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Comment by rootlocus | Hacker News Reader

Protecting kids online requires attention from their parents, not from the government.

Protecting kids is well within the scope of the government.

This “it’s the parents job” is also reductionist. It is, but somehow we still have made it illegal for minors to buy hard liquor and pornography from physical stores in the United States and few argue that restriction is wrong.

And they still find ways to drink themselves to alcohol induced comas. There's no real substitute for education and parental nurturing only best effort band-aid solutions. Children with problems at home are more likely to be targeted by bullies or child predators.

I'm not saying the government shouldn't do anything, they should and it should probably involve legislature around social media that positively affects adults as well. But raising a child, teaching it what's dangerous and what's safe and developing a relationship of trust so you're aware when there's danger lurking, that's a parent's job. No amount of legislation will help neglected children. They're tiny, curious, ingenious humans who will find ways to get what they want.

Children drinking themselves into alcohol induced comas is fairly rare. Teenagers consuming large amounts of explicit pornography is not at all rare.

I agree nothing will replace parenting. The children who do drink themselves into comas are largely enabled by adults (who are also generally committing a crime). But there is harm reduction the government can and probably should do.

I have to say, as much as I think the article author here is naive, I also have to wonder if the net positives outweigh the net negatives. Uploading an id and face scan to a pornography site seems like the worst of all possible scenarios. Getting a government issue credential is better than that at least.

No one is saying it’s one or the other. It’s both. There are certain children who need protection from bad parenting and certain parents that need protection for their neurodivergent children.

This is my take, but I am a bit frustrated by OS manufacturers. The obvious move is have a screen after factory reset the puts the device in kid mode permanently. It then will send a "I'm underage" flag to sites, and sites return no content (or safe content) when they see that header. This is a system that makes it easier for parents to do their parenting job. All the pieces of this system already exist, but the UX for managing a device during setup to be a "kids device" isn't there.

This system is good for a bunch of reasons:

* It gives parents control such that they can tailor the experience to their kids. This is a problem with current proposals.

* It doesn't bring identity into the mix at all, completely defusing the risk of mass surveillance.

* It's easy to verify if adult sites are complying: hit them with a curl request containing the header, check the response. This is much easier that verifying that Discord is checking user ages properly using their face-scanning technology.

That's how i was leaning, because i cynically assumed a maximally-fuckwitted decree.

However. The world is as it is, not as we wish it was. My mother can't click "update and restart"; pathological technophobia.

Should it be parental responsibility? Sure, why not. Will it that be effective? No. At scale, people are incompetent.

Protecting kids and other vulnerable people matters to everyone, so why not the government? What would think of a country where, let say your mother cannot go out without fearing getting robbed or raped? Same for kids. Maybe you do not have kids and you do not care. Anyway being a parent does not mean being behind your kids at every single moment. I hope you have not spent your childhood under constant supervision of your parents. So at some point everyone is concerned about protecting kid, and not only there own ones

This approach has clearly failed and something different should therefore be attempted.

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