Comment by johnisgood | Hacker News Reader

Comment by johnisgood | Hacker News Reader

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I mean, it does invite the Government to your household, just like marriage (which is a legal contract) invites the Government into your bedroom. I oppose both.

Parents are supposed to be parenting, without the help of the Government. You do not want your kid to spend their time on Facebook or Instagram? Do something about it yourself, as a parent. I understand that tech-illiterate people may be at a disadvantage here, but we are on HN and I am pretty sure we are able to:

Set up a Raspberry Pi (or any other SBC, or even an old x86 box) running Pi-hole with custom blocklists, configure DNS-level filtering with time-based access rules, or implement iptables/nftables rules on your router to enforce schedules. You can use hostapd with separate SSIDs for children with different firewall rules, set up a transparent proxy with squid + SquidGuard for content filtering and time restrictions, or configure your router's DHCP to assign specific DNS servers per MAC address with dnsmasq managing time windows. If you want more granular control, there's pfSense or OPNsense with packages like pfBlockerNG-devel for domain blocking and traffic shaping, or you could write a simple cron job that modifies your firewall rules based on time of day. These are all straightforward solutions that don't require government-mandated age verification systems with their inevitable privacy nightmares and implementation overreach.

The technical capability exists; the question is whether parents are willing to invest a few hours to implement it rather than demanding legislation to do their job for them.

> Parents are supposed to be parenting, without the help of the Government.

Why wouldn't we want the government to support parenting in similar ways the Government support's retirement, personal security, entrepreneurship, education, health, and other societally important activities?

> These are all straightforward solutions that don't require government-mandated age verification systems with their inevitable privacy nightmares and implementation overreach.

Yes, they are. They all also stop being effective as soon as a child is outside of your wifi network, which was my entire point.

> whether parents are willing to invest a few hours to implement it rather than demanding legislation to do their job for them.

Framing it this way doesn't really help your point. It proves that you don't understand what parents are actually dealing with. It is the same response that people on HN have when a non-developer writes a technical article in NYT.

This issue affects the privacy of all individuals, not just a narrow subset of users.

Mandatory identification and age-verification requirements are against privacy, justified under the familiar refrain of "think of the children". The critical question is how far society is willing to go in accepting pervasive surveillance and data collection under this rationale. Not long ago, we expressed concern and even disdain toward such practices when observing them in countries like China. Today, however, the gap between those systems and our own is narrowing to an uncomfortable degree.

FWIW there are technically sound, privacy-preserving solutions to achieve this goal. Zero-knowledge proofs, for example, can verify eligibility or age without disclosing identity or personal data. These solutions are well understood and feasible. Yet they are consistently excluded from policy discussions and implementations. This omission suggests that the underlying objective is not genuine child protection, nor meaningful respect for individual privacy, but rather increased control and data accumulation.

> They all also stop being effective as soon as a child is outside of your wifi network, which was my entire point.

True, these solutions do not work outside your Wi-Fi, but the point is that government-mandated age verification compromises privacy for limited benefit. I believe parental guidance (and the guidance of their teachers, ideally) and household controls are more effective. In any case, the broader point is that there is no technical silver bullet. Parents will always need to combine education, guidance, and trust-building with any tools, rather than relying on government mandates that compromise privacy.

> Parents will always need to combine education, guidance, and trust-building with any tools, rather than relying on government mandates that compromise privacy.

I agree. You haven't explained why the government can't be one of those tools, just as it is for so many other harmful activities (drugs, alcohol, gambling, firearms, etc.).

You use the phrase "relying on" to imply parents are just asking government to do everything for them. A more charitable view is that this is a tool along with other tools to support a common societal goal.

Okay, but do not do it at the expense of everyone else ("compromising privacy").

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