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Comment by alecco | Hacker News Reader

(repost)

  - Let's limit children's use of social media and screens.
  - Great! Let's do it.
  - We need to identify who is 18+, so here's your digital ID for everything. And, from now on, if you ever criticize the government you will lose your bank account and your job.
  - WTF!
  - That "WTF" just cost you 100 social credits.

UK, EU, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and next USA. It's amazing how coordinated it is. They are using dog-whistles like CSAM, immigration, crime, and now children's wellbeing.

View on HN

It's bloody obvious how damaging social media, especially on mobile devices, is to everyone's mental state. Check out what teachers have to say about the attention span of the current generation pupils. But no, your access to whatever it is you're addicted to is more important.

Anyway, the government can already take away your bank account. No need for them to introduce such a complex scheme.

Yes, but damaging adults is OK. It's only children that must not be damaged.

Adults are expected to think for themselves. Kids need help because they don’t have the experience yet.

If society and parents ban you from something and they do it themselves then the ban has virtually no effect.

That’s right and important to keep in mind.

It's why we see so many infants getting caught for DUIs. Seriously? You seem to be implying that there's no justification/efficacy for any law/ban prohibiting children from engaging in adult activities. That's... something.

They can, but digital passports and ID makes it far easier. Notice that even though government can do it now they are still pushing for these.

“It’s for the children” is the siren song of tyranny.

Yes let's take away everyone's privacy because parents can't be bothered to parent.

I doubt that parenting can do much here.

I've read that after elementary school parents have an incredibly small impact on their children's development, peers and their environment (which includes virtual one), has virtually all of the impact on your children's development.

How so? Parents and schools can collectively decide to take away the smartphones of preschoolers if keeping them safe and focused was the main priority. Like how else is a preschooler gonna get a smartphone without adult money and support? Last time I checked preschoolers can't open a checking account and a credit card.

This bs of government forcing everyone in the country to have to doxx themselves just so preschoolers can't access social media(which they will anyway since rebellious children are very resourceful on cheating the system made by tech illiterate adults), is like if prehistoric humanity were to stop using fire just because the village idiot burned his house down.

> Parents and schools can collectively decide to take away the smartphones of preschoolers if keeping them safe and focused was the main priority

Collective action? Like some sort of communist? No THANK you!

If only there were some kind of collective larger than a family or a school that could decide to take away social media from impressionable children...

Yes, and how would the government ban social media apps from preschoolers without forcing everyone to doxx themselves to prove age?

Your sarcastic jab doesn't add any new questions or answers to this very important issue, since everyone can agree social media is bad for kids, but also we don't want to lose internet anonymity just because schools and parents can't raise kids without giving them a smartphone in hand since birth.

They've already done it, mate. You can go read about the Australian law. They are putting the burden of proof on the tech companies: "You have heaps of data on your users, you know who are young teens because you target them for marketing. Ban underage kids or we fine you."

Do children buy devices and pay for internet service?

Good luck denying your 12 year olds a smartphone when every single of their friends has one and they are cut off from everything.

My parents gave me really shitty smartphones that were barely powerful enough to do important things but was an awful experience for Instagram/games/etc until I bought a better one with my own money (similar specs to Pinephone Pro)

No luck necessary. Not like you need permission from your child to deny them things.

You can get a dumb phone since having a phone (not necessarily smart) is a good idea. There's also parental controls on at least Android smartphones that let you control the apps and sites they get access to.

Pocket money is a thing, PAYG is a thing, gift cards are a thing.

Skipping lunch and saving up the dinner money to spend on an ex-demo Performa 5200 and a 56k modem is how I got online back in the late 90s.

What the heck is ‘dinner money’?

Your parents couldn’t be arsed to cook even a single meal for you?

https://www.collinsdictionary.com/dictionary/english/dinner-...

Parents can still confiscate their children's belongings even if the child bought them. Imagine a child buys large speakers and puts them on blast with windows open in the middle of the night. Doesn't matter if the child bought them on their own, the parent should still be able to confiscate them.

Sure. But a phone is easy to hide… well, until it gets addictive and overused.

Cellphone service providers will most likely be unwilling to start a contract with a child, so the child can't get a SIM on their own. Also if the parent wants to make sure that the SIM card they get can't be used with another phone than the one they provided, they can get an eSIM.

The child is also not going to have access to their home wifi unless their parents provide the password. That network is also totally in their control. They can setup a firewall.

School networks should also have firewalls, if they even provide wifi to the students which arguably they shouldn't.

The only remaining way to get internet access is through open networks on restaurants, etc.

If the child is old enough to be hanging around outside like that though, they're likely old enough for social media, I think.

Contract, yes. I said PAYG, as in Pay As You Go, as in not a contract.

Before I left the UK, there were remarkably good options for PAYG as both a phone SIM and mobile internet dongles.

Does the USA not have PAYG options?

Is "no contract" to be taken super-literally? Do they not ask to sign a terms-and-conditions document at least? or ask for ID at least to ensure you're a resident of the jurisdiction? I always thought "no contract" was just a term of the trade to mean "no post-payment contract". I'm skeptical they're willing to have anonymous users.

> Do they not ask to sign a terms-and-conditions document at least?

Not when I got one (… two … no, three…). No idea what current rules are, may have changed, but back when I lived in the UK you'd find stacks of SIMs on supermarket shelves for £0.99 each, no questions asked. Topping them up was also no questions asked.

It's possible there was a tickbox somewhere for "you agree to the T&Cs", that's the kind of thing that I'd not even remember, but no actual signature was needed.

Germany (where I live now) needs a proof of ID to register a SIM, so did Kenya when I visited, but the UK hadn't done anything like that by the time I left the country.

Let's suppose the cause really is as simple as "parents can't be bothered to parent". By default, this will continue to be the case. And realistically we're not going to fix it by telling bad parents to please start being good parents. So what do you actually want to do? I'm not saying it's this or nothing, but if you don't have an alternative policy that might actually help, I don't take much comfort in the idea that the kids who are damaged will have _parents_ who totally deserved it.

There are some alternative policies, for example, banning smartphones in schools. This doesn't completely solve the problem, of course, but at least it limits social media use while the children are under direct supervision of the government.

A more extreme policy would be to treat smartphones themselves the same way we treat alcohol and cigarettes, enforcing an age minimum at the point of purchase. Of course the giant tech corporations would fly into rage over this suggestion and lobby heavily against it.

Why are we focusing on pupils? Attention span in general has degraded, I see it on myself and my family too and we're all between 32 and 60.

The only person that hasn't degraded is my grandma as the only internet feature she uses are video calls.

> It's bloody obvious how damaging social media, especially on mobile devices, is to everyone's mental state.

Agree. A simple solution would be to regulate social media by forcing a maximum time per user per day or banning it altogether. But that's clearly not the agenda. (same with all the other dog-whistles).

> Anyway, the government can already take away your bank account. No need for them to introduce such a complex scheme.

But currently they can't match anonymous social media profiles to IDs or bank accounts. This is why they want a mandatory "Digital ID" for social media.

The fact that this discussion seems to revolving around a single axis of limiting social media time and mandatory identification is such a farce.

When I was growing up, I had very limited access to real life social spaces that I actually enjoyed participating in. Online communities were my respite, the light in the darkness that honestly kept me alive until I managed to make it to college. If there was an overbearing nanny state preventing me from knowing that there was a better life waiting for me after grade school, I'm not sure I would've bothered to stick around until then.

That said, most of modern social media isn't the same as the online communities I and many others grew up on. It's a free for all with very thin walls between social spaces, almost no human oversight, and run by the most despicable and immoral people on God's green earth. So I am inclined to agree with the people who say that kind of social media is a bad influence and should be curtailed.

But even today, that isn't everything that's on the internet these days. Discord especially has quietly become the socialization hub of most of the younger folks I know of, and a large part of that is because it allows the creation of private, invite-only groups moderated by actual people. As far as I'm concerned, the Internet needs more Discords and fewer Twitters and Instagrams. There shouldn't be an arbitrary limit on socialization, but socializing should be...social, not some weird performance art done in front of the entire internet.

Frankly, the law should be "you can sue social media if you can link their service to a problem with you'r child's mental health"

then let the courts decide. they'll clean up their act pretty quick when lawsuits come pouring in, and it removes the central govt's role in USER ID's and other 1984 schemes.

> Frankly, the law should be "you can sue social media if you can link their service to a problem with you'r child's mental health"

So you want to make it legally viable for religious parents to sue social spaces that allow for their children to question the religion of their parents? That's totally something that I could picture happening under such a regime. And that's ultimately indicative of a larger conundrum we face as a society.

The fact that as a society we seem to favor giving parents the ability to make their children in their own image, over giving their children the leeway to figure out who they truly are outside of their parent's guidance. And that's a truly difficult line to tack. Sometimes the parents are 100% right and the children would self-destruct under their own supervision. Other times, the children are being abused and tortured for not following the whims of their selfish parents.

I was lucky, all things considered. My parents were well meaning, just extremely overbearing and micro-managing. Some of the outright abuse that some of my acquaintances describe undergoing would make y'all sick if repeated here. I don't know if there's any solution, but I'm not sure giving helicopter parents more leverage against social spaces is the right play.

> So you want to make it legally viable for religious parents to sue social spaces that allow for their children to question the religion of their parents?

Why not. In a court of law, and facts, such lawsuits would only serve to highlight that religion is not a real thing. That would be a good thing for the world.

>It's a free for all with very thin walls between social spaces, almost no human oversight, and run by the most despicable and immoral people on God's green earth. So I am inclined to agree with the people who say that kind of social media is a bad influence and should be curtailed.

It was the same in the past. The difference is that the house odds were different. You didn't have algorithms cramming the worst of the worst down your feed, forums, IRC, message boards and the like weren't built with the goal of maximizing engagement. Heck, even vote based communities which inevitably turn into low common denominator groupthink producing cesspits are mild compared to modern stuff.

> When I was growing up, I had very limited access to real life social spaces that I actually enjoyed participating in. Online communities were my respite, the light in the darkness that honestly kept me alive until I managed to make it to college. If there was an overbearing nanny state preventing me from knowing that there was a better life waiting for me after grade school, I'm not sure I would've bothered to stick around until then.

This is indeed a problem. Especially when growing up in a small town you can get stuck in a monoculture where people all have the same interests (I think in the US that's often sports and religion I think, in my case it was a bit different). I have zero interests in any of those and I don't do pretend. So I never fit in well either.

I also started looking for online places and started embracing being different. It wasn't easy but it did shape who I am. I'm still very much in alt cultures now.

These days I live in big cities where it's much easier to find groups to fit me than to try and fit in to whatever monoculture exists.

>It's bloody obvious how damaging social media, especially on mobile devices, is to everyone's mental state.

It's not though. That's just the popular meme among easily influenced and excitable social groups (like parents). It's not reflective of reality. The idea that mobile devices are somehow damaging to mental state is not supported by scientific studies. Nor is the idea that online discussion forums and markets are.

What is dangerous is mis-using medical terms like "addiction" in apparently an intended medical context. When you start throwing around words like addiction governments get really excited about their ability to use force and start hurting and imprisoning people. Even murdering them. Multi-media screens are not addictive. There is no evidence supporting such assertions in reputable scientific journals.

What are you talking about there's an overabundance of studies that links social media consumption with degrading mental health. Especially for youth.

Here's a review (a paper that collects results of many other papers) from 2022:

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9052033

By link you mean correlate, which doesn't mean anything.

Social studies are useless anyway. Academic social studies are so biased that anything they say on the matter should be discarded. They will always produce "evidence" on demand for whatever the left want to do.

Social media should be left alone. Parents who want to can block it on their children's devices. There's nothing more that needs to be done.

> the term of problematic use characterizes individuals who experience addiction-like symptoms as a result of their social media use. Problematic social media use reflects a non–substance related disorder by which detrimental effects occur as a result of preoccupation and compulsion to excessively engage in social media platforms despite negative consequences.

This study is taking "problematic social media use" as it's implicit given and then from this arbitrary base it is then saying this small subset of problematic people experience depression because of the fiat declaration of "problematic".

But then it goes on,

>While there exists no official diagnostic term or measurement, Andreassen et al [17] developed the Facebook Addiction Scale, which measures features of substance use disorder such as salience, tolerance, preoccupation, impaired role performance, loss of control, and withdrawal, to systematically score problematic Facebook use.

Which isn't even a real journal article but instead a comment in a non-research paper which hasn't ever even been cited by anyone else until this paper. https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C29&q=Dev... https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/22662404/

This is not real science. This is anti-facebook political manipulation via science sounding words. I'm plenty anti-facebook myself but I am very pro-science so it's sad to see this successfully masquerading as real science.

Why shouldn’t parents mind their own children? Why limit everyone’s speech?

Do you have kids?

It's much easier to say to a child "you can't have a social media account, it's the law because experts have determined it's not healthy at your age" than "your mother and I think that social media is bad for you".

I tried that before they were 13. Technically false, but almost no social media company allows under 13s.

It didn’t work very well.

Whether experts have determined it's not healthy is independent from whether it's against the law.

Whether it's the rules of the parents, or the "rules" of the government, they're all the same in the eyes of a child.

source: was once a child

https://www.waituntil8th.org/

A true observation, but not sufficient to criminalize and infringe on basically everybody else.

There are all sorts of things that would be easier for parents to prohibit if the government made it illegal: Popular toys, M&M's, pork, anything that questions the bible...

I don’t think this is obvious - I have kids and this is a constant battle. If you take the devices away they are along and isolated and it’s so much worse.

Some schools have these rules, but unless they are practically enforced, kids get around it.

I worry these laws will result in the worse of both worlds.

We need really well moderated forums for kids, along with practical bans for everything else.

I’m not sure how that happens.

I'm 52 and I'm alone and isolated, so age has very little to do with any of it. There is no reason to pass laws to solve what technology caused and technology will undo or we will go extinct and it won't even matter anyways.

When I was a teenager (that was a while ago) the addiction and social dangers where different, my mother (she raised us almost by herself alone) never “forbid” me to anything, just explained us what was what and what could be the consequences. Do not expect the government do the parenting, be a good strong and loving parent and trust your kids.

If it were bloody obvious the government wouldn't need to be involved, parents would find a way to get their children off social media. And there are much gentler solutions than a ban that should be explored first (like letting households volunteer themselves to be IP-banned by social networks, for example).

> parents would find a way to get their children off social media.

They wouldn't have a clue. Hell, I personally had this addiction for a long time and it just takes too long to see what a horrible experience it is in the long term. You can argue you should be able to do whatever you want at any age, I'm not the person to say anything about that.

But I totally agree that, as other comments point out, they use it as a justification for all sort of surveillance, I don't really think it is necessary to go that hard because whoever want to get access, they will. It's the internet after all.

the largest companies in the world have their core profit motive tied to getting you to engage in social media.

asking households to voluntarily leave is like asking people not to get fat -- ain't gonna work, esp. when mega corporations want you to consume consume consume.

it needs to be a law, and it needs to be enforced.

Are you suggesting we ban people from eating excessive amounts of food? Because you've drawn a parallel and I quite like how we treat food - people can just eat too much if they want to and people tell them not to get fat when they complain that it has negative consequences.

You do realize that kids learning how to dodge IP blocks is a practice as old as the internet itself, right?

That wouldn’t solve anything.

Pretty much every doctor agrees alcohol is bad for developing brains. But science doesn't always win against society.

Is there any place without an age limit for alcohol?

In terms of private consumption, effectively so. The UK limit for consumption at home is five. I have no idea how even that can be enforced.

Boots taste good, actually! +10 social credit for you!

Great example of what "hapless enabler" looks like.

We all agree there's a problem. But simply letting the .gov do whatever it finds convenient will likely not solve the problem any better than any other option, and will likely make a whole bunch of other things way worse.

But that's fine because it's for the children, right?

> Better than any other option

Such as?

Facebook knew for years its social media was hurting the mental health of teenagers, and not only they doubled down on it because it makes money, they will also face zero consequences.

Corporate self-regulation is a myth.

> And, from now on, if you ever criticize the government you will lose your bank account and your job.

We could have a real conversation about tradeoffs (and maybe this one isn't worth it!) but not if you just assume/pretend the worst-case scenario is real. I'm Australian and I'll happily bet that N years from now I'll still be able to criticize the government without being debanked or sacked.

If we do ever fall to authoritarianism, I doubt this will have been a crucial step; it's already easy for the government to deanonymize most posters if it wants to, and an evil future government that wanted to go further could probably just... do it, regardless of precedent.

Governments never give up power. They will only take more. So considerations on what power should be given over should be done carefully instead of having knee jerk reactions based on "think of the children".

It's my impression that the shift from 'basically normal government' to 'authoritarian nightmare', when it happens, tends to happen quite abruptly rather than via the ratchet effect/frog-boiling. And there seem to be plenty of examples of democracies that have remained basically normal despite decades' worth of policies that libertarian-leaning observers would decry as the thin end of the wedge. I'm open to being convinced that the risk of a policy like this clearly outweighs its benefits, but I think I need a specific causal pathway and/or historical precedent rather than general arguments.

The US is kind of an obvious example of this ratchet effect. The powers that have been given to the executive over the course of decades and consistent moving to the right for decades has led us to where we are now. Similar cases in Russia and China where more power is handed over to a centralized leadership role over time.

I'm not a libertarian or follow the thin end of the wedge belief system. It's a simple observation that governments operate under the idea of growth of power. That is not to say an absence of government or reduction of government is good or better. But to recognize our role in maintain the social contract with the government. Abdicating that role entirely does not improve your life.

The only benefit of this legislation is that VPN's will get a bump in revenue, the web becomes more unusable and critical information gets stored at third parties who become high value targets for hacking. Not to mention these data brokers can easily turn around and begin to monetize this data. I'm not a privacy nut by any measure, but this seems like the most obvious major hit to personal data privacy. Instead of addressing the problem that is being claimed to be resolved, it's just lining another corporations pockets who will sell your data. We've seen this story play out many many times already. but you think this time will be different? I don't think so.

> but not if you just assume/pretend the worst-case scenario is real

Just want to point out that Canada weaponised war time powers to debank truckers protesting during COVID. The rubicon has already been crossed. While I didn't support their cause, the writing is on the wall about what governments want to be able to do to people it finds inconvenient.

your government already has an online censorship department https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ESafety_Commissioner which is being used to silence social media posts with bogus "informal" takedown notices

Social media posts are getting people arrested in the UK. Even if mostly "fixed" in appeals, there seems to be a cross national trend.

https://redact.dev/blog/how-and-why-people-are-being-arreste...

  Police in the UK continue to arrest people for online posts that are reported as threatening, harassing, or grossly offensive.
  Cases are commonly brought under communications and public order laws, including offenses tied to harassment, malicious communications, and hate incidents.

There's a lot I don't like about the UK (enough that I left the country), but these things are not "criticising the government".

Closest the UK got, in recent years, to people getting punished specifically for criticising the government was that Mock the Week got cancelled. But not, say, Have I Got News For You, which has spent its entire existence doing nothing but.

Also Rahm Emanuel: "Let's take Second Amendment rights away from everybody on the no-fly list." [1,2]

1: https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/03/rahm-emanuel-hey-lets...

2: https://old.reddit.com/r/reddit.com/comments/816qf/rahm_eman...

The harm from guns is far, far clearer, and they are far less essential or relevant to daily life, especially for young adults.

Also the US is basically the only country which sees lethality as a "right".

The harm from unaccountable governments who treat their constitutions like suggestions is far greater still, though. It's not about the guns, it's about the list. If you're an American who's not outraged by Emanuel's statement -- on guns or on social media for that matter -- it's because you feel privilege that you may not actually possess.

On that subject, it's certainly a strange time to argue for government's role as the holder of a monopoly on the tools of violence, isn't it? The human consequences of this misguided philosophy ran well into eight figures in the 20th century alone.

In any case... say what you will about the US, we won't shoot you at the border for trying to leave.

> On that subject, it's certainly a strange time to argue for government's role as the holder of a monopoly on the tools of violence, isn't it? The human consequences of this misguided philosophy ran well into eight figures in the 20th century alone.

Sounds like you think the argument people are making is that it ought to have the monopoly?

I think the argument is that whoever doesn't have that monopoly, can't call themselves a government… at least not for very long. Reason being, not having a monopoly necessarily requires someone else is doing violence and cannot be stopped by the so-called government, which means the so-called government is weak and at risk of being taken over, perhaps by the people doing the violence, perhaps by a outside "peacekeeping" force.

It's OK for the government to have the best guns, and in fact (as you suggest) that state of affairs is pretty much unavoidable for any government worthy of the name.

It's not OK for the government to have all the guns.

Given that, it's necessary to consider who should have legal access to guns and who should not.

What we call the "No-fly list" is an abhorrently-wrong way to do that.

> It's not OK for the government to have all the guns.

Why?

The argument I've heard Americans give over the years is to stop authoritarian governments, to keep the government "scared" of the people.

Yet people in the USA are now being snatched off the street and deported for what is supposed to be protected by the first amendment: speech.

Clearly literally getting shot at didn't keep Trump "scared".

Maybe because everyone knows violent uprising should be a last resort and things aren't bad enough to condemn millions to stravation and death yet.

Unless you are saying you personally would join a US uprising, asking why armed people haven't yet started one yet themselves isn't a compelling arguement to disarm them. If people were shooting back I think you and most others would be condemning them.

I'm saying Trump isn't even afraid of an uprising.

That's not a condemnation of the people failing to replicate the Jan 6 thing while switching red flags for blue ones.

I'm saying the freedom to have guns didn't do the thing that people say it does.

I would go further: I also don't think private arms would work if y'all did start firing them, because who wins a civil war is more likely to depend who the military supports than private firearms, and if the military aren't the deciding factor for whatever reason (internal split within the military?) then it's down to whoever outside the country is supplying weapons/logistics to which side (so, probably China?)

We aren't talking about a civil war though, we are talking about a civil uprising. Trump didn't take the government by force or strongarm politicians into compliance, they mostly went along with all this bullshit too. People already had the view that federal politicians as a whole were corrupt and self-serving and have been failing to effectively govern and legislate in the country's favor for decades. I also doubt any or enough of them would be willing to take up arms themselves and become a factional leader. Nobody is going to rally behind Kamala or some geriatric or the democratic party even if they were willing to try.

And in an insurgency type situation private arms/small arms are extremely effective, if costly with lives. The US failing to subdue multiple countries long term despite having a tiny fraction the amount of small arms, veterans, or people directly involved in US logistics operations, is all the proof we need. Nobody wants that, it would be horrendous and bloody, but tanks and planes don't run off mere hopes and dreams and the US citizenry is more heavily armed by multiple factors than any other country or people in history.

The other thing that private arms buys you is international support. If you show that you can make the most of limited offensive capabilities, you attract allies whose interests are aligned to your own, as seen from the American Revolution to modern-day Ukraine.

If you disarm and roll over meekly, nobody is going to want to help you.

And if you know anything about Rahm Emanuel's background, you'd think he'd be the one waving this particular banner, but... (shrug)

> In any case... say what you will about the US, we won't shoot you at the border for trying to leave.

How does this alleged virtue square away with everything else that's going on?

There ara bunch of murdered Venezuelan fishermen right now that never came even remotely close to the border, let alone transiting it in either direction.

"Say what you will about zombies eating your brains, at least they won't eat your eyes."

I don't have the solution. But it seems like a problem which needs to be addressed and regulation isn't a crazy place to look. As a parent, it feels like I'm constantly battling with Meta, Tiktok and Google over my childrens' development and we have very different goals.

Why not just take away their phone?

iPhones have excellent parental controls (by the abysmal standards of consumer software more broadly). You can just not allow insta and such, or set time limits on them per-day (30 minutes, say). I assume Android has something similar. You can set the Web to allowlist-only. Kids can send requests to bypass limits, sends the request right to your own Apple devices, easy to yay or nay it. It’s damn good.

Phones are among the easiest devices to manage.

> iPhones have excellent parental controls

If those work, sure, although kids tend to be pretty clever about getting around parental controls and are sometimes quite a bit more technically sophisticated than their parents.

It ain’t the ‘90s and this ain’t Windows 95 with bypassable-by-accident OS account logins and half-assed website blocking made by the lowest bidder. Getting past app installation restrictions and time limits on iOS would be… challenging.

It sucks as a parent because you get this from both ends: “parent better! (Putting in tons of work that our parents didn’t have to)” and also “lol what are you doing restricting kids on computers is impossible, give up you idiot”.

(And on some platforms it is, for practical purposes, impossible—looking at you, Linux, not just because it’s a powerful open platform but because its permissions and capabilities system is decades behind the state-of-the-art and tools for sensibly managing any of that on a scale smaller than “fleet of servers” and in the context of user-session applications are nonexistent)

> It sucks as a parent because you get this from both ends: “parent better! (Putting in tons of work that our parents didn’t have to)” and also “lol what are you doing restricting kids on computers is impossible, give up you idiot”.

I didn't claim that it's impossible, merely that it's difficult sometimes, as you also implied ("putting in tons of work"). The advantage of physically consfiscating phones is that it's a low tech, brute force method available even to the least technically sophisticated parents.

heh...see my comment above about bypassing screen time limits on ios by simply deleting and reinstalling the app.

To that extent can't kids just pop in a live USB and get a totally ephemeral and open os?

I'd push the implementation to the router and force root certs on devices and have all clients run through your proxy or drop the packets. That way even live usbs will not get network access. Have some separate, hugely locked down network for kids' friends.

Maybe put a separate honeypot network up with some iot devices on it with wifi and a weak password, and let the kids have some freedom once they figure out how to deauth and grab the bash upon reconnections.

Idk. I'm some years away from this problem myself,but someone recommended this in another thread recently.

https://wiki.squid-cache.org/Features/SslBump

> To that extent can't kids just pop in a live USB and get a totally ephemeral and open os?

That's a lot more difficult if you leave secureboot enabled on the computer. Plus, most devices, especially newer ones, allow you to pin your own certificates and sometimes even disable the OEM certs.

That, in addition with locking the BIOS with a password (and if the device does not have known OEM override passwords like on bios-pw.org), should be more than enough to keep a kid out.

Thanks for the tips!

Found out last year that simply deleting an app and reinstalling it will reset time limits.

App deletion and installation were among the first things I disabled :-)

I'm not sure if you're asking as a parent or an observer of parents. But it's not such a clear option given how entrenched we've made devices into children's lives.

My son's cross country team communicates via GroupMe and it's very difficult for him to stay up-to-date with the web version from a laptop. My daughter's friend group communicates via snapchat.

This doesn't mean parents have to allow everything. My daughter doesn't have Snapchat, for example. But there are definite tradeoffs like her being left out of many conversations and slowly getting excluded from friend groups as a result.

It's too much unnecessary complexity added to parenting and the motivation being profit by mega corps is why I suggest regulation is a valid place to start looking.

> I'm not sure if you're asking as a parent or an observer of parents. But it's not such a clear option given how entrenched we've made devices into children's lives.

It doesn't have to be a 24 hour a day ban. A kid could be limited to an hour a day or phone use or something like that.

> It's too much unnecessary complexity added to parenting and the motivation being profit by mega corps is why I suggest regulation is a valid place to start looking.

The inevitable result would seem to be that all adults, parents or not, would be forced to present their identification online to use the internet. I think that's too much personal freedom to sacrifice, regardless of how noble the goal.

> It doesn't have to be a 24 hour a day ban.

Limits help, for sure. But it's like setting limits for addictive products like "one cigarette a day". It's better than a pack a day but the impact addictive products have on kids don't stop once their limit is up.

> I think that's too much personal freedom to sacrifice

That's why I started by saying I don't have the solution. Regulation and fines for companies that target kids feels plausible. While not exactly the same, we curbed teen cigarette use by imposing marketing restrictions and issuing fines to tobacco companies (and drastically reduced adult smoking too for that matter).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_smoking_bans_in_the_Un...

Lack of something like SSO and centrally-managed permissions for families is a huge pain in the ass.

Minecraft is notably insane due to this. I don’t know how normies get their kids playing online with it (ours is locked down to just-with-friends, and we gatekeep the friend list), I thought it was hard as a techie. Cross-platform play (outside of X-Box, I suppose) requires creating and carefully-massaging permissions on two overlapping but unrelated systems, both the account on the console itself and a Microsoft account (and their UI for managing this is, in modern Microsoft fashion, entirely nutty). Then, if anything goes wrong, the error messages are careful never to tell you which account’s settings blocked an action, so you get to guess. Fun!

(Getting “classic” Java Minecraft working, just with a local server, was even harder)

Your options are to go all-in on one or two ecosystems; to take on just a fuckload of work getting it all set up nicely and maintaining that with a half-dozen accounts per kid or whatever; or to give up.

Then schools send chromebooks home with less-restrictive settings than I’d use if I were managing it and no way for me to tighten those, and a kid stays up all night playing shovelware free Web games before we realize we need to account for those devices before bed time. Thanks for the extra work, assholes.

sso for the family :mindblown:. Tie this in with a real ID validation tool, and then integrating systems only know "is/is not allowed" and the parents can mind all the kid's stuff.

Can't zero knowledge proof solve this problem?

Submit a zkp that you are over 18 to the website that requires it. The proof need not be tied to the identity of the user.

I personally don't think self-regulation works. It's harmful so the next best option is the government regulating it.

Doesn't matter if they can, because that's not how any of the shot callers want it done.

That is in fact how it is being done in the US and the EU.

Problem? That's the intended result.

This is how the eu standard for digital ID works already, the above post is uninformed fearmongering.

reminder - you have been mind read. whole this privacy talk is ridiculous

tell me more fellow traveler - who has read my mind, and how?

This is probably controversial, but this reason I would much rather things like social media and pornography be outright banned rather than age-gated.

That would have severe economical impact, so nobody dares to go there which is why all these salami tactic solutions are being thrown around. Personally, I think your suggestion has merit, since we can observe that not only children's mental health is severely impacted. Another advantage I see with this is that clear lines allow for clear enforcement that would then get a lot less expensive. I mean, the overabundance of malicious ads should also go into this pot. Another idea would be to put social media companies under strict rules and compel them to install human moderators to enforce them, think dang or tomhow.

Edit: it works on HN (rule wise and moderation wise), so it could work on other platforms, too. Of course that would be expensive for the companies, but frankly, the companies are causing the current upset, so why not place the cost with the ones causing it instead of impacting everyone and even socialising the fallout like lawsuits.

That may sound nice offhand but blanket bans like that on things that have widespread appeal have never been helpful because eventually you gotta start arresting people, and likely a lot of people, in which case the solution ends up far more harmful than the problem.

> And, from now on, if you ever criticize the government you will lose your bank account and your job.

When has this happened in the countries you listed?

The Canada trucker COVID protests are the standard example.

They did a bit more than "criticize the government".

Man, just imagine the pushback if Trump did something like that now. The word "facist" would be in the headlines for months.

"Oh, but it was 'our team' so it's different."

whatever

That has nothing to do with online identification. Do you believe that those operating a vehicle that can easily kill people shouldn't require registration to prevent this from happening again?

Also, that a was few dozen truckers who were actively blocking major highways, and the banking ban lasted less than a week for most people. Several orders of magnitude more people get arbitrarily unbanked for less. I had a credit card and bank account permanently banned while traveling and they refused to give me an explanation.

> And, from now on, if you ever criticize the government you will lose your bank account and your job.

The USA seems to be doing the "if you ever criticize the government [there will be consequences]" part before the rest of them?

> It's amazing how coordinated it is.

It looks coordinated to you? Then why is the USA threatening tariffs etc. for the rest of us doing these things, even when they're going further?

We already ban children under 13. I think that's a good thing and the age limit should be 16 or 17.

The rest of your comment is a non sequitur.

It's a good thing that children under the age of 12 don't know how to use checkboxes!

Luckily the Australian law is written such that tech companies can't get away with a checkbox.

Why are you lumping Canada into that group? Only UK and AUS are doing the digital ID.

https://www.biometricupdate.com/202508/canada-adopts-nationa...

https://www.todayville.com/canada-moves-forward-with-digital...

https://www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Committee/441/FINA/Brief/B... "Oct 7, 2022 — Recommendation 1: That the government drive economic growth by prioritizing and investing in the government's digital identity mandate."

If your making the slippery slope argument sure I can agree there is a risk.

However its saying digital validation for federal benefits - I mean given the amount of fraud in the US social security system of recent years it seems like having some kind of protection is important to not waste our tax payers benefit. And if you cross the border you are immediately in a digital system in the US.

That said this isn't saying digital identity for websites similar to what AUS is proposing.

Also in the meantime kids find their way to other sites / work around and they claim to be adults so now ... NO PROTECTIONS for the kids ...

Completely the opposite of what you would hope.

An an Australian, the social media ban legislation specifically requires than non-ID methods be available (it specifically says that also included digital ID).

Children’s welbeeing being a dog whistle? You should go out and talk to real parents and teachers in the real world.

We like to pretend that this is something new. Before free porn on the internet, what did people do?

- They bought porn from stores (no anonymity)

- They rented porn from hotel rooms

- They paid for it on pay per view channels (how many kids growing up in the 90s remember watching the fuzzy scrambled Spice channel and trying to make out a boob somewhere in the garbled picture?)

- They went to movie theaters for porn! I've never actually seen this but have read about it.

NONE of those actions are anonymous. They're even documented and associated with real identities.

If you're telling me that somehow adding some kind of verifiable age gates to things like porn (and social media) will lead to authoritarianism, we don't have to theorize. We ran this experiment already. And nobody had issues with it, realistically.

We're still running this experiment. If you try to watch an R rated movie in a theater, they will likely ask you for ID if you're clearly under 17. They used to do that to me growing up.

The current state of "Kids can access all this without any protection at any time" is abnormal. It's NOT normal.

We can all have a reasonable conversation here without always bringing in the authoritarianism boogeyman.

A store that asks for ID before letting someone buy a porn mag will have an employee check with their own eyes and then return the ID. By the time the person is out the door, any record of who they were is basically gone. The record is just in the fading short-term memory of the employee. If they turned right around that instant and went back into the building, they're basically as anonymous as they were the first time. If they interrogated everyone affiliated with the store, including the owner, nobody would know the home address of the person even though it was on the ID. The anonymity is even larger if you let a few days pass. Nobody will ever remember you for having bought that magazine or for having ever entered that store for that matter. They'll likely be different employees.

With online services, the identity would be tied to your account forever. A government would have the ability to review every passing comment you've made in your entire lifetime and know exactly who you are, who your family is, where you live, where you work, what your bank accounts are, etc.

Right, the practical privacy outcomes are dramatically different when the digital panopticon is up and running.

The expectation of privacy from random unaffiliated humans seeing me pass on the sidewalk is very different from being stalked by a drone swarm that follows me and whatever vehicle I'm in.

As others have pointed, this is unfortunately already true, due to big data and analytics companies hoovering up everything.

So again, what changes in any fundamental way?

This is a tech forum. There are already standards that can be used to verify age without requiring a lot of extra info. (Already used by drivers licenses at TSA checkpoints, those are all standards).

There are ways to solve this without essentially saying “there is no alternative so let’s give nefarious companies access to our kids brains all the time”

Just because it's bad, doesn't mean it's fine if it gets way worse. There's a difference between individual platforms potentially selling data with aggregators maybe finding ways to fallibly join them together, and the government mandating using a standardized identifier between all of them such that platforms can't even choose to be privacy-respecting.

You can use pseudonyms on practically all social media. That's under threat.

> There are ways to solve this without essentially saying “there is no alternative so let’s give nefarious companies access to our kids brains all the time”

It's ultimately the parents' responsibility, and the parents willingly gave their children access. It's very easy to setup parental controls. It's very easy to get your child a dumb phone. It's very easy to confiscate technology that their child isn't using responsibly. Adults should know that peer pressure isn't reason enough to give their children more freedoms than they're able to responsibly handle.

If people want to tackle this on a societal level, we should be looking into what's causing parents to be so lax in their parenting.

This is a speculative, intuitive reflex meant to derail an argument.

Sorry what do you think is happening in New Zealand?

Better to just heavily tax social media like we tax other harmful things like cigarettes. Heavily tax advertising while we're at it, too.

can you describe how this tax would work?

Collect the tax on social media companies per monthly active user.

I would suggest that anyone who says modern social media isn't damaging to people in general, but particularly young people, either (a) has never used it; or (b) is being deliberately disingenuous.

From that point I would view social media essentially like alcohol.

As an adult you can choose to (ab)use it if you wish, but it's arguably the government's responsibility to protect children at large from social dangers like this.

It's absolutely a thing that people are asked to prove their age to buy alcohol, or even to enter a licensed venue that serves alcohol. I don't think I've ever heard anyone except underage teenagers complain about the invasion of privacy to hand over your ID for beer/etc.

Does the implementation around safe proof of age need work? Probably. Does that mean the whole thing is a not-so-subtle attempt to fire you for swearing?

I don't fucking think so mate.

People are already fired for saying stupid shit on social media, they're already debanked for being out-and-proud White Supremacists.

Given the current political situation in the USA and how it got there, if you have any illusions of a continuing democracy, you should be champing at the bit for anything which reduces social media use.

> It's absolutely a thing that people are asked to prove their age to buy alcohol, or even to enter a licensed venue that serves alcohol. I don't think I've ever heard anyone except underage teenagers complain about the invasion of privacy to hand over your ID for beer/etc.

If they reported verifying my ID to the government every time I bought a drink I would complain about invasion of privacy.

Meh, the gov can do this already. The effect of social media on our kids is a bigger evil at this point.

Can we stop pretending Google and Apple don't already know exactly (probably down to the month) how old a phone user is?

Digital ID is not required...

> It's amazing how coordinated it is.

It's not really "amazing" at all, when you consider that the working class in those countries has finally woken up to the fact that their biggest present day issues, like housing unaffordability and low purchasing power, have been caused by the intentional fiscal policies of their governments over the last 30+ years, instead of the usual boogeymen (Xi Jinping, Putin, Covid, immigrants, etc).

And now after 20+ years of constantly vote hopping between left and right, hoping "this time it will be better than last time" but in practice it always ended up worse, the people are trying to hold them accountable for it, so the elite are switching tactics now that the ye olde reliable tactic of gaslighting the people doesn't work anymore.

If the carrot doesn't work anymore, time to move over to using the stick to keep the peasants in line.

There’s no evidence about this being coordinated is there?

What?

Coordinated

When you put all the points on a graph and they form a line, what more "evidence" do you need?

Your request for evidence reminds me when the 3 telco operators in my country raised their prices simultaneously on the same day, and the nation's anti cartel watchdog said they found no evidence of price fixing lol

Just because the system is corrupt, incompetent or ineffective at finding evidence, doesn't mean there isn't collusion going on.

You do not need collusion for people with similar aims and interests who look at each other for precedents to behave in the same way.

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