what a car seat or seat belt mitigates.

Besides that, the benefits vs. harms needs to be weighed before you shove your parenting responsibilities off to the government. Age verification laws have the potential to do a lot of harm to a lot of people. Seat belt laws do not do a lot of harm to a lot of people.

I agree with your comment but disagree with the framing that these are necessary because parents “fail”.

The safety mechanisms you point to are not a result of parents failing, it’s a result of a common agreement that society as a whole benefits from certain guardrails. Seatbelts were very controversial! But after you realize that a seatbelt is a small inconvenience that can prevent you or your children from being violently ejected from the vehicle and splatting on the pavement in the event of a car crash, we agreed as a society that the public health good outweighed the slight inconvenience of wearing a seatbelt. Nothing to do with the failings of parents. Parents already feel like failures most of the time already as it is.

What are those technical and physical controls you speak of? If your kid is taught to be responsible why would you need them?

>What are those technical and physical controls you speak of?

We're on a "Hacker News", and you want me to explain what parental controls are? Do you have some specific questions that you genuinely want help with? Because this smells like a bad faith question.

Physical controls like... Gosh, I don't know. Choosing what devices your kids have access to, and what time their allowed to use them? Taking devices away when rules are broken? Putting devices in common rooms instead of bedrooms?

>If your kid is taught to be responsible why would you need them?

Ah, I see your edit confirms that this is a bad faith line of questioning.

It’s not bad faith, I honestly have not found a set of physical and technical controls that work for kids that are addicted to short form video content.

Have you tried to restrict devices against a determined child? Especially one that has to use a device to complete school homework? Because you make it sound easy. I can assure you, it is not. Just because a device is allowed at a time of day doesn’t mean he’s using it for the stated purpose. I sit with him as much as possible while he’s doing homework, but I may have to step away to cook dinner, wash dishes, drive a kid somewhere, help one of my other kids - and guess what, I come back and it’s more YouTube. So how does “time of day” restrictions help?

I may come off snide and annoyed, and truly this topic does make me annoyed as there is no simple solution. Yet people who are not in this position are so quick to point out how simple it is - yet never can back up their claims with actual facts.

Edit- before I’m accused of being too lenient, I have a fairly strict screens policy for my kids, and I still struggle. When I go out, it’s insane how many parents just let their kids sit and watch videos while the parents talk. The kids will have iPads basically chained to them while in line, at the table, in the car, it’s absolutely sick. Hell, I have my own problems with screen addiction.

Here’s some mitigations and how they’ve failed:

There are no devices allowed in bedrooms. Work is to be done in common rooms, but unlike when we were kids, there is no desktop. Only laptops. So they’re easily portable. I have had a recently wiped iPhone swiped from my office because it was unlocked - it took me a few days to realize that, and by then he had watched 22 hours of YouTube. Internet is locked out on their devices but turning it on and off is a bit of a pain so sometimes I’ll forget. Even with no internet, he will pull out the laptop while in the car driving home from school and play a cached web game. They tricked my wife into thinking the rear screen in the car was unlocked, so she toggles it- not realizing that actually unlocked the screen. Their Nintendo switches have ok parental controls once I realized you can actually set it to zero time if you do it on a day-by-day basis (otherwise the minimum is 5 minutes). I have a house wide pihole, but once he gets a cellphone that will be trivial to bypass unless I go through the effort of forcing an always on vpn. One time my wife shared the password to her laptop with my daughter (who is responsible) but my son was within earshot, so he was able to unlock it while we weren’t looking. Shall I go on?

I believe I’m doing the best I can yet I am fighting upstream the entire way.

It's obviously not as simple as any of us write out on in a few dozen words online. I have sympathy for you. But I disagree that age verification laws are needed. I think they'll do significantly more harm than good, and they don't even begin to address YouTube addictions.

>Yet people who are not in this position are so quick to point out how simple it is - yet never can back up their claims with actual facts.

I don't know what actual facts you want from me. I don't have a study published in Nature or whatever that I can cite. I just have my experiences with my three kids (ages ranging from young to almost moving out) and the experiences of my friends, family, and colleagues that have kids.

I'd be happy to share my experiences, and what worked with my kids (and what didn't), but it's hard to believe someone wants a genuine conversation when they hit you with a "If your kid is taught to be responsible why would you need them?" off the top. (Or equate age verification laws to seat belt laws, like the other commenter).

It’s a legitimate question. I shared my struggles in the edit. I would be happy to adopt something that could work.

They should raise their kids in a manner so they can be trusted to browse the web responsibly and talk to their parents about scary stuff.

I think you'll find some difficulty training children to complete tasks that adults routinely struggle with. Additionally there's the minor issue of defeating the literal billions in R&D that have gone into gamification and other dark patterns. Even your own comment ending with how children should communicate with their parents after being traumatized by internet content suggests you agree that traumatizing content is pervasive and likely unavoidable.

Tell me you are not a parent without telling me you are not a parent.

No offense, but do you have kids of social media age and, if so, are you 100% certain this is true for them? I know I can’t say that for my own.

One of my kids has a very addictive personality. Great kid, smart, gets good grades. But 100% addicted to YouTube. He will lie straight to your face, sneak an unlocked phone to his room, and watch 22 hours straight of random videos.

I shudder of the day he discovers internet pornography. He has no natural defense mechanism and he’s up against billions of dollars and decades of research on how to stoke addiction (aka “engagement”)

Then impose punishment for doing so. Parenting is hard, and not called "being your kid's best friend" for a reason.

And mind, I'm not against using legislation to cut down on the exploitive and addiction ridden field of UX. I grew up participating in trying to bridge the world of library science and organizing information for quick recall of Web 1.0 and the hell that became web 2.0 when SEO became big, and people realized there was a buck to be made off looking to monetize eye space.

The problem isn't at the root parents. It's greed, advertisers, and marketing. But unfortunately it's an Us v. Them to the point where current parents have to focus on eauipping kids to resist the exploitive tendencies current web experiences are built around.

Also to you- how many kids do you have?

Some assumption that I did not impose a punishment. Prey tell what would you suggest the punishment be? Don’t forget, assignments for school are posted online in Google classroom and need to be turned in online. Many require watching YouTube videos. Please enlighten me.

You edited your comment to add nuance past the snide “parenting is hard” useless quip. So I’ll add some to mine as well.

Greed is the problem. There is a problem of misalignment around this entire ecosystem we have built. We are in an age where we can measure so much more accurately than ever before, so we have invented metrics for everything.

Unfortunately these metrics ultimately boil down to “how can I make more money”. We are what we measure. So now we are stuck with platforms whose key performance indicator is time on site, leading to micro optimizations to identify how to get people hooked. No wonder parental controls are so shitty! Those don’t exactly move the “engagement” graph up and to the right, do they? And there’s no meaningful regulation to counteract that force. In other words there is no incentive for them, and I fact every incentive to make my job as a parent harder.

So now back to your first comment, boiling down to “you’re a shitty parent. If you were a better parent who scolded their children, you wouldn’t have this problem”. It’s telling that you started your comment that way, and instead of responding to my comment by perhaps enlightening me with your sage parenting tips, decided to edit your comment to add bs about how oh it’s greed not parenting after all. Tell me again how I as an individual is supposed to take on an entire industry built upon a profit motive to do exactly what my kid is doing?

Punish him how? Take away his video games? Did that. But then he got up at 6am on Saturday and turned on the Apple TV. Guess what, there’s no meaningful parental controls on that. So I took the remotes and locked them away. Encourage him to go outside and play with friends? Won’t do that because the screens are way more stimulating than interacting with actual people.

Then, one day, I forget to turn the Internet back off on his school laptop after he turns in a project online, and the cycle starts again.

I have none, nor will on grounds that I'm not bringing children into this world on ot's current trajectory, but I will damn well stand up to try to help and prepare every child brought into the world otherwise, including by working through prepping or aiding parents if need be. They'll need all the help they can get in a system currently orchestrated to turn their natural drives into a production line for ongoing State directed labor.

I don't want to see children being exploited by master manipulators with huge R&D budgets directed purely to the task of incenting more wealth/value extraction. I don't want to see adults targeted by the same. I don't want an economy centered around that. I don't want "Captains of Industy" vying for and directing "engines of wealth creation", utilizing human capital and resources to their own ends. Because that's what leads to my earlier glib answer, where we have to perpetuate the current cycle of suffering in order to prepare them for that world, and punish them as well as ourselves in the process. Which is exactly where we're bloody headed without change, and in a hell of a different direction than installing emperors who want to completely change the shape of things to suit their ends alone.

You can feel free to dismiss me as "you'll never know because you aren't currently what people recognize as a parent". That's fair enough. But please understand that short of massive change to how and who drives the levers of our existing (and crumbling) regulatory edifi, we're on track for Great Depression 2.0 and speed running the Gilded Age of the Robber Barons and relearning the lessons of the 20th century again because we clearly failed to do it the first time around.

Without setting limits to what we, the adults in the room can do in terms of optimizing for wealth centralization through exploitive commerce models, the only people left to pass on the skills necessary for your children to thrive in an increasingly exploitive world where the trend in cost for being able to crank out systems to amplify parasitic value extraction is you. The parent, and any other caregiver with their eyes open.

If you think you're shitting bricks right now, I've been taking the last year or so to evaluate how life has changed for the young folks in my life, and I'm horrified by what I've found, and I know if it's happening in my circles, it's happening in everyone else's. And while I played a part in the genie getting out of the bottle, I know enough about the nature of the thing in question to be able to recognize that right now, y'all, and anyone who cares are the only ones who can get this train turned around.

And in the meantime, yeah, that's going to mean a lot of the onus on policing those little scions of chaos we call offspring to the active caretakers. The essence of the Internet ain't to bring the Angels to your home, but to offer the Angel and Demon alike a highway through which to enter your home. They (kids) don't know the difference, or appreciate that for you, telling the difference is work to be done which you have to balance with other demands; I understand, and don't discount that.

I can't change it alone either though, because it's a collective action problem. And we seem to really suck at that when it's goal is "enforce an upper limit on greed".

I appreciate your response. Collective action is tough. I don’t have any answers but I’m struggling nonetheless. My only hope is I can raise my little kiddos to understand the problem and help create the solution. The world has generally progressed in the right direction so I hope it can continue that way.

And yet people wonder why opting out of having kids entirely is really popular.

Even if I don't necessarily agree with it, I can understand an argument for not allowing credit cards to suffice for this (not everyone has good enough credit to get a credit card - we shouldn't discriminate against the poor and all), but shouldn't every adult legally residing in Australia be able to open a bank account and get a debit card, even with bad credit?

Everyone with 100 points of id can open a bank account. If you have very bad credit, or even officially bankrupt, you can get a debit that does not let you spend more than you have, well mostly. But, that still leaves the newspaper commenters who have a friend of a friend who does not have 100 points of id or loses their card and bank details weekly.

No idea about Australia, but in Estonia (and I suppose most of the Europe?) children can get a debit card without much hassle. Maybe we could give them dedicated BIN numbers so that you could check for age this way, but I think it’s not worth the hassle.

Perhaps the world's most digital-native democracy isn't the fairest comparison to us ye olden paper pushers, lol.

Fair point :^)

I’ve decided to look it up, and it’s a mixed bag: in the EU, there’s 6 cointries where minors can open a debit card (the age requirement is as low as six in Slovakia or seven in Latvia). Then there’s another 11 countries with no minimum age at all – though they do require parents’ consent. https://fra.europa.eu/en/publication/2017/mapping-minimum-ag...

> it's not actually possible without destroying the internet as we know it

Looking around at all the neo nazis, Russian disinformation and just the general populace turning more and more insane I’m getting pretty tired of the internet as we know it.

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