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Comment by mjevans | Hacker News Reader

How about just requiring browser, OS vendors, and phone makers to give parents real child accounts that are easy to use and keep kids off the Internet?

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There are a lot of actual solutions that could be implemented that don't invade privacy, but that's the point. These rules are all designed TO invade your privacy. They're designed for you to give up your online anonymity and make you accountable for your speech and actions online.

> They're designed for you to give up your online anonymity and make you accountable for your speech and actions online.

They're designed destroy anonymity to give the in group pretext to persecute the out group. It will be propagandized as accountability but it will be anything but.

Is this serious or meant as satire about us-vs-them framing?

Both can be right. Some people in the debate think it's very important to check ages, while other people want to collect data, and a third group of people want excuses to shut down platforms.

The US is repealing section 230, and it appears to be a pretext for shutting down platforms that don't block anti–Trump speech. Australia has an age verification law that seems to actually be about keeping kids off social media.

I would rather avoid having the government decide what I should run on my devices, private companies are already bad enough.

I'm becoming increasingly cynical that the lack of privacy in online communication is what most of the sponsors of these bills are after, and people thinking of the real harms to children are useful to them.

This would suddenly mean no more custom browsers, no more custom OSes, and I doubt they'd cater to the Linux and BSD crowds with this one. It's something the OSS community has been trying to fight for the last 4 decades. With a full-on government requirement this would lock you to the vetted platforms while letting anything other get in would be illegal for the site owners.

It doesn't mean any of that? The point is that the parent, not the child, is the owner of the device. So the parent can restrict the device they own before handing it off to the child (or the same with accounts on the same device).

That’s what we currently have with parental controls. If they wanted the OS to check for the parent legally being an adult, that would rule out custom OSes and browsers which couldn’t be trusted (by the government) to check for that.

Not really, they'd just have to send the "I'm a child" header if the "I'm a child" flag is set. Linux could have /etc/childlocked set to 1 — a global setting instead of per account isn't ideal, but it would satisfy the law.

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