Hacker News Reader

Comment by johnc1 | Hacker News Reader

There is a much easier solution that already exists - parental controls on children's devices. I honestly don't understand why is it not solving the problem?

Yes, parents are responsible to set this up. But parents are also responsible to lock their alcohol, drugs or guns, condoms, etc., and many other things.

Perhaps parental controls are not good enough? That's where the regulation could genuinely help - require child-certified devices to implement minimum set of parental controls, and make them easy to use.

View on HN

That's not the problem governments are solving. They're solving the problem of convincing the public it's a good idea to end the anonymity of internet use.

I know! What puzzles me is responses every such article gets even on HN - let's build some cool tech that 95% of the general population and 100% of politicians won't even understand not to mention agree to.

Yes, government want to end anonymity and that's clear to some. But governments enjoy on a pretty broad support for this and many people supporting this believe it's a real problem. Suggesting to leave it unsolved or solve it in a way they can't trust or understand is only going to alienate them, making the government job easier.

I think suggesting a simple, cheap and effective solution to this problem that has no impact on privacy is a way better way to counter that. I think local parental controls fits the bill.

People on average aren't very smart and will happily support programs objectively harmful to them and everyone else because the government and a nice lady from the breakfast TV says it's necessary to think of someone's else's children watching porn (this soundbite is gross. I don't understand how it's okay for the serious people to repeat it).

Of course it's accurate to say a lot of people aren't smart.

A lot of people also may or may not be smart but have limited knowledge of this area and limited time/effort to expend thinking about it.

I don't think you should rail against those things because they will always be true for every topic.

Instead, people who have understood the deeper implications of this, for instance the typical HN reader, need to connect with the average person, engage with rather than dismiss their child protection fears, while explaining the downsides.

Taking a high handed dismissive attitude will not help to shift public opinion.

But I'm expressing my opinion on HN, not for the general public?

I thought that stating this, I believe, fact as a contributing factor in the creeping authoritarian climate would be understood without having to attach a handful of caveats and papers?

(you're contradicting yourself)

Once again blaming the tv which barely anyone watches rather than the algorithmic feed in their pocket 24 hours a day.

It’s not 1980 any more.

Naah, "nice lady from the breakfast TV" is mostly[1] an allegory of the traditional media narrative, but you can't seriously deny the impact and importance of it?

If you deny for example Murdoch-owned media impact on the society, or the extent of the damage for example BBC did in the UK to the human rights or the discourse, I'd suggest reading more :)

[1] one TV programme I remember (I don't watch it): "Good Morning Britain is the UK's most talked about breakfast television show with a weekly audience reach of 4 million people." that's 10% of the age group 16-64 here, not too shabby-- and that's ONE tv.

> But governments enjoy on a pretty broad support for this

No they do not. They do an enormous amount of PR trying to convince people that they have it, though.

In the real world when there is a ton of support behind a position, you see representatives of it all over the place and they are pushing the agenda and the coverage. In the world of online age verification, you just see a bunch of lame duck politicians using procedure to sneak policy changes in and keep objections from being heard, and a few government contractor-surrogates writing op-eds (that they haven't read.)

When puritans go on the march, they're actually pretty loud. Most of the anti-social media people are hippy-dippy upper-middle class liberals who curse "screens," completely believed Cambridge Analytica's PR and think that Trump rules through mind control - who will be bothered by the end of anonymity; and the remainder are angry online right-wingers who think that they were censored by and as a result of social media. They're not marching together, they're not marching to have people identified when they're using the internet, neither of them are even prioritizing social media right now and they aren't putting pressure on anyone.

The fact that it's so unpopular is why there are lame ducks doing it. They're just assuring their fortunes on the way out, and the person on the way in will pretend like they had nothing to do with it even though it will be will be passed and implemented on their watch.

The bills are being raised and passing in more countries than just America though.

> No they do not. They do an enormous amount of PR trying to convince people that they have it, though.

Ok who is paying for that PR though? its not free.

its not like all the UK kids charities are for it.

> Most of the anti-social media people are hippy-dippy upper-middle class

My kids school is very much not in the posh area of london (although they are trying to make it posh) they hate what social media feeds their kids _indirectly_ As in clips and trends sent to their kids via chat or DMs.

It appears that what they want for their kids is basically a walled garden where the advert-content can't bombard their kids, along with the racist/violent stuff.

Precisely. The people in power would love nothing more than to stop “disinformation” (facts that cause social unrest).

That's why they are still appealing to sentiment rather than established research (which actively refutes the arguments they are making).

which begs the question, In preparation for what?

Alien disclosure.

In 1953, Eisenhower signed a pact with the Zeta Reticulans (grey aliens) at Holloman Air Force Base. This pact set in motion a century-long program of preparing humanity for the alien disclosure. Communication must be controlled at a global scale, to avoid mass panic and the collapse of society when the disclosure is announced.

> That's not the problem governments are solving. They're solving the problem of convincing the public it's a good idea to end the anonymity of internet use.

I'm really sorry, but that's giving politicians far to much credit for being able to plan ahead.

Look at both the UK and the USA. The UK's just yeeted its PM because he had the personality of a block of cheese. The USA is currently inches away from shooting people if they mention the word green and water in DC. None of that screams "I am a master at planning ahead and manipulating public opinion in to doing x"

The politicians have no idea about how this all works, they see that "social media" is causing harm (its not the only source, we might get to that) The public, especially in the UK really do not like americanised media being forced in their faces and want "something to be done"

Again for the UK specifically the OSA specifically didn't layout a government mechanism for age verification. they left it to the end company to avoid the suggestion of tracking. Despite it being ripe for uberfraud and blackmail.

it would be much more private if ofcom had published an opensource gateway to anonymously authenticate against. (assuming the thing was built properly and verified)

But to the point you are hinting at

Google, meta, apple and $OS makers already track you. This is not an issue of privacy persay, its about who can track you and why. I'd much rather a list of times I access a site that required age verification being stored by the government, than every single fucking page I looked at tracked by google/meta.

The latter is already here.

Formally politicians may be in charge, but at this point most political power derives from within the administrative state.

> its about who can track you and why. I'd much rather a list of times I access a site that required age verification being stored by the government, than every single fucking page I looked at tracked by google/meta.

It is about what abuses can happen from that info. Google could sell your data. The government can imprison you. You don't think Trump wouldn't try to collect info on his opponents and weaponize the DOJ against them?

> You don't think Trump wouldn't try to collect info on his opponents and weaponize the DOJ against them?

He already is, and if he really wants, can compel google et al to pony up the data. But thats an argument against big tech, rather than age gating.

Yeah. Didn't you find your dad's dirty VHS tapes when you were young? I'm sure most of us did. And we turned out fine.

And no, porn isn't more extreme these days either. I remember seeing bukkake, golden showers etc on borrowed tapes and hacked pay TV. BDSM existed back then too. And I had some pics of a girls face surrounded by male members and their output. Never once did I think this would be a normal thing to do with my girlfriend once I got one.

And these things are still gonna happen. Teens are going to go through their dad's phone when he's sleeping, find his stack of Blu-ray's or vids on this computer. Even with all this age verification stuff. I don't understand why we suddenly think that's the end of civilization.

> I don't understand why we suddenly think that's the end of civilization.

Because they've been told to think it by the combined forces of Meta and the Heritage Project. They spelled it all out in Project 2025, a check list which has been followed nearly to the letter. They're also rampaging through libraries and trying to keep books of the shelves.

Conservatives don't like porn, because controlling sexuality is part of the cult playbook to control people. (Addendum: they don't like other people having it. They're hypocrites, of course.) They also want to, while instituting a backdoor ban on porn, define everything else they don't like as pornography. Project 2025 repeatedly uses the term "pornographic" as a synonym for for LGBT issues and other things.

The goal, after de-anonymizing the Internet, is specifically to control access to information and entrench their fascist Overton window shift.

They're really sore that many Millennials and Gen Z had the internet as an escape hatch from local, abusive churchy bubbles and want that locked down going forward.

Haha a backdoor ban, I see what you did there ;)

And yes that usage of the law by linking LGBT content to porn is something I've seen in Europe like in Hungary too. But even in the Netherlands, one of my friends is always foaming at the mouth about schools mentioning lgbt in sex ed class. When it's the most important time to prevent people needlessly struggling with their orientation.

Luckily where I live this isn't a thing and it's still very pro lgbt. The city always makes a huge deal about pride month with posters and events everywhere.

I do worry about the control over the internet too. And I've seen it coming for a while. When I was younger there was this WAN movement where people connected their WiFi networks together with parabolic dishes and the government was always trying to prevent and discredit that saying it was used for illegal file sharing (which it was but so is/was the internet).

I'm not so worried for myself because I'm so technical, whatever restrictions they come up with I can work around them. But most people aren't that lucky.

> Yeah. Didn't you find your dad's dirty VHS tapes when you were young? I'm sure most of us did. And we turned out fine.

Were they delivered to you in truckload volumes every day, including tapes recording executions, child molestation, foreign political propaganda, domestic political propaganda and misleading advertisements?

Every day, any day, unlimited quantities? Including giving your phone number to any strangers anywhere in the world so they can talk to you without limits, supervision or even parental knowledge?

No?

Then let's perhaps stop pretending that millenial internet free childhood is a thing that exists and let's talk about actual modern issues.

Kids won't see these things unless they go looking for them and most of those things will not be under age verification anyway. And misleading advertisement has been a thing of forever and it's not going to go away becasuse too many rich people make money off it.

This is really a matter of parents not giving their kids devices to access the internet until they are ready for what is there.

And I've never seen executions or child molestations in my life. It's not like this is so easy to come across.

Also I'm not a millennial.

I think their point is to protect kids who have parents so tech illiterate they do not know how to manage parental controls.

Having seen some parents I kind of believe it but not to the point of wanting to implement ID tracking on everything.

Have decent defaults. “Is this phone for a child” and “scan this wr from parents phone”. 90% of problems solved.

That said while Apple does a good job at parental controls, Microsoft is altered. Trying to have controls on Minecraft across a windows laptop and a switch involved a multi hour odyssey, creating tons of accounts for parent and child.

Or, just incentivize or mandate stores to sell "child-certified" phones with parental controls pre-configured (along with a physical plug-and-play usb key for parents disable them when the child is old enough).

People aggressively attacked the proposal of California to add parental controls into OSes, so I'm not sure if that would fly.

You've got to be really on the margin of society to not be able to set it up when every grandma and her dog use smartphones. There're about 1000 different ways to improve the lives of such people without making everyone use their government ID when scrolling Instagram.

I consider myself fairly tech literate and parental controls are incredibly hard to use correctly. I ended up just setting up an android phone with an MDM, because as someone with a sysadmin background it was far easier for me than anything I could find targeted at parents.

The local school district has been issuing iPads to kids for about a decade, and they still haven't figured out how to block exactly what they want blocked. The system they give parents for monitoring the iPads is a joke (Apparently my kid spent 75% of his iPad time the last week of school on sites categorized as "web").

I am a member of FIRE, I am extremely opposed to the mandatory ID laws, but the state of parental controls is phenomenally bad and saying you have to be "on the margin of society" to not be able to set it up is so far from my experience that I couldn't help but to respond to this comment.

I'm not sure what the solution is; a lot of people have suggested requiring sites to send categories (e.g. if every social media site was self-tagged, then blocking social media could be just a single check box in parental controls), but that probably isn't constitutional in the US (Compelled speech is usually banned under 1A grounds), and is subject to too much interpretation (seems unlikely that all 50 states would agree on a definition of "social media" much less "pornography").

Having devices send the age out to sites seems strictly better than ID checks to me, but is still a "one size fits all" approach to parental controls, I worry that if that became the norm the already mediocre controls that exist would atrophy, and it certainly would make it easier for malicious actors to setup a website to target minors.

Using smartphone in itself doesn't mean anything, especially when a lot of people ask assistance to someone else whenever something change on their smartphone.

I was thinking that some kind of permanent physical attachment with passive electronics could be given to children, like an ankle bracelet used for home curfew, monkey's headband, a dogs shock collar, or just a nice bracelet, call it MoB, which couldn't be removed until they are of age. Devices they are given could be associated with those devices and not usable without them, if they disappear from passive scanning then they have been tin-foiled, etc etc. I've not seen any discussion of this type of approach which gives children something to aim for - freedom, and tallies with human historical culture as well.

My God, what a horrific and evil idea

go on, spell it out - its just a thought experiment - how is it worse than the death march we're already on? and the inexorable march to control adults, this is the opposite of that, and it reflects the control we're supposed to exert over our children, in a pretty neutral way (it seems - waiting for your arguments to burst my balloon!). Society and parents control you while you need a parental guardian, then once of age you're free to do whatever we like.

I don't understand why the act of buying internet access isn't considered a parental control. I doubt very many kids are doing it or can.

Ok, but parents buy internet access and then let their kids use it, because the kids need it for school. So? The parents job is to keep their kids out of trouble. Learning how to keep track of what their kids access shouldn't be difficult, and maybe should be part of the obligation parents have, kind of like their obligated to teach their kids to drive before giving them the keys to a car. Its analogious to saying "kids shouldn't walk home from school or be let out of the house at all because they might wander into a nude beach or join a drug smuggling satanic cult". Most of us don't hold that view because we trust that kids can be taught to be vaguely responsible.

What's more: tools to shield the kids have been around for longer than most of the parents have been alive at this point. The problem is pretty much solved in multiple ways, and wouldn't even be a problem if parents only followed their basic responsiblities. Also it isn't a problem in the first place, I haven't seen any clear, undisputed evidence that shows that kids are degenerating into fiends because of looking at adult stuff on the internet.

The problem with this idea is that it assumes responsible parents, which are not a given. I agree with you completely - I don't want any kind of controls on the Internet - but we live in a world where we cannot actually rely on parents to fulfill what you would consider to be basic and reasonable expectations of parental duties.

For kids with parents like that, the internet is probably the least of their problems.

They certainly have other problems however the internet is unique in that it drops the entire world directly in your living room. Even with irresponsible parents zoning laws keep most children away from things like casinos and strip clubs (at least until they can drive) and everyone benefits from community efforts to keep the neighborhood safe.

Exactly. Might be the only place they have a semblance of home.

> The parents job is to keep their kids out of trouble. Learning how to keep track of what their kids access shouldn't be difficult

Unfortunately it is, but we could fix that with only minimally invasive legislation. Right now you either whitelist which breaks half the internet on a recurring basis (things are constantly changing) or you blacklist which is swiss cheese. Either way you're relying on third parties.

I think it would be much better to legally mandate a certain minimum level of self classification for website operators along with a simple and extensible scheme for communicating such. It might also be useful to mandate that devices ship from the OEM with parental control software supporting that standard but honestly I doubt that's necessary - if their were a standardized and above all reliable signal available I think browsers and operating systems would rapidly adopt support for it.

Exactly! We already have content tags on TV/Movies, just extend it to the web and make mandatory.

I imagine it could be not trivial to enforce (esp. for offshore web) - but definitely easier than enforcing the same sites to implement much more complicated identity verification (while preferably also not leaking this data).

But that might not even be necessary. A small on-device AI can probably do a decent job classifying pretty much everything we don't want children to see - with and option for parents to override it when needed.

> I imagine it could be not trivial to enforce (esp. for offshore web)

It's quite trivial, actually - the parental control software is designed so that if there are no content tags, then the site does not display. The mandate for websites to tag their content would only need to apply to websites over a certain size, to bootstrap the network effects.

The other option is for the major browsers to refuse to load pages that don't include the tag. I don't think it's a good thing that they can unilaterally dictate web standards but that's the reality so might as well take advantage of it for the better I guess.

I think that's the same option? I'm imagining "parental controls software" as something built into browsers (/ app stores) that can be enabled when you're setting up a new device. Or it can be disabled, meaning no tags would be required, leaving the open web unaffected.

Given that we're at the point where big tech is pushing its regulatory capture legislation aimed at demanding mandatory identification ("age verification" fundamentally boils down to identity verification), I don't think it would be unreasonable for a legislative mandate for every site over a certain size to have to publish tags, and every mobile device manufacturer over a certain marketshare to have to include a parental control solution in the device setup.

Although I'm also left wondering what the state of the art really does look like here, and whether a mandate for tags is even what is needed. The real problems would seem to be twofold - parental controls software isn't included with most devices, and most parents won't go out of their way to seek out a third party option. And second, very few websites aim to serve people under 18, 13, etc to begin with. Rather they like the fiction that their services are "18+" regardless of who is using them. (Mandating tags would serve that last one, but perhaps there is a more direct approach?)

> I think that's the same option?

Not quite. I'm suggesting that adoption could be forced if the major browsers refused to load sites that didn't include the tags regardless of whether or not parental controls were enabled. The end result would be that either your site included the tags or else it would not load without some sort of manual user intervention on every visit on windows, ios, etc.

> leaving the open web unaffected

But the entire point here is that there would be a legal mandate for all sites to carry such tags. The goal is to fix the problem that parental controls are spotty and unreliable at best.

> The real problems would seem to be twofold

It's as I previously explained. None of the current options are particularly good even if you are a parent that cares and is willing to invest time and effort.

> they like the fiction that their services are "18+" regardless of who is using them.

That's due to not wanting the liability of a mishmash of laws from different jurisdictions. Nearly all of them treat an 18 year old as an adult so problem solved.

That's entirely separate from these tags BTW. The idea isn't for the site to communicate some arbitrary age appropriateness signal that they as a third party to the family couldn't possibly know. Rather it's to communicate classes of content such as porn, gambling, violence, social media, user generated content, games, that sort of thing.

> But the entire point here is that there would be a legal mandate for all sites to carry such tags.

My point is that you don't even need to mandate it for all sites, and attempting to do is kind of specious based on the existence of foreign sites. Rather you can focus on mandating it for the large consumer-oriented sites, and this will create enough of a critical mass that a web browser with parental controls enabled will have decent functionality.

The difficulty with forcing some uniform mandate onto "all sites" is that the mandate has to be for tags that are faithfully stated, rather than a blanket 18+. And small personal website operators shouldn't be in the position of being forced to determine whether the random stuff on their personal website is specifically suitable for 13+, 18+, etc.

That's the goal of defining the semantics in terms of an open system rather than a closed system - it fails gracefully.

> None of the current options are particularly good even if you are a parent that cares and is willing to invest time and effort.

Pragmatically this is disappointing to hear, but matches everything I've been able to surmise.

> The idea isn't for the site to communicate some arbitrary age appropriateness signal that they as a third party to the family couldn't possibly know. Rather it's to communicate classes of content such as porn, gambling, violence, social media, user generated content, games, that sort of thing.

I think it should be both. There should be a class of tags that assert a site is legally fine for a 13 year old to view in the US, an 8 year old to view in the US, etc, possibly multiplied with jurisdiction. (note the direction there - it's not a statement that there is content unsuitable for a 13 year old, rather it's a warranty that the contents are suitable for a 13 year old). There should also be tags of the content/aim of the site like you've listed.

The settings in the parental control software can then make a good first pass based on age, then content categories, then parents could even allow/disallow specific sites. The point is to provide good defaults, but ultimately keep control of parents rather than giving it away to corporate attorneys as any age verification (ie identity verification) based solution inherently does.

> small personal website operators shouldn't be in the position of being forced to determine whether the random stuff on their personal website is specifically suitable for 13+, 18+, etc.

Agreed, but I take that a step farther and apply it to all operators. It's one thing to have a tag "18+ in the US" for when an operator is reasonably certain that his content is not legal to provide to minors. But the vast majority of the time operators should not be expected to be legal experts and they certainly can't be expected to keep up with all the different jurisdictions of the world.

Keep in mind the motivating issue here is parents filtering the content that their children are routinely exposed to. Everyone will inevitably have different concerns and standards, ex no social media versus no user generated content whatsoever versus 1 hour of social media or games or whatever per day. It's content awareness that's missing here. Everyone with legal concerns already posts a disclaimer that you have to click through and if they really care they send the RTA header.

> attempting to do is kind of specious based on the existence of foreign sites.

If the major browser vendors require it to load a page at all then it immediately becomes a de facto global requirement.

> The difficulty with forcing some uniform mandate onto "all sites" is that the mandate has to be for tags that are faithfully stated

One of the tags would amount to "not applicable". If a bunch of small time operators would prefer to be blocked by default and not think about the content they post then they could coordinate to create their own tag for that. The first step is uniform adoption then after that governments can penalize noncompliance in the form of inaccurate tags. I don't expect the latter would be much of an issue in practice though. Most people aren't going to intentionally misconfigure something but lazily not bothering in the first place is all too common.

>The parents job is to keep their kids out of trouble.

I challenge that anyone believes this, and for my evidence, I would submit all the age based laws that protect children regardless of what parents do.

We have already, long ago, decided that it is the government's job to protect children, at least in cases where parents fail to do an adequate job. That's why I don't see this ending any other way. The march to total domination by the side of the government might be slow, but they already won the war around a century ago (exact timeline for laws protecting children in place of parents is a very long topic and does differ country to country, I recall hearing some places still even let kids buy alcohol if they say it is for their parents to consume).

You don't belive parents generally protect and nurture their children?

For most of human history there were few, if any, laws governing how children were raised yet civilization didn't collapse because of that, and, indeed, there were no discernable effects. In many places parental-infanticide was even legal. Yet always parents did their best to keep their children safe in general, because that's what parents naturally do. Somehow its different now to you I guess but I fail to see why. Obviously some parents will do a poor job, that's true about every human thing. If people can't drive we take away their license. If people can't parent, however, we apperently have to bend everything in society to cater to their failure and create a massive surveillance state.

Why would you want to lock condoms?

Have you missed the recent moral panic about the declining birth rates of white children? Brought to you by the same people who hate pronouns [0], trans people, and/or covid vaccines. In such a world, condoms will be required for non-whites (or race mixing relationships) and forbidden to aryan/white couples.

Notes:

0 - For an example of using 2 pronouns in one sentence: "I am he".

https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=John%2018%3A6-8...

I am he

As you are he

As you are me

And we are all together

There is a bootlegger and baptist thing going on here. One understandable point of view is that of parents that control their kids' phones, but other parents in the community do not. Then their kids are the only ones in the class without tiktok or Instagram or something.

For those parents life is easier if nobody is allowed on these things.

> For those parents life is easier if nobody is allowed on these things.

Get over it, and stop caring how other people parent their kids. Or, better yet, learn from them.

They very much aren't good enough yet. I'm a highly technical user and have had to move to using MDM tools to actually have something that works reliably.

...parents are also responsible to lock their alcohol, drugs or guns...

No they're not - all those things are illegal for children nearly everywhere.

Children can buy their own devices. School issued devices are not under parent control. Parental controls and school controls are laughable. There is no incentive for OS vendors/retailers to provide robust solutions to this problem. PII industry is essentially pushing regulatory capture.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com